Kwaidan (1964)

KWAIDAN
1964
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Staring Rentaro Mikuni, Keiko Kishi, Michiyo Aratama, Misako Watanabe and Tatsuya Nakadai

Now we're up to a movie in my review docket that's been sitting there for a LONG time.  If you look around the internet for professional reviews of Kwaidan, you'll find a lot of gushing and flat-out verbal orgasm, calling this "one of the most beautiful films ever shot" and an "unequaled Japanese masterpiece" and such.  But that stuff isn't why you come to the Lick Ness Monster (hopefully, because I've dropped the ball on scholarly B.S. a long time ago).  This is the place for story and characters, not technical stuff, so let's see what I can whip up for this movie that film critics the world over virtually fellate.

On many levels, they're right.  Going strictly by visual impact, this movie is indeed a sight to behold, and I'm not even talking about "by 1964 standards."  It's still a feast for the eyes in 2015, and while the special effects are sometimes wonky, they're wonky in a way that dazzle you, not make unfortunate saps point their fingers at the screen and make bad jokes.  The acting is occasionally also a little suspect, but it really doesn't matter.  In movies that take traditional Japanese ghost stories and make them as SLOW BURN and visually impressive as humanly possible, you're not looking for performances that woo the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  What this movie has going for it is PACE - glorious, glorious pace, sometimes achingly slow, but never so damn hectic and unwatchable that it treads into modern-day action movie territory.  Not even close to that.  And while the movie starts much stronger than it finishes, it's still worth watching at least once, 164-minute running time and all.

Once again, Kwaidan is director Masaki Kobayashi retelling four traditional Japanese ghost stories.  First up is "The Black Hair," a story about social advancement, the endangerment of marriage, and swords.  Really, really big swords.  A swordmaker living an impoverished life with his wife decides to leave her when the opportunity arises to marry a much more affluent woman.  In a twist that absolutely no one will see coming, the husband soon realizes that this was a huge mistake, and that his second wife is nowhere near as nice, friendly and devoted as his original wife.  See those last two sentences?  That's like 20 minutes of Kwaidan condensed.  Did I mention that this movie LOVES its pace?  As he still longs for his ex, he breaks the news to his current wife that he wants to dissolve the marriage and head home.  Of course, he does, where a horrific surprise awaits.  This is without a doubt the most effective story of the bunch, particularly because of that ending.  You know how I reviewed Insidious last week and moaned about its woefully bad downer ending?  This is a story where a downer ending is used to PERFECT effect, coming off as completely appropriate.  So +5 points to the movie for this segment.

From here, we get a story that I've seen no less than three different versions of.  Titled "The Woman of the Snow," this one also takes place in really, really olden times and concerns a woodcutter who takes refuge in a hut during a fierce snowstorm.  Unfortunately, a ghost of the snow kills his mentor splitting the hut with him - although she spares him for reasons we cannot comprehend, telling the woodcutter to never speak of what he has seen or else she will kill him.  Again, this leads to a twist that absolutely no one will see coming.  Not that it matters.  On his way home, he meets a woman who looks curiously like the ghost, taking her home where they fall in love and eventually marry.  Ten years down the line, we get the closing twist that, while it is a downer, again feels completely appropriate, unforced, and...not lame.  In this day and age of horror movies forcing twists just for the sake or twists, it's so refreshing to see these endings based entirely on emotion and mood rather than loud noise shocks, no matter how slow-moving it is.  Also, if this plot sounds familiar, it's because it was remade in the really awesome Tales From the Darkside: The Movie.

The first time I saw this film, I remember being so jacked at this point, prepared for more home runs.  But unfortunately, this is where the movie takes a downturn.  The next segment is titled "Hoichi the Earless," and for the most part, it's a musical about a battle that took place long before the segment takes place.  Hoichi himself is a singer who recounts the story of the battle and is called before a royal family to sing his masterpiece for them.  While the previous segments were long, it feels SO much longer here, as the long sections of operatic music unfortunately is one aspect of the film that has not aged very well.  In addition, the character of Hoichi himself is nowhere near as fascinating as the protagonists that we've enjoyed thus far.  When the royal family believes that Hoichi's singing may be calling ghosts, the downer ending that comes from this belief DOES drag the rating up somewhat, but it's still easily the worst segment of the movie.  -2 points.

The movie wraps up with "In a Cup of Tea."  An author wonders why so many writers have started works only to not finish them, eventually reading a story from one of his own books about just such a thing.  This is our framing device for a "story within a story," as a samurai named Kannai is charged with guarding a daimyo.  While eating lunch, he sees a curious face in his teacup that does not belong to himself, an incident that understandably creeps him out.  Within short order, he receives a visitor - amazingly, the same guy who appeared in his teacup.  He introduces himself before pointing out that he was the man that Kannai "wounded" that afternoon, and the samurai makes a few pointless slashes at this ghost-like figure before he disappears, seemingly for good.  The story more or less ends from here, going back to its framing device for another down ending that ranks somewhere between the first two stories and "Hoichi the Earless" in terms of its satisfying content.

Much like many J-horror films, Kwaidan is a movie that you're either going to be very into, or simply not get at all.  In doing my sparse research for this review, I learned that during its initial screenings for American audiences the entire "Woman of the Snow" segment was cut.  While it's arguably the strongest segment, I can understand this, because this running time is simply brutal if you're not a hardened J-horror veteran like myself.  Hey, I sat through Ju-Rei: The Uncanny.  I'm invincible.  Unfortunately, most people aren't.  If you've got a rainy afternoon and nothing else going on, though, this is definitely a movie that you should watch at least once in your lifetime, if for no other reason than it's just so incredibly different from what you're used to seeing here in the States.  And even from its eventual J-horror brethren.

*** out of ****.  Two segments are great, the other two not so much.  Fortunately, those two segments combined with a nice, slow-going slog through ghost country is fascinating enough to seek out a cheap used copy of.  Check it out.

Insidious (2011)

2011
Directed by James Wan
Starring Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne and Barbara Hershey

I'm on record with my like of "evil ghost" movies.  They've done an admirable job reinvigorating the horror genre in recent years, dragging it out of the muck that was the nonstop barrage of remakes that peppered the landscape throughout much of the '00s and the intermittent "atritionary torture" films in the Saw/Hostel vein.  Having said that, I also think that they've more or less run their course by now and, much like Owen Hart, it's time for a change.

That's not to say that there haven't been some very quality flicks in this subgenre.  The one in question today is a good starting point.  James Wan is the guy behind the director's chair for many of the ghost movies, and Insidious has actually turned into an honest-to-goodness franchise before anyone has even realized it.  I have yet to check out the sequels, mainly due to the maddening ending in this movie, but I'm told that they're also a good, fun time in theaters that don't require you to think too much.  A description that fits much, much better than, say, The Avengers: Age of Ultron.  Having checked out this movie for the first time since I saw it in a packed movie house, I actually found it to be a bit better than I remembered, and it's as good of a starting point as any into the realm of Creepy Demon movies.

Bare essentials time: you've seen this movie a bunch of times before.  It's all in the execution, and fortunately James Wan knows how to execute.  A new family moves into a creepy house.  There's father Josh (Wilson), mother Renai (Byrne), sons Dalton and Foster and infant daughter Cali.  Throughout the first act, we get intermittent incidents that tell us something is NOT RIGHT with this house (cue dreadful dreary music).  Fortunately, the story doesn't waste much time with this conceit as one of the sons promptly falls out of the attic and soon falls into something else...a coma. 

It's a plot device that I haven't seen before in this kind of film, and it works really well.  After months of treatment without result, Josh and Renai begin to notice with increasing voracity that, yes, indeed, something is NOT QUITE RIGHT with this house.  That's the last time I make that lame joke, I promise.  There is actually one jump scare that did a number on me in the theater involving the dark figure that Renai sees in their daughter's room, and the scripting of this portion of the movie is done very well, building a sense of dread while giving the audience a good inkling of what the family is going through in a way that is only periodically melodramatic.  So +2 points to the movie there.

Once the spiritual brigade gets involved, however, the movie really cranks it up the 11.  As the incidents pile up, Josh and Renai call in the best set of paranormal investigators this side of Poltergeist.  How good?  One of them is played by Lin Shaye.  So eat it.  Shaye is the leader of this team, a psychic who can immediately tell that there is an otherworldly presence in the house and explains that Dalton - a kid with the ability to travel to "The Astral Plane" - has traveled too far into something that she calls the "Further" and is in essence stuck in limbo.  Only Dalton has brought back a demon.

The final third of the movie consists of the usual seance/exorcism sequences that films like this bank on.  The script shows some creativity by making Josh into this movie's JoBeth Williams, as he connects these incidents to a series of creepy happenings from his own childhood involving an old woman that he used to be tormented by as a child.  The only way to save Dalton is for him to venture into the Further himself, and that's our confrontation.  There are a few unintentional laughs in this sequence in regards to the way that the demon actually LOOKS, but thankfully we only get fleeting glimpses of him.  An then we get the wholly depressing, completely devoid of any hope ending that no doubt set up the sequel, the prequel, and the seventeen films that will no doubt be forthcoming.

Ending aside, Insidious has a lot going for it.  Wilson is excellent as the rare MALE who gets the strong hero role in a movie of this nature, while Byrne does decent enough as the concerned, worrying mother.  Wan's directing style is one that does depend on jump scares, but they're jump scares that are based on things that actually WOULD scare us if they were around.  As opposed to, you know, bullshit like dogs or cats jumping out of shadows.  The movie loses some steam when the paranormal investigators become involved, because we've seen that part of the movie many times before.  That momentum is regained in the finale in a big way, and while this is a good movie, I can't help but think that this story was one that could have been wrapped up just fine and been an all-time great in the ghost genre as a single film.

If not for that ending.  Man.

*** out of ****.  Highly recommended if you're a fan of the evil ghost subgenre.  For everyone else, it's worth a rental.  Check it out.

Cursed (2005)

2005
Directed by Wes Craven
Starring Christina Ricci, Joshua Jackson, Jesse Eisenberg and Judy Greer

Oh, Wes Craven, what happened to you, man?  I really dug Red Eye, his 2005 effort that came a little bit after this flick and seemed to be a good departure into more mainstream thriler fare.  But then came the insanely insipid My Soul to Take.  And don't even get me started on the snake-eating-itself metaphor that was Scream 4.  Even at his BEST, Craven always was maddeningly inconsistent, but the amazing dip that the dude has taken over the past decade really is something to behold.

Which brings me back to Cursed.  It starts a bizarre mix of "just past their peak of fame" actors and up-and-coming stars, but it's the movie's STORY that is truly befuddling.  Scripted by Kevin Williamson, it offers us the usual "Diablo Cody before Diablo Cody" teen dialogue, and it's got more than a few truly out-there plot twists that I admittedly didn't see coming.  But not in the "oh, that's so cool and unexpected" way.  More in a "what the f**k is this?" kind of way.  As refreshing as I found Williamson's style in 1997, I've now come to the realization that this tone is something that instantly turns me off in movies - the way-too-out-there snarkiness and the overly clever-for-the-sake-of-being clever characterizations are like the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, and it's an attitude that invades this movie and infects it like the CGI wolves that dot the landscape.  No more stalling.  Time to get to it.

Your star characters for the film are, refreshingly enough, a brother and sister.  Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenburg star as Ellie and Jimmy, respectively, and all bit of bullshit removed are decent enough in their roles.  Ricci in particular is something of a mystery for me; this lady was RIGHT there around the turn of the century as far as hitting the major major leagues, but she never made it there for whatever reason.  Probably because every pervy director in the country wanted to get her naked and she wouldn't wilt on that until her star had already faded.  But I digress.  Ellie is essentially in charge of Jimmy after the death of their parents, and Jimmy is having all kinds of difficulty with school bullies.  The lead bully is also played by Milo Ventimiglia, who starred in Heroes and got to bang Hayden Panettiere for a while.  Yeah.  And now you know.

Within ten minutes of the opening credits, Ellie and Jimmy are involved in a car accident and are summarily attacked by a huge beast afterwards.  In addition to that, a floozy played by Shannen Elizabeth is killed in this same sequence.  Don't say that this movie doesn't pack on the cameos.  For those keeping score, it also has R&B singer Mya (boner), Portia de Rossi, Lance Bass, Craig Kilborn, and SCOTT BAIO, but enough about that.  Jimmy begins researching the creature that bit them after their horrific car accident, and believes that he and his sister are about to become werewolves.

From here, we get the requisite "character switch" portion of the movie.  The normally reserved and professional Ellie starts dressing moderately slutty at work and exhibiting a lot more confidence with her jock-ass boyfriend Jake (Joshua Jackson, another guy who slipped through the cracks of stardom around this time).  We also get sweet retribution for Jimmy as he gets to beat up on his bullies and impress the girl that he's been pining for.  Now, I like the "nerd revenge" plot device, but I've grown to really hate that "meek guy loves the nice girl who has a douchebag boyfriend" plot device.  It doesn't make characters any more heroic, it just makes them emo, and it's just as annoying here.  While all of this is going on, Ellie and Jimmy become aware of a series of murders taking place across Los Angeles, with Jimmy now fully convinced that the rampage is connected to them in some way.  Spoiler alert: it is.

We don't get much in the way of scares here.  The movie's best sequence belongs to Mya, who gets ripped to pieces by a werewolf in a pretty nifty parking garage chase sequence.  Unfortunately, said sequence falls apart once we get our first full-body glimpse of the wolf.  It looks fantastic in close-up, with the creature effects by Rick Baker taking center stage. And man, if this movie isn't a metaphor for modern-day special effects and why I can't get into almost any mega-budget action movie anymore, because the CGI is just terrible.  Handmade effects, at times, actually do look real.  CGI just looks like cartoon bullshit, and this movie is the proof of that statement.  It takes me right out of the movie almost any time I see it, and it's never been any more apparent than in Cursed. 

Thus, the movie fails pretty handily to scare audiences - both because of its incredibly slow middle section and because of how ridiculous the creature effects look.  It doesn't even have the benefit of jump scares; it's just one unimaginative stalking sequence after another.  Once the actual IDENTITY of the werewolves becomes known, it turns even more ridiculous, with Williamson's script turning in one-liners and sight gags at the worst moments.  That is actually the tragedy of this movie - with a more serious approach, and with this cast, this actually could have been a really nifty werewolf movie with a sibling duo fighting like hell to escape the death warrant that they have inadvertently found themselves under.  As it unfolds, we're left with just another faux clever meta-humor infused joke factory "horror" flick, and I've just seen one too many of those. 

The movie actually does have a saving grace - the aforementioned cast.  Both Ricci and Eisenburg put tons of emotion and heart into their performances, and we actually do care about these characters by the time the final credits tick by.  Some of the cameos are also a treat, with Baio's bit in particular being good for a couple chuckles.  It's a shame that the script doesn't do them any favors.

* 1/2 out of ****.  Sadly not recommended, and it's another MISFIRE in the strange "memorable hit" to "miss" ratio in the career of Wes Craven.