REVISTING THE OLD HAUNTS

At its best, the 2015 Poltergeist is a beat-for-beat (but only sometimes shot-for-shot) retread of the 1982 Poltergeist, with Jared Harris substituting for Zelda Rubinstein. And I love Jared Harris, and I'm never sad to see him in a movie, but Zelda Rubinstein was the best part of the original movie. So at its best, Poltergeist '15 is a conspicuously less-good version of a thing that exists in a perfectly fine iteration. At its worst, Poltergeist '15 is basically a disaster site.

I will say this in its defense: it manages to reverse the usual fatal sin of horror movies, particularly ones about ghosts and hauntings, particularly in the modern age. Virtually every such film is at its best when it's simmering along and freaking out the characters, and the minute it starts to explain things and bring in the experts to help exorcise the whatever it is that's causing mischief, everything goes right into the crapper. Poltergeist front-loads all of its worst material, and ends up being kind of interesting as it gets closer to the end, or right about the point that Harris and Jane Adams, in the role of a credulous parapsychology professor at the local university, take over protagonist duties.

That front-loading is dire, though. There's a rule so straightforward, longstanding, and obviously necessary that I'm always baffled when horror filmmakers forget to follow it: start by showing us what normal looks like, so we know what abnormal looks like. Phantasmagorical explosions of style and plotless terror on the European model can get away without laying that groundwork, but none of those words describe Poltergeist at all, which eagerly starts throwing demonic clowns and unseen people in the closet at its central family their very first night in their new haunted house, without even a single evening of vague unease to warm us up. It's not a good way to amp up the tension, it's a good way to blow out the tires on the movie before it's even out of the driveway, and the first half-hour of the film throws out so many creepy images with gothic shadows and a wailing score to tell us that it's time to be scared, it's numbing. It's like director Gil Kenan and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire threw the switch from "banal domesticity" to "gaping hellmouth" so hard that they broke it and couldn't switch it back.

Even setting that aside, the first act of the new Poltergeist is amazingly defective. The basic plot is about the same as last time, with the names changed and significantly more emphasis on economic misery: the recently laid-off Eric Bowen (Sam Rockwell) and his writer wife Amy (Rosemarie DeWitt) have settled on a kind of dumpy suburban home as the new place for their family to live and economise as they regroup (Deficiency #1: every character reacts to this house like it's a tumble-down shack that only the most hellishly impoverished would dare to live in, when it's quite a trim, clean 2-story in a nice neighborhood, and if the constant implication that we're in the southwestern Chicago suburbs is meant to be taken seriously, it's certainly setting the grindingly poor Bowens back not less than a couple hundred thousand dollars). And so comes the fateful day when they move in the kids, surly teenager Kendra (Saxon Sharbino) and unbearably adorable moppets Griffin (Kyle Catlett), around 11, and Madison (Kennedi Clements), around five. It's seriously repellent how precious they are; but they have the merit of looking inordinately plausible as DeWitt's biological children.

And so, without further ado, the Bowens are swamped by an army of horrors, most of them plaguing the absurdly high-strung Griffin; eventually, the Whatever It Is in the house seduces Madison into entering her closet, whence she is warped into a hell dimension that, as we'll find out, exactly overlaps the Bowens' house, but only occasionally interacts with it. After which, things settle out into that beat-for-beat retread, and Adams and Harris come along, and it's almost possible to forget just how wretched everything has been so far. Other than Catlett, who's pretty terrific as a preteen neurotic living in the worst imaginable place for a child of his nervous sensibilities. Rockwell and DeWitt are generally terrible in their roles, persuasive as a married couple happy to be with each other as a bulwark against poverty, and nothing else - certainly it's difficult to believe in either of them as a parent, the foundation upon which the entire notion of Poltergeist stands. But it's not sporting to blame the actors for being unable or disinclined to do much with the half-formed characters and situations in Lindsay-Abaire's screenplay, which frequently resembles a skeleton for a script to be built up later more than a coherent movie in its own right. Like the way it treats the Bowens' financial difficulties, which is the central point of some scenes and totally forgotten in others. Or its utter failure to figure out what makes Kendra interesting and necessary as a character in any way.

Kenan's directorial debut came in the form of the motion-capture haunted house adventure Monster House in 2006, and it's easy to see that as an argument in favor of his qualifications for making a family-friendly scary movie (though the new Poltergeist is considerably less interested in being for kids and parents than the original), but none of his facility with genre mechanics shows up here. The first act is one-note and blandly assembled, typified by its pile-up of jump scares of escalating ridiculousness - a scary clown? No, a whole fucking box of scary clowns! No, a freaked-out squirrel jumping at the characters! No, a squirrel with blood red zombie eyes! - and its artless reimagining of moments from the original with absolutely none of its creativity, most prominently a scene that re-creates the wonderful moment in the the first film where the camera pans away from a kitchen only to find that a few moments later every object within it has been stacked into a complicated tower (in the remake, it's a house made out of comic books). Not only is the tone different - in the original it was more mysterious and wonderful than scary, but since the remake is humping "scary" as hard as it possibly can from the second scene, there's no room for that here - it's accomplished in a shock cut instead of a single camera movement, or even a simulated single camera movement. The result is something barely shocking, since Kenan telegraphs it too openly, and certainly not creepy.

It sticks the landing, at least, though not without some stupid touches (a Boschian hellscape of writhing CGI corpses is just silly), with Catlett, Harris and Adams all coming to the fore in the last third in ways that tweak the original enough to feel like the new thing has a worthwhile personality of its own. It's never, ever as good as the first movie, which I don't even personally love all that much, but it maneuvers through the formulaic requirements of a haunted house movie crisply enough.

Don't stay for the mid-credits scene, though; it's jokey awful nonsense, and the worst part of the entire movie with its insipid winking. And it immediately undoes all the hard work of the film's last hour in washing out the foul taste of the first 30 minutes.

4/10

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GHOSTS OF THE PAST

That the Insidious franchise would gravely soldier on even after the fucking awful Insidious: Chapter 2 was already a bad sign. That it would do so in the form of a prequel was an even worse sign, and that this prequel would defy basic rules of numerical order to call itself Insidious: Chapter 3 was pretty much just an insult to basic intelligence (mind you, Insidious: Chapter 0 would have been pretty fucking stupid, but it would have at least made sense). So with all those apparently insurmountable checks against it, imagine my aghast shock at finding that Insidious 3 is... sort of in an area adjacent to "good", maybe? I don't want to come right out and call it "good". But it is definitely not bad, and that's what matters most.

The plot, and really everything else, is most easily summed up as "The first Insidious, only not as good, until the last act, when it becomes better". Set with all due ambivalence "a few years before the Lambert haunting" - enough for at least three or four more prequels, if they want to go that way! - the movie takes as its victim the high school senior Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott, a most fascinating discovery - her unusually wide face is terrifically expressive and photogenic, evocative of a teenybopper version of Claudette Colbert), who has been reeling ever since her mother Lillith died a year prior. Her father, Sean (Dermot Mulroney) plainly reached the end of his tether some while back, and has just enough energy to feel bad about not keeping up with his younger child, Alex (Tate Berney); being a decent father to Quinn is quite out of the question at this point. This leaves her quietly hoping every night that in whatever afterlife exists, her mother might be pulling for her. This leads her, in the film's opening, to the home of retired psychic medium Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye), who takes pity on the girl and breaks her one rule - don't talk to the dead any more - to hunt for Lillith. What she finds gives her a low-grade freakout, and she urges Quinn to do absolutely anything except quietly whisper for her mother in the night.

Quinn does not take this advice, and thus leaves herself open to being played by the spirit of a dead person who is not her mother, not at all: embodied as an old man with a breathing apparatus (Michael Reid McKay), the entity is able to partially take over Quinn's body after it causes her to be hit by a car, and now Elise really must make a choice: help the Brenners at risk of her own safety, for putting herself psychically "out there" means she becomes a beacon to the malevolent spirit that's been following her for some time, a man dressed as a woman in a black bride's dress (Tom Fitzpatrick). From here, the movie follows the Insidious formula to a T: Elise has increasingly specific visions and insights that lead her to realise how to save the possession victim, the bumbling geek ghost hunters Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (series writer Leigh Whannell, making his directorial debut) show up to not really help in any meaningful way, and it ends with a character having to trek through The Further, the series' vision of the not-exactly-Hell afterlife, where everything is pitch black or dark blue, and buildings and other physical places have an unnerving tendency to dissolve into empty voids. And all the points in the world go to Chapter 3 for at least this reason: for the first time in three movies, the final act trip to The Further doesn't immediately send the film plunging into absolute shit. Perhaps because after three movies, Whannell finally knows how he wants this mythology's afterlife to function, and so he can simply use it rather than have to laboriously construct it in the middle of his plot.

The basic truth about all of this is that Chapter 3 would be a better movie if it wasn't an Insidious prequel. Literally everything that is worst about the story is directly related to the need to set up the next two movies with appalling detail, clogging up the movie and jamming the breaks on the momentum. If nothing else, the set-up of how Elise recruits Tucker and Specs as her official ghostbusting buddies in the final moments is forcibly wedged-in and jokey in a most disgusting way, with Shaye's generally strong, impassioned acting making such a precipitous dip in quality that I'd be willing to believe that she was trying to sabotage the scene right out of the movie. Even discounting that particularly gross example, the need to fit into the franchise provides a lot of deadwood and loose ends, if it's fair to call something a "loose end" when it has already been resolved in another movie. But there's a strong stand-alone narrative here, and introducing random threads solely for the purpose of having them solved in a movie that came out two years ago hurts the integrity of the Insidious: Chapter 3 that could have been, if only it weren't obliged to be Insidious: Chapter 3.

The film's strengths are in its fine, uninspired deployment of generic elements: the extremely predictable jump scares that manage to land, the smart withholding of jump scares to leave an unresolved tension, the spooky J-horror-ish design of the various ghosts both malevolent and otherwise. It's not terribly complex or imaginative, but as a director, Whannell proves that he's been paying attention all these years: his staging is never less than perfectly functional, and occasionally a good deal more than that. There are some crafty and thoroughly enjoyable individual shot choices, like a one pan back and forth to a window that prominently showed up in the trailers, or a few different moments where we see two angles on the same action simultaneously thanks to a video monitor showing the feed from Tucker's surveillance camera. It is not high art, but it adds a sense of style to a film that's already perfectly suitable as a spooky tale told with conviction and the refreshing absence of cleverness and irony.

And then there's the other strength, which is that Chapter 3 is a surprisingly durable character piece: it fashions itself somewhat around the idea that Elise and Quinn are kindred spirits, both susceptible to the depredations of angry ghosts because they're not moving forward in the grieving process (Elise's problems all stem for her misjudged attempt to find her dead husband in The Further after he committed suicide). Both Shaye and Scott give sufficient performances to pay more than lip service to that conceit, too, though not so much that it ever comes within the slightest distance of dominating the movie's collection of things going bump in more or less exactly the way you'd expect them to, if you've seen the first two movies (and what would cause somebody to bumble into Insidious: Chapter 3 without having seen them is impossible for me to guess). It's horror comfort food, through and through, challenging no expectations and only just living up to those expectations one would be sane to bring into the theater, but it's atmospheric enough, with solid enough characters, and enough of a manipulative sound mix prodding us in the ribs at intervals, that it's enjoyable enough if this is the kind of thing you tend to enjoy.

6/10

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BULLY PULPIT

All due respect to the recent spate of high-profile horror movies to be critically fêted on account of being actually good, but one of the things that The Babadook and It Follows have in common is that they're both immensely well-made versions of something that's already been done. Now, quite unexpectedly, we have the opposite, in the form of Unfriended (which premiered under the name Cybernatural, which simply doesn't do for something made later than 1997, and not a soft-core cable porno). Legitimately, it's as formally radical as any American film in years, and that despite being a genre picture; despite sounding like a slightly tarted-up first-person camera movie, and especially like 2013's The Den, it's only superficially the same thing. It is the rarest of the rare: it has created a totally new set of storytelling tools, laying out the rules for a new kind movie that, a year or two from now, I am hopeful might be used in a really aggressive, challenging way, the first great work of quintessentially Millennial art.

The problem is that Unfriended, aside from inventing a new language, is shit.

But I would like to accentuate the positive for starters, since the things that are bad about Unfriended are common to a great many poor horror films, and the things that are good are almost totally unique. The notion is that high school student Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig) and her boyfriend Mitch Roussel (Moses Jacob Storm) are all ready to have a fun night of sexually taunting each other on Skype, when their friends Jess Felton (Renee Olstead), Adam Sewell (Will Peltz), and Ken "Kennington" Smith (Jacob Wysocki) jump into the fray, somehow, using computer trickery best described as "the screenwriter wanted it". The five of them banter a bit, getting increasingly annoyed at the sixth individual apparently listening in on their call, trying to figure it out, accusing snotty frenemy Val Rommel (Courtney Halverson) of being the hacker and dragging her into their chat, and only eventually figuring out that what might be going, and since this is a horror film, "might be" = "surely is", is that the dead Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide one year ago tonight, could be haunting everybody she thinks is responsible for bullying her into killing herself following a humiliating YouTube video that showed her drunk and covered in her own filth. Which does in fact mean that she wants revenge on, basically, the whole school, and I imagine that's to be the sequel hook.

Now, there's nothing special about any of that, except that the whole film is shown as a shot of of Blaire's MacBook desktop. And here's where we must be very specific about what we mean: it's not the footage being shown on Skype, a gimmick that dates at least back to the segment "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" from 2012's V/H/S, and it's not the Skype window with instant messages popping up in front of it, as in The Den. It is, literally, the whole of the desktop, with .jpgs and folders visible around the edges of windows that include Chrome, Skype, Apple iMessage, and Spotify, at least. Which is one important thing already: Unfriended uses name brand programs, and that adds immeasurably to its sense of realism compared to movies that have people using InstaChat and searching on Snoople, or whatever drippy pseudonyms the copyright-dodging screenwriter came up with that week.

That's lovely, but the really exciting thing, what makes Unfriended totally new in my experience, is that it's showing us the unfiltered version of what happens on Blaire's computer: we see the entire record of her life online, with all the various traces of abandoned thoughts on the titles of browser tabs and in her Facebook history, the programs she had open when she started to flirt with Mitch. And other than the appearance of the mouse arrow as she selects what she's focusing on, there's nothing in the movie to guide our eye; we simply get to decide whether it's the actual video of Laura's death we want to stare at, or the sidebar of "also suggested" videos, we can spy on her song playlist. What Unfriended has done is lay out the rules for how a movie can depict and move through that digital space; it has given the foundation to a filmmaker who wants to go for broke and really experiment by making all of that unfocused side detail where the actual storytelling happens, using scraps and errata that we can look at but don't have to, leaving swaths of important character detail spread out across a screen such that we can't see everything and have to prioritise what to look at. Unfriended even starts to be aware of that possibility, as it leaves sometimes up to six different video chat screens playing at once, and not always having the most prominent ones include the most interesting information.

That being said, while I have no doubt that a truly radical experimental narrative shall be made using this aesthetic, Unfriended is absolutely not it - all that wonderful space it leaves itself for squirreling away important bits of information in little side details is wasted on in-jokes and generic filler, the functional equivalent of "lorem ipsum" paragraphs. And it can't even be bothered to keep continuity straight: the action is clarified to take place in April, and we see certain Facebook well-wishes that are time-stamped to "January" and "X hours ago" at different points, all in story that takes place in real time over 80 minutes. There's also a countdown that skips from 10 to 5. So much for hiding interesting details in plain sight.

The plot, meanwhile, is generic "revenge against the obnoxious teenagers" boilerplate, interesting solely in that the exposition is given out of order and throughout the entire movie, so it all seems a bit more mysterious than in your average slasher, where we understand the point of the revenge more or less from the beginning. But a slasher is exactly what it boils down to, including both the regressive sexual morality (we discover that one character isn't a virgin at exactly the point that the movie begins to turn against that character) and the one-word personality types: the Druggie, the Horndog, the Bitch, the Geek, the Bitch (2), and the Hypocrite. Screenwriter Nelson Greaves's desire to structure this as a mystery and give the film a sucker punch twist ending turn into a tawdry trick, thereby trivialising the only thing about the story that had any prayer of being interesting: the film thinks that it's telling a complex tale of how bullying works in the age of social media, pointing out that bullies can be bullied themselves, and that dogpiling is a horrible fucking thing to do to people, no matter how distasteful they are. But its reliance on cheap horror tropes and shabby shocks devalues that theme significantly.

It's painfully unscary - I suspect that watching it on a television or, preferably, a computer might give it more oomph than seeing it in a movie theater possibly could - and includes one of the most contrived death scenes in recent horror cinema (assuming one would, for whatever reason, keep a blender in their bedroom, would it even so be possible to commit suicide with it?). And the filmmakers' enthusiasm for the Kids and their Ways leads ultimately to a deeply misguided climax built around a high-stakes game of "Never Have I Ever" that is bafflingly silly. So, let's be clear, I emphatically do not recommend this film. It's like someone invented the English language by writing The Da Vinci Code. But I do look forward to recommending its most successful knock-offs a few years down the road.

5/10

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WHO CAN TAKE A SUNRISE, AND SPRINKLE IT WITH BLOOD?

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

Let's not dick around here: Candyman is the finest American horror film of the 1990s. Now, admittedly, those who've been hanging around this blog for all that long are aware that for me to make this claim of superiority is about on par with declaring something "the finest swift kick to the nutsack". But I promise that my enthusiasm has much more do with the quantity of things that Candyman gets right than with the general poverty of its competition.

Adapted by writer-director Bernard Rose from Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden", Candyman centers upon a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), researching urban legends for her thesis. One of these legends involves a ghostly killer with a hook for a hand, who appears when you say his name, "Candyman", in front of a mirror five times. A cleaning woman happens to overhear Helen transcribing her notes, and talks about the story in a much more matter-of-fact way than the giggling undergrads swapping campfire tales, mentioning among other particularly concrete details that the Candyman is known to haunt the Cabrini-Green housing project on the city's north side. And so Helen and her research partner Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) head up to the dangerous gang hub to poke around and find what they can find.

That's barely even the set-up for the movie, but it's already enough to clue us in to exactly what makes Candyman such an unusual achievement. In changing the setting from Barker's native England to Chicago and Cabrini-Green, Rose fundamentally re-shapes the territory that the story can occupy. The no-longer-extant Cabrini-Green, my younger readers may not know and my non-American readers would have no reason to be aware, was arguably the most notoriously dangerous and mismanaged housing project in the United States, a shorthand for urban blight, the inability of civic governments to do right by their communities, and the abysmal failure of white America to care about the fate of black America, and to generally assume that African-Americans were, when left to their own devices, prone towards violent thuggery. Setting a story in Cabrini-Green, in 1992 (three years before the beginning of the 16 year demolition project that has sought to reclaim the area for upper-middle class yuppies*), could not help but force that story to refocus itself as a statement on race in America. I would go so far as to say that's the primary reason why somebody would choose that location.

And lo! quite a parable about the U.S. race problem Candyman proves to be, though it has the luxury, being a horror film, of never having to come right out and say what's going on. But subtle it ain't. There is, for one thing, the backstory of the Candyman himself (played by Tony Todd when we eventually see him, around halfway through the movie): the son of a slave, tortured and burned to death for the crime of having a consensual sexual relation with a white woman in the 1890s. He is the angry patron spirit of every African-American male who was unjustly punished for the crime, essentially, of not being white. And what happens over the course of the plot? A white chick bumbles around in a place where she doesn't fit in, does what seems to be the right thing (she ends up uncovering the identity of a local gangleader who has been using the Candyman legend as a fear tactic, all Scooby-Doo like), but her actions - born in the pretty explicit conception of Cabrini-Green as a whole breeding ground of Others that she can use as intellectual fodder without having to deal too much with the actual material of their lives - serve only to make things worse, since her actions are what end up rousing the Candyman. As he tells her, point blank, if she wasn't so hellbent on taking away the power of his legend by running it through academia, he wouldn't have to put in such extreme measures to keep that legend fresh and ever more terrifying.

It is, in microcosm, the great American tale of over-educated white people with no fucking clue messing around with the lives of minorities like a kid with a lab kit, to disastrous results. It is, in fact, pretty obvious once you start looking for it. But the film takes the privilege of genre and never bothers to state its themes in the way of an actual message movie (which is perhaps why it gets to have such a cynical message that so signally refuses to lets its white characters off the hook. Although, the film is rather notable for how few important white characters there are: just Madsen herself, and Xander Berkeley as her husband. Her shady husband, but of course we already knew that from "Xander Berkeley"). And if the only thing you wanted Candyman to be was a horror movie, there's still plenty of fantastic work being done purely at the level of genre. The roots in Barker are clear even without the film's portrayal of the Candyman, with its distinct debt to Pinhead from Hellraiser: it's a film about the terrifying power of ideas, as much as the terrifying power of being split in two by a ghost with a hook for a hand. As one of the first films to pivot around the phrase "urban legend", then at its very trendiest, it's little surprise that Candyman should turn out to be about the dangerous power of storytelling, and the woe that befalls those who don't sufficiently respect that power. We can broaden that a bit: it's a film about failing to appreciate the role of culture, history, and knowledge: Helen ends up on the Candyman's bad side because she treats him as a lark, as opposed to the Cabrini-Green locals, who have a grave respect mingled with their hatred for him.

It's also, to be fair, a horror film that works at a gut level as much as an intellectual one, which is after all where horror needs to succeed. Much of that can be credited to Todd, a great character actor with an outstanding ability to seem menacing while being still and richly erudite. Much of it can be credited to the sound mix, which puts Todd's booming voice on a different level than the rest of the sound in the film, feeling like it's entering your head through something other than your ears. A whole shitload of it can be credited to Philip Glass, whose score is one of the best a horror film has enjoyed since the dawn of the 1980s: the droning repetition for which he's famous works perfectly in context, coming off as a dolorous chant as it throbs and throbs its way down into your bones. Glass is such a natural for horror that I have no clue why there are so few horror movies in his career; it worked magnificently in this case.

Arguably, the single element of Candyman that works best, though, is its sense of place. The location photography here is abnormally good: in the 23 years since, I can't name a half-dozen films to have taken advantage of Chicago anywhere near as well, and perhaps only one - The Dark Knight - to have topped it. The film opens with a series of aerial shots, with Glass's music brooding beneath, that start off by rendering Chicago as a flat, indecipherable map of lines and squares that only resemble buildings if you deeply want them to, putting us at into a disconcerting mood right from the beginning (is this an American city? An alien planet? Why not both!). The footage shot in Cabrini-Green, meanwhile, takes superb advantage of the run-down bleakness of that place, portraying it as a victim of human mismanagement that has been turned into something totally inhumane, an unnervingly authentic hellhole where it feels entirely plausible that such forgotten, hidden legends as the one the film builds itself on could survive and thrive.

Given such an extraordinarily suggestive central location, the film gets to do a lot with mood and implication, letting story elements bubble up without having to spell them out. I am particularly fond of the production design in the Candyman shrine - which I presume to have been shot on a studio set back in California - where the full range of Candyman lore is indicated through the paintings on the wall and the plates of chocolates with razor blades in them, but never explained. It suggests a deep background to this story, one that we and Helen never begin to tap or understand, and that lack of understanding is the driving force of everything bad that happens. Candyman is, essentially, a horror film about the danger of confident ignorance, whether that comes in the form of blithely accepting your husband's obvious lies about the undergrad he's fucking, or in the form of trying to reason with a vengeful ghost, or in the form of thinking you can know more about a lifestyle than the people who live it every day. It's brainy, it's atmospheric, and it's spooky as hell, and for all these reasons and more, Candyman is one of the essential works of modern English-language horror.

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CINDERELLAS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE: THE PRETTIEST GIRL AT THE BALL

There's no inherent reason to compare a Korean horror film and an Australian feminist parable, but throughout the entirety of 2006's Cinderella, from director Bong Man-dae and screenwriter Son Kwang-soo, I couldn't keep myself from thinking about Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty from 2011 (whether I'd have made the same connections if I'd seen the films in chronological order, I leave as an exercise for some alternate universe incarnation of this blog). Both take key stories from Western European folklore and bend them until you can only see certain vague elements left in place, which are used to explore the way that folklore and contemporary media alike construct an idea of appropriate female behavior. Sleeping Beauty is, ultimately, an academic piece, while Cinderella is, ultimately, a genre film, and this difference speaks to the enormously different way that one watches them; but it's no secret that genre films have a special privilege to act as social commentary.

Regardless, Cinderella's appropriation of dribs and drabs from Charles Perrault's fairy tale is, for a very long time, almost totally invisible. Almost all of the most interesting and distinguishing elements of the film, in fact, start to show up in the last third, and I shall do my very best to indicate them without going full-on into spoilers, but the sensitive might want to have their parachutes ready to go; I'll let you know when to jump out of the review.

First and most visible of the film's tweaks to the basic formula is that our evident Cinderella and her mother are related by blood, and have what appears to be a splendid relationship. Hyeon-su (Shin Se-kyung) is a high school student, the beloved only daughter of Joon-hee (Do Ji-won), a well-known plastic surgeon. She's also cornered a perhaps ethically dubious market: the film doesn't really clarify the point, but Joon-hee's habit of working on her daughter's school friends feels a bit fucked-up on face of it. The girls, obsessed with finding ever more incremental ways of making themselves look prettier and prettier, don't seem to find anything wrong with it, and if anything, it appears to help with Hyeon-su's popularity among her peers. And at this point, I shall allow that the "seems" and"appears" aren't my way of being coy, but the film's way of being a bit foggy in execution. Structurally - especially once we get to the twists - Cinderella is something like a slasher film, and that goes to include the rather wan characterisation of everybody outside of the innermost circle of characters. In the early going, the movie is longer on cryptic mood than on narrative clarity, and when it starts to tilt in the other direction, there's not the foundation for it. And thus, instead of an ensemble, Cinderella has "that mass of girls who are friendly with Hyeon-su in some capacity".

The cryptic mood is awfully lovely, though. Quite without forewarning or explanation, the movie dives into random paranormal activity: Hyeon-su, carving a clay bust of Su-kyoung (Yoo Da-in), her friend who has just gone under Joon-hee's knife, accidentally slices the knife across the sculpture's cheek, and within seconds, Su-kyoung is bleeding from a nasty gash in the same place that simply appeared from nowhere. We're off the races from there, as the girls are visited by an apparent ghost in the form of - you'll never believe this - a pale girl with long black hair. And horrible things start happening to any of Hyeon-su's acquaintances who've had work done.

There are quite a few individually striking moments generously scattered all throughout Cinderella: the clay sculpting scene, a sequence in which a child is not quite murdered through suffocation, a face-painting party gone severely awry. Bong's ability to marry sickening horror imagery with a gauzy, damn near fantasy-like sense of mystery is utterly admirable. Where things fall apart is, well, where things come together: though more of its component parts are effective than otherwise, the film doesn't succeed in bringing all of those components into a cohesive whole. Cinderella ends up feeling like a collection of horrifying anecdotes centered on the idea of plastic surgery, rather than a fluid movie. The story is underdeveloped, and neither the director nor his game leads - both Shin and Do are quite effective, the latter brilliantly combining unfathomably cruelty with a genuinely tragic layer of maternal tenderness - do much to compensate for it.

But eventually, the film runs out the clock on trying to be crafty, and just about halfway through, we finally learn what's going on, kind of, in the form of a huge, inelegant backstory dump. And here's where the morbidly spoilerphobic must take their leave, though I shall do my level best to speak in vagaries.

Unlike the vast majority of contemporary horror and especially contemporary ghost stories, Cinderella becomes vastly more interesting and effective when it starts to explain things. It is, for one thing, only at this point that the grotesque irony of the title announces itself in all its glory, and we understand the film's critiques of the beauty industry and the individual women who would sacrifice anything for physical attractiveness; and also, on a more elemental level, it's here that the film finally indulges in the mythic angle of familial depravity that the phrase "a horror film version of Cinderella" implied from the beginning. The shocks, even the ones that we've more more or less figured out, hit hard, revealing a depth of nastiness in the characters and the society that supports them that's hard to prepare for, and the slow scare scenes, gratifyingly replacing the more generic jumps and jolts of the film to that point, are the best kind of inexorable. Despite the potential for elaborate, frequent gore effects, Bong holds off for maximum effectiveness as a punctuation mark, instead of a gross-out twist. Everything contributes to a bafflement of sympathy and identification; the implication of the final sequence unnervingly suggests that it's possible for someone to be so broken by emotional malnourishment that suicide in order to become a restless ghost could seem like a great bargain, since it allows for the paranormal toolkit to get revenge on everyone who has wronged you. This is not a film in which being wronged makes one victim, but just a different kind of aggressor.

As intriguing as Cinderella turns out to be in the end, I can't claim that even in its absolute best moments, it's an especially terrific example of Asian horror. The flip-side is that there's nothing that it does which makes it worse than the average of its genre; it's solid horror filmmaking that's not particularly inspired and could easily be trimmed into something that gets through its middle a little faster. It's very much the kind of movie that's best appreciated by people who've already liked things very similar to it, and I would not like to think of it as anybody's first experience with K-horror; but it's definitely got more than a little to recommend it to genre habitués.

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BIGGER & BLACKER

In the wide world of sequels that certainly don't have any actual reason to exist, one could do a lot worse, conceptually speaking, than The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death - though that title! There's absolutely nothing that mouthful achieves that wouldn't be more accurately and clearly covered by just plain The Woman in Black 2. But anyway, the sequel to the 2012 ghost story The Woman in Black has the good sense to leave that film's cast entirely alone, and with a perfectly fine Edwardian-era haunted house that nobody in the surrounding village wants to go near, it was as easy as pie to skip forward a few decades to find it still squatting there, grim and rotting, for a pair of London schoolteachers and band of refugee children to shelter there during the Blitz. This is, I am inclined to think, the most characteristically Hammer-esque touch in this latest production by the resurgent Hammer Films. It is also the only halfway decent idea to be found anywhere within Jon Croker's script, so there's that.

The glow of that one right choice does linger for a bit, though, and the opening sequence, in 1941 London, is a pretty terrific re-creation of the period in all its tightly-circumscribed panic, for a shlocky horror movie. Hell, given the movie this is, and given the people making up its target audience, I'm downright impressed by how unapologetically it throws us into the setting without bothering to explain the context or history. All we get are Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox), a young woman who teaches under the command of the strict headmistress Jean Hogg (Helen McCrory), and the two of them are in a hurry to get their seven charges off to the rural village of Crythin Gifford. Make that eight charges, since in the previous night's bombing, little Edward (Oaklee Pendergast) lost both of his parents, and is now joining Hogg's band, complete with a shellacked, post-traumatic lack of expression and refusal to speak. This is about the point where the movie uses up all its sense of place and war-era imagery, and no longer can pretend that it's any good in any way.

After arriving by train to Crythin Gifford late at night, the grumbling local do-gooder Dr. Rhodes (Adrian Rawlins, star of the 1989 Woman in Black telefilm) roughly informs the women that the only available lodging is the sprawling mansion on the outskirts of town, Eel Marsh House. Though to be honest, I'm not sure if it's named such. One thing that Angels of Death cannot be accused of is too much exposition on behalf of the viewers who might not have bothered with the first movie, and that goes from setting the stage - the important fact that Eel Marsh House is on the far side of a causeway that disappears during high tide is used during a tension-raising scene without have actually been established - all the way to the meat of its story, which uses the mythology of the titular woman (Leanne Best) that was explained the first time without really bothering to go over it all again, so a great deal of what happens is inexplicable far beyond the normal kind of cryptic events to be found in horror movies. And I cannot help but appreciate that economy of storytelling; but if a film is going to depend so completely on the viewer's knowledge of the first movie in order to make sense as a narrative object, it feels like a cheat to then have the content of the sequel be a re-hash of all the same setpieces from the last time around, in a slightly different order.

In fact, just about the only thing that The Woman in Black did that Angel of Death fails to repeat was to include a single protracted haunting sequence uninterrupted by plot or even dialogue. That was basically the only thing that hauled the first movie across the fine line dividing "derivative storytelling and tacky-looking ghosts on an absurdly over-designed set" from "derivative storytelling that has a really fucking kickass centerpiece that ends up making the whole movie a worthwhile experience". Absent that - and there really isn't even a feint in that direction - the sequel reveals just how threadbare the whole affair is, cobbling together ghost story clichés into a framework where it feels like a third of the scenes are missing: not just the ones explaining the backstory from the first movie, but more prosaic matters like, how does Eve go from riding into town with the hunky pilot (Jeremy Irvine) to poking around in a derelict basement all by herself? Meanwhile, the scenes that are present are trite muddles, doling out tragic backstories for two of the three adult characters with more than two scenes of screentime, and wandering away from the central action in a way that makes it clear that the filmmakers have no sense of what any of the characters are doing when they're not onscreen.

Tom Harper, the director, tries to keep this stitched together more or less by marching through reasonably well-timed jump scares at a steady pace, but even if it worked, that would feel like a cheap substitute for atmosphere and a real sense of the decaying dread that Eel Marsh House is meant to evoke. And for that, Harper and his cinematographer, George Steel, would need to abandon their weird hang-up about overlighting to make sure we can see everything clearly, even when story context - or just plain basic visual continuity - demand murkier blacks.

The film feels composed out of almost nothing but half-measures and recycled ideas, and the result is worse than terrible: it's astoundingly mediocre and plodding. The surprisingly good cast provides something that resembles life - Fox has a terrific sweet, plucky screen presence, and I'm very eager for her to get a better part in a more functional story - and I rather admire the way that the art team (the production designer is Jacqueline Abrahams, the supervising art director is Andrew Munro) aged the garish sets from the first movie into something still more ominous and rundown, but for the most part, Angel of Death is such a slack, by-the-numbers haunted hose story that it's not even up to the task of being bad.

4/10

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NONNEIN

Feature-length toy commercials may not get much more crass than Ouija: "You can buy one of these at your local toy store", one character literally snorts at one point, and that's after the infomercial-like exchange during which two other characters speculate about how nice it would be if there were some sort of... anything... that let you communicate with the dead people you've known... some sort of easily obtainable board, perhaps. But points for burying that advertisement underneath a hilariously self-negating film whose overriding surface-level message is much closer to "If you don't use our product exactly the way we tell you to, you will die. And even if you do use it exactly the way we tell you to, you'll kill a solid 60% of your friends in the process". Truth in advertising!

That kind of giddy idiot writing is very much the thing that keeps Ouija surprisingly entertaining for a very long stretch of its 89 minutes, though the entertainment is never intentional. Or hell, maybe it is. If you are special effects artist-turned-first-time-director Stiles White (co-writing with Juliet Snowden; they last teamed up to script the absurd Jewish exorcism movie The Possession), and you are stuck making a motion pictured based on a Hasbro board game so non-specific in its application that a non-branded variant of it shows up in three or four haunted house movies every year, maybe you do just throw your hands up and start making fun of yourself. At least that would go some way towards explaining why Ouija is maybe the funniest bad horror movie of this year, and the last couple of years as well; maybe it's just the accumulated rank incompetence. I vigorously approve of it either way.

It's barbarically clichéd in every regard: there's this girl, see, Debbie (Shelley Hennig), who has been acting all weird, and nobody can tell why, not even her best friend Laine (Olivia Cooke). Still, it's a shock when she kills herself by hanging herself from the chandelier in her parents' foyer with a string of bright white Christmas lights. A shock to everybody but us, that is: we saw her playing with a Ouija™ game - the characters are fucking fanatical about calling it a "game", which makes sense from a corporate standpoint, but reflects the casual usage of no human being in existence - and we saw her playing it alone, in strict defiance of the rules. And that is how she called up the angry spirit that made her go all hollow inside and then kill herself as the punchline to a shot set-up that holds so long on the "her body is totally about to drop from the top of the frame" tension that you could wander out of the theater to have a nice dinner and come back before it finally plays out.

Laine is horribly distressed, more than anybody else, and after a couple of days of moping - days during which her father leaves on business, while Debbie's parents leave her the keys to their house while they decompress for a few weeks, leaving the film conveniently devoid of authority figures besides Laine's mystic old Hispanic grandma (Vivis Colombetti), which I am extrapolating from the way she's always referred to as "nona", and not because Laine or her dad (Matthew Settle) appear to have an ounce of Latino blood between them. But by Christ, we could not have a movie like this without a mystical ethnic.

So anyway, Laine strong-arms her boyfriend Trevor (Daren Kagasoff), hers and Debbie's other best friend Isabelle (Bianca Santos), Debbie's boyfriend Pete (Douglas Smith), and most reluctantly of all, her own little sister Sarah (Ana Coto), into having a séance in Debbie's house, using the very same Ouija™ board. Naturally enough, they kick up an evil spirit; naturally enough, it takes them an inordinately long time to figure this out, despite the spirit's overtly menacing behavior and refusal to actually identify itself as Debbie. Many deaths happen, while nobody figures out what the hell is going on, and Laine, who had earlier blamed herself for Debbie's "suicide", because she went to a party without her friend, seems totally unruffled by the actual deaths that she actually is at fault for.

It's as thunderously predictable in every moment and as an overarching plot as any PG-13 horror movie could ever daydream about being; anyone who has even heard of, let alone seen Insidious: Chapter 2 ought to be able to get pretty far ahead of the movie without hardly any issue, and that's even without the cameo by that film's Lin Shaye, as the Lin Shaye Character (kind of - there's actually a bit of misdirection around her, but the reason for the casting is obvious enough). And White telegraphs each and every scare with enough chance to brace yourself and cover your eyes and have a scream cued up that only the most generous and giving viewer could actually manage to be frightened by it.

But Ouija is not meant to be a good movie: it is meant to lever money away from bored teenagers, and if along the way it manages to be so idiotic and half-formed as to be laugh-out-loud hilarious, so much the better. Much of this is because of the dialogue, which includes some delectably impossible words that nobody would ever speak - like when reference is made to ordering pancakes "with the works", which may be some regionalism, but only served to conjure up for me the appealing image of pancakes topped with onions, relish, and tomatoes. Or when Douglas Smith enunciates the word "article" with what sounds for all the world like an additional "c". Or when the characters stop their conversations dead to have lengthy readings from the Ouija™ rulebook, which everyone in this universe appears to have committed to memory.

Much more is simply from how laughably ill-made Ouija is: the tense setpiece staged in a tunnel so dark that we can actually see quite clearly down its entire length, even though the characters cannot; the ripped-from-J-horror ghost designs. Even the fucking production design is laughable: Debbie and Laine's rooms are both covered in magazine ads and posters that suggest less that the art crew was aware of what these "hu-man teen-agers" did with their private spaces, and more that the art crew was sozzled on wine and grabbed a bunch of fliers from community theater Shakespeare productions.

It is, basically, a wonderfully bad movie, filled with lapses in story logic and erratic characters written like ciphers and played like aliens. I do not recommend seeing it in theaters: I almost popped from trying to hold in all the obnoxious remarks I wanted to make to the friend I saw it with. But oh, Lord, when the DVD comes out, the beer-and-pizza parties this outrageous piece of shit is going to fuel...

2/10

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YOKAI WALK WITH ME

Daiei Film's third and final film centered around yokai, 1969's Along with Ghosts (a very unlovely title, but the literal translation isn't much better), is certainly the weakest of the three. And the least centered around yokai. In fact, while 100 Monsters would be hollowed out to almost nothing without having the paranormal entities covered by the highly nonspecific umbrella of the word yokai, and Spook Warfare wouldn't exist at all, it would be fairly easy to rewrite Along with Ghosts to lack any specific kind of haunting at all; just a sense of creepy dread in an old forest in one scene, and the monster mash in the final 10 minutes of the film could be snipped out entirely, offering as it does very little other than the sense that the filmmakers forgot that they were making a yokai film until it was to late to do anything but arbitrarily throw ghosts at the finale.

None of which means that Along with Ghosts doesn't have its strengths, nor that it isn't effectively creepy - which it is, perhaps surprisingly, given how little actual creepy material exists, and how much ghastly-ass comic relief does. This is not a movie as overtly For Children as Spook Warfare, but it has a lengthy scene dropped right into the middle that finds two bumbling henchmen hunting for kids in a slapstick sequence that would barely pass muster in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, hard to defend on any level other than "you know... for kids!", and an angry dwarf lady who is hard to defend on any level whatsoever. In the lowest depths of these passages -which I take to be unquestionably the bit where the henchmen are chasing a barrel zipping back and forth, thinking it has the children when in fact it is a dog - it's difficult to conceive of Along with Ghosts being any damn good on any level. And then the rest of the movie happens, and while it's not great by any means, it's still a pretty good ghost story even when the ghosts are conspicuously absent.

The feudal politics in this one get dense to the point that the film can be hard to follow, so what follows is more the impression of the plot than the actual plot: a yakuza band led by Kanzo (Tamaki Kazue, I think; the credits are incomplete in English, and information online is dubious) has stolen an incriminating document, killing the messengers carrying it in the middle of a sacred spot. When they are warned against this by the old man caring for that shrine (Hidari Bokuzen), Kanzo kills him too, though he survives long enough to pass word to his 7-year-old granddaughter Miyo (Burukido Masami) that she must take the document and flee to an inn some way down the Tokaido, the great sea road. She is assisted in this quest by Shinta (Hozumi Pepe), a slightly older and much more world-wise boy, and Hyakasuro (Hongo Kojiro), a samurai who had till lately been in the employ of the man Kanzo killed. Also ghosts - spooky, zombie-like ghosts who are pissed as all get-out at Kanzo and his men's initial and persistent violations of their sacred spaces, and do their own little bit to stop the yakuza, though it is very little indeed.

I'm inclined to a certain feeling of generosity towards Along with Ghosts that it probably doesn't earn. The thing is, for all its many lapses, it gets one key thing right: it paces out its most explicitly haunted scenes with great canniness, so even though there is virtually no yokai action and only a little bit more paranormal activity of any sort, there's never a long enough break that it feels like we've abandoned the universe of a lightly creepy bedtime story, where the promise of ghosts and monsters hiding just around the next bend is omnipresent, regardless of whether they actually prove to show up or not. And in fact, arguably the two best scenes in the film - the initial attack at the shrine, and Kanzo's torment of Miyo in a fixed dice game - are both eerie and ghostly without actually having ghosts. That's a tone that suits the film comfortably, and directors Yasuda Kimiyoshi and Kuroda Yoshiyuki (individually, the directors of the two preceding yokai films) did well to sustain it more or less, even though there's a pretty rough patch towards the center where too much daylight and too much kiddie frolicking and too many cartoon bad guys threaten to knock the entire film off the rails.

The flipside is that, while the tone is mostly enjoyably insinuating in its storytelling atmosphere, it leaves things a little abstract, and that hurts this as a yokai film even more than the lack of yokai does. When we think of the first two movies, we think, like as not, in terms of the great creatures: the karakasa, umbrella ghost, and the snake-necked lady, and the kappa, and that rock-headed thing from Spook Warfare who led the yokai, and my Japanese mythology is nowhere near strong enough to guess what he was supposed to be. All of them have interesting screen presence and well-defined personalities as morally neutral monsters. The phantoms in Along with Ghosts, in contrast, are totally generic and impersonal. They make an impact, I suppose, with the slow way they fade in, and the overtly threatening nature of their appearances, staged in ritualistic ways that feel far more deliberate and angry than anything in the previous movies. But they're just ugly creatures with decaying faces, and absolutely no energy. It's terribly disappointing, mostly only in reference to the first two. Though even if we just take this as a film unto itself, the relatively anonymous character of the yokai here only underscores the impression that this could just as easily have none of them, making it through on its implicit paranormal elements and leaving the outright haunting out of it.

And that would leave us with a satisfactory but not at all special samuarai adventure with a perfectly charming little girl for a protagonist, suitably threatening villains for a movie that keeps just pulling back from committing to being a kids' film, too many scenes that make their point three or four times before wrapping up, and lots of subdued, atmospheric imagery. It's a pleasing yarn, but certainly no more, and it's easily the least memorable film of the trilogy. There's a genuine sleepy pleasure to it, though, and if it's a fairly empty conclusion to a likable little horror series, I can't honestly declare it to be an obviously insufficient one.

Reviews in this series
100 Monsters (Yasuda, 1968)
Spook Warfare (Kuroda, 1968)
Along with Ghosts (Yasuda & Kuroda, 1969)

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DOLL FACE

The best movies are the ones that introduce you to a totally new experience. One of those happened to me at Annabelle. I have literally never had anything even a little bit like this happen to me before, and I don't know if it will ever happen again, though I can live in hope: after the movie ended, and just as the first card in the end credits was starting to fade up, someone in the middle of the theater loudly asked, in a voice that had more despair in it than anger, "Everybody agrees that was absolutely terrible, right? Did anybody think that was good?" And not one of the twenty or so souls in the room challenged him, though a few of us laughed.*

It could be worse. I mean, I'm sure it could. Though at this particular moment in time, I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining how that could be the case. Director John R. Leonetti (a cinematographer by trade, but his directorial credits extend all the way back to 1997's all-time classic Mortal Kombat: Annihilation) and his filmmaking team manage to make a creepy-as-shit doll not scary. That's like Horror Cinema 101: creepy dolls and ventriloquist's dummies. The only bigger gimme is clowns. And yet, in Annabelle, the titular doll only manages to look profoundly stupid. "Perhaps the Annabelle doll is just too ridiculously overdone and veers straight into camp", I thought to myself, around the time that Leonetti and DP James Kniest favored it with a close-up that lovingly showcased its cracked grey skin and its enormous blood-shot eyes, like it had gotten its little doll self plowed on doll-sized whiskey sours. But that can't be the case - we already saw Annabelle in 2013, in The Conjuring, to which Annabelle is a sort of half-assed prequel, and the doll was terrifying as all hell back then.

So the only real solution is that Annabelle is just a piece of incompetent shit, and the agitated fellow in the movie theater with me was absolutely right. It's not just that the film is bad: there are far more horror films that are bad than otherwise. It's that it's bad to a degree that absolutely makes no sense: even just regurgitating every single scare tactic from every single haunting movie in recent memory should have produced a somewhat more functional genre film than this terribly exercise in cinematic lard and self-sabotaging mistakes at every corner. There's a scene in which the female lead, Mia Gordon (Annabelle Wallis) is trapped in a basement with what certainly looks like Satan, or anyway a charcoal grey job that resembles the lazy "ooh, the Devil" design that horror filmmakers rest on when they're not interested in being bold. She gets on the elevator, and pushes 6. The doors close, the elevator grinds, the doors open, it's still the basement. She shines the flashlight around. Nothing is there. She pushes the "door close" button. This happens no fewer than four times, and Satan never does show up - never even puts his shiny black claws in the elevator door at the last minute to freak Mia out real good. I would call it laughably inept, except that, dear reader, I was not laughing. Just silently stewing and becoming good and pissed off that the film had decided that a busted elevator with nothing attacking it was the stuff of top-notch skin-crawling excitement

Or, ooh, how's this for ineptitude: in one scene, an artificial long take is created by stitching two shorter takes together, one as Mia walks to the front door of her house, one as she walks through her house. Garden-variety stuff. Emmanuel Lubezki has made a career out of it. And yet clear as day, you can see where then filmmakers here just threw in a really short dissolve to marry the takes, and it's as believable as those jump cuts in an old movie where the only way to make an object appear or disappear was to stop the camera, have everybody stand still, and hope like hell nobody shifted so much that their position in the frame shifted. When that happens in a film from the '40s, it's part of the buy-in you make to watch a film of that vintage. When it happens to an all-digital production from 2014, it is acutely disgusting.

The movie itself is a grab-bag of lazy notions from every other horror movie of the last five or ten years. A very pregnant Mia and her husband John (Ward Horton) are young marrieds in Santa Monica, CA, in 1972. He's applying for his medical residency, she's… it doesn't matter what she does, since she's about to be taken out of commission for a while. They have a kindly pair of neighbors, and the neighbors have a long-lost daughter named Annabelle, who left to join a cult. And one fateful night, she and her cult boyfriend creep back home to ritually murder her parents. When John goes to investigate the screaming Mia heard, they follow him back home, where they stab her in the belly. The baby survives, but the doctor insists that she stay in bed as much as remotely possible for the rest of the pregnancy.

So "Mia", "John", pregnant, Satan: it's an overt Rosemary's Baby nod, though by mostly limiting itself to stealing the names of that film's lead actors, it's actually something of a classy and restrained one. But as long as Roman Polanski is on the table - or even if he otherwise wasn't - hauling up the "Southern California cultists stab a pregnant woman" plot point (the Manson Family is even name-dropped in a news report) is neither classy nor restrained by any possible definition of those terms. I would go so far as to call it shockingly crass and exploitative to call upon the memory of Sharon Tate's horrible murder in such a direct and unthinking way. Annabelle, folks: there's no wrong way to hate it. But back to the plot.

It's during her convalescence that Mia starts to notice odd things, all of them clustering around the hideous-as-sin collector's doll that John bought for her the morning of the killings, and which Annabelle was holding as she committed suicide that night. We who saw The Conjuring - or even Annabelle's prologue, where two young women freaked out as they described their experience with the doll to an unheard offscreen investigator who the film rather obviously sets up to be a cameoing Patrick Wilson, except it never returns to the frame narrative at the end and so, fuck it (I will concede the possibility of a post-credits scene, but waiting to find out wasn't a priority at the moment the film ended) - we know that Annabelle-the-possessed doll is behind it, which frees up the filmmakers to stage lots of menacing shots of the doll as the music booms and nothing happens for many long seconds at a time. It takes the help of a pair of Wise Ethnics - Father Perez (Tony Amendola), the family priest, and Evelyn (Alfre Woodard), a bookstore owner with an interest in the occult, but it's not an occult bookstore, because that would be lazy writing - to clear up what's going on, and what is going on is the usual "the demon wants your newborn baby" folderol, with the usual lightbulbs bursting and devil faces appear in shadows and popcorn exploding and setting the kitchen on fire.

If the film does anything worthwhile, it's that it gets its '70s signifiers all lined up properly: the cloths and props are a little showy at times ("hey, I got you a VINTAGE BAG OF DORITOS! WHO WANTS DORITOS?" screeches one scene), but for the most part the settings specific enough that we can't forget it, but unforced enough that it doesn't get in the way of the story, which is almost a shame. And when Woodard shows up, she's like a cool breeze on a hot day, providing the movie with an authoritative, stable presence that comes amazingly close to making some scenes not-unpleasant to watch (I might add that, even by horror movie standards, what happens to Annabelle's solitary African-American character is a malarial swamp of problematic racial representation). Having said that, I'm tapped out of compliments: there's nothing else that's tolerable in Annabell, let alone actively good. The acting is horrible, especially Horton's, with his wide-eyed "golly willickers!" attitude that suggests he accidentally researched the 1910s when building his character, not the 1970s. But the actors can only be blamed so much, what with the crudely functional dialogue they are obliged to deliver, and the broken motivations they are given to play (for a woman whose single driving motivation is her baby's safety, Mia sure does seem to leave her alone in the haunted apartment a lot). And it's just even a wee tiny bit scary: every jump scare announces itself and is diluted by the half-dozen jump scares preceding it that never bothered to show up, and the creepiness of the "Satan wants your baby" routine is undercut by how much the baby feels like a concept the actors are playing, not a living being that parents desperately want to protect. Also by how much this is plainly a film that won't kill its baby.

It's useless, completely useless: clumsily made and criminally underwritten. If you had asked me if a 2014 movie about a baby and devil-worshippers had even a prayer of being worse than Devil's Due, I'd have laughed right in your face, but oh, how strong a bid Annabelle puts in for itself in the race to be the worst horror film of 2014!

1/10

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OUT OF THE WEST

Daiei's second yokai film in 1968, which is most readily found in English under the title Spook Warfare, and with the implication that it came out first (the actual title is much closer to "great yokai war", which would eventually be used in the Western distribution of a different film 37 years later), is a marked improvement of its predecessor, 100 Monsters, in some ways, and a distinctly more slapdash, tossed-off affair in others. Which sounds like it turns out to be a push, but for one key thing: absolutely everything about Spook Warfare makes it considerably more fun than the first movie. It's so much goofier in every respect, and more aware that it's kind of actually a children's movie, and while the stakes are higher, the sense of danger is barely present at all. All of which sounds like I'm describing an absolute piece of shit, so let me back up a little bit.

The first and most obvious thing about Spook Warfare is that unlike all of Daiei's other "samurai movie with monsters" films - 100 Monsters, but also Daimajin and its sequels in 1966 - it's not at all a stock jidaigeki: it's not a tale of villagers fending off a wicked warlord until along come people in a suit to save the day. Which is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; Daimajin is a wonderful film after all. But it does shift the way the film functions quite a lot, and I think for the better. In effect, Spook Warfare isn't a film into which yokai arrive; it is a film about a band of yokai fighting... a wicked warlord. But he's a wicked demon warlord, so it still fits. The point being, by focusing from the onset on the spirits and monsters, and letting the humans serve as the side characters for most of the running time, the film acknowledges that we're pretty much all there for the effects, the creepy characters, and not so much the drama. But even setting that aside as a vote in favor of instant gratification and empty spectacle, the streamlined narrative of Spook Warriors and focused deployment of the yokai gives it a storybook feeling that's far stronger than anything in 100 Monsters; it has a direct progression of events that's fare clearer and more engaging, even if it ultimately burns down to "the funny and scary monsters do things".

And having talked about focus and clarity and all, I shall look like a fool for pointing out the other really apparent thing here, which is the film's wildly unconventional opening: I can't name any other Japanese movie that starts off in Mesopotamia. Here, two greedy treasure hunters accidentally unsealing a millennia-old Babylonian demon named Daimon (Hashimoto Chikara). I will assume that "Daimon the demon" doesn't sound so flippant and dumb in Japanese. Daimon is a being of obvious malice, from his rotten green features on down to the way he kills the treasure hunters without a second glance, and he's been pent up for long enough that he can't wait to start doing something evil, which involves him immediately transporting himself to feudal Japan. The reason why feudal Japan is, of course, because Spook Warfare is the second film in a series made in Japan on standing sets from jidaigeki, but in the context of the film it's the most random damn thing. But we have to push through this part to get to the actual movie, so even though the opening sequence is the exact opposite of streamlined narrative cohesion, it has to be dealt with.

The film, anyway, starts to become immediately more delightful in Japan, where Lord Isobe (Kanda Takashi), a local magistrate, and his daughter, Lady Chie (Kawasaki Akane), are fishing. The arrival of the storm which contains Daimon sends the party scurrying, but Isobe stays behind just long enough for the demon to kill him, drink his blood, and possess his body. Because Daimon, you see, isn't just a big scary Babylonian monster: he's the intrusion into the world of Japanese yokai of a specifically European conception of a vampire. And no, Babylon and Europe nearly aren't the same thing (nor is Egypt, where all of the "Babylonian" architecture seems to have come from), but give the number of Western-made films and stories to cram Japan, China, Korea, and certain bits of southeast Asia into one big sack, I elect not to get huffy about it.

The arrival of a Western monster isn't just a conceit, it's the whole plot hook. Daimon, disguised as Isobe, starts to wreak havoc and freak everybody out; the first person to attempt to figure out what's going on is Saheiji (Kimura Gen), Isobe's most trusted adviser. Their struggle is quick and ends with a fragment of Daimon's essence possessing Saheiji as well, but during the fight, in a surprisingly comic bit of business, a projectile falls into the pond in the middle of Isobe's courtyard, falling right on the head of the local kappa (Kuroki Gen) sleeping there. Kappa being the turtle-like river creatures of Japanese folklore, you know. The kappa gets annoyed, and even more annoyed to see that a foreign demon is trying to take over his turf, but Daimon makes immensely short work of the little creature. With nowhere else to turn, the kappa heads to the local haunted ruins, where a whole army of yokai hang around, and though he fails to convince them that a monster unknown in Japan is terrorising the land, he's done enough to lay the groundwork so that when Daimon overplays his hand - gathering up local children to drink their blood, his favorite food - the yokai are at least a little ready to wage war. But it still will take a collaboration with the hopelessly outmatched human contingent fighting Daimon from inside Isobe's palace to stop the interloper.

The film's charms are perhaps shallow, but the are legitimate: we get to watch as a whole gallery of yokai, gross and cute and fanciful creatures from across the range of folklore, plot how to oust a Japanified vampire out, to preserve the honor of Japanese monsterdom. There's no way not to make that kind of narrative scenario sound odd, but it's awfully sweet and fun, anyway. And since Spook Warfare unashamedly announces itself as a trifle for an audience of children, "sweet" and "fun" are far less insulting than they might otherwise sound. It also excuses the remarkably apparent shortcomings of Spook Warfare's production: the seams show all over, whether it's the poorly-hidden cutting to make things appear and disappear, or the fact that the green makeup Kuroki wears on his arms and legs as the kappa keeps rubbing off, or how much none of the yokai look like anything but cloth and rubber. This might, indeed, be part of the point: we get to see all of the marvelous creatures, but they're so obviously artificial that none of it is ever actually scary. Mostly just charming and goofy.

Which isn't to say that it's devoid of any kind of meat on its bones. The climactic battle is impressively serious and elaborate in its action choreography for something targeting a young audience. And while the various yokai are always presented in a way that makes it clear that we have nothing to worry about, it's just pretend (and besides the yokai are generally treated as comic figures by director Koroda Yoshiyuki, focusing on the silliness and bumbling when he can, on top of being protectors, not a menace), there's still that little frisson of enjoyable creepiness when we see things like the lady with the snake neck (Mori Ikuko), grinning with malevolent delight, or the full form of Daimon as a batlike creature with his ribs on the outside. It's uncanny without being dangerous in any way, and that's enough to make it something of a perfect little children's horror movie/bedtime story. Its guileless sense of adventure and bouncy approach to saying "boo!" don't at all mean it's not okay for adults too - as I imagine has long since been clear, I found the film utterly bewitching in its playfulness and haunted house whimsy. But what I think doesn't matter, and that's just fine. It's not for people like me, and I'm just pleased that I got to find it so likable and inviting anyway.

Reviews in this series
100 Monsters (Yasuda, 1968)
Spook Warfare (Kuroda, 1968)
Along with Ghosts (Yasuda & Kuroda, 1969)

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DEFINITELY NOT 100 MONSTERS, BUT ENOUGH THAT I LOST COUNT

October at Antagony & Ecstasy means weekends dedicated to classic horror films. This year, rather than tackle a franchise, I've decided to have two little series running in tandem, one on Saturdays and one on Sundays. The Saturday series I've picked is thanks entirely to the fun I've had in the past year reviewing a whole crapload of daikaiju eiga, and after this month is over, I promise we're done with '60s and '70s Japanese genre films for a while.

In 1968, Daiei Film released a quickly-made trilogy of tokusatsu horror films, connected only that they featured broadly the same kind of creatures (the same model that they'd employed two years earlier, in their Daimajin daikaiju eiga). And I do mean broadly. For these films - usually referred to in English markets as the Yokai Monsters trilogy - aren't about one specific monster, like Daimajin the statue or Gamera the flying turtle, and they aren't even about one basic class of monster. They are about yokai, a type of being for which we don't have a word in English, or even really a concept - the word, as I understand it, is an umbrella term for all supernatural beings that aren't gods or demons, everything from trickster spirits living in the woods to hideous perversions of human beings. I'm not even entirely sure if the strictest use of the word yokai would demand that the beings in question are either malevolent or scary, though Daiei's first film in its trilogy (though marketed on DVD as the second) is predicated on that being more or less the case.

The film is known in America, at least, as 100 Monsters, which is almost, but crucially not quite, a fair translation of the original title, which is something like 100 Yokai Stories. And it's not just because "monsters" is a pretty crude attempt to render "yokai" in English. The thing is, 100 Monsters is in fact a horror movie about telling scary stories, one whose adoption of a certain distanced relationship from its own content very neatly reflects the way that spooky bedtime tales feel comfortably dissociated from our own present reality, either because they take place in some distant place or time, or because they are sketched out in only as much detail as it takes to move the plot from point to point (nobody ever wondered what kind of car the madman's hook was hanging from, after all). 100 Monsters certainly gets the distance and detachment right: it takes place somewhere centuries back into the past, and it's so unconcerned about filling in the details that I didn't really notice till over halfway through that I hadn't caught more than one or two character names. It's a film that exists strictly at the level of folktale: once upon a time, a village was attacked by an army of ghosts.

That doesn't actually happen till the end, though. First, we're introduced to the tradition of hyakumonogatari kaidankai, the telling of one-hundred stories of the supernatural. As each story was completed, a single candle would be extinguished, until the final story was told by the light of only one flame. Custom demands that the final story be followed by a cleansing ritual to prevent the yokai which had just been described and summoned by the stories from manifesting in the lives of the storytellers. We see one such event wrap up one night in a town suffering under the cruelty of its wealthiest inhabitant, the landowner Tajimaya (Kanda Takashi), who has been steadily strengthening his grip on the community, and makes his most bastardly move yet on the morning when he announces his intentions to seize and demolish an old temple. In order to do this, he needs the approval of the even more bastardly Lord Uzen (Gomi Ryutaro), a corrupt and repellent petty dictator.

On the night that Uzen arrives in town to railroad through his decision, Tajimaya endeavors to stage a hyakumonogatari kaidankai game just for his benefactor, which plays out as well as one could hope for. But Uzen, a bully with no patience for superstition, cuts the night off after the 100th story but before the benediction to banish the yokai, and this sure enough means that over the next couple of day, a whole host of of bizarre creature star to show up with the intention of causing all possible inconvenience and misery for the men who called them up. Which makes things a lot easier for Yasutaro (Fujimaki Jun), a stranger staying in town and expressing a rather focused fascination with the bad guys' plotting, and who now has the luxury of sitting back while the yokai take care of whatever corruption he'd been trying to ferret out.

That doesn't sound like enough to fill up even the modest 80 minutes to which 100 Monsters runs, and it's not hard to argue that it's a film with more than its share of padding. Like the first Daimajin, with which it shares director Yasuda Kimiyoshi and screenwriter Yoshida Tetsuro, the film is first and foremost a period drama, a jidaigeki, about the torments suffered by poor villagers at the hands of an unscrupulous and cruel warlord, into which some fantasy film elements insert themselves near the climax; unlike Daimajin, 100 Monsters isn't a tremendously good version of that. Yasuda, his cinematographer Takemura Yasukazu, and his art directors Kato Shigeru and Nishioka Yoshinobu do a fine enough job of crafting an Edo period setting that looks believable as a physical place, but not fussily realistic, and in particular, Yasuda pulls out some really interesting, almost startling unexpected camera angles (mostly from surprisingly high angles) to to lift us from the setting and keep alive the feeling that we're watching a storybook fable, not a dramatic narrative. Even in the depressingly faded print that made its way to DVD, 100 Monsters is a handsome looking movie.

But it is also a lumpy movie with no clear sense of how it wants its story to play out - it is very difficult to imagine how it would have continued developing if the yokai hadn't shown up, making it awfully convenient for the characters that they did. It's much too short to be boring, but it does feel like it's repeating itself without purpose, leaving the human story in the middle part of the film awfully sluggish. The film does have the decency to know this, and to hand out yokai scenes with unanticipated frequency: the opening (in the form of a story being told), and right about the one-third mark (another story, and most unnervingly creeepy part of the film, a little gut punch of obvious but effective paranormal nastiness, with one particular yokai effect that I found most impossibly successful, and I will not look to spoil it now) are both ghostly setpieces; a bit later, the film introduces its most famous yokai, the one-legged, two-armed, one-eyed moving umbrella called karakasa, in a scene that's just the most damn delightful thing I can imagine. Herein, Tajimaya's childlike son (Shinichi Rookie) paints karakasa on a blank canvas, only to find his drawing come alive in a really terrific animated effect, and then to suddenly burst into three dimensions in the form of an implausible but still deeply enjoyable puppet.

All really solid moments, and they help considerably in propping up 100 Monsters at exactly the points it threatens to sag. Which helps us get to the excellent final sequence, in which the yokai attack Lord Uzen in dreamy slow-motion, and later file out of the town in a gauzy, semi-translucent parade that's uncanny and beautiful equally. There's a real strain of visual poetry going on here, surprisingly so given the film's cheapness and generic requirements (and yet, not at all surprising in the light of the tremendously good final sequence of Daimajin, which was also poetic but in a different way); and even more surprisingly, it augments the otherworldliness an horrifying quality of the scenes, rather than robbing them of their spooky effect by making them beautiful instead.

The parts of 100 Monsters that work are absolutely terrific; they also stand out badly in the context of the parts that are... just fine. I would love a more consistent 100 Monsters: if not more consistently full of yokai (on the contrary, I think they are judiciously and craftily used), at least more consistently clear and purposeful. There can be a vagueness and overly simplified sense of narrative conflict in a some places within the movie, and yet it also feels overstuffed: the clear mark of a film that would naturally be a clever little ghost story anecdote around 45 minutes, if 45 minutes was a running time that people knew what to do with. 80 minutes starts to feel bloated.

But forget my criticisms: it's a lovely movie, with some terrific haunting setpieces, and a real sense of not knowing what's happening or what to expect (which may very well just be the result of U.S. parochialism, but the film's inalienable weirdness is absolutely its most salient characteristic to an American viewer, and I couldn't possible fail to mention it). When it clicks, and it frequently clicks, it's a captivating tale of straightforward, winningly simple ghost story impulses. If I am disappointed in its sagginess and wandering screenplay, it's only because I like the good parts so much that I wish the whole movie could be at that level.

Reviews in this series
100 Monsters (Yasuda, 1968)
Spook Warfare (Kuroda, 1968)
Along with Ghosts (Yasuda & Kuroda, 1969)

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1982: In which horror went mainstream when we weren't looking, and the New Age of the Producer has begun

The question of authorship of 1982's Poltergeist is not going to be resolved here. It is one of the great stubbornly unanswered question of film production in modern days: whether producer/scenarist/co-writer Steven Spielberg (it is one of only three films for which he took a screenwriting credit) in fact directed the movie for which Tobe Hooper received credit, or if he was simply a very, very, very hands-on producer. It is a situation that undoubtedly happens more often than anybody supposes, and the history of the studio system is thick with movie for which the producer had more of a firm hand on the final product than the director, or directors (for it is also the case that many more old films than you could imagine went through multiple directors, with only the last one, or the one who did the most work, getting the onscreen credit; the studios were factories then, not art classes). But in this case, fanboyism kicks in: an anxiety over whether the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the director, also in 1982, of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial "really" made Poltergeist, and how we're supposed to value it as a result. Which is nonsense, of course; whether Hooper was just there to facilitate Spielberg's vision, or if he was just there to serve as a blind for the DGA while Spielberg facilitated his own vision (and what is not contested is that Hooper had little to nothing to do with post-production, where the bulk of any film's actual personality emerges anyway), there was never any point whn Hooper might possible have ended up as the auteur of what is, every inch, a Spielberg film. And this is not the first time that a producer, and not the director, served as the primary creative spirit behind a movie: one needn't look beyond David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind and Duel in the Sun for two especially clear-cut examples. The desire to discover who "really" directed Poltergeist is a farrago, mired in 1970s-style belief in Director as God and the way that singular artistic visions can be communicated though an especially collaborative art form. But we are in the 1980s now; the director's artistic vision is dead, and it is now time for branding and marketing and a new iteration of the old studio machine to make movies for us, and not individual genius so much.

Anyway, the point of any film is the film, and whoever really directed Poltergeist, the film does not cease to be the thing it has always been and will always be: a fascinating and in some ways disastrously compromised dark twin to E.T. that also represents a weirdly family-friendly horror movie from an era when "horror movies" almost exclusively meant stories of grotesque psychos stabbing sexually active teenagers with lots of stage blood ensuing. It's one of those haunted house movies about the unpredictable terrors of home ownership, looking at the literal suburban hell faced by the Freeling family: dad Steve (Craig T. Nelson), who got the gorgeous new tract home they all live in as a perk for being the most awesome of all the sales reps for the Cuesta Verde subdivision; mom Diane (JoBeth Williams), teen daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne), young son Robbie (Oliver Robins), and youngest of all, little Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), who's the first member of the family to actively notice the odd shifts and bumps that everybody else overlooks. She also develops, early in the movie, a peculiar fascination with the static that the family television receives when programming ends for the evening (ah, the days when TV wasn't broadcasting every hour of every day!). In fact, by the end of the first scene, she'll end up staring intently at the blasting white noise with an implacable look of calm on her face that contrasts mightily with the raging flickers of white light that make her close-up look unnaturally freakish for such a small child.

Something or someone is communicating to Carol Anne through that static, and it starts to mess with the Freeling household at large, creating a weird zone in the kitchen where objects and people slide across the floor, while also battering things about and shaking the house to no end. Inexplicably, the family doesn't take this as their cue to leave immediately; it's not until one particularly violent event during a terrible storm results in Carol Anne having been spirited right out of the house that Steve and Diane begin to suspect that something terrible might be going on; this sends them to call on local parapsychologist Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight) to help figure out what the hell is happening, and when she proves no better equipped to to explain the paranormal activity, she brings in the psychic Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), whose beatific attitude in describing the unholy nexus of dark psychic energy residing in the Freeling home is the freakiest part of the whole movie.

Poltergeist is a garden variety haunted house movie in a lot of ways; it benefits most from coming at a time when, after years and years of treating horror as a shoddy B-commodity to be hidden with shame, the studios were starting to realise, en masse, that there was some money to be made in the genre. And it especially benefits from being a pet project of Spielberg's right in the window of time when he could basically do no wrong: he had, between 1975 and 1981, directed three of the most indescribably enormous hits in the history of American cinema (and also the mega-flop 1941, from which he sprung back quickly), and if he wanted to oversee the first special effects horror extravaganza of the new popcorn movie era, nobody was likely to step in and tell him no. And so Poltergeist is executed with a tremendous array of cinematic tricks that were the absolute state of the art in 1982, most of which have aged fairly well. Though a lot of it feels sort of identical to his 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and therein lies the problem.

Poltergeist is a Steven Spielberg movie. I've said it, but it needs to be repeated: whether Tobe Hooper "directed" it or not, he was only executing Spielberg's very specific and very characteristic vision. That the film came from the exact same period in Spielberg's adulthood reminiscing about Spielberg's childhood as E.T. is absolutely impossible to miss, as both present a version of the California suburbs as a nexus for childhood fantasies - happy fantasies of finding a best friend and having adventures in E.T., scary fantasies of looming spooky trees and creepy clown dolls and the ineffable terror of thunderstorms in Poltergeist. But Steven Spielberg, for all the thrillers dotting his career, has an attitude that is completely at odds with the impulses of horror, and however much influence Hooper had on the pre-production and production (and nobody denies that he was active in the film's pre-production), the fingerprints of a man who certainly isn't known for his family-friendly work are clearly to be felt in patches here and there. So we have, on the one hand, a writer and producer whose instincts are unyieldingly safe and juvenile in focus: let's make Poltergeist a spooky story about the things that scare little kids, but not too spooky. And on the other, we have a collaborator who made America's most widely-seen film about cannibalism prior to The Silence of the Lambs. Given how much of the film ends up walking back all of the actual scary material with lengthy conversations about metaphysics and light shows in which ghosts look like even more gentle Spielbergian aliens, it's remarkable that Hooper, or whoever, was able to get as much of the legitimate nightmare fuel smuggled into the film as he was: it's never sustained for more than a scene, and it's usually only a single isolated effect at a time, but there's a reason Poltergeist started the conversation that ultimately led to the creation of the PG-13 rating. Rotting flesh hallucinations and giant hell-skulls and some acutely terrifying sound effects come along just often enough to pierce through the "let's tell a scary bedtime story!" attitude that is Poltergeist's main mode for it to feel legitimately darker and harsher than a first approximation of the story and the way the story has been told would ever lead one to believe.

At the same time, it leaves the film feeling erratic and lumpy: not like the largely gentle-touch of the horror was a deliberate choice to let those occasional high-impact moments land harder, but like the film was being torn in two directions. And again, we don't know that happened; but the story about how Jerry Goldsmith (hired to give a disappointingly generic John Williams impression) was shocked to find that he'd be working with the producer, not the director seems awfully telling in at least one respect. For the score, more than anything else, is the film's keenest tool in knocking the edge off its horror with a sweetness and even Romantic air that significantly undercuts the moody lighting and looming camera angles (particularly in the very last shot, which seems for all the world like it should be brooding, except that the music insists, in a most bullying way, "all is well, the heroes have won, la-la").

The production values alone are enough to make this one of the 1980s' most distinctive and important horror movies, showcasing what the genre could do when given unprecedented resources and support; its thematic concerns - living in the suburbs is actually bad for your soul! - make it essential viewing for any even semi-serious Spielberg aficionado, of whom I understand that there are at least one or two out in the world. Its interpolation of enormously ambitious shot set-ups and effects sequences into the modest domestic setting of a single family home set it out as one of the most unique of the first generation of post-Star Wars effects showcases. And yet for all that I'd basically recommend it as necessary viewing for everybody, I can't convince myself that Poltergeist actually works all that well. Truly, it achieves the exact goal it sets for itself, to provide the most intense scary movie experience that the whole family can enjoy. But speaking as a grown-up horror fan, I can't help but wish for more out of this one-of-a-kind marriage of Spielbergian extravagance with genre mechanics, and while Poltergeist does not fail on its own terms, it still feels very much like a missed opportunity.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1982
-Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger learns what is best in life in Conan the Barbarian, and becomes the most unexpected superstar in generations
-The lingering memory of the Holocaust poisons the present, as Meryl Streep is forced to make Sophie's Choice
-Fast Times at Ridgemont High is the film that launched a thousand puberties, and proved the teen sex comedy could be pretty darn good cinema, too

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1982
-The Palme d'Or victory for Yol brings Turkish cinema to new international prominence
-In the last year of his life, ultra-prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder releases his final masterwork, Veronika Voss
-Contemporary history is solemnly embalmed by the British-Indian co-production Gandhi

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