Three Films Make A Post: Terror goes into over-time.

Home Invasion (2016): Despite being a direct-to-video production, director David Tennant’s Home Invasion looks and feels more like a TV movie, the sort of thing Lifetime gets up to from time to time, say. So the film doesn’t take the violence or the threat to its central characters very far and plays things rather safe and friendly for a home invasion movie, building up competent enough thrills but not exactly telling a riveting story. It also wastes Scott Adkins as the least interesting bad guy available, generally opting for stilted dialogue and little else whenever it can get away with it. Natasha Henstridge and child actor Liam Dickinson are okay, but the film plays the threat for their lives and limbs so conservatively, I found myself less than excited.

Mandrake (2010): Tripp Reed’s Mandrake for its part actually is a TV movie. Just another SyFy Original, this one’s concerned with an “expedition” (or as we in the biz call them, annoying people wandering through the jungles of Shreveport) that pulls out the wrong dagger from the wrong chest and has to contend with the resulting awakening of a very pissed-off ent (whose name probably would be Grumpyroot or something of that kind). For most of the time, this plays out like the adaptation of a second string Weird Tales story, with its same basic adventure tropes (including the usual bullshit about “natives”, though they aren’t exactly the bad guys here; in fact, punchier writing could have made something quite interesting out of the way they aren’t), the same somewhat cool monster, and the same pleasantly clichéd plot structure.

Additional selling point is that our heroes seem to be surprisingly okay with human sacrifice as long as they aren’t on the wrong end of the dagger. Obviously, I enjoyed the whole she-bang well enough, but who am I kidding?

Southbound (2015): Given how many of the people involved with this anthology horror piece concerning the misadventures of various soon-to-be-dead (or worse) characters travelling southbound on a nameless US desert highway have been part of the VHS films, I was rather expecting an unpleasant trip into the world of bro horror.
Instead, I got a pretty good horror anthology with some truly nasty bits, with rather simple yet very effectively realized short tales, and a sense of weirdness floating around the edges of the stories that to me is pretty much the opposite of bro´horror, like Twilight Zone episodes gone horribly wrong. It’s a delightful show case for all the directors – Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath and collective Radio Silence – that also suggests they were rather held back by the VHS films’ paradigm to look really shitty.

Three Films Make A Post: Evil Gets An Upgrade

Nightbreed Director’s Cut (1990): What surprised me most on watching Clive Barker’s preferred version of the film is how small the differences between this and the film’s initial version truly are, with little about them that’s fundamentally different. At least, the film still has all the flaws that always made it difficult for me to love it. So, while there’s certainly more to see of them now, the Nightbreed as a whole still feel more like alternative circus performers than any sort of ancient tribe of “monsters”, and they are still a pretty boring culture that seems based on all the least interesting clichés about oppressed groups you’ll encounter. Boone and Lori – the theoretical protagonists – are still complete non-entities, with no character traits beyond “being madly in love” and deeply stupid I could make out, which is a bit of a problem in a film that aims so clearly for the mythical and the archetypal, which might be simple but generally isn’t flat. But then, the Nightbreed probably got the destroyer/saviour there that fits them.

Faust: Love of the Damned (2000): This is Brian Yuzna at his least interesting, wallowing in the grotesque and the dubious of taste (which should be a good thing), but never really managing to actually do or say or think through it (which is a bad thing). There’s certainly a degree of joy to be found in the grotesque for the grotesque’s sake but the decisive something that would make me feel anything about the grotesquery I am seeing is missing here. The film isn’t exactly improved by lines and lines of horrible (and just awfully dumb) dialogue and a lead in Mark Frost who is certainly trying for the over the top approach that is the only reasonable one for this material but is more often than not ending up looking and sounding like a clown in a bad costume; and clown’s aren’t that frightening.

The Pact II (2014): I liked the first film of what I hope won’t become a long franchise a lot, and sequel directors Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath did make an interesting film before this in Entrance but – apart from the pointlessness of constructing a sequel to a film that really did tell the whole story by making the same film again while adding random clichés – this sequel just isn’t very good at all. Where the first film’s characterization was sharp and surprisingly deep, this one’s is trite, the characters never becoming more than actors saying words they learned from a script. Worse, some of the acting is truly atrocious (particularly Patrick Fischler is dreadful, though other performances by him I’ve seen suggest that he’s doing exactly what the directors want from him, for whatever reason), and where the first film was full of elegant and inventive moments of horror absolutely based in its characters, this one’s are mostly trite, or just jump-scaring up better set-ups from the original film.

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In short: Entrance (2012)

The film follows the eventless life of a disillusioned Los Angeles working poor (Suziey Block). Escalating events that should be disquieting occur at the periphery of her rather empty life, but they are drowned out by the quotidian until it is much too late for her.

What begins as a mumblecore-y, mostly improvised film shot hand-held and very digitally concerning the special kind of boredom of a very particular type of urban poor in Los Angeles slowly - some might argue too slowly - turns into quite a disturbing piece of horror.

How much a given viewer will enjoy the experience of watching Entrance will probably depend on his or her patience for scenes that are constructed to make the audience feel the central character's (excellently played) disillusionment and boredom with her life, possibly even life at large (this is not the sort of film where characters do much verbal self-analysis); in other words, large parts of Entrance are out to actively bore the audience. As consequently as it is done here, even early disturbances of our protagonist's routine are made to feel quite boring when we should by all rights find them threatening.

Boring one's audience on purpose is a difficult technique, and directors Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath are not quite perfect at it. There were moments in the proceedings when I doubted the pay off to be worth the pain, and nearly didn't persevere, but after a scene of pointless tedium usually followed one of pointed tedium, so I did. The slow and boring parts lead into a very tightly done and pretty disturbing climax that would not have worked quite as well without what came before. However, one really needs a lot of patience and some tolerance for some of the particular tics of US non-horror indie filmmaking of the last few years to get something out of Entrance. The jittery camera, the mumbled dialogue, and the willingness to bore work out more than fine in the end, but they aren't exactly aesthetic markers to fall in love with.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,dallas patrick hallam,patrick horvath,suziey block,horror