Orphan

I originally intended to see Orphan in the movie theater, but I simply was not able to. I bought it new with some reservation – I prefer to buy used DVDs because they’re cheaper and it’s part of the whole recycling thing. But I had heard enough good stuff about the movie to want to watch it sooner rather than later, and I was in a horror movie buying mood on the day after Halloween.

I was not disappointed. It was the first of my horror movie purchases that I watched, and it pushed most of my horror movie buttons. Creepy child sociopath; issues of sex and sexuality; insanity; and representation of human anxiety. Isabelle Fuhrman presents a spectacular performance as Esther, an adopted child who seems too perfect. Knowing this is a horror movie, everyone knows that Esther is going to end up being a bad seed, and Fuhrman shows that eerie, sweetly manipulative side to Esther with aplomb, neither underacting nor overacting like many child actors. And (spoiler alert) since she had to basically play a deeply disturbed adult trapped in the body of a child, it was imperative that Esther be handled with, pardon the pun, kid gloves by an actress of precision and skill. Fuhrman took on the role as if she was made for it – it is not surprising that she blew away the casting directors and inspired new Esther character traits.

Fuhrman is flanked adeptly by Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard, taking on deceptively difficult roles. Vera Farmiga’s performance reminded me strongly of Jennifer Connelly’s in Dark Water. The secondary conflicts of adopting children, stillbirth and grief, recovering from alcoholism, and maternal feeling of inadequacy brought a new dimension to a standard bad seed story and made the movie into something that I think will be an essential in any horror collection in the future.

The line that was eventually cut from the previews (if not the movie itself) that it must be harder to love an adopted child as your own is, in my opinion, integral to the movie. The point of it is not that it is true, but that many parents who adopt children (especially older children) or those considering adoption worry that it is true. Children in the foster system are disadvantaged at the start – they don’t have the attention or affection that they need, they often don’t have stability or security as they go from home to home, and they can feel like society’s trash. This can lead to behavioral problems and personality disorders that most foster and adoptive families have to brace themselves for. And I say this with complete support and encouragement for anyone looking to foster or adopt – it is not an easy road, but I feel it is a good one, better for the children in the long run. Esther and the movie Orphan is an expression of that anxiety, although it is no more a commentary on antisocial personality disorder in orphans any more than Damien from The Omen is indicative of Satan incarnate in biological children (ETA: I realized belatedly that this is an inaccurate comparison, since Damien was born of a jackal and replaced his mother’s real child – Instead, make it the child in The Bad Seed). They are simply cinematic expressions of that anxiety.

At the same time, you’ve got the other secondary plots that play out beautifully, although the script on them is a bit clunky near the beginning, a bit too cliche on the matter of a “dark past” for the nice family. However, Farmiga and Saarsgard take the time to show both the love and the underlying suspicions without giving into the temptation to become caricatures. You believe their progression into a troubled family, but the most beautiful part is that even at their worst and most suspicious, they never stop loving each other. The subtleties and multi-layers in this movie are beautiful to watch because they never lose their complexity.

I gave away part of the twist above, but hopefully, if you read through the review, you have already seen the movie and appreciated the surprise. I’m an excellent audience in that way, though – I rarely figure out the twist ending.

Even if Orphan does not become a favorite for you – maybe it doesn’t push your own personal horror buttons – I know it’s going to be at the top of my list.

Paranormal Activity

I went to see Paranormal Activity last night. I was anxious about, too. Not because it was supposed to be scary, but because I was so worried it was going to be a let down, and it wouldn’t be. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a horror movie that actually scared me in the theaters. I’d heard such promising things about this one, and I really didn’t want to be disappointed.

I shouldn’t have worried.

My favorite genre of horror is supernatural. My absolute favorite horror movie is the black-and-white version of The Haunting, and one thing I love so much about that movie is the subtlety and the fact you never really see anything, and in fact, there is some question that it isn’t the house but Eleanor herself causing the disturbances. It’s never clear (nor is it, really, in the novel on which the movie is based and from which the name of this blog originates), and I love that.

Another reason that I love Asian supernatural horror so much, too, is that it doesn’t seek to explain why the supernatural thing is happening–it’s enough that it is, and there needs to be no rational explanation. I find that refreshing. American horror suffers occasionally from the “we must make this meaningful in some way” plot device, which leads to confusing resolutions and headtilt-worthy plot twists (don’t even talk to me about The Orphanage). Personally, I think it is much scarier if you never know the reason why, or if there really isn’t a reason. I didn’t find the movie The Strangers to be all that frightening, except for line at the end where Liv Tyler’s character asks her tormentors, why us?, to which the masked killers respond simply, because you were home.

Paranormal Activity does a great job with both of these elements; it’s wonderfully understated, and there’s no real reason given for the manifestation other than it has happened to the main character before and she doesn’t know why. This makes for a truly scary flick that had me breathless, shivering, and genuinely pretty freaked out. I’m a hard person to scare, so this is something of an accomplishment!

I’ve seen people comparing this to The Blair Witch Project, though I think that’s based mainly on the low-budget, hand-held camera aspects. Though I do see some similarities (and quite honestly, Blair Witch remains one of my scariest movies, precisely because the horror remains a thing unseen. Also that last scene makes me whimper), I found the writing in Paranormal Activity to be much better–one thing the movie does really well, in fact, is to make you *like* these two characters. You knew all along they were doomed–it’s a narrative with a certain doomed endpoint, and that is made quite clear through title use–and they were so *likable* that you generally felt bad about that. There are also some really fabulous moments of genuine humor, which were well-crafted and well-placed in the script (Wes Craven, take note), and yet do not detract at all from the overall atmosphere of the film.

The plot of the movie is fairly simple. Katie and Micah are a young couple in San Diego, and Katie has been experiencing various supernatural phenomenon that has been increasing in frequency over the last few weeks. Micah purchases a camera to record their bedroom while they sleep and see if he can catch anything on tape–he is skeptical but supportive, although he finds the situation a lot more fascinating that Katie, who would rather all of this just stop. They meet with a psychic, who suggests calling a demonologist, and points out something very important to Katie and Micah–the more negativity in the house, coupled with increasing attention given to the demonic entity, will cause a disaster. And as the movie unfolds, this is exactly what happens.

We watch the couple go from happy and well-adjusted to miserable and terrified in a slow progression that is almost as scary as the phenomenon we witness on tape. Sleep-deprived and losing their stamina, the couple fight and bicker and behave exactly how the psychic told them not to. As a result of that and Micah’s increasing obsession with capturing more and more evidence, the demonic entity grows stronger and stronger, and they are plagued with more than just sounds in the dark.

What I love about this movie is how subtle it is. The things that happen while the couple are sleeping (easily the scariest part of the movie) are done without monsters, without overblown special effects. Lights turn on, then off. The door closes partway and then goes back to where it was before. There is a crashing noise from below the bedroom. None of these things are particularly amazing. These are things that I’ve heard, laying awake at night, and blamed on my imagination or the house settling. And that’s why this movie is so brilliant. Because you can see yourself in this position, and you can think rationally about what you’d think was going on–and what happened if you realized how wrong you were?

As the movie progresses, as Micah and Katie grow more distressed and upset, the entity gains strength and is able to manifest in stronger ways. One of the scariest scenes in the movie is when Katie gets out of bed, and stands next to it for an hour (there is a timestamp on the screen), staring down at Micah’s sleeping form. He wakes up later and finds her, practically catatonic, outside on the porch swing. She’s speaking quietly and slow, but in her own voice, and yet–somehow you just know that’s not Katie. She doesn’t remember a thing the next day.

I don’t want to detail all the ways the demon manifests on the camera, but suffice it to say; whenever it was night and the camera was trained on the sleeping couple, the theater fell silent and no one said a word. Because it just kept getting more and more intense, despite never seeing anything but a shadow against a door or footprints in powder on the floor. You might not think these are the sorts of things that would scare you in a movie. You would be wrong.

One of my favorite scenes occurs when Katie is dragged off the bed and pulled into the darkened hallway–her body slides off the bed in such a way that doesn’t seem physically possible. But it’s not that unnatural, jerky motion so favored by Asian horror and American remakes thereof; there is just something off about it. This is the sort of detail that is left out of most modern horror–it doesn’t have to be overwrought to be terrifying.

Eventually, Katie is too weakened to fight back, and the demon overtakes her. And even that was brilliantly subtle–you can tell it’s not her, because you’ve gotten to know her character so well through the movie. When she informs Micah they’re not leaving the house, and looks at the camera with unblinking eyes and a small creepy smile–you know from these cues and from a slight difference in her voice that she’s no longer Katie. And when the scene switches to the now-familiar nighttime shot of the couple asleep in their bed, you know it’s going to be the last time. The resolution comes quickly and frighteningly, a sudden break from all the prior tension.

The only minor quibble I have with the movie was the very last shot. Katie, possessed by the demon, lunges towards the camera and her face briefly contorts–there’s nothing overdone about it, not really, though she has some obvious demonic features and a hint of pointy teeth. The penultimate scene, in my opinion, would have made a far better ending–Katie, on the floor, looks up at the camera and smiles. I think the movie should have ended here, frankly, though the last scene did make me jump.

What is frightening about Paranormal Activity is that it plays on fears we all have; fear of the unknown. More than that, though, it’s the fear of our safe places being violated when we are at our most vulnerable. It is the fear that the noises we hear in the dark, these are not just the house settling or our imagination. It’s the what if all those noises we ignore really are the things we say don’t exist? What if this is going on in my house, when I’m asleep? What would I see if I set up a video camera in my room?

I highly recommend this movie if you’re someone who appreciates a lighter touch in horror, and has enough of an overactive imagination that what you envision is way scarier than anything Hollywood will show you. I’m hopeful this movie will do very well, and more movies in a similar vein will be produced as a result rather than, say, Saw XII. Also, in a refreshing change from a lot of theatrical releases, Paranormal Activty clocks in just under 90 minutes. Bravo!

I’m always going to defend slasher flicks as an important part of the horror genre, and I can even handle the odd torture/revenge movie depending on what it is, but supernatural horror is my favorite, and this is definitely in my top ten.

–Merrikat

The Ninth Gate

I have watched The Ninth Gate twice, and I was in very different places during both viewings. Suffice it to say, I was a bit bored during the first viewing, mostly because I expected things to speed up. Growing up on more drama-filled horror, the quiet unease that best describes this movie (the same unease Polanski brought to Rosemary’s Baby as well). At the time of my second viewing, I’ve been having some issues with religion in general, so the movie resonated a different, darker chord inside of me. I enjoyed it more the second time. I understand why I found it in the $5 discount shelf, but I think it’s underrated. It’s a good movie as long as you know what you’re getting into, but I would not recommend it for those with short attention spans.

Johnny Depp plays a character that fits him like a glove, and one suspects how much Dean Corso differs from Depp in terms of vices, although I assume Depp has more virtues. Not a single character in the movie is sympathetic, but you find yourself captivated by the subtle, compelling characterizations all the same. Not a single character in the movie is good, yet you find yourself rooting for Corso and The Girl as they go about their quest. For lack of a hero, you side with a villain. You dislike Corso in the beginning when he’s bad, but you begin to care about him by the end when he’s worse, to borrow a phrase from Depp himself in describing the character. Something about the journey echoes The Omen, but in The Omen, you don’t root for the devil. The Girl is more than just alluring – she is unassuming, amused and amusing.

The thing that drew me to The Ninth Gate when it was just a discount DVD on a shelf was the religious theme. I love a good religious theme, especially one tied to very real history or mythology, and it is my understanding that the The Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows is an actual book. It is the same interest that drew me to Stigmata and The Exorcist. How true to life anything else that happens in the movie is, I can’t say, but it certainly feels real every step. Polanski has that talent to root every scene in impossible reality, with very little enhancement beyond the necessary. From the woman who saw the Devil one day and subsequently devoted his life and study to him to the ambitious, cold Boris Balkan (played by the eternally creepy Frank Langella), from the mismatched colors of The Girl’s socks to the shape and style of Corso’s glasses. This is a movie of details. Polanski works hard not to give away the details, but let you discover them for yourself. You join Corso on his mystery journey – your eyes follow his. It’s a thin, difficult line to walk in film making, and Polanski doesn’t manage it at every point, but he does manage it for a good part of the movie.

From a religious perspective, I liked the way that The Girl does not seem to do anything to any of the characters, quite against the typical depiction of the devil character. She had those who she favored, but she did not force them into her way of thinking; they were already on their paths, and she was more a watcher than one who engaged. When she did engage, it was just a nudge in the right direction, a little helping hand of protection. There was something not right about her, but you could never put a finger on why she was evil, if she was evil at all. People seem to do evil in her name, but she does very little herself. The last scene seems to suggest that there was supposed to be great evil in her, and it is the weakest and most tacked on scene in the movie, but I doubt there was any more evil in her than what was already in most of the characters, and by extension, what is already in most of us, without the help or excuse of the devil (whether you choose to take “the devil” as literal or metaphorical on this point is your choice).

The ending was the weakest part of the movie, and it makes me wonder what the original book had as an ending, and what words it used to describe it. However, I felt that the journey, the silence, the subtlety, and the universally unscrupulous characters made for an interesting movie, at the very least. It is certainly one that I will keep in my collection, to return to when I need to feel my world turn upside down.

Meeting the Beast: Ginger Snaps and Feminist Werewolves

Welcome our guest blogger, Naamah Darling of livejournal. She writes porn, erotica, pulp adventure, and fantasy. Her works have been featured in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4 and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 6, edited by Maxim Jakubowski; also at http://www.scarletletters.com and at The Edge of Propinquity. She is also an Arts & Culture Editor at Weird Tales. In her spare time, she writes uniquely biting commentary and makes beautiful art. It is a pleasure to include her talent here.

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This is an edited, much better version of the entry I posted at my journal early this year.

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The first thing I want to say about Ginger Snaps, almost as a disclaimer, is that I really liked it. It was sharply-scripted and incredibly funny. It hit dark notes without losing its deft touch. It was not trying to be fine art, it was trying to be snarky schlock that at once indulged in and poked loving fun at the genre, and I think it accomplished that admirably.

That said, the people who have claimed that it is a masterpiece of feminist awesomeness are wrong.

This was the same nonsense we always see: sex used as a metaphor for degeneration and moral decay. The end result was more of the same body-fearing, sexuality-fearing bullshit that I’m accustomed to seeing in horror movies, and despite the sharp writing, really excellent acting, and a genuinely interesting exploration of what happens when one of a pair of friends (in this case, sisters) begins spiraling into self-destructive behavior, it brought nothing new to the table. Hey, why break with tradition now?

Coming-of-age stories for women are pretty limited. Many are cautionary tales warning of the dangers of sex and sexuality. This kind of story at least hints at pleasure-driven sexuality, which a lot of surviving women’s stories do not. I’m much more likely to give a thumbs-up to a story that has the character suffer horribly for fucking than I am to give a thumbs-up to a story that shows the character being rewarded for settling down with a husband and popping out a litter after a brief excursion into adventure and free will. To my mind, better fucking and dead than live and enslaved. Make of that what you will. At least you get that moment of freedom before you go to the bitch-whore’s culturally-mandated demise.

Anyway. The good things about the movie were very good.

Both lead actresses were fabulous. Ginger (played by Katharine Isabelle) was a complete bitch in a really fun way. Katharine effectively conveyed the allure that often comes with people who are slowly losing their self-control – they may not be likeable, but they have a kind of charisma, personal force, that is incredibly hard to deny. The movie didn’t lean on it, but the few scenes where Ginger was wracked with horror over what she was becoming were truly pitiable. She managed to convey the awful vulnerability of a wounded thing that is still dangerous. She did sexy very well, too. In one of the most unexpectedly erotic yet disturbing moments I’ve seen in a long time, she is coming on to the young man who has been working on a cure. She pulls her shirt up to show her belly, and we see the extra wolf-nipples among the fur that is growing there. It’s disturbing because it was not played for horror, as a turnoff, but was intended to be sexy . . . and it was.

Emily Perkins was great as Brigitte, too. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an actress exude that much discomfort from every pore. She embodied teenage dork awkwardness with a perfection that was both funny and sad. Her eyes were amazing. Incredibly expressive. Her love for her sister was obvious, and equally obvious was that it wasn’t stupid or thoughtless. Brigitte knew what Ginger was, and loved her anyway. She was slow to give up hope for her sister, she held on right to the end, and I like, too, that the script made it obvious that this wasn’t because Brigitte had any illusions about Ginger’s nature.

What annoys me about movies like this is that they conflate the bestial and sexual in us with what is most damaging and dangerous. That isn’t right or accurate or fair. Never mind the negative press that gives to wild animals, the negative press it gives to women is enough. It’s not that our bestial side cannot destroy us, it’s that those tropes are so often used against women attempting to grow up that employing them even in the service of a structurally sound tale is morally problematic, and calls the ethical underpinnings of the entire tale into question. In these tales, no alternative is presented beyond “don’t be sexual, don’t do these forbidden things,” and because these forbidden things are not, in themselves, harmful, this “lesson” is something that we are culturally going to have to stop reinforcing, or we are at least going to have to examine how we reinforce it, and who truly needs it enforced.

It’s easy to call up the image of the beast in a woman, to tell a story about a girl-child finding her teeth, and it is easy to find power in those stories. It’s also easy to endow the beast-woman with the most alluring womanly features and the most terrifying features of the animal/monster. It’s not so easy to resolve the questions that doing so raises, because it’s very hard not to bow to the cultural training that says that female sexuality is horrifying and dangerous. From a narrative standpoint, it’s not easy to resolve those questions without taking that power away again and pulling the wolf’s teeth. We aren’t told how else the story might end, so we are left repeating the same ending over and over.

I’ve read people defending this as feminist art, but I have to put a bullet in that one. If it was meant as parody, it is such a close reproduction that it fails to subvert. It lays the whole concept of destructive female sexuality bare in its stark ridiculousness, but it does not turn that on its ear. It shows us how silly it is, but offers no alternative, only the same old end.

It has value, I think, for all that – this movie could easily be used as a very entertaining and watchable example of everything that is wrong with stories about girls gone wild. It didn’t work as feminist, though. Just because something is funny, fun, sharply-written, sexy, thoroughly enjoyable, and written by a woman does not mean it’s feminist.

Come on. It’s the oldest story in the book: Girl has sex for fun, girl is punished, girl dies. Nothing feminist about that.

Tellingly, Ginger does not choose to be what she is — not even by choosing poorly. It is thrust upon her as a very obvious metaphor for the horrors of puberty and the onset of sexual maturity and the dawn of sexual behavior. So now, we have changed the elements, and the naked bones of the story go like this: Girl becomes woman. Girl tries to enjoy being a woman. Girl cannot control herself. Girl becomes a monster and has to die.

In the original story, when Little Red Riding Hood is cornered by the wolf in the forest, he asks her “Which way are you going? By the path of pins or the path of needles?”

Red chooses the path of needles, and the wolf takes the path of pins, or vice versa. The symbolism of this passage is lost to us, but its significance is not: it is a choice bound up with womanhood and carnal love and knowledge of the flesh. If she chooses the longer way, the dawdling way, the wolf will go on ahead of her, impersonate her to gain entry to Grandmother’s house, and therein commit his murderous acts. If Red goes directly to her grandmother’s house, as she was told, we are given to understand that the wolf would not arrive in time to commit his deceit. In some versions, Red actually asks the wolf to choose the correct path for her. (Ironically, viewed outside the fairy-tale morality where all little girls are good and all big wolves are bad, this is actually not a foolish idea at all. Who knows the way through the woods better than a wolf?)

However it happens, Red takes one path and la Béte, the bzou, the man-wolf, takes the other. When she arrives at the cottage, he has made his entry and is already waiting for Red. He serves Red her own Grandmother’s flesh and seduces her out of her clothes and into bed, where he eats her right up.

Worth noting is that not every version punishes the wolf for this – the wolf is only being a wolf, after all; it’s the girl who shouldn’t have gone into the woods dressed like that, who should have known better – but most people are familiar with the huntsman and most people believe in the badness of wolves and little girls alike, and so in most modern tellings the wolf, too, must go to his fate and his belly full of rocks as punishment for being a carnivorous and sexual being, and for corrupting a little girl into the same.

But, you see, it does not really matter which path Red takes. No matter which version you read, the one where she chooses the path of pins, the one where she chooses the path of needles, the one where she lets the wolf choose for her, the end is the same: both paths condemn her. The quickest road takes her to her grandmother’s house, safely away from the wolf, safely within the narrow little world allowed to her; it is a shorter road to a death by inches, because the girl has turned her back on everything but what is asked and expected of her. She does not even learn the cruel lesson of the wolf’s seduction. She doesn’t taste even that much wildness.

The longer road dallies and dawdles and takes its pleasurable time, but in the end it leads to the darkened cottage, to the ritual cannibalism, the shining teeth and – only if Red is truly lucky – the cleaving axe offering rebirth from the belly of the beast and a second chance to choose the safer path.

Once Red has met the wolf, has experienced temptation, has been asked to come away into the woods, she is already damned. Damned just for meeting the wolf. She can’t make a right choice. Ginger, like Red herself, is only offered one choice: continue unchecked down the path which, we are given to understand, can only lead to murder, cannibalism, and lesbian incest . . . or cease to be what she is and go back to the powerlessness she had before. Be condemned for being an animal, or remain a child forever. Path of pins, path of needles. There is no third path of learning to deal with your beast responsibly, no third path of learning when to use wolf manners and when to speak like a human woman, no third path where knowing the wolf is the right, smart, safe thing to do. No, you turn your back on him, or you let him eat you alive.

It’s not much of a choice at all, really.

But so it is for women, so it always is. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Powerlessness or death. The end is always the same, no matter which path you choose . . . and one cannot choose not to meet the beast.

And now my fur has turned to skin
And I’ve been quickly ushered in
To a world that I confess I do not know,
But I still dream of running careless through the snow
And through the howlin’ winds that blow
Across the ancient distant flow,
It fills our bodies up like water till we know.
– Blitzen Trapper, Furr

From the dark into the black,
Throwbacks always have to go,
But now I know it’s painless.
– Tarot, Painless

I would recommend, if you want to see a very good movie that discusses these things in a more approachably female way, that you see A Company of Wolves, based on the peerless Angela Carter story of the same name. And while you’re at it, reading the rest of the book in which it appears, The Bloody Chamber, is probably a good idea.

Return of the Living Dead 3

I thoroughly enjoyed Return of the Living Dead III for the same reason why I love Wishmaster – it’s good fun with a solid bit of kink. A brilliant, young and gorgeous Melinda Clarke (you may know her as Lady Heather from CSI) really owns this movie.

As a story, it’s nothing to write home about. The military continues to be stupid, casualties are had, there’s a security breach when the colonel’s son reanimates his daredevil but sensitive girlfriend. There are the requisite non-zombie bad guys, a group of street thugs who cross dead-Melinda. There’s an out-of-place homeless River Man who acts as the oracle of the film. There’s a little sex and romance with a definite, intentional kinky side because pain keeps the hunger for brains away. And there’s some solid gore factor.

The gore factor is actually quite interesting to watch – without the help of CGI, the gore was entirely dependent on the prosthetics team, and they came through surprisingly well for a sequel movie. I was amazed at the macabre artistic skill, and it’s one of the reasons why I might be interested in purchasing the movie eventually.

Melinda Clarke is the other reason. She’s become known over her last few projects for being a mistress of pain in one way or other, and she’s quite a poised, beautiful woman at her present age, so it was a delight to see her in her early twenties. She reminds me of Amber Tamblyn (which makes me eager to see how Amber will age), and she takes zombie sadomasochism and makes it her bitch, completely rocking the self-piercing, cuts, glass and metal spikes near the end. Melinda didn’t have to for a sequel zombie movie, but she really committed herself to her character – in the midst of fun schlock, it was a pleasure to see the aspects of her character’s various selves as the situation calls for them: carefree, sexy daredevil, zombie with pain and brains on her mind, and a desperate woman with a dreadful hunger but trying to be what she was.

By the end, I was surprised by how good the film looked (even if the story was nothing special) and how much I liked watching it. I’d recommend it if you’re into some good kinky fun (a la Wishmaster), if simply for your curiosity’s sake. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t – don’t expect too much, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Wicked Little Things

The premise of Wicked Little Things is already weak – it is one thing to have ghost children, which lends itself to more varied presentations of the ghosts (i.e. whole and healthy-looking, rotting corpse, spider movements, Japanese demon). At least you know that the supernatural mechanism of creating ghosts is pretty straightforward – strong negative energy at death can lead to entities returning until business is finished. It is another to have wimpy looking zombie children, created by no other mechanism than a vision of black-eyed children eating people. Zombification generally needs an explanation – is it radiation? a voodoo priest? a rage virus? In Wicked Little Things, we are given no such acceptable explanation. According to the requisite crazy mountain man, they want revenge, but that’s a ghost’s prerogative.

So the premise is already weak. The acting is all right, working of course with a poor, hackneyed script. It seems to be a dull cross between Dark Water and The Messengers. Like in The Messengers when it was nice to see an early Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame, I enjoyed seeing Scout Taylor-Compton (of the Halloween remakes) in a young teenager role, although her character was quite whiny. She was still already too cute for words when she wanted to be.

Even the setting and make-up was so unoriginal as to lose their impact. The only thing that would have made Wicked Little Things officially throwaway would be if they had made it PG-13, thus robbing it of any edge at all. As it is, not even the edge is all that edgy – it’s just nice when horror movies that build themselves on gory subjects like zombies do not hide their goriness.

It’s a good movie to watch, then forget as though you never watched it all. It’s substance-less drivel, for only the most committed of horror fans.

Wishmaster

I must confess that I love this movie and enjoy its sequel. It has a cult following rather than being particularly legitimized by the horror community at large (at least as I understand it… I certainly don’t hear about the Wishmaster as much as I hear about the Candyman and Freddy Krueger). But I watch it more often than I watch Nightmare on Elm Street, which is easily my favorite slasher movie ever, and that’s saying something about how much I like Wishmaster.

To begin, Wishmaster is a cheese pizza. I don’t know whether that the direction that they wanted to take it or not, but the end result is a movie that is as much comedy as horror and certainly doesn’t seem to take itself very seriously. There are times when the violence is high, but there still seems to be as much laughter as gag reflex. At the very least, the viewer appreciates Craven’s prosthetics team and their last hurrah (although the CGI leaves a lot to be desired, especially since the production dates were late in the last century, enough to do better). The formula is typical, the prosthetics era obvious and fantastic, and while there are a few plot holes and mistakes, it certainly has the potential to just be the kind of movie that you just coast along with and forget at the end, a blood-and-popcorn slasher flick.

But it isn’t. And the primary reason for this is the excellent work done by actor Andrew Divoff, who plays the Wishmaster in his djinn and human face. Divoff commits himself to the role of the gleefully malevolent djinn, but he never once takes his role too seriously – think Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare sequels, and you’ll know what I mean. As a result, he becomes one of the most charismatic villains of last century’s slashers. That delightful smirk, the pock-marked but handsome face, the smooth baritone of the human becoming the metallic, mechanical rasp of the djinn (a sound that came entirely from Divoff rather than being edited in), the sheer enjoyment he shows when he gains a soul for a wish, his innate magnetism when confronted with the camera. The Genie-blue contacts and shirt under his suit after he gets his human face is an especially subtle and nice nod to the genie myths before, and the color looks particularly striking on him. Divoff completely owns the movie and elevates it to cult status beyond the mediocrity it could have been.

Tammy Lauren, who plays the female heroine Alexandra, does a fine job herself, although it is not a stand-out role in the film. She is better termed a stand-out character among the slew of strong slasher heroines. For one thing, she’s older – she’s a career woman probably in her last twenties/early thirties who analyzes fine jewelry for a prestigious auction house rather than a high school or college student. Like most slasher heroines, she does not have an active sex life, although she is pursued by her male best friend at the start of the movie in a scene that almost feels tacked on to give her a love interest counter to the djinn’s obsession. The man dies at the beginning of the movie anyway – although she decides to take him up on his offer of going a little further at the end of the movie after everything goes back to how it used to be, Alex is alone romantically for the better part of the movie, another aspect of her unusual characterization. And sex itself is entirely absent, which is almost a slasher faux pas!

Alex’s only help is another stand-out actress, Jenny O’Hara as the classics professor Wendy Derleth. She, like Andrew Divoff, is a particularly magnetic and charismatic character – apt, considering the djinn uses her face for a pivotal and powerful scene. There is also an odd woman-on-woman part of that scene that I cannot help but like – unusual because most lesbian undertones in movies and television (especially horror) are among the young and femme, and O’Hara was already in her late forties/early fifties. Of course, she was the djinn wearing her face at the time, so when she was so interested in Alex’s welfare, asking whether she wanted anything, then that stroke of Alex’s hand, it was actually the djinn. But it was still an incredibly compelling and even beautiful scene that seems pleasantly out of place.

As far as its flaws, they are many. The most obvious one that is hard to overlook is the way that the rules of wishing are bent to the point of breaking. Sometimes, the victims absolutely have to say “I wish,” and others, the djinn can use its power for other expressions of wanting, like “prefer” or “would love.”

There are some cult horror classic cameos, such as Robert Englund as an officious art collector, Ted Raimi as his assistant, and Tony Todd as a bouncer, and each one of them is a pleasure to have on the cast (particularly Robert Englund, who I have a soft spot for).

For those who have not seen Wishmaster, it is a movie that I recommend without hesitation, but with the disclaimer that it’s not supposed to be a good film. Just good fun. With the awesome Andrew Divoff sauce. Period.

-Magdalune