What, am I funny like a clown? Do I AMUSEMENT you?

Few gimmicks are easier to pull off in a horror movie than menacing clowns. Plant one on your poster and you can guarantee a few automatic rentals, at least 10% of which will come from me. Hence today’s feature, 2009’s Amusement, clinched its way onto my television when it hit Instant Watch.

Quick Plot: Opening credits introduce three lovely young ladies poised for big things: Tabitha (most likely to succeed), Lisa (most likely to be famous), and Shelby (most likely to shine, whatever that means). Last is a weird little boy with mental issues, untitled but we’ll call him Most Likely to Remind People of Michael Myers.

Shelby, now grown and tired, is driving home to Ohio with her boyfriend, a young man who dreams, it would seem, of joining a highway convoy. Granted I don’t travel much by car, but are convoys some sort of secret Skulls-like fraternity that guarantees true happiness? Anyway, as you can guess, this one is filled with menace, here in the nicely twisted form of a kidnapping-happy roadster.

Following the mildly effective first story, we move on to Tabitha (Satan’s Little Helper charmer Katheryn Winnick) as she embarks in spending the evening with her moppy-haired cousins. And for whatever reason, their collection of awful evil very terrible clown dolls. A storm is raging, one first-shift babysitter missing, mysterious hooded man spotted, and giant awful evil very terrible clown doll is creaking away in a rocking chair, waiting for the perfect moment to leap to life and hunt the pretty blond.

Lastly, we move to Lisa, who worries when her good-girl roommate never comes home and hunts her down with her health inspector boyfriend. They end up in a Frankensteinian hotel headed by a little weirdo, who naturally....well you see where it’s all going.

Amusement is an odd little dish, one made with a lot of genuinely good ingredients that simply never got cooked long enough. The basic premise of following three women as they get taken by a psycho is something new, and the fact that each story has a completely different approach helps. The opening offers a neat car chase, the second, a tried and true clown hunt, and the third, a nice stalking through a funhouse. All three actresses are adequate, with Winnick proving the most charming. 

On the other hand, Amusement is also something of a mess. We don’t really know the villain well enough to ever really be scared of him, as a single childhood flashback doesn’t really give us much to fear. Ending all the buildup with one more stalk-chase sequence feels lazy, especially when we reach a point where it seems clear who will emerge the survivor. The film has plenty of genuine originality but unfortunately, not a good enough screenplay to make it work.

High Points

Though we know how it has to eventually end, the prolonged scene with the life-sized clown doll (or is it???) is fairly effective (at least if you’re naturally uneasy with giant life-sized clown dolls)

Low Points

As stated earlier, a script that doesn’t really have the energy to tie its pieces together

Lessons Learned

Entertainers and performers are also known as lovers of the laugh

There’s an art to a good convoy, and it apparently includes introducing yourself awkwardly at rest stops

Most FBI interrogations are not held in abandoned drafty warehouses with moving walls and no cell phone reception. Remember this when calling in on your job

Rent/Bury/Buy

Amusement is not by any means a good film, but it has a little more going for it than a lot of other slick direct-to-DVD modern horrors. Director John Simpson can clearly stage a few good scenes, though tying them together just never seemed to happen in Jake Wade “The Hitcher AND When a Stranger Calls remakes writer” Wall’s script. Sure, for a $10 million budget, a better story could have been told, but it makes for an entertaining enough 85 minutes of your mild attention. It’s no Drive-Thru (really what is? Other than Drive-Thru, which you should totally stop everything for and go watch immediately), but it’s a decent little horror that passed my morning with mild suspense.

Now go watch Drive-Thru.

2010 Revisited, Audio Style

In only a few places might you find this guy:

hanging out a few spots away from him.

and naturally, it's the audio pod paradise known as the GleeKast!


Cohostesswiththemostess Erica and I take a mini break from everybody's favorite/most hated musical comedy to list our favorite films and television moments of 2010. Will voids be entered? Swans be black? Machetes wielded? 3D Step Upped to? You can only find out by visiting http://gleekast.podomatic.com or downloading the show (for free!) at iTunes.

Making Cavities Look Like Candy

As Corbin Bernson knows, any film involving teeth can instantly get some sort of financing and audience interest. Hence, 2009’s Oral Fixation, a cleverly titled horror that combines stalking with dentistry.

Quick Plot: Imagine, if you will, Bill Murray’s masochist dental patient in Little Shop of Horrors (or go back further to Jack Nicholson’s, if you prefer) but made over into a hot chick with large breasts. That would be Rachel, a perky young woman madly in love with her married dentist. Almost immediately, a routine checkup turns into a fatal attraction complete with kidnapping her beloved’s child, attempting to murder his wife, and framing him for rape.

That’s pretty much Oral Fixation in a nutshell, all 79 minutes of it. I’d love to say more, but it’s been 10 minutes since I watched the film and I already can’t remember anything else about it.

High Points

Despite this clearly being a low budget production, the performances by all the leads are actually more than adequate

Low Points

While I always approve of shorter running lengths, I can’t give a thumbs up when the ending is not explained in the least. A neat little shot shows a few heads preserved in jars, but how said heads--possibly the protagonists of the movie--ended up there, if those said heads are who they seem to be, and how their collector ends up where she does...yup, none of it is explained in the least. None.

Lessons Learned

As a private investigator, it’s good to know that most subjects are far more forthcoming with revealing intimate details of their lives after you introduce yourself

Never leave condoms lying around the house where any crazed stalker could do with them as she pleases


An allergy to anesthesia can be a pain, but if you happen to have a fetish for that kind of thing, it's also really convenient

Rent/Bury/Buy

Oh Instant Watch, I would never know what to do with Sunday mornings without you. Oral Fixation is not good, but if you’re like me, it’s not the worst way to kill 80 minutes of your life. It’s goofy, occasionally gory, and ultimately, a film that knows well enough not to overstay its welcome. Now that it’s no longer streaming, I wouldn’t advise you to seek it out with any energy (i.e., using a Netflix rental on the film) but should it ever get back there, it’s...you know, a film about a psycho who gets off on painful dentistry. Make of it what you will.

The Biggest Bug Your Windshield Ever Caught

There’s something truly lovable the directing style of Stuart Gordon, and I’m not ONLY talking about one of my all-time favorite killer doll films. Though he doesn’t necessarily boast the genre-making resume of someone like George Romero or Tobe Hooper, all Gordon’s work has an interesting, fairly intelligent yet unabashedly gory style that somehow feels less sleazy than so many of his cohorts.

Hence I greeted his latest feature, Stuck, with guarded enthusiasm, mostly due to the underwhelming reviews it had received. Thankfully, there’s no bravery-inducing charm quite like Netflix Instant Watch.

Quick Plot: Brandi (a cornrowed clad Mena Suvari) toils away at a nursing home, faithfully hosing down the incontinent as her boss dangles a possible promotion over her pug nose. Meanwhile, a soon-to-be homeless fortysomething named Tom (sad-faced Stephen Rea) shuffles around town just as Brandi drunkenly plows her car into his torso. In shock, Brandi pulls into her garage, Tom’s legs still jutting out her windshield.

That’s the main setup of Stuck, and it’s a pretty neat one at that. Also thrown into the mix are are Rashid, Brandi’s wannabe gangsta boyfriend, and a few colorful neighbors, including a sympathetic family of illegal immigrants. At its core though, Stuck is--or really, should be--a morality tale, a two-man showdown between a nothing-to-live-for bum and a life-finally-going-her-way young career woman (sorta).

The problem, at least from my high standards, is that Gordon seems to avoid what makes his story so fascinating. It’s amusing to watch Rashid reluctantly prove his non-badassness, but focusing on his and Brandi’s inept coverup is far less interesting than the psychology involved in doing so. When you have a truly gifted actor like Stephen Rea, why relegate him to moaning for help?

Having said this, I did enjoy Stuck as a breezy instant watch. It’s funny and something new, a well put together thriller comedy that never skims on blood or cruelty. It’s just not quite the movie it feels like it could have been.

High Points

Though he doesn’t get nearly enough to do, Stephen Rea brings his A-game, particularly in his early job-hunting sadsack scenes

Low Points

Mena Suvari will never be wrongly accused of being a good actress and though she's more adequate than usual here, I still wish her Brandi had a few more layers. We never really feel the inner struggle going on inside her in terms of do-I-kill-a-man-or-not, something that feels so missing when such a dilemma is the film’s main asset

Lessons Learned

Nothing sets a sexy mood better than a lava lamp

Corn rows flatter no white woman

Anybody can do anything to anyone and get away with it

Rent/Bury/Buy

Stuck is a pretty enjoyable little movie, but it lacks the smarts to really explore its setup. Perfectly adequate for Instant Watch, but not a film I’ll return to anytime soon. A when-you-get-the-chance recommendation for most, unless you’re a disturbed Suvari stalker (boobs are shown) or Suvari despiser (she still really can’t act). The Rea/Gordon ingredients help to even things out, but Stuck still feels like a bag of trail mix. Passable for a meal, with mild bursts of positive satisfaction. Then pretzels, which are TOTALLY fine....just not as good as those tasty chocolate covered raisins that your bag just never seems to have enough of.

A Tale of Two Vanishings

Like many a film lover, I’ve grown weary of lazy remakes. But you know what makes me even more grumpy and tired? People complaining about remakes.

They exist. They have since the dawning of film. Sometimes they make me want to slaughter mutant newborn babies and Bijou Philips. Other times they make me happier than a blob eating a phonebooth. It’s a topic my blogging pal T.L.Bugg covered all through October (I even stopped by with a top 13 list) and one that doesn’t deserve generalizations.

Which brings us to today’s double feature:

1988’s Dutch-French mashup Spoorloos

and 1993’s The Vanishing

Director George Sluizer filmed two versions of Tim Krabbe’s novel, The Golden Egg, presumably for two different types of audiences. His first foray is a quiet, suspenseful tale of obsession dripping with tragic nihilism. Five years later, Luizer reattacked the material, setting it in the US and tossing in an action movie in the film’s final act.

Plain and simple, I preferred Sluizer’s original. It’s more haunting, less conventional, and overall, a far more frustratingly rewarding trip into evil. That being said, his 1993 second try is interesting in its own right and today, I’d like to discuss both in SPOILERIFIC detail.

You’ve been warned.

Quick Plot: A happy yet imperfect couple is enjoying a mini-vacation when their car runs out of gas. Movie 1’s Saskia freaks out when boyfriend Rex brashly leaves her to fill up, an insensitive action after she told him about her terrifying, nightmare wherein she was abandoned. Though Rex returns, Luizer establishes a subtle theme of her fears, something that (in hindsight) makes the whole of Spoorloos truly sad.

Sluizer drops the golden egg dream in his American adaptation, a choice that speeds up the action while denying us enough connection to Diane (played with, I’ll concede, likable charm by a young pre-Blind Side Sandra Bullock). Part of this probably stems from the opening switch. Where the Dutch Vanishing starts with Rex and Saskia, the American one frames the tale with the villain, played with a bizarre posh Minnesotean accent by Jeff Bridges.

In both versions, we watch Raymond/Barney practicing his abduction, timing the effects of chloroform and getting comfortable with the challenge of the muffle. In his second film, Sluizer makes Bridges a constant lurking figure, setting the tone from the very first scene. In that sense, it’s a far more conventional thriller with an immediate villain. Bridges is undeniably a great actor, but it’s hard to uncrack his Barney. Like the Dutch version, we get his anecdote about discovering his sociopathy, but there’s something more unnatural here. The French Raymond comes off as a regular schoolteacher and family man successfully hiding his inner evil, a sort of not-as-good-looking Dexter Morgan dipping his toes into something he’ll never regret. Bridges never quite sells his everyman-ness. If you had a conversation with him--and that weird voice--at a rest stop, you’d be more likely to throw to feign deafness to avoid any connection.

Though both villains are fathers, Luizer does make a few changes in their respective relationships to their teenage daughters (or daughter, in Bridges’ case). We’re never quite sure how Raymond feels about the women in his life. Though he comes off like a good parent, we simply don’t get enough interaction to know if he harbors blankness or like our old sociopathic pal Mr. Morgan, a gradual appreciation for the hole they fill in his otherwise empty life.

In Bridges case, things are different. He’s a cold husband but a loving dad (even if you uses his daughter in a screaming spider test), a point that comes in handy for the final act. On Sluizer’s part, was this a choice for character or plot? There’s untapped potential in the daughter, who may, one could almost hope, prove to have her own hidden evil. But using her presence as a mere plot convenience that buys Nancy Travis (we’ll get there) time and survival opportunity ultimately feels more like a final act storyline bowtie than psychological trait.

And what of Rex/Jeff, arguably the protagonist of both films? Gene Bervoet’s (Dutch Rex)’s performance is as interesting as it is frustrating. He’s something of a jerk, a questionable boyfriend who later proves more obsessed than ever in love. Kiefer Sutherland, in contrast, takes on the role with a strong balance of vulnerability and boneheadedness. What starts as fear and inadequacy about losing Diane turns--perhaps more believably--into resignation. Yet even though he knows deep down Diane is dead, his fatal flaw grows: he simply needs the truth.

Enter the biggest plot difference in the films in the form of a new girlfriend, a brief stopping point in the Dutch version but a major plot point of Nancy ‘90s Travis in the second. The first film uses her economically to demonstrate the extent of Rex’s obsession (and also, jerkiness). Travis’s Rita, however, becomes the key factor in the remake’s ending.

What to make of that coda. Sluizer’s first film is memorable among other things for its nihilistic conclusion, with Rex finally learning Saskia’s fate inside a coffin. It’s a brave and terrifying way to end a film.

Well, Kiefer (it's easiest to think of him by that name) wakes up in a compromising position but lucky for him, his curly haired sweetheart is sobering up and fast on his trail. Through some Nancy (Travis) Drewing, Rita finds Jeff and Barney and enters into an action packed showdown. Ho. Hum.

I admire Sluizer’s decision to rethink his film for American audiences. The idea of remaking one’s own work seems silly if you’re not doing anything differently, and watching a direct translation would’ve been a waste.

That being said, I join the Dutch Team on this one. Though the American performances (save for Bridges, whose work here I’m still undecided on) are absolutely fine, the overall makeover feels so utterly 1990s thriller. This is one of Travis’ more standout roles (not to be cruel, but I wonder if if there’s a reason she’s always relegated to girlfriend bit parts) but making the film her story missed out on the more complex and fascinating aspects of Kiefer’s conflict. The first film was a study on obsession. This one was ultimately about a cottage set chase sequence.

Lessons Learned

A fight does not equal a thing

Part of the diner waitress uniform involves frizzy hair (makes sense), gigantic earrings (seems inconvenient with frizzy hair), and gum

Because every now and then I forget, allow me to point out a truth we all know: the 1990s were an awful awful time for ladies’ fashion

On the flip side, DMVs were ridiculously friendly and accommodating

Doctors notes for claustrophobia do not get you out of wearing your seatbelt

Rent(x 2)/Bury (moohahaha x2)/ Buy(x2)

Don’t, as I did, watch Spoorloos and follow it up the next day with The Vanishing. You’d think I’d know this by now.

Overall, I recommend both films, with the following rules:

-If you only have the time or energy to see one, go with Spoorloos. It’s more powerful, more thoughtful, and ultimately leaves you far more haunted than about 80% of genre film.

-Want to watch both? Do it. But wait a week or month between viewing. If you don’t already know the original’s ending (you know, even though I already told you about it) then watch the Dutch version first to ensure it packs its intended punch. If you’re a man or woman of no restraint, then it may actually pay to see the more conventional American version first. You can enjoy it for its slickness then go deeper when your appetite is whetted something more complex.

Sunday Night Sap

When I was eight years old, I wrote my first (thus far, only) novel. It was called Over the Rainbow and it followed a pack of young siblings as they fought a gnome for his gold.

It was magnificent.

For a good deal of my life, it’s been my dream to be a writer. Silly idea when you think of it. All someone needs is a pen or foggy window and bam! Dream realized. But I suppose the idea of being published, of seeing my name (or some clever pseudonym) on the spine of a book I was proud of sitting on a store shelf just seemed like the pinnacle of what I could do.

Writing is my passion, something I’ve always known but have occasionally hid from. Despite spending years toiling on plays and essays in college and currently, putting appliances onto paper Monday to Friday, it wasn’t until the Deadly Doll’s House was built that my words found a genuine home.

On Wednesday morning, my blog disappeared. Some of you may have noticed, either by clicking on the usual link and finding a blank blogger page or through my Twitter freakouts and Facebook warnings. Clearly, whatever issue happened has been resolved but for about two days, I had to live with the fact that all the posts and comments made over the last (almost) two years had evaporated like a vampire on Buffy or Christian in Left Behind: The Movie.

There were shakes. Stomachaches. Lots of kitten cuddling and Google research. Two nights that involved awful dreams and mornings of baggy eyes. Then my Wednesday email opened up with comments and I breathed the biggest sigh of relief known to a 5‘1.5” woman.

The Deadly Doll’s House’s mini-vacation in limbo let me think an awful lot about blogging and what it meant to me and as we start a new year, I can tell you this: it means a lot. 

I realized this mostly when I started thinking of the worst case scenario, i.e., if www.deadlydollshouse.blogspot.com was never restored. What would happen to those 300 or so posts, written on morning subway commutes and after-dinner evenings? It was actually a really easy answer: they would slowly be reposted, somewhere in between the new ones I would write and publish on a new Internet home.

Point is, I love this strange little phenomenon we all participate in known as blogging. I love how it has let me meet dozens of incredible creative folks from all over the world. I love that it’s opened up endless conversations about everything from the merits of dubbing to post-apocalyptic manners. That it’s let me read some of the best writing I’ve ever experienced, even if the majority of the authors are unpublished everymen (and of course, women) tap dancing on their laptops between office work and cooking dinner. I love that writing about film has let me fall completely in love with cinema, and that I almost feel like in some odd bestial way, it’s a mutually fulfilling relationship.

2010 has had some personal and professional highs and lows for me, but ultimately, I’m ending it feeling incredibly rewarded for having--and holding onto--this odd little environment of friends and film. Thank you--readers, writers, and movies--for being contributors to that, whether by creating your own content or responding to mine. It’s not something I take lightly. It is something I love. 

Pfff. All this mushiness is making me nauseous. Time to watch something terrible that involves entrails or doll rape.

Exes and ohs,

Emily