And You Thought Your Commute Was Rough

As stated before, the outcry over Lions Gate’s shelving of Midnight Meat Train riles up a nerve in my defenses. It’s not that I support a major studio burying an original horror film in dollar theaters and DVD bins; I just wish all the boo hooeing by genre fans was aimed at a worthier movie.

And now, having watched Maurice Devereaux’s End of the Line, I have even more reason to dislike that other subway slasher, because here’s a unique, timely, and actually scary little horror far more deserving of Internet campaigns.

Quick Plot: A young psyciatric nurse named Karen (Ilona Elkin) sadly accepts the news that one of her patients has thrown herself in front of a subway. Muffins and freaky drawings from the late woman’s files  provide little comfort, and things only get worse when Karen’s subway ride becomes the kind of nightmare every commuter fears. First, there’s the creepy homeless guy leering over her shoulder, followed by the fact that--much like my last night’s commute in the freezing cold--the train seems to be running on a random and inconsistent schedule. To make things worse--okay, horror movie worthy--the train soon hits a delay and Christian fundamentalists with the world’s best cell phone reception embark on a crusade to “save” the souls of fellow straphangers.

Because I love a pleasant surprise and love you, I’m digging out some roadblocks to stick right here:

As a warning: I want to discuss this film, but what made my initial viewing so enjoyable was, in part, the fact that I knew very little about End of the Line. While it doesn’t have a Martyrs-style switcheroo, there is something really neat about some of its unexpected plot developments so if you haven’t seen the film, YOU SHALL NOT PASS.

Or something. Just skip to Rent/Bury/Buy and come back after you’ve followed those instructions. Don’t make me page you.

SPOILER SITY

A disclaimer: There are probably just a handful of subjects I find more fascinating than Doomsday cults. There’s something so strangely horrifying about human beings surrendering everything that seems to make them who they are for some undefined greater being pent on eventually destroying their very existence. Also, I ride the subway every day and am constantly imagining a variety of horror movie scenarios that could occur at any given stop. For these reasons, End of the Line was quite possibly made for me.

Devereaux’s portrayal of the religious fanatics is eerie for a bucketful of reasons. Yes, it’s creepy to see nice middle aged women stabbing straphangers with crucifix knives that belong in a Children of the Corn playpen. It’s also unnerving to note the Hilter Youth-esque jumpsuits and at-peace smiles on every murderous character’s face. More importantly, Devereaux seems to ground the cult in popular Christianity.

I want to tread lightly here and try my best to not make any of my mere blogging comments into attacks on religion. I have no issue with anybody living a life based on personal faith, but those who try to force it on you when you just want to listen to a cuss-heavy podcast on the subway or trick-or-treat for candy rather than doomsday pamphlets aren’t just annoying; they’re judging you by essentially demonstrating that they believe you’re not worthy of heaven. I appreciate how End of the Line’s fanatics wanted to actually help their victims, straight down to apologizing when mass suicide had to take priority over fatal stabbing. 

Back to the controversy I can’t seem to put into words, doomsday cults--and any religious sect that has an end date in their pre-determined future--are terrifying because their members simply can’t value this life as much as the next. If, for example, a world leader believes in the possibility that The Rapture will occur and that when it does, he’ll be judged worthy, what’s to stop him from pushing the button to detonate the next world war? The characters of End of the Line are so confident in their beliefs that none of the physical pain they cause registers as anything other than God’s will. It’s not their actions that makes this a frightening film; it’s their complete lack of regret.

At first, the final moments bothered me as a trite betrayal. Since The Believers and Frailty, I’m far less surprised to discover that the crazed extremist characters in a genre film were right, and more importantly, I’d have been a tad annoyed to feel as though I misjudged everything onscreen for the previous 100 minutes. Thankfully, Devereaux’s ending was far more clever than I had initially realized. Upon listening to some of the extras, it became rather clear--even if nobody is willing to fully admit it--that the sneaking suspicion I had was right: there were no demons. There were, however, some powerfully mixed muffins eaten throughout the film by every character we notice see visions of rubbery monsters, mouthless ghosts, and tunnel dwellers dirtier than mole people. Pass the electric Kool-Aid, we’ve got some tasty spiked pastries that need washing down.

High Points

Although End of the Line doesn’t go too far into the backstories of their villains, the cult members are still individually drawn with the kind of precision rarely seen in horror. From the suddenly unchaste Sarah to the conflicted teenagers, the choice to show that some parishioners had actual doubts added a more human layer to the killings. Gray is always more interesting than black and white, particularly when it comes to morality.

I’m normally immune to jump scares, but for some reason, the very first pop made my drop my nacho

For the most part, Devereax has his main group of protagonists react to the horrors with refreshing believability. As much as we in the audience know to stab first, ask questions later, if any of us couch potatoes were actually in this kind of situation, we would probably find it near impossible to beat a teenager to death with the crowbar quivering in our hands. I appreciated that the commuters were genuinely conflicted over having to resort to homicidal violence. Even the young stud--the first man to kill--spends his last few moments asking for reassurance that he did the right thing. 

Similarly, none of End of the Line’s characters demonstrate the kind of superhuman survivalism often summoned in these types of films. Their action sequences are messy and chaotic, consisting simply of frightened people swinging hand tools at stab-happy Christians. Since we’re not watching SWAT team members or retired boxers, this makes perfect sense

Low Points

Overall, the performances are adequate and nobody stands out to drag the film down, but it also feels as though none fully step forward to add anything overly special to their characterizations

Once I put some of the pieces--or crumbs--together, I was a little more accepting of the final shot, but I still found the last ghastly baddies to feel a tad too Halloween porch ready

Lessons Learned

If you want people to join your cult, perfect a recipe for hallucinogen-laced muffins

1980s style punkettes are pretty damn fierce when the going gets tough

Mental patients are quite talented when it comes to colored pencil artwork. Look at that shading!

Ironically enough, nobody can complete an abortion faster than a Born Again

Always keep mace accessible when riding the subway. You never know when you’ll have to escape the clutches of a horny priest hung up on virginity and the fact that he resembles the homeless love child of Paul Bettany and Quentin Tarantino

In order to seduce a virginal fundamentalist, the secret is to kiss her earlobe

Rent/Bury/Buy

End of the Line is a definite watch, and a possible buy if you find it the right price. The DVD is loaded with extras, including a coy but interesting commentary, thorough making-of featurette, and a few more goodies. It’s not a film I’m return to often, but the original concept and spirited execution defnitely merits a revisit somewhere down the, ahem, line. More importantly, be on the lookout for Devereaux’s next film. Not only does he tell a good story on a meager budget, he also has mastered the art of referencing other masters without being annoying about it. One of my biggest pet peeves in indie horror is when directors think it’s cute to use a famous horror director’s name for a character. It’s not so much a wink wink as it is a smacking-you-in-the-face-with-a-frying-pan-emblazoned-with-an-obvious-reference-on-the-bottom (think “Dr. Savini” from The Dead Next Door). You don’t name a character Argento; you name him after the main sound mixer for a bunch of Argento films. That's the sign of a promising filmmaker.

Get Out of My Bad Dreams and Into My Cult

Perhaps it's my own age, but I always find something truly special about non-slasher horror films made in the 1980s. Once you hack your way through the cookie cutter patterned Friday the 13ths and their knockoffs, there is a seemingly endless supply of decent little thrillers rich in gore, compelling storylines, and character actors that instantly keep viewers young by challenging them to identify what other 1980s horror or 1990s sitcom they made brief appearances in.


For these reasons and more, I was excited to finally view 1988's Bad Dreams, a Nightmare on Elm Street-ish inspired flick that had the terrible luck of premiering around the same time as Freddy’s most beloved outing against the Patricia Arquette-led Dream Warriors. Well-cast and directed by a young (very young) Andrew Fleming (he who would go on to make a personal 8th grade favorite, The Craft), Bad Dreams is not what you would call a classic, but certainly worth its weight in dead mental patients and 80s era scoring.


Quick Plot: We open on an icily blond Richard Lynch leading his Waco-esque (pre-Waco times) cult into a fiery mass suicide. One young woman, Cynthia (Nightmare 3’s mohawk donning Jennifer Rubin), survives alone, falling into a 13 year coma which wakes her up conveniently enough in the 1980s, just in time to ride the nightmare horror craze and act beside a Summer School era Dean Cameron in a powerful supporting role. Since Cynthia has no memory of the fire and has even less resources in the outside world, she’s committed to a mental asylum headed by ReAnimator’s Bruce Abbott and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Henry Yulin*. Cynthia struggles to fit into the kooky borderline personality support group, quite a challenge when she’s continually haunted by the eerie image of a post-burning Lynch and the slightly uncomfortable fact that everyone she seems to talk commits suicide in an elaborate manner.

This is not your fluffy dumb and dead teenager movie, despite its reputation as Freddy's illegitimate child tucked away in a VHS love nest. While Bad Dreams was clearly influenced by the more famous films of its time, it holds its own and holds up well 20 years later. Sure, we've seen our share of pretty young women with ghostly visions and questionable sanity, but middle aged horndogs being splattered by violent air conditioning and salty mouthed Weekly World News reporters add new and welcomed touches to an age old sub-genre. The film is not without its faults--a clumsy climax and not quite fully realized villain revelation bog down its second half--but Bad Dreams ultimately succeeds on its own terms in creating a new story with memorable characters and a few moments of actual fear.


High Points
From Jennifer Rubin’s sympathetic amnesiac to the quirky but resonant mental patients and always enigmatic Richard Lynch, the entire cast turns in solid performances to make you genuinely care about each character




If you read my disappointed review of The Believers, you may know that I have a fascination of sorts with cults. While I still would have preferred a little more exploration into Unity Field, the presentation of this Jonestown-ish group is haunting and realistic


The gore is not nearly as explicit as in the Nightmare series, but Bad Dreams does boast a few memorably twisted and creative death scenes, plus a truly disturbing and impressively directed baptism by fire that may indeed induce your own bad dreams


Low Points
Somewhere along the line, the film switches viewpoints from Rubin’s patient to Abbott’s psychologist and while this does produce one of the film’s wackiest and most entertaining sequences, it also loses our character investment

This moment actually made me happy, but not in a good way: note the final expression and blase shrug of the police investigator at the film’s resolution. Should major characters really express such a blatant lack of interest after a dramatic and deadly showdown between the protagonists and villain?


Lessons Learned
If you want to be totally 80s, get two divorces and a yeast infection. If all you can handle is Cleveland, stick to the 70s.


Having secret sex in a turbine fan room carries risks far greater than herpes


The record for longest tenure in a coma is 37 years


Comas will do wonders for your hair and complexion

Rent/Bury/Buy
Fans of 80s studio horror should enjoy Bad Dreams as an interesting, if not amazing remnant of a time when horror had something of a heyday. While it doesn’t pack the lasting visual innovation of its ultimate rival, Dream Warriors, it is a well-acted and sometimes haunting film that refreshingly does not involve zombies, big men with machetes, or boobs (sorry boys; the ladies can enjoy the sexiness of Bruce Abbott’s Mr. Rogers’ sweater). The DVD includes a few older featurettes, along with a friendly commentary by writer-director Fleming. An alternate ending packs a creepy and appropriate punch before finishing with a dime store Halloween decoration image that belongs in no film made for more than thirty seven dollars and eighty two cents. Bad Dreams is definitely worth a viewing and could have enough rewatchability potential to merit a purchase.


*You might be wondering why I seem to have this need to credit each actor with another performance. Truly, it’s just too hard not to when nearly every cast member has some notable horror or cult film on his or her resume. Plus, I've been playing the movie-actor-movie connection game for nearly two days, so I'll personally take any chance to boost my personal database of useless film knowledge.

X + Y = The Apocalypse

Doomsday cults present a terrifying possibility for genuine horror, yet there seems to be a shortage of quality entries about the subject when it comes to modern cinema. I suppose self-appointed messiahs don't bring in the Friday night crowd and sometimes, real-life tragedies make fictionalized depictions feel tasteless and exploitive. Generally, films featuring cults (a mighty Google challenge, as one must, in doing research, first sift through some very temptingly distracting cult movies) tend to focus on devout Satan fan clubs, like the co-op board from hell in Rosemary's Baby or the children-hating corporate folks of Halloween III. In the mainstream, Children of the Corn and its bevy of underrated sequels come the closest to fully exploring (and exploiting) the idea of blind faith on a mass scale.


For these reasons and a few more, the description of Daniel Myrick's Believers was fairly promising. A small but creepy collection of educated professionals and their children have been making minor news as they prepare for the mathematically predicted apocalypse. Meanwhile, two all-American paramdedics (one so strapping, his sunnily pregnant wife is giving him a son!) are called to a lonely restop to revive a dying woman as her little daughter watches. Before you can say David Koresh, a truck of white-clad gun toters shows up to haul the do-gooders to an underground bunker, where doomsday plans are in full swing (although for all the fiery rain and simultaneous suicide talk, the ascension seems easier to plan than a baby shower).


Myrick is best-known as half the team behind a little something you may have heard of called The Blair Witch Project. That film, for all its prosperity and influence, never quite pushed its innovative filmmakers into the commercially successful sphere of cinema. Myrick has some decent straight-to-DVD horror credits that help to soften the blows of The Blair Witch 2, but he hasn't come close to backing his juggernaut with further proof of directoral ability. Unfortunately, Believers doesn't help.


In every possible way, this is a mediocre film, confused from the very beginning as to what type of story it wants to tell. The setup has plenty of potential: a mathematic cult that has discovered the formula to the universe is philosphoically promising. It's just not developed. At all. Was the concept too heady and sci-fi? Why not emphasize the human drama by exploring the characters of the cult members to suggest how these people came to put so much faith in a Tobin Bell-voiced Teacher who's good with numbers? Let us feel something as they near their end. Doesn't happen. Another option: make a suspenseful thriller. Problem with that is you need atmosphere, but Myrick seems to lack the creative energy necessary to produce it.


Sigh. All of these ideas are tagged and dimissed in Believers. It's clear that the filmmakers had ambitious intentions in theory, but failed to find any interesting ways to get them across. I'm guessing the film began as an intelligent, numbers-based horror in the vein of Pi, but the approach was deemed unsellable and susequently dumbed it down. Or possibly the reverse: the film maybe was intended to be a simple cult story and someone threw in bogus science for a twist. But as my recent fortune cookie says, "If you chase two rabbits, both will escape." I'm pretty sure that somehow explains this film.


High Points
There is an attempt to show how a seemingly regular joe could come to believe in a cult's teachings, but the execution--a long exposition-soaked monologue that explains the character's religious background--feels clunky and obvious


About 20 minutes from the end, I declared that a sorely needed, if predictable twist ending would be the only way to mildly redeem the 90 minutes that had come before it. That did happen


Turning a restroom into the Reflection Room makes perfect sense


Low Points
A lead heavy soundtrack doesn't mesh with the unmoody lighting choices


Is there a rule that says every cult has to wear white and speak in monotone?


Lessons Learned
Super genius cults that have the intelligence to decode the universe and revive the dead still have the age old villainous problems with peacefully killing the one tied up guy with the ability to foil their plans


Super genius cults haven't evolved past chalkboards


Telling a shifty mechanic you don't trust him when you're all alone is probably not a good idea; turning your back while exploring his weapon-ridden shop is even worse


Winning Line
“I can’t believe believe you don’t know you’ve been fucking brainwashed!”
I can. Because, you know....that's what brainwashing is.


Rent/Bury/Buy
I wish I could recommend a rental, but honestly, the best I can give Believers is a casual viewing on cable. I will say that the DVD includes a director commentary and several deleted scenes, so those as weirdly fascinated by cults as I am may find something redeeming there. Ultimately, this is just an exercise in the cliches of cult culture. Nice touches--such as the bathroom graffiti reading "Mathematics is the language in which the gods speak to each other"--are wasted when all the film has to show for it are bland and faceless zealots with glossy eyes.