I Am Legend (2007)

directed by Francis Lawrence
USA
103 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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We're reading I Am Legend at my book club this coming month, so I decided I might as well check out all the film adaptations of it too. I watched this one for the first time a few years after it came out, and it really hasn't aged well. I give it credit for its sense of being "in the now" because as of 2007 (or a couple of years after 2007) it looked like real life, but nowadays it just feels painfully out-of-date.

This movie is basically only related to the book by title and the name of the protagonist alone. In every other respect, they couldn't be more dissimilar. The film takes the most frightening aspect of the book- the fact that the vampires are essentially human beings- and does away with it completely, rendering (literally rendering- the CGI is so bad) them into typical shrieking zombie caricatures who all look the same. I guess the notion of slowly going mad as the people you used to be familiar with stand outside your door and howl for your blood just isn't as flashy as a horde of vampires chasing Will Smith over decrepit cars and cracked concrete until he nearly falls off a cliff many times, but the lack of human element in this is its most egregious mistake. It's so intent on erasing the human that none of the vampires are played by actual flesh-and-blood people at all, and it looks horrible.

I think the problem that led this movie down all the wrong paths is that it focuses too much on loneliness as the physical state of being alone. Sure, Neville is surrounded by vampires when he stays out too late after sunset, but when he returns home, he is- save for Sam the dog, who out-acts every single person in this movie combined- totally alone. In the book, Neville is alone in that he's the last man who won't murder for a drop of blood, but at the same time, he's surrounded by the shambling remains of everyone he's ever known and loved. That kind of loneliness is far different from the "last man on Earth" stance I Am Legend The Movie™ shoots for.

I don't hate movies often, and I don't hate this one in its entirety. Most of the time when I dislike a movie it's because I have a genuine moral opposition to its content, not just because something about it is bad in a way that's unrelated to anything about its moral standing. But I can say faithfully that the ending of this film, when the vampires suddenly and for no reason abandon all previous indications that, as explicitly stated by the protagonist, they're incapable of emotion, and give us what's supposed to be a heart-rending scene of tenderness between two awful CGI mannequins, was something I hated very deeply. That completely shallow display of fake emotion is what defines this film for me. It's just not good. It isn't immoral, it isn't offensive, it is just not good. When I was 12 and it was one of the first horror movies I'd ever seen, it impressed me, of course, but now that I can see it for how cheap it is I don't find it moves me at all.

Craters of the Moon (2013)

directed by Jesse Millward
USA
77 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I watched this because I like Craters of the Moon park; I've never been there, but Dan Bell's video tour introduced me to it and I think it's a nice place. We unfortunately don't get to see much of the actual topography in this film since it's covered with snow, but the desolation and huge size of the park serves as the backdrop for what unexpectedly turned out to be a great and unsettling movie.

Craters of the Moon is pretty sparse to match the lack of life within the park. For the most part the main two actors are the only people around, and for the most part they're confined to their frozen car and the immediate space around it, although this is definitely not a single-setting film nor does it feel constrained. This wouldn't have been as good and interesting to watch as it was had it not been for some really good acting, which is almost entirely thanks to Breeda Wool playing Molly. Cody Lightning as her husband was effectively menacing as well but Wool's performance felt so raw and convincing that it's a shame not more people have seen this film.

Every movie has more story to it than is told on the screen, I think, and in the case of this one it's a whole personal dialogue between the couple that lies just beneath the surface, untold: we don't really know how long the husband has been such a gigantic prick, if this has been an ongoing thing or if the accidental murder (?) of a random guy at the start of the film was what made him snap. Or was it the remoteness of the park where the couple found themselves trapped that let him have the freedom to abuse and psychologically mess with his wife to an extent he'd never been able to before?

This is not a movie about spousal abuse in the typical way that such movies play out- it moves far away from the trappings of the home or even of the city and positions itself instead as something that feels way more like a survival/slasher film. I'm trying to figure out how to emphasize that the clashing between the couple isn't overblown in this film without seeming like I'm putting down other portrayals of abuse for being cheesy, but... I guess a lot of them are cheesy, just a sort of back-and-forth, easily recognizable battering that always (on film, I mean) plays out along basically the same time table. There's something much darker and more ominous in Craters of the Moon. It feels like a straight horror film even though it doesn't match my personal definitions of one. I don't know where this came from and unfortunately by the time I saw it it's already been six years since its release but hopefully this director won't disappear forever.

Midsummer (2003)

directed by Carsten Myellerup
Denmark/Sweden
94 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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I watched this pretty much entirely for laughs, because I recently watched the (vastly superior and wholly unrelated) film Midsommar. It looked mediocre, and it was. I had a hard time staying awake.

So the basic problem with this movie is that it has no content. Nothing happens. Ostensibly it's supposed to be a horror movie, but it really doesn't feel like it; the main character goes off to a party in a cabin in the woods with a bunch of other people and is haunted by the memory/ghost? of his sister who recently committed suicide. Or is he? In any case her presence is so light that it's almost not there at all. There's so little in the way of ghostly activity that it could be written off as normal guilt over the death of a loved one. It was fairly boring watching these young adults fumble around in bed (and out of bed) and have awkward parties with the only "horror" being occasional interlude of disembodied laughter as the main character gets a conflicted look on his face. I guess towards the end it's revealed that the ghost wasn't who it seemed to be, but even then it's so sparse I couldn't get invested in it.

Strangely, the thing that caught my attention about this film is the somewhat peripheral character of the grocery store checkout girl. She's sitting down. As somebody who has worked as a cashier, that's so jarring to see. I know that this is a film and not real life, but the entire dynamic between her and her customers is just so drastically different from what I'm used to. It seemed like she was in a position where her being trained to use the register was the only way she was any different from the customers, and that's how retail should be. Instead of like it is in the U.S., where cashiers are treated like robots available at the customers' beck and call to get yelled at and abused, in Midsummer, this cashier deserved all the respect anybody else deserves because she's just a person who happens to know how to use something.

So yeah. Maybe it's an indicator of how boring this was that I was more interested in what it said about the status of retail workers in its home country than the actual plot. It's not like this movie is an outlier, I'm not bashing it in particular; there's a seemingly unlimited amount of incredibly boring Scandinavian "horror" movies that are as bland or blander than Midsummer. But Midsummer certainly is bland.

Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987)

directed by Chester Novell Turner
USA
62 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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You may better know this movie as the film that sold on VHS for $2,000. It would be wonderful if any of that money actually went to the creators, but instead of being sold for that price because it's so popular (although I'm sure some who bought and sold it over the years do like it), it's now known as a collector's item and an object of worship for VHS fanboys. Tales from the Quadead Zone has the same aesthetic as the ooey-gooey mom's-basement shot-on-video trash heaps from the 80s that became popular and easy to find, except it was made by black producers and has a majority black cast, which means instead of this being accessible and a classic like nearly identical films that were made by white people, we gotta pay $2,000 for a VHS tape of it.

So. CINEMA. How is this as a film, putting aside the price tag? Borderline incoherent. None of it makes any sense whatsoever and everybody looks like they're about to fall asleep. It's an anthology where every segment is a story from a book of the same title, being told by a mother to her dead son (who manifests as a wind blowing her hair around and a whisper going shashashashashasha), except instead of a third segment the mother's deadbeat husband comes home and she has to kill him. The first segment is about a large but poor family who continually squabble over the small amount of food on the table at dinner, until one of them takes matters into his own hands. The second appears to be about two guys who steal a body from the morgue so they can bring it to his brother to ridicule and dress up in a clown suit, but then the guy comes back to life and beats up his brother for dressing him in a clown suit. The third, like I said, is simply a continuation of the wrap-around story.

I think a lot of the roughness of this is due to the lack of budget, so there's really a limit to how much you can make fun of it (I don't like making fun of it at all- this is genuinely good), especially because there is an undercurrent of social commentary under all that goop. The wrap-around story is actually very tragic if told in a stilted and awkward way. I guess some people consider this a blaxploitation film, but that label is... pretty inaccurate in several ways, tbh.

Tales from the Quadead Zone is a singular thing. It is its own object. Wikipedia claims that the directors expressed interest in a sequel in 2013 and I'm down for it. If people can throw thousands of dollars at a VHS tape of this then they can certainly kick a few dollars into a GoFundMe or something for a second one.

Hide and Never Seek (2016)

directed by Lee Doo-Hwan
South Korea
90 minutes
3.5 out of 5
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So this is a found-footage movie where most if not all of the stuff we see onscreen is a video broadcast from a horror vlogger's mildly successful internet show. Unlike Unfriended and 99% of other examples of the screenshot-horror subgenre, Hide and Never Seek is genuinely really well-made and doesn't feel like an amateur production. I was surprised by how well it was shot despite its format- instead of making everything appear grainy and suffering from the loss of detail that comes with viewing something on a small screen, the sets and environments look spooky and dark even through an internet broadcast.

This movie is paced really strangely, and despite being more coherent than most of its ilk, it still can't quite decide whether it wants to be made up of behind-the-scenes footage or the vlogger's finished, polished broadcasts. Writing and directing this can't have been easy, because you have to kind of write a character playing a character- or at least not acting like himself- but also create moments where he's taken off-guard and his online persona slips. Acting that out is probably not easy either, but everybody carries it off really well in this case.

(Also, something about the anonymous fan donating $15,000 (USD; 15,000 won is like $12.75) under the handle "Psy" is really funny to me. Imagine you're livestreaming and the real Beyonce comes into the chat, gives you $15,000, and tells you to go to an extremely haunted and unsafe location.)

The horror is also interesting because it's never specified exactly what's going on. There's a shaman, a ritual popularized by the internet, a dead little girl who doesn't really have any bearing on the rest of the film, a creepy deserted island, and a lot of typical poltergeist rattlings and bangings all thrown together in a pot to create what could have been a Generic Haunting™ but instead feels deeply sinister here. 

This is the director's first film, and it came out so well. There's still something creepy about the whole "one-man hide-and-seek" thing, and by extension all rituals birthed by the internet- without the provenience of being passed down through the ages or whatever, we just have these strange instructions kicked around without source, with a lot of hyperbole and supposed real experiences attached to them, and it's not easy to disprove somebody saying they saw a ghost when they're just another anonymous claim on the internet.

Butterfly Kisses (2018)

directed by Erik Kristopher Myers
USA
91 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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This was on my streaming site of choice with no synopsis, no runtime, no director/actors, no genre-tag, no information about it other than the title. I had to find out about it elsewhere and then go looking for it since I had passed it by at first glance, because who's going to watch a movie called Butterfly Kisses? And who expects a movie called Butterfly Kisses to be an utterly fascinating deconstruction of the found-footage horror subgenre?

People tend to throw around the term "deconstruction" a lot without really elaborating on what it means or what the piece of media in question is deconstructing, but I feel confident in calling this film a deconstruction because it does break down its subject into constituent parts and examine it. The film itself is about a documentary filmmaker making a film about a found-footage filmmaker, who found some footage of film students making a documentary about a local urban legend, and is making it into a film while also investigating it to see if there's any truth behind it. Each person in their own respective film has their own opinion of the legend they're investigating, and for a long time Butterfly Kisses itself refuses to show anything to the viewer that would decisively spell out its own opinion- basically, we genuinely can't tell if the whole thing is hoaxed, and if so, who's hoaxing it. I've seen few films play ambiguity this straight or for this long, or have it feel this satisfying to be along for the ride.

I'm not sure whether or not the whole "Peeping Tom" urban legend was made up for the film or not, but it shares elements from so many other horror tropes that it seems like they just took a bunch of those and gave them a locale (Baltimore). It's mostly the sort of stuff you hear about shadow people: trench coat, black figure, top hat, moves when you blink. Other than that, we don't know terribly much about Peeping Tom, like what exactly he is or what he does with you once he reaches you. There's a really frightening implication in the fact that none of the filmmakers can locate the film students originally pursuing this creature on any official records or contact their families at all. It's like Peeping Tom just erases them from existence, which is far scarier than a simple death, especially because from the looks of it whatever he does before he disappears them is not painless.

I don't think anybody is really ever going to be able to achieve the level of fourth-wall breakage that Blair Witch Project did, because it's too hard to keep anything fully anonymous now that we've advanced beyond mystery VHS tapes and telling your actors to lay low so people can't tell if they're still alive or not. But what we can do is write love letters to that film and examine its influence and why it's caught our imagination so much for so long. Butterfly Kisses is one such film but it also is fully its own thing, and it's now one of my favorite found-footage horror films because of that and more.

Bad Black (2016)

directed by Nabwana I.G.G.
Uganda
68 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I'd been wanting to see this ever since Who Killed Captain Alex? turned me on to Wakaliwood and changed my life for the better. Bad Black hasn't progressed any further than Captain Alex in terms of practical & special effects- if anything, the guns are even more obviously made out of bamboo, pipes, and sticks, and many of the sets are simply unpainted cardboard boxes. It is, however, more honest about the state of things in rural Uganda: the moniker "Wakaliwood" may evoke the glitz and glamour of its American namesake, but this particular Wakaliwood film isn't shy about issues of injustice and economic inequality.

This movie has several plots going at once that are all tangentially related but difficult to summarize due to the off-the-cuff, loose-cannon nature of the whole thing. The title comes from the storyline involving a woman named Bad Black who grew up as an orphan in the ghetto and now, as an adult, seeks revenge on the people who traumatized and killed her fellow orphans. One element of the story centers on a muzungu doctor taught to become a commando by a child named Wesley Snipes who can't possibly be more than six years old, and this is a fascinating reversal of the typical colonialist narrative of a doctor saving poor impoverished African babies. It's radical to see, instead of a white person coming to teach the natives to act like him, a white person being taught by the community he's inserted himself into. This isn't the only radical thing Wakaliwood has done- it's important just by existing, just by being a community representing itself on film from the inside; no voyeurism, no white gaze, no pity.

At one point during the muzungu's commando rampage, the hype man who serves as narrator for the entire film says "This doctor... NEEDS borders" and aside from being legit one of the funniest things I've heard recently, it's also another interesting inversion of colonial mentality. We never really get to hear the people served by NGOs talk about NGOs. In Western media they're always portrayed as mutely suffering and passive, never joking about the doctors, never with any opinion of the doctors other than inherent gratefulness. If any opinion is given between doctor and native in Western media it is almost always the stereotype of distrust in science/medicine. Hearing the people targeted by orgs like Doctors Without Borders joke about it reminds us that there is a reciprocal relationship between NGOs and their patients.

Bad Black is more story-oriented than Captain Alex but it never compromises its roots as Supa Action Movie. The hype man is also slightly (very, very slightly) more toned down in that he does less mock-crying at the characters and lets them speak on their own for some stretches of dialogue. He's definitely still there, though, and honestly I think we should consider creating a third category alongside subtitles and dubs wherein an enthusiastic Ugandan hype man tells us the story over the dialogue. I really, really recommend this movie. It is that good.

The Axiom (2018)

directed by Nicholas Woods
USA
98 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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A lot of the time I'll get roped into watching an awful movie because the poster looked deceptively cool, but this time I intentionally watched what I thought would be a bad movie because I had to know just how bad it could be if the poster was that terrible.

The acting isn't great and it definitely doesn't need to be 98 minutes long, but the majority of issues I had with The Axiom are conceptual problems. This could have been a really fascinating concept, especially to me because I love weird stuff in national parks, but it gets muddy and leans too heavily on one character or another being an idiot. To start with, the token savvy old man who is the only person who knows how to get around in the forest relatively safely only reveals this information to one girl, who in turn does not reveal it to any of her companions or have them take the weird potions of protection he gives her. Even if she was figuring they would all just call her and/or the old guy crazy, at least once they were in the forest and started witnessing firsthand the bizarre things that the guy was trying to protect them from, they would have some context for it instead of stumbling in blind and getting hurt or killed.

I think why this interesting concept fails is because we have the potential for this world full of distinct monsters, a world that has rules and conditions and players in the game, and instead of exploring that, we have to see it all through the perspective of people who know nothing about it. It seemed like there was an established group of people who made sport of going in and out of the forest's many dimensions and who knew how to do this and what they would find (to a degree), but instead of these people, we see a bunch of campers bumbling around.

This is a really boring depiction of parallel dimensions, too. I didn't get the feeling of multidimensional travel and weird time warp stuff from anything in The Axiom, it just seemed like a forest with ghosts and ghouls in it, and not even very many ghosts and ghouls. It seems like more than anything this was the Be Cruel To Women dimension. I think it's a mark of poor writing or concept or something when you have a horror film that deals with people thrown into a realm of incredibly strange creatures and environments beyond human comprehension and the first thing that happens is they all go "uhhhhh I gotta beat up girls". It's just too much of an easy grab. If I'm watching something where people are supposed to be messed up due to being inside a different dimension I want to see things happen to them that I can't expect to see in a cut-rate slasher flick.

Also really not into Mr. Long Fingers Dude from the poster. When will people realize that ghouls with long fingers are worthless if the fingers flop around like they don't have any bones in them? Actors with too-long prosthetic hands have no dexterity in them and it ruins the effect if they can't move their hands in a realistic manner.