Project Horror, Day 11: A Tale of Two Sisters (South Korea)

If I watch another zombie movie, I'm going to leave the house in search of brains.  ¡No más!  Today we start our world tour of foreign horror films.

The last decade in horror has really been shaped by films coming out of Asia, specifically Japan.  Although American horror is sort of skewing back towards the torture/slasher end of things again, for a few years there were pretty constant remakes of movies that were originally from Japan - The Ring, The Eye, The Grudge, movies that built up tension in the audience, usually with a supernatural element, and lots of dark atmosphere.  Unfortunately, I'd seen most of these and wanted something new, so I went a little farther west and found this movie from South Korea.  Thank you to Matt Musselman for the recommendation!

This is kind of a hard movie to summarize.  After the death of their mother, two sisters return home from the hospital.  Their father has remarried, and the stepmother is very cruel to them, especially the younger sister.  While the older sister tries to protect her younger sister, she becomes more and more defiant of their stepmother, and her father either doesn't notice or chooses to remain uninvolved.  All of the women gradually become aware of an evil presence in the house, and of how it binds them together...

SPOILERS - they're bound together because they're all three separate personalities in the big sister.  The stepmom actually used to be the nurse who cared for the girls' mom while she was dying.  Mom and little sister both died at the same time and under strange circumstances, right after nurse and big sister had an argument.  Big sister suffers from split personality, and has been living the lives of all three women, which explains why her father, aside from concern about her recovery, has never been worried about her tales of abuse.

If it's difficult to summarize this movie, it's at least not difficult to say that I didn't really care for it.  I'll give some credit and say that it's still very well-made.  The director does a good job of escalating the suspense while giving you a good little jolt here and there, and the color palette of the film is really beautiful to look at.  My main problem with it is just that the split personality twist has been done.  To.  Death.  And it's not like this movie is old enough that it came in at the leading edge of that trend, either.  Identity, Psycho, Raising Cain, and High Tension are all other examples I can think of off the top of my head, and I'm sure there's plenty more if I think about it.  Hell, did you see Adaptation?  One of the movie's biggest running jokes is that Donald Kaufman's script about a split-personality serial killer is made up entirely of clichés.  Split-personality movies are beyond tired.  Prove me wrong, directors!  Make an awesome, terrifying split-personality movie and I'll come see it!

I give this movie 2 antique wardrobes out of 5. (An antique wardrobe plays into the plot, and it's the only thing I could think of to rate this movie with aside from maxipads, which also figure into the story, but which I am not going to post here because my mom may see this someday.)

Project Horror, Day 10: Zombie

Did you ever find something, and not even realize until that moment that your life had been missing that exact thing?  That your life had a hole which was now perfectly filled?  I had that experience tonight, watching Lucio Fulci's Zombie when, about halfway into the movie, I watched a zombie fight with a shark.  No - it's not enough for me to tell you.  You really have to see for yourself.

 

Although I'd never seen this movie before, it's been on my radar for a while.  At the video store my family used to go to when I was a kid, there was a VHS copy of this in one corner of the store with the same cover as in the picture above.  I was terrified even to walk past it.

It wasn't as frightening as I used to fear, but it was a great movie to end my block of zombie flicks on.  Now that I've seen two of Fulci's films, the thing I notice is that he's not necessarily gorier than other directors, but he's very inventive with the gore he does use.  There's a scene where multiple zombies are resurrecting out of a graveyard, and it's just fantastically done.  Also, the final shot of the movie is one of the most well-known in zombie movies, with a horde of them shuffling across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan.  My favorite thing, though, was that this movie really played up the voodoo angle as a part of the zombie plague, complete with pounding jungle drums.

I give this one four sharks out of five.

Project Horror, Day 9: Phantasm

I'm nine days into this, and so far I haven't watched anything that's really put a solid scare into me.  Tonight's movie, Phantasm, did not change that.  You know during Sex Pistols concerts when Johnny Rotten used to ask the crowd, "Did you ever get the feeling you'd been cheated?"  This movie left me feeling cheated.  The Netflix description and keywords both said that it was a zombie movie, but it really wasn't.  I mean, it technically was, in the sense that it has people resurrected, but not really...

This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.  Not "so good it's bad," not "guilty pleasure," just a purely stupid movie.  Two brothers live together after the death of their parents several years before.  A friend of the older brother's dies, and at the funeral they notice strange things afoot at the funeral home.  Blah blah blah, long story short - the funeral home director is like 300 years old and resurrects the corpses as his slaves, but the process he uses also shrinks them down to dwarf-size and he dresses them in tiny brown hooded robes so that they look exactly like the Jawas from Star Wars.  Now, I ask you, if you were to make a horror movie, do you think you could find monsters a little more frightening than Jawas?  I could go into the bathroom right now, and make myself look more frightening than a Jawa, using only things from my wife's make-up case.

This is a Jawa.  The only thing frightening about him is that he's carrying a gun.  Maybe if the zombies in Phantasm had been carrying guns, they'd have been frightening, too.  Also, although this picture gives you no sense of scale, it comes up about to Mark Hamill's waist, and Mark Hamill is only like 5'9".

I hate you, Phantasm.  I give you zero nothings out of nothing.  You get no rating because you deserve none.

That's my boy (or, Make it work Part 2)

This is why I choose the outfits on school days.

Project Horror, Day 8: City of the Living Dead

Although I've been aware of him for a while, this is the first time I've ever watched one of Lucio Fulci's movies.  I'd actually hoped to watch Zombie instead, but Netflix's shipping dates may make that impossible.  We'll see.  From what I'd heard of Fulci, and his penchant for extreme gore, I knew that I'd probably need to brace myself for this one.  Maybe I was over prepared, because it wasn't as grisly as I'd feared.

That's not to say that there weren't some pretty shocking scenes.  Fulci's zombies are much more gruesome looking than your standard undead, and their kills are brutal.  There's an effect several times in the movie where one of the characters cries tears of blood - it's really unsettling.  Also, a dad protects his daughter's honor by killing a guy with a table drill through the head, the first scene so far this month that I've had to watch from between my fingers.

When you watch a Romero zombie movie, you never get an explanation for why the dead are rising.  In movies where you do get an explanation, it usually is either some kind of virus (28 Days Later) or some sort of chemical reaction (The Return of the Living Dead).  I think this is the first movie I've seen that had a supernatural explanation for it.  The first scene is of a priest hanging himself in a churchyard, which opens a gate to Hell and causes the dead to begin rising.  If the gate isn't closed before All Saints Day, it will remain open forever.  A psychic and a reporter race to the town of Dunwich (a nice shout-out to H.P. Lovecraft) to try and stop the onslaught of the dead.

I'm impressed with Fulci.  The script wasn't great and the actors seemed like skilled amateurs, but the guy knows how to gross you out.  If Zombie gets here in time to be included in my zombie block, I may still go ahead and review it.

I give this one four maggots out of five.

Hint: It's not the biceps

I invite you to notice the similarity that the cashier in the grocery store pointed out tonight.

Project Horror, Day 7: The Burrowers

The Burrowers made it onto the list compliments of my friend Kyle - thanks for the recommendation!

Full disclosure - I added this one to the list as a zombie movie, but it turns out that the creatures in it are not textbook zombies.  You know the cave crawlers in The Descent?  They're more like that.  Still, I've got a movie per day quota to meet here so I'm forging onward.

Before I knew anything else about it, two things appealed to me about this movie.  First was that it's a western-horror genre mashup.  Although there are plenty of good horror movies made, there are SO many released that are just about killing off a group of teens that it's fun to see a change of setting.  Second, this movie features Clancy Brown, one of my favorite Hey! It's That Guy! actors.  You may know him best as The Kurgan from The Highlander, which you may remember won the Academy Award for Best Movie Ever Made.

I know that I've already referenced three other movies, but here's just one more.  Did you ever see the John Wayne movie The Searchers?  If not, please make plans to see it as soon as you can.  It really could be a contender for Best Movie Ever Made, and I say that as somebody who isn't especially a fan of John Wayne, or of Westerns, for that matter.  Anyway, The Burrowers borrows that movie's basic plot of seeking a loved one kidnapped by Indians, but changes it by having the characters find out that Indians actually had nothing to with the abduction, and that the loved ones may be in for a far worse fate.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this movie compares to The Searchers in terms of movie greatness, but you won't be able to watch both without seeing the parallel.

Actually, that would be a pretty good one line review - it's not The Searchers, but it's a pretty fun movie.  If you want a really fantastic Western horror movie, I recommend another that my friend Kyle is also a fan of - Ravenous.  I give The Burrowers three cowboy zombie heads out of five.