Worth Mentioning - Evil Has Many Faces

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Demons, broken minds, and a masked slasher.

THE POSSESSION OF HANNAH GRACE (2018)

Filmed under the generic title Cadaver and released under the even less appealing title The Possession of Hannah Grace, which makes it sound like it's just the umpteenth "call in the Catholic priests for an exorcism" movie to be released in the last few years, this horror movie is actually much better than I expected it to be, and better than its titles ever indicated it would be.

Hannah Grace does start out with the typical exorcism scene, as a couple Catholic priests try to cast a demon out of the body of a young girl named - you guessed it - Hannah Grace, who is played by Kirby Johnson. The exorcism quickly goes very wrong, as the demon within Hannah has a strong telekinetic ability that it can use to injure and kill the priests... So Hannah's father (Louis Herthum) is forced to smother her to death to stop her from hurting anybody else.

Actress Shay Mitchell took on the lead role in this film to face her fear of the horror genre, and she was given a good role to play here. Her character Megan Reed is a former police officer whose life fell apart after she froze when faced with an armed criminal. That criminal was able to kill one of her fellow officers because Megan didn't act. Now she's trying to get her life back together by taking a night shift job in a Boston morgue. Hanging around dead bodies all night every night doesn't seem like a good way to get over emotional issues, but Megan thinks it's the right way for her.

Unfortunately for Megan, the body of Hannah Grace is brought to the morgue she works in. And while Hannah Grace herself may be dead, the demon inhabiting her body is still alive... and it happens to be the kind of supernatural being that gets more powerful every time it kills someone.

Since the demon was already using mental powers to toss people through the air in the first scene, I had trouble believing that anything could be done to eliminate this threat, but Megan lucks out in that she's actually able to put up something of a fight against this thing wearing Hannah Grace's body instead of getting killed instantly. Having this encounter with a demonic entity even helps her work through her issues.

I'm not saying The Possession of Hannah Grace is a great movie, as you have to set aside logic from time to time, but director Diederik Van Rooijen and screenwriter Brian Sieve did deliver a decently entertaining B-movie here. I was glad I watched it, and the friends I watched it with enjoyed it as well.

THE GOOD SON (1993)

I started watching horror movies at a very young age, and the only one my mom made me wait a while before allowing me to see was Children of the Corn, because she was concerned about letting a kid watch a movie about killer kids. I was still quite young when I "finally" did get to watch Children of the Corn, as it was old news by the time I went to the theatre to see the killer kid movie The Good Son a couple months before I turned 10 years old. It's strange how memories work, because that September 1993 trip to the theatre to see this movie seems like a vague forever ago, while my memory of going to see Jason Goes to Hell the month before is still clear and fresh.

Directed by Joseph Ruben, the guy who brought us a maniac father figure a few years earlier in The Stepfather, The Good Son stars Macaulay Culkin - then the biggest child star in the world - as a twisted tween named Henry Evans. Henry is obviously a naughty kid as soon as we meet him, running around town damaging property, mocking animals, and smoking cigarettes. As time goes on, we learn that he's much more than just a little troublemaker; he's a dangerous psychopath who already drowned his little brother in the bathtub and is a major threat to the rest of his family.

We meet Henry through the eyes of his cousin Mark (Elijah Wood), who has just lost his mother in a heartbreaking opening scene. One thing The Good Son does quite well is how how both Mark and Henry's mom Susan (Wendy Crewson) deal with the tragic losses they've recently experienced. Their sadness hangs over the entire film and adds an extra level of both drama and unease.

Mark goes along with Henry's antics at first, but soon realizes exactly what Henry really is and becomes determined to keep his family safe. Even if Henry's parents have trouble believing that their son could be as bad as Mark makes him out to be.

As it turns out, The Good Son troubled me more deeply than Children of the Corn ever did, because this is a much more realistic film than Children of the Corn. Corn shows a religious cult of children taking over a town in middle America and not being discovered for years, it's purely horrific fantasy. But in The Good Son, the things Henry does are the sort of things real life juvenile delinquents and young psychopaths do all the time. This sort of kid actually exists. I could have gone to school with him. So when I saw Henry consider dropping Mark from his treehouse, or threaten the life of his little sister (who is played by Culkin's sister Quinn Culkin), or toss a dummy into traffic, or try to hurt his mom... and when I saw his mom's realization that her son is emotionless and homicidal... that stuff actually got to me, and haunted me.

Maybe I should have waited a little longer to see The Good Son, but even when revisiting it almost twenty-six years later I still find it to be effectively disturbing.

Macaulay Culkin did a commendable job of making Henry such a detestable little creep. Some of his dialogue is overwritten, the lines scripted by Ian McEwan wouldn't have worked at all if delivered by most other child actors, but Culkin pulled it off.

INTO THE DARK: DOWN (2019)

There were times when I wondered how the New Years entry in Hulu and Blumhouse's holiday / notable date themed horror anthology series, New Year, New You, was going to reach feature length and remain interesting when the majority of the movie centered on four women interacting in one house. Director Sophia Takal made it work, though. With the Valentine's Day entry Down, director Daniel Stamm pulled off an even more impressive feat, with the aid of writer Kent Kubena and stars Natalie Martinez and Matt Lauria: they made an interesting feature (82 minutes) that's almost entirely set inside an elevator with just two people in it.

Jennifer and Guy meet each other for the first time on the night of Friday, February 13th while taking an long elevator ride down to the parking levels below the office building they work in. Four stories underground, at a point where their cell phones have no service, the elevator breaks down. Jennifer and Guy seem to be the last people leaving the building, so there's not likely to be help coming anytime soon. They're stuck together as Friday the 13th turns to Valentine's Day, and hope they won't be stuck there until Tuesday the 17th (Monday the 16th is a day off, Presidents Day).

At first, their interactions are holiday appropriate. They get to know each other, they bond. The movie rips off a moment from Vanilla Sky where the two draw pictures of each other and the man takes a serious, flattering approach while the woman goes for a humorous caricature. Within hours of meeting, Jennifer and Guy have sex. And after they take that step, things completely fall apart, as Guy reveals that he's not the nice, normal person he appeared to be. This switch happens just before the halfway point, so 38 minutes of build-up gets over 40 minutes of payoff.

All that payoff could have been avoided if Jennifer had waited until they were out of the elevator to threaten Guy with jail time. But she doesn't wait, so the viewer gets to enjoy a good amount of action, thrills, and violence, nearly all of it taking place in the elevator or the elevator shaft.

Somewhat reminiscent of P2, Down is simple and fun, and Martinez and Lauria did a great job of carrying almost the whole thing on their own. It's set in a confined space with just two people, but I never found it to be dull and was always anxious to see what might happen next. This was a fun way to spend 82 minutes.

THE HILLS RUN RED (2009)

The Hills Run Red is a slasher movie about the making of a slasher movie, and the more you know about that sub-genre of horror the more you'll get out of it, because it subverts expectations at every turn. The story begins in 1982, when a filmmaker named Wilson Wyler Concannon (played by William Sadler) made his contribution to the early '80s slasher boom with a movie called The Hills Run Red. It didn't go over well. It was so graphic and sadistic that it was pulled from theatres, after which all prints disappeared - along with Concannon himself. The only trace of the movie's existence are some stills and a trailer that's so banged up it plays like a faux trailer from Grindhouse.

Cinephile Tyler (Tad Hilgenbrink) is fascinated by the mystery of The Hills Run Red and seeks to unearth this lost film, even though his buddy Lalo (Alex Wyndham) suggests the film might not be worth digging up and his obsession with it is hurting his relationship with his girlfriend Serina (Janet Montgomery, who was also in Wrong Turn 3 this same year). The subversion begins with the characters, as not one of this bunch is squeaky clean. Lalo and Serina are sleeping together behind Tyler's back, Tyler is neglecting Serina, and is a little too interested in Concannon's daughter Alexa (Sophie Monk), who he meets at the strip club where she works. He ends up tying Alexa to a bed and spends a few days forcing her to go off heroin cold turkey.

Alexa then leads Tyler, Serina, and Lalo out to the secluded house deep in the woods where her late father used to live, where there might still be materials related to The Hills Run Red stored away. More subversion: this group takes a gun with them, even though they have no reason to think they might be in danger on this trip, and even after they enter the woods their cell phones have full service.

Within the woods, these characters will find out that the hulking maniac from Concannon's film, a madman called Babyface (Danko Jordanov) who cut chunks of flesh off his face and stitched a baby doll mask to what remained, is real, stalking these woods and brutalizing anyone who crosses his path. And unlike most slashers, Babyface isn't opposed to using a gun.

The story makes twists and turns and more expectations are subverted along the way - one moment with Babyface even plays the expectation you might have for what sort of character he is, especially if you know screenwriter David J. Schow (who was working from a story by John Dombrow and John Carchietta) previously wrote two Leatherface movies, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.

The Hills Run Red was directed by Dave Parker, who clearly has a love for and a deep knowledge of this type of stuff. Thankfully, while Parker packed some of his previous movies with direct references to film, here the characters get across their film smarts without having to name drop constantly. Sometimes it works, but talking about other movies within a movie often gets old very fast.

This is definitely one to watch if you're a slasher fan, and it delves into some twisted, disturbing subjects that make it more than just a simple slashfest.