Fright Night 2 (2013)

Not to be confused with that other Fright Night 2.

I don't even want to know why the sequel to the Fright Night remake of 2011 is another reboot, and file it under "Things Man wasn't meant to know" like grandpa HPL taught me. Particularly, I see no reason to whine about it in a film I found much more entertaining than the remake it remakes without the boring US suburbia stuff that is so overplayed in horror.

Anyhow, I think we can leave out the usual synopsis and just say that Charley Brewster (Will Payne) again sees a vampire, nobody believes him, and the lamest incarnation of TV host Peter Vincent (Sean Power, whoever he is) comes to his help or not. Just this time around, the movie takes place in Romania where our teenage heroes are taking some kind of guest study course, and the vampire is Countess Bathory herself (Jaime Murray), moonlighting (tee-hee) as an art professor.

While this is all highly derivative of the other Fright Nights and every vampire movie ever, director Eduardo Rodriguez uses the possibilities of producing a direct-to-video movie with what I assume to be quite a budget for this sort of thing, at least comparatively, with aplomb, and stylistically very much in the spirit of European horror of the 70s.

Until now, all of Rodriguez's films I've seen were visually very bland, shot in the yellow, desaturated colours I've grown to loathe over the years, so it comes as a bit of surprise to not just find the director use colours in the classic, mood-enhancing ways we all know and love from European gothic horror but to use them very well, clearly aiming for the dream-like end of the horror spectrum where camera angles become as strange as the plot, and where an atmosphere of weirdness and the bizarre is much more important than coherence or logic. It's really the only direction to go with a script as plain silly as Matt Venne's (this is a compliment, obviously) whose finale surprisingly doesn't go for a huge plot twist and has the feel of something made up as the film went along. It's overcomplicated, it's strange, and it's rather a lovely thing in a film world full of movies constructed so tightly to after formula it's impossible not to know everything that will happen in them, and how it will happen, after one has seen their first acts.

There's a bit more sleaze and gore than I would have expected, too, both used effectively and enthusiastically. Direct humour does take a bit of a back seat compared to the other films in what I now have to call a "franchise"; in fact, the three actual horror comedy scenes stick out as if they belonged in a different movie. Add to that how much this Peter Vincent version lacks in personality, and that he might as well just not be in the film for all the importance he has, and it's difficult to shake the feeling that the script wasn't always a Fright Night script.

On the acting side, the film's a bit of a mixed bag, with Power as boring as his character, Chris Waller and Sacha Parkinson bad in a fun to watch way, or rather bad in different fun to watch ways as a comparison of their respective vampire scenes will show, Will Payne appropriately hysterical, and Jaime Murray doing a bang up job of overacting in a fun and conscious way and looking weird yet attractive.

I'm sure a lot of people will loathe Fright Night 2 as just another film that isn't the original Fright Nights, but I'm rather glad it isn't. If I wanted to see those, I'd just pop in their DVDs and watch them. Instead, Rodriguez delivers a film that might be a bit of a mess, but a mess in all the right, interesting, and strange ways, the sort of film that stands as a reminder that you can take the prospect of something as dispiriting as a remake of a remake, and end up with a fun, imaginative film. Plus, it's also a film that has a lot to teach regarding the dangers of overcomplicated occult rituals, and the existence of vampire sonar. What more could I ask of a direct-to-DVD movie?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,comedy,jaime murray,will payne,sean power,sacha parkinson,eduardo rodriguez

In short: Curandero (2005)

This Mexican horror movie directed by Eduardo Rodriguez (him of the atrocious El Gringo) took ages to get proper distribution, despite being quite as hopeless than your usual low budget black magic movie, featuring El Mariachi Carlos Gallardo himself in the title role giving a not unexpected performance between wooden-facedness, machismo and a certain human fragility, and providing a generally non-horrible ninety minutes, unlike a lot of independent horror films of much lower quality that have no problems whatsoever finding distribution. If I were of an unfriendly bend of mind, I'd assume a film full of Mexicans speaking Spanish (the English language dub is of course horrible) and not wearing sombreros is just too much for certain people to take.

Curandero does have its problems, though. First and foremost among these is that Rodriguez seems to attempt to win the price for the most piss-coloured film made in the decade of piss-coloured films. It's a decision that really ruins any aesthetic attraction the film may have, with everything in it being either absolutely desaturated (blood in this pretty bloody movie is not red but dark brown like, well, crap) or yellow, yellow and yellow. People with yellow skin (seriously) walk under a yellow sky, through colourless and yellow locations. It's like a black and white movie made by someone who doesn't want to bother to think about the differences between light and dark and hates shadows, and it really costs the film most of an ability to build up any kind of coherent mood.

A coherent mood would be quite helpful for it too, for not all of the script's tonal shifts from black comedy to horror to the sort of Mexican direct-to-video fodder which usually starred one of the Galindo brothers and back again work quite as well as they should, giving the film a more disjointed feel than its comparatively straightforward plot would suggest. The film's pacing is, as they say, erratic, repeatedly going from slow and ponderous - with scenes that go on way too long (the problem of real low budget independent horror beside problematic acting in minor roles) - to semi-fast in a way that makes it difficult to get really excited about the film or lose oneself in it.

On the other hand, despite these flaws, Curandero had no problem in at least holding my interest, if only to see what slightly weird flourish Rodriguez would give the next scene, and what gory hallucination/vision its hero would have next. There's a basic low budget movie charm to Curandero's version of magic and the supernatural that makes it difficult to resist the film completely, and while I'd have thanked its director pretty fucking much for putting a bit of thought into the basics of its visual presentation, I can't say I didn't enjoy watching it on that level of my tastes that appreciates sudden outbreaks of surrealist gore even if it is yellow.

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,in short,horror,eduardo rodriguez,carlos gallardo,gizeht galatea