SUMMER OF BLOOD: 21st CENTURY HORROR - THIS IS HALLOWEEN

All this happened years ago, and it's long since time to get over it, but it's really and truly baffling that Warner Bros. saw fit to handle Trick 'r Treat so shabbily. Having taken on the feature directorial debut of Bryan Singer's protégé Michael Dougherty (who co-wrote both X2 and Superman Returns), financed by Legendary Pictures and Singer's company Bad Hat Harry, Warner's announced a release date in time for Halloween 2007, only to cancel it at the last minute. That clearly spoke to a lack of faith in the project, though it's hard to say why: the film's December, 2007 premiere at the Butt-Numb-a-Thon festival in Austin was enormously well-received, as was its tour of the horror festival circuit over 2008. The film quickly took on the aspect of a legend, loved by all who knew it and lusted after by those who didn't. And still Warner sat on it. Finally, in October 2009 - two years and one day after its initially-scheduled release date - the company released it straight to DVD.

Not an impressive fate for one of the only obvious instant classics of horror in the first decade of the 21st Century. Trick 'r Treat is not entirely without lumps, but it's a film wherein even the most apparent flaws are so clearly a function of Dougherty's commitment to his muse, a refusal to compromise the personality of the material even slightly, that its flaws simply don't "count". And its strengths are as distinctive and impressive as anything else from its generation of American horror.

This despite having a seemingly insurmountable strike against it from the start: Trick 'r Treat is an anthology film. Anthologies, even horror anthologies, that are uniformly solid do exist, but anthologies with at least one obviously poor segment are much, much more common. Dougherty's script massages things by letting the stories bleed into each other, and he and cinematographer Glen MacPherson do splendid work unifying each of the four stories with an overall sense of thick autumnal night air, while giving each of them enough of a distinct visual style that we can usually tell where we are just at a glance. So it's not as bluntly divided against itself as it might have been, to its benefit.

Taken as a whole, the idea of each of the four segments (plus a prologue is basically the same: obey the traditions of Halloween, whatever "tradition" might mean in a given context, even the traditions that Dougherty appears mostly to have invented on the spot. The spirit of Halloween, present to witness and punish those who transgress against these traditions, is a little boy-shaped thing with tattered orange footie pajamas and a burlap mask that vaguely resembles a face; his name is Sam (Quinn Lord), which I take to be short for "Samhain", the Gaelic holiday retrofitted into Halloween. "Samhain" also appears in dialogue, and I am unduly impressed by the fact that it is pronounced correctly ("Sow-win").

The first thing we see is a snippet of a vintage safety video about trick or treating, that cuts to a glowing jack-o'-lantern smile against a pitch black field. It's as direct a reference to the opening credits of the seminal Halloween as I expect that Dougherty wanted to try to get away with, equal parts "I love you and I want to do what you did" and "okay, I can take over now". That jack-o'-lantern, when we see it, belongs to Emma (Leslie Bibb) and Henry (Tahmoh Penikett), a married couple on their way back from a costume party. Emma extinguishes the candle, over Henry's playful objections, and sets herself semi-indifferently to the task of taking down a few of the sheets from the many ghost decorations in the couple's yard, while he gets a porn video set up. Bloody limbs and creepy figures standing at a distance and staring abound, all turning out to be feints; the actual attack on Emma occurs without any set-up at all. It's mechanically perfect, a dance of false scares that distract us from the real scare until it cuts our throat with a jagged pumpkin lollipop.

Between the graceful staging of the scares, the concise, appealing character relationship established in just a few lines between Bibb and Penikett, and the wonderful visuals made by MacPherson's thick and gloomy lighting of the wonderfully evocative neighborhood location (the production design is by Mark Freeborn and the set decoration by Rose Marie McSherry), we've seen everything, in embryonic form, that Trick 'r Treat has in store, somewhere in this wonderfully self-contained anecdote. The rest is all expansion.

The four stories, in the order that they take prominence, center on Steven Wilkins (Dylan Baker), the principal of the local middle school, whose enthusiasm for the nastiest traditions of Halloween leads him to spike the candy he gives out with cyanide, and even this isn't the bleakest thing that happens when bratty kid Charlie (Brett Kelly) shows up; Macy (Britt McKillip), Sara (Isabelle Deluce), Schrader (Jean-Luc Bilodeau), and Chip (Alberto Ghisi), a group of young friends who play a prank on Rhonda (Samm Todd), an autistic girl, by recalling the grisly local story of how a busload of special needs students were driven into a flooded quarry at their parents' behest, and using this as the basis for a mean joke about zombiefied children; Laurie (Anna Paquin), a college-aged virgin whose sister Danielle (Lauren Lee Smith) and friends Maria (Rochelle Aytes) and Janet (Moneca Delain) try to set her up with a guy for their slutty costume party; and Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox), who hates children and Halloween, and chases away trick or treaters. For this most singular rejection of the spirit of the season, he is particularly targeted by Sam. The mode is very EC Comics: each of the stories ends with a karmic shocker of some kind, and in one case an out-and-out twist (one that is deliciously foreshadowed all over the place; enough to make my least-favorite plotline on first viewing my favorite on a second). And the point is emphatically not anything deeper than a quick jolt of the creeps, exactly as you'd hope to get if you and three buddies were swapping stories around a campfire some Halloween night.

That's easily the film's greatest strength: it is the most Halloweenish Halloween movie of all (something that even Halloween itself, with its charmingly dubious "California summer in Midwestern autumn drag" looks, could never claim). If there is an aspect of Halloween festivities that's not covered by the movie, I can't name it: children play-acting at spooky rituals, adults dressing in filthy costumes, news reporters dutifully spitting out inauthentically cheery boilerplate about some town's overly enthusiastic embrace of extreme kitsch in pursuit of tourism dollars. And the look of the thing! There's no better depiction of the inky blackness of a fall night punctuated by the warm lights of houses and candles on the books, from the opening scene all the way to a climactic jump scare consisting of nothing but Kreeg's terrified discovery that his whole yard has been filled with flickering jack-o'-lanterns, a shot that's as beautiful in its glistening blackness as it is unnerving.

With such a grand creation of a sustained mood, it's little surprise that Trick 'r Treat is top-shelf horror: if not scary, as such, then admirably suffused with the chilliness and mystery of a good ghost story, crossed with the inventive violence of the better slasher films. The reliance on stillness is a gratifying strength, particularly given the frenetic era of horror that the film was made during: the wide shots of Sam standing and observing, repeated throughout the film, are a terrific way of quietly reinforcing a baseline of ominous calm, and most of the tensest moments in the film are also the slowest (this is particularly true in the fog-coated abandoned quarry of the kids' subplot, from its choked-off sound design to the simple little "bye-bye" gesture at its end). But it's no weaker when it opens the throttle: the most shocking gore effects, which I cannot talk about because they qualify as the film's one absolute spoiler, are extremely impressive and particularly unsettling in both conception and execution, especially given how frequently such effects have gone wrong in other movies. Really, as far as the nuts and bolts of horror goes, the film only commits one enormous misstep: it should never let us see underneath Sam's burlap mask, because the blankness of his expression is worth far more than the frankly squirrelly idea for what we eventually see of him.

Is this the film's only actual flaw? Probably not. Not every performance is equally good, particularly in Laurie's segment, where Paquin significantly outclasses all of her scene partners. And it's not one of those horror movies that allow much room for talking up its fascinating character arcs and social commentary: this really is all about the joy and pleasure of sharing scary stories. That's hardly a little thing; in fact, it is much too easy to overlook just how important it is. And to claim that it's the only card Trick 'r Treat has to play is doing no more than accusing the film of being an exemplary addition to a tradition of hair-raising anecdotes older than cinema itself.

Body Count: 9 in the present, plus the 8 children in the flashback to the schoolbus massacre, plus a number devoured in a murderous orgy whose number I cannot satisfactorily arrive at. But I think "not fewer than 23" is a good estimate.

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MISAPPLIED SCIENCE

A review requested by Sara L, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Anthology films are always a shaky prospect, but they don't come more clear-cut and solid in conception than Memories, a 1995 animated film in three parts. It is nothing more complex than an adaptation of three short stories from manga artist Otomo Katushiro, unquestionably known best in the English-speaking world as the author and director of 1988 Akira, the film with which anime broke out in the West. He was on board to oversee Memories as executive producer and director of the last of its segments, but otherwise there's no obvious attempt to unify the three stories, each of which offer a different tone and completely different style. They are linked only by the theme that it's easy for humans to over-use technology without thinking about what we're doing; but that would likely have been the theme of any Otomo-derived anthology.

The result of filtering one man's thoughts through three different filmmaking sensibilities paid off well: unlike a great many anthology films, Memories doesn't have a weak link, though it feels that way while you're watching it, kind of. For it's terrifically imbalanced: the segment that is, far and away, the most stylistically inventive is also, far and away, the most shoddily constructed as a narrative, and the film commits the gaping structural error of leading off with its best segment by such a totally unfair margin that it tends to make the other segments feel a great deal more disappointing in comparison than they deserve.

It's also, quite incidentally, the only one of the three to meaningfully earn the title Memories; and not incidentally, the one that feels least of a piece with the attitude of the other two. Which I wish to believe, largely out of auteur loyalty and not for any real reason, is because it was written by Kon Satoshi, not yet a major director in his own right (his debut feature, Perfect Blue, was two years in the future) - the director in this case was Morimoto Koji, an animator of some note (he served as animation director on of the marvelous 2004 Mind Game), but who hadn't prior to this film had much chance to show off his directorial talents.

This opening movement, "Magnetic Rose", is the most conventional science-fiction piece in the film, taking place in deep space, where the crew of a salvage ship responds to a distress call from what appears to be a derelict station. That whole song and dance. The crewmembers who head onto the station to investigate that we need to be most concerned with are Heinz (Isobe Tsutomu) and Miguel (Yamadera Koichi), and what they find beggars belief: the inside of the station exactly resembles a plush European mansion of centuries earlier, right down to a simulation of the gardens outside. And it's haunted, apparently, by the presence of Eva (Takashima Gara), an opera singer with a tragic life that led directly to the psychologically fracturing mysteries of the place: Miguel begins to lose his grasp on reality and his own identity, while Heinz is tormented by visions of his dead daughter and promised that he can reside in his memories of his family forever.

There's nothing here that reinvents the wheel, either as a sci-fi fable or a work of animation, but as a mood piece about people being consumed by their pasts, it's hard to imagine "Magnetic Rose" being any better. The sagging, ancient sense of rotted opulence in the backgrounds is staggering, and perfectly matched to Maria Callas's performance of the iconic aria "Un bel dì vedremo" from Madama Butterfly, a song that sounds beautifully mournful in all the right ways, and which itself expresses similar themes of obsession with the lost past as the sequence containing it. "Magnetic Rose" is explicitly about the way that too much time stuck in memory can make it impossible to distinguish between what is true and right and what's merely illusion; the sci-fi trappings literalise that in the form of robots and holograms, but the emotional resonance of the piece is contained more in its faded old world settings and the heaving operatic music. It's old fashioned with crackling generic elements, tremendously accessible and deeply resonant, and it sets the bar for the rest of the film extravagantly high.

And, well, the rest of the film smacks into that bar. The second segment, "Stink Bomb", written by Otomo and directed by Okamura Tensai (who, unlike his co-directors, has worked almost exclusively in television, outside of this film, coming early in his career), is a strong black comedy in its own right, but frankly a bit goofy and one-note compared to "Magnetic Rose". It centers on Nobuo (Hori Hideyuki), a somewhat dim lab technician at a medical research firm, who get pushed into trying some experimental pills for fever when he comes to work sick. Except that he takes the wrong pills, and ingests a bio-warfare concoction instead, and once it enters its system, it reacts terribly with his body, causing him to emit a noxious, toxic gas that kills all animal life and triggers massive plant growth. The clouds of stench emanating from his body pervade the city so effectively that it becomes a national crisis almost immediately, and then an international one, as the U.S. military intercedes to capture Nobuo for their own ends.

The satire is blunt but not thus ineffective; casting secret weapons research as a badly safeguarded game played by blustering politicians and easily fucked up by a workaday dope is rather more biting and cynical and effective than putting it in the realm of shadowy melodrama. The bigger problem "Stink Bomb" has is that it's full of missed potential to be something even more interesting - the story's best and most haunting moments, of which there are several, all hinge on the sense of confusion, loneliness, and terror Nobuo feels at being plunged into a world where everything around him is dying, and heavily suited soldiers are hellbent on capturing him for reasons he doesn't understand. There's a sense of desolation that feels like something out of George A. Romero, the genre film as metaphor for social loss and isolation; crisply captured in the visuals and wonderfully acted out in the rich, heavily expressive animation of Nobuo's singularly well-designed face, it's quite a beautiful and touching thing, when it happens. And then it shifts back to the sardonic, bleak satire, and it feels like something goes out of it when that happens, a little bit every time.

It also starts to get wearisome before the segment's 40 minutes are up (it's just a bit shorter than "Magnetic Rose", and quite a bit longer than the finale) that Nobuo is such an utter dimwit. All of the strongest moments would be even stronger with a more knowing, self-aware person of largely average intelligence in the center; the plot mechanics work the same either way. By putting such a comic schlub in the central role, "Stink Bomb" scores some laughs, but at the expense of depth.

The last segment, Otomo's "Cannon Fodder", goes even deeper into overt satiric commentary than "Stink Bomb", while almost totally eschewing story. It's set in a nameless city state whose entire culture seems to be based around its series of building-sized cannons, fired multiple times every day at the neighboring enemy city, never seen by any of the cannon city's residents. Our tour guide for this militaristic world is a boy (Hayashi Isamu) whose father (Yamada Keaton) is a loader on Cannon 17, a necessary job but one that lacks the glamor or prestige of the cannon-firer, and is accompanied by no end of shitty working conditions.

Nothing "happens" - it's just a single day slice of life - but Otomo stuffs a great deal into the twenty-some minutes of his segment, managing to present a complete portrait of a 1984-style society in a constant state of war against an enemy that very possibly doesn't exist, and has been in even the smallest details of dress and decoration built around the idea of admiring its military, while also throwing out ideas about the oppression and exploitation of the working class that get far less screen time but still feel quite well fleshed-out. It's idea driven, and those ideas are important and urgently presented, though there's an inevitable dryness that comes from having only concepts, no drama.

Instead, all the dynamism in "Cannon Fodder" comes from its aesthetic, which is absolutely magnificent: the first two segments both use relatively straightforward anime style, but this one starts off with rough lines and smudgy coloring that feels exactly like pencil sketches, only done using cels. It's beautiful and striking, and that's only the least unique aspect of the style. The character design is even more idiosyncratic, primitive and almost inhuman in its presentation of the toothy humanoids with their lumpy builds and necrotic colors, all the better to stress the bedraggled, sickly lives of the workers, and the puffy inauthenticity of the military-approved heroes. But the most impressive thing of all, beyond doubt, is the gonzo ambition of the "camera movement", using what I suppose has to be CGI in concert with elaborate, difficult drawings to flow images together in a steady stream of sinuous shots in and around the film's world and all its trappings. It's involving and hypnotic, beautifully executed and astonishingly daunting in conception, and it's excellently suited to drawing us into the setting that is the primary reason "Cannon Fodder" exists at all.

Sure, it's a bit academic and detached, but it's smart as hell. That's true of everything in Memories: it is a most thoughtful collection of sci-fi notions, lovely to look at and troubling to contemplate. Like any anthology, it can't help but feel misshapen, but even its weakest moments are still awfully successful and worthwhile, and if the overall effect feels a bit less than the sum of its parts, that doesn't take away from how outstanding those parts are individually.

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AVENGING ANGELS

The original sin of the anthology film is that no matter how tightly controlled it is, no matter how thematically tight, and no matter how aesthetically consistent, there's always going to be a segment that isn't as good as the others, and it's going to feel like it showed up in the worst possible place to fuck up the flow of the whole thing. In the case of Wild Tales, recent Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee from Argentina, which finds Damián Szifrón writing and directing six otherwise unconnected short stories about the highs and owes of seeking revenge, the structure is almost perfectly designed to make the whole experience seem less than it deserves. I do not gather that this is the consensus opinion, but for my money, the film begins with its absolute best (and shortest) segment, gently and almost steadily declines in quality until it goes off the cliff it its last, worst (and longest) segment, the only one of the six where it's obvious within the first few minutes how it intends to end, and the only one to build virtually its entire narrative on hoary old clichés - in particular, "women are like this, but men are like this" gags involving infidelity and the wildly over-the-top reaction to same. It's shrill finale to a generally whip-smart collection of social satires, and it leaves a sour aftertaste that disproportionately affects the whole movie's effectiveness.

Still, five out of six is an exemplary batting average for a movie of this sort, and Szifrón's fearless embrace of the blackest comedy gives the whole film a striking personality, even in its weakest patches (and there's a nasty tendency for the individual segments to either begin blandly or fizzle out - only the relatively brief first two are at a steady level from start to finish). Good or bad, Wild Tales comes from a sparklingly nasty and savagely witty place that isn't like much else; the presence of everyone's favorite florid melodramatist Pedro Almodóvar as one of the five producers (along with his brother Agustin) is enough to prime us for the ebullient bad taste Szifrón exercises, but there's cutting criticism and anger behind Wild Tales that goes beyond anything found in Almodóvar. It is, whatever else is true, it's own thing, and that's spectacularly valuable.

The punchy opening segment, which finds passengers on a plane discovering their unexpected connections to a failed musician named Pasternak, sets the tone of things perfectly. The humor is a bubbling pot of farcical absurdity - before the shape of the thing begins to clarify itself, the continual pile-up of random jokes is some of the best sustained comedy I've seen in years - that builds to a terrific bleak punchline, and it follows the best rules of sketch comedy, in that it makes its point, sells its gag, and gets the hell out. Nothing else that happens for the remainder of the movie is so focused or deliberate, and this, too, is a sin of the anthology format: starting off strong means that the rest of the feature will feel like pulled punches. That said, "Pasternak" couldn't ever be moved; its brevity functions perfectly as a prologue.

Still and all, it casts a shadow that the rest of the film can't escape. "Las ratas", the second segment, which also feels more like a sketch than a short film, does the best job of darting in, stabbing, and vanishing back into the shadows, and its much tighter dramatic scope - a waitress (Rita Cortese) and cook (Julieta Zylberberg) debate the morality of poisoning a vile mobbed-up businessman (César Bordón), and the cook's increasing impatience with the waitress's refusal to take her just revenge eventually takes an abrupt, extravagant turn - allows it to examine the social and personal impact of revenge more clearly than "Pasternak". It's not as funny, or as effortless, but it still makes for a combined opening gambit that starts Wild Tales at full speed with impressive braininess for something so prone to sophomoric jokes.

But after that, Wild Tales never quite finds its sweet spot again. The third segment, "El más fuerte", has a strong beginning and stronger close, as it examines two men (Leonardo Sbaraglia and Walter Donado) getting into an increasingly disturbed and violent pissing match over road etiquette. But it's also somewhat belabored in its pursuit of a fairly straightforward idea - it's by far the most obvious and predictable of the shorts prior to the last one - and there's simply not that much modulation of its one gag. Segment four, "Bombita" makes some killer social critiques by the end of its tale of a normal working man (Ricardo Darín, the castmember with the biggest international exposure) buffeted by random chance and bad luck until he decides to turn himself into a anti-bureaucracy terrorist, but it takes a long time to find its footing, during which point it's just an exercise in cringe humor. Segment five, "La propuesta", has the opposite problem: it's satiric points about the way the very rich exploit everybody else to avoid having to deal with their own problems are all scored in the early going, and it becomes eminently clear that Szifrón couldn't figure out how to end it.

And then we get to that ending, "Hasta que la muerte nos separe", with a bride (Erica Rivas) exploding with rage when she find out that her new husband (Diego Gentile) had an affair with one of their guests a while back. There are no insights here, only musty observations about A Woman Scorned, turned up to 11, and it's stretched out far beyond the breaking point for something that follows such an obvious predetermined line (the only thing that's not totally predictable about it is its concluding joke, and that's more because the joke is such a random piece of provocation dropped in for no obvious reason other than shock value. It sucks the last air out of a film that developed a slow leak around the 20 minute mark, and more than anything else, it leaves Wild Tales feeling like a series of naughty anecdotes instead of an insightful commentary on human misbehavior. Which is deeply unfortunate, given how well it occupies that more daunting, complex territory here and there throughout its running time.

Narrative lapses notwithstanding, Szifrón's sense of timing and his immaculate control of tone cannot be doubted: this kind of lacerating black comedy is terrifyingly difficult to pull off without lapsing into either banal niceness or unpleasant sourness, and he keeps the tone right on target throughout, even when his plots are starting to fail him. It's an energetic beast, mixing style, pacing, emotional mood, and acting style to great effect - whatever else is true, it's never boring - and while it ultimately collapses under the weight of its own personality, how wonderful to have that kind of dynamic, challenging, and at times insightful personality in the first place!

7/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: TAPED OVER

V/H/S/2 begins with a scene of a seedy private eye (Lawrence Michael Levine) recording two people about to have sex in a hotel room. This event does not inform anything in the rest of the movie; it doesn't even introduce us to the character of the P.I., who'll be more formally set-up in the very next scene. But it does permit us to have a shot of tits being fondled within the first 30 seconds of the movie, and anyone who cherished the first V/H/S can tell you, tawdry high-school jock levels of respect for women are the beating heart of this horror omnibus series.

Or not, actually. The overwhelming theme of the first movie - all women are castrating she-demons - puts in not the whisper of an appearance in this sequel, and besides that first shot in the framing narrative, there's only one other snippet of (hugely gratuitous and objectifying) nudity in any of the four short films making up this anthology picture. Which is already enough to put V/H/S/2 at least half a step up from its forebear, an impression cemented when the third segment proves to be of such astronomically higher quality than anything else in either of the film that it manages completely by itself to hoist the movie over the line separating "probably nobody needs to ever see this" from "horror fans should probably see this, but maybe not anybody else". At this rate, I expect V/H/S/3 to nail the elusive "if you can't come up with any better way to spend your time, it's okay" threshold, and then we'll have ourselves a movie.

Anyway, the film takes the general form of its predecessor, a mysterious old building with a staticky TV surrounded by many VHS tapes. Or perhaps we should call them V/H/S tapes, a subtly different format for which it makes sense that visibly modern digital footage should have ended up on clunky slabs of black plastic. P.I. Larry and his assistant-girlfriend Ayesha (Kelsy Abbott) have been hired to find a missing college student, and have gone to his last place of residence to find him. Nobody seems to be there - emphasis on seems, as the human figure appearing and disappearing in the background of shots makes clear - and as Larry snoops around looking for clews, Ayesha starts digging through the tapes to find out if they contain any information. Thus does she find footage of their missing student (L.C. Holt), prattling on about the order that the tapes must be watched in, and how it does something to your head. Intrigued, Ayesha starts to watch the tapes, all of which contain documents of unexplained phenomena out in the world.

There's no real consistent quality to the four segments - five, if we count that wrap-around "Tape 49" (which theoretically means that this film takes place earlier than the last; the frame narrative there was "Tape 56"), written and directed by series mastermind Simon Barrett, one of the leading lights in modern indie horror (he also wrote the, in my opinion, wretchedly overrated You're Next). This is to be expected of anthologies, of course. The aggregate quality is still higher than V/H/S, though the gap between high and low is wider. The first segment, at any rate, is promising-ish: "Phase I Clinical Trials", written by Barrett and directed by Adam Wingard (of... You're Next), starring Wingard as a man with a terrible eye injury that makes him the perfect candidate for a new artificial eye. Which oh-so-conveniently has a recording chip in it. Anyone who's seen the Hong Kong horror film The Eye, its dreadful American remake, or just about anything, really, can see where this is headed: our hero can now sometimes see ghosts, and they are not at all friendly. Eventually, he crosses paths with a woman with artificial hearing (Hannah Hughes), who knows quite a lot more than he does, including the fact that you can make the ghosts scatter by having sex in front of them, an excuse for a boob shot so hilariously contrived that I'm actually willing to concede it might be satire.

The longer it gets, and the more it tries to explain shit, the more that "Phase I Clinical Trials" starts to get weird instead of scary, but in the early going, it's actually pretty decent, creepy mixed with jump scares in a way that actually kind of works. No such muted praise applies to "A Ride in the Park", written by Jamie Nash, directed by Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sánchez (the latter of whom got this whole game started when he co-directed the grandpappy of all "lost camcorder footage" horror pictures, The Blair Witch Project), which is an absolute dog of a short. In the woods, a cyclist (Jay Saunders) stops to help a bleeding, screaming woman (Bette Cassatt), who turns out to be a zombie. So he becomes a zombie. And so do the people who try to help him. There is nothing in this sequence that even threatens to be interesting; the brief flickers that indicate this is meant to be a comedy can be used only to justify how deeply unfrightening it is. The whole thing is filmed from a camera atop the cyclist's helmet, which gives it a feeble "YOU are the zombie!" kick, but that dies off by the first time that nothing happens for thirty seconds of static "verisimilitude". If there's any merit, it's that from a technical point of view, it's impressive how the filmmakers use sleight of hand to get their gore effects over in apparently uncut takes, but this one starts boring and gets worse, until its random birthday party massacre climax.

Things skyrocket with "Safe Haven", an Indonesian effort contributed by writer-directors Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans, the latter responsible for the brilliant The Raid: Redemption. It's the most pacy and plotty of the segments: a news crew manages to snag an interview with the secretive "Father" (Epy Kusnandar) of a millenarian cult. To their dismay, they find that the ticking clock happens to end at the exact time they're in the compound, and the literally apocalyptic crumbling going on around them has rather unpleasant personal ramifications. Forgive me for being vague, but it wouldn't do to spoil the surprises, which are many, and almost all wonderful (though the punchline at the very end is pretty much useless). This is by far the most imaginative of the shorts, with the most ingenious effects and, it has to be said, the flimsiest grasp of the found footage gimmick that animates the entire concept of the anthology. There are scenes which abandon it altogether, turning into a normally-edited film with barely a fig-leaf of "there's a camera here" to stitch things together. No accident that it makes the film more watchable and kinetic. It doesn't, ultimately, re-write any rules, but it offers quite a lot of energy and gory fun for those who like those things, without feeling as hamstrung as its bedfellows.

Some of that high spirit continues to the beginning of the cryptically-titled "Slumber Party Alien Abduction", which opens with a bunch of boys making a home movie about dog-eating robots, and in a flash offers the best justification for a found-footage movie in years: it's kids dicking around with a camera. The one group of people who actually would keep shooting even after some of their own start to die off, finally put front and center. And the opening few minutes, documenting pre-teen and barely-teen boys being assholes to each other, has an exquisite ring of truth; but once the slumber party tails off and the alien abduction kicks in, it becomes so noise and chaotically hand-held that it's almost impossible to follow, and from the brief snatches of aliens we see, it's just as well that we can't. Things end nastily, and because of the age of the cast, it's quite a bit more sour than in other found footage movies where things end nastily (all of them), but it caps off five minutes of such pure cinematic misery that it honestly comes as a relief when the last of the children is dead.

So that's it: one hit, one acceptable miss, one miss, and one dead-on-arrival mistake. Still a better percentage than the first movie, or most found-footage horror as a whole. It's still a hollow concept that feels more and more tired with each passing year, but at least V/H/S/2 doesn't compound its hollowness by being rancid on top of it.

6/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: COMMEDIA DELL'MORTE

There's an insurmountable argument to be made that, most of a year later, there's no merit to kicking Movie 43 anymore. On the other hand, writing shell-shocked, visceral pans of fucking dreadful movies is fun, and it's Christmas Day. So here's my present to myself, and hopefully to you as well, my readers. God bless us, every one.

Now, I have not seen every wide-release American film of 2013, but I do not need to in order to know with all my heart that Movie 43, an ineptly-conceived anthology of comic sketches, is the worst of them. It's almost unimaginable to think that anything might possibly have found some deeper crevasse of badly-made anti-comedy to explore,* and certainly, to imagine a movie that made worse use of a bigger cast of major actors, many of them still in an emphatically bankable period of their careers. The complete absence of anything resembling creativity or comic panache is mind-blowing; I am convinced that I spent the entire movie with a look of taxidermied dismay akin to the ones being worn by the theater audience in The Producers before they concluded that Springtime for Hitler had to be some kind of postmodern joke. Not, mind you, because Movie 43 is so durn morally outrageous, which is what it desperately wants to be. But its bad taste is profoundly unimaginative and repetitive. It is like a petulant eleven-year-old who just learned the word "cunt" and says it at every opportunity, far more tedious than anything else. Although, with its hard "k" opening and and the humming puff of "nt", the word "cunt" is, itself, much funnier than just about anything said in Movie 43.

The biggest problem with Movie 43 is that every single one of its sketches (twelve and a commercial parody) operates the exact same way: think of a gag, repeat it until you hit your target running time. There's no escalation, no twist of expectation, no modulation. Just the joke, and the joke, and the joke, and then you cry a little bit and the next sketch starts. This is not clever comedy writing; it's barely even functional comedy writing. The only way to to distinguish between the relatively complex and sophisticated sketches and the crude ones is that the complex ones need a complete sentence to describe the concept. "Homeschooling parents sexually and socially humiliate their teenage son to give him a complete high school experience" is sophisticated, in this universe. "Neck scrotum" is unsophisticated.†

It is, in an infinite universe, possible that someone could laugh all the way through Movie 43 without being heavily augmented by illicit chemicals, but I can't imagine why. It's not merely that the jokes are scatological and crude (they are), but that they are graceless - the execution amongst the sketches is rarely less than clumsy and obvious, and there's not a single one of the sketches that doesn't go on for a third or more of the running time it actually requires, irrespective of it being funny or not. Just to make the ghastly train-wreck complete, the film is saturated with important actors: two Oscar winners and an additional five Oscar nominees, alongside a handful of major young stars, some less-major 30somethings just a couple years past their sell-by date, a pair of old warhorses, several important comedy character actors, and the inevitable Anna Faris, the patron goddess of shitty smut-based comedies wasting the talents of actors who really should know better. Honestly, it's this aspect that pushes Movie 43 from "unfunny, leadenly 'shocking' comedy" to "instant contender for the Bad Movie Pantheon" - any hack can crap out a sketch of a blind date where the woman is grossed out that the man has testicles on his neck, but it takes a deal with Satan to have that woman played by Kate Winslet and that man played by Hugh Jackman. Presumably, this was easy money - nobody could have had to contribute more than two days of shooting, based on their ultimate screentime. But money could not possibly have been worth the fact that five years from now, puckish talk show hosts will still be reminding Jackman of the time he wore latex testicles under his chin.

Truth be told, the neck testicles sketch is one of the film's strongest: it's one of only a few that actually heightens its stakes as it progresses, and it was directed by Peter Farrelly, who knows at least something about gross-out humor (he also directed what is, far and away, the best part of the film, in which Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant taunt each other with an escalating series of dares). And weird as it is to say, Winslet's idling speed (and make no mistake, virtually everyone in the cast is idling, except, oddly, for Gerard Butler as twin killer leprechauns) is so vastly higher than almost everyone else involved that even her playing the grossed-out reaction shots in a one-note genital-joke sketch is more interesting and effective than virtually anything else on display.

The film plummets elsewhere: a bit in which Chloë Grace Moretz gets her first period (also a feature in one of 2013's other worst films), causing all the men around her to freak out like the plague just came to town is built on the nugget of an insightful social observation, but the actual humor of the thing relies to such an extent on people bellowing and pointing that any humor is smothered in its crib; a speed-dating sketch featuring Batman (Jason Sudeikis), Robin (Justin Long), Supergirl (Kristen Bell), and other DC figures immediately realises that it has nothing interesting to say about the private lives of iconic pop culture figures, and retrenches into a grueling iteration of jokes about Batman using filthy language to discuss female anatomy. Which would have been way funnier if Sudeikis had done a Christian Bale voice, instead of just being Jason Sudeikis. The most inscrutably anti-funny sketch, directed by Griffin Dunne, involves Kieran Culkin, Emma Stone (whose estimable comic skills are as helpless as Faris's), and violent sex talk over a grocery store intercom; there are neither discernible gags nor a payoff. The dumbest, by Stephen Brill, involves a new iPod shaped like a life-size naked woman that mangles teenage boys' penises when they try to have sex with it; I think the joke is that Apple is clueless and sexist, but it's so transparently an excuse to have images of a naked woman onscreen that it doesn't even remember to write setup-punchline jokes. The biggest missed opportunity is perpetrated by the sometimes-reliable James Gunn, who gives us a story of a gay animated cat who tries to murder the woman (Elizabeth Banks) trying to come between him and his owner (Josh Duhamel), which is at least structured like a narrative, with rising action and all, but never comes up with a joke more profound than "animated cat erections".

But worst of all is the most viciously dysfunctional sketch, the frame narrative. Directed by Farrelly (and this is the U.S. version only; parts of Europe got something that sounds at least modestly more coherent), it features Dennis Quaid plays a washed-up director pitching ideas (the sketches) to Greg Kinnear's studio executive, to which Kinnear consistently replies with some variant of "that doesn't make sense and isn't funny", which is a noble thing of the movie to admit, but then, if Movie 43 is itself aware that the bits in Movie 43 suck harder than any sane person with a modicum of taste would want to suffer through, then why does it have the effrontery to expect us to sit through it? It takes balls bigger than the ones on Jackman's neck to invites us to watch a 90 minute movie, and then announce in the first minute "by the way, all of this is going to be completely awful". But at least Movie 43 can keep that promise, even if the rest of it is a fire-scarred wasteland of stale and repetitive jokes and actors whose palpable confusion is even more pathetic than their anguish. Though, to be fair, plenty of them seem to be having fun. Somebody had to, I guess.

0/10

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