Cannibals and restless spirits.
THE WOMAN (2011)
During the production of the Jack Ketchum adaptation Offspring, director Andrew van den Houten and Ketchum (who had written the screenplay, based on his own novel) realized that Pollyanna McIntosh was delivering such a good performance as the feral cannibal known only as The Woman that she deserved to come back for a sequel. So they reached out to filmmaker Lucky McKee and asked him if he would be interested in making a movie with this character in it... and that's how we got The Woman, directed by McKee from a script he wrote with Ketchum. The pair also fleshed the story out in a novel they wrote together.
Offspring had been a sequel to Ketchum's first book, Off Season, which has still never been brought to the screen. Both of those stories are simply about a tribe of cannibals raiding homes and attacking people. McKee wanted to shake things up with his film, and he certainly did. The Woman isn't another story of regular people having to turn violent to deal with the savage maniacs tormenting them. This one finds The Woman being captured by people who are already savage to begin with, they just hide behind a facade of small town normalcy.
Spotting The Woman out in the wilderness while out hunting, family man and lawyer Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) decides to subdue her and chain her up in his cellar, forcing his family - wife Belle (Angela Bettis), teen daughter Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter), younger teen son Brian (Zach Rand), and four-year-old Darlin' (Shyla Molhusen) - to go along with this insanity. They feed her, or attempt to. Clean her up. Replace the rags she wears with a conservative dress. Chris claims they're doing this to civilize her, but he has much darker intentions... and this situation with The Woman isn't the only dark, twisted thing going on around here. Chris is a violent sociopath. He smacks Belle around, he's molesting Peggy, and people would be horrified to know what's going out with the vicious dogs he keeps in the barn. This guy is the scum of the earth, Belle is complicit in his actions, and Brian is following in his footsteps.
In Offspring and Ketchum's novels, the cannibals are vile characters who tear people to pieces, and yet here McKee and Ketchum managed to find a way to make The Woman the protagonist. By the end of the film, we want The Woman to escape her shackles and dole out some bloody vengeance, because most of the Cleek family needs to die.
This is a deeply disturbing film, the kind of messed up that makes you feel dirty just watching it. The violence and rape on the screen is shocking and disgusting, but the information we get about the Cleek family is just as troubling as the visuals.
McKee did make some questionable decisions along the way - for example: as effective as it is, it might have been even more effective without the odd music choices - but everything worked out in the end, and The Woman is great... But if you decide to check it out, be warned that it is the opposite of "feel good entertainment".
THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA (2019)
When it was announced that The Conjuring / The Conjuring 2 director James Wan and frequent Conjuring spin-off writer Gary Dauberman (Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation, Annabelle Comes Home, The Nun) would be producing the supernatural horror film The Curse of La Llorona for New Line Cinema, the distributor of the Conjuring franchise, it was specifically stated that the movie would not be part of "the Conjuring Universe". Then when the movie was first screened for an audience it was revealed that it is indeed part of the Conjuring Universe, tied to those other films by the presence of cast member Tony Amendola as Father Perez, a character he previously played in Annabelle. I wasn't a big fan of Annabelle and didn't even remember Amendola's character from it, but the filmmakers made sure viewers like me would connect the dots by including a quick flashback of Perez holding the Annabelle doll.
Perez has a very minor role in The Curse of La Llorona, which takes place in 1973 (four years after Annabelle) and stars Linda Cardellini as Anna Tate-Garcia, a social worker who is raising her two young children Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen) by herself since her police officer husband was killed in the line of duty. Her work causes her to cross paths with a Latin woman who believes her two young sons are being haunted by the legendary evil spirit La Llorona.
As the story is told in this film, La Llorona was a woman who lived in Mexico in the 1600s. She married, had two children, and when her husband cheated on her she got revenge on him by drowning their children. For three hundred years La Llorona has continued to lurk in our world, regularly giving young children a watery death. The woman Anna meets seems crazy at first, but is proven correct when La Llorona drowns her sons. And then Anna's kids Chris and Samantha become La Llorona's next targets.
While I love the Conjuring movies (especially the first one), I've had a tougher time getting into their spin-offs. I enjoyed Annabelle: Creation, but Annabelle and The Nun both felt very sloppy and lazy to me. (As of this writing, I haven't watched Annabelle Comes Home yet.) The Curse of La Llorona is a step up from Annabelle and The Nun, but it still has a bit of sloppiness and laziness to it. It also has very little substance.
Chris and Sam catch La Llorona's attention roughly 20 minutes into the 93 minute long film, but what are the chances that director Michael Chaves (who made his feature directorial debut here) and screenwriters Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis were actually going to let great harm come to even one of these kids, let alone both of them? I felt the odds were strongly in favor of Chris and Sam, so I never felt like they were truly in danger. Although La Llorona has been doing this child drowning thing for three hundred years, in this movie she comes off as being very bad at the gig. Since she can't just kill Chris and Sam, she becomes more of an annoying houseguest than a true threat, hanging out in the shadows of their home and frequently lunging out at them to scare them.
The amount of non-threatening jump scares was getting tiring, but then Raymond Cruz steps in to save the day as shaman Rafael Olvera, and this soft-spoken, stoic-but-secretly-bumbling enemy of evil made the second half of the movie much more entertaining to me. Rafael wields crosses, blows smoke, rubs eggs all over Anna's house, blocks La Llorona from passing through doorways, blesses water left and right, and sometimes comes off like a douchebag. Anna contacted just the right person to help her with this issue.
People who have been terrified by the story of La Llorona over the decades might be disappointed to see her performance here, but within the Conjuring Universe there has been worse.
INTO THE DARK: SCHOOL SPIRIT (2019)
With their series Into the Dark, the Hulu streaming service and production company Blumhouse announced their intention to release a horror film every month for a year, each movie having something to do with a holiday or notable date in its month of release. Some months gave the filmmakers obvious dates to work with - Halloween in October (The Body), Valentine's Day in February (Down), etc. Other months were more challenging. For example, what do you build a horror story around in August? Relaxation Day? Eat Outside Day? Okay, Frankenstein Day is promising. Girlfriends' Day, Sisters' Day, or Middle Child Day could be viable options, especially after the March movie (Treehouse) claimed to be associated with the Ides of March.
But never mind all that. Hulu and Blumhouse decided to brush aside the holiday stuff in August and focus on a major event that would be taking place in the United States in that month. The start of the new school year.
Directed by Mike Gan from a script he crafted with Patrick Casey and Josh Miller, School Spirit is a slasher take on The Breakfast Club - occasionally a very obvious and direct take on that 1985 John Hughes classic. The story centers on a group of five teenagers who have come in to endure a Saturday detention in the library of their school, Helbrook High. The kids are Harvard hopeful Erica (Annie Q), whose presence in detention is shocking to the others; troublemaker Vic (Julian Works); Russ (Philip Labes), who is always getting detention for ditching classes; the awkward Brett (Corey Fogelmanis), who clearly has a crush on Erica; and Lizzy (Jessi Case), who purposely gets detention to avoid having to spend Saturdays with her alcoholic mom. Instead, Lizzy and the other kids are under the supervision of fed-up, alcoholic Vice Principal Armstrong (Hugo Armstrong).
Although detention regulars Vic, Russ, and Lizzy have figured out a way to smoke weed and raid Armstrong's booze stash during this punishment (Lizzy wishes her friends would just stick to smoking instead of wanting to drink), this is the wrong school to be doing that sort of thing in. Erica's on-and-off boyfriend Jason (Jordan Austin Smith) dropping by in hopes of having sex with her in one of the classrooms also has the wrong idea. That's because Helbrook is home to the legend of the "school spirit", a mysterious figure who is said to stalk the halls of the school in the costume of the blade-wielding mascot, the Admiral. Helbrook students have a tendency to go missing, and some day the school spirit / the Admiral is responsible. Those who say that are correct, as this "breakfast club" learns when the Admiral shows up and starts slashing its way through them one-by-one.
Set in modern day, School Spirit is a decent '80s homage, blending The Breakfast Club with the slasher sub-genre that was very popular in that decade. It isn't as fun as The Breakfast Club or the slasher classics, and a couple of the characters have reactions to the threat of imminent death that are so dumb that it takes me out of the moment and makes it tough for me to enjoy the slashing, but I found it to be entertaining overall despite having some issues with it. And when the true story of the school spirit was revealed, it was so wonderfully nonsensical that I couldn't help but love it.
STIR OF ECHOES (1999)
Early in his career, Kevin Bacon appeared (and got killed in) the original Friday the 13th. Soon after, he gained enough popularity and did enough critically acclaimed films that he could have left the horror genre behind, as others have over the decades. But he has dipped back into horror from time to time, whether he was happy about it or not (although he's fond of Tremors now, at the time he was depressed to be making a movie about giant worms). He's made some good horror, he's made some not-so-good horror. One of the good horror movies he worked on that you don't hear referenced all that often is writer/director David Koepp's Stir of Echoes.
Based on a novel by Richard Matheson, Stir of Echoes casts Bacon as a blue collar Chicago family man named Tom, who has a wife (Kathryn Erbe as Maggie), a young son, and another child on the way... and disappointment over the fact that he never had any success as a musician. Lately Tom and Maggie's son Jake (Zachary David Cope) has been carrying on conversations with someone no one else can see. You might assume that this is just an imaginary friend, but since this is a horror movie this isn't just an innocent, childish thing. The kid is speaking to a ghost.
This causes a lot of drama when a girl named Debbie (Liza Weil) comes over to babysit Jake and he gives enough information about his invisible pal that Debbie realizes the person he has had contact with is her missing sister Samantha (Jennifer Morrison). Of course, Debbie doesn't automatically assume that her sister has been hanging about Jake as a ghost, she figures that Jake came in contact with Samantha after his maniac parents abducted her.
Tom begins catching glimpses of Samantha himself after Maggie's sister Lisa (Illeana Douglas) hypnotizes him as a party trick. Tom is skeptical of hypnosis, but proves to be highly susceptible to it. Lisa always wanted him to be more open-minded, so as she wakes him up she suggests that his mind will be like an open door from now on. It's not the outcome she intended, but that has made him open to being contacted by spirits and having psychic visions, just like his son. It takes him a while to figure out why Samantha is trying to communicate with them, though, and the longer it takes the more irritated she gets, causing her to get up to some haunted house shenanigans. Like turning off the light when Maggie is in the basement, or repeatedly turning the channel when Jake is trying to watch TV. She keeps turning the TV to a channel that's showing George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, so that's no problem in my book. I'd be thanking her for letting me know Night was on.
If someone remembers anything watching this movie, it's probably that Tom feels compelled to start digging holes in the back yard and cellar of his home, an endeavor he feels is the most important thing he has ever done in his life. It's this compulsion that will eventually allow him to figure out exactly what's going on in this movie, which is a dangerous thing to do.
Stir of Echoes tells a very intriguing supernatural mystery. It has its share of jump scares, but it's not really a movie that's out to terrify its viewers - even when she's annoyed, the spirit of Samantha is still a sympathetic figure, because it's clear that something bad happened to her (obviously, she was killed) and she's trying to give the information to someone living. It's really fascinating to follow Tom on the journey of finding the answers.
Koepp is mainly known as a screenwriter, and he has worked on a ton of huge films, like Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Panic Room, Spider-Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and The Mummy 2017, among others. (Don't let the pseudonym Leonard Maas Jr. fool you, he worked on I Come in Peace, too.) He has only directed a handful of films, and Stir of Echoes is without a doubt my favorite.
Early in his career, Kevin Bacon appeared (and got killed in) the original Friday the 13th. Soon after, he gained enough popularity and did enough critically acclaimed films that he could have left the horror genre behind, as others have over the decades. But he has dipped back into horror from time to time, whether he was happy about it or not (although he's fond of Tremors now, at the time he was depressed to be making a movie about giant worms). He's made some good horror, he's made some not-so-good horror. One of the good horror movies he worked on that you don't hear referenced all that often is writer/director David Koepp's Stir of Echoes.
Based on a novel by Richard Matheson, Stir of Echoes casts Bacon as a blue collar Chicago family man named Tom, who has a wife (Kathryn Erbe as Maggie), a young son, and another child on the way... and disappointment over the fact that he never had any success as a musician. Lately Tom and Maggie's son Jake (Zachary David Cope) has been carrying on conversations with someone no one else can see. You might assume that this is just an imaginary friend, but since this is a horror movie this isn't just an innocent, childish thing. The kid is speaking to a ghost.
This causes a lot of drama when a girl named Debbie (Liza Weil) comes over to babysit Jake and he gives enough information about his invisible pal that Debbie realizes the person he has had contact with is her missing sister Samantha (Jennifer Morrison). Of course, Debbie doesn't automatically assume that her sister has been hanging about Jake as a ghost, she figures that Jake came in contact with Samantha after his maniac parents abducted her.
Tom begins catching glimpses of Samantha himself after Maggie's sister Lisa (Illeana Douglas) hypnotizes him as a party trick. Tom is skeptical of hypnosis, but proves to be highly susceptible to it. Lisa always wanted him to be more open-minded, so as she wakes him up she suggests that his mind will be like an open door from now on. It's not the outcome she intended, but that has made him open to being contacted by spirits and having psychic visions, just like his son. It takes him a while to figure out why Samantha is trying to communicate with them, though, and the longer it takes the more irritated she gets, causing her to get up to some haunted house shenanigans. Like turning off the light when Maggie is in the basement, or repeatedly turning the channel when Jake is trying to watch TV. She keeps turning the TV to a channel that's showing George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, so that's no problem in my book. I'd be thanking her for letting me know Night was on.
If someone remembers anything watching this movie, it's probably that Tom feels compelled to start digging holes in the back yard and cellar of his home, an endeavor he feels is the most important thing he has ever done in his life. It's this compulsion that will eventually allow him to figure out exactly what's going on in this movie, which is a dangerous thing to do.
Stir of Echoes tells a very intriguing supernatural mystery. It has its share of jump scares, but it's not really a movie that's out to terrify its viewers - even when she's annoyed, the spirit of Samantha is still a sympathetic figure, because it's clear that something bad happened to her (obviously, she was killed) and she's trying to give the information to someone living. It's really fascinating to follow Tom on the journey of finding the answers.
Koepp is mainly known as a screenwriter, and he has worked on a ton of huge films, like Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Panic Room, Spider-Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and The Mummy 2017, among others. (Don't let the pseudonym Leonard Maas Jr. fool you, he worked on I Come in Peace, too.) He has only directed a handful of films, and Stir of Echoes is without a doubt my favorite.
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