While She Was Out (2008, Susan Montford)

It all starts with that title.

While She Was Out masquerades as potent potboiler, or perhaps as homage to '80s b-horror or any number of low-grade rape-revenge flicks, and it all starts with the title, an evocative, mysterious mouthful akin to wonderfully wordy titles like When a Stranger Calls-- it's here that the first seeds of dread are sown. That title-- along with a few gushing recommendations from unreputable sources-- led me to this movie, a corking disappointment in which a harangued housewife FIGHTS FOR HER LIFE OMG against a diverse foursome of ambiguously gay wayward teenagers.

To be fair, it starts strong, albeit cheesy-- you can practically smell the cheddar as a quivery Kim Basinger cowers in the shadow of her caricature of an abusive husband-- but takes it's time applying an ominous atmosphere to the tensest of activities: last-minute Christmas shopping. These scenes are imbued with an inexplicable tension, perhaps brought about by the viewer's knowledge from the dvd box that she'll soon be antagonized by high-school dropouts, or by the ghostly, ominous Christmas carols floating through the soundtrack. Whatever the case, these early scenes ramp up the tension rather effectively.

And then, it derails. Pissed that Ms. Basinger left an indignant note under his windshield on the way in, Lukas Haas, clearly angry at women for a lifetime of rejected prom invitations, waves around a gun with his ethnically-diverse posse of retards. We know he's bad news, because he has a gun and yells the word "bitch" a whole bunch. Whatever the case, one dead security guard and one hasty getaway later, our heroine, armed with a toolbox (seriously), finds herself in a DEADLY GAME OF CAT AND MOUSE, scurrying her way through a heavily wooded building site.

I dunno. While She Was Out seems like such a hodgepodge to me. There's the familiar wayward youth storyline, where a band of screwy adolescents are failed by society and commence the killin'; unfortunately, this lacks the societal implications of, say, Eden Lake-- a similar storyline that seems stunning after watching this one-- or the cold-sweat thrills of Them. (Hell, Lucky McKee's Red has a wellspring of depth on this disarmingly superficial thriller.) And then, of course, there's the tried-and-true "woman gains strength in anger, wages war on attackers" angle most prevalent in grindhouse shocker I Spit On Your Grave, perfected in Neil Jordan's surprisingly lyrical Jodie Foster vehicle The Brave One. But, of course, to aspire to the rape-revenge subgenre would require a lot more ingenuity-- it requries a certain pulpy violence to truly attain uplift in this depressing field, and it must be inventive. Something like Grave climaxes in a male-nightmare of a bloodbath, and it's not that I want to excuse a film like I Spit on Your Grave-- it's just that it has the foresight to make its bloodthirsty audience approve of its revenge. At a breezy 80 minutes, a solid 30 of which are spent on prologue and epilogue, there's no real room to develop the necessary hatred for our bad guys to pull this off, and the deaths are all quick and ho-hum, save for one reasonably gory bludgeoning. When we dwell on our villains, though, the film reveals its emptiness, choosing to have the guys debate the finer points of female colognes (they track their prey, in one guffaw-worthy sequence, by sniffing out her Chanel No. 5), and holding a ridiculous death ceremony for their fallen comrade. Haas spends more time saying "I'm gonna get this bitch" than actually trying to do so. I don't know, it's just... it's sloppy, all around.

The performances are all right, if better served by a superior script. Kim Basinger dials down the shrill a little bit from the shrieking rednecks she played in 8 Mile and Cellular (although the screaming comes back near the end), and she's reasonably effective; Haas seems deserving of better material, but he's really kind of bad in his most crucial sequences, translating his explosive outbursts into dog-whistle hysterics. The less said of the other performances, the better-- this thing looks like a play put on by the Dangerous Minds students-- but Haas and Basinger are the only ones that matter anyway. And they are completely and wholly okay.

What While She Was Out lacks in.... well, everything, it makes up for with a rousing finale. The end of Basinger's ordeal is rather anticlimactic-- there's some misdirection, some sexual diversion, and it's all over pretty swiftly-- but that last five minutes or so of movie are pure gold. This thing ends with a beast of a final shot, a great 11th-hour twist that's as amoral, over-the-top, and pulpy as any number of grindy b-flicks it should've been emulating the whole time. (I dunno, I'm starting to feel like we'd all be more kind to this movie if it were made in 1982.)

So the bookends are terrific. We've established this. But the film's simply... pedestrian. It's blase. Nothing happens, except a horrifying affront to the English language courtesy of director-scribe Susan Montford. But if we're talking about the opening and closing scenes as bookends, well... it's kind of like seeing gorgeous, ornate bookends-- and finding nothing but Dan Brown books and Sean Hannity books and the shooting script for Battlefield Earth between them. Ashame, that. One day, someone will expose Christmas-eve shopping for the creepy curio it is; unfortunately, that's not today.

Rating: ** (out of five)

Eden Lake (2008, James Watkins)

Eden Lake is one of those disconcerting films that transports you to a very dark mental state; as our heroes, an innocuous, in-love couple on a weekend romantic getaway, are antagonized, the viewer's mind inevitably wanders to what increasingly brutal acts of vengeance they'd wreak in a similar situation.

Steve (Michael Fassbender) and Jenny (Kelly Riley, gorgeous) are off for a weekend of frolicking at a B&B on Eden Lake. The getaway promises at least one surprise - in an early scene, Steve surveys the shiny rock he's purchased for Jenny - but, unfortunately, a lot more are in store. When Steve confronts a group of disruptive teens at the beach, it sets into motion a chain of escalating events that have deadly consequences.

While comparisons abound - John Boorman's classic Deliverance seems to be a bit of a touchstone here, as well as France's Them and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (albeit redone here as the English Countryside Switchblade Fiasco) - Eden Lake is remarkably singular, a film that belies its peaceful, sun-kissed locale to deliver, with stunning veracity, a cautionary tale about conflict, about youth gone wild, about parenting, about society. Simply put, these children - all, as we see near the end, remarkably failed by their parents - are monsters. Ringleader Brett (Jack O'Connell), in particular, is a serial-killer-in-training, a child so monstrous and screwy that, at what must be a ripe old fifteen, his character remains one of the more brutal and intense screen villains in a while, especially in the increasingly emasculated horror genre. His reign of terror is what causes us, the audience, to transport to a particularly dark mental state - with each successive act of brutality, we're left to fantasize, disturbingly, all the devious punishments this child deserves. O'Connell deserves praise for his role - he makes sure that we the audience despise him thoroughly.

This isn't to discredit the efforts of the rest of the cast. Fassbender and Riley, in particular, are great protagonists. They tread a lot more cautiously than many of us like to believe we would - a particular "how would you behave in this situation?" thread on Eden Lake's IMDB message board unearthed a lot of would-be Sly Stallones claiming they'd "go Rambo on their (sic) asses" - but they're remarkably full performances for horror-movie leads. Riley, in particular, impresses as she nears the end - we're meant to question ourselves as we react to certain decisions she makes, and her mixed emotions are nakedly palpable. (Speaking of ends, this one's a doozy - those looking for a traditional Hollywood ending or a disposable final-frame "boo!" to send you squealing into the night are better off seeking out some PG-13 J-horror remake.)

There's a lot of societal unrest at play here, and it unspools slowly, along with the tension. Watkins doesn't necessarily dole out his scares as much as he takes a calculated approach to suspense, stopping to puncture it only periodically. This is a taxing, savage film, but those that would compare it to the "torture porn" of Hostel or the endless Saw sequels clearly missed the point altogether. Complex, unbearably tense, and, occasionally, torturously violent, Eden Lake is a modern gem.

RATING: **** (out of five)

Silent Hill (2006, Christophe Gans)

"Has there ever been a passable movie based on a video game?" I asked, grimly watching a Max Payne tv spot. "Only Silent Hill," the girlfriend replied. I perked up, eager to discover this anomaly in the film world.

As it turns out, to an extent, she's right. Silent Hill isn't a great movie, no-- but it's kinda nifty. It begins in a bit of a whirlwind, mind you-- within the first five minutes or so, Radha Mitchell realizes that her daughter lapses into psychotic episodes, murmuring about "Silent Hill" at night, and she's in the middle of carrying out her master plan to.... well, to barrel her SUV into the West Virginia town and see what happens. This was my first demerit point AND my first kudo, I decided while watching this. On one hand, don't horror movies that take for-EVVV-ver to get to any sort of payoff just cause you to grit your teeth? On the other, we're thrown so immediately into the meat of the story that there's ZERO chance of identifying with the characters. A bit of a conundrum, that.

But then Radha gets to Silent Hill and stumbles upon a series of eerie setpieces and cool grotesqueries, and all-- well, most-- is forgiven.

There's very little sense to be made of the human aspect of this movie, mind you. There's no connect with the characters, through faulty scripting AND faulty acting (should Radha Mitchell ever carry a movie? seriously?), and the plot, topping out at over two hours (long for this kind of flick), is as convoluted as they come. But still, the supernatural element... well, that's just great.

The film LOOKS fantastic. The picture is crisp, and the images are arresting. The (seemingly random) series of ghoulish obstacles that Radha (and leather-babe motorcycle cop Laurie Holden) encounters are delightful. There are creepily lurching, armless monstrosities. There are armies of burned-alive corpses. There's a monster that is inexplicably terrifying (to describe him to you is pointless, as your immediate response would be to point and laugh at my low standards). And, perhaps most creepy of all, there are legions of cultish Pilgrims, refuges from that alternate-dimension revisionist history where they all land at Burnt Offering Rock. These are all very, very cool. There's a keen visual sense at play here, and let's face it, it keeps the picture afloat. There's no emotional content (disappointingly little, really, for what is essentially a child in peril flick) and way, WAY too much plot-- but director Christophe Gans keeps the fantastic surreal imagery coming, and the two hours go by a lot quicker than one may assume.

And that's really all I have to say about Silent Hill, a film that I sort of recommend, just for looking so damned cool. Fans of grisly, eerie images will find themselves in a sort of spot-the-phantasm shangri-la, and, really, there's nothing wrong with that. So it's short on heft. So what? The artsier stuff here should more than satiate the discerning viewer.

Rating: **1/2 (out of five)

Them (2006, David Moreau and Xavier Palud)

I've become convinced that foreign horror filmmakers have the art down a lot more effectively than American ones. It would certainly explain a lot-- why all the Asian horror movies run big creepy rings around their stateside peers, why the U.K. is capable of weaving these terrific terror tapestries like The Descent and the 28 Whatevers Later series while we're forced to deal with The Ruins, and, most of all, why France got Them and we merely got The Strangers. It's all so unfair. I want good movies too!

See, anyone who read a review of last year's The Strangers got a whole earful of Them, a movie critics liked to talk up as being serious inspiration for the Liv-Tyler-gets-stalked-by-grocery-sack-clad-killers horror flick. As Them got more and more into the (admittedly lean) meat of its story, I was able to see just where everyone was coming from. In fact, I'd be inclined to brand The Strangers an out-and-out ripoff-- that is, if I got the impression that the director of the strangers had ever seen a foreign movie.

But enough of all that. Them is a wonderful little curiosity. It exists in no larger sphere, serves no larger illustrative purpose-- it simply IS, this nasty little Romanian-countryside-home-invasion thriller. Olivia Bonamy and Michael Cohen play a couple, tucked away for a night in at their idyllic rural country house, when (naturally) things go kooky. One break-in, one leg injury, and several uber-creepy hooded figures later, they're fighting for their lives.

I'm particularly fond of horror movies that don't telegraph their scares-- much like a sitcom without a laugh track, a horror movie without a gauntlet of empty jump scares and nervy string swells allows you to process everything on your own. It's less cheap this way-- the scare feels genuine, earned. That's one thing I must credit The Strangers for-- that scene where a masked phantasm materializes without fanfare behind Liv Tyler is a minor scare-flick masterwork, beautiful in its simplicity, stunning in its creep-out factor. Them thrives on these little moments, and it ramps the sinister quotient up considerably. Shadows pass through the foreground and creep up the stairs. There's an incredibly subtle moment of tremendous menace where one of our protagonists lets the other into the bedroom, and we catch the briefest glimpse of a hooded figure stalking down the corridor. It's such a fleeting moment that it doesn't register until it passes, and it's worth its weight in screams.

It's simply terrific work. It's not particularly disturbing, and far from gruesome, but it's so suspenseful, so unrelentingly eerie that it goes off like an absolute firecracker. (I haven't even mentioned the opening scene-- what a magnificent sliver of horror cinema! The stuff nightmares are made of.) And from potent prologue to abrupt denoument, Them doesn't waste a scene of its lean (77 minutes) runtime. The men behind this movie went on to helm the American J-horror remake The Eye. Please, please don't hold it against them.

Rating: ****1/2 (out of five)

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996, Robert Rodriguez)

It's hard to believe I ever actually gave From Dusk Till Dawn any sort of short shrift as a film-- watching it again, it's a fantastic piece of work, one of the most astoundingly entertaining films in any genre of the past 20 years or so. Everything fits together perfectly, the Quentin Tarantino script bristles with the rat-a-tat dialogue of the best Tarantino pictures, and the film looks and feels cool enough to have been made by QT himself. Of course, it was made by Robert Rodriguez, and that's good too, if not better-- it's like Tarantino's brand of retro-cool cross-pollinated with Rodriguez's knack for sweltering south-of-the-border locales and hot-shit action, and that's just about as awesome as it sounds.

Really, what more can you ask for in a movie like this? Anyone who's heard of it knows what it's about-- fugitive Gecko Brothers (portrayed, stupendously, by Tarantino and the film's easy MVP, George Clooney) kidnap a family and skate across the border, stowed-away in their RV. The first half of the movie is a pitch-perfect on-the-lam picture; halfway through, it shifts, wholesale, into something else entirely. It is at this point that the movie explodes and splatters the walls with awesome.

Believe me when I tell you this: this movie is AWESOME. If you're unfamiliar with the direction the script takes at the halfway point, do yourself a favor and keep yourself in the dark-- you're due for an Exorcist-style head-spin when the narrative goes from zero to WHAT??? in a matter of seconds. There's a lot of action, and it's great, but where Rodriguez and Tarantino really excel is their characters. They're incredibly memorable-- most notably Clooney's Seth Gecko (he's a certified badass here-- seriously, you'll give yourself an aneurysm trying to figure out how Clooney went from this to Batman & Robin in less than a year-- and Tarantino's given him all the best lines), but Tarantino himself is nice and creepy as Seth's pervy bro, and a startingly subdued Harvey Keitel plays the imperiled family's put-upon ex-clergy patriarch pitch-perfectly. Even the minor characters all get a chance to shine-- the beauty of ensemble acting-- giving Tom Savini and Fred Williamson their moments in the sun.

I dunno, there's just a lot of awesome, iconic stuff going on here. I'm kind of keeping tight-lipped about the places it goes-- it's just so much more fun if you don't know-- but trust me when I say that this is a flick just chock-full of wonderful. The script is bursting with delicious one-liners, and more importantly, it goes everywhere you (or at least, I) could possibly hope it will. There's iconic quotes and even more iconic shots. Really, it just exudes cool, and anyone with even a fleeting interest in things that are cool-- like, REALLY cool, not force-fed community-at-large cool-- needs to recognize.

There's no way I could ever recommend this movie enough.

Rating: ***** (out of five)

Mirrors (2008, Alexandre Aja)

I suppose it'd be easy to watch Mirrors without spending a dime. All you'd have to do is tune in to an episode of "24", and when Jack Bauer bodyslams, shoots, elbow-drops, or otherwise mauls a terrorist, mentally replace said terrorist with any sort of reflective surface.

Really, though, for what it is, Mirrors isn't bad, or at least not as bad as it could've been. Kiefer Sutherland plays a burnt-out ex-cop with a tortured past-- that's original, right?-- his new job as a security guard for the abandoned husk of a burnt-up department store leads him to a host of angry, vengeful, super-pissed mirrors, and his estranged wife and kids are the dastardly reflectors' would-be victims. Right, so let's get the cons out of the way first: Mirrors lacks an original bone in its mangled body ("I killed a man. You don't just bounce back from that" is one line of dialogue, as is the single most standard line in every supernatural horror flick: "You think I'm crazy."), requires a level of belief suspension that many discerning moviegoers don't have the tolerance for, and features the exact same mood and "boo!"-style scares that have plagued the endless sea of post-Ring PG-13 horrors. I'll grant you all that.

But there's at least something about Mirrors that puts it above its peers. Granted, saying Mirrors is better than Boogeyman or The Eye or Shutter is the faintest of praise, but it's got moments. That department store set, for one, is a thing of wonder, one of the creepiest setpieces in recent mainstream horror; also, the movie shows a little bit of flair for splatter, gunning for the hard R instead of the sterilized stock images of tween-safe terrors (somewhere in the first act there's the most gruesome act I've seen in a horror movie of this ilk, and I've seen 'em all ladies and gentlemen). Of course, the whole thing would be moot if it wasn't for Keifer Sutherland, entertaining the masses as he brings Jack Bauer to the supernatural world. Really, though, it's nice to see a character in this type of role instead of a cypher-- the teen-friendly horror flicks these days seem content to let all the creepy stuff happen to the best-looking guy in school, regardless of how empty-headed and soulless he may be as a protagonist-- and his (borderline-shtick, but still) intensity makes for a few wonderful freakouts. Point is, you couldn't have this movie without Kiefer, at least not in theaters; anyone else would send this directly to the dvd racks. He brings some much-needed acting firepower to the film, acting as he does against Amy Smart (okay, but very scarcely used) and Paula Patton (gorgeous, but with the acting craft of, I dunno, a Hilton).

Director Alexandre Aja is a strange ranger-- he's got a flair for going over-the-top, sometimes with glorious results (The Hills Have Eyes) and sometimes with ugly ones (High Tension). Mirrors seems tame compared to those two-- one can probably assume it's his bid for more mainstream work-- and contains little of the subtext he seems to like to inject his films with. I suppose with Aja at the helm I would've expected some sort of between-the-lines ruminations on the poison of vanity, and if he wants to be a true great he shouldn't squander that sort of opportunity. I mean, Romero used his horror template to attack consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, and we can all see how that turned out.

Right, but Mirrors DOES have one of the most deliciously mean endings I've seen in quite some time (right up there with the great The Descent and the horrid Hide and Seek). And Keifer's quite good, and if you really want a reason to see it, he kidnaps a nun.

Rating: **1/2 (out of five)

Baghead (2008, Jay and Mark Duplass)

Somehow looking as though it was on a tighter budget than Blair Witch, the Duplass Brothers' Baghead offers a few charms along the way, but feels pretty incomplete as a horror movie. Which, I know, I know, it's not strictly a Horror Movie-- it's just, I have a big problem with the movie's scares being so effective, only to be completely negated by an 11th-hour plot twist. Same reason Shyamalan pissed me off so much with the Village, really: it ratcheted up superb tension with those groundhogs or whatever, only to find out that the filmmakers pretty much peed in my cereal.

Not to do Baghead the disservice of comparing it to bad Shyamalan (a sadly redundant phrase these days). The cabin-in-the-woods setting allows for some sort of sense of dread to build up, although that's mostly because we're aware that we're watching four friends go to a cabin in the woods, which the likes of Evil Dead and Cabin Fever have taught us not to do.

Sexual tensions abound, and there's lots of friendly blather-- character-rounding, I suppose, but there comes a point when it gets boring (exception: Steve Zissis as Chad-- what a good role, deserving of a more proficient film that can better capture his nuances). But when the masked boogeyman shows up, for those tantalizingly short moments that he does-- it's genuinely creepy, and the reactions captured on camera seem real, devoid of Hollywood's histrionics. Unfortunately, the shadowy lurker only shows up for about 20 of the film's final 30 minutes-- a sad waste, that.

The film's inaudible and filmed on the super-cheap. As a result, a lot of dialogue and reaction shots are lost, and the movie becomes a bit confusing when someone's not screaming. A shame, that-- there are some fantastic moments here. But they're too few and far between, and when an 80-minute film drags, it's typically not a good sign.

Rating: ** (out of five)