Reviews: Relatively Harmless Horror Movies
Halloween has come and gone, and here is the new crop of horror movies I saw during the spooooky holiday season:
-Eye 3
-They Wait
-Poltergeist
-Dead Calm
The Eye 3 and They Wait: B
Both these movies were lent to us by our friend S-Chan. Stark and S-Chan are way more experienced with the Asian horror movie market. I haven’t even seen The Eye, forget about The Eye 2 or any other Pang Brothers movies, but S-Chan insisted that no prior knowledge of anything at all was required for The Eye 3, and boy was she right. The basic plot of the movie is as follows: Some kids from Hong Kong go on vacation to Thailand, where one night, they decide they really want to see ghosts. Of course they use the instructions found in a cursed book, full of all sorts of bad ideas, and much horror (or, more accurately, hilarity) ensues. The plot of this movie was ridiculous. Everything was played for laughs. Let’s see… there was the part where two break dancing kids start a dance-off with bodies possessed by ghosts, the time one of the characters kicked a small child down the stairs, thinking the kid was a ghost, and the effective method of repelling ghosts by farting. Yes, you heard right, farting. The ending was kind of silly, considering how the first 98% of the film had been comedy, but whatever, a good time was had by all.
Two things I wonder about:
1. Where does the preoccupation with hair come from? So many of these horror movies (and this even carries over to the North American remakes) involve gross long hair, usually wet or tangled or obscuring the eyes. I am wondering if this is an older cultural tradition or if this is a new trope that has developed in horror movies.
2. Is Thailand to Hong Kong what China is to the West? The depiction of Thailand in this movie was chock full o’ Exotic Otherness. Hm.
They Wait is a Canadian movie about a family, Canadian mother, Chinese father, and son, returning to Vancouver for a funeral. The return happens to occur during “Ghost Month,” and of course (not so) scary events ensue. The boy starts seeing ghosts, ghosts aggravated by his family, whose fortune was built on a terrible sweatshop they operated in the past. The boy falls into a coma, and it’s up to his mom, the only one who believes that supernatural causes are at root, to save him. Good things about this movie: the kid is ADORABLE, Jamie King, who I didn’t expect much from, was actually pretty decent, and Terry Chen is really, really hot, oh my god. It was nice that they didn’t make the ability to see ghosts some mystical Chinese power, as the white mom is the believer, along with the son. It wasn’t a very scary movie, but it was entertaining enough.
Poltergeist: A+++
Ahhhhhh! This was the best Eighties movie I’ve seen since Roadhouse last month. Why have I never seen these movies? I really missed out. This was awesome. Remember the days when Steven Spielberg made fun movies? Those were the days. Okay, the number one most awesome thing about this movie: Craig T. Nelson. I love me some Coach. Seriously, if Craig T. Nelson were in everything, my life would be complete. I loved the depiction of the parents in this movie. They were so real. They weren’t all uptight and parental, but they weren’t hipster yuppie parents either. They were depicted as having a life outside of their kids, cool enough to smoke pot in the bedroom, but not so cool as to live something other than a typical suburban lifestyle. Awesome. The mom was hot, another added benefit of watching this movie now, as opposed to as when I was a kid. I loved the scene where Coach catches her using the daughter as a guinea pig to test out the poltergeist. Hahah.
As I was watching this movie, I was thinking about how they don’t make movies like this anymore. A horror movie that was gross and fun and a little bit scary, full of in-jokes for the adults and slime for the kids, and with zero body count. I think the art of making movies like this has been lost through the assumption by the film studios, starting in the Nineties, that the entire audience for horror movies was between the age of 15 and 21. And now the entire horror industry seems to have become dominated by the grossest of the gross, high bodycount, extreme gore slasher film. Bah! Give me Poltergeist over the Saw franchise any day. Poltergeist is a treasure trove of tiny moments that can be enjoyed again and again. How many times can you rewatch Saw. I hope the film trend swings back in the other direction soon.
Dead Calm: B+
Remember when Nicole Kidman had a kinky mass of red hair and weighed more than five pounds? Relive those days by watching this movie. This was a pretty decent thriller that Stark and I caught on TV the other night. I was down with watching it as it starred Sam Neill, whose terrifying performance in Event Horizon traumatized me in high school. He plays a Navy officer whose wife is in a terrible car accident that kills their son. He decides the best cure for her depression would be to sail out into the middle of the ocean and have no contact with civilization for “as long as it takes.” I thought this sounded like a terrible plan, and Nicole was mostly catatonic at the beginning, so who knows what she thought, but really, what a stupid idea. There is nothing freakier than being stranded in the middle of the ocean on a tiny boat with only one other person. How awful. Anyway, as they’re floating around, in the midst of the least relaxing vacation ever, they see another ship on the horizon that looks like it’s in distress. Suddenly here comes Billy Zone, rowing towards them. Oh no, don’t let Billy on the boat, dude is creepy! Ah, you didn’t take my advice, well, here goes the rest of the movie. Like I said, it was a decent, no-frills thriller. I haven’t seen one of those in awhile.