Last Shift (2014)

2014
Directed by Anthony DiBlasi
Starring Juliana Harkavy, Joshua Mikel, J. LaRose, Mary Lankford, Natalie Victoria and Sarah Sculco

Well, Netflix, it looks like you picked a winner for me this week.  Last Shift was one of the standouts of the 2014 London FrightFest film festival, and I've got to say that I agree with teh consensus.  For a change.  People know me as an annoying contrarian, but every once in a great while I reverse this trend and go along with the crowd.  In this case, it's well deserved, because this flick is a pretty damn good and pretty damn creepy time in front of the tube.

This is one of those movies that's all about atmosphere.  Director Anthony DiBlasi chose to set the entire thing in one single closed off setting, isolate one character, and fuck them all up to high heaven.  It's a plot device that I recently saw in the four-star (bah Gawd)-reviewed Oculus, for my money one of the best horror films I've seen in a good long while.  While it isn't QUITE as effective here, it's got the benefit of having one of the best horror movie performances in years, a really likable lead character, and one of those bummer endings that breaks your heart.  In the good way, I promise, not the "oh come on, you've gotta be kidding me" way that The Devil Inside pissed audiences off to high heaven.  Enough jibber jabber.  Let's get going.

The setup is incredibly simple.  Meet rookie cop Jessica Loren, played by Juliana Harkavy in one of those performances that immediately launches her into the Jamie Lee Curtis hot girl stratosphere of horror movie heroines.  While there are other people in the movie, she's on-camera for almost the entire thing, and you don't get bored of her - she's dynamite.  The character itself is fairly straightforward, as she's stuck on a curious assignment her first night on the job: guarding an abandoned police department for one 8 p.m. - 4 a.m. shift.  I always relate to characters who work similar hours to myself, because I know how messed up my life feels and how an entire work week feels like one gigantic day that never ends, so +2 cool points to the movie here as well.

Things start innocently enough.  Her mother doesn't want her to do the job, since her father died on duty.  The guy that she relieves is kind of a dick who likes playing tricks for no apparent reason.  And then there's the boredom once those doors close.  But after a while, the movie starts springing its bag of tricks on you.  And this bag of tricks is one that any white bunny would be damn proud of (/tomatoes).  She periodically gets calls from a young woman who says that she is in trouble in a farm outside of the city, only the station is no longer receiving 911 calls.  There's a homeless bum who invades the police station and urinates on the floor, only to sneak back in later for no apparent reason whatsoever.  And then there's all the ghosts and other assorted ghoulies that go bump in the night.

To be sure, the flick has a fair amount of "loud noise" stingers, but here...they're actually effective and get under your skin.  I think the reason is that we become really invested in Jessica and what she's going through.  Working your first day on a new job is one of those situations that we've all been in on numerous occasions, the nerves and apprehension you feel about fitting in and pleasing your bosses and all that.  Add some demons into the scenario, and we've got a recipe for some emotional investment.  (Lick Ness Monster cliche time) And that's the best thing that any movie can do!

There's a fair amount of demonology and ghost activity contained within Last Shift, and it's all based around a subject that isn't touched upon much in horror movies.  It seems as if a year prior to the events of this film, a bizarre, murderous Charles Manson-style cult was arrested and brought into this station for questioning.  Worshiping not Satan but "the King of Hell," the being said to inhabit hell before ol' Goatface himself arrived, the cult is/was primarily young woman following their Bray Wyatt-style leader John Michael Paymon (Joshua Mikel, who is dynamite for the few scenes that he gets).  All of them appear to have stuck around after their creepy mass suicide bit, and have every intention of taking out the daughter of one of their arresting officers.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  All things build up to a finale that admittedly shocked the hell out of me.  And if it shocked the hell out of me...it probably won't shock you, because most people are smarter than me.

That's where we're at with Last Shift.  It's slick, it has good acting, and it has execution better than almost any horror movie that you've seen in recent memory.  Meaning that when it feels like getting under your skin, it can do this with Guns N' Roses 1987-style aplomb.  If you've got Netflix, check this one out.  It's well worth 90 minutes of your time.  Also, here's hoping that Juliana Harkavy impressed a few people with her performance here, because she's got way more charisma than a good 75% of actresses whose names can be found on marquees these days.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  Good scares and good shocks await.  Turn down the lights where applicable and have fun with this one.

Stir of Echoes (1999)

1999
Directed by David Koepp
Starring Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Zachary David Cope, Illeana Douglas and Jennifer Morrison

The movie in question today is another one that, for whatever reason, escaped my radar until just now.  Count me in among the many, many people back in 1999 who were more enthralled by The Sixth Sense, directed by that guy that I once called the best director currently working.  Which was then immediately followed by his career dovetail into unimaginable shit...but I digress. 

Yup, Stir of Echoes came out September of 1999, somewhat of a hit with critics but more or less vanishing from multiplexes within a month.  Looking back, I can see why.  The flick has its moments, but that's all they are.  The script (by David Koepp of all people, who also directed) takes a novel from 1958 and does its damndest to modernize it.  While the material is there for some really awesome true-life horror stuff, it more often than not takes the easy route of flashy MTV-style editing and camera tricks.  Isn't it amazing to remember a time when stuff like this was only occasionally noticed instead of the norm?  Pepperidge Farm remembers.  Another thing I remember is watching the final 45 minutes or so on HBO back in the day, finding the movie forgettable and really cookie-cutter.  Now, I think it's definitely more than that, but not in the way that I can really recommend.  More on that later.

Folks, I read something disheartening when I was doing the Tremors franchise review.  Apparently, Kevin Bacon considers Tremors the low-point of his acting career, even crying to his wife during filming that he couldn't believe he was doing a movie about giant underground worms.  I can't say that I know what it's like to be a Hollywood actor, but I would MUCH rather be in an underground worm movie than a semi-generic ghost flick.  Chalk that up to the symptoms of my one-of-a-kind glandular condition.  Alas, concerned family man Bacon is what we get here, and truth be told, he does a fantastic job in this movie.  The character is Tom Witzky, phone linesman and family man extraordinaire.  His wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) is pregnant with their second child, and his existing (?) son Jake (Zachary David Cope) is one of those stereotypical horror movie creepy kids that I've harped about on here before.

Without bothering to look up any of the handy-dandy IMDB external reviews, I'm guessing that there were more than a few mentions by critics back then about how there was another movie released shortly before this one that also featured a kid who sees dead people.  Since this story was concocted in the late '50s, I'm guessing that this flick holds the trump card in the "who ripped off who?" category.  Amazingly, this plot convention isn't mentioned very much, because what REALLY sets the plot in motion is Jake's abrasive sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas, who kind of looks like Toni Collette).  A party-time pissing contest turns into Lisa hypnotizing Jake, which results in what's actually a pretty cool scene involving an empty theater and a white screen that I remembered well enough to write about just now.

From this point forward, Tom starts seeing weird visions of a dead teenager on his couch (don't ask), which prompts the mystery plot to move forward.  It turns out that this girl disappeared from the neighborhood six months prior, and Tom is obsessed with finding out what happened to her.  How obsessed?  Well, enough to never go to work again and seemingly never let the couch out of his vision.  Perfectly rational behavior, if I say so myself.  In this reporter's opinion, this is where the movie starts to wrong from a very sound setup, because it's all stuff we've seen before.  There IS the added wrinkle of the close-knit working class neighborhood that Tom calls home, complete with a best friend played by Kevin Dunn (no, not Kevin "Most Hated Man in the Internet Wrestling Community" Dunn, but rather the guy who played Jerry Seinfeld's dickhead childhood friend who didn't like turkey roll) who seems to care a whole lot about his football hero son.  Foreshadowing alert.

I'll give it to the movie for its opening half.  The setup was certainly there for some fantastically sick, creepy stuff to go on as Tom's visions of the past become more and more frequent.  Instead, it went the decidedly opposite route of The Sixth Sense.  That flick was all about the quiet; this one throws a lot of loud shit at you.  Sometimes it's effective, like the "less is more" faceoff that Tom has late in the movie after finding the dead body in the finale.  Sometimes it isn't, like the flashback sequence that shows how said dead body became...uh, dead.  While Bacon puts his heart and soul into the movie throughout the whole thing, he can't carry just how generic the whole thing becomes late in the game. 

Another big plus that the movie has is its acting, even in the non-Bacon roles.  Douglas is really good as the sister-in-law - she's sarcastic in a totally endearing way, and Dunn is always aces in anything he's in when he isn't purposefully trying to sabotage NXT call-ups.  The atmosphere is also pretty well-done; a tight-knit Chicago neighborhood is something that you generally don't see in a horror/suspense movie these days.  It's also got an interesting way to move the plot forward in the form of the couple hypnosis sessions that Tom undergoes; it's definitely more inventive than finding plot clues from goddamn library microfilm, for example.  It's pretty much everything else in between that falls a little flat, mainly due to familiarity. 

In short, everyone involved in this movie really tries, but it's material is something that's hard to make truly captivating with any amount of dressing up.  For that, I'll give this flick ** 1/2 out of ****.  It's worth a watch on Netflix, but don't track it down otherwise.

Darkness Falls (2003)

2003
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman
Starring Chaney Kley, Emma Caulfield and Lee Cormie

Fun fact: I'm actually beginning to write this review with a good, solid 20 minutes to go in this movie.

Not-so-fun fact: I'm pretty sure that this might be the most by-the-book horror movie I've ever seen.  And I've seen something like 150 slasher flicks and 100 ghost movies, so that's saying something.

You know, had I seen this movie back when it was released in 2003, I probably would have really liked it.  It's got a lot of forward momentum, it wastes absolutely no time getting going, and it's stylish and slick.  In 2015, though...yeah, there's a reason why I'm passing judgment on it before it's already over.  Darkness Falls should be in the friggin' dictionary under "ghost thriller," although in some respects that's understandable.  It was released at a time when Japan-style ghost movies were all the rage, and flicks featuring vengeful spirits carrying out supernatural justice were as easy to sell then as found footage movies would be a few years down the road.  It follows all the beats without exception and without shame, and that's the problem.  I've seen this plot done so many other times, and so much BETTER in movies like Ringu, Ju-On, Kaidan, Dark Water...you name it.  That, and the characters are about the most milquetoast and occasionally dislikable bunch of rubes I've seen in quite some time.  With that out of the way and 10 minutes of running time left to go, let's get to it.

Opening narration drill:  Welcome to the town of Darkness Falls, which boasts an especially wicked back story.  The tragic tale of Matilda Dixon takes place sometime in the indeterminate past, as the children of the town present their lost tooth to her in exchange for gifts and gold coins.  A fire ends that practice, leaving her horribly disfigured and sensitive to light.  When two of the town's children go missing, the people of Darkness Falls immediately think that the sensible thing to do is to track Matilda down and lynch her.  Only the missing children soon show up in short order.  Cue South Park Mr. Derp musical stinger. 

Flash forward to the present(ish) day, as socially awkward early teen Kyle Walsh has just lost his last baby tooth.  We get some more good exposition as his crush Caitlin Greene enters his room at night, followed by some rather clunky and stilted romantic dialogue.  Anyway...skipping ahead, Matilda - now the town's vengeful spirit drawn by the Tooth Fairy ritual - appears to claim Kyle as its next victim, but instead winds up killing Kyle's mother.  Kyle is carted off, while Caitlin is left behind to wonder just what the hell happened.

Flash forward (again) 12 years down the road.  Caitlin's little brother Michael is now having all sorts of issues falling asleep at night, and showing a lot of the symptoms that Kyle himself showed as a youngster.  Take a few guesses as to where we're going from here.  It also means that we meet the actors playing the older versions of the characters.  For what it's worth, Chaney Kley is actually fairly decent as adult Kyle, managing to get you on his side with his "I'm hurt and scared yet brave" act.  But Emma Caulfield is just all kind sof bad as Caitlin, alternating between being totally terrified by everything that's happening to her little bro and being totally okay and all "scientific explanation" with it. 

And don't even get me started on the kid playing little bro.  From the awful "adorable" speech pattern to his bad fearful facial expressions, he's every reason why I strongly dislike kids in horror movies to the nth degree.

Amazingly, this movie is over already as I type this.  The running time is an INCREDIBLY brisk 75 minutes, leaving absolutely no room for bullshit once it establishes everything.  There's a BIT of extra drama in the form of childhood friend Larry trying to get into Caitlin's pants, but that repeatedly goes nowhere.  Once he's wiped off the screen by the Tooth Fairy, he's never mentioned again anyway.  That really is this movie's biggest problem:  Everything is so goddamned FAMILIAR that it's maddening, walking territory that we've seen dozens of times before, and done so much BETTER so many times before, that even though the story is competent and the execution of its second half stalk-and-kill sequences are shot well, it all just falls so incredibly flat.

Of course, I should also mention that Darkness Falls is rife with a lot of the conventions that are much derided in the Internet Horror Community (not to be confused with the terroristic Internet Sports Entertainment Community, or ISEC).  We get cat scares, "loud noise" stingers aplenty, dick cops, creepy kids...the works.  I'm not averse to horror movie cliches, per se.  In fact, a lot of the time, they comfort me.  But the way that it all unfolds here is just a thoroughly dislikable package.  It's kind of like a heaping helping of Adam Sandler's character from Funny People, only not quite as bad.

As previously mentioned, this movie is very short.  The final 30 minutes consists of pretty much nothing but Matilda/Tooth Fairy attempting to take out Kyle, Caitlin and Michael as they make their way to the town's lighthouse.  There's a reason why I wrote so much of this review while this sequence was going on, because there was no emotional investment whatsoever.  If you can tell that this was a bad movie...you're right.  And it's not bad in the way that's fun to watch, either.  There's no moronic dialogue, horrendous camera work or bizarre plot devices that make for good riffing material with friends; it's all just THERE, a kind of cinematic connect-the-dots exercise that you'll forget 90% of while you're watching it. 

* out of ****.  I award it that one star because it's at least a slick, well-polished movie.  Virtually EVERYTHING story- and horror-wise misses the mark, however.  Avoid this like death.

Mother of Tears (2007)

2007
Directed by Dario Argento
Starring Asia Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Moran Atias and Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni

Confession time:  Dario Argento is arguably my favorite horror movie director.  Added confession time:  There's a long stretch of his career that I think isn't even worth the paper it's printed on.  It begins almost immediately after his 1987 movie Opera and continues almost unabated to this very day.  The high points?  Parts of 1993's Trauma and the bit at the beginning of Do You Like Hitchcock? featuring an insanely hot Italian woman getting undressed in front of a window.  So in 2007, when the news filtered out that the final chapter of his "Three Mothers" trilogy was getting a release date, there were nonetheless many Argento freaks who rejoiced.  I can't say that I did, because I discovered the dude a little later...but rest assurred, had I known, there would have been much rejoicing.  Yay (/Monty Python).

Alas, the rejoicing was for naught, because Mother of Tears featured the Argento cold streak continuing.  You know all of those hallmarks of his earlier movies, like atmosphere, creepy music, genuinely disturbing kill scenes and shocks that genuinely shocked?  Yeah, all those are gone here.  I knew all of this pretty much within five minutes of inserting the DVD into the player sometime in 2008 shortly after watching Suspiria and Inferno - for you non-horror fans out there, two absolute must-see movies that set the table for supernatural horror moving forward.  ALSO for you non-horror fans out there, the general gist of the movies is this: Three ancient witches are buried in the cities of Munich, New York City and Rome, and attempting to break through into the modern world and f**k that shit up with a vengeance.  It's implied, trust me.  The witch contained in THIS movie is said to be the most powerful one, so there's your background information.  Time for the show.

You know, a big part of why a lot of the latter-day Argento movies kinda suck (in addition to the myriad of adjectives listed above) is his fascination with casting his daughter in his movies.  No doubt that Asia Argento has her fans out there, but personally, I've always found her to be somewhere between Christian Bale and Daniel Craig on the charisma scale.  And...she's your star character this time, as American art student Sarah Mandy.  The script actually does give us plenty of reasons to care about her, as she has a supposedly "quirky" personality, as well as her relationship to Michael Pierce, the curator of Rome's Museum of Ancient Art.  Whether or not that's a real thing...is up to the fine folks at Google.  Your setup for what is to come - a team has just uncovered an Urn containing the remains of the third titular "Witch" in this "Three Mothers" trilogy, and early on in the film, the casket containing that urn is opened and the Mother of Tears is released.

Now, Suspiria was about a group of devil worshippers making a German dance academy their home.  The witch in that film had been active ever since the 1800s.  Somehow, the idea of a school of dance being used as a front for Satanic activity is very unsettling.  Inferno was similar to this movie, as a character released the witch from some form of ancient sleep in the early goings, which is some kind of Keystone Cops-plot development, but in that movie it worked because we felt a lot more of a connection to the characters in question.  Not so here.  Asia Argento...she tries, but I just can't into her.  Call it glandular (Lick Ness Monster cliche #3).

So, after awakening the evil witch, her army of supernatural enforcers quickly go about raising hell quite literally and we get some glimpses of the villain this time around.  And she's...something else.  Played by Moran Atias, she's an incredibly hot, stacked witch seen in frequent states of undress (save for the magical cloak that was found along with the urn - don't ask about that particular plot detail, although it does PAY OFF at the end of the film. Spoiler alert).  A very different beast from the invisible witch in Suspiria and the "Wolf in sheep's clothing" witch in Inferno, I must say.  Atias is great to look at, but unfortunately the amusement ends there.  Her helpers aren't much better.  Can you tell that this movie was frustrating from a character standpoint?

Now for some actual story stuff.  The script (by no less than FOUR people, and it shows) starts off with a simple kidnapping convention, as the Mother of Tears and her cult of followers abduct Michael's (that's Argento's boyfriend, for those keeping score) son and won't return him to Michael and Sarah unless they stop their Scooby Doo-level of meddling into their evil Satanic world domination plan.  A fair tradeoff if there ever was one.  The script does its absolute damndest to shock us here as both Michael and his son are brutally murdered by the cult when they try to recruit an exorcist into their mission, but while the scene is brutal, it falls flat. 

The movie then attempts to give the first two movie some credence as it is explained that Sarah's mother was one of the characters in the first film - the shrieking woman who bit it in one of the two or three most brutal murder scenes in movie history, and also a powerful "white witch" lending this whole thing some semblance of continuity.  It's not the Star Wars trilogy, but it's there.  What IS worth mentioning here, also, is that this movie severely cranks up the gore quotient from the first two movies in the trilogy, and it's a stylistic shift that unfortunately bogs the movie down a bit and turns it into a geek show.  Suspiria in particular was a movie that combined its use of color and its amazing soundtrack and camerawork into something truly disquieting and disturbing.  This flick slathers on the fake blood and kill scenes, as Sarah and all of the various witches, priests, familiars and police detectives that she runs across go toe-to-toe with the cult.

I will give the movie some points when it comes to the final showdown, however.  Sure, there's some laughable stuff on the way there, like that weird coven of witches that Sarah conveniently follows to their hidden lair.  But the finale itself does redeem the movie somewhat.  It managed to lull me out of the half-stupor that I was in up until that point, not the least reason being yet another shot of Moran Atias' fantastic nude body in the process. 

Oh, and Udo Kier is in this movie.  Best known as Ronald Camp in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective here in the states, this veteran of Euro cinema had a really good cameo role in Suspiria, and he's once again aces here as an alchemist who helps our intrepid heroine on the way to saving the world.  This dude never disappoints.

I'll close this review with a little more history.  Dario Argento wanted to make all three parts of the Mothers triogy back-to-back-to-back, but the lukewarm reception to Inferno back in 1980 made him put the third movie on hold and go back to making the blood-soaked murder mysteries that brought him to the dance.  Completing the trilogy was the right move, and in some respects, this movie DOES deliver.  It brings closure to the whole story, giving us a true sense of good winning out over evil in the finale and giving audiences a ridiculously evil and ridiculously hot big bad.  The execution of everything else, however, is almost howlingly bad.  Still, it's better than, say, The Room.

Therefore, I award this movie ** out of ****.  End communication.