Deathwatch

During WW I, a battalion of British soldiers stumbles through a field of fog, losing their orientation. When they come upon extensive German trenches, they kill the few German soldiers still in it except for one and take over the trenches. Obviously, they don't heed the lone soldiers warning about the place, telling them that they will turn on each other if they stay.

They are under command of one Cpt. Jennings, who orders them to defend the trenches until their own troops catch up with them. But they are unable to make contact with anyone, with only white noise coming through the radio.

The place is eerie, to say the least, and the fogs surrounding everything never lifts. They soon realize that they are stranded, not knowing where they are and unable to call for help. But their Captain insists on staying, no matter how uneasy everyone is.

Sometimes, at night, the place is surrounded by battle noises but whenever they get ready for the oncoming attack nothing happens and the noise dies down again. In the confusion that follows their trying to clean out the tunnel system by throwing explosives inside, the Captain accidentally shoots one of his own men - the first sign of them turning on each other.

On another occasion, a patch of fog, this one rather red than white, befalls one of the soldiers who is then finally ready to desert his post. When he does, he is - as deserters will be - shot by a companion. His other fellow soldiers try to help him, but he gets swallowed up by the ground before they can get to him.

This then causes the group to finally split apart, some wanting to leave immediately, the Captain still wanting to stay and establishing his role as the leader and one rather crazy man hollering at whatever is out there with him to come and get him. When the Captain orders him to cease his nonsense, he gets stabbed to death for his efforts. As predicted, they all turn on each other, with only one of them (the youngest) having any sense of moral left and only shooting out of self defense.

When all but himself are dead the earth swallows the bodies along with him into...the ground? ...hell? When he comes to he is surrounded by decaying corpses and in the distance sees his entire battalion, seemingly unharmed, including himself. When he stumbles outside he runs into the one remaining German soldier, now suddenly fluent in English when before he was only able (willing?) to communicate in French, telling the survivor that he is free to go as he was the only one trying to help him.

It all ends with another battalion happening upon the trenches and aiming at the German soldier, who lifts his head to face the camera, smiling.

The film relies mostly on the dreary and bleak atmosphere and a pretty decent cast, convincingly portraying a scared, desperate group of soldiers.

It is a bit confusing, though.

5/10

Ghost Ship

Last Sunday's horror film bonanza (see my previous posts) concluded with Ghost Ship. Sort of as a way to calm down after The Collector/The Collection we needed something blood free and relatively calm. It was....fine. Not really scary.

Some guy contacts a group of what can only be described as ocean teasure hunters because he saw a seemingly deserted ocean liner in the middle of nowhere while flying over and, who knows, it may be worth something. The group is beat and ready to go home but the promise of financial gain prompts them to join in.

When they find the ship it does hold what they were hoping for - gold. And lots of it. It is also haunted by seemingly all the passengers that were on it when they 'mysteriously disappeared' in the 1960s. The disappearance, of course, was not so mysterious after all. Most were killed for the gold the ship was holding.

The new arrivals also find a pile of bodies that could only have been there for a few months. And they start seeing things and miscalculating dangers and people die. (Of course they do.)

Not too surprisingly, the guy that first alerted them to the ship's existance has something to do with all the eery things that have been happening. Turns out he is not a human but once was a very bad man and has to collect souls for his boss (the devil, one assumes) and the ship seemed to be as good a hunting ground as any, but he needed to get someone to fix it agains because it was in danger of sinking.

In the end, the lone survivor is straped to a gurney, because she is badly injured and as she lifts her head she sees the boxes of gold being loaded onto another ship and the bad guy boarding with them.

Oh, well.

4/10

The Conjuring

I have seen a lot of horror films. A lot. This is the best horror film I have seen in a long time, if not ever.

The film details the allegedly true story about a haunting in the house of the Perron family and is based on the findings of Ed and Lorraine Warren. Whether or not you buy into the paranormal depicted or, indeed, believe that such phenomena exist, the film will have you jump more than once.

It is old school horror rather than buckets of blood poured onto everyone and everything (something I am absolutely cool with in films, but find it less effective than haunting story telling). The build-up is slow paced but when the weird things start happening, they happen in spades. And it is scary. For me, it's the small things that do it, like in Paranormal Activity (the first one aka the only one that matters) the door that moved in the middle of the night, here it was hands reaching out from between clothes and clapping.

If you want to have side-to-side comparisons of the fictional vs. real people, there is an article with photos and all about it on the History vs. Hollywood website. There is also a pretty official webpage for the film.

Very, very scary and very, very good. James Wan knows what he is doing.

9/10

The Awakening

Florence Cathcart exposes hoaxes dealing with ghosts and writes books about it. One day she is asked to come to a school for boys haunted by one little boy, that appears to some of the children there with twisted face, scaring the boys. So much so that one died from an asthma attack.

She sets up all sorts of machines and means of proving that the 'ghost' is only boys playing pranks. When the school closes down for a week, only a few personnel and one boy, Thomas, stay behind with Florence. That is when things get really creepy. Florence starts seeing the ghost and at the same time remember all sorts of things, like a broken statue or a single shoe.

Turns out she is the most traumatized of them all, having grown up in the house the school is in, where - as a young girl - witnessed her father shooting her mother, who couldn't give him a son, and then coming after the little girl but in the end killing his bastard son, instead. That son turns out to be Thomas.

Florence's visit had been orchestrated by Tom's mother who worked for Florence's family back in the day and stayed in the house to work for the school, as well. Her idea was for Florence and Thomas to be together again, so the boy won't be so lonely.

Creepy with a gothic look to it. Too bad I don't like Rebecca Hall, which made the viewing experience less enjoyable. Luckily, this features also Dominic West, Imelda Staunton and the wonderful but underrated Shaun Dooley. Thomas is played by Isaac Hempstead Wright (of Game of Thrones fame).

5/10

The Messengers

The Solomon family moves to a farm in North Dakota to plant sun flowers, after they have had a rough time of it in Chicago for the last two years. The father lost his job and the daughter got into trouble back there.

The house they bought with their last money is, unsurprisingly, haunted by the ghosts of a family that died there. There are ominous shadows in the background and the daughter and her toddler brother seem to be the only ones seeing them - the teenage girl terrified by them, the boy having a blast.

When a mysterious stranger shows up and stays on to work on the farm, nothing much seems to happen for months, however. Then suddenly the visions come back with a vengeance. Nobody believes the teenager, however, as she is a known troublemaker.

In the end, it turns out that the farm hand was involved in causing all of the trouble back in the day, he was actually the father that did away with his entire family and loses it one day, after he has been attacked by the ever present crows. He suddenly cannot tell the new and old family in the house apart and tries to kill his all over again.

There are a lot of eye-rolling moments in this, mostly about the philosophizing of the farm hand and a local teenage boy. The scares are kind of interesting. The film also gives Kirsten Stewart an opportunity to show off the entire range of her acting.

Yes, I was being sarcastic just then.

Why the ghosts would be called "messengers" is not ever addressed. They don't appear to be giving any messages to anybody, unless you interpret their weird behavior in trying to scare the hell out of people and possibly trying to kill them as warnings. Come to think of it, though, the  crows on the farm are the probably the messengers.

Maybe we get confirmation in the sequel. Yes, there is a sequel! Part two at least bears the promise of some serious eye candy in the form of Norman Reedus. The only saving grace in part one was William B. Davis (the cigarette smoking men from The X Files).

4/10

The Innkeepers

Yet another ghost story.

With the owner of the Yankee Pedlar Inn vacationing in Barbados, two employees are left to man the front desk of the place in its final days. Both, Claire and Luke, are interested in ghosts and on a mission to record the sounds of one Madeline O'Malley, who is said to haunt the inn ever since she was killed and hidden in the basement.

Over the course of the last two days a total of four guests are in the house, a disgruntled mother with her young son, a former actress turned 'healer' and an old man insisting on renting a room on the already stripped third floor.

While Luke is off sleeping, Claire records the sound of a piano playing by itself, sees a disfigured ghost in a wedding gown and sits with the healer who warns her not to go into the basement. So, of course, Claire and Luke eventually explore the basement. Luke, who told of Madeline sightings before, freaks out and runs off. He also admits that he made everything up. This means that Claire is the only one to have seen the ghost of Madeline, apparently.

After she finds the old man dead of suicide, she runs off....and ends up in the basement once more where she is haunted now by not one but two ghosts, as the old guy has joined in the fun. She dies and Luke later finds her inhaler at the bottom of the stairs.

Most of this happens in the second half of the film. If you wonder what was going on in the first half - I honestly couldn't say. Basically, the film kicks off about 50 minutes in.

*shrug*

3/10

Mama

I like a good ghost story. Especially when it is as pretty as this. Sure, it looks goth and is macabre, but I find it pretty nonetheless.

Jessica Chastain (sporting an unfortunate hairdo) stars alongside Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (of Game of Thrones fame) as couple Annabel and Lucas taking care of two little girls named Victoria and Lily. When Luke's twin brother went of the rails five years back, he shot two work associates and his wife and took off into the woods with his two girls. They ended up in a cabin, also inhabited by a ghost, who mainly lived in the wall.

After the ghost did away with the father, the girls spent the next five years there, growing savage and calling the creature Mama. Luke never gave up looking for his brother and nieces and they were eventually found and after spending some time in psychiatric care, were handed over to him and Annabel, while under the watch of one Dr. Dreyfuss, who slowly pieced together the story of this Mama the girls keep referring to.

Unfortunately, Mama came with the girls into the new house and becomes very jealous of Annabel. Luke ends up in a hospital after a fall down the stairs and Annabel is left to fend for herself. She finds out the story Dr. Dreyfuss has pieced together after he disappears while trying to solve the enigma of Mama by going back to the cabin the girls were found in (he doesn't make it out again).

Mama was separated from her own child when held in an insane asylum. She escaped, kidnapped the baby and ended up falling down a cliff with the child. While Mama fell into the water, the baby's blanket got caught on a branch and the two were again separated in death. She haunted the area looking for her baby ever since. Annabel and Luke try to get rid of the ghost by offering the remains of the child, that had been stored away in some government facility because nobody ever came to claim them, as a trade for Victoria and Lily. In the end, they have to make a huge sacrifice.

Some of this is truly scary. One can recognize Guillermo del Toro's producing hand in this.

8/10

Scrooged

I love this film. I watch it every year at Christmas. Every! Year!

Yes, it exploits every Christmas sentiment and it features run-of-the-mill jokes. But it has the power to reduce me to a crying mess. The scene when little Calvin starts to talk again at the end gets me every single time.

The story is the standard one. Francis Cross (Bill Murray) is a heartless network president that makes people work on a live show on Christmas Eve and has no quarrels about firing people around Christmas and giving a cheap towel to his little brother as a present.

As Ebeneezer Scrooge, Cross gets visited by three ghosts.

The ghost of Christmas past is a taxi driver that takes him back to his childhood days and the initial meeting and subsequent loss of the potential love of his life, Claire, who is everything Cross is not - kind, selfless and bighearted.

The ghost of Christmas present takes a more direct approach, in as much that she keeps hurting him - head butts, kicks in the balls and on the chin. She shows him that not everyone is as fortunate and cynical as he is. The ghost is played by Carol Kane, who is absolutely hilarious in this role.

The ghost of Christmas future is a rather frightful creature showing him a bleak future for him and all the people close to him. This one, of course, makes Cross realize that he needs to change his ways.

The grand finale features the new and improved Cross giving a heartfelt speech about the real meaning of Christmas, the reunion with Claire and everyone breaking into song, doing a group rendition of Put a Little Love in Your Heart.

Watched it. I will have my presents now!

8/10

The Innocents

The 1961 film The Innocents is based on the novel The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Originally, this was adapted for the stage and there is a theatrical feel to it. The setting is as ghostly and gothic as it gets in black-and-white British horror films - a country estate, way too big for its few inhabitants.

The focus of the story is on the new governess Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) and the two children she is hired to care for, Flora and Miles. The previous governess has died about a year before. Later we learn that she took her own life after the accidental death of her abusive boyfriend, who also worked on the estate as a valet.

Both, the former governess and the valet, appear to Miss Giddens as ghosts and she concludes that the children are possessed by the spirits of the lovers.

She takes it upon herself to get to the bottom of it all and - ultimately - save the children from the peril they are in. The two youngsters do appear to be rather mean spirited, especially the little boy. Miss Giddens' solution is to send off the staff and Flora and stay behind with just the boy, to help him freeing himself from his demon by facing him. It ends in tragedy.

Wonderful, classic film. The feel and setting was much later imitated in The Others, which I also recomend wholeheartedly.

8/10