Grace (2009)

Being Film #10 in Hail Horror 4

Being a parent means dealing with dozens of different things a day.  It's confusing, ecstatic, maddening - sometimes all at once.  All in the name of that tiny little life you're now responsible for. GRACE, a disturbing little horror film from Paul Solet preys on those feelings - I cringed with the weighted memories of my son at that age during some of the more graphics moments - but the film takes that feeling of being a parent further - it tries to say something about feminism, veganism, and alternative lifestyles, all while telling a gruesome story about the lengths a mother will go to for her baby.  But while multi-taking and being able to handle a dozen things at once is a necessity for any parent, in a film - especially a horror film, it can be more than a bit distracting.

Madeline is a modern, liberal woman, finally pregnant with her first child.  The beginning of the movie is filled with flashes of butchered cows cut next to her pouring soy milk.  She and her husband Michael and looking into having their child's birth done naturally, with a mid-wife.  All this goes against the wishes of her slightly off-kilter mother-in-law Vivian, would like nothing better than to have Madeline in the care of her own doctor.  Both worlds collide when after a car accident that leaves both Michael and the unborn baby dead.  Madeline decides to carry the baby to term anyway, and after a traumatic birth the baby girl indeed appears stillborn until she miraculously revives in Madeline's arms.  "Grace," Madeline names her.

It's soon apparent things aren't normal with Grace.  She has an odd odor, and attracts flies like rotted meat.  It's gets worse than that, though.  Grace begins to get weak and displays bloody rashes along her body.  She won't eat anything  - except the blood of her mother.  

And there you go.  Madeline tries everything, including the blood from packaged steaks and other, more brutal alternatives, but Grace wants her mommy.  Literally.  

The problem is that Grace the baby knows exactly what she wants, but GRACE the film is a little less sure of itself.  It wants to say things about alternative medicine, about veganism and animal cruelty, and the bonds between parents and their children, but the way it goes about doing all these things is haphazard and clumsy, often a blaring news piece on television or a quick comment made in conversation.  And when the focus is on the characters, they often feel like quirky sketches instead of real people with bonds to one another.  If GRACE is effective at all, it comes from the small monstrous moments between Madeline and Grace.  Solet, expanding his short film of the same name, reaches into the "Dead Baby" taboo bag and dumps its contents throughout the movie.  Breast feeding scenes are particularly squeamish...

It all ends pretty much as you'd expect it to - there's a fairly predictable "twist" ending and a fair amount of violence, although it's somewhat surprising in where it comes from.  GRACE feels very much like an expanded short film, padded out with a lot of half-baked ideas that don't come full circle.  Somewhere in all of this is a joke about comparing the film to thin, watery skim milk as opposed to rich, robust and healthy breast milk.  But I'm too tired beat by this film to look for it.  Check it out if the concept interests you.  Otherwise, I'd skip GRACE. 

New Look

Here at Geek Monkey we're always in a state of flux.  I wanted something a little cleaner, so behold the new look.  Maybe one day I'll actually stick to a layout for longer than a month, but in the meantime expect a few more changes as I settle into the new feel of the site.

There's still a few more horror movies to get up, and in November we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming.  Thanks for bearing with all the gore - I promise once this is over you won't be seeing nearly so much of it!

Phantasm II (1988)

Being Film #9 in Hail Horror 4

It almost took a decade, but somehow the planets aligned, money was found, and Don Coscarelli brought the twisted horror of the Tall Man back for PHANTASM II.  In large part thanks to the financial successes of 80s horror franchises like FRIDAY THE 13TH and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET Universal decided to foot the bill, betting on the iconography of Angus Scrimm's Tall Man and his nefarious metal spheres to cash in at the box office.

So PHANTASM sports a larger budget, meaning we get to see some spiffy effects, like what's finally underneath the hoods of the menacing dwarfs (turns out, some great animatronic demon faces) and some pretty spectacular explosions.  All the key players from the first one (reviewed here) come back, with the exception of Jodi (who died) and Mike, who perhaps at the studio's urging is now played by James LeGros, who's not bad at all, but still feels a little off, especially when paired against Reggie Bannister, who's back and better than ever as Reggie, the ex-ice cream truck driver turned ass-kicking, flannel wearing sidekick.

If the above sounds a little more like an action picture than a horror movie, that's kind of how I felt about PHANTASM II.  It's not a bad sequel by any stretch of the imagination, but it definitely plays up the ass-kicking and downplays the horror a bit.  The movie picks up immediately where the first one ends - with the Tall Man breaking through the closet door and grabbing Mike.  Reggie runs upstairs to save him, and is confronted by a horde of the evil imps.  Reggie blows up the house, and Mike spends the next decade in a mental institution.  When he's released, he finds Reggie and together they begin the long journey to revenge, intent on tracking down and ending the Tall Man's evil plans, which seem to consist of raiding the cemeteries of town along the Northwest, turning the bodies into more evil dwarfs which are then shipped back to the Tall Man's home planet, or something like that.

Really, the whole PHANTASM series gets points for being so completely out there in terms of story that at times you don't know what the heck you're watching.  You have action, horror, science fiction, comedy...if I had to make a comparison it would be to Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD series (Raimi and Coscarelli know each other, having come up around the same time), specifically ARMY OF DARKNESS.  Reggie is essentially the Ash character, even going to far as to engage in a wicked chainsaw battle with one of the Tall Man's minions.  That's not the only homage to Raimi - there's a scene where Mike and Liz, a young woman sharing a telepathic link and prophetic dreams of the Tall Man with Mike, are chased by a new golden sphere that can break through doors, and basically mimics the door smashing scene in EVIL DEAD 2.  On the more comical side, take a look at a another scene where one of the Tall Man's minions is bagging a well-known set of ashes:

All nice, sly touches in an engaging film, but the real fun comes from watching Angus Scrimm own the screen whenever he's on.  There's always been something about the Tall Man that frightened me as a kid - Scrimm's features and imposing height bring to mind Boris Karloff in some of his more sadistic roles like in BEDLAM or THE BODY SNATCHER.  You don't know anything about him - his history, his motives...only that he seems to know what's inside your head.  There's a great moment in PHANTASM II where he confronts a drunk priest hiding in the mortuary.  The priest is making the sign of the cross as he passes row upon row of interred caskets when he turns to see the Tall Man:

"They don't need your prayers," he says, right before he hangs the priest by the rosary he wears around his neck. The spheres are back as well, and this being the 80s, they're imbued with some new attachments like circular saws, blowtorches and, yes, laser beams.  All of which pale when compared to one nasty little bugger that manages to burrow inside one poor clod, traveling up his torso and coming out (partially) through his mouth.

All in all a fun time, not too serious and retaining all the wackiness you'd come to expect from Coscarelli.  It's amazing that PHANTASM lasted through four films with the same creative team, a rarity for a horror franchise, and I think that makes for a really fun time.  Don't go in looking for real scares - PHANTASM II is more of a sit down with friends and laugh and high-five each other during all the cool parts.

Of which there are many.

Martyrs (2008)

Being Film #8 in Hail Horror 4

NOTE:  MARTYRS is a film that works best if you go in completely fresh.  So I'm going to keep things as brief and spoiler-free as possible.  The best thing to do is just stop reading this review, check out the film, and come back, provided you have the stomach for it. 

When it comes to horror films, there are those that make you scream and laugh at the same time, and when you leave the theater you have a smile on your face.  It may have grossed you out, but it was all in good fun.  There are plenty of good, scary films like that, and that's perfectly okay.  But there's another type of horror film, the one that creeps under your skin and festers, never really going away, making you scratch and tear at your skin because it's just so unsettling.

MARTYRS is a lot like that.  It deals with some pretty disturbing subject matter, and crafts a brilliant jewel of a film that constantly keeps you off balance, working as an outright horrific story, a crazed thriller, and a meditation on guilt, vengeance, and enlightenment.  It's also one of the most brutal films I've ever seen, making each act of violence so gut-churning the last thing you're going to want to do is laugh.

The movie opens with a young girl, Lucie, escapes from an abandoned building, where she's been chained, starved and, judging from her appearance, physically abused as well.  Director Pascal Laugier immediately puts you right in the face of the unpleasantness, giving MARTYRS a very gritty but professional realism, never shying away from Lucie's abject fear as she runs half naked through the deserted industrial section where she was being held.

Once found she's cared for in an orphanage where, despite everyone's best efforts, she can't quite adjust after her horrible experience, the details of which are not revealed.  She does make friends with Anna, a sweet girl who shortly becomes her inseparable twin.  Through Anna we begin to see that the lingering effects of Lucie's imprisonment might be far worse than anyone thought.  Something seems to be stalking her, something that has a purpose...

From there MARTYRS jumps head 15 years, and MARTYRS really begins, as we see what's become of Lucie and Anna.  It's hard to say much more than that.   The movie deals with Lucie's guilt and anger over what happened to her, and Anna's eventual discovery of what exactly did happen, and why.  Where the film ultimately goes is a complete 180 from where you think it'll go, and it's a ton of credit to Laugier, who not only directed but wrote the film, and refuses to take any shortcuts in the story.  When he kills someone in this film it is horrible, even when it seems entirely justified based on the mechanics of the story.  There's no cheering as someone gets their comeuppance, Laugier wants you see the terrible impact of death, which in turn affects the latter part of the story where things begin to get truly weird.

Everything in MARTYRS has a purpose, and Laugier pays as much attention to the development of Lucie and Anna as he does to the set pieces and gore.  Although, that's a pretty easy thing to do when you have some amazing actresses in the roles, and Mylène Jampanoï as Lucie and Morjana Alaoui as Anna are both revelations in the film.  They carry the film on their shoulders, and I'd be hard pressed to think of a film, horror or otherwise, that asks for more from its actresses.

To continue talking about MARTYRS would be to risk giving too much away, and this is a film that works best going in without knowing too much of what you're getting into.  Not for the squeamish, I'll just end by saying that this is an excellent film, well-crafted, well-acted, and terrifying to boot.  Not content to leave when the credits roll, MARTYRS lingers under your skin for a long time, and is without a doubt one of the scariest and best horror films I've seen in a long time.

Hardcore Zen

Sometime the world gets so screwed up in your head, you need to take another perspective on things.

I have a lot going on right now. I'm in the end stages of interviewing for a new position in my company, and whether out of fear or anger at losing me, the workload in my current job has tripled. This combined with a major medical emergency courtesy of my father as well as the usual hard work and frustrations that come with marriage and fatherhood have me spinning around in circles, lashing out and being a general grump about life.

Reading Hardcore Zen by Brad Warner was an enlightening experience, which is odd thing to say, especially since one of the things Warner stresses in the book is the lack of enlightenment as an achievable goal when practicing Zen. Warner, who until moving to Japan and becoming ordained as a Soto Zen priest was an early participant in the early 80s hardcore and punk explosion in Middle America, playing for Zero Defects and leading Dimentia 13. Hardcore Zen in an exploration into what it means to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism (particularly the Soto school, as opposed to the much more rigid and vigorous Rinzai school, which focuses much more on enlightenment) and how it paralleled both his life and the fundamentals of the punk and hardcore movements.

The biggest takeaway from the book is the questioning of everything: what you see, what you hear, what you read, but especially what you think you are, and your role in this thing we call the Universe. Warner goes to great pains to emphasize that you should even questions everything he says - the overriding principle of Buddhism is founded on seeing true reality for yourself, instead of seeing what others tell you to see or to expect to see. There's a distinct lack of practical information - besides a chapter on sitting zazen (the basic meditative discipline in Zen practice), Warner's focus in on the principles of the practice and the ways it differs from a religion or philosophy, so if you looking for a generic handbook or "how-to" of Zen Buddhism, this probably isn't the book for you.

But I won't deny that Hardcore Zen got me extremely interested: the act of truly finding your own answers by questioning everything until you know what it is you're supposed to asking makes sense to me, and although I don't know if it will lead me anywhere it's fast becoming a subject I intend to pursue further. Warner comes from a similar background to my own, and the similarities made for a rewarding read, one that cuts through the New Age bull$#@! of what we commonly know as Buddhism and opened the door to something intriguing and new.

So the next time you're in New York and you see some guy sitting in the Half Lotus position, his hands folding in the cosmic mudru while his headphones bleed Bad Brains and Circle Jerks, don't worry: he's just trying to find the right questions.