And Then There Were None

I have a thing for old b/w versions of the stories of Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, Edgar Wallace and the likes. Hence, a 1945 version of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians works for me.

This is a version of said story that one could easily imagine as an on stage production. The setting is very limited (a house indoors and out, a small boat) and it is played out like a stage production. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

The material relies heavily on acting and not on surroundings. It has an air of sophistication about it that would nowadays be replaced by grisly details and lots of movie blood (one guy is said to be cut in half!).

Weirdly enough, this genre does not work for me in book form, though. Never made it through a single Christie book.

6/10

Breaking the 4th Wall Movie Supercut

Breaking the 4th Wall Movie Supercut from Leigh Singer on Vimeo.

Jayne Mansfield's Car

One of those films that flew totally under the radar. And this is a little gem.

Years ago, Naomi Caldwell divorced her husband and left her family in Alabama to go to England. There she remarried and stayed. Now that she died the two families meet up for the first time in Naomi's native Alabama, where she is to be buried.

Both, the Caldwells and the English Bedfords have unresolved family issues that break open over the few days they spend under the same roof. But there is also some healing involved for some of the family members. The two husbands of Naomi first bond over a visit to the (alleged) car that Jayne Mansfield died in, the two Bedford siblings, Phillip and Camilla, take up with Donna and Skip Caldwell, respectively, Carroll Caldwell reconnects with his estranged father over a letter he wrote him many years ago that the old man has never acknowledged but has been carrying around in his pocket for the longest time.

There is one particularly touching scene, when Skip tells Camilla about the injuries he suffered while flying a military plane in WWII.

Billy Bob Thornton directed this one. I have previously seen and liked his Sling Blade and this is the second of his that I have watched.

6/10

In Bruges

Ray's first job as a professional hit man goes terribly wrong. He is supposed to kill a priest, but when he does he also accidentally kills a little boy waiting for his turn to confess.

Together with Ken, Ray is sent to Bruges to 'lie low' for a while. There they both await further instructions from their boss Harry. While Ray is miserable and bored, Ken is happily playing the tourist.

Then Ken gets a call from Harry telling him to off Ray. When he refuses and sends Ray off on a train to save him, Harry comes in to take care of the situation himself.

Then Ray (involuntarily) reappears in Bruges and things don't quite go as planned for Harry.

Funny with weird situations galore.

Even Colin Farrell is good in this.

8/10

Battle in Seattle

The film is based on the 1999 WTO Conference in Seattle and how the protests surrounding it got out of hand.

It does not glorify the civil disobedience but rather strives for a balance for both sides. The protests and traffic disturbances caused humanitarian causes to take the biggest hits. Resources were shifted to the main part of the conference, cutting off speaking time from causes like Doctors Without Borders that would usually happen alongside, while all relevant people are gathered in the same locale.

But much more than paint a big picture, it focuses on the human stories, which takes away some of the force somehow. Peppered in are TV clips from Seattle used to cover that part of the story.

It does sport quite the impressive cast and is thoroughly watchable although it is never quite clear where it stands or if, indeed, it takes sides at all.

6/10

Alexandra's Project

Steve comes home on his birthday expecting a surprise party. While he was at the office, his wife had all photos of his family sent over to the house. Supposedly, the will be used as part of a surprise present.

What Steve gets instead is a chair placed in front of a TV set, playing a tape of his wife telling him about her frustration with their marriage.

He sits through the recording, that begins with his children telling him happy birthday and then leave. He watches his wife have sex with their neighbor while telling him that this is how she has been earning her own money while home alone.

And he learns that she has not only sent the kids away and is leaving him, she has also taken every photo he possessed of the children with her as the ultimate punishment.

An interesting concept and quite well made film.

Certainly disturbing.

8/10

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

A struggling car dealership owner calls in salesman extraordinaire Don Ready to move some cars and avoid having to sell the lot and have it turned into a rehearsal space for the local boy band (man band). Their claim to fame is that they once opened for O-Town (remember them?).

Don has his demons pestering him because he falls for the car dealer's daughter Ivy. Something similar has happened once before in Albuquerque ("Querque") a while back, when he was more interested in getting laid than concentrating on his trade - something that cost his best friend his life.

To complicate matters further, he also thinks that one of the young salesmen may be his son.

Yeah it's ridiculous but it also features a lot of actors you would expect in a weird comedy.

4/10

Child's Play

When criminal Charles Lee Ray gets shot while running from cop Mike Norris he transfers his spirit into a popular children's toy.

The toy is a doll from the Good Guys TV show. Ray now goes by the name of Chucky (Ray's nick name).

Little Andy wants nothing more than one of those dolls. His mother gets him one and the doll proceeds to wreak havoc on the boy and his family while at the same time trying to take revenge on everyone that has done him wrong in his lifetime.

This is cult!

6/10

The Apparition

During a séance a spirit is set free into our world and it proceeds to haunt people. The haunting manifests in - at first - a fungus spreading in a nice condo, a neighbor's dog dying, claw marks in a closet and - ghasp! - open doors.

Now, this undefined spirit was set free in the second of two botched séances and the couple haunted were not in that session at all. The guy was in session 1, which went all wrong, as well. The consequence of it was that his then girlfriend disappeared into the wall (literally). Why the spirit-thingy would come and haunt the later uninvolved guy and the totally uninvolved now girlfriend is never explained.

Why the séances were held in the first place goes unexplained, as well. And why the hell there would be a second session is beyond any horror film afficionado's understanding, I believe. The group holding séance number two even thought that they could trap the spirit. Right.

Anyway, an old friend (and from all appearances the initiater of this whole ghost calling venture) comes to the rescue of the frightened couple, bringing all kinds of fancy equipment with him (lacking, apparently, a decent hand held camera or merely a run-of-the-mill phone with camera function). They want to send the spirit back where it belongs by playing a recording of the session backwards. Ta-da!

Anyone suprised that this does not work? Yeah, me neither.

What a load of crap.

1/10

Identity

The lawyer of Malcolm Rivers makes one last ditch effort to stay the execution of his client. Rivers, convicted of murdering six people a few years back is brought to a middle-of-the-night hearing, where the lawyer and a psychiatrist try to prove that he was not aware of what he was doing because of his multiple personality disorder.

The many people in Rivers' head all end up in a motel in the pouring rain that keeps them from getting where they want to go. The group is as random as can be, including a family with small child, a prostitute, an actress, a couple of criminals, a former cop...

What happens in the court hearing and is played out by the character in the motel is that the one personality that made Rivers kill has to be irradicated. To achieve this one by one the people at the motel get killed off until the sitting judge is convinced that the culprit is gone.

The real story in the film is what is going on at the motel. The characters don't seem to be aware of what they actually are in the bigger picture, so this plays out as a quite brutal whodunit. Each person that dies gets marked with a room key, counting the bodies down from 10 to 1. They all hurl accusations and cannot seem to find any common ground on how to handle their situtation. Halfway throught the killings, one of the most level-headed of the group, Ed, turns out to be the personality that the committee around Rivers can work with.

This is when the two stories overlap, Ed suddenly finds himself strapped to a chair a not recognizing himself in the mirror. He is confused as to how he is no longer in the pouring rain by the motel. But this really turns out to be the way in. When all but one of the characters at the motel are gone, the committee is satisfied with their progress and Rivers' death sentence is overturned.

However, on the way back to the prison the psychiatrist realizes to late that one of the personalities believed to have died in an explosion acutally survived and that was the very one they would have needed to eliminate. Deadly mistake.

Despite the flaws and the confusing set up I really, really enjoy this film.

8/10

Cube

Cube is one of those wondrous films that feature nobody you have ever heard of and develop from a simple idea and visual.

Six people that have seemingly nothing in common wake up entrapped in cubic rooms. Each room has portals - one in the middle of each side - that leads into another cubic room. They have no recollection of how they got there and - after some deliberation - venture on together to look for a way out.

Only trouble is that any given new cube/room could hold a deadly trap - and quite wonderful they are. You could be sliced into pieces, you could take a load of acid in the face, the room could turn into an iron maiden. At first, they test for traps by use of their shoes. Eventually, the figure out that each room has a unique set of nine-digit numbers and deduct that whether or not the adjoining room holds a trap can be figured out through the number based on whether it is a prime number or not.

Thankfully, one of the six is a maths wiz. But once the prime number theory fails them they have to adapt their search by a new numeric parameter. Here another of the group comes into play. One young, mentally challenged man, who was previously regarded as a burden to the group, can calculate impossile problems in his head in no time.

As the search for an exit goes on, people get more and more agitated and turn on each other. Through trial and error they finally do figure out a way to make it out again, by being in the right room at the right time. See, it turns out that the rooms shift and the numbers not only include coordinates but also a time frame (it is all very mathematical and way above my head).

So simple, yet so effective.

8/10

House at the End of the Street

A divorcee and her teenage daughter Elissa move into a small town and a house they can really only afford because of what happened next door.

Legend has it that a young girl killed her parents years ago and now only the girl's brother lives in the house. The girl, 13 at the time, was said to have disappeared into the nearby woods and/or drowned in a nearby lake. But no body was ever recovered, so you know there is something very fishy about ti. The boy, one Ryan, had been sent away to live with an aunt after causeing an accident that left his sister mentally challenged. He is now back (and in college) to renovate the house so that he can sell it.

Elissa totally likes Ryan and even though the rest of the town, at best, shuns him or, at worst, beats him up she stands by him. Her mom doesn't like that either for some reason. I'm not quite clear why that is, especially since she has something going with a local policeman who finds no issue with the young man whatsoever.

Anyway, both Elissa and the small town cop are wrong about Ryan.

What really happened is this:
The parents were totally drugged out in the house while Ryan and his little sister were playing outside. The girl wanted to go higher and higher on the swing and Ryan failed to hold her arm for a bit and she fell off backwards and hit her head. This left her not retarded (bad word! bad word!) but, um, well, dead. The parents blame the boy and from now on decide that he is the daughter and raise him as such. But then once the teenage hormones kick in, he snaps and kills the parents and reappears as the poor discarded brother.

He cannot, however, cope without his little sister and keeps a young woman in the basement that he pumps full of drugs of some kind (whereever he got them from....). The woman in the basement is exchangeable because, you know, sometimes shit happens and he breaks her neck when she tries to run off through the forest and he catches up with her just in time.

Anyway, final showdown, cop dies, mom gets injured, Elissa kills culprit. And then....they move out again. Sure, they were fine living beside a house in which some sort of tragedy happened and where the town weirdo is still holed up, but now that it is just a house, no way José. We're done here.

3/10

Evil Dead II

I took a couple of weeks off from posting or, rather, from watching movies because I was preoccupied with working my way through all nine seasons of The Office.

My return to the blog is part 2 of the Evil Dead series.

Following this is a re-telling of part 1 in which our hero Ash only takes his girlfriend to the deserted cabin of the first installment. The find the book, girl loses her head, Ash is left to face the evil spirits all alone. He does lose a body part, as well. To save himself from alien hand syndrome he cuts the affected limb off with a chainsaw. And he goes slightly mad.

Soon he is joined by a group of four people, one of them the daughter of the owner of the cabin. Her scientist father found and translated the evil book and it was his voice on tape that called on the evil spirits. The daughter now brings with her the means to undo all that - missing pages.

But before they are saved of anything more blood will flow.

Basically the same as part one with different cast (except for the wonderful Bruce Campbell). The main difference is that this one does not take itself too seriously.

7/10

"Carnival of Souls" Horror Movies 1918-1966

In case you are in Vienna for the next few weeks...

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 Collection

Daddy's little rich girl gets cancelled on by her (no good) boyfriend and goes off with friend to a party so exclusive one needs a password ('Nevermore') to get in. Looks like everyone knows the password, though, as the place is stuffed. Even the boyfriend is there, making out with some random blonde.

The location has been prepared by the elusive serial killer known as the collector. The people on the dancefloor get eliminated by what looks like a part of a giant lawnmower, some get caged in and simply squeezed to death. Also on the premises is one red box, holding our hero (ish) from part 1, Arkin.

He manages to escape the house of death by jumping from a first floor window with a body (the boyfriend) in front of him to break his fall. Daddy's girl takes his place in the box. Arkin is questioned by police who apparently cannot decide whether he is just a victim or is somehow involved with the mass murder that has just occured. Just in case, they cuff him to his hospital bed.

Shortly after, he is visited by a squad like outfit tasked with finding and rescuing the newest collection piece. And they want Arkin to lead the way. They don't give him much of a choice in the matter but simply put a gun to his head. So he takes them to the location he was being held and tortured in. He can tell the way because he cut marks in his arm, one straight one whenever he had counted to 100 and a diagnol one for every turn the car made. They end up at a place called Hotel Argento (a nod to the director? maybe), which is the collector's headquarter.

Unsurprisingly, the place is a death trap. The group (including Bubble from The Wire) has to pick their way around the house and - also unsurprisingly - get killed off one by one. They find a few victims of the collector in various stages of paranoia (mostly drug infueled). Daddy's girl has by now managed to free herself from the red box and navigates her own way through the labyrinth of death.

Her and Arkin will be the only ones to make it out alive. The body of the collector, or whatever should be left of it after an explosion and extensive fire, is not found on the scene. Jump to some time later...Arkin has dedicated himself to finding the culprit, having concluded that the guy really is a collector. Of insects, that is. He finds the guy through some registry of entomologists and - after telling him that he will torture him extensively before killing him, forces him into a box.

The stage is set for part 3, I think.

7/10

The Collector

The Chase family has recently moved to a remote location and as the house needs some fixing up, they have hired Arkin (Josh Stewart, very easy on the eyes) as a handyman. They also have a bit of a bug problem, so an exterminating firm makes an appearance early on in the film

Arkin needs money to pay off his wife's debts with some shady character. He needs this money right now. Luckily, the Chase family is set to go away for a couple of weeks and he knows where the safe is hidden and the things inside it will easily get him what he needs.

After dark, he goes back to the house and lets himself in. Just when he is about to crack the code for the safe he realizes that he is not alone, after all. The next thing he notices is that the entire house is rigged with deadly traps. A masked man, the 'Collector' in the title, is looking for an addition fitting for his collection (he collects humans, apparently) an it could be one of the Chases.

The parents are both stashed away in the basement, both badly hurt. Unfortunately, he could not yet get a hold of the two daughters of the family. The older, Jill, is a bit of a trouble maker (your average teenager) and off somewhere with a boyfriend after having refused to go on the family vacation. The younger, Hannah, is simply hiding. Also in the house is the previous collection piece, a man kept inside a red box (the box is what ties the collector's crimes together).

Arkin is torn between helping the people he was going to steal from and making a run for it. The latter option made very difficult thanks to the deadly weapons that could hit him in every room in the house.

Jill and her boyfriend make an appearance. They believe the house to be empty. When they start to make out the collector takes a creepy interest but Jill spots him and after being attacked dials 911 without being able to talk to the operator. There follows the death of the boyfriend, and a disgusting death it is. Arkin comes to Jill's aid while the collector is off investigating a sound. Arkin looks bloody and beat at this point and has no business being there in the first place, so Jill assumes he is an accomplice. While backing away from him she picks up a pair of scissors to use as a weapon, triggering a trap that nails her to the wall.

After he realizes that both parents and Jill are dead at this point, Arkin makes it out of the house but when he turns to look back he sees little Hannah begging for his help from an upstairs window. So back in he goes to rescue the little girl. Despite all the traps, some acid fluids, and one very angry dog they manage to get away. Arkin, having quite the bad day, gets hit by an oncoming cop car. Nevertheless, Hannah gets rescued and he gets put in an ambulance and taken away.

But there is no happy ending for him. The collector hits the ambulance with his own car, causing it to flip over and Arkin ends up in the red box.

Bad guy wins.

8/10

Sinister

A true-crime writer, who apparently gets a kick (or "inspiration") out of moving into homes where crimes have been committed, tries to reignate his faded flame of stardom by writing this one book that will change everything.

For that purpose he moves his family into nice suburban house. Of course, this home is no different, never mind what he tells his wife. Right at the beginning of the film, we see a super 8 film of a family 'hanging around'. In this case, this translates to a group hanging of every family member but one - a little girl disappears and is never heard of again.

Soon, our writer finds a box in the attic holding a number of home movies from different decades and shot in far apart locations. What they all have in common is that on each we see a family murdered. The manner changes but from each family one child goes missing.

The connection? Bughuul. That is some sort of demon, only few drawings of it remain. Along with the videos, the writer finds drawings of the different crimes, seemingly done by children and naming all the victims and putting an extra figure next to the dead bodies, called 'Mr. Boogie'.

What connnects the victim's families is that each has lived in a house that was once occupied by one of the other families. So, when the writer finds that out, it is already too late for him and his loved ones, even though he did get the hell out of Dodge when weird occurences and sounds in the new house had spooked him out enough.

They die by the hand of their young daughter. After she is done, she is picked up by Mr. Boogie and carried into another super 8 film.

In normal films this would all be weird but in horror films this sort of works. It would have been great except for one thing that bugged me throughout - they never turn on the lights. They even have dinner in the near dark. While this may add some suspense to the viewing experience if you stop and think about it it is just plain stupid.

6/10