I had some extra time after watching the latest kung fu movie in my mini-marathon, so I turned on Netflix to see what was new. I don’t use Netflix as often as I probably should, so there were a lot of things added since the last time I browsed. I tend to spend way too long looking for something to watch when I begin browsing Netflix, so I decided to just take a look at the first thing that caught my eye. That movie ended up being No Escape Room, and I thought it was pretty good.
No Escape Room is a supernatural horror movie about a father and daughter who get stranded in a small town and pass the time waiting for their car to be repaired by trying out a local escape room. If you’re unfamiliar with an escape room, it’s basically a game where people are locked in a room together and have to solve riddles and puzzles to unlock a door and escape. The father, Michael, and daughter, Karen, seem to have something of a strained relationship, and the weekend was supposed to be a bonding trip for the two of them. So, Michael tends to try too hard, and Karen tends to barely try at all when it comes to forming a good relationship. The activity of doing an escape room might be good for them though.
Michael and Karen are joined by three strangers, Andrew, Melanie, and Tyler, who are also there to participate in the escape room. Melanie is the escape room expert, her boyfriend Tyler doesn’t want to be there, and Andrew is something of a mystery. With all of the necessary character types included to help explain the game and create tension among themselves, the movie moves along well with only the necessary amount of exposition and explanation. Things seem off about the escape room right away though, and the escape room ends up being an escape house with some eerily realistic dangers lurking about. Mysteries are built and unraveled, people are separated, and scariness ensues.
No Escape Room is a TV movie so there are clear spots where commercial breaks would be inserted, but if those weren’t there I wouldn’t have expected it to be made for TV. It’s kind of scary at times, there a bit of blood and violence, and overall I really enjoyed the mystery and the tone. As the movie goes on, the mystery of the house does feel like it begins to get a bit too convoluted to the point where it barely makes much sense anymore, but it was still fun enough to watch. By that point I was invested enough in Karen’s story that the parts of the movie that felt out of place didn’t bother me too much. The movie has a very campy ending, but again, I though it was fine.
For me, the best bits were towards the middle of the movie where we were still learning things and the house still felt like a big puzzle. After a while it becomes more psychological and supernatural, and that wasn’t quite as fun for me. I still enjoyed it though. I’d recommend No Escape Room for a light horror movie with more mystery than scare, but don’t expect many satisfying conclusions for the characters. Some of them come to very abrupt ends once their usefulness to the plot has been exhausted.
Today’s movie was an easy choice. As a follow-up to The Grudge (2004) yesterday, today’s movie of the day is The Grudge 2 (2006). Director Takashi Shimizu is back for the sequel to his American remake of his own movie, and even though The Grudge 2 isn’t as good as The Grudge (2004), it’s still quite effective in a lot of ways. Unlike The Grudge (2004) being a fairly close remake of Ju-On: The Grudge, The Grudge 2 is not a remake of Ju-On: The Grudge 2 despite bringing over some elements from previous Ju-On movies. Not being a remake helps The Grudge 2 feel a bit like a fresh start, and a bigger focus on Kayako’s curse venturing out of the house and over to America helps it feel different than a lot of what came before it.
Like The Grudge (2004) and other Ju-On movies, The Grudge 2 tells multiple stories that begin to converge as the movie goes on. One story follows Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn) as she travels to Japan to make an attempt to bring her sister Karen home. Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is still in the hospital after the events of the first movie, and Aubrey becomes overwhelmed with family baggage, her sister’s condition, and the mystery behind what happened to Karen and her boyfriend. Aubrey tries to find out what happened to Karen which leads her to the cursed Saeki house.
Another story follows three young women who attend an international school in Japan together. One of the girls, Allison, is tricked into entering the Saeki house by two bullies, Vanessa and Miyuki. The prank obviously goes bad, and the curse begins to follow them.
The third story takes place in Chicago, and it follows a young boy named Jake who is dealing with his father re-marrying after Jake’s mother passed away. As Jake is processing his feelings, something strange begins happening to the people around him, and the strangeness seems to be centered around a nearby apartment.
Each story is told linearly, and the intercutting between all three makes it feel like they’re all happening at the same time. If you’re paying attention to some early dialogue you can figure out when two of the stories are happening in relation to each other, but the third story’s time is left a mystery until the end. At first it’s not entirely clear how the stories are connected, but connections are made in a fun though not always unpredictable way. One of the reveals at the end is quite good, but another one isn’t so much of a reveal since it seemed pretty obvious what the connection was about halfway through the movie. It was still enjoyable watching the characters figure it out though. This movie feels a lot more linear than other Ju-On/Grudge movies I’ve seen, and despite the opening scene and a few overlaps, the three main stories never skip back and forth in time. That definitely makes the movie easier to follow than some of the Ju-On movies, though following the timeline was never a big deal in my opinion. As long as the narrative delivers tension ad scares, I’m fine with a bit of time and space ambiguity.
There are a good number of effective scares in The Grudge 2. One of my favorites is one that caught me a little off guard. I won’t spoil it, but it happens when Allison is talking to a counselor at her school. I thought the scare was going to be one thing, but then something else happened and it got me good. I also enjoyed some of the riffs Takashi Shimizu did on some familiar scares from the series. For example, there’s a shower scene, and one of the most iconic scares from the Ju-On/Grudge franchise involves a scare in the shower. Shimizu doesn’t do what you might expect though, and I enjoyed that very much. There’s also a reference to the scene he’d already done twice where a ghost creeps up on a person in their bedsheets, but again, Shimizu changes it up.
Watching some of the featurettes on the DVD helped give a little insight on Shimizu’s mindset and probably explains why he chose to change things up a bit with this movie. The Grudge 2 was Shimizu’s sixth feature length installment of the franchise in six years. Including the two short films that came before the features, Shimizu had been writing and directing the series for eight years. In come of Shimizu’s comments on the DVD, he talks about wanting to do something different if he was going to take the job to direct this second American installment. The Grudge 2 does feel different than what came before, but maybe not always for the best.
I enjoy The Grudge 2 quite a lot, but apparently it was quite a struggle to get the movie written. The Japanese writers (including Shimizu) and the American writers had very different ideas about what the movie should be and how they should approach it. Japanese and American storytelling can be quite different in a lot of ways, and Shimizu apparently had to make a lot of concessions with regards to how he wanted to tell the story. What I saw didn’t go into specifics about what Shimizu may have wanted versus what was actually shot and edited, but The Grudge 2 doesn’t feel quite as genuine as The Grudge (2004), if that makes any sense. The sequel feels a little too clean and easy to digest while there was some ambiguity to The Grudge (2004). The Grudge 2 dives into Kayako’s backstory a lot more, and the curse feels less mysterious because of it. The atmosphere is still often very good, but I suppose it felt like the movie was holding my hand a bit too much.
That said, I still think The Grudge 2 is a very good sequel. I like the story picks up pretty much where the first movie ended, and it continues to move Kayako’s curse forward. There are a bunch of creepy moments and nice scares, and that’s about as much as I can ask for from a sequel to a remake. Now I suppose I need to watch the third American Grudge, because I know I’ve never seen that one. Takashi Shimizu would not return to direct that, and in fact, The Grudge 2 was his last time directing any movie in the franchise. That’s a shame, but I can imagine wanting to move on to other things after spending so much time in the same mindset.
Cherry blossom season is coming up in about a month, and I’m making tentative plans to doing something during that time for my horror podcastThe Last Theater. Thinking about what I want to do has made me want to watch certain Japanese horror movies, but I kind of want to wait until I figure out exactly what I’ll be doing before I dive into what will surely be a J-horror binge. So I did the next best thing to watching a Japanese horror movie and watched an American remake of a Japanese horror movie. Now, you might be thinking that watching an American remake of, well, anything is a bad idea, but there are good J-horror remakes out there. Today’s movie of the day is one of those good remakes, The Grudge (2004).
I did a podcast episode about my distaste for The Grudge (2020) about a year ago, but The Grudge from 2004 is a genuinely good movie, remake or not. First of all, Sarah Michelle Gellar is the star, and that already gives the film a bunch of points. Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert are among the producers of The Grudge (2004), and that adds a few more points. And the smartest thing the filmmakers did was to hire Takashi Shuimizu, the director of Ju-On: The Grudge which The Grudge (2004) is based on and the creator of the entire Ju-On franchise. Rather than hiring an American director to localize the movie for American audiences, Takashi Shimizu was basically allowed to recreate his original movie while trying to improve on things he thought could be better. The Grudge (2004) is basically a do-over for Shimizu. I don’t know if The Grudge (2004) is necessarily better that Ju-On: The Grudge, but it might be. I’ll need to watch the original again to really begin to make that assessment. What I do know is that The Grudge (2004) is a great horror movie that manages to deliver real Japanese horror from the perspective of a foreigner in Japan.
The Grudge (2004) stars Sarah Michelle Gellar as Karen, an American student living in Japan with her American boyfriend Doug. Karen volunteers as a care worker for school credit, and one day she is asked to go care for an elderly woman named Emma when the usual care worker doesn’t show up for work. Karen finds Emma incommunicative and living in filth, and after cleaning her up, Karen also discovers that there is something wrong with the house Emma lives in. Karen and Emma encounter a frightening presence, and from there the movie branches out to tell the stories of multiple people who have come into contact with the presence in the house.
Like most movies in The Grudge/Ju-On franchise, The Grudge (2004) is told in multiple vignettes that move forward and backward in time. Eventually the stories begin to come together and even overlap in a few ways. Karen seems to be the thread that connects everything, though a lot of that just has to do with the fact that Karen is the first character we really get to meet (after a brief, tone-setting intro sequence), and Karen is the last character we follow. Within the story, the connection for everyone is the house itself and its former residents. I know this is all kind of vague, but I don’t want to spoil anything if you’ve never seen any of these movies before. These early Grudge and Ju-On movies are quite good and well worth watching. I haven’t seen many of the later Japanese movies in the franchise, and I think there are two American releases I haven’t seen either, though I’ll be taking care of that very soon.
The Grudge (2004) is a very good and scary haunted house movie that emphasizes tone and tension over cheap scares or, really, even plot. Sometimes the weaving of the different times feels disconcerting, and some of the overlaps make you wonder what is actually happening, but it all comes together well to heighten the creepiness of the movie. There is some blood and gore in The Grudge (2004), but not nearly as much as in The Grudge (2020) which I complained about. The Grudge (2004) is rated PG-13, and it’s a great example of the fact that you don’t need a gory R rating to make a great haunted house movie.
One thing that really struck upon this latest viewing of The Grudge (2004) is the fear associated with being a foreigner in an unfamiliar country. Most of the people we follow in the movie are American, and they each have some degree of apprehension about living in a foreign country where communication can often be difficult. Maybe it’s because I haven’t watched The Grudge (2004) since before I lived in Japan for two years myself, but I totally understand the uneasiness a lot of the characters are feeling. It’s not that they dislike where they are, it’s just that it can be easy to feel isolated and alone even in everyday situations. These fears are made clear in the movie, and I feel like Takashi Shimizu was able to use those normal, understandable fears to heighten the supernatural fears that are a part of the American characters’ adopted country. I might not be explaining this very well because I haven’t taken the time to really iron out the ideas the movie presented to me this time, but I am impressed with how Shimizu was able to integrate those feelings of isolation into his movie. I think it’s something that he couldn’t have done in the same way with his original movie. It’s a great example of adding complexity in a remake rather than diluting it for a different audience.
I want to think more on that. But for now, I think I might move on to The Grudge 2 because I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. I’m also going to start planning out what I want to do for Sakura season, but that’s still a little ways away. Until then, I have a lot more movies to watch.
So, I was browsing through Tubi as I find myself doing quite often these days, and I came across a Chinese movie titled Dead Space with the following plot synopsis.
“One by one, a group of friends die in their nightmares. The last two decided to figure out why but they must not fall asleep until they do.”
Sounds familiar, right? Well, the movie art looked looked kind of neat, and I enjoy a good rip-off, so I decided to give Dead Space a watch. What I discovered was absolutely a rip-off. Specifically, it’s a remake of the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street remake but with a much lower budget. A much, much lower budget. But is Dead Space any good? Well, if you’ve listened to the review my buddy Joey and I did for the Nightmare (2010) remake over at The Last Theater (here’s the episode!) then you know how I didn’t much care for that movie. Now, imagine taking the script for A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), running it through Google Translate to convert it to Chinese, and making a movie off that Chinese script for about $150. Do you think the result will be better? No, probably not. But as a curiosity, I enjoyed the movie fine.
I won’t bother explaining the plot here, because it’s almost exactly the same as A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) down to the way people die and some of the aggravating plot twists. The problem is, something seems to be lost in translation. Dead Space is about twenty minutes shorter than Nightmare (2010), and even though I couldn’t tell you exactly what was left out since it’s been a while since I watched Nightmare (2010), Dead Space definitely felt like it was lacking a lot of connective tissue that was holding the just-okay scenes of Nightmare (2010) together. Dead Space feels like it just meanders from scene to scene in order to get to the next image it wants to try to recreate.
I mean, I guess I can commend the filmmakers on making a movie, but it feels more like a project put together by a fan who wants to learn how to make movies, not something to be taken seriously. I suppose it might have been localized for a certain market, but just like any movie, why not just watch a subtitled version of the original (or the original remake in this case)? I’m only speculating about the reasons for how and why Dead Space got made though, because I can’t find any information about its background. All that said, I guess the movie did what it was a supposed to. It got published online and nerds like me have seen it, so good job filmmakers!
There’s not really much else to talk about with Dead Space without just nitpicking the choices made by the filmmakers. I’m sure a lot of the differences between this and Nightmare (2010) were just due to budget constraints. The acting, directing, editing, and everything else are fine in a b-movie way, but none of its bad enough to be super cheesy and fun. It’s just alright. Oh, and why the title Dead Space? I know I complained about the title to another movie called Dead Spacerecently, but it makes even less sense here. Yes, there are dead people, but what space are they referring to? Maybe the title is another unfortunate causality of Google Translate.
I do need to mention one more thing before I go. The killer. The characters in the movie talk about the killer’s burned face, but what the filmmakers decided to go with instead of burn makeup is a knockoff version of Heath Ledger’s Joker makeup. It’s a bizarre choice that makes absolutely no sense. I’m sure the real reason was, again, the budget, but there’s not even a line in the movie that gives a reason for his white face, wide red smile, and black eyes. It’s so strange. At least his Freddy glove looked good.
So would I recommend Dead Space to anyone? No, I wouldn’t. I thought it was interesting just as a curiosity, watching to see how close they would follow the Nightmare (2010) script and how they would handle some of the scenes I knew would be difficult to pull off. I can’t see myself ever watching it again though.
For today’s movie, I wanted to pick something with one of my favorite actors of all time, Shu Qi. I became a huge fan of Shu Qi’s back around the year 2000 when I saw her in the movie Gorgeous. After watching her steal scenes from one of my favorites of all time, Jackie Chan, I had to see more. So, I imported and watched a bunch of her movies on DVD, and I’ve been a superfan ever since. There are still lots of her movies I haven’t seen yet though. She’s been in tons of stuff, and finding her movies in the United States can be difficult and pricey in a lot of situations, but I’ve been trying to slowly see everything Shu Qi has done. Some of her movies are easier to track down than others, and today’s movie of the day is one that wasn’t too difficult to find. Plus, it gets bonus points for co-starring Karen Mok, another great actor I discovered while I was collecting a bunch of Hong Kong DVDs nearly two decades ago. Today’s movie is Haunted Office, a Hong King supernatural horror movie that is fairly light on scares but has a nice twist at the end.
Haunted Office feels like an anthology movie even though the stories do sort of overlap in places. Effectively though, the movie is made up of three separate short stories that all happen to take place in the same office building. The first story stars Karen Mok as Pat, an office worker who encounters some ghostly happenings centered around the bathroom on the floor her office is on. The second story stars Jordan Chan as Richard, a young and spoiled head of a small business who connives to get a nice old lady to quit so he doesn’t have to pay her pension. And the third story features Shu Qi as Shan, an office worker haunted by a female ghost, and Stephen Fung as Ken, Shan’s new fellow employee who tries to help her out. All three stories are simple and fun ghost stories with little twists at the end. Then at the very end of the movie, all three stories are brought together for one big final twist. They’re all enjoyable, but I don’t want to say any more than that about the plots for fear of ruining any surprises if you happen to watch the movie.
Shu Qi’s story was my favorite, then Karen Mok’s, then Jordan Chan’s. Jordan’s Chan’s story was basically a comedy while the other two were more serious, so there’s good variety in the film. I didn’t realize Haunted Office is basically an anthology movie until I got well into it, so the pacing seemed really odd at first. We see Shu Qi and Stephen Fung in one of the first scenes with Karen Mok, but then we follow Karen Mok and don’t see the other two until over halfway through the movie. Jordan Chan’s story acts as kind of a bridge in the middle, but really, there’s no meaningful crossover until the final couple of minutes of the movie. It works fine, I just wasn’t expecting it at first.
That’s really all I have to say about Haunted Office right now. It’s light and fun, and there’s just enough going on in the background that you can probably start piecing together some of the mystery that is revealed later on in the movie. I give it a recommendation for fans of Hong Kong horror that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The Blair Witch Project (1999) – A Movie A Day 2021 #37
The Blair Witch Project poster
It was kind of a rough day, so I decided to pick a movie to watch that I knew I’d love. Something of a comfort movie. I have a lot of standbys that I go to depending on my mood, but I decided to pick an older favorite I hadn’t seen in a long time but had randomly been on my mind recently. Today’s movie of the day is The Blair Witch Project, a movie that I consider to be one of the best of its breed.
Most of you reading this probably already know what The Blair Witch Project is about, but I’ll go ahead and recap it just in case. The movie is framed as actual film and video footage found deep in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland. The footage was supposedly shot by three film students, Heather, Josh, and Mike, as they were gathering footage for a documentary about a local legend, the Blair Witch. The trio went missing during their trip into the woods and were never found, and the footage we see in the movie is supposed to show us their final days before becoming a part of the legend they were there to investigate.
One of the reasons The Blair Witch gives me such good feelings undoubtedly has to with with the fact that I experienced the amazing marketing buildup to the movie as it was happening. I discovered the existence of the movie not by seeing a traditional movie poster, but by coming across a “missing” flyer hanging up at a small independent theater. I was intrigued. There was also a web site created for the movie (which is still online!) that has images from the movie plus tons of “evidence” and extra videos portrayed as real-life interviews and news footage about the missing students. Even though I knew it was just a movie, the length the filmmakers went to allow viewers to suspend their disbelief is admirable. So before I even saw the movie, I was already invested in the characters and the story in a big way.
The other big reason The Blair Witch Project gives me such good feelings is because I remember what it felt like seeing it in a theater for the first time. It was such a unique experience in a lot of ways. For one thing, it had to be the first time I’d seen a movie in the 4:3 aspect ratio in a theater, and that helped add to the realness of the experience. Also, the quality of the footage was all over the place which, again, adds to the realness and the uniqueness of the theatrical experience. Shots were out of focus and fuzzy, big moments often happened off screen, and the ever-present “shaky cam” that I know so many people dislike all worked wonders on me. I was enthralled from beginning to end. I was so excited after leaving the theater because it was such a new and fun experience.
I know a lot of people look down on found footage for various reasons, and I get it (mostly), but when its done right, it can be fantastic. For my tastes, The Blair Witch Project is done right, and that starts with how it was made. Now, I’m not trying to write an essay on The Blair Witch Project or found footage movies in general, but here’s a brief explanation of why the movie works so well for me. As I understand it, all of the footage was shot by the three main actors as they spent a few days and nights effectively isolated in the woods. They were given drop boxes with clues on where to go next and secret guidelines for how their characters should react in certain situations, but otherwise they were left on their own to shoot footage and improvise the scenes. Crew members were kept hidden from the actors during the day, and the crew would increasingly harass the actors at night as the Blair Witch got closer and closer. It sounds like an excruciating ordeal, but it made for a movie that feels more realistic than most other found footage films.
One of my biggest pet peeves about found footage is when the action is too perfect on screen. Like when the camera pans over at just the right moment to perfectly frame some big action or line of dialogue. Or when it seems clear that scenes were done repeatedly because of cuts between shots that are supposed to be in the same moment, yet the footage feels disconnected within the space of where the characters are. I get why most movies do that, filmmakers want important moments to feel important, but it makes it feel less real to me. Important moments are missed all the time in real life, and people panicking are going to miss more than they see. Stuff is missed all the time in The Blair Witch Project, and not seeing what’s in the woods yet hearing the panic in the voices of the actors as they flail around with their cameras is far scarier in my opinion. That said, if you get motion sickness from shaky cam, maybe skip this movie.
I could go on about why I love The Blair Witch Project so much, but in the end it really all comes down to the fact that I think it’s a well-made movie that does exactly what it sets out to do. It feels real for the most part, and I love the gradual buildup to the final few scenes. I’ve seen a bunch of found footage movies over the years, many I enjoyed and many not so much, but The Blair Witch Project will always be in the upper echelon of the format.
Today’s movie is Death of Me, a psychological/supernatural horror movie starring Maggie Q and Luke Hemsworth (brother of Chris and Liam). The movie was released in October of 2020, and it was recently added to Netflix which is where I watched it. After watching The King of Fighters recently I’ve been on the lookout for more Maggie Q movies that I haven’t seen, so this was an easy choice for my movie of the day.
Death of Me is about a couple, Christine (Maggie Q) and Neil (Luke Hemsworth), who are vacationing in a small village off the coast of Thailand. Christine and Neil wake up on what is supposed to be their final day on the island with no memory of the previous night and with their rental room in shambles. They don’t have much time to think about what happened as they scramble to catch a ferry to the mainland so they can head home, but when they both discover that their passports are missing, they begin to suspect something is seriously wrong. Christine and Neil then begin to try to piece together the previous night, only to uncover a dark mystery that begins with the couple finding a video on Neil’s phone of him apparently killing Christine.
From there the movie progresses in a Wicker-Man-esque way with the locals becoming more sinister as they prepare for a local festival. Christine’s health begins to deteriorate and she sees flashes of frightening images, but are the things she’s experiencing real, or are they just hallucinations? Can she even trust Neil after what she saw on the video? It all builds up to a mostly satisfying climax with more than a little predictability.
For me, the best part of Death of Me is Maggie Q’s performance. The mystery of the movie feels familiar and is often pretty easy to predict, but Maggie Q helps sell every scene with her mixture of fear, annoyance, and anger. There is one scene late in the movie that I won’t spoil, but it’s a great and surprising moment of Christine having just about enough of the way everyone has been treating her, and she finally decides to do something about it. I’m sure you’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it.
Overall though, I thought Death of Me was just okay. It’s not particularly scary like the cover artwork may lead you to believe, and the mystery doesn’t feel super mysterious to me. The movie feels like it emulates similar plots including the aforementioned Wicker Man (which is actually mentioned in the movie by Neil), but I am glad I kept watching until the end. I was feeling a lot of frustration just like Christine was (well, maybe not just like Christine, but I was getting annoyed with how people were treating her), and seeing Christine lash out was pretty satisfying. I’d say give this a watch is you really enjoy psychological thrillers, but maybe watch the trailer first to get a feel for the tone of the movie.
I’ve been doing this A Movie A Day 2021 challenge for just over three weeks now, and you know what I haven’t watched yet? I haven’t watched any brand new horror movies. Part of the fun of this challenge is clearing out my backlog and discovering movies from the past that I’ve missed out on, but in case you didn’t know, I adore horror movies. I even have a web site about them (among other related things):The Last Theater. So yeah, I should be using part of my challenge to watch lots and lots of new scary movies so I can keep up better with modern times, and so I have something to write/talk about on my site (The Last Theater). With that in mind, I watched Curse of Aurore, a horror movie that was released on VOD on January 12, 2021. As the first horror movie released in 2021 that I’ve seen, I enjoyed it pretty well.
Curse of Aurore is a found-footage horror movie. More specifically, it’s a haunted-house-style movie framed as real footage being shown to us by a YouTuber. I’ll get back the YouTube aspect in a bit, but the main film follows three independent, no-budget filmmakers who are in rural Quebec, Canada to figure out what they want their next movie to be about. Lena, the star of their productions, is staying in a house owned by her family, and she is joined by Aaron, the director, and Kevin, the guy that does everything else. Lena has learned about a local legend that she thinks would be great for a scary movie, and she excitedly pulls Aaron and Kevin along as she tries to dig up more information from the locals.
The legend Lena is chasing is that of Aurore Gagnon, a girl who was killed by her step-mother in 1920 after years of horrible abuse. The tale of Aurore Gagnon is a real-life story (with at least two movies being made about her life), and in the world of Curse of Aurore, supernatural occurrences have been happening for years in the town where young Aurore died. Things get creepier and creepier as Lena, Aaron, and Kevin continue to investigate, and after a while it seems as if their investigations have attracted some unwanted attention.
The story is told in a way that is not unexpected for a supernatural found-footage movie. There are minor scares here and there throughout the first hour or more, and the real action kicks off in the final few minutes. It’s a structure that feels natural in a movie that is supposed to be showing us real people actually filming extraordinary things. Like I said when I wrote about The Last Exorcism, if things got crazy right away, logically the camera would turn off and everyone would just go home. But the writing in Curse of Aurore is good enough to convince me that, for the most part, these people would continue to record even when things started to go poorly for them.
In a movie like this where we’re stuck with essentially just three people for about an hour and a half, it’s important to create interesting characters and dialogue. Maybe it’s because Lena, Aaron, and Kevin are no-budget filmmakers with a passion for movies (which I can relate to), but I enjoyed getting to know these people who I was fairly certain would not be making it to the final credits. They have good banter, and I believed that they were friends even when their personalities began to clash. There’s also a scene towards the middle of the movie that I really enjoyed where Lena breaks down a bit and laments about pouring so much effort into making movies only to have no one see them. I think anyone who tries to do something creative can relate to that on some level, though I do wonder if that was somewhat of a cathartic scene for the people who were actually making Curse of Aurore. Well hey, I saw your movie, and I liked it.
It did feel like there were some red herrings and dead ends plot-wise in the first part of the movie, but in found-footage, I think a lot of that can be attributed to giving the movie a more natural feeling. People say and do things for no good reason all the time. As long as that sort of thing isn’t overdone, I think it can add to the charm of the “real life” footage. And of course, some of the stuff that was said and done was for setting a tone, and some of it made more sense later on as character building.
As for the supernatural aspects of the movie, I mostly enjoyed the way they were handled. If you’ve seen Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, you’ll know that it can turn into something of a game when you’re looking in the background of every scene for when you might see a ghost. Curse of Aurore has a similar approach to a lot of its earlier scares. The camera will catch things that the characters miss, and the first time I thought I saw something I went back to watch the scene again. Some of the ghostly images are pretty obvious if you’re paying attention, but some of them are very subtle and extremely quick. There’s a fair amount of replay value in Curse of Aurore just to go back and try to find more haunting images.
The ghostly things we see are used sparingly which I very much appreciate. I’m sure the budget didn’t allow for elaborate effects to be added to a bunch of scenes, and I think that works in the movie’s favor. Some of the images do feel unnatural in a computer-like way, but they’re supposed to be unnatural anyway. Well, supernatural which is pretty close to unnatural. Overall, the added images were effective more than they weren’t, and they never brought me out of the movie. I liked them, and they were done very well.
The plot did involve some amazing coincidences in order to keep things moving along, but once the movie is over, you could make an argument for the “coincidences” being orchestrated by someone or something. I can’t say anything more without major spoilers though, so I’ll leave it at that. And as for the resolution of the story, even though it wasn’t dissimilar to a number of similarly themed movies, I though it was well done. Again, there would be spoilers if I said more, so you’ll just have to watch the movie or send me a message or something if you want to know what I mean.
I’ve already said a few times now that Curse of Aurore feels like other movies of its type in many ways, but I don’t mean that as a bad thing. I’ve said it before that if a movie is well made, then it’s a good movie even if I’ve basically seen it before. I mean, genre movies are called genre movies for a reason. They follow a familiar pattern and deliver generally expected plot progressions and stories. That’s how a movie fits into a genre. I think that point is lost on like half the people that reviewed Curse of Aurore on IMDB. Anyway, I won’t get into a rant about genre or random people reviewing movies online. I’ll save that for another time. I guess my point here is, don’t believe pretty much any of the written reviews on IMDB. Just believe me. Or don’t. But I do try to be fair.
Anyway.
I enjoyed Curse of Aurore. The one thing I didn’t care for as much was the framing device they used. It’s similar to what I wrote about An American Haunting, if you’re going to frame your movie with something to the extent where the final shots of the movie aren’t going to involve any of your main characters, there needs to be a good reason for it. The framing here focuses on a YouTuber (Casey Nolan of Mind Seed TV) with a horror channel opening a blind box he bought on the dark web. He shows us some of the items in the box, and at first I thought it was kind of clever. He pulls out this red beanie with a hole in it, and when we go to the found-footage, we see one of the characters wearing the beanie in the first scene. Will we see how the beanie got a hole in it? Spoiler, we don’t. Another thing the YouTuber found in the box is a doll with a thumb drive attached to it. The footage we’re watching for the main part of the movie is supposed to be the video found on the drive.
So, I do like the idea of trying to frame the footage in a way that might explain why we are seeing what is essentially an edited down version of what was “really” filmed. Many found-footage movies leave me with the nagging question of, if this is supposed to be real, then who found all the cameras or tapes or discs or whatever, took the time to edit it, and then sent it out for the world to see? Having the YouTuber show it to us answers half of the question (he’s showing it to us), but the half of the question about who put the footage on the drive and sold it on the dark web is left unanswered. I don’t need an answer for that really (ambiguity can be good), but the way the footage ends really seems like anyone who might’ve had access to it wouldn’t want it to get out. That’s a small complaint though.
I also didn’t necessarily care for how the YouTuber reacted at the end of the movie. After watching the footage with us, he says he’s done and just walks away. That’s fine, but clearly he still did multiple takes with different camera setups, he edited the footage, and he still released “real” crimes for the world to see. It felt weird to me, and I didn’t care for that being the thing the movie left me with. I would’ve rather ended the movie with Lena, Aaron, and Kevin. But now that I think about it, if the whole YouTuber thing is supposed to be a comment on the irresponsibility of some YouTubers putting out stuff that they shouldn’t, then I take back everything I just wrote. It’s a brilliant ending (though I’d still rather be left with Lena, Aaron, and Kevin).
If you’re looking for a pretty good horror movie to start 2021 with and enjoy some supernatural found-footage, I’d recommend Curse of Aurore. It’s a fun movie with some creepy moments and satisfying finish. You can find it for rent on all sorts of streaming services including, yes, YouTube. I watched it on Amazon, but it’s cheap anywhere, so give the trailer a watch and go from there.
An American Haunting (2005) – A Movie A Day 2021 #20
An American Haunting poster
As big of a fan of horror movies as I am, years of exposure to silver-screen scares seem to have desensitized me somewhat. Great horrors movies can still scare me in the moment, but few of those scares stick with me after the credits have rolled. Of all the genres and sub-genres of horror movies that exist, films about ghosts and hauntings can often be a big exception to my quickly-fading-fright rule. A well-made ghost movie will often stick with me, maybe for the night or maybe even for a few days or longer. Obviously not every movie about ghosts will have the same effect, and there are plenty of average and below average haunting movies out there, but every time I watch a ghost movie I get a little excited about the possibility of a truly creepy and effective story. So, knowing that An American Haunting is based on the supposedly true story of the Bell Witch haunting, I was cautiously looking forward to a few good scares when I picked it for my daily movie. I was cautious not only because of the potential for a nervous night’s sleep, but also because I’d known about it for a while and had sort of avoided it because I didn’t want it to be bad. Well, after seeing An American Haunting I slept just fine, but the movie was a bit better than I was expecting.
My expectations about the quality of the movie likely had a lot to do with the awful experience I had with a movie from 2013 titled The Bell Witch Haunting. I don’t like to bash movies, but that thing was awful. And yeah, I know the filmmakers behind An American Haunting have nothing to do with The Bell Witch Haunting, but the association in my brain was hard to shake. Plus, I’ve seen plenty of not-great haunted house movies, and the trailer for An American Haunting was giving me strong not-great vibes. An American Haunting certainly isn’t great, but it’s good for what it is. That’s hardly a resounding endorsement, so allow me to elaborate.
An American Haunting tells the story of the Bells, a family living in Tennessee in the early 1800s. The family consists of father John Bell (Donald Sutherland), mother Lucy Bell (Sissy Spacek), and their children Betsy, John Jr., Richard, and Joel. After John gets on the wrong side of neighbor Kate Batts in a land deal gone bad, the Bell family begins to experience an increasingly violent haunting. The focus of the haunting is young Betsy Bell. Betsy is tormented night after night not just with sounds and moving objects, but she is eventually physically assaulted by the unseen force. Betsy is dragged across the floor, lifted into the air, and slapped repeatedly as the force steadily increases its tortures. The local preacher and the community school teacher join the Bell family to try to figure out how to stop the haunting, but things only get worse when John becomes a target of assault as well.
Eventually certain things come to light and the reasons behind the haunting become more or less clear, but the resolution of the movie leaves a lot to be desired. The plot is largely based on the “true” accounts of the Bell Witch, but some very generous liberties are taken with the story, especially in the later stages. Creative license is great, but I didn’t really enjoy how things were wrapped up. It made sense from a high-level look at things, but when you really get into what happened throughout the movie, it doesn’t all come together super well. There is also an unnecessary framing device where the whole story about the Bell family is being read from a letter found in what I think is supposed to be the same house in the present day. So the main bulk of the movie is a flashback for some reason, and the final scene feels pointless. I can’t say what happens without spoiling the whole movie, but basically it’s a thing where you’re meant to feel something for a few characters that you know absolutely nothing about and haven’t even seen for about an hour and a half. I would have very much preferred if the story had only taken place in the past.
The stuff surrounding the Bell family is better than I was expecting though. I didn’t know Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek were in the movie until they both showed up on screen, so that was a very nice surprise. They added some much-needed weight to the scenes involving the Bells.
As for the haunting itself, even though it was done pretty well, it’s approached in a way that I’m not always crazy about. I prefer quiet and creepy over loud and scary, and the haunting of Betsy Bell was often very, very loud. Screams, crying, slapping, and slamming were a constant accompaniment to the presence of the entity in the Bell house. To me, that’s not as unnerving as quiet moments where I wonder along with the characters, “did I really just see what I thought I saw?”
There is no ambiguity about what is happening when we see Betsy being suspended in mid-air and smacked around by invisible hands. Despite there clearly being something supernatural in the house, there is an agonizingly long sequence where the Bell family tries to convince the school teacher that his rational explanations aren’t sufficient. Thankfully he is eventually convinced that something supernatural is going on, and we then can finally move on with the story. That whole section of disbelief felt like it put the movie on pause though, because we (the audience and the characters) all knew what was happening except for this one guy who we apparently need on-board before we can move on.
Other people may enjoy the loud and obvious approach to the scares though. They’re not my favorite thing, but they didn’t prevent me from enjoying the movie fine. Like I said, I didn’t care for the wrap-up, but up to that point I enjoyed seeing John, Lucy, and Betsy deal with their situation. I probably won’t ever watch An American Haunting again, but I’m glad I finally saw it. I’m still looking for a really great Bell Witch movie though. I know it can be done.
Found footage movies have a bad reputation. Ever since the subgenre’s popularization with The Blair Witch Project back in 1999, general audiences have tended to look down on found footage movies. Granted, the proliferation of hastily made found footage horror movies in the ensuing decades has set the bar pretty low, but the when the style is done well, the resulting movies can be great. In my opinion, The Last Exorcism is one of those great found footage movies.
The Last Exorcism follows Reverend Cotton Marcus, a charismatic preacher with a flair for showmanship. Marcus believes that by preaching he can perform a valuable mental service for those who find comfort in religion, but events in his life have caused him to no longer believe in the spiritual side of what he does. Marcus has lost his faith in God, and that lack of faith has caused him to re-think his stance on some of the more archaic practices in his religion. Specifically, stories of children being harmed and killed by modern-day exorcisms have led to Marcus feeling the need to expose exorcisms as fraudulent and unnecessarily dangerous. So with that in mind, Marcus invites a two-person documentary crew to follow him as he performs one final exorcism with the goal of showing that there are no gods or demons involved, just people with serious mental problems.
The setup for the exorcism itself is pretty standard as far as these things go. The person possessed is a young girl who has been living an isolated life in rural Louisiana with her extremely overprotective father. The girl, Nell, is sweet and naïve about the ways of the world, and it becomes apparent that her father, Louis, has been raising her with a strict and fundamental understanding of Christianity. Nell also has a brother, Caleb, who is protective of his sister in a different way than their father. Caleb sees the danger in his father’s way of thinking, and he blames Louis for Nell’s problems. That anger is evident right away when Marcus and his crew arrive at Louis’s house, and it sets up some great tension between Caleb and Marcus very early in the movie. From there, Marcus gets to know the family and goes about his fake exorcism. Things begin to get out of control though, and there may be more to Nell’s problems than Marcus was prepared for.
So yeah, the setup isn’t super original, but the difference between The Last Exorcism and a bunch of other exorcism movies in in the stylistic approach and in the characters. First of all, I think found footage is a great format for a movie like this. I’ve seen some actual documentaries on exorcisms (there’s even one on Netflix right now called The Devil and Father Amorth made by William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist), and the pseudo-documentary style of the early portion of The Last Exorcism feel very similar to a lot of those. Of course with something like this I always end up questioning the logic of having the footage edited so nicely if it were footage that had actually been found somewhere, but that aside, the filmmakers used the format extremely effectively.
As I said, the first part of the movie feels very much like a documentary. We get to know Reverend Marcus and his motivations, and he comes across as likable and sympathetic. The actor playing Marcus, Patrick Fabian, does a fantastic job. He infuses a certain degree of smarm and sarcasm into Marcus, but never so much that you start to dislike him. There are enough funny moments that you start to smile with him, and there are enough quiet moments that you begin to understand that he’s taking a huge personal risk by doing what he’s doing. Turning his back on the church could have dire consequences for his family, but he’s doing what he believes is right. All of that comes across very effectively through Patrick Fabian’s performance.
After Marcus and his crew get to the farmhouse, the tension begins to rise. Part of that is thanks to Caleb, played by the great Caleb Landry Jones, and part of the tension increases naturally as Nell’s situation starts to unravel before our eyes. The found footage style really works to add an immediacy to that tension. Not only are you right there with everyone in the house with the chance that some very dark forces will be looking right at the camera/at you, but as the tension and action ramp up, the cameraman becomes less careful with his shooting style. Yes, there is a decent amount of shaky cam in the later stages of the movie, but that’s never really bothered me. To me, the shaky cam is part of the effectiveness of the style. We’re not supposed to see everything clearly, and that adds to the terror.
In the later stages of the movie you might start to question why the camera is still recording, but the movie does an admirable job of setting up everyone’s motivations enough so that most questions of that type have more or less been addressed. Well, maybe not at the very end of the movie, but I think a little suspension of disbelief is warranted given the strong setups earlier in the movie.
I’ve already talked about how good Reverend Marcus is, but the rest of the cast is great as well. Nell is played by Ashley Bell, and she really gets into her role. Nell is rather childlike when we first meet her, which makes sense given her background, but she is also very convincing when she goes to some of her darker places. Caleb Landry Jones plays Nell’s brother Caleb like a bomb about to go off. He seems dangerous right from the start, but once the family drama begins to come to light, you might be more on his side that you previously thought. And the father, Louis, is played very well by Louis Herthum. Louis is strong and stubborn, but there’s also a deep sadness driving him forward. He seems like he’s about to go over the edge, but what that means for everyone in the house remains unclear at first.
So yeah, I love The Last Exorcism. I’ve seen it a few times now, and I enjoy it every time. Like many found footage movies, the action and terror are built up to, so the most exciting bits are towards the end of the movie, but that feels more realistic to me. If you have scary, life-threatening stuff going on early in a found footage movie, then I have a harder time believing that the people involved wouldn’t just leave. In The Last Exorcism, I understand why the characters do what they do even if I don’t agree with all of their decisions. The writing and the acting make me believe that they believe they are doing the right thing pretty much all the time. But yeah, if you’re not into a slower buildup for a series of payoffs later on, then this movie might not be for you. But if you’re looking for a good found footage movie with some memorable characters and scenes, then The Last Exorcism should be on your list. I’ve read reviews where people say they don’t like the ending (I’m phrasing that way more politely than they usually do), but I think the ending, bonkers as it is, was well done and was foreshadowed in a rather sensible fashion. That’s all I’ll say about it though. Check it out, then we can talk about that ending. By the way, don’t watch this trailer if you don’t want spoilers…
