Aw, us amerikens r sew darn dumm

Making a sequel to a film that, by many accounts (mine included) is the best horror movie to debut this century is no easy feat. How do you follow up one of cinema’s most pleasantly terrifying surprises without pooping all over fans expectations?

Well The Descent 2 does KIND of literally poop on viewers

(thank goodness this film was shot before the ubiquitous craze of 3D)

...but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun. Think of it as a surprisingly edible slice from an upstate NY pizzeria: not especially good, but surpassing the below-zero expectations you probably had based on the fact that that the sauce looked questionable, the crusts lacked character, and the restaurant’s name was “Donald’s Pizza and Diet Delights”

Quick Plot: Two days after the disappearance of Juno & Co., a raving (and conveniently amnesiac) Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is discovered covered in her friends’ blood type by a dirty Appalachian Yankees fan (boo, hiss, foreshadows of evil). Hesitant to draw too much media coverage, town sheriff Vaines (Gavan O’Herlihy, playing a surlier cross between Tom Atkins and Lost’s Mr. Friendly) orders a rescue team to quietly venture underground, himself, deputy, and suspicious Sarah in tow.

It doesn’t take long for some Very Bad Things to happen, mostly thanks to the full-swing stupidity of a good ol’ American boy and his trigger happy ways. A gunshot causes a rock fall, which turn turns a lot of separated spelunkers into easy pickings for familiar crawlers.

If you haven’t seen The Descent--scratch that. Of course you have. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t, so if you ARE here and you HAVEN’T, then you’ve discovered some sort of non-reality in this universe that may or may not be the ending of Lost. 

And I'm not ready for that.

So yes. You’ve seen The Descent, and thusly have a pretty good idea of what to expect in its follow-up. More cave dwellers. More closeups of Batboy lookalikes screeching to the stalagmite skies. Strong women that can kick ass and, most likely, do non-girl pushups while still looking hot. Lots of British accents despite the film being set in the American south.

These points are not necessarily bad. For all its contrived plotting (are non-soap operas even ALLOWED to use ‘short-term amnesia’ for major explanations?), The Descent 2 is actually one of the more respectful sequels to be made, taking its time to homage its predecessors via visuals and character. At times, it feels uninspired and merely lazy but on the other hand, that’s the very nature of unambitious sequels with prominent write-ups in Fangoria.

This is not Neil Marshall’s surprise masterpiece. Where the original was considered everything from a study in female power dynamics to an analogy of US foreign policy, The Descent 2 is its kid sister tripping around the house in Mom’s high heels. The scares are more gutty than primal and characters display about as much intelligence as the subscribing constituent of The Weekly World News (those keeping Batboy in business), but as directed by The Descent’s editor Jon Harris, this is a fun enough romp that more than entertained me for 93.5 minutes.

High Points

An early ick-scare involving a corpse and surprise squatter is a pleasantly gross jump

While The Descent 2 never quite captures the claustrophobic horror so suffocating in its original, one character’s quick realization that she’s near-buried in treacherous rocks is actually quite scary and sad

Low Points

What worked so well about Juno’s villainy in the orignal was the complexity of her responsibility. Yes, she did a very stupid thing leading her friends into an abyss, but it came from a brash, overconfident and believable place mixed with residual guilt. By contrast, Vaines’ decision to go cave-diving and his execution in doing so is simply idiotic and the sign of a man afflicted with severe mental retardation.

So we can all totally agree that those last 30 seconds never happened, yes?

Lessons Learned

Americans are bad people who inevitably mess everything up

The most appropriate uniform for fighting carnivorous cave people is a smoking pair of hot pants

When investigating the disappearance of five physically adept women underground in unchartered and unstable caves, it’s best to not tell a single other authority figure where you’re actually going

Just because you have handcuffs in your pocket does not mean you have to use them

Rent/Bury/Buy

For curiosity alone, give this film a shot. No, you won’t be clutching your cat in fear (as I did on first viewing of Marshall’s debut), but if you approach The Descent 2 knowing you’re watching a typical sequel, the experience isn’t wasted. Those who are easily offended by subpar followups should avoid it, but a good deal of horror fans willing to let go of expectation will probably find themselves more entertained here than with 63% of other unambitious nontheatrical releases. The DVD is busting with features, including a commentary and thorough making-of. Give it a chance, then shoot your venom or mild enthusiasm below.

The Truest Test of Endurance

.Last week, I considered the lack of obesity in horror films. Despite their tendencies to consume heavy amounts of calorie laden beer and hungry inspiring drugs, most victims in standard releases still maintain a striking physical resemblance to catalog models. At the same time--and much more realistically--most lack the endurance to last long against giant madmen, black magic enhanced hunters, or highly infectious carnivores. 

Hence, this week I look at a few films that cleverly cast characters with the physical aptitude to fight off your typical horror villains. Not all survive and not all the films are any good, but each deserves a little credit for amassing some worthy warriors. 

Mulberry Street

This surprisingly good After Dark series entry brings the fast vampiric zombie sub-genre into the streets of Manhattan. Not the most revolutionary premise, but Mulberry Street does earn some innovative points for the diversity--both in age and ethnicity--of its featured cast. Middle aged immigrants, elderly hermits, and a few believable teens make a refreshingly real cast, but it’s the skillful integration of physical fitness into everyday New Yorkers that gives some impressive action. Credit goes to writers Nick Damici and Jim Mickle for finding creative ways to smoothly squeeze athletic characters into the story. A retired boxer, recent Iraq war veteran, and beefy bouncer can hold their own against rat-bitten barflies. And while it’s always fun to watch regular folks torn apart by infected cannibals, seeing the victims put up a kickass fight is far more rewarding.

Jeepers Creepers 2

Dead teenager films are more common than me getting angry at Emmy snubs, but rarely do the adolescent victim bodies prove to be worth more than their Gap provided wardrobe. Victor Salva’s followup to the surprisingly spry Jeepers Creepers strands a busload of high school basketball players and the least perky cheerleading squad in cinema history on a dusty mountain road, where a very hungry monster is busy cramming in his supper before a 23 year hibernation. While the premise sets up the possibility of teamwork and game plans, the endgame is far less interesting as the kids would rather squabble with thinly veiled racism than apply court lessons to a man-eating creature. 

Tremors

Don’t let the fluffy haired era of Kevin Bacon’s early career fool you. Whether it’s a strict Baptist city council or the power of Meryl Streep, America’s most ubiquitous actor is a force to be reckoned with. When backed by NRA poster couple Michael Gross and Reba MacEntire, Alcatraz ex-con Fred Ward, and surprisingly adept practical pole vaulter Finn Carter, gigantic prehistoric earthworms don’t stand a chance. 

Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Doomsday

Does Neil Marshall get partial financing from Bally’s Total Fitness or that guy outside my subway that hands out postcards every morning for a three week bootcamp? From highly trained soldiers to fully ripped spelunkers to plague surviving action heroes, each of his genre films has featured a fully fit cast ready to fight back against any threat, whether it comes in the form of werewolves, cavemen, or cannibalistic punks. Sure, the body count is high in all three films, but nobody goes down without first inflicting serious damage. 

Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4

When it comes to teenagers, Freddy Krueger has predictable tastes. He likes ‘em young, pretty, and generally ectomorphic. Occasionally, he takes a break from Seventeencover girls and slim pretty boys to hunt tougher prey, such as the dive team champ of Part 5. In Renny Harlin’s fourth installment, Freddy hits the gym and zeros in on some of the fittest adolescents ever seen in 1990s cinema. There’s the muscleman Kincaid, whose clearly been bulking up after nearly losing his life in Part 3, and a karate kid wannabe with a sadly inadequate training regime, plus a Kafka-esque kill which I regularly use to justify my aversion to toning. Sure, Freddy also cheats his diet a bit to eat some pizza and a few weaker pickings (like the asthmatic science nerd and 90 pound weakling that can’t even beat up a water bed), but all that filler ultimately leads up to a showdown with a physically/mentally/spiritually empowered wallflower who finds her inner Karate Kid Part III. Hilary Swank salutes you.

Resident Evil

Some filmgoers can only watch so many decaying corpses feed on helpless living creatures before it just gets old. In this era of Z-Day Awareness, we horror fans want our living dead to be challenged and our survivors to be smart. Thankfully, Raccoon City is fully equipped with resourceful SWAT teams able to navigate (somewhat) Cube-esque slicing traps and hordes of hungry zombies. By the sequel, heroine Alice gets enough biogenetic enhancements to conquer a newly bred man-beast with power that would make Mark Maguire strike out with envy. The third film does one better by turning Alice into such a machine that no fast running flesh eater or post-apocalyptic hillbilly stands a chance. More importantly, Alice gets her own posse in the form of a battle scarred caravan. None are particularly badass (nor is the film particularly good), but at least they fight well enough to convince us why they’ve survived a few rounds of good old fashioned noshing.

So hit the gym, drink your protein shakes, and add a few of your own well-trained horror casts that make those bad guys work for their dinner. 

Martyrs, Spoiled

Me: Psst. Did you see Martyrs?


You: No.


Me: Go away.


You: Dude(tte). What’s your problem?


Me: I can’t go into any detail whatsoever about this movie without spoiling it grosser than a gallon of milk left open in an Elm St. boiler room.


You: Oh.


Me: Yeah.


You: So...should I, like, watch the movie?


Me: Yes.


You: Is it great?


Me: Eh. Yes. No.


You: Yes or no?


Me: I’m not sure. But it’s definitely very good.


You: Okay.


Me: Yeah.


You: Um, later.


Me: I’m glad we had this conversation.


That’s right folks. I did indeed major in Playwriting and English and graduate cum laude. Onto the review, which, in case my Shakespearean dialogue was a little too dense, contains SPOILERS that will make you want to throw hungry wolverine clawed kittens in my direction.

You’ve been warned:


Like many works of art and the artists that create them, a good deal of horror films struggle with identity crises. Their makers have clearly seen enough canon to know what’s expected of their genre and strive to recreate what’s worked in the past while occasionally casting a line out to catch something fresh. The recent (and recently reviewed) Frontier(s), for example, hit all the notes of backwoods horror birthed by classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (or the earlier and beloved Spider Baby), but hinted at something new with Nazi undertones and a disappointingly unexplored dystopian setting. Unfortunately, Frontier(s) stopped short of forming anything revolutionary. For all the moody chaos in the bleak police state future, it delivered straight--if exceptionally well-done--gore cinema (known today as the heavily stigmatized torture porn).


Martyrs, the Canadian/French sleeper that has been making its prestigious rounds through the DVD community this past year, turns the confines of horror sub-genres into a fascinating, intelligent, and imperfect collage. Just when you think you know what type of film auteur Pascal Laugier is delivering (mangled ghostly girl? J-horror!), one shockingly explicit action transforms the story and style into another (shotgun in suburbia? home invasion!) and another (secret torture den? Underground society conspiracy!) until finally, the last 30 minutes lets Martyrs come into its own... for better and worse.


Quick Plot: Somewhere I never want to go in an industrial area of France, a young girl runs screaming through an empty morning street. We soon learn that this is Lucie, a mysterious orphan who was held captive and tortured, though no culprit or motive has been discovered. The understandably disturbed child is befriended by the pretty and maternal Anna, her roommate at a sad little orphanage that seems not entirely safe from the ghosts of Lucie’s past.

15 years later, the action shifts to a secluded upper middle class home where a typical family eats breakfast over the usual morning bickering. The doorbell rings. Father answers it, his face registering confusion, fear, and (possibly) recognition before a blast of shotgun busts through his stomach. At the other end of the smoking weapon is a now grown Lucie, her face still holding all the fear and hell of the little girl we met ten minutes earlier.

And then other stuff happens.


I could continue to describe the story, but if you’re reading this far, you already know it (and if you don’t and therefore haven’t heeded my SPOILER warning, you deserve a large heaping of force-fed gruel and systematic beatdowns). A lot of things happen in Martyrs, and none of them are good. Okay, a lot of things happen in Martyrs and none of them are any more pleasant than a route canal performed by Steve Martin’s dentist character in Little Shop of Horrors. At the same time, this isn’t a Saw sausage fest that tries to top itself or other extreme films with cinematic violence for shock’s sake. Bad things happen because the story demands them. Bad things happen because there are people in this world that do them.

Long haunted by a gollum-ish female, Lucie shoots some people--two innocent, two not. This does nothing to quell the demon that hunts her. When Anna meets the inspiration for Lucie’s trauma, she (and we) is equally repulsed, terrified, and heartbroken. It’s almost a relief to see her head blown off, for both the character’s sake and our own.

Like the film itself, there is no clear morality in the universe. People torture young women to unlock a mystery that probably shouldn’t be unlocked. Lives are destroyed in beyond painful ways. Yet the head mistress of this diabolical underground community gets her answer: a martyr is made in Anna, a skinless Joan of Arc without the independence to do anything with her bravery.


Or maybe Anna wins. What she tells the grand torturess, we never know. Maybe she lies. Maybe she whispers horrors of what lies beyond this world to terrify and guilt this macabre madame into suicide. Maybe she creates an imaginary eden to lure the old woman closer and quicker to an eternity of hell. Or maybe she has nothing to report and proves that the years of cruelty were for naught. We don’t know.

Personally, I’m not ready to rank Martyrs as a Great Film just yet. It’s an excellent movie, yes, and one that is clearly made by an artist with the potential to steer the genre in a solidly new direction. Technically, Martyrs is near perfect; the acting is spot on, the visuals are beautiful, and the editing is effective. If there’s a flaw, it comes somewhere at the 40 minute mark, where, despite what I recall as being tense and engrossing staging, something starts to drag. Maybe it’s the Haute Tension-ish look sparked by a pretty girl in a bloody tanktop or the not-too-surprising first reveal of Lucie’s real tormentor. I can’t put my finger on it, but at some point, I fell out before coming back.

Laugier does not reinvent the horror film, but he does reshape what’s already there with fascinating results. One hour in, I realized that I had absolutely no idea where this film was going. I haven’t really felt that way since the total surprise of The Descent. Where Neil Marshall’s spelunking scarefest led us into a nightmare with jumps and fear, Laugier’s Martyrs starts with hell and philosophically transforms it into purgatory.

High Points
Although we never get to truly know either character, both Morjana Alaoui and Mylene Jamponoi make intensely sympathetic and haunted characters


The minimalist score constantly evolves throughout the film, never settling on a predictable pattern to warn us of mood shifts


From the snowing feather gunshot to Anna’s gleaming eyes, Laugier creates some incredibly memorable visuals

Low Points
While I originally admired the opening Peeping Tom-esque home movie documentary feel of the child Anna and Lucie, it’s abandoned so quickly that I wonder if it was a simple exposition device


Lessons Learned
Overachieving in butterfly swimming competitions is just asking for trouble


When your shower is clogged, the best solution is to dig a ten foot hole in your front yard and find the little mouse bastard that’s been hanging out in the pipes


There are few things more frightening than old French ladies with money and Norma Desmond headwraps

Rent/Bury/Buy
You need to see this movie, if only to throw your hat into the discussion of what the fuss is all about. (But then, if you’re reading this far, you’ve already seen it.) As I explained in my yesterday’s posting, Martyrs didn’t quite live up to the hype I’d been hearing about it through podcasts and the blogosphere, but it definitely did leave an equally deep emotional and philosophical impression. Because of its ambiguous ending, it’s also a film to share and discuss, so I could certainly endorse a buy from your local independent dealer. A thorough making-of is included in the extras, giving you detailed discussions about every aspect of filming. All in all, it’s a solid, unique, and thoughtful horror that highlights Pascal Laugier as a filmmaker to watch with two open eyes. As the man tapped to helm the remake (reboot? I can’t keep up with the evolving language of stale cinematic trends) of Hellraiser, it’s guaranteed that we’ll be seeing more of him. Let’s hope he continues to make cinema his own.

Neil Marshall Law

The commercial failure of films like Doomsday and Starship Troopers makes me die a little inside. How is there a massive audience for Fast & Furious when a gleefully over-the-top post-apocalyptic actionfest barely coughs up enough money to pay for a three pack of Vin Diesel’s wife beaters?


The world is a sad sad place.


Not quite as sad--or massively cool--as Neil Marshall’s bonanzaland of the near future. Heavily flawed but tons of fun, Doomdsday gives you a lot of...well...everything. it’s not always good, but it’s far from dull.


Quick Plot: A highly contagious flesh-eating virus spreads across Great Britain, leaving the government no choice but to quarantine Scotland to let the dying sort their own deaths out. One sobbing mother is able to send her young, now one-eyed daughter over the wall to eventually grow up into an ass-kicking Rhona Mitri. Twenty five years later, the disease seems to be reappearing, leaving the prime minister and his sinister right-hand man to send a team into the danger zone in search of a cure. Failing that, a few of the ghetto-dwellers susceptible to the resurgent plague will be sacrificed as a new quarantine zone is formed.

WIth a generous supply of ammunition and only 48 hours to use it, Mitri and a few Marshall alumni head to town with mini-Dead Reckonings probably purchased from a skillful used car salesman. It’s not long before they come across one band of survivors--Mad Maxish mohawked cannibals with awesome style and great technique using hand weapons. As if futuristic raves weren’t enough, the action soon moves to a less urban setting as Malcolm McDowell swings by to lead a band of survivors currently living under a Medieval lifestyle. But with gladiator shows. At this point, there’s still another 45 minutes left.

Doomsday is a ride, pure and simple. If you were expecting anything near the slow build of The Descent or the tight quarters of Dog Soldiers, you won’t find it in this sprawling epic of a movie. This is one ambitious film, but there are some semblances of Marshall’s skillful personal touch. For such a large cast, most of the leads and supporting roles are memorable enough for their deaths or heroics to resonate. Some of the action is breathtaking and the setting--which ranges from a lawless city to ancient castles--looks fantastic. If there’s a major flaw, it’s Marshall’s looseness with telling a strong story, which simply takes a backseat to car chases and stage dives.


High Points
Malcolm McDowell is always a welcome presence, particularly when he’s playing the a Shakespearean eccentric with excess power


While the opening is a bit of a slow go, the initial attack by the punk survivors--filled with a surprisingly high body count--is intense and rollicking

From the Snake Plissken-esque character design to the Waterworldiness of a cheerfully scavenger society, spotting Marshall’s nods and allusions to other post-apocalyptic fare makes for fun viewing


Low Points
I love the mixture of punk cannibal gangs and medieval village societies rising simultaneously, but because of their spread, we never really get enough of either. Maybe I’m being greedy, but I was hungry for a full-blown war between the two.

It’s hard to believe that a mere 20 years would turn half of a country into Robin Hood extras without any solid backstory to explain where they got all that period garb


The 48 hour countdown feels like a random touch to organize the timing; with two warring gangs, car/foot/horse chases, sword and gladiator combat, and a cannibal rally, the added ‘intensity’ of crunching time is just annoying

Lessons Learned
In the near future, neon hair dye will be in abundance and losing an eyeball will be awesome


Horseback riding at full speed is incredibly instinctive for Englishmen who have probably never seen a live horse in their sheltered lives


Futuristic cannibals are extremely talented when it comes to making a little meat--say from one average sized male--feed an entire population. The boys of We’re Going To Eat You should take note.


Rent/Bury/Buy
This has a good deal of re-watchability and a fully loaded DVD, so anybody with a soft spot for wild action or post-apocalyptic adventure won’t do wrong investing in a purchase. You won’t get an entirely cohesive story, but you will be spared dull exposition or, well, more than five minutes without some form of creative killing. It’s not for everybody, but if the recycling of decapitated heads makes you happy, then this is the film for you.