The Devil in the Details

If you're expecting a low-budget, gorier version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds from Aussie folk horror Long Weekend, a film in which nature is out for revenge against a reckless vacationing couple, you might very well be disappointed by its relative subtlety. Nothing in this film is quite as gory as the infamous scene in Hitchcock's film where our heroine stumbles upon a man whose eyes have been pecked out, though it's far more disturbing overall. Our two main characters, of which there are few in this film, are both extremely unlikable and repugnant from the very minute they first appear onscreen. From the moment our 'hero' pulls into his own driveway only to crash right into a van that by rights he should have anticipated, you know he's a careless moron with little sense, and then there's his wife: a cold woman who at one point tells her husband to "Get fucked!" in those exact words when he tries to make innocent conversation with her. Hu...

That rare Hitchcockian riff that manages to be every bit as carefully crafted, literate, and genuinely thrilling as anything the master himself ever made, Road Games is a treat for any connoisseur of vintage film. It's based around an ingenious idea: what if Rear Window took place on a desolate stretch of Australian highway, with a bored, nosy truck driver replacing Jimmy Stewart's laid-up photographer lead? It's a wonderful vehicle (if you'll excuse me) for a colorful cast of characters that our hero, Patrick Quid, will run into time and time again over the course of his journey. Not unlike an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, every piece of the narrative ends up coming back in some way later on, and sometimes it just seems that fate has it out for our hapless lead. It's all tightly wound, something one should expect of anything written by the great Everett De Roche, whose film Long Weekend I've just recently watched and found myself simalary head over heels...

After the endless fun I've been having watching other Australian folk horror films like Celia, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Long Weekend, I was looking forward to today's film, Wake In Fright. At one point thought to be lost, forever doomed to be supplanted by an international TV edit of the film, it has now been unearthed and remastered in glorious HD. It certainly feels like a privilege to be on this side of history and able to appreciate films like this wherever and whenever we like, but I digress.  When a schoolteacher, forced by the board to man the lonely outpost town of Tiboonda for the better part of the year, goes to visit his long-distance girlfriend in Sydney, events conspire to leave him stranded in a dirty outback town made up mostly of farmers, and those who mooch off the farmers. Residents of Tiboonda, lovingly referred to by the locals as "the Yabba," have to make up their own fun to pass the time, and so are certainly something of a wild bunch. Our ...

Alright, so in view of the fact that this is third version of a familiar story that I'm covering here, I've decided to dispense with my usual format and just give it to you straight: comparing and contrasting this, the 2002 Gore Verbinski film, with Ringu, the original Japanese adaptation, and of course, the 1991 novel  that started it all. I realize that some might would skip those first two analyses if they were only familiar with this version, but I'll leave that to them to figure out. While I certainly wouldn't judge you for skipping the novel, Ringu is a horror film I can easily recommend to just about everybody except those too close-minded to read subtitles, and so I find that a bit more unforgivable. And needless to say, though I may have forgotten to say so last time (oops) there will be spoilers for all three versions present throughout this analysis. And so, without further ado, let's dive right in. To begin with, I want to discuss the more positive aspe...

Let's Scare Jessica to Death, despite its title, vintage, and poster, is not a teen horror film full of sex and violence. Rather, it's a slow, meditative horror film about a married woman who has a psychotic break and is moved into the rural countryside by her husband to get some fresh air and rest. Furthermore, it's a subtle wake for the hippie movement that heralds the arrival of the bleak seventies. You see, when director John Hancock was handed the original script, which was a shlocky "B" horror film about a monster slaughtering no-good hippies, designed from the ground-up play to an audience of distracted, horny teenagers at drive-ins, he accepted the job on the condition he could rewrite the whole screenplay from scratch, and apparently, he was given the greenlight. Hancock would go on to drastically rearrange and reimagine the story to bring it in line with, of all things, Henry James's  The Turn of the Screw and its beloved '61 film adaptation Th...

How often do you hear fans of a book complaining that the film version takes liberties with the source material? "It was successful for a reason," they always say. "Why fix what isn't broke?" Well, without going on a tangent about how popularity doesn't necessarily equal quality, let's instead take a look at one of the more definitive examples of intelligent screenwriting that tightens and strengthens an already excellent thriller and takes it up to the next level. It turns out, editors can be a great thing. Alright, so you know the drill. I just went over most of this in my review of Suzuki's original 1991 novel, but this review would feel incomplete without a little summarizing, so here goes: when teenagers begin to die mysteriously of heart failure all around her, ace reporter Reiko Asakawa picks up the thread, which leads her to a cursed videotape that turns her entire world upside down. Now, with naught but a week to live, must find out who auth...

Robin Hardy shopped around the seed of an idea for a sequel to his seminal seventies horror film The Wicker Man for many years before finally settling on an idea called Cowboys for Christ, which he first wrote and published as a novel in order to drum up interest in and funding for a film adaptation, which would be called The Wicker Tree. Considered more of a spiritual sequel than a true chronological one (though it's matter of debate in either case,) The Wicker Tree attempts to play around with familiar ideas and storytelling devices while also adding enough new material to justify itself as a standalone film, and whether it succeeds or not is quite hard to say. Critical reviews at the time were mostly critical and downright dismissive, concurring with audience and fan reaction. In my opinion, this is far from the worst thing that Hardy could have done in attempting to follow up a near-perfect horror film, but the relationship of this movie to its sister film makes it quite har...

After discovering that four teenagers died at the same time, on the same day, in the very same unlikely manner, ace reporter Kazuyuki Asakawa smells a scoop and begins to investigate. His situation becomes dire, however, when he stumbles upon a cursed videotape and, after viewing its contents, is told he has exactly one week to live. There was an 'or else' to the threat but, unfortunately, it's been taped over, leaving him with virtually no leads and no hope of escaping his fate. He, along with a crack team of colleagues and old friends, must find out for what purpose the tape was created and complete whatever task it wants of him before his time runs out and he becomes the curse's latest victim. It's Ring, for god sake! Y'all all know the story by now, right? Besides the classic M. R. James ghost stories it's alleged to have been inspired by, Ring is largely to blame for the trend amongst young people of proliferating endless creepypasta dealing with haun...

The Blair Witch Project is a once-beloved film that has had its reputation put through the wringer over the decades since its release. Often seen by modern horror viewers (aka teenagers) as slow, boring, and gimmicky, it's a wonderful film that seems to be forever haunted by its infamous marketing that claimed it to be real footage, pissing off regular people who felt duped and those that obviously knew it couldn't be a real snuff film. Its original reception only made the situation worse, as reviews of it tended to call it one of the scariest films ever, which many seem to interpret as a challenge. In my humble opinion however, then and perhaps even moreso in these scorched-earth days of cheap horror exercises for easy box office returns, The Blair Witch Project stands as nothing short of a triumph of the found footage genre. The film follows a crew of three young adults who aim to make a documentary discussing and investigating folklore surrounding the town of Burkittsville...

Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves was a film I didn't exactly expect much of. I had never seen any of Jordan's films, and Angela Carter, the author of the book on which this was based and thus primarily a writer of fiction, wrote the screenplay herself, which I felt could go either way. A great fiction writer can easily stumble when trying to make visual works out of their prose. Not to spoil my opinion too early, but this is actually a rare triumph in nearly every area, as both a film and an adaptation. While perhaps not something to everyone's taste based on perusing audience reviews, this film is a fairly unique work in the folky, fairy tale horror tradition and like Carter's collection of stories it's based on, it's still being vigorously copied today. The bulk of the film is very faithful to the text of the short story, though with a few added embellishments, most of which probably wouldn't feel as pure and inspired if it came from a stranger poki...