Tag Archives: Shudder

Perempuan Tanah Jahanam

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I think I like the Indonesian title better. “Woman of the damned land” is kind of badass, you know? Whereas, I cannot really determine what Impetigore is supposed to mean. My best guess is that it’s a portmanteau of the Latin “impetigo”, meaning to rush upon and attack, and “gore”, meaning buckle up and get ready for buckets of the stuff. And I’m sure that by Indonesian standards there was rather a lot of the stuff? Nah, that’s not fair. Whatever else this was, it was not a tame movie.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a broke-ass tollbooth attendant trying to determine how to make ends meet with your best friend who is also a broke-ass tollbooth attendant, only she’s a little more worldly than you are, and there’s been this creepy guy perving on you for a few days in a row, and now he’s identified you as a person with a different name from a village so small it isn’t on the map, and also tried to kill you with a machete because they in the village don’t want “your” curse anymore. So you dig through stuff your aunt left you when she died, and find indications that your long dead parents did in fact come from that village, and they have exactly one picture of you, when you were five right before they died and you went to live with your aunt, and as if it weren’t weird enough to only have the one picture, that picture has the name the machete-wielding perv called you by.

If I were that girl, I’d maybe run away from Indonesia or something? Not her. She sees the big expensive house in the background, and, remembering that they are both broke-ass 20-somethings, they decide to hare off to the remote village so they can sell the house and stop being quite so poor, even if the village is populated by the kind of dead-eyed people you would expect to find in Resident Evil 4.

All’s I’m saying is a) that is a really good setup, and b) between this and Satan’s Slaves (by the same director and producers), it’s fair to say that Indonesian horror cinema is having a moment.

Lastly, I have a thing that I do not know if I learned about Indonesian culture or that I learned about the writer or director of the film, or a thing that I learned about the makeup effects artist. But seriously a lot of people, with moderately implausible frequency, threaten suicide, and suicide of a very specific type at that. This is where I need a Joe Bob Briggs to come along and do my research for me and explain which one of the above is at play here.

Turkey Shoot

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Freedom is obedience, obedience is work, work is life.

Turkey Shoot is an Australian early ’80s era imagining of the fascist (or maybe Soviet communist?) dystopian future of a generation thence, where all undesirables are sent to re-education camps, only nobody ever seems to actually get re-educated enough to leave. And in the meantime there’s plenty of physical and sexual abuse by the guards to go around. I started to add “and mental abuse”, a la the camp’s number one lesson presented above to get people back to the right way of thinking so they could rejoin the Nation’s Great Society, but I guess that’s baked into “re-education camp” in the first place, innit?

I think fascist / communist hybrid is what they must have been going for. Or maybe Soviet communism was always basically fascist, but we focused on the economic system part because the Nazis had already been beaten and fascism was over? I dunno.

Anyway, the camp is the setting. At the end of act one, the actual plot is introduced, in which some rich people who were probably also political bigwigs were invited to hunt the most dangerous game. So a handful of the characters we’ve been given reason to care about are chosen as the hunted, and then there’s a big hunt in which things go pretty much as you’d probably expect, especially if you expected a random werewolf guy to be involved.

Hey, why not?

 

The Pool (2018)

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So, what I knew about The Pool going in is that it was a Thai movie about a dude trapped in a really deep, empty pool with a crocogator. Which, yeah, that’s enough by itself to fill like 75 minutes I reckon?

So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this is in fact a pressure cooker of a plot, where every few minutes brings another new twist that ratchets up the tension another notch, until… well, that would be telling, obviously, but what I will say is that by the end of the movie, I believed the writers were willing to go to any lengths, which is ultimately what you want out of a horror movie but so rarely get. Nobody is safe, no line is uncrossable.

Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence

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As you will no doubt remember from Maniac Cop and Maniac Cop 2[1], there was a maniac cop who was actually sort of undead too?, and who got the best of both Richard Roundtree and Bruce Campbell, which lets you know he was a badass. And it turns out that he’d been sold out by the city and left to die in prison, and once that truth was revealed he was able to rest in peace, secure in the knowledge that a balanced view of both sides of cops (ie, way too much brutality and people should be terrified of law enforcement, or else cops should protect each other unless it’s actually a bad apple, which it somehow never is though) had been presented over the course of the two films. And if that “balanced” message has aged badly, it’s still impressive that anyone was presenting a two-sided message in the late ’80s, instead of only the one side you’d expect.

Maniac Cop 3[2] proves you can have too much of a slightly but on average good thing. Because, you see, by the early ’90s, the dial had apparently swung back to cops are always right and it’s only the evil media misportraying them that causes problems. To wit: you would think that after a lady cop foils a pharmacy robbery, getting shot in the process, she’d be a hero, right? But instead, the footage is edited to make it look like she murdered the hostage while also trying to murder the perp, and now in addition to having no brain activity in her hospital room, she’s also the postergirl for “Police = Bad”, even though the unedited footage shows her being heroic but ambushed.

Okay, so that’s probably why the maniac cop comes back to life for more vengeance, right? Haha, no, he was raised by a voodoo priest at the beginning of the movie before any of that happened, for no apparent reason! But undead maniac cops get the paper and the 5 o’clock news, same as everyone else, so it isn’t long before he makes it his business anyway. (What an unnecessary subplot, the voodoo thing. I don’t get it at all.)

Anyway, none of that is important, and knowing it’s happening mostly makes the movie way worse than if you’re just watching it to see a maniac cop kill people for no apparent reason, regular slasher style. And then later to watch Robert Davi[3] drive down a highway into oncoming traffic for about five minutes straight, watching the road for maybe one of those minutes total while mostly unloading clip after clip of his gun out the passenger window into a maniac cop of some kind, complete with real time reloads in between and occasional pauses to comfort the screaming doctor lady in the passenger seat.

It is maybe the best cop car chase I’ve ever seen, outside of a Blues Brothers revival.

[1] You won’t.
[2] I had assumed that the sub-heading, “Badge of Silence”, would be a reference to a code of silence, a la thin blue line, a la cops not turning on other cops. But there was never a plotline that came close to that as a concept, so, I have no idea what they were going for. *shrug emoji*
[3] You don’t know you know who he is, but you’ve seen him before. He has Edward James Olmos cheeks, but with dead eyes.

The Beach House (2019)

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The movie starts with a high overhead shot of aquamarine water, and zooms down beneath the waves to something cloudy spurting from a crack in a rocky wall at the ocean’s bottom. We are told via music cues that this is ominous. The movie ends, if you were to play this scene backwards (dialogue excepted) with a high overhead shot of aquamarine water, tracking down to a beach and then a woman lying on her back on the beach, rocking slightly and saying over and over to herself, or possibly to the audience (since she’s speaking directly into the camera), “Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared.”

Meanwhile, I was wishing I had been.

Between those far too on-the-nose bookends, The Beach House is actually okay, if you go for flicks that are a cross between The Mist and Reefer Madness with a touch of body horror thrown in. A couple goes to, you know, a beach house, only to discover uninvited guests are also staying there. But none of these people are me, because they make friends and hang out getting stoned. But then a weird glowy (or high-induced?) fog rolls in, and shit gets real.

Except that phrase implies big actiony setpieces, whereas this was definitely slow and creepy, even in the glaring light of day. If they hadn’t tried so hard in the first and last scenes, I would have come away with a more positive overall impression.

De Dødes Tjern (2019)

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Lake of Death is a Norwegian remake of a famous (I’m told) Norwegian horror movie from 1958, Lake of the Dead. Same in Norwegian, though, as you can see. And man did it know it was a remake, what with all the dialogue references to Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil Dead, Cabin Fever, and so on. Mostly, that was the only problem with the movie. It couldn’t decide what kind of film it was. Slasher homage? Creepy ghost story? Portrait of a woman in declining sanity? Who knows! It really didn’t make a lick of sense until the last five minutes, at which point it made an extremely small amount of sense but still mostly not.

See, there’s this 20-something girl, and she and her twin brother owned a cabin on a lake in the Norwegian woods, or rather inherited it when they were orphaned, and eventually got it out of trust or got old enough to drive themselves to it, or, I don’t know how it worked. Usually people who are in foster care or being adopted don’t own cabins, okay? But then a year ago, the brother went missing presumed dead, and now the girl and some friends (a podcaster, a Dane, a blonde swimmer, a person who owned a car, and I forget who else) are visiting it and the lake one last time, before she sells the property.

Only, the lake has a creepy history about mesmerising people into being murderers or being a place where parents drowned their sick children who would not recover, and the cabin has unexpected secrets, and also now that they’re at the cabin, animals are being tortured, and people are going missing, and uh oh, oops all murder! ….except, you know, is it a ghost, or a newly crazy person, or a previously crazy person, or all of the above, or none of the above? Too many things, is what I’m saying here. Too many things. Pick a genre! …or transcend it, that’s okay too.

Spoilers, I guess, but I kind of wish it had been the ghost thing.

Jeruzalem

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The first few minutes of Jeruzalem show old Super 8 footage of not quite an exorcism, being performed by a catholic priest, a rabbi, and… an imam? (it wasn’t clear) after a dead mother had returned to her home in Jerusalem, with glowing eyes and, occasionally, tattered wings. This was accompanied by knowledge gleaned from the Talmud slash Jeremiah 19 that there are three gates to hell: one in the desert, one in the ocean, and one in Jerusalem.

My copy of Jeremiah 19 doesn’t make any kind of reference to that, but if you google for the three gates to hell, it’s apparently a thing from somewhere in the bible and/or Jewish teachings. I exited the rabbit hole before I got too deep or more confused.

Anyway, this is only like the first three minutes or so? The meat of the movie is two American girls, both of whom I believe were themselves Jewish, headed on vacation to Tel Aviv. The catch is, one of them is wearing Google Glass, because this was 2015 and the outcome of that particular piece of technological archaeology was not yet known. So it definitely gives off an early movie air of “what if Cloverfield, but with facial recognition tied to Facebook profiles and navigation and cat videos, instead of, y’know, a video camera?” It almost makes sense, as they were in her prescription, so why would she take them off? Counterargument: why would it always be recording, though? Or maybe there’s some deeper than I cared to look indictment of what gets stored on those multi-petabyte server farms of Google’s. …you know, if Glass had taken off and it was a thing to worry about.

Anyway, back to the plot: the girls meet this guy on their plane out, and make friends, and he convinces them to go to Jerusalem for a few days instead of Tel Aviv, because… honestly, I missed why. Yom Kippur maybe? So they go to the old city, and visit the Wailing Wall, and explore some creepy caves under the city, and go sexy clubbing, but things are occasionally unsettling in various ways, and before you know it… well, I’ll be honest, I actually had no idea as I entered the second half what it was actually going to be about, and that was pretty dang refreshing, so I’ll stop here and say that as found footage horror goes, I ain’t mad at it.

I’m not sure it made a lick of sense, and sometimes it relied on the technology being glitchy to heighten the tension, but it was nevertheless entertaining and unpredictable, and that’s not nothing.

Lyle

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Here’s a movie you’ve seen at least a hundred times before: pregnant lady, around whom strange things are happening. (Most obviously, the accidental(?) death of her toddler child in the new Brooklyn apartment they just moved into.) The two possibilities presented are a) she’s paranoid or b) Satanism!

The only real question is whether Lyle is finally the movie where she’s paranoid[1].

Snarky as I sound, it was pretty good. Maybe a few too many arty camera angles, but the questions of what actually is going on and, if so, who is in on it were kept coyly unanswered until the last ten minutes of the movie. …then again, it’s less than 70 minutes long, so perhaps I should be less impressed.

[1] There’s maybe a paper to be written on how this trope always goes in the direction I imply, while the trope where either spooky things are happening around a man or he’s snapped and started murdering people always goes in the “not spooky” column.

Yummy

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Since I saw Hack-O-Lantern last year, I’m pretty sure Yummy is / will be the weirdest[1] movie I see in 2021. It’s exactly the kind of movie I keep Shudder around for, because it’s so far outside the space of my expectations for any movie anywhere, yet in retrospect it was mandatory that someone finally make it.

Because, have you ever seen an indictment of the plastic surgery / beauty standard, of toxic masculinity, and of the male gaze, all bundled together into a zombie outbreak movie? Except also it’s not brave enough to truly shy away from nearly any of those things, insofar as they might shatter precious genre conventions. But to be honest, those failures are a big part of what makes it just so… noteworthy? I’m not sure what I mean, but it is extremely that thing.

A dutch(?) lady with breasts larger than she’d like, her hemophobic[2] boyfriend, and her slutty teen fifty-something mom go to what the write-ups describe as a sketchy plastic surgery hospital, but I’m not sure I see much of that?, in order to get (respectively) a breast reduction surgery, credit for being legitimately supportive, and an umpteenth facelift and/or lipo. Except: oops all zombies! (I maybe left out some twists and turns, but do you care? I think not.)

Topless zombies, flaming penises, explosive lipoinsertion, and horrific manhole covers are but a few of the treats in store for anyone with the distinguished tastes required to give this weird-ass movie a shot. Check it out!

[1] Weirdest is maybe the wrong word. I’ve definitely seen a far weirder movie, but it was basically someone’s coked out fever dream, and a little too weird. So I guess here I’m using weird with an upper limit of “can be described without first getting high myself”.
[2] Aside from being a great word, this is another standout aspect of the movie. How has nobody ever put someone afraid of blood into a zombie flick? And yet, here we are breaking new ground.

Amjeon

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Warning: Do Not Play is a movie about a student film called Warning, which the plot of the movie (not of the student film) exhorts you not to play. Well, okay, maybe not you, but it is exhorting everyone in the movie not to play it, and especially the not quite a student herself yet also not quite an auteur movie script writer / I’m pretty sure also director who has nevertheless become obsessed with it while trying to finish the script for her own horror movie.

Broadly, obsession is what the movie is about, and also the movie-within-the-movie probably? Mi-Jung’s life, what little of it there is in the first place, seems to quickly spiral out of control, at least any time she isn’t hunting clues to Warning‘s existence, or to its director’s identity, or to the filming locations. And anytime she is hunting for all of these things, she is surrounded by danger. Because Asian ghosty horror movie, y’know?

I liked it. It was either extremely dreamlike or playing with time loops, and I’m not sure which. Probably not both? Later events offer a third option, but that feels like a spoiler even by my semi-loose “look, we both know you’re not going to watch this” standards.

You will not like it if: a) you are allergic to not really knowing what just happened, for certain, or especially if b) you find yourself yelling at the writer lady every time she pulls out her phone during a dramatic confrontation and takes photos instead of hitting record. Come on, lady, you want to make movies! Remember?! (But I did appreciate the verisimilitude of how badly cracked her phone’s screen was.)