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     Paul_finch (Paul_finch) Username: Paul_finch Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
Having yet again made the mistake of thinking the posters on IMDB know what they're talking about, I was tempted into spending some birthday money on this low-budget shocker from Ti West (of THE ROOST and CABIN FEVER 2 fame) - and can only say that I was monumentally disappointed. As so often when I go on IMDB, I find it difficult to understand how so many movie buffs can be so wrong about a movie. And at the risk of sounding pompous, I don't mean "I think they're wrong", I mean "they ARE wrong". How so many people can heap so much unwarranted acclaim on a film like this defies explanation. WARNING: ULTRA BIG SPOILERS AHEAD Basically, we're in 1983, when paranoia about secret Satanic cults is sweeping the States. We're told this straight away, so unless it's the most mischievous red herring of all time, it's clear from the outset that we're about to watch something concerning Satanism. And lo and behold, we are. It’s the night of a much-awaited lunar eclipse. Samantha, a college kid on her uppers, agrees to take a baby-sitting job at weird house out in the woods. At this point of the film, things start to look good. The elderly couple who own the house, Mary Woronov and the always enjoyable Tom Noonan, are not quite normal – though there’s nothing hugely disturbing about them. They admit that there’s no child here, but ask Samantha to look after their aged mother, who lives upstairs but who she will never see or hear. She doesn’t like it, but they offer her more cash, so she finally agrees. So far, so derivative. But I’ve always believed there are few original stories, particularly in horror, so I’m still happy to watch. Besides, the cinematography is pretty good, and the film has an effective bleak look. The retro feel for the very early 80s is just about right. There’s a FRIDAY 13TH atmosphere about this movie. The college kids are real college kids – scruffy, wearing plaid shirts, woolly hats, etc. The girls have feather cuts, and don’t wear make-up, and so on. But I couldn’t help thinking that Ti West was so busy trying to recreate this era, that he started missing opportunities to make it scary. Samantha becomes frightened in the lonely old house, but we never understand why, and here things go downhill fast. The next third of the film is spent with Samantha, on her own, poking nosily around and apparently – for no obvious reason – becoming more and more disconcerted. The fanboys on IMBD get really excited about this, describing it variously as a “slow burn”, “an intense build-up of dread”, and a “promise of impending doom”. Not being a fan of non-stop explosive gore FX, that’s just what I like in horror movies, a gradual upping of the tension until it becomes unbearable. But sorry, it isn’t happening here. Nothing strange or out-of-the ordinary occurs for minutes on end – except that Samantha breaks a vase, and, while clearing it up, discovers photos of different, younger people living in this house. Well … big deal. They could be friends or family visiting. They could be children and grandchildren. They could be the former tenants. In fact, they almost certainly are. There’s surely no reason for Samantha to suddenly grab a knife with which to defend herself. She hears creaks from the upper floor. This apparently terrifies her, but hang on – there’s supposed to be somebody up there. She’s babysitting an old lady. Certain things have happened on screen to make it clear that Samantha is in trouble. The friend who dropped her off at the house was waylaid on the way home, and shot dead by a bearded chap with staring eyes. When Samantha orders a pizza later on, he’s the one who delivers it. He then hangs around outside the house, almost as if he’s keeping guard. While Samantha is poking around, she tries a locked door. She can’t enter and walks away; we see a pile of mutilated corpses on the other side, lying in a pentangle. But Samantha doesn’t. So why is she so frightened? It just doesn’t add up. When the denouement finally arrives, it is so old-hat that I frankly couldn’t be believe Ti West was serious. It turns out that – surprise, surprise – Samantha’s pizza was drugged. But this only affects her when she finally goes to the attic, where the old lady supposedly lives, and sees a hideous claw reaching around the attic door. She wakes up in the basement, tied in a pentangle, where Noonan and Woronov, the bearded guy and mother (your basic demonic hag, whose presence and appearance are never explained), all now clad in vintage 1960s Hammer hooded robes, plan to sacrifice her to the devil or something of that order. This involves lots of blood, both painting her belly with it and making her drink some (references, I suppose, to the sort of scare stories that were doing the rounds at the time concerning Satanic practices). However, she’s a tough kid, and she escapes simply by pulling her hands free of the ropes, and stabbing three of her tormentors to death with a knife that someone conveniently left right next to her. She then runs out into the graveyard. Noonan, mortally wounded, follows, begging her to accept that she is “the chosen one”. We’re now in the realms of complete nonsense, because why is she “the chosen one”? – all she did was answer an ad for a babysitter on a university bulletin board. Anyone could have done it. However, to add insult to injury, rather than face this grim destiny (and instead of simply trying to escape, which wouldn’t be difficult as Noonan is clearly dying), Samantha takes the gun that slew her friend and shoots herself in the head. But if that’s not daft enough, the ‘really unexpected’ climax comes a few minutes later, when we learn that she's somehow survived getting a bullet in the brain from point-blank range and is now safe in hospital, where the doctors have discovered that she’s pregnant – so we’ve got an immaculate conception as well! I really wanted to like this film, because I like low-budget horror when it’s done properly, and I like Tom Noonan (he’s good in this, even though he doesn’t have a lot to do). But I found it thoroughly depressing because it takes its audience for granted. What starts out with some promise, both in terms of style and substance – what could have been an interesting and spooky dissertation on the Satanic madness of the 1980s a ‘was it real or wasn’t it?’ sort of thing, is quickly jettisoned in favour of a standard black magic romp so formulaic that Dennis Wheatley would have been embarrassed to pen it. And the final ‘twist’ at the end, though the IMDB crowd have been utterly wowed by it, is the most misconceived part of it because we’ve all seen ROSEMARY’S BABY umpteen times, and reminding us about that only serves to remind us how a subtle horror film should really be made. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
I rather enjoyed this one.  | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
She then runs out into the graveyard. Noonan, mortally wounded, follows, begging her to accept that she is “the chosen one”. We’re now in the realms of complete nonsense, because why is she “the chosen one”? – all she did was answer an ad for a babysitter on a university bulletin board. Anyone could have done it. I took that as being deliberate, Paul - in his demented mind, she was the "Chosen One". In reality, she was just some chick who'd answered the ad. | ||
| Paul_finch (Paul_finch) Username: Paul_finch Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
For once in our lives, Gary, I think we'll have to agree to disagree. If Noonan and co. had been a bunch of deluded but homicidal oafs playing at raising the devil, it would have been a better story. But then, and I forgot to mention this in my opening rant, we hear that there was a bizarre and unexplained lunar event - implying that, whatever they were doing in this house they'd borrowed for the night, it was having devastating consequences (even though their ritual, whatever it actually was they were doing - which, if we're honest, wasn't very much, failed). Sorry Gary, I really didn't like this one. But that's mainly because I had such high hopes for it. Almost every online review I saw gave it the thumbs-up, and the trailer was very enticing. I thought it started well enough, but it didn't pick up sufficient atmosphere and the pay-off was a massive let-down. I'm all in favour of slow-burn horror stories, but I think you've got to help the audience by dropping subtle clues here and there. The sledge-hammer method in this one - dropping no clues at all, except suddenly showing Samantha's friend being pointlessly executed, and then showing a heap of slaughtered householders behind a locked door - didn't have the desired effect. Not for me, at least. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
Yeah, I can totally see your problems with the film, mate. But I have a weakness for this kind of daft horror film, and as a period piece I thought it was wonderfully done: tone, mood, photography, cheesy plot, they were all spot-on and reminded me so much of those 80s clunkers I loved back in the day. Call it the nostalgia factor...  | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
I'd go further and say that the reasons I liked this one say more about me than they do about the quality (or lack of therein) of the film itself. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.31.239.78 |
Fight! Finchy versus McMahon . . . | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
Don't be daft; I'm agreeing with him! Paul's reasons for dislking the film are valid, but it's one of those that I like despite its obvious flaws. Basically, we're both right.  | ||
| Paul_finch (Paul_finch) Username: Paul_finch Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
Hmmm ... As a cheesy throwback to the age of cheap and cheerful 80s nasties, I suppose it works. But I was hoping for a lot more, and at first I thought it was going to deliver. The set-up of the babysitter in the lonely house, though achingly cliched, worked quite well. Noonan and his wife were genuinely creepy without being OTT, and the lunar eclipse was an interesting bit of background colour (that was all we needed to know we were in the realms of hte occult; not some on-the-nose exposition about 80s Satanism right at the start). You knew something bad was going to happen without needing to be told. But when nothing actually did happen - at least nothing that made much sense (I mean, why didn't they just grab her and tie her up as soon as she arrived - why go to the trouble of pretending they were going out and then let her wander the house all evening?) - until right near the very end. By the time we got to the finale, I was expecting something to special to make up for the rest. But we just didn't get it. Not one I'll be watching again in a hurry. I've tried to exercise some quality control in terms of the horror movies I've been buying recently. I've picked up far too much crap on the advice of horror movie websites, and this one, I'm afraid, is now destined for that dust-laden bottom shelf. Perhaps it's time I learned that I've never heard of a new movie through mainstream sources, there's probably a reason for it. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 61.216.47.215 |
I quite enjoyed this, but I do agree with Paul's criticisms. This film surely features the most inept group of devil worshipers in the history of cinema. Recently, I enjoyed the somewhat Cronenbergian (at least I thought so) Pontypool. Anyone seen this? | ||
| Mark_samuels (Mark_samuels) Username: Mark_samuels Registered: 04-2010 Posted From: 86.142.169.99 |
Pontypool is better than Dead Air Although I do wonder whether both might have worked better as radio dramas... Mark S. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.240.106 |
I also thought Pontypool would have worked well as a radio drama. Good film, but it's basically a filmed play. | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.209.76 |
House of the Devil went down well with us, but the last 20 minutes or so almost ruined what was a nicely developing little piece of low budget cinema Pontypool was better, although oddly enough I can now remember very little about it compared to House of the Devil - odd how some films stay with you & some don't, isn't it? I do think that fan sites are to be avoided though, as anything halfway decent tends to get raved about. It hearkens back to the 'fanzine saturation' days of the late 80s when mags like Samhain would run endless in depth articles on films like Peter Jackson's Brain Dead, running the movie into the ground with hype because at the time it was the only horror movie worth talking about. |