31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 10: The Cell

2000.

We did it. We survived the 1990s and now we're a third of the way to Halloween. How you feeling so far?

Here’s a high concept pitch for you: Inception meets Hannibal. Let’s jump inside the mind of a disturbed serial killer and have some adventures inside. Sounds fun, right? Can you imagine a nightmare full of imagery too baroque for most JRPGs? That’s the journey we’re going on in The Cell, directed by Tarsem Singh.

Singh is one of those directors I wish better for. He’s a darling filmmaker for a certain set of movie nerds. Somebody is going to reply to this about how I really need to see his second movie, The Fall from 2006. (Yes, I’m getting to it. One day, I promise you.) Even his less-loved movies like Immortals or Mirror/Mirror employ incredible imagination and artistry behind them. Immortals is a boring fantasy movie that Singh turned into a unique work of art. Nobody else out there is working with such intense style in live-action. And if they are, they are not making movies intended for wide audiences.

The Cell was too bold for 2000. Going through the original batch of reviews, they’re mostly negative. I’ll get back to one later that stood out to me. Many critics just did not understand what this movie was doing, or were turned-off by its more gruesome elements. Audiences though, flocked to the movie en mass. It made over $100 million at the box office. But these days, The Cell is largely forgotten. It's a cult classic without a cult. I don't hear many horror fans arguing for it. Somebody does write a piece once a year arguing The Cell should be rediscovered. Those pieces never work, the movie remains buried in obscurity. I do not expect to turn things around for this movie.

The Cell’s plot involves two concepts, one horror, one SciFi. The horror concept is about a serial killer, Carl Rudolph Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio playing to type), who traps women in pre-programmed contraptions that drown them after days of slow watery torture. Carl is suffering from a brain disease that has created his schizophrenia, and that disease strikes him comatose the very minute before the FBI catches him. That leaves the head investigator, Agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn), mere hours to save Carl’s latest victim, but with no way to talk to the killer. Luckily, there is also the SciFi premise. This is an experimental VR machine that allows researchers to jump inside your brain and share a dream. With no other option, Agent Novak recruits the best psychiatrist on this team, Catherine (Jennifer Lopez, hello again), to jump inside Carl’s mind and find the clues.

The dream premise allows Singh to go as wild as he wants with the art design. We open with Catherine inside the dream of a little boy, riding a white horse through the dunes, in a feathery dress that would not look out of place in a Final Fantasy game. Carl’s imagination, unsurprisingly, is even more vivid. Sometimes his world is disturbingly beautiful, such as when he sits at the top of a throne room with massive curtain-like wings stretching out. Or it’s all twisted and bloody contraptions, like something out of a kinky music video. There's also the indescribably weird. A horse gets split apart into a dozen segments – and is still alive.

While the Carl we see in the real world seemingly nothing but a heinous monster, his dream-self is often more innocent. Real Carl likes to go hard on the sadist fetishes. In a very awful scene, he suspends himself on S&M piercing hooks to masturbate over a woman's corpse. Dream Carl can either be a grotesque Shin Megami Tensei boss, or to Catherine’s surprise, a lost and troubled little boy. Catherine soon loses track of the mission, instead hoping save whatever is still human inside this monster.

The ticking clock premise does continue through The Cell. Agent Novak goes on his own dream journey and will do his best to save the day. But the movie largely loses interest in this. Eventually the real question becomes how close Catherine can get to Carl. Plenty of horrible things happen in The Cell, including one gruesome moment involving Vince Vaughn’s guts and a crank. But this is not an exploitation movie. It’s a movie that wants us to understand that there are no monsters, only victims. The world does not need to perpetuate cycles of punishment and pain. What we instead have is a splendid ending where Catherine reaches out and brings Carl a kind of peace.

That leads me to that one review that really stood out. I typically do not want to call out reviews, but this was especially bad. It’s a Slate piece from 2000, written by David Edelstein.  Quote: “…I don’t want to see the serial killer (or even his inner child) coddled and empathized with and forgiven. I want to see him shot, stabbed, impaled, eviscerated, and finally engulfed – shrieking – in flames.” This is terrible, Dave. It’s one thing for a critic to miss the point of a movie, it’s another thing entirely to get it, then outright reject it because the filmmakers are capable of more sympathy and humanity than you are. Edelstein is also getting to the heart of the problem. He wants pure evil that can be destroyed by the golden heroes. However, that doesn't speak to the reality of this movie, or real life.

The entire serial killer obsession is often one that looks to dehumanize, to exploit. Jeffrey Dahlmer has been in multiple horror movies, mostly bad ones. They view him as this purely evil entity. However, the real Dahlmer, was no demon. He was a sad, pitiful, lonely man. It’s easier to reckon with super genius maniacs than homophobic societies and incompetent police forces that allowed people like Dahlmer to exist. The Cell is playing in the policing fantasies of FBI criminal profiling, which have turned out to be largely bunk. Luckily the movie is not solely interested in that worldview. It can also imagine a better more just place than what policing alone can offer.

Next time we travel to 2001, the year of the tabloids completely inventing a summer shark scare, the New England Patriots wasting a sixth round pick on some nobody loser called Thomas Brady who will never amount to anything, and our next movie, Dagon.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 9: The Sixth Sense

1999.

It is impossible to discuss The Sixth Sense without discussing the twist. Try watching the movie now, I dare you to focus on anything else. I just could not. I found myself following Bruce Willis in every scene, watching the trick play out. Plenty of movies from this era were wound up in a great twist ending: Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, Memento, etc. The Sixth Sense’s twist is the hardest to ignore. There are few shots, few scenes, that do not depend entirely on the sleight of hand director M. Night Shyamalan is playing.

So, let’s get it out of the way, because you know the twist by now. Here’s your last chance to turn away from SPOILERS with the most famous twist in movie history other than Darth Vader being Luke’s dad: (SPOILERS AGAIN) Bruce Willis is dead. He’s a ghost the entire time.

 Boom! You got us, M. Night. Well, played, you clever bastard.

The twist at work is brilliantly executed. We repeatedly see Bruce Willis’s Dr. Malcolm Crowe in scenes with other characters. You just never notice that he’s not interacting with the adults. Sometimes the movie just outright fools us. Malcolm’s wife Anna (Olivia Williams) says “happy anniversary” in his direction, but ignores everything else he has been saying. One scene gives us the implication that Malcolm was mid-conversation with Toni Collette’s Lynn Sheer, the mother of Cole (Haley Joel Osment). They're sitting directly across from each other when the shot opens, so we imagine an interaction that has not happened.

However, I don’t think The Sixth Sense needed this twist. Don't get me wrong, I love it. It's genius. But I have issues with it. This is not a movie building to a great twist, it’s a great movie with a twist in it. And I’d argue, the ending actually becomes something of a distraction. Upon this rewatch, I was too busy following the mechanics of the movie to just watch the movie. “What is Shyamalan hiding up his sleeve in this scene?”, I wondered. That left me ignoring the more successful drama being played out.

The Sixth Sense is about this little boy, Cole, who is bullied and isolated from the world. A child-psychiatrist, Dr. Crowe, has been hired by his mother to help the boy out. (Or so we believe. There is no actual explanation as to how Malcolm got on this case.) Slowly, Malcolm is able to break through the boy’s boundaries and discover what is really troubling him: the undead. Ghosts are all over Philadelphia, and they all want attention from Cole. Sometimes that attention is terrifying. The Sixth Sense has some real banger scares with a dead boy and puking girl. Those shots are still scary twenty years later.

However, Cole discovers that as scary as the dead are, they’re still just people. People who need help. Together with Dr. Malcolm, Cole is eventually able to accept his gift. He can be something of a hero, right terrible wrongs for spirits with no voice. He can even open up to his mother and admit what is really going on. 

This is a running theme with Shyamalan: exceptional people overcoming the world’s judgement to do great things. He accomplishes it far more successfully in Unbreakable, which is his best movie. Sometimes this anti-institutional theme makes his movies really problematic. Glass is almost an Ayn Rand fantasy of individualism. Old decided to take on the pharmaceutical industry in the absolute worst possible year. Nobody else is making movies like Shyamalan, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

The Sixth Sense is a spectacular drama with great acting everywhere. Donnie Wahlberg and Greg Wood only get one scene each, and they both are amazing. Haley Joel Osment is the best actor in the movie, which is shocking considering how tiny he is. He was only about ten when this movie was made, and the way shots are staged make him look even younger. He’s a helpless little lamb compared to the massive monumental scale of the buildings around him. Cole still calls his mom "Mama". Toni Collette and Osment’s final scene together is an absolute tear-jerker, settling all the drama the movie has built up in an overture of love and acceptance.

But then the last scene has to be about Malcolm and the big twist pay-off. I wish The Sixth Sense was remembered more as a great drama and less this twist movie. I why this was done. The ghost reveal isn’t lacking sympathy and emotion. But it is gimmicky. I would rather people walk away from this movie with hearts pull of positivity and wonder, not applauding as the magician pulls the ghost of Bruce Willis out of a hat.

M. Night Shyamalan has had a roller coaster of a career. He reached the highest of highs early on, being prematurely hailed as “the new Hitchcock”. Ten years later, his stock had turned completely toxic. I think the problem were the twists. Eventually his movies became juggling acts of six or seven ideas all to wow the audience with final reveals. Signs and The Village suffer badly for that. Or Shyamalan just got up his own ass with movies like Lady in the Water, an atrocious ego trip. He’s mostly recovered over the last ten years with a string of solid movies. Old's final twist is awful, but I liked that movie.

Shyamalan is one of our most talented directors. His eye for staging shots and building tension is masterful. He can pull beautiful human moments out of ghost stories or Superman movies or alien invasions. Unfortunately, over his career, he hasn't re-found the humanity on display in The Sixth Sense again. I won’t take anything away from him – The Sixth Sense is easily the best movie we’ve covered so far. It’s damn good. But it also makes you wish he had more movies like this.

Next time we travel to the NEW MILLENNIUM, the year 2000!!!! That's the year X-Men launched two decades of Marvel movie dominance, the Supreme Court doomed millions of people to horrible deaths by making George W. Bush president, and our next movie, The Cell.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 8: Ring

1998.

We’ve now progressed far enough into the Nineties that we’ve reached the J-horror explosion. One of the biggest movies of that fad was Ring (AKA “Ringu”), directed by Hideo Nakata. This is a film that, in this hemisphere at least, has been mostly supplanted by its Americanized remake. When I say “The Ring”, you’re probably thinking of Naomi Watts and Gore Verbinski. The Ring ended up being the prototype for an entire craze of Hollywood remakes of movies all across East Asia. Some of those remakes were solid, such as 2004’s The Grudge, which stayed mostly unchanged. Most were horrendous acts of butchery, like the 2005 version of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece, Pulse. 

(Thanks, Harvey Weinstein, you ruined that too, you piece of shit.)

Ring is an important movie for more reasons than just a fad. If you've seen any movie made this century with a creepy little girl with long black hair covering her face, they probably were inspired by this. Sadako, the evil little girl who will kill you in seven days, must be regarded as one of the great icons of horror. The trope of creepy ghost women in Japanese folklore is one that goes back centuries, But Sadako is one that made stringy-haired pale waifs an object of nightmares across the globe. From F.E.A.R. to A Tale of Two Sisters to Cabin in the Woods, Sadako's influence is vast. Also, much of the modern creepypasta obsession with cursed media is predicted by Ring. Would there be a Slenderman without Sadako?

There were actually two different J-horror explosions in the West. One was the mass-plundering remake fad already discussed. The other was a more respectable recognition in the West of Japanese filmmaking and style. Movies like Audition, Ichi the Killer, and Battle Royale made their way across the Pacific largely unaltered and found niche audiences. Eventually those movies, especially Battle Royale, had immense cultural impacts of their own. We did not need a single American actor to translate it.

I would like to say that with Ring America got this wrong. I'll admit, I'm against Westernizations. I have always been suspicious of the impulse behind these remakes. I know a lot of audiences do not like subtitles, I know a lot of audiences do not want to watch something foreign. Neither of those urges feel all that great to me. People should have open minds and experience more varied culture. Studios also are underestimating audiences here. People can feel sympathy for movie characters even if they aren’t a blonde English-speaking White lady.

That said, I am sad to report that 1998’s Ring is a worse movie than the 2002 version. I really expected to like the Japanese version better, and I just don’t. Nanako Matsushima is not a bad actress, she is able to play the part played by Naomi Watts successfully enough. The great Hiroyuki Sanada is definitely a trade-up from Martin Henderson. I also like that this version of Ring has color and is not bathed entirely in a blue filter like Verbinski’s movie. The 1998 version is a very handsomely-shot movie. But it isn't as fun. Not for me, sorry.

It's an unfair fight in a lot of ways. Verbinski had a bigger budget and modern CG effects. The huge climatic moment of Sadako (Rie Inō)’s big reveal is still terrifying in 1998’s version. (I say I'm not too impressed by Ring, but this is the first movie so far to have given me a nightmare after seeing it.) But where Verbinski can have her body seep water and stutter like VHS static, that can’t happen here. Her hair and clothes are even neater. I think it’s a great scene in either version, and the 1998 movie needs respect for being first. But Verbinski wins this fight.

The bigger problem is that the rest of this 1998 version is very slow. It’s a movie mostly set in libraries or news offices or editing studios, only breaking that up to sit around apartments or hotels. There’s a ticking clock until the seven days pass, which adds tension. But there is nothing happening on the way to that countdown. The American version throws a few jump-scares in. The Japanese version has nothing along the way. We have a very scary opening, very scary ending, and frankly boring middle. Worse, Matsushima and Sanada have no chemistry. They’re supposed to be ex-spouses, so you expect some tension there. Instead I am left with no idea why they broke up or why they were ever together in the first place.

Beyond technical execution, Ring has been a concept that has survived the test of time. Almost nobody has a working VHS player anymore but Ring movies still keep coming out. There have been thirteen different Ring movies in three languages. There are two alternate sequels to Ring in Japan, which both spawned their own side-franchises. The Ring is big enough that it launched its own Freddy vs. Jason-style crossover movie in 2016. That’s Sadako vs. Kayako, basically The Ring vs The Grudge, a wonderfully wild concept that fills my heart with joy. Who would you rather be killed by? The creepy black-haired girl in the attic or the creepy black-haired girl in the TV? 

I am so glad to live in a word of infinite wonders such as these.

Next time we travel to 1999, the year of Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary, and Jessica all discovering that Lou Bega was cheating on them, John Elway's final rodeo, and our next movie, The Sixth Sense.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 7: Anaconda

1997.

My original plan for today was to cover Guillermo del Toro's Mimic, a movie about killer cockroaches in trench coats that seemed fascinating and terrifying. But then I discovered that Harvey Weinstein had interfered with that movie too. Mimic is sadly uninteresting and disappointing.

So I called an audible and instead went with Anaconda, directed by Luis Llosa, a movie with no ambitions to be anything other than stupid fun. This is also also a milestone for us in that this is the very first movie we're covering that I saw in theaters. I was six-years-old, played hooky from Kindergarten, and my dad took me out to see Owen Wilson get eaten by a giant snake.

Anaconda is the biggest movie we've covered so far in this series. Not just in budget, which at $45 million might dwarf all the previous movies combined, but also in cast. In '97, Jennifer Lopez was not a household name just yet, but she would be superstar in just two years. Joining her is Ice Cube, Jon Voight, and as mentioned, Owen Wilson. Even the less famous people in this movie are Kari Wuhrer and Jonathan Hyde, who you'll definitely recognize at least if you've seen The Mummy or played Red Alert II. Eric Stoltz is here too, but spends most of Anaconda in a coma, so you'll forget he's even in this. The throw-away first victim of the giant snake is Machete himself, Danny Trejo. 

Anaconda is as star-studded as horror movies get. Eating this cast is our title character, a big killer anaconda made out of what were then cutting-edge special effects. This movie made $136 million globally and inspired four sequels. So considering that Anaconda is as mainstream as it gets, is it any good? 

And the answer, I'm happy to say, is yes. This is a fun time. It's what we needed after yesterday's bummer.

The first thing we need to talk about, because it is the thing you'll remember the most about Anaconda, is Jon Voight's accent. He plays Paul Serone, a leering snake-poacher and psychopath. I've met people from all over the world, and I still don't know what accent Jon Voight is supposed to have. Wikipedia's summary says he's supposed to be Paraguayan. Serone never speaks Spanish or Guarani, though he sometimes mutters in Latin. Even by the of the movie, Serone remains a total mystery, just a weird dude who spends most of the movie leering at the other cast members.

The rest of the cast are a crew of documentarians hunting for an indigenous civilization somewhere in the Amazon. (Never mind that this is a bad idea which will probably expose the natives to modern disease and exploitation, just run with it.) While sailing down the river, they come across a stranded hunter, our mystery man Serone. Serone takes charge and manipulates the voyage away from hunting natives and towards poaching snakes. Jonathan Hyde is impossibly British, I think he says "bloody" a dozen times. He's the one person who can get even close to Voight's ham levels. Still, Voight is off in his universe in Anaconda, usually only Marlon Brando could swing a movie to such wacky levels.

Now, does a bizarre accent and hammy performance ruin a movie? No! Jon Voight is fantastic in Anaconda, he makes the movie. He's got an intensity that nobody else can match. Anaconda is Paul Serone's movie, everybody else is just along for the ride, whether they like it or not. You might get eaten by the giant snake, or you might get a dead monkey spat in your face. Either way, Serone led you there.

Serone's partner in evil is, of course, the snake. It's a great monster. Anaconda works as a creature-feature. Not even special effects can match Voight's intensity, but the creature is massive and terrifying. There's a particularly great moment where a character is trapped on a cliff face, pinned by the snake, and tries to leap away to safety. Do they get away? Nope, the snake catches them mid-air. Curtains for that guy.

One thing I have not much discussed during this series is the massive revolution happening in special effects all through the 1990s. There have been tiny bits of computer generated effects here and there in the movies we've covered. Lord of Illusions had a lot of them, but made sure they looked other-worldly and unreal. Anaconda is our first movie to really bet hard on CG to convince an audience that a monster is eating Owen Wilson. And yeah, it's a 1997 movie, the CG is imperfect. However, when the snake is not in CG, it's a animatronic puppet. It looks fantastic. The effects are as good here as they are in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, also from '97. Anaconda's production combined the mediums of CG and practical effects in smart ways. Mostly, it holds up.

Anaconda is a movie that ends with a big-ass killer snake that is on fire chasing J-Lo across a river. It's that movie, it never stops being that movie. It's a high-adventure out in the jungle with kills, thrills, and ham. What more do you need?

Next time we reach 1998, the year of Bruce Willis and Aerosmith saving the Earth from a meteor the size of Texas, Bill Clinton's creepy behavior launching a political scandal the size of Texas, and our next movie, Ring AKA Ringu... which is not the size of Texas.

31 Days, 31 Hororr Reviews Day 6: Hellraiser IV: Bloodline

1996.

We have reached a milestone in this series. In 1996, I was five-years-old and was finally conscious enough to remember things. This is the first movie I'm reviewing that I remember existing at the time. I saw commercials for it on TV. Obviously, my parents did not let a Pre-K kid see Hellraiser IV: Bloodline in 1996. It took me almost twenty years, but can I finally correct my parents' mistake?

No, my parents were right to keep me away. Hellraiser IV sucks hard.

Pinhead is not the only horror icon to go to space. Jason did it in Jason X, Leprechaun did it in Leprechaun 4, and Jeff Bezos did it earlier this year. Unfortunately, for space slashers, the SciFi aspect is just a shallow gimmick. It's a bad sign of a franchise totally out of ideas. Most of these movies suck, even Dracula 3000 sucked.

But I had hope here with Bloodline. It was  the last Hellraiser that mattered. The last one where anybody cared on any level. After this, all the movies all went straight-to-video. Series creator Clive Barker would no longer have any involvement at all. And even the scripts were mostly repurposed concepts that had nothing to do with Cenobites. Pinhead got shoved in last-minute and suddenly you had a Hellraiser movie. I don't recommend any of those sequels. Or this movie.

As bad as space slashers are, I don't think Hellraiser necessarily doesn't work in space. The whole concept of Hellraiser is that our reality is a small bubble of sanity in the midst of vast oceans of infinite pain and kink. There is something inherently disturbing about space. It's a reminder that we're helpless beings in an infinite darkness. I also like the idea that even a future civilization is helpless against the Cenobites. We can conquer physics and travel the stars, and it makes no difference. Even our greatest selves in our wildest imaginations of achievement are helpless before the forces of pure sexual chaos. So there could have been something here.

Basically I was hoping for Event Horizon. That isn't a perfect movie, it's often a very dumb movie, but it did something with a spooky spaceship.

Hellraiser IV is a victim of a pair of gentlemen called Bob and Harvey Weinstein. These two, admittedly, would go on to commit far more terrible crimes than mishandling the Hellraiser franchise. I mean no disrespect to their human victims when I discuss their cinematic ones. Still, I hate these guys. I could go on four hours about all the movies they ruined. They took a creative and vibrant horror concept with unforgettable imagery and turned into pure trash. Hellraiser III was already extremely dumb, but at least dumb on an impressive scale. Cenobites fights cops in the street. Our current movie is just cheap and sad. It is nothing but connective tissue between kills. Hellraiser was and still could have been so much more. The Weinsteins only could imagine another slasher series, so that's what we got.

Hellraiser IV: Bloodline, before the producers tore it apart, had big, ambitious ideas. It is a three-part saga centered around three men of the Merchant family (all played by Bruce Ramsay) and their centuries-long battle against the Cenobites they accidentally unleashed upon the world. This family is the one that invented the Lament Configuration box, and have some kind of genetic memory that keeps them returning to it. Bloodline's story goes from Early Modern France to the depths of the cosmos. 

Instead, the Weinsteins gave this project only four million dollars, the shoot was a disaster, and then they butchered it after the fact. There are three directors who worked on this project: Kevin Yagher, Joe Chappelle, and Rand Ravich. The final directing credit goes to "Alan Smithee", a fake name directors use when they've disowned their movie.

The movie comes off rather sad. The spaceship sets are pathetic for a major motion picture. They look like they were filmed in a basement. The movies does get a better-looking sets for France and modern-day Manhattan. If you have very little money, it is easier to find a handsome house and a loft apartment to film in, versus building a spaceship. As for the acting, it's all not great. Doug Bradley can still go a cool Pinhead, at least. Bruce Ramsay is not great in any of his roles. But a very young Adam Scott got his first role in this movie. So if you ever wanted to see a demonic vixen eat Adam Scott's face, I guess rent Hellraiser IV.

Admittedly, there is good gore. Kevin Yagher had a background in special effects, so at least he knew how to pull off some spectacular if preposterous kills. The Cenobites haven't lost a step when it comes to tearing people's faces off with hooks. There's a Twin Cenobite with actually a awesome make-up and prosthetic work. Pinhead has a Chatterer dog now, he also looks great. He's a good boy.

But violence is not what made Hellraiser Hellraiser, it never was. I enjoy gore, sure. However, what's intriguing  about Hellraiser is also what makes movies like Phantasm or From Beyond or even yesterday's Lord of Illusions. Jason Voorhees is a very simple concept: he's a big guy with a big bladed instrument who will kill you. Pinhead is not just going to kill you, he's going to transfer you to a realm of horny nightmares. He isn't from a Christian Hell, he's from a Hell beyond paradigms of good and evil. Instead now, in Hellraiser IV, he's just the Devil. He's mundane now. You know everything you need to know about him already.

"I cannot die, I am eternal!" rants Pinhead. He's not wrong. There will be Hellraiser sequels for as long as they make movies. They've made six more Hellraiser movies since Bloodline. And don't worry, they're not done. However, when it's all said and done, if this is all Pinhead can be, maybe he's better off dead.

Next time we travel to 1997, the year of Final Fantasy VII, every mom in the world crying over Princess Diana, and our next movie, Anaconda.