Zombies Ruin Everything

PG-13 Horror usually isn’t my thing. I find the audiences to be mostly immature teens taking full advantage of the fact that they can get into a serious movie that adults are also viewing. But the audience alone doesn’t deter me; when I think of PG-13 Horror, I think of a watered-down piece of cheap-scare crap that doesn’t have a cinematic soul. It’s guaranteed to have been cut-down from it’s original R-rating so the aforementioned kids can get in, therefore making triple the profit and extremely lacking in quality. Does Woman in Black follow in the tradition of PG-13 Horror? Not entirely.

The film begins as Daniel Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a lawyer who has to leave his young son to go to this creepy town to finalize paperwork that somehow involves this gigantic, creepy house. There’s a woman who (ta-daa!) dresses in black and seems to scare the doo-doo (yes, I went there) out of the town-folk whenever brought up. That is literally all I can tell you before I start giving things away. From there on out, the title character endlessly terrorizes our protagonist while weird images and shadows are seen throughout. You know the drill.

The “plot” I just laid out isn’t to be mocking, it’s just that we know how these things go: A “who cares” set up is given so we can get our hero into his mess. The question isn’t so much “What’s the story?” so much as it is “How freaky is it?” And I have to give the filmmakers credit where credit is due: our villains are cliched in their design, yet not in their delivery. I didn’t know too much going in, so I’m not going to spoil much here. I will say that I’m glad that when the terrorizing starts, they’re not cheap. I’m pretty sure I counted a total of two cheap scares (Aah! A small animal jumps in the way when we’re focused on something else! Eek! The next scene starts loudly and abruptly!). The rest of the weirdness is pretty legitimate. A dark face looking down on us from a window in a supposedly empty house becomes extremely eerie. A small figure crawling out of the mud in a torrential downpour is pretty strange altogether. I looked at them as punches that weren’t constantly being pulled.

If you’re wondering how good of a job Radcliffe played from someone who doesn’t care about Harry Potter (I just couldn’t ever do it), I can honestly say he does his part well. On one hand, I could say there wasn’t much to the role but on the other hand, I think of one scene I liked in particular that showcases his talent. A loud banging noise is going on in a locked room as Radcliffe tries desperately to open the door; heading downstairs, he grabs a hatchet and rushes back, ready to hack his way in…only to find that the banging is still going on but the door is now open. Radcliffe’s expression is great as we can see his face become even more pale in silent fear, realizing he should have been careful what he wished for. I don’t see him as Harry Potter like most people will I’m sure, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t want to refer to him as that in this article. I think most will agree that he doens’t come off as “The Boy who Lived” in this so much as he does “The Guy who wanted to do something besides Harry Potter.” Subtle things are done well here and the house in the marsh is a cool, but the watery pathway that leads to it is a character in itself. I also enjoy it anytime a male is the lead in a horror movie. Yes, it’s a given that we should feel sorry for the main woman in peril, but taking a male who is thought of as being the tough, rational type and having him fear for his life gives a whole new spin on the genre. Maybe that’s why I liked The Thing (1982) so much.

The problem here is that the first thirty to forty-five minutes are just boring. Kipps goes here in the rain. Kipps goes there in the mud. After a while of wording it like that, I start to think of it like a children’s book written by Tim Burton. While I want to defend it by saying that it has to be that way, lulling you into a false sense of security until POW! The movie REALLY starts! But that’s a trite stereotype we’ve grown used to in movies like this. Not every scene has to be crap-yourself scary but it doesn’t have to be mind-numbingly slow either. Better balanced movies have had me entertained even when the shark/ monster/ demon isn’t present. I actually found myself falling asleep in a couple parts. There’s also the ending which had me confused and while I won’t necessarily say why here, I will say that it left me with a few questions I don’ think the filmmakers even had in mind or maybe just didn’t care to answer. They had an ending and to a lot of people, it’s all about the ending. And it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t good.

Great scenery, good acting, and even better costume design (I wouldn’t normally bring it up, but three piece suits and pocketwatches are just cool), this movie has a lot going for it and destroys the competition when it comes to many other PG-13 dreck, but better pacing and a better ending would have done a lot more for as the viewer.

Plays like: Insidious (2011)/ The Haunting (1999)

GRADE: C

While I originally intended to use this site solely for my story, lately I’ve been thinking that putting only my story on here and then just leaving it alone is not taking fully advantage of this creative outlet that is the internet. So I’m ALSO going to use it to praise or lambaste recent films. Write that down- “lambaste.” Our first movie to discuss is “Chronicle.”

Chronicle is the story of three high school students, Matt, Steve, and Andrew straying from a party one night to find a particular object that gives them superpowers; or a superpower, specifically telekinesis.  After a good bit of fun and games with their newfound skill , the trio become more experienced, eventually leading the abused and bullied Andrew to wonder whether or not a limit to his abilities even matters.

Shot in “Mockumentary” style, Chronicle follows in the tradition of its celluloid predecessors by slowly letting you get to know the characters just well enough before the story kicks in. And when it does, you don’t want it to stop. One might think that after so many Comic book movies, three kids with superpowers wouldn’t have enough meat to it, but the way Chronicle handles the story, it instead makes you realize how careless other Comic properties have been; merely washing over the aspect of being able to do something cool instead of savoring such a severe, supernatural gift. Tormented Andrew, who documents most of the story through his own camera, made me especially glad that such limitless abilities aren’t in existence for fear that some butthole teenager might get ahold of them and get revenge on people that have made his life a living Hell (or maybe just made him mad). What’s worse is to think that they’d even get away with it. Dane DeHaan, who plays sad lil Andy fills the role quite well in my opinion; having you feel sorry for him as his alcoholic father treats him like a punching bag, while in other scenes making you hate him for abusing his gifts and taking his frustration out on his friends. By the way, a couple shots in the film look as though DeHaan REALLY does get slapped in the head, causing me to cringe, even if just for a moment.

My real issue with the film isn’t the acting or story, so much as it was the special effects: The CGI here ain’t exactly state-of-the-art. I was occasionally taken out of the moment with how noticeable the digitally rendered baseballs, legos, or people were. I guessed the budget before looking it up, and wouldn’t ya know it, I was right on the money (ha!) at 15 million. For the style of film making, that’s pretty high up there, considering the original Paranormal Activity and Blair Witch was shot for 1 million. But the story here is much too ambitious for that small a budget. Objects and people are constantly flying or thrown, floating or demolished. Blair Witch had people running in the woods and hanging out in freaking tents. In all honesty, I’d have to elaborate on something a friend said in that it should have been shot as a regular film and just given a decent budget. Still, I have to give it up to director Josh Trank for putting a unique spin on the home camera approach by using not only Andrew’s camera, but others’ cellphones, security cameras, and various recording devices.

All in all, I liked this movie. It explored the possibilities of what a decent kid might do given the option of never being caught, while not getting so dragged down in the melodrama of what makes you care in the first place. I also like that the Mockumentary Subgenre has another decent fim behind it because the prospect of seeing abnormal things from a “real” perspective onscreen is still intriguing to me. When it’s done right of course. And Chronicle has done it right.

 Devil Inside or The Last Exorcism? Not so much.

GRADE: B