The Descent: Part 2

Elegiac and poignant are not adjectives one expects to read in a review for a horror film, but the sequel to Neil Marshall's brilliant 2005 horror film The Descent does something interesting in playing off the events of the first film in order to evoke these emotions. Sure the film is a fun, often flawed Friday-night horror flick, but it's also trying to be something more than that – and even though there's not quite the same amount of character development as the original to give weight to the peril and mayhem the characters go through – for a 90 minute sequel director Jon Harris should be given some credit for almost making the film a success. There are pay-offs in the film that don't work, repetitive set pieces, and an ending that is atrociously bad; however, warts and all, The Descent: Part 2 is still a visceral experience that outdoes anything we've seen from the genre since Marshall's original film, and it even slows down for a few moments so that the story can compound on the sadness from the first film, all culminating in making this sequel a better horror experience than its straight-to-DVD American release would suggest.

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My 20 Favorite Things of the Decade

Instead of doing a traditional countdown of the best films of the decade (for that you can see the Question of the Day feature that was posted in the last week or so) I thought I would change it up and just list some of the things that made me extremely happy the past 10 years. I think people may be a bit "listed" out right now, and I like doing something more personal than just listing movies I loved…which is an exercise I take pleasure in, but for that just look at my top 10 lists for the past 10 years (check the labels on the left side of the blog). So here are my 20 favorite things (movies, sports moments, music, books, etc.) of the past 10 years…

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What the bloody hell?

Me too Shauna...me too.

No...this isn't a rant against the Academy Awards expanding from five nominations for best picture to ten. No, I figured I'd take this opportunity to rant about something else that may be news to some, but came as a surprise to me. In my usual random web searching I decided to see when The Descent, one of the best horror films ever made, was released, and to my shock and horror I found that there is a sequel set to be released in September. The above still is one of a handful of images that has been released in promotion for the new film. Ugh, I feel like screaming, too. Complaints after the jump...

Okay...did the filmmakers think that fans of the movie didn't see the original British version of the movie on DVD? A version, although ambiguous, made a great case for the fact that Sarah didn't make it out alive (The U.S. version ends with her "escape" whereas the U.K. version cuts back to reality and Sarah in the cave with no exit in sight). Also, on the IMDB page they show that the character of Juno is once again in the film. In case you forgot she was left to be eaten by the "crawlers"...so does this suggest then that the whole thing was in her head, that the allusion to the idea that the caves can play tricks on you is actually what happened? But then how do they explain the fact that they are bringing the "crawlers" back in the sequel, and supposedly they have evolved further and can fly now. Double ugh.

Neil Marshall's name is nowhere near this film, and I'm wondering why Shauna MacDonald agreed to do the film again. This will be a disaster if they just do a straight horror. And based on the plot synopsis, and the early images that were released, the film looks like it's just going to be a rehash of the first film: Sarah is rescued, she goes to a hospital, goes back down in the cave to save her friends who are apparently still alive. Again, this all suggests that the "crawlers" were indeed figments of their imaginations (especially Sarah who is a grieving mother and widow, and hints at the fact, early on in the film, that she may not be ready to move on with her life), but if that is the case, and the sequel is primarily psychological horror, then why the need to bring back the "crawlers"? And why make them so visible? They were more or less shadow creatures in the first film, and they came into the plot at a point where the characters would most likely have started hallucinating. The best part of the original is the reading that they all killed each other and imagined the "crawlers". The idea of a sequel with the same characters and the same scenario makes no sense.

I guess one could chalk this up to flattery through imitation, but man this is going to be rough to sit through with an open mind...because yes, I will see it, just like I do with any horror film or any sequel to a film I love. However, this has "bad idea" written all over it. The logic seems all over the place here as they seem to be disregarding any kind of psychological aspect that was clearly at the forefront of Marshall's film; and the fact that they're asking the audience to disregard the darker, nihilistic ending of the original is already putting the sequel in a pretty big hole. The power and poignancy of that final image of Sarah looking at her daughter, then as the camera pulls back they show Sarah looking at nothing (suggesting everything was in her head), is neutered now because of this unnecessary sequel.

And it's not like I'm anti-sequel, I just don't understand the logic in making a sequel to a movie where they totally disregard the elements of narrative that made the original so creepy. Perhaps this will be like what Aliens was to Alien, a pedal-to-the-floor action/horror hybrid that was all kinds of entertaining goodness...who knows, but it'll have to be pretty damn intense and impressive to make me forget about the fact that they're pretty much disregarding the end of the original film.

I don't know...maybe I'm too much of a fan of the original to think anything good can come out of the sequel, but it just seems altogether superfluous. Oh well...I guess more thoughts on this in September. This makes me want to find an old essay I wrote in college (published no less!) about the state of horror films...I guess we horror fans, and fans of the original film, play the waiting game.

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Ruining the "Ruins"

If every film that were adapted from a book was to be viewed directly after reading the source material, then each one of those films would be doomed for failure. It’s inevitable that the reader has created a better film in their mind; storyboards that no doubt clash with the filmmaker’s vision of how that source material should not only look on screen, but be transferred to the medium of film. I’m sure that Carter Smith’s The Ruins, when isolated from its source material, is an adequate enough horror film; however, I cannot separate it from its source material because I happened to read the book written by Scott B. Smith (no relation to the director) in one sitting – then I watched the movie. Maybe I was too ambitious in thinking that I could go straight from reading the book to watching the movie, and perhaps I should have allowed myself a buffer zone; but I was eager to see the visualization of Smith’s fantastic horror novel.

It’s inevitable, too, that the reader will always nitpick the small changes that are found in book to screen adaptations. These tweaks are necessary sometimes, because setting something up in film (especially in a 90 minute horror film) is a lot harder than using the first 100 pages of a novel – so I don’t fault Smith’s film too much for messing with the story and abandoning all remnants of character development, but what does seem odd is Smith’s penchant for dropping characters and changing the situations that happen to specific characters so that they can fit into a more conventional (and profitable) horror prototype.

Smith’s novel is about two vacationing college couples (Jeff and Amy and Eric and Stacey) who meet a German named Mathias in Cancun, Mexico. They engage in small talk, and Amy even kisses Mathias in a drunken haze. They become chummy and then Mathias tells them about his brother who left with an archeologist to an ancient Mayan ruin. They run off to find him and in the process meet a Greek who doesn’t speak English; they take him with them as he leaves a note with a map to the ruin on it for his other two Greek friends who are sleeping one off.
Naturally they come across many ominous signs that should be taken as a warning, and Amy is the only one in the group to recognize them, she’s hung-over and not in the mood for a hike, so her boyfriend Jeff, thinks she just isn’t feeling good because of that. Jeff is a bossy guy, a med school attendee, he is the self-proclaimed leader of the group; he insists that they continue despite the bad feeling Amy.

Once on the ruins bad things happen as they become prisoners on top of the dig site because for some reason the local Mayan’s won’t let them leave the site. And their afternoon hike becomes a multiple day struggle for survival as they battle hunger, thirst, broken bones, and some scary ass vines. The rest of the story I dare not give away, because that is the joy and the exhilaration found in Smith’s horror novel; a novel worthy of being compared to something Stephen King would write. Smith’s novel does an amazing job of building and compounding banal scene after banal scene where the reader really does feel tired and sun-burnt and hungry and exhausted.

Smith writes the novel as one long sequence – there are no chapters in The Ruins and reading the novel is like having your entire body in a vise grip, you go from one scene to the next at a breathless pace; the characters don’t get any breaks for rest and neither does the reader.

I rarely read horror novels anymore, as most of the stuff I read I guess could be construed as ‘arty’ or ‘heavy’ books, but I wanted to give this one a shot because I loved Smith’s previous (and only other) novel A Simple Plan. I read Smith’s story in one sitting, and that’s not to say that the novel is comparatively lesser than the aforementioned types of novels I read, it actually means that the novel was extremely entertaining and utterly hypnotic. I zipped through it because I was like a madman wanting to see the novel to its end. The ending of the novel is something I knew the filmmakers wouldn’t have the conviction to keep intact, but I held out hope that Carter Smith’s version of the novel (scripted by the writer of the novel Scott Smith) would at least be serviceable in bringing to the screen a horror story that reminded me of the claustrophobic, everything-gone-wrong type of horror stories found in modern films like Bug, Deep Water, and The Descent.

The film version of Smith’s novel is a mess – and again I freely admit that I probably shouldn’t have viewed it directly after reading the novel – a herky-jerky gore fest that is not at all interested in the banal, slow build of dread that made the novel such an intense and horrifying read. Smith the novelist shows with his two novels that he is interested in this banal evil (especially in A Simple Plan which was made into a superb film by Sam Raimi) and how it plays with our minds. Perception is a big factor in the novel. Are these things really happening to these people, and did I just read that a vine was aping a cell phone ring tone? The film, however, is not all interested in building anything. It wants to show you gore and creepy vines that are more out of a monster movie than something ambiguous and frightening.

The film has decent enough acting, but inexplicably Scott Smith let the Carter Smith do whatever he wanted to with his story (reading about the film I found that the author apparently has no qualms about letting his work be manipulated by studios) turning it into more of a dead teenager movie or a vacationers go missing torture porn, than a truly horrifying film. Sometimes it’s okay for “nothing” to happen, because sometimes that’s the scariest thing (think Deep Water or some of the hopelessness found in The Descent.) The results of Smith the director tinkering with Smith the writers work is that for no reason, other than to plug in these characters into a more traditional American horror formula, Smith the director omits certain characters, changes events, changes the way some characters act, and has things happen to different characters.

There’s one scene that is truly horrifying in the novel: there is a moment when The Greek has his legs eaten by the vines (in the movie it’s Mathias, who is one of the central, and strongest, characters in the novel, who in the film is relegated to screaming) and one by one the characters happen upon it. There’s a slow buoild to the realization of why the Mayan’s won’t let them off the ruins, and that’s totally omitted in the film. Instead, we are left to see Mathias with vines wrapped around his legs and then the famous hacking off the legs scene.

The film wants nothing more than to try and shock you with gory moment after gory moment, all of which are laughably spliced together out of context and at rapid speed. The film’s opening should be ample warning for those who have read the novel: the vines are monsters that kill because they want to, not because they are feeding. For as laughable as the original premise is (what horror premise like this isn’t, really) at Smith the writer didn’t have his vines just eating people for the hell of it. In the novel it was only when there was blood (or in an odd and horrifying scene semen) is spilt that vines come out to play. And usually the vines were interested in mocking the inhabitants of the ruins in an attempt to drive them insane so that they would turn against each other. In the film, however, they suck you into the earth and stalk their prey hissing and moaning and grabbing at the hapless female victims (another insulting thing about the film version, they swap characters when it comes to all the bad things that happen – in the book Eric is the one who wants to cut himself open, not Stacey); the already laughable premise is heightened by the eye-rolling formulas that the films relies on.

The film was doomed for the start – in my own mind. I had envisioned a decent film that was predicated on of the most horrifying thoughts of all: the idea that nobody is coming to save you. Instead Carter Smith turns a great horror read into something yawn-inducing and predictable, a paint-by-numbers exercise that is horribly uninteresting when compared to the novel.

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DVD Review: Doomsday

Watching Neil Marshall’s Doomsday is like watching a loved one make mistake after mistake – you know what they’re capable of and the good they can create, but really because you care about them so much you have to just sit and watch them fail, because it’s for the better. Doomsday encapsulates this feeling; a pastiche of post-apocalyptic /80’s action films, Marshall pays homage, or, let’s just call it like it is – apery, to films like Escape From New York, Mad Max, Aliens, and even modern video games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil; however, the only way in which Marshall’s film succeeds is in making the viewer wish they were watching the source material that Marshall borrows from. All I can say is that I hope the failings of this film will provide Marshall with an adequate “what not to do” list for his next picture.

One of Marshall's homages -- the silhoutted infected

reminded me of the above pic from Lamberto Bava's Demons

The film opens with a virus infecting Scotland. A wall is built on the border of Scotland and England in order to isolate the infected. Evil shenanigans ensure from politicians who seek to kill off the entire city and then claim there is a cure at just the right moment. Of course, as we know with films like this, anytime that Marshal Law is declared things go haywire rather quickly.

We are introduced to the main character Eden Sinclair (great name) when she is a little girl. Her mom is trying to get her across the wall so that she will be safe. As the riot ensues (caused by the chaos of Marshal Law) shots are fired and one of the bullets strikes Eden in the eye. Her mom does indeed find her a ride out of the chaos, but Eden is left with only a letter with a return address as evidence that her mother existed. She flies off and we learn about the history of the virus and how it died off.

Flash forward many years (or as Marshall puts it “2036 NOW”) as a much older, sexier Eden dons an eye-patch (like Snake from Escape From New York, just one of thousands of John Carpenter references) and a gun, and we see that she and her partner are infiltrating a slave operation. This gives Marshall the opportunity to make references to James Cameron action films and show lots of blood. There’s even a nod to Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond with one of the nastiest looking shotgun deaths I’ve ever seen. We learn that Eden is cold and dethatched, even after her partners’ death all she cares about is that they got the job done. Word comes across the wire to her boss (the always great Bob Hoskins) about the big bad virus coming back and how they think they find a cure for it….so naturally Eden is a perfect fit for a top secret operation that involves taking a team of troops into the no man’s land in order to find Dr. Kane (Malcom McDowell) who may know about the cure.

There’s your story. Along the way we get oodles of references to Aliens (rag-tag group of military who all specialize in something, and spout off quirky lines under stress; also there is a scene, a great scene, where they search Kane’s laboratory and it evokes the great scene in Aliens where they find Newt), Mad Max, and the other aforementioned films. However, it’s about this point in the film (about 40 mins. in) that Doomsday lost me. Once the Mad Max stuff started happening and you had the torture and the psycho-punk, post-apocalyptic junk involving anarchy and cannibalism, I was just ready for the film to move forward. I don’t care how bloody or wink wink Marshall’s film is, it just wasn’t interesting.

Seriously, the entire ending is filmmed like this --nothing more than a car commercial. I half expecting to hear Jeff Bridges tell me about "the open road..."

Not only did I not dig the Mad Max stuff, but that’s only part of the film! When they escape from these psycho punk rockers the film turns into Lord of the Rings (seriously) and then turns into a weird mix between Army of Darkness, Gladiator, and George Romero’s Knightriders. You see, because the government neglected the other side of the wall, evolution took over as history repeated itself and it became survival of the fittest. Therefore you have a dystopian society with the Mad Max portion of the film, and then a call back to the medieval days with the second half of the film. This is where Eden and her crew (down to just three people now, per horror film standards about the dead weight getting knocked off, think Aliens again) find Dr. Kane as he is ruler of his “kingdom”. It’s just a strange, strange moment and I never got into it. From here the film takes another bizarre u-turn as Eden finds that Kane has been hording all sorts of goodies in an abandoned mine – these goodies include cell phones and a really nice car….after that the film goes back to the Mad Max portion while simultaneously turning into a car commercial – Marshall even films it so.

The film is a mess, and it’s a damn shame too because I love Marshall. Doomsday’s sum is never quite as good as its parts, as I was constantly entertained or enthralled, but I just didn’t give a crap about it. You see, that’s the difference between this Marshall film and his masterpiece The Descent, which was also art through imitation. The difference being that The Descent had characters and situations involving their past that we cared about. With Doomsday Marshall completely abandons the reasoning why Eden would be so inclined to go on a suicide mission, and really, only is it at the end that they call back to the fact that she constantly sought her mother’s home and to know who she was.

Many people give Quentin Tarantino a hard time because they believe he doesn’t do anything different in his films than what Marshall does with Doomsday, but I would disagree, as again, you can look no further than Marshall’s previous film and see the same style on display in Doomsday, just with more substance to it. Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a review for the New York Times when the film was released, and really his final line of the review best encapsulates what’s so wrong with Marshall’s film:

In terms of story, “The Descent” and “Doomsday” are as different as two genre films can be, but the falloff in artistic quality is still quantifiable. Where “The Descent” was a slow, quiet, exquisitely modulated, startlingly original film, “Doomsday” is frenetic, loud, wildly imprecise and so derivative that it doesn’t so much seem to reference its antecedents as try on their famous images like a child playing dress-up. Homage without innovation isn’t homage, it’s karaoke.

So it’s a missed opportunity. As I said it’s an entertaining movie, but really it never goes beyond that. It’s a gore fest and gore hounds will be satisfied, but there’s no context for the gore, so really we just see fake heads rolling around on display and excruciatingly long chase scenes that never end all because Marshall had a budget, and used every last cent of it. And that rock score, my God it thumps and bumps and blares throughout, never ceasing, not even for a quick reprieve, and really, I guess that’s a good metaphor for how this film plays. Marshall just seemed overwhelmed with all the goodies at his disposal, and it reminded me of the carefree, kitchen sink style of filmmaking displayed by Sam Raimi in the third Spider-Man film. I’m glad Marshall had fun, and I’m glad he has the budget now to do what he wants. It was a nice vacation, but it’s time for Mr. Marshall to get back to work.

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How does film make you feel?

There is a great discussion going on right now at Jim Emerson's Scanners blog (the best film blog out there) about how we react to film. Do we react because of how it makes us feel? Or do we react because of how good the film looks? These questions and others are raised by Jim and others in the comments. It's a good discussion for any film buff to read. One of the main points Jim is making is that if he goes to see a movie with someone they may react the same to what is on the screen, but the real reaction, the important one perhaps, is how we react to the film going on in our heads.

When we see a film it registers with some part of brain; either the emotional or analytical. Of course both can be affected. When I watch Bergman or Fellini, I understand that what I am seeing is a master at work. There are images and film techniques that I will not see from other filmmakers, yet I am also moved by the story. My film professor from Western Oregon always says that, for him, in order for a film to fully succeed it must not just be aesthetically appealing, but it also is in need of a narrative; characters involved in a story where it is worth our time investing in those two hours.

There are a lot of movies I can appreciate for their aesthetics. There is a big movement right now with independent film that is proving this. The likes of Michel Gondry, Julie Taymor, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, etc. are all making movies that are visually alive, stimulating, even original. However I rarely find myself caring for any of the characters in a Wes Anderson film. Gondry's The Science of Sleep is like Fincher's The Game, Fight Club, and Alien 3; a good looking movie that sucks. Taymor made the visually appealing Titus and Across the Universe (which I haven't seen, but what I can gather from critics is that it is visually appealing and nothing more), but where those films fail for is that they lack a narrative that involves me, something that makes me say, it was worth my time investing in these characters and their journey. So I grow weary of the quirky set pieces and odd behavior (another reason why I don't like Terry Gilliam) of recent avant garde cinema because when I am finshied watching one of those films, I find that all I can discuss are the aesthetics of the film. There is no emotion when I talk about or write about the film. However, when I see something like a Bergman film or Fellini's 8 1/2 or Jim Jarmusche's Stranger Than Paradise (a truly independent film, both in style and narrative) I am moved by both aspects of the film: the aesthetic and the narrative. Both remain in my memory for much longer than Fight Club or The Science of Sleep, because there is an emotional reaction to what I have just seen. There is nothing moving about Fight Club, but I will never forget about the images from Stranger Than Paradise, Winter Light, 8 1/2, or Cries and Whispers.

I am not ragging on the directors above; in fact it might be quite unfair of me to place them alongside such giants as Bergman and Fellini (in fact David Fincher claimed the top spot on my top 10 list this year with his Zodiac). I think what I am trying to get at is that there is a certain criteria for film to register both emotionally and aesthetically. Films like Crash and Million Dollar Baby or something like House of Sand and Fog are good films, but they exist solely for the purpose of affecting our emotions; there is hardly anything aesthetically memorable about those films, we remember them because they either touch us deeply, or temporarily are able to prey on our emotions and evoke sadness from how the film unfolds.

Often I react to a film immediately, even though I may be thinking about the film for days afterwards, I will have a pretty confident opinion if what I saw was something that is worth thinking about or not. I sometimes fall into the all-too-easy trap of hyperbole; claiming certain films are the "best" or "worst" of something I have seen in (insert arbitrary number of years here). When I think about a film like Million Dollar Baby or Crash (two films I did like) compared to some of my favorite films that came out this year: No Country For Old Men, Zodiac, Eastern Promises, Into Great Silence, Breach, etc., there is no comparison; the latter films win hands down. They resonate with me still, not just because they freshest in my mind, but because they contain elements that affect both crucial parts of my film-going sub-consciousness. Even though DVD's of Million Dollar Baby and Crash sit on my bookshelf at home, I haven't revisted them in almost two years.

One film I was thinking of that applies here is There Will Be Blood. Having just seen the film I have been asking myself ever since I left the theater: Did I really care about what happened in that film? I don't know if I have an answer yet, although in my review of the film much of it was expository, relaying much of the basic plot points, perhaps in an attempt to try and figure out through writing whether or not I was emotionally involved in that picture.

But every time I wanted to care about There Will Be Blood I felt like Paul Thomas Anderson was slapping me (like Eli slaps Daniel) in the face and saying: No! Look at my movie, don't care about the characters. The ending still has no affect on me whatsoever; the only thing I can say about it is that it strikes the right note in how abrupt and sardonic it is.

I think it is possible for films visuals to speak for themselves and create emotion. Once again I return to Stranger Than Paradise and a scene where they are staring out onto a frozen lake. The visual itself speaks volumes towards their journey, their feelings, and the minimalism of the film. It is a brilliant shot that explains through visual exposition what the characters are feeling, and just like Bergman, it creates genuine emotion through imagery.

I often have conversations with many friends, most of whom claim they just want to be "entertained" by movies. There all different types of moviegoers, and that's what so great about the medium. How the images and words get from the screen into our subconscious and how we unscramble those images and words and but them in place to form an opinion in one of the great things about watching a film and having an opinion on it. Some of my friends just want me to tell them whether or not they would like the movie. That's impossible to do. I may have somewhat of an understanding based on previous movies they have liked, or certain genres they feel akin to, but it is impossible to truly say that you will or will not like a certain movie. It's all about how you decipher the code when it's in your brain, and what you choose to remember about it. And how does it make you feel?

That is a question that only the filmgoer can answer. When my friend Mark went and saw The Descent with some of my other friends Kyle, Stacey, and Josh; I could have probably guessed based on the genre that maybe they wouldn't have liked the movie. But a couple days before they went and saw it, Mark heard me raving about it. That was my reaction to it. I personally found the film to be many things; a great horror film that penetrated my fears of entrapment and being enclosed in tight spaces. I also found it to be a touching film about the loss of a child, and how for this woman, the only way she was ever going to get back to her child was to plunge the deep and the dark. Just like the cave, she had to dive down within her own memories and personal demons, but what she finds is that life without her daughter is a life not worth living, so for the entire film she is just finding ways to get back to her daughter. The film ends (you can only see this ending on the DVD, for some reason they cut the real ending out of the American release) with a heartbreaking shot of her facing her daughter with a cake (an image that appears numerous times in the film), they are "looking" at each other (Sarah has now taken on the characteristics of a "crawler") but never in the same frame. As the camera slowly zooms out you see her facing nothing but the darkness. The camera continues to pull out slowly, Sarah is there surrounded by darkness, and the sounds of the creatures lurking above. It's an ambiguous shot as the camera fades to black with noises of the creatures above, is what we just witnessed all a dream? Did it happen the way we think it did? Have those final moments after Sarah fell down even happened yet? Remembering the set up, one of the girls tells Sarah that you begin to see things in the caves, your mind plays tricks on you, and that final shot moved me and frightened me. It was a perfect ending, both aesthetically and emotionally.

But I can understand why Kyle, Josh, Mark, and Stacey didn't like it. Maybe they aren't horror fans, maybe they didn't like the pacing of a British horror film, maybe the ending with all of the creatures was a little too crazy. I don't know, the great thing is only they can understand their reasoning for not liking the film, and all they can do (like me) is react honestly. The way I feel about a film doesn't mean others will react with the same positivity, negativity, or neutrality, that I do. The Descent is a perfect example of this.

Anyways, head over to Emerson's blog and read the discussion. I went a little off topic with what they are discussing over there, but it's a fun discussion, so check it out.

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