Quarantine (2008)

directed by John Erick Dowdle
USA
89 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I flat-out refused to watch this for a long time because an American shot-for-shot remake of a Spanish horror movie- which is, I might add, possibly my favorite movie of all time- sounded inherently pointless. But now that I've seen it, please trust me when I say that this is genuinely a good movie, because I'm probably the last person who wants to admit that.

I thought I was really in for it when this film began with literally the same opening scene as [REC] but with different actors, and I thought I was in for it even worse when so much time was wasted on a ton of randy jokes. But then things began to ramp up and they just got worse and worse until the familiar ending we all know and love (except this time it doesn't get ret-conned to hell and back over a bunch of sequels). Aside from the aforementioned weirdly long intro with a lot of sex talk, this really is almost identical to [REC], but there's something about it that almost feels... weightier. I think it's a combination of how low the budget for [REC] was and the fact that I've seen it about a thousand times, but the things that happen in Quarantine, even though they happen the same as they do in [REC], have a more immediate sense of urgency to them. When they see the infected old woman and the police have to shoot her, Angela and Scott the cameraman just kind of stand there for a minute. The characters process things in, I feel, a very realistic way. Jennifer Carpenter is absolutely excellent in this and I believe she's the driving force behind why it's such a good movie, more so than the direction or production, even. At times her voice hitches in a way that I don't think is possible to fake unless you're genuinely crying uncontrollably.

This is an exceptionally gory movie, as is typical of director John Erick Dowdle, but what separates a good film from a boring gorefest is whether or not there's a reason for all the gore, and in Quarantine, there definitely is. There's an abundance of blood and guts here, but it all feels like it's in place and serves to make the film as a whole more scary.

Returning to that sense of urgency I talked about, even though I knew the zombies were coming and I know, broadly, that zombies are a more unrealistic horror trope that I personally am not fond of, I could believe that what was happening in Quarantine was really happening. Or at least that the characters fully believed it was. When they lock down the building, when we see the CDC trucks on the ground below, when one of the tenants rips through the plastic shield and is immediately shot in the head from the next building over- it feels authentic. It feels like real terror. I'll always love [REC] more because of personal reasons, but this movie feels like a nightmare.

Girls, Dance with the Dead (2015)

directed by Kayoko Asakura
Japan
70 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I'd been wanting to see this for a very long time. I could sum up the plot, but you gotta understand that this is one of those movies where stuff just happens and you have to accept it. It's not realistic, it doesn't make sense, it's just a really strange and wonderful movie that should be taken at face value. It is what it is.

So basically: Five girls work as a cleaning crew doing whatever jobs are assigned to them, and when one job takes them into the woods to clean up trash, one of them comes across the dead body of a woman shot in the chest and becomes obsessed with it. The other cleaning girls eventually discover the body as well and they all decide to perform a ritual to bring her back to life. However, because there's only five cleaners and the ritual requires one person to represent each of the seven deadly sins, they make do by using the dead girl herself as one sin and just kind of... use themselves as a collective to represent another sin. Because of this, the ritual goes wrong, and the girl comes back to life unable to be killed. Any time she's dismembered she just regrows her limbs, fire doesn't hurt her, bullets don't stop her, et cetera. They go around having fun until the men who shot the undead girl find her again and try to kill both her and the rest of the cleaners for good. Also, everybody in this movie is part of an actual Japanese girl group in real life, called You'll Melt More!.

As far as I can tell, there's really no point to this movie other than exactly what it says and does on a surface level, but the message hits surprisingly deep in the end- the undead girl was in the forest in the first place because she was in the middle of committing suicide, and in being given a second chance, she figures out that she didn't want to die, she wanted to live. This is pretty much an extended music video, so there's not much depth to it other than a fairly typical progression of "thing happens - people have fun - fun ends and a crisis occurs - happy ending", so it's nothing that'll stick with you and teach you a life lesson or anything, but to me it's a perfect, refreshingly weird self-contained story in 70 minutes.

People really dislike this movie, which is a huge surprise to me since I thought it was just delightful. A common complaint is that the acting is stiff, which is blamed on the fact that everybody in this is a musician. I feel like this has to be considered within the context, though, because J-pop groups are essentially all hybrid musician/actors due to the amount of time they spend in the public spotlight, and also I just disagree with that statement in general; I think if the acting is ever a little stiff, it doesn't really matter because the rest of the movie is so strange and stylized that good acting wouldn't have changed the end product all that much. This isn't really a colorful or emotional movie, it's not over-the-top or in-your-face, it's just a story about a band bringing a dead girl back to life and teaching her the value of being alive. I have to appreciate any movie where girls do whatever they want and nothing stops them.

Grave Encounters 2 (2012)

directed by John Poliquin
Canada/USA
95 minutes
1.5 stars out of 5
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We're all stuck inside going stir-crazy so here's a second review for the price of one, to take up that extra 30 seconds of your time you'd otherwise have no way to fill.

I re-watched Grave Encounters the other night and decided to follow it up with this trash heap for some reason. I feel like I say this with practically every sequel I watch, but somehow this movie manages to completely miss the point of the first one and forge ahead with its own incredibly weak concepts while also introducing us to some of the most spectacularly unlikeable characters ever.

Grave Encounters 2 tries to be very meta about both itself and the first film, since we're still supposed to pretend the first one was "real", and introduces the main character as a film reviewer who is also an amateur horror director with severe delusions of grandeur. Some of the meta humor is a little bit funny but for the most part it's just annoying, much like the rest of this movie's sense of humor. Seriously, I don't know if this was an attempt to be cool and relatable to the teenz or whatever, but who in their right mind thinks we want to see stuff like close-up shots of the protagonist vomiting or pictures of him getting tea-bagged or thermal-cam footage of a guy farting? Why would you ruin your movie with such unfunny, immature antics inserted between otherwise serious scenes? The whole intro is a total disaster and should have been cut, the first Grave Encounters was much more effective because we only knew the bare minimum about the actors' personal lives.

This movie also messes up possibly the only interesting thing about the whole Grave Encounters concept, which was the ghosts, and by extension the nature of the building itself. The first ghost we see is a horribly, horribly cliche creepy little girl who asks the crew if they'd "like to play" before transforming into a bad CGI demon and chasing them, and as soon as I saw that, I knew I was really in for it. The singular redeeming quality of Grave Encounters is the intensity of the haunting. These are not people anymore; they don't speak (what was the point of the one who ripped its tongue out if not to prove that?) and they can't reason, they're demons trapped in a constructed hell. The depths to which the first film goes in depicting a haunting is the only reason it's interesting at all, and the sequel takes that and makes easily digestible evil ghosts who love to taunt people with cheesy nursery rhymes and write stuff on walls.


The one thing I did like about this movie was the return of "Lance Preston". The actor playing him looked like he was genuinely having a good time, it's just a shame he seems more suited to playing an unhinged vagrant than the smarmy twerp his character was supposed to be in the first film. I was hoping for a comeback from the "I saw a ghost... it was really scary" landscaper, but no luck there. Some blink-and-you-miss-it details open the way for interesting backstory, like how the airline the characters fly to get to Toronto was named "Friedkin" after the evil doctor from the first film, but the movie as a whole drops the ball pretty badly.

Grave Encounters (2011)

directed by Colin Minihan, Stuart Ortiz
Canada/USA
92 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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It's been a very long time since I watched this, and as one of the handful of movies I picked to watch when I was away from home as a young teenager for the first time and able to watch horror movies (also for the first time), I wanted to see how it held up. Turns out it doesn't hold up very well at all. I'm assuming we all know the story, either because this is a fairly old film by now or because it's been done to death, but in case you don't: it's about a fake ghost hunting TV crew who find themselves wrapped up in a real haunting in an abandoned mental asylum.

I'm going to talk about the things I liked about this movie first, because there is some genuinely really good stuff in here. This does things that a lot of horror movies don't do because they're too unrealistic, especially found-footage movies. It doesn't even make an attempt to subvert the typical "scary insane ppl" tropes, and that's hurtful and disappointing, but the way it messes with time and space is very original. The building loops back on itself and sprouts new corridors and wings constantly, trapping the characters inside with no hope of escape, and also affects time so that it stays dark outside no matter how much time is supposed to have passed. The idea of a place transformed, a location that saw so much horror and was poked and prodded by unholy forces (heavily implied, and confirmed in the sequel, to have been summoned by our cliche evil doctor Dr. Friedkin) until it became something other, something actively malevolent, something where the bounds between the place itself and the entities inhabiting it are blurred- that's all incredibly cool. But I can think of better movies that do sort of the same thing.

Again, it's disappointing how much this clings to the fear of mentally ill people. There's an opportunity here to at least save itself by highlighting medical abuse and making it so the doctors, not the patients, were the evil ones haunting the building, but instead it renders everyone into demons and depicts some very cliche (I keep using that word, but it's true; everything here is unimaginative) stereotypes. The people who were unfortunate enough to get stuck inside the building when whatever happened to turn it into a mini-hell dimension have all been turned into basically demons, and are also another slightly interesting spot in an otherwise underwhelming film- how impersonal the ghosts are, how they have no aim other than to chase and subsume, how they're not even close to human anymore.

This should be good. It has room to be good. But- to me, at least- it's just so boring. The filmmakers clearly have an eye for horror and if you're unused to horror films or are easily scared, watching this at night, alone, could be a fun (or traumatizing, take your pick) wild ride. I know it was that way for a lot of people, otherwise this movie wouldn't have the notoriety that it does. Personally, though, I just found it irredeemably boring and not willing to take the next step to match how good its concept was with how mediocre in terms of execution it was.

Dark Age (1987)

directed by Arch Nicholson
Australia
87 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This is a very rare example of a monster movie in which the monster is viewed as something that should be respected and left alone, rather than an evil beast that humans are justified in hunting down and killing. This seems like a fairly simple concept to understand, and I can't believe how many terrible action movies full of death and killing there are when there could be more movies like this that seek peace with the monster instead. Also I kind of only wanted to watch this because Burnum Burnum is in it and he's cool.

Respecting and understanding the giant crocodile that is central to Dark Age is inextricable from respecting the culture of the people who advocate for its being left alone. The movie is heavily involved with Aboriginal storytelling but it presents those stories and traditions as ongoing, instead of going down the path most movies made by outsiders about Indigenous stories and traditions take where they present them as relics of a vanishing past or weird mystical rituals that are interesting but ultimately meaningless. I really admire Dark Age because this is one of the only movies I've seen where Aboriginal knowledge is treated as being 100% right, and the white colonizers are cast as the bad guys. This movie says that the right way to treat the croc is the way it's been treated for thousands of years by the people who know it best, not the way people who see it as an object to development and profit would like to deal with it (by shooting it).

It isn't flawless and there is still something annoying about how a white protagonist is required to make all of this believable- there shouldn't have to be a white guy standing up behind the Aboriginal group going "hey, these people are right!" for other white people to believe them, but unfortunately that's true in real life as well; a lot of white people don't listen to Indigenous people until another white person forcibly raises the subject.

So, how is it if you're just looking to watch a giant monster movie? Not great! There's plenty of car chases and fight scenes between various drunken Australian white men who want to murder each other and/or kill every crocodile they see for fun and profit, but if you're used to the kind of movies where humans triumph over beasts, this is not your bag. Saying this might conjure up images of that subset of cheesy kid's movie where a little boy or girl befriends a magical being and defends it against the horrible grown-ups who want to get rid of it, but A. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and B. The best thing about Dark Age is how serious it is. Like I said, Aboriginal beliefs are unambiguously respected, and the protagonist is willing to fight and die for them because he knows they're not just a fancy story about being kind to the aminals, they're the truth. There is a quite boring sideplot about his failed romance with a lady anthropologist that took away from the fun a bit, but I guess it was hard to film 90 minutes of croc defending. Overall a good time and a movie that should be remembered better than it is.

Strange Horizons (1992)

directed by Philip Jackson
Canada
79 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I've come to realize lately that my favorite sci-fi movies are ones that feel like a bunch of grown adults playing pretend. I'm getting tired of the lack of self-awareness in mainstream cinema and I'm looking now towards movies in which the raw edges are not hidden- things where, while the most effort possible was clearly put in, there's a pride in lack of budget. Strange Horizons is the heir apparent to John Carpenter's "Dark Star" in my mind, not so much thematically but definitely aesthetically, with its scrap-metal spaceships and sets that look like you'd see someone's basement if the camera just panned left a little. It's actually fairly impressive for what it is; all of the sets are believable in their own way and to me nothing about it can be called bad.

That all being said, the narrative style in Strange Horizons is very unconventional, and not the sort of expansive, explore-the-galaxy-type sci-fi one may expect. A lot of time is devoted to the lead character going on long, passionate monologues about his past or his opinion on the nature of life or something like that. The film uses the excuse of him being delirious from exposure to allow him to basically recite a lot of vaguely Shakespearean dialogue out-of-context that would be more at home in a stage play than a film. Nothing of note actually happens during this movie. It's all in the talking, not in the doing. But even so, I can't describe this to you accurately- there's so much backstory and nuance that you have to watch it to get the full picture.

The synopsis is misleading: saying that it's the "story of a war between men and women in the 23rd century" is both highly inaccurate and serves to alienate a fair few viewers for whom that concept draws up ideas of gender essentialism, such as myself. Said war is only invoked in hints at events long come to pass, and any real animosity between men and women is, on the level depicted in the film, not a whole lot more than the griping of an average American at our ineffectual government. It's not a solid line of "evil women bad, take over world, men good, poor poor men". The women's side doesn't even appear to be made up entirely of women, which is intriguing, because it makes the supposed war less about gender and more about ideology. To make a long description even longer, this really does not feel like a film made by MRAs to lament their oppression by women the way I feared it would be. Gender has little, if anything, to do with the actual brunt of the film. It's too concerned with semi-lucid rants about I don't even know what to dedicate itself to making any points about gender.

Anyway I loved this. It's not at all what you expect just going off of the basic information the synopsis presents. The drifting, indiscernible plot coupled with home-brewed practical effects and an extremely endearing ship's computer named Shorty whose avatar is a skinless human head- among all the other great things about the film- makes this an incredibly original movie that unfortunately I'd never even heard of despite almost 30 years having passed since its release, although thankfully it is now on Amazon Prime for bored late-night film-watchers to stumble upon unawares.

Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986)

directed by Piotr Szulkin
Poland
84 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I hope this is common knowledge, but still, I feel the need to emphasize that nobody does sci-fi like Poland in the 80s. And within that niche, nobody does Polish sci-fi like Piotr Szulkin. It's easy to recognize that the fuel behind Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes is a deep, cynical nihilism; an existential fear that the cycles of pain and depression humanity keeps getting stuck in might be all there is to life. There's not much faith in human nature in early Polish sci-fi, or at least not much faith in groups of people, who almost always are depicted as reinforcing oppressive structures any time they get even a little bit of power.

In a future that uncannily mirrors the U.S. government's current views on space travel, everybody becomes too concerned with money and luxury to bother with sending people into space anymore, and therefore the once-prestigious job of space exploration is relegated to prisoners on prison ships. It's a really interesting concept because it's almost feasible: what if little kids didn't grow up thinking they wanted to be astronauts (or cosmonauts) and instead viewed the profession as dirty work? It's almost frightening, how plausible it could be- if we ever get tired of putting astronauts through some of the most rigorous training known to humankind, space travel could easily become an assembly line of unwilling poor people forced to do dangerous work. The "heroes" in this film are prisoners chosen specifically to claim territory on uninhabited planets for (presumably) their government, a job that's superficially respected but behind closed doors is degraded and looked down upon. The protagonist of Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes' situation only gets worse once he arrives at his designated planet.

As with much sci-fi of this time and place, a lot of what happens feels more like an allegory than the kind of sci-fi Western audiences are used to. The protagonist lands on supposedly an empty planet only for a man to drive up to him in a car and offer him the services of a very young girl in his backseat. He finds that the planet is in fact populated with a dirty scrum of people- a bizarre, brutal society, mixing bureaucracy with ritual. The one message I kept getting from the planet's populace was that they were all prisoners as well, but prisoners who had convinced themselves they were free. Freedom is a big theme in this film, specifically the question of whether or not anybody can ever consider themself truly free, which obviously had resonance with Poland's population at the time.

It's an incredibly bleak film showing the worst of human nature, but it's not without a wry cynicism that seems to come almost as a defensive mechanism to Eastern Bloc sci-fi of this era. And although the planet is full of "humans", the real feat here is that it never stops feeling like an alien world anyway. The luminous constant nighttime and the streets paved with white dust feel like a genuine other place. The sets could pass for ramshackle starships and broken-down tech, or they could pass for a dingy Polish backlot- the blending of reality and fantasy is what makes Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes both excellent sci-fi and potent commentary on a real time and place.