Drag Me To Hell

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Rating 3


Directed by Sam Raimi

Written by Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi

Starring Alison Lohman (Christine Brown), Justin Long (Clay Dalton), Lorna Raver (Sylvia Ganush), Dileep Rao (Rham Jas), David Paymer (Mr Jacks), Reggie Lee (Stu Rubin), Adriana Barraza (Shaun San Dena), Molly Cheek (Trudy Dalton), Chelcie Ross (Leonard Dalton), Bojana Novakovic (Ilenka Ganush) and Kevin Foster (Milos)


Christine Brown is a loans officer who is trying to secure a promotion at the bank where she works. Told that she has to prove her ability to make hard decisions, she rejects the request of Sylvia Ganush to extend her loan, meaning that the old woman will now be evicted from her house. When Mrs Ganush goes down on her knees to beg, Christine calls Security to have her escorted from the building. In retaliation, Mrs Ganush curses Christine, condemning her to terrible torment for the next three days, after which she will be dragged to hell. It is now a desperate fight against time to find a way of ending the curse before it is too late.

…


Sam Raimi is one of the masters of American horror films, having first made his name with ‘The Evil Dead’ in 1981 and its two sequels. His films as a director have been diverse, frequently taking him outside the horror genre, and in recent years he has concentrated on the hugely successful ‘Spider Man’ franchise (a fourth film is currently in pre-production and is due for release sometime in 2011). ‘Drag Me To Hell’ is Raimi’s first horror film as a director since ‘Army of Darkness’ in 1993, unless one counts his excellent 2000 gothic psychological thriller ‘The Gift’. The film was released in 2009 to near universal praise and often ecstatic reviews – and has been described as the best horror film of the decade. It has a 92% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 202 reviews and a reasonable but not overly impressive worldwide box office gross a little under $83 million, against a production budget of $30 million.

Reviewing the film for the British daily newspaper The Independent, Anthony Quinn called it, “cheap, nasty and rather a magnificent.” I am not convinced it is any of these things. It definitely is not cheap and nasty, but neither is it particularly magnificent. It certainly harks back to horror films from an era before Wes Craven’s ‘Scream’ trilogy and it has absolutely nothing in common with the loathsome likes of ‘Hostel’ and ‘Captivity’. There is plenty of slapstick humour to be found here and it is expertly made, bearing many of the hallmarks of Sam Raimi’s directing style. Somehow, though, I never really engaged with the film. Part of the problem I suspect is simply that I guessed almost immediately where it was heading and simply spent the next ninety minutes waiting for that to happen. The reviews, generally, seem a little over-effusive to me, but, in fairness, perhaps I am missing something and should watch it again sometime.

Ellen Page was originally cast in the role of Christine Brown, but had to pull out, which is a pity. I didn’t have any previous awareness of Alison Lohman and while her performance here was perfectly competent, I didn’t really like it very much – there just seemed to be something missing.

‘Drag Me To Hell’ is a film I think I would probably defer judgement on at this stage. I certainly seem to be out-of-step with general opinion about it, but while I didn’t dislike it by any means, I came away feeling slightly underwhelmed by it all.

Review posted 5 November 2009



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Boogeyman 3

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Rating ½


Directed by Gary Jones

Written by Brian Sieve

Starring Erin Cahill (Sarah), Chuck Hittinger (David), Matt Ripley (Kane), Mimi Michaels (Lindsay), Nikki Sanderson (Audrey), W B Alexander (Lukas), Elyes Gabel (Ben), George Maguire (Jeremy), Kate Maberly (Jennifer), Jayne Wisener (Amy), Nikolai Sotirov (Boogeyman) and Vladimir Yossifov (Boogeyman)


Following the death of her father Dr Allen (played by Tobin Bell in the second ‘Boogeyman’ film and whose voice is heard here), Audrey becomes convinced she will be the next victim of the boogeyman. She returns to her dorm at university and tries to convince her friend Sarah, who doesn’t believe her, until she sees Audrey being killed by a supernatural entity. It then becomes a race against time, after Sarah has read Dr Allen’s diary and tries to convince her friends and all the other students in the dorm building that their lives are in danger.

...


‘Boogeyman’ was a cheap 2005 horror film from Ghost House Pictures, the company formed by producers Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi. With a cast that included Emily Deschanel, on her way to the popular Fox Network television series ‘Bones’, and Lucy Lawless (who is married to Tapert), the film had a successful run at the box office. A second film, released direct-to-DVD, followed at the beginning of 2008, this one featuring an appearance by horror stalwart Tobin Bell. A year later comes the third instalment, again released direct to DVD. There is really no need of either sequel, but these are cheaply made films with a built-in audience and no doubt can be guaranteed to make a small profit.

‘Boogeyman 3’ follows a tried and tested formula and vaguely picks up the story from the end of the second film (which had deviated somewhat from the original film), also throwing in a touch of ‘Urban Legend’ for good measure. It is set on a college campus, which means lots of very thin young women in skimpy tops and a variety of boyfriends and male friends whose sole preoccupation seems to be sex and drugs. At the centre of this we have a psychology student who is overcoming the death of her mother and, so it seems, had, a year earlier, suffered some kind of breakdown that caused her to have hallucinations. She now has a college radio show, alongside her psychology professor, in which she imparts advice to other students who call in with their problems. As she comes to believe that the boogeyman is more than just a myth, so her friends start to think she is having another breakdown, but one by one they begin to disappear and as the fear of the boogeyman spreads, so it becomes stronger.

No cliché is left undisturbed and as the body count increases so too do the inevitable buckets of blood that get thrown indiscriminately over the various actors. However, the gore is fairly minimal here. So too is the sex, although I have deducted half-a-star for the pointless and wholly gratuitous scene in which one of the male students climbs through an air conditioning vent and watches female students baring their breasts in the female locker room below. Another half a star is deducted because, having spent most of the running time going nowhere in particular, the film suddenly offered up what might have been, in this setting, a reasonably inventive twist in the story, only to rub it out almost immediately and tack on a rubbish ending, apparently existing only to allow us to view a young actress with large breasts, wearing a skimpy top and panties.

Having said this, the film is clearly targeted at a very specific audience (which I assume to be American teenage boys) and what is served up here is (the lack of gore to one side) probably exactly what that audience wants. In his review for the iFMagazine website, Peter Brown writes, “Boogeyman 3 starts out well enough... hot chick (UK babe Nikki Sanderson) in a bathtub showing off the goods and getting stalked by some creature. Unfortunately... it’s all downhill from there.” I am clearly out-of-sync with my thinking here.

The presence of Nikki Sanderson in those opening scenes did rather throw me for a while. I remember her as the teenager Candice Stowe in the British television soap opera ‘Coronation Street’. Sadly, I thought her performance in ‘Boogeyman 3’ was rotten. Sanderson is one of several British and Irish actors here, alongside Eyles Gabel, Kate Maberley and Jayne Wisener.

I am a sucker for films like this one. ‘Boogeyman 3’ is not very good by any stretch of imagination, but I have no doubt that in time I could probably watch it again.

Review posted 15 July 2009



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The Grudge 3

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Rating 1½


Directed by Toby Wilkins

Written by Brad Keene

Gil McKinney (Max), Johanna E Braddy (Lisa), Jadie Hobson (Rose), Emi Ikehata (Naoko), Shawnee Smith (Dr Sullivan), Marina Sirtis (Gretchen), Matthew Knight (Jake), Beau Mirchoff (Andy) and Michael McCoy (Praski)


The curse that originally emanated from a house in the suburbs of Tokyo now resides in an old apartment building in Chicago. Max is the supervisor in charge of the building, dealing with lettings and general maintenance. He lives in an apartment there with his sisters Lisa and eight-year-old Rose, who suffers from severe and life-threatening asthma. Another resident, Gretchen, a painter who suffers from arthritis, sometimes babysits for Rose, when Max is working and Lisa, who plans to leave soon, is with her boyfriend Andy. Lisa plans to leave soon, which creates conflict with her brother. Jake, the sole surviving member of a family killed by the curse in the building (as told in ‘The Grudge 2’) is under the care of Dr Sullivan in a secure psychiatric facility. Naoko, the younger sister of Kayako, the young woman whose violent death was the starting point of the curse (‘The Grudge’), comes to Chicago from Japan, intent on putting an end to the curse once and for all.

…


‘Ju-on: The Grudge’, the 2003 Japanese horror film written and directed by Takashi Shimizu, itself a remake of an earlier direct-to-video film by the same writer/director, is a classic of J-horror. A genuinely inventive film that is pervaded by a aura of creepiness and foreboding, it was remade in 2004 as ‘The Grudge’, a film also directed by Shimizu and filmed in Tokyo, but with a largely American cast, with top billing for Sarah Michelle Gellar. This film was a substantial box office hit, grossing in excess of $187 million against a production budget of just $10 million.

A sequel, ‘The Grudge 2’, followed in 2006, once again directed by Takashi Shimizu, but this time with the action split between Tokyo and Chicago. Gellar returned to make a cameo appearance and the lead role went to Amber Tamblyn, playing her younger sister. Although not as successful as the first film, it still grossed nearly $71 million.

Now comes a third American film, this one released direct to DVD. Takashi Shimizu turned down the offer to direct this time around, but he is credited as one of the executive producers of the film. Although set in Chicago, filming took place in Bulgaria, with Toby Wilkins, who had previously made the well-received low-budget independent horror film ‘Splinter’, as the director.

‘The Grudge’ was very nearly as good as the original Japanese film and managed to retain the unsettling aura created in that film. ‘The Grudge 2’, although certainly flawed and several notches below the film it followed, did have merit and was not altogether unsuccessful. However, the decision to transfer the curse from Japan to America, as told in that film, was always likely to be the undoing of the story.

As a quick cash-in direct-to-DVD horror film, ‘The Grudge 3’ succeeds in doing what presumably was intended. However, it is a pale shadow of the films that preceded it, telling its story in decidedly pedestrian fashion and completely missing the point of the Japanese folklore that informed the original. Shawnee Smith, who is familiar from the 1988 remake of ‘The Blob’ and the ‘Saw’ horror franchise, is wasted here in a role here that amounts to nothing. Equally, Marina Sirtis, best known as Deanna Troi in ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, plays a character who could have been cut out of the film entirely with no difference made to story. These are the two most immediately recognisable actors amongst the cast.

I cannot say I actively disliked the film. It was a painless enough watching experience, but I do think it’s a shame that it blunts some of shine of the ‘Ju-on: The Grudge’ and ‘The Grudge’, which despite some negative critical reaction was a very credible remake. I am being very generous in giving it one and a half stars.

Review posted 29 April 2009



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Rise: Blood Hunter

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Rating 3


Written and Directed by Sebastian Gutierrez

Starring Lucy Liu, Michael Chiklis, James D’Arcy, Carla Gugino, Margo Harshman, Cameron Richardson, Marilyn Manson and Robert Forster


Sadie Blake (Lucy Liu), a young newspaper reporter, is raped and murdered when investigating the activities of a secretive cult, but wakes in the morgue to discover that she is now a vampire-like creature, neither dead nor alive and craving human blood. Discovering that she cannot die by any normal means, she sets out on a quest to kill those responsible. In doing so, she crosses paths with Clyde Rawlins (Michael Chiklis), an alcoholic police detective who is pursuing an obsessive investigation into the murder of his teenage daughter.

‘Rise: Blood Hunter’ gets off to a very bad start. Following a pointless cameo appearance by Robert Forster, we are treated to some truly cringe worthy soft-core “girl-on-girl” action involving Lucy Liu and Cameron Richardson. It is wholly gratuitous and serves no purpose whatsoever, other than providing a bit of cheap titillation for the boys. I feared the worst, but with that nonsense out of the way, the film settled down and became surprisingly effective.

The influences are blatant – ‘Blade’, the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez school of filmmaking. There is nothing new here, but it moves along briskly and the two leads are rather good. I have not particularly liked Lucy Liu in anything I have seen her in previously, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that I enjoyed her performance. I liked Michael Chiklis in ‘The Fantastic Four’ and he is equally as likeable here.

The film has a 36% rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 14 reviews. Its box office gross was under $3 million, of which just $114,000 was grossed during its limited theatrical release in America. Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez also wrote the screenplays for ‘Gothika’, ‘Snakes on a Plane’ and the Hollywood remake of ‘The Eye’. It was produced by Sam Raimi's Gost House Pictures.

Review posted 28 December 2008


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Boogeyman 2

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Rating 1½


Directed by Jeff Betancourt

Written by Brian Sieve, based on characters created by Eric Kripke

Starring Danielle Savre, Matthew Cohen, Tobin Bell, Renée O’Connor, Chrissy Griffith, Mae Whitman, Michael Graziadei, Johnny Simmons, David Gallagher, Lesli Margherita and Tom Lenk


When sister and brother, Laura and Henry Porter (Danielle Savre and Matthew Cohen), are children they witness the brutal murders of their parents. Ten years later, Henry undergoes a course of locked-down residential experimental therapy to overcome his fear of the boogeyman, conducted by Dr Jessica Ryan (Renée O’Connor, from ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’) and her senior colleague Dr Mitchell Allen (horror stalwart Tobin Bell).

When Henry leaves the hospital and makes plans to move across country to start a new job, his younger sister’s own fears begin to manifest, and she agrees to enter the programme. The other inmates at the facility are all young people suffering from a variety of phobias and psychiatric disorders. When they begin to be murdered in gruesome fashion, Laura is convinced it is the work of the boogeyman.

‘Boogeyman 2’ is a direct-to-DVD horror film from Ghost House Pictures, the production company set up by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert to make low-budget horror films, starting in 2004 with the box office hit ‘The Grudge’. Jeff Betancourt, the director of ‘Boogeyman 2’, was the film editor on ‘The Grudge’ and its sequel. The first ‘Boogeyman’ film, also a product of Ghost House Pictures, was released into cinemas in 2005. It had a worldwide box office gross a little over $67 million.

The only thing of note the sequel shares with its predecessor is its lead characters’ fear of the boogeyman. There is otherwise no real connection between the two films. ‘Boogeyman 2’ is a composite of clichés from many other horror films and it is probably possible to name any number of films it resembles. Two that immediately came to my mind are ‘Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed’ and ‘Darkness Falls’, although it does not possess the quality of the former or the likeability of the latter.

Cheap, clichéd, direct-to-DVD horror films are hardly a rarity. Clearly there is a big market for them, or at least that is what the constant churning out of such films would indicate. ‘Boogeyman 2’ is well made, but there is nothing remotely original or appealing about it. I found it all unnecessarily and tediously gory, although that might be the one thing its real target audience would have thought made it worth watching. We also get some gratuitous bare breasts for the boys.

I didn’t like it very much. The story was far too predictable, even for a film of this type, and the gore was boring and unpleasant. I would not rush to watch it again.

Is there any point to a film like ‘Boogeyman 2’? There clearly must be an audience for it – and Ghost House has subsequently announced a third film. It provides work for the people involved in making the film, which I think is reason enough for it to exist.



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The Messengers

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Rating 3


Directed by Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun : Written by Mark Wheaton, based on a story by Todd Farmer : Starring Kristen Stewart, Penelope Ann Miller, Dylan McDermott, John Corbett, William B Davis, Dustin Milligan, Evan Turner, Theodore Turner, Tatiana Maslany and Jodelle Ferland


Roy Solomon (Dylan McDermott) takes his family from Chicago to live on a remote and dilapidated farm in North Dakota where he plans to make a fresh start and cultivate a crop of sunflowers. Roy cannot afford to pay for farm labour, but offers Burwell (John Corbett), a passing stranger, food and lodgings and a small cut of the profits to work on the farm.

Jessica (Kristen Stewart) and her mother Denise (Penelope Ann Miller) are barely on speaking terms and tensions in the family worsen still when Jessica begins to display a barely concealed fear of the house and claims she and her young brother Ben (twins Evan and Theodore Turner) were attacked by apparently supernatural forces. Ben is mute and cannot corroborate her story. The deadly secrets contained in the old house seem to be inexorably linked to the crows that swoop around the fields that surround it.

The Pang brothers from Hong Kong are famous for the acclaimed 2002 film ‘Gin gwai’ (‘The Eye’) and its two sequels. ‘The Messengers’ contains several examples of the distinctive visual imagery common in J-horror films, but it is not in that league.

It is decidedly derivative, adding nothing new to the haunted house genre. Some muddle in the detail suggests editing after the fact, but it also has much to commend it for fans of genre, which I would count myself amongst. However, it is no better than ‘The Return’, the critically mauled Sarah Michelle Gellar film that followed a vaguely similar narrative.

17-year-old Kristen Stewart has been mentioned as an actress to look out for in the future and her performance is perfectly fine. Her portrayal of the sullen teenager is believable, but she is not especially noteworthy in this particular role, apart from being wafer-thin, even by current Hollywood standards. She is perhaps best known for her roles in ‘Panic Room’ and the Oscar-nominated Sean Penn film ‘Into The Wild’.

Stewart does fare better than Penelope Ann Miller and Dylan McDermott, whose roles give them little to work with. It was nice to see John Corbett, who I have paid little attention to since his days in the television series ‘Northern Exposure’. William B Davis, a very distinctive actor celebrated for his role as the cigarette smoking man in ‘The X Files’, is wasted in a small role that initially offers much but goes nowhere.

‘The Messengers’ was produced by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures, which was also responsible for other cheap and cheerful haunted house films like ‘The Grudge’ and ‘Boogeyman’. It has an 11% rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes, which is par for the course for this type of film, and grossed $55 million at the box office against a production budget of $16 million.



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The Grudge

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Rating 3½


Directed by Takashi Shimizu

Written by Stephen Susco, based on 'Ju-On: The Grudge' written by Takashi Shimizu

Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, William Mapother, Clea DuVall, KaDee Strickland, Grace Zabriskie, Ted Raimi, Bill Pullman and Ryo Ishibashi


Sarah Michelle Gellar has said she was taken by surprise by the long hours films crews are expected to work in Japan, compared to their colleagues in America. Takashi Shimizu has admitted it took him a while to get used to the working practices of the American actors because it conflicted with his usual working methods. He has also said he was initially surprised that Gellar took such a keen interest in every aspect of the filming process because Japanese actors are not expected to have much involvement in the production other than acting their parts in accordance with the instructions of the director. Gellar has said everyone was extremely polite and kind to her, but she did quickly notice that members of the film crew seemed slightly uncomfortable when she asked them questions -- and Shimizu would look on with benign amusement when she made suggestions to him about various things.

“In Japan actors and actresses can work all day. As long as we put them in a taxi and they get home safely after working, that’s fine. But here, American actors have only a certain amount of hours they can work in a day; then that’s it. It was really hard for me to work around that -- the scheduling, the timing -- with those actors. Other than that, the actors themselves were great. It was a really great experience for me to work with them.”
Takashi Shimizu: horror.com

Gellar was the last of the American actors to be cast. She says a friend sent her the script together with a DVD copy of ‘Ju-on: The Grudge’, which she found waiting for her when she returned home from a brief vacation. She read the script and watched the DVD that same evening and personally contacted Sam Raimi the following day, making known her interest in the central role of Karen Davis. Raimi has confirmed this story, saying he was initially reluctant because he didn’t think the budget would accommodate her involvement. However, she persisted, and Raimi claims it was her unrestrained enthusiasm about the film and her willingness to audition for the role that eventually won him over.

‘The Grudge’ had a $10 million production budget. Executives at Sony Pictures Entertainment later stated that their ‘best scenario’ prediction was for a $15 million opening weekend. The final worldwide gross exceeded $187 million, making it one of the most profitable films of 2004.

When I read the shocking reviews ‘The Grudge’ received I am absolutely mystified. As ever, there were some good reviews, but many dismissed the film as a worthless piece of garbage. Gellar came in for a lot of criticism for her performance. Roger Ebert has been quite supportive of some of Gellar’s films in the past, but he considers ‘The Grudge’ to be one of the worst ten films of 2004. I don’t agree with this, but it’s a perfectly valid, if subjective, opinion. However, in his review of the film he claimed the non-linear timeline employed in the narrative is impossible to follow. I find it surprising coming from a film critic and writer of Ebert’s experience and reputation.


“The Grudge has a great opening scene, I’ll grant you that. Bill Pullman wakes up next to his wife, greets the day from the balcony of their bedroom, and then - well, I, for one, was gob-smacked. I’m not sure how this scene fits into the rest of the movie, but then I’m not sure how most of the scenes fit into the movie… I eventually lost all patience. The movie may have some subterranean level on which the story strands connect and make sense, but it eluded me.”
Roger Ebert: Chicago Sun Times

There is not a great deal of difference between ‘Ju-on: The Grudge’ (Shimizu’s Japanese original) and the American-financed remake. I think the original is the better of the two films. It has an atmosphere that is both foreboding and alien. Compensating for this, the remake does attempt to show that the American characters feel a sense of displacement within Japanese culture and I think this works very well, although there is no great emphasis placed on it. In both films the characters are merely part of the fabric of the story. Their presence and personalities always remain very sketchy as they are sucked into the unfolding horror. This is very deliberate, but it’s one of the things that some critics reacted against.

“…The pacing is so slow and the actors so numb and uninvolved that the horror elements are lost in a fog of dullness. Lo and behold! Gellar cannot act. Miraculously coasting up until now, The Grudge solidifies Gellar’s status as an actress in need of acting lessons. Instead of expressing emotions, she makes amateur grimaces. She is not in touch with her character. In fact, no one is. And, since for the first half of the movie the camera is trained on Gellar’s frozen face, this is not good. The most important expression in a horror movie – fear - is never seen… Is Karen happy in Japan? Does she like her job? What are her feelings about weird things? Is she a survivor? Is she smart or just a dumb young lady getting by in Tokyo? Gellar is out of her element here.”
Victoria Alexander: Films in Review

All the performances in ‘The Grudge’ (and in ‘Ju-on: The Grudge’) are quite similar. There is a kind of ennui that envelops each character. It could be argued, as many critics who reviewed ‘The Grudge’ have done, that this is simply down to bad acting. On the other hand, it might be suggested that these actors are giving the performances asked of them by the director, who is attempting to create a very specific atmosphere in the film. Effectively, it’s a mood piece.

I must make a special mention of Ryo Ishibashi, in the role of Detective Nakagawa. I think this is a great performance. Ishibashi imbues his character with a quiet dignity, but also a sense of sadness and resignation about the inevitability of the terrible events that are unfolding around him.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think this is a really good film.



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The Grudge 2

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Rating 2¾


Directed by Takashi Shimizu

Written by Stephen Susco

Starring Amber Tamblyn, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Arielle Kebbel, Jennifer Beals, Sarah Roemer and Edison Chen


It could be argued that having already made four Japanese-language versions of ‘Ju-on’, with a fifth one apparently in pre-production, as well as directing a Hollywood remake of ‘Ju-on: The Grudge’, there was really no need for Takashi Shimizu to make a sequel to that widely unloved American rewrite.

In the end, money talked loudest. ‘The Grudge’ was a very big box office hit and ‘The Grudge 2’ was inevitable. This one has nothing in common with ‘Ju-on: The Grudge 2’, whereas the first Hollywood film was a relatively faithful retelling of it’s original source material. Clearly, the intention here was to pave the way for a third film to be set in America. Indeed, a third film has been announced, although not this time with Takashi Shimizu at the helm.

‘The Grudge 2’ doesn’t break any new ground and there is nothing here that isn’t already present in the first film. Shimizu employs his usual technique of cutting up several seemingly unconnected strands and weaving them into an incoherent whole that employs a non-linear timeframe. The story takes precedence over the characters, who are largely reduced to ciphers. I’m not at all sure what purpose there is in making the mother of Karen and Aubrey so unpleasant – confining her love to the older daughter only and making it so obvious – but it doesn’t take up much of the plot.

I’ve watched the film three or four times now and while I don’t claim it is a great film by any means I have enjoyed it more on each occasion. It certainly benefits from the presence of Amber Tamblyn, who is a very likeable and guileless actress.



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