Monday, February 22, 2010

Bloody Reunion, Opera, and Lo: 3 DVD reviews because I'm not going to bother with Shutter Island. CRAP!!!

I’m skipping this weekend’s Theatrical horror entry entirely and I have no interest in watching “Shutter Island” now or when it’s released on DVD. Shutter Island looks like the overly produced and fairly typical Hollywood “twist ending” thriller that have been flooding the market over the past several years. I’m broke, people… I can’t see every little faux horror feature that sees a theatrical run and I’m not exactly rolling with invitations to screen films with a press pass.

This is a blog, not a real publication type of magazine. You folks want due diligence to the art of film reviews than I suggest you check out some trade magazines, newspapers, and other sources. I’m just a dinky little fan who wants to yap about the movies he’s seen recently, and the movies he wants to see eventually. So it’s DVD time from Netflix, and I’m unlucky enough to not get the brand new releases I was hoping for. No “Cabin Fever” sequel yet, Miike’s latest Yakuza adaptation, or that other movie I was waiting for. Hey, I forgot the name, and I don’t feel like looking at my list at the moment. Sue me! So let’s see what I did get?

Bloody Reunion:

Japan doesn’t precisely corner the market on the Asian Horror scene. Korea is quickly jumping to catch up in leaps and bounds with their own films, including the Vengeance trilogy and “A Tale of Two Sisters”, among others. So when I noticed a little slasher entry on my “suggestions” list from Netflix, I decided to throw this little gem up to the top of my list for a quick review. The premise looked promising enough, with a group of children from the same class reuniting after some twenty years at the home of their sick teacher. They are systematically stalked and slaughtered in slasher-gore fashion with a special nod toward the “torture” films so popular over the past ten years. Good enough for me! Let’s roll the film and see what develops…

And in the opening moments, we see the teacher give birth to a deformed child, get abused by her husband, watch the same husband kill himself in front of their child, and various other flashes of her teaching these kids who are bound to meet some twenty years after the death of her husband. It takes less than five minutes to update us on all of this before the police barge in, turn on the lights, and reveal a horrible scene of blood and horror as her adult students have been killed. There are two survivors… the sickly teacher and one of the students, a young woman who then tells the lead detective the whole story that then proceeds to unfold for the next hour and then some. I have whiplash before the story really gets underway, but I’m sure all these flashes and quickly delivered bits of information will become relevant at some later point in the story so I keep watching. And we get gore… we get a lot of gore. We get one victim forced to swallow razor blades washed down with hot, scalding water. Another has their eyelids stapled open. And on and on it goes, with crucifixions and brutal beatings and on and on and on. And throughout the story, we get flashbacks to the class some twenty years earlier where Mrs. PARKS isn’t quite the wonderful teacher we originally are led to believe in. But who is the killer; the deformed son, the shy student once humiliated before his peers, Mrs. PARKS herself, or one of the other maladjusted children who have grown to resent and hate the teacher and the rest of the class? (Why is her name in all caps? Because that’s how the sub-titles kept reading throughout the entire film and I couldn’t tell if it was a language thing or just someone in the sub-title department having fun at my expense. Are we supposed to shout her name when we talk about the film? Is it really the way it’s spelled in Korean? What’s up with that? Why does no one else have their whole name in caps? Look, I don’t know the answer people; I’m just telling you why I’m capping her name for this review.)

The story is decent; if not something I’ve seen a few too many times to really deliver the shock it probably intends. Though subtitled, the film is sometimes a little hard to follow and leaves a few too many dangling threads with no real answers. The movie suffers from a host of too many squandered opportunities, including the introduction of iconic imagery with a “Bunny-Mask” killer. It is fairly generic, but I doubt it was ever attempting to reinvent the wheel. Despite its flaws, however, Bloody Reunion was a fun watch for me and one I would definitely recommend to a good number of my horror friends.

4 out of 5.

Lo

This is a film that is just full of surprises. Nearly the entire movie takes place in the confines of a small circle of candles set on the floor of a dark room. A young man summons the demon Lo in order to save his girlfriend from the nether pits. If the man breaks the circle with any part of his body, the demon and other foul monstrosities will have him and will devour him in eternal torment for all eternity. So the stakes are set and the audience is on the edge of their seat as both demon and man collide in a test of wills, their story unfolding in bizarrely acted flashbacks taking place on a small stage lit with spotlight. The boy and the girl meet, they fall in love, and a demon appears to drag the woman to hell as the young man is left to recover from his wounds.

What makes the film work are it’s limitations, capturing the story in the confines of a summoning circle allows the film makers to make the best out of a minimum budget and every dollar is shown on the screen. The simple make-up is helped along by good lighting effects, casting things in shadows that the camera tends to play with in order to express different moods. Sometimes played for laughs, the story is pure horror at it’s core and plays off themes developed in the classic tale of Faust.

Major credit for this film should fall square on the shoulders of its lead actor, a role that requires him to be sympathetic and somewhat awkward as he pits his will against that of an ageless demon. Certainly, it takes more than one to tango, but all other performances are heightened by this guys performance as he sells the gravity of the situation and could have come dangerously close to over reaching. He rips your heart in one moment while the next sees him playing various reactions for laughs, and he absolutely captures the camera throughout each scene.

4 out of 5.


Dario Argento’s “Opera”

I actually did some research on this film! Okay, I pretty much looked it up on Wikipedia and a couple of random fan sites, but the end result is still the same. I wanted to find out some additional information, and so I have a little bit of background to go on. Why would I go through this much trouble? Well, keep on reading and you’ll eventually find out.

This film is considered one of the last true Argento “Masterpieces” and was also a very troubled production for cast and crew on the set. Vanessa Redgrave was originally cast as the diva but dropped out of the movie due to scheduling conflicts, so her role was shot completely from her POV. One of the cast members died during filming, and many of the crows used for filming were lost or escaped during production. Finally, several distributors demanded various cuts to the finished film, and they withdrew any real theatrical support and chose to release the film directly to video at the time of it’s release. Argento himself believed that the production was likely haunted by the curse of MacBeth, a plot device used throughout the story.

When the lead actress for the latest production of Lady MacBeth is injured, her young study is propelled to stardom when she takes the part. The Opera is believed to be haunted by the curse of MacBeth and its new lead is stalked by a vicious killer who binds our antagonist and forces her lids open with needles taped to her lids. The film features some brilliant set pieces, great cinematography, and brutal killings. But all of that suddenly takes a quick and rapid turn toward the end of the film as every dangling plot thread is frayed, cut, and ultimately left to dangle in the middle a huge mess of nothingness! Seriously… this film is a prime example that you can build a great first, second, and even third act but then completely fall apart with an ending that very cleverly exposes the killer and leaves you wondering about every other bizarre character introduced and ultimately left to flounder throughout the story! What’s worse is that, even after the ending of the film and story, we’re left with another ten minutes or so of additional material that doesn’t actually go anywhere nor do anything. It’s just this big huge mess that wastes time and leaves you wondering why the director fought so hard to leave it in one piece.

Honestly, I was finished with the film but I wanted to know if I had seen some sort of cut up print with missing material lopped off so I logged on to the internet to find out. And the answer is that I saw the finished product, the one that Argento fought the distributors in order to have his vision released, and I couldn’t figure out why he would even want to. If there had been some additional revelation or transformation, I could have easily understood his desire to see the project through to the bitter end… but there was nothing! NOTHING!!! Everything that needed to be said or shown had already been explicitly detailed throughout the course of the film, and we were still left with dangling plot threads that never made a single move to make sense. I’ve seen better Argento films that came out much later than this one, and I’m not going to deny the greatness that this film could have been but it wasn’t even close to Suspiria and I thought The Card Player was much better than this thing.

2 out of 5.

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