I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)

2016
Directed by Osgood Perkins
Starring Ruth Wilson, Paula Prentiss, Bob Balaban and Lucy Boynton

Kids, this is one of those films that is very difficult to review.  Why?  Because...there's nothing.  And I actually mean that as a compliment.

Seriously, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (and I'm going to try to keep mentioning that title to a minimum, because typing it is a pain in the ass) is one of the most low-key and downright MINIMAL films I've ever seen.  I've seen Roger Corman flicks that contain something like seven spears and five loincloths and manage to recreate the Roman empire, and this one has it beat.  See those four actors listed above?  They're pretty much the only people in this movie, but it's not just volume that we're talking about here.  It's everything.  Thus, if you want to see Lick Ness Monster play mental gymnastics, this is the review for you.

Just released on Netflix, this film (1-for-1 on not typing that title again!) is the brainchild of Osgood Perkins, son of legendary actor and Norman Bates himself Anthony Perkins.  He's directed a couple other movies, but I haven't seen nor even heard of them, so I'm not going to italicize them.  You know...Osgood.  Now that's a name that seriously needs to make a comeback.  If we had more Osgoods running around, I dare say that the world might just be a much more happy place.  And now I'm just talking out of my ass to prolong this paragraph.  So Osgood wrote this movie as well, and I've got to commend the guy, because this script couldn't have been any more than like 40 pages and he managed to get 90 full minutes out of it.  A classic example of the "less is more" concept that gives me a half chub if there ever was one...so, let's delve into the dark, slow, and slightly impenetrable world of I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (that's two).

Stripped down to its barest essentials, the film is essentially a haunted house story.  A live-in nurse named Lily (Ruth Wilson) has just arrived at a rather sprawling residence to serve as the hospice care for aging horror novelist Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss, a former friend of Osgood's late father who came out of semi-retirement to do this mostly silent role).  See that last sentence?  That's almost all of the plot we get for the vast majority of the running time.  In this case, it's all in the spice and the presentation.  Fortunately, I can report that these are areas where Osgood really excels, along with the talent of his actors.

It's a good thing.  Keeping with the minimalism theme, the movie is also VERY sparse on both dialogue and background music.  If memory serves correctly, I can actually NAME the scenes that contain dialogue.  There's a bit early on where Lily calls one of her friends after arriving at the house while the camera conveys to the audience that something horrible is just out of frame.  There's the scene where Mr. Dalrymple from Seinfeld shows up as Lily's boss to give us all the exposition we need involving Iris Blum's most famous novel that may or may not be about the house's original residents.  And there's Lily's narration as she goes about reading the novel...or trying to.

See, Lily is kind of a wuss.  Her defining character trait is that she's skittish and afraid of everything.  The book in question is her Pandora's box, because she believes it to be connected to the strange noises that she hears at night in the house.  Why?  The earlier exposition involving Mr. Dalrymple, that' why, who explained that Iris explained that she wrote the novel not as fiction, but as it was dictated to her by a ghost that lived in the house.  And I think you know where it's going from here, especially since we'd seen some creepy flashback scenes earlier involving the original owners of the house.  What this film lacks in originality, though, it more than makes up for in execution and the tour-de-force performance from Wilson.

Quick side story: when I was a little bastard (like, 10 years old), I wrote a horror story for one of those "short story" assignments in school called "Fear of Blood" about a kid who finds himself facing off with a psycho killer.  The TWIST PART (proving that I, Jon Lickness, gave M. Night Shyamalan everything he knows) was that said kid had a crippling fear of cuts and blood.  Amazing writing, I know.  I even drew a title page for the story with big block letters dripping blood that probably got me more than one mention to the school doctor.  I mention this story because I wish this was a plot device used more in horror films - either a specific fear or a non-specific one that a character has to deal with in addition to the external threats, because it does WONDERS in getting us into a character.  Wilson does a fantastic job playing a scaredy cat, and because of this, we're fully in her corner.  +2 cool points.

So it goes with this movie.  Lily is able to read the book in roughly one-page increments, and, bit-by-bit, the haunting becomes more bold and pronounced.  It avoids the cliches of every other haunted house movie where the ghost starts to specifically target our heroine - it really does seem like we're dealing with your garden variety residual haunting (google that term if you're not a paranormal aficionado like me) in this movie instead of a malevolent one.  A lot of it is really clever, well-shot, and achingly tense.  And then the ending hits, one that is horrifying but left a sour taste in my mouth. 
As usual, it's probably just a case of me being a moron.  I'm sure that a film critic who knows their movies will tell you that the ending of this flick is all kinds of poetic, unexpected and awesome, and they're probably right.  And...I really don't know what I expected or how I would do things differently.  But I just wanted something different from what we got.  No spoilers here, and your mileage might vary.  The flick is easily viewed on Netflix for anyone interested, and it's something that I would actually heartily recommend despite how much I disliked the ending, because there's plenty to admire about this film.  There's atmosphere, there's creepiness in spades, and there's Ruth Wilson, who I really hope to see more from in the immediate future, because she's dynamite.

*** out of ****.  Check this one out, because it's creative, original and actually genuinely SCARY.  But...that ending.  Man.

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

1973
Directed by John Hough
Starring Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill and Gayle Hunnicutt

The horror genre has many different flavors.  There are movies that actively try to creep you out.  There are movies that are all about throwing the most out there gore and syrupy makeup at the camera as possible.  There are movies that are almost bad on purpose.  And then...there is 1970s horror, something that deserves an entire row in the great Neapolitan taste profile of cinema.  Simply put, '70s horror is DARK, man.  A lot of them were about demons and devils, still more of them were mystery-killer flicks with out-there endings a la Dario Argento and Mario Bava, and quite a bit of them ended with some hint of the idea that evil had, in fact, won.  This was still a relatively fresh concept in horror at this time, and the shock of seeing a lot of this stuff as it unfolded must have been as startling as anything Platinum Dunes can throw at the screen with loud noise stingers.  '70s BRITISH horror amps up that darkness even more, and The Legend of Hell House fits this motif like a glove.

This flick really is a prime slice of what British horror is all about.  It's one of the rare ones that I've seen that isn't produced by either Hammer or Amicus; instead, it was distributed here in the States by 20th Century Fox and boasted what had to be an impressive budget for 1973 horror standards.  More than anything, though, it's got that unmistakable British horror glow (if it's accurate to use that word about this sort of thing).  There's lots of creepy atmosphere, lots of fog, soul-destroying synthy music, and plenty of sexy chicks parading around on the screen.  This film has one of Lick Ness Monster's personal favorites in Pamela Franklin, the sex kitten who first wowed audiences in 1969's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and later went on to appear in a small host of horror films.  Nonetheless, seeing her name in the credits gave this movie a +1 from the jump, and then the movie hits you with its story.

Hey, kids, you want to know why horror is the best genre?  Because, most of the time, there is absolutely no time for bullshit, unlike my reviews.  LIKE a lot of the movies I review, this one follows the "keep it simple, stupid" edict with getting a story together.  There's a rich guy who wants to learn about life after death.  There's a creepy old castle that is reputed to be the most haunted house in the world (actually said in the film).  And rich guy wants to hire a group of paranormal researchers to venture to the house and see if they can attain proof of the ghost world.  With that, it's off to the film's omnipresent Belasco House, named after family patriarch and supposed head-ghost-in-charge Emeric Belasco, where all of the movie's seances, happenings, and other assorted chicanery unfolds.

First things first - the atmosphere in this movie is fantastic.  The Belasco House is made up to the hilt, with director John Hough and his production team decorating the place with enough menacing colors and shadows that this set could have easily been used in a Gothic period piece film.  +52 additional Fonzie cool points to the movie in this regard.  But where the movie starts to fall short in a few areas is its surrounding characters. 

Make no mistake, The Legend of Hell House has a fantastic group of ACTORS at its disposal.  In addition to Franklin, you've got Roddy McDowall up on the screen doing his thing.  Weirdly enough, I'd never seen this guy in anything until the last couple of years, but now he seems to be popping up in everything that I'm watching.  A first-season Columbo episode, the pilot movie of Night Gallery...yeah, while the rest of the world cares about zombies and Game of Thrones, I'm all about '70s horror TV, baby.  Clive Revill and Gayle Hunnicutt are also good actors all things considered.  But with the exception of Franklin, it's the characters that they play that let the material down. 

So...Revill plays the leader of the group, a scientist named Lionel Barrett who quickly establishes himself as the unabashed and slightly annoying skeptic in this story.  He's accompanied by his lovely wife Ann (Hunnicutt), a character who is essentially just along for the ride and to provide some sexual tension later.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  But Barrett's aces are the other two - the pair of mediums, one a spiritualist (Franlin) and the other a physical manifester (McDowall, and yes, I know that "manifester" isn't even a word - deal with it).  The early goings of the film have Barrett and his mediums attempting to contact the spirits of the house and get their holy proof, an early sequence granting the audience an earth-shattering long glimpse of Pamela Franklin in her medium...um..."costume."  And it's glorious.

This movie is all about the slow build.  Fortunately, the middle portions pick up after introducing us to this group of mostly milquetoast characters as the movie becomes all about Florence Tanner, the younger medium played by Franklin.  See, Tanner is convinced that the house is haunted by many ghosts, including family members and victims of the notoriously cruel Emeric Belasco.  There's a fascinating little saga involving Tanner attempting to release an entity that she believes to be Belasco's son from his prison in the house.  The relationship takes on the air of a tragic romance at points, at one point even evolving to the point of Tanner stripping down to nothing and inviting the ghost into her bed to share some ghostly action with.  Much like the medium costume scene, it's a cinematic masterpiece.  While all of this is going on, McDowall is in the background, simply watching the proceedings.  His character was involved in a similar operation years ago that ended with everyone besides himself dead, so surely you can understand his apprehension.

If I haven't spelled it out enough already, there's a heavy undercurrent of sex to this film.  There's a curious subplot involving Revill's wife Ann consisting of scenes where the prim and proper scientist's wife, who may or may not be acting under the influence of the ghosts in the house, throws herself at McDowall and feverishly describes what she wants to do to him.  For his part, McDowall always throws her away, although this does cause tension with Revill.  Since I'm a moron, I'm unable to gleam any of the metaphor that the film-makers were going for here, so suffice to say, we've got lots more near nudity to play around with.  Trumpets from the heavens.  Supposedly, the sex was actually toned down quite a bit from the book that this movie was based on.  Said novel was also written by Richard Matheson, a guy who created, among other things, the awesome TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which everyone should add to their Netflix list RIGHT NOW.

I realize that I haven't reviewed much of the plot of this movie, but really, it's not at all about plot.  It's all about the build, and that's a good thing, because the final trimester kind of flies off the rails.  We get a couple of quick character deaths followed by a wholly unsatisfying climax that involves lots of one particular actor doing a lot of shouting.  I won't reveal which actor this is...but really, it's a lot of shouting.  Figure it out. 

For all the things that this movie DOESN'T do well, it succeeds marvelously in crafting that sense of dread, something sorely lacking in most modern horror films.  That atmosphere is Richard Matheson's calling card; he wrote the script for this movie, adapting his own novel, and everything that I've seen with his name attached to it has that signature dark, foggy quality that looks like it could be appearing in the days of Jack the Ripper.  That dread makes up for the faults in The Legend of Hell House, along with the sheer conviction of its great cast.  British horror films from this time period are always a pretty safe bet to have great acting, because when you have David Warner, Peter Cushing, Pamela Franklin and Roddy McDowall at your disposal, you've got no excuse.  Yeah, it falls a little flat emotionally due to its weaksauce characters.  But I can guarantee that you'll remember this movie when it's over.  That's enough to get an endorsement from me.

*** out of ****.  Not an all-time classic or anything, but definitely worth a watch.  And hey...it's on Netflix instant as we speak.  Check it out.

Sorority House Massacre (1986)

1986
Directed by Carol Frank
Starring Angela O'Neill, Wendy Martel and Pamela Ross

I've seen something like 2,084 slasher films in my life, and Sorority House Massacre is definitely one of them.  We're off to a rip-roaring start with this review, aren't we? 

Flashback to the '80s, where there were a whole slew of "Massacre" titles released within a few years of each other.  Slumber parties, beach houses, nail guns complete with amazing evil laughing bad guy.  Name the locale or the weapon and we got it during this period.  This particular movie has a little bit of an interesting twist in that it was partially produced by the legendary Roger Corman and it has the incredibly rare quality of being both written and directed by an Honest-to-Christ FEMALE, one Carol Frank.  We need more female slasher directors.  Thus ends the Lick Ness Monster Women in Slasher Movies initiative.  With that background, I was actually pretty excited to click "Play" on this bad boy and let it unwind...but alas, it's not very good.

If you're even a casual fan of horror movies, you've basically seen this one before.  Let's break down what we're dealing with here.

SLASHER MOVIES FOR DUMMIES, as pioneered by the great John Carpenter (and perfected/ripped off by Sean Cunningham):

(1) The past evil, embodied by some bad incident from the days of yore that comes back in the present day;

(2) A group of good-looking kids in a cut-off environment;

(3) Various circumstances that ensure that the clueless adults can't help the kids in peril.

This would be Sorority House Massacre to the letter.  Slasher movies were a dime a dozen at this time, so you don't see a movie like this one for its subverting of genre rules or anything.  It's all about the execution.  Unfortunately, that's where the flick falls way short.

The main character is Beth, played by Angela O'Neil doing her best Jamie Lee Curtis impersonation.  As a kid, Beth survived a horrific murderfest propagated by her brother Bobby (John C. Russell).  Bobby is still in an asylum, and you can take three guesses as to who will crash Beth's party.  O'Neil is a decent-enough actress all things considered, but that might be slightly skewed considering what we're dealing with around her.  The plot has Beth at some college that I'm not even going to look up the name of on Wikipedia wanting to pledge to a sorority (shocking, I know) and spending her first few nights at the house.  The 74-minute run time leaves precious little moments to introduce all of the surrounding characters, and it's a good thing, because it covers all the bases of slasher movie stock characters quite well.  We've got the rich girl, the slightly bitchy girl, and the fellow nice girl who maybe-sorta might survive along with Beth at the end.  It's not really interesting, with the exception of...

AMAZING SCENE ALERT.  Roughly 20 minutes into the movie, Rich Girl leaves to do...something, I can't quite remember what.  T kill time, the other girls decide to invade her expansive closet and try on her clothes, complete with CLOTHES-TRYING-ON MUSIC MONTAGE.  If that wasn't great enough, throw in the quick cuts of clothes flying in the air in time with the music and you've got some George Carlin-esque levels of comedy.

See, Beth is having all of these weird visions as she walks around the sorority house.  Through some miracle, it's the same home that Bobby killed her entire biological family in, with the script using that convenient "she blocked it out" thing to write this inconvenience off.  There IS a little bit of a twist here in that Beth and her brother seem to have a psychic link, with the latter sensing that his surviving sister has returned to their home.  Which means that it's time to break out and start killing people.  It should also be said that his breakout scene involves such cunning tactics as waiting behind a desk with a zombified look on his face and then simply getting up, nailing a double axe-handle smash and leaving.  Not quite another Amazing Scene, but it's close.

I love horror movies, but I'll be the first guy to admit that riveting plots isn't why I (and many other people) watch a lot of them.  Some horror movies have deep, subtextual plots, but definitely far from a majority.  For most horror movies, it's all about the fun factor.  Sorority House Massacre is severely lacking in this with the exception of those two borderline hilarious moments that I've already mentioned.  There's no Tom Savini or Rob Bottin-level gore effects to gawk at, there's no creative kills (it's mostly just relatively bloodless stabbings), there's not even any Crispin Glover-style quirky side characters to get involved with.  And...oh yeah, that's right, all of the side characters' boyfriends show up halfway through the movie, and the whole thing becomes suicidally boring with romantic subplots for like 20 minutes just before the killing starts.  Which promptly killed most of the interest that I had with how this turns out.

When it was released, this movie got a lot of criticism for its similarity to Halloween, and it's a fair complaint.  It pretty much ripped everything right out of the John Carpenter playbook word-for-word, with the exception of the lead heroine's psychic link with her psycho brother.  What we've got here is Halloween with all of the atmosphere, awesome music, slow-burn murder sequences and likable characters removed.  So...Rob Zombie's Halloween, then.  Wow.  Amazingly, in Zombie's SECOND Halloween film, he even had his hick version of Laurie Strode do the "psychic bond" thing with Michael.  I think I'm on to something here.  Illuminati proof confirmed.

That's about all I've got to say about this one, other than what the killer LOOKS like.  As in, he's pretty much just a regular dude with a regular haircut.  Kind of funny considering the way-over-the-top weird faces and masks that populated this era, but it doesn't make the movie much more interesting.  Yeah, kids, this one wasn't exactly a classic, and the best part is that there were TWO MORE of these godawful things that I haven't watched yet.  * 1/2 out of ****.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

1999
Directed by Ed Sanchez and Dan Myrick
Starring Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard and Michael Williams

I'll admit it - the new trailer got me.  When I saw that Adam Wingard was going to be directing a movie called The Woods, I was confused...yet interested.  So imagine my shock when the curtain gets pulled back from this film and we all learn out that it's actually a new Blair Witch movie.  All three of you who follow this series of masturbatory reviews know that my town of 13,000 people is currently bereft of a movie theater, so thus, making me drive 40 minutes to the nearest multiplex means I'm way more than just confused...yet interested.  Nonetheless, I was there for Blair Witch 3, ready to be riveted just like I was all those years ago when this flick hit me in the face in a movie theater.

Spoiler alert: It sucked.  But maybe that will be a tale for another day.

Confession time.  I hadn't watched the O.G. 1999 Blair Witch Project in something like 15 years, because it's actually one of the five or six movies that I won't watch by myself, at night.  I was far from the only one back then.  I still remember being directed to the web site for this movie by a friend in late '98, reading through that timeline and looking back at the "Missing" posters crafted for the three lead actors.  This flick had buzz, and it seemed to be everywhere in the early days of the internet.  Then came the first TV ads a few months later.  And then came that ungodly "Curse of the Blair Witch" documentary that aired on the Sci-Fi channel.  I don't think that anything had ever frightened me as profoundly in my life as that stupid thing did back when it aired.  I shit you not, I was up almost all night sweating bullets.  Of course, we all know now that all of this stuff was simply a brilliantly executed marketing tactic for this cheaply shot but chillingly effective film made by people who wanted to actually, you know, make movies scary again.  All these years later, I can report after another viewing that I still think they succeeded with flying colors.

This review is going to be a little different.  Don't expect my usual bit of waxing where I look at characters, three-act structure or gore FX.  This is going to be a blow-by-blow of how this whole movie came to be.

The Blair Witch Project was the creation of Haxan Films, in particular a couple of film students named Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez who noticed (correctly, IMO) that documentaries about serial killers and paranormal phenomena were actually way scarier than horror movies were in the '90s.  With no money and no investors on their side in the day and age when Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay were already on their way to killing popcorn cinema for good, they hatched on an idea that would combine that belief with storytelling - a faux documentary in the vein of The Legend of Boggy Creek, a.k.a. the movie where Charles B. Pierce went stumbling around the Arkansas sticks looking for Bigfoot.  Somehow, that film worked.  Surely, one about a friggin' murderous witch could.  Time to craft a background.

Now, anybody can go on Wikipedia and learn what they did.  The phony history of the Blair Witch was written, "documentary" footage was filmed involving some of the good people in Burkittsville, Maryland, and a trio of unknown actors trained in improvisation were hired to head off into the woods and get hunted down by an unseen force.  The Blair Witch Project was far from the first "found footage" film, but it DID invent the term, as the prologue contains the sentence "A year later, their footage was found" to describe what we see from the three student film-makers.  We've had something like 9,781 found footage movies in the years since (although, weirdly, the massive wave didn't come until a decade later starting with Paranormal Activity).  For my money, though, this is still the most effective of the lot by FAR, because everything they did to these people was, in effect, real.

The shoot started with a quick course given to the actors about how to use the film-making equipment, and then it was off to the very...um, wildernessy...wilderness of Maryland for what Myrick and Sanchez thought would amount to something like 20 minutes of their finished film.  Shooting mostly in Seneca Creek State Park, the actors were given GPS tracking devices and were fed coordinates every day to hike to.  Every day, each actor would be given a separate sheet with some very bare-bones instructions about how to act that day, along with directions to a milk crate containing food and supplies.  Everything that they did in between was completely improvised, with the actors staying in character pretty much 24-7.  Picturing the giant trailer that George Clooney undoubtedly retreats to every time he gets done looking down, looking up and squinting, it really does give you an appreciation for what these people went through.

The sense of suspense was heightened on the actors as each day ticked by.  They were given less food and more detailed, angsty instructions about the in-fighting between the characters.  By night, Sanchez and Myrick - along with partners in crime Gregg Hale, Kevin Foxe and Mike Monello - would do everything they could to get the actors to piss themselves on camera. 

This approach is what gives this movie its edge; in a sense, it really was all REAL.  There are things that take me right out of movies like Paranormal Activity, where we get the oh-so-convenient plot device of the demonologist guy who suddenly has to vanish for a conference just as the climax hits and that incredibly hokey ending of The Last Exorcism that turns the damn thing into a monumentally stupid movie.  For my money, the only thing in this movie that feels staged is the fact that it occurs to nobody to follow the river instead of just picking a direction to walk every day.  That decision is still a little iffy.

The film-makers crafted this story while looking at the dailies every night, and as this thing went on, they knew that there were about to be some big changes to their planned fake documentary featuring the story of the three kids who got lost in the woods.  They realized that what was happening in Seneca Creek was enough for an entire narrative story, and the plan started to involve less and less of the fake documentary that didn't quite crank it up to 11.  When shooting was finished and it was time to cut everything together, Myrick and Sanchez eventually decided to make the entire film the stuff that Donahue, Leonard and Williams shot, with the documentary getting recycled into the aforementioned "Curse of the Blair Witch" Sci-Fi special that terrified me to my very soul as a teen-ager who knew about this movie from its slick web site.

From there came the buzz.  And from there came the sale to Artisan Entertainment.  And from THERE came the marketing budget that dwarfed what this movie cost to make, and from there came the quarter of a billion dollar box office gross, contributed to by this guy.  I'll never forget sitting in the theater watching this tick by with rabid anticipation, hating Donahue's character along with everybody else and feeling the sense of dread sweep over that entire darkened room.  The movie closes with a slam-bang double-dose of classic scenes, as Donahue cuts that classic snot-covered speech that's been spoofed in a zillion crappier movies since and that chilling final shot.  End communication (/Kodos).

When this movie was released, it got a boatload of critical praise to go along with its Scrooge McDuck-esque box office haul.  But it polarized audiences; some, like myself, found the whole thing to be an ingenious concept pulled off to near perfection.  Others found it lame, a movie where nothing happens and were disappointed that the witch never shows up on camera.  To those people, I would point them to The Last Exorcism, 'cus that one has everything you're looking for and then some, believe me.  Nevertheless, all these years later, I was able to get somebody else to watch this flick with me after it sat on my DVD shelf untouched for a decade-and-a-half.  And it still holds up, just like it did in 1999 when this was one of just a few movies that has ever legitimately kept me up at night.

**** out of ****.  The granddaddy of all found footage flicks still has the title.  The kids out there are advised to give this one a watch, because it's a bigger mindf**k than any of the gazillion hidden-camera films that popped up post-2009.

Trollhunter (2010)

2010
Directed by Andre Ovredal
Starring Otto Jespersen, Hans Morten Hansen, Tomas Alf Larsen, Johanna Morck and Glenn Erland Tosterud

Polarizing review time.  Get ready.  I'm sure everyone is just hyperventilating with anticipation.

Trollhunter is a movie that gets a ton of praise in the online horror and fantasy communities.  Like, a real lot.  More than any recent movie that I've reviewed since The Babadook, and that's saying something, since the vast wave of reviews that came in for THAT particular film were nothing short of flat-out verbal orgasm.  Peruse the IMDB external reviews for this Norwegian found-footage flick and you're likely to read lots of stuff like "visionary," "hilarious," "triumphant," and, dare I say, "scrum-tralescent."  It's won awards, and not just the horror movie awards that don't count.  Real awards.  The kind that they have actual TV shows for.  Well, at least in Norway, where this movie was made.

And...I didn't like it.  At all.  Boring life and times of Jon Lickness break alert: I've been showing a friend as many classic horror movies as I can for the better part of two years now.  By this point, we've exhausted pretty much all of the main eventers (Jason, Michael, Freddy - but we still have Leatherface to go) and were looking for a break, so we decided to hit Netflix to see what they had.  I remembered that the guy who runs the Good Bad Flicks YouTube channel heartily recommended Trollhunter and it looked good based on his video exploring its production, so we decided to give it a shot.  The short version?  We both found the flick entertaining at points.  But...no substance.  And long stretches of boredom, unfortunately.

Yes, folks, this is a found-footage movie, made during the time when that particular trend was all the rage.  It's also Norwegian.  The last thing I ever expected to find in the archives of the great, grand horror genre was a Norse found-footage film, but rest assured, if you can think of a comedy sketch about a horror film, someone has made it for real.  Directed by Andre Ovredal on a fairly decent budget for a movie of this nature, it's clearly a semi-satire of the genre and has comedic elements to go along with its story about a dude who keeps the monsters of Norway at bay with his arsenal of high-tech weapons.  But most of it, for me anyway, falls flat.

The concept of the movie is undoubtedly pretty cool.  It's the how and why of getting there where the movie falls short.  Meet the main characters (unfortunately): a trio of college students doing a report on illegal bear poaching.  There's Thomas (Glenn Erland Toseterud), Johanna (Johanna Morck), and cameraman Kalle (Thomas Alf Larsen).  For everyone who bitches about the characters in The Blair Witch Project being dislikable asshats, check this movie out, it might give you a newfound appreciation for Heather Donahue's prolonged improvised bitchiness.  Oh yeah, upcoming review spoiler alert.  Thomas in particular was a character that I just could not stand, but I digress.  The group is doing a documentary about illegal bear poaching in the Norse countryside, and this is what brings them to Hans (Otto Jespersen).

Expectedly, this dude wants nothing to do with the camera crew, and justifiably so.  When one of them is Thomas...dude, I get it.  Supposedly, Otto Jespersen, the guy who plays Hans, is actually a reasonably well-known Norse comedian, and I'll take Wikipedia's word for it, because he's undoubtedly the most entertaining thing about the movie and easily the most likable character.  After a few close calls with the local government and a few bloody bear corpses are found, the film crew continues to follow Hans, where they find out that his actual job is to corral the army of gigantic trolls that live in the Norwegian countryside and occasionally kill the ones that wander outside of designated areas.  Wut.

I will give it to the movie in a couple places.  First, the special effects, considering the budget, are really impressive.  The trolls look more fluid and lifelike than just about anything you'll see in a Michael Bay movie.  Secondly, it handles some of the folktale aspects of trolls with a lot of cleverness.  In particular, the whole "turning to stone" thing and how it's accomplished is done in a really effective way.  But this is also where the movie loses its way, because for every cool little scene that we get involving Hans nuking the trolls, we get a bunch of boring exposition from scientists or doctors giving us every minute technical detail about the biology of trolls as animals or something that lessens the effect and derails the momentum that the movie had managed to achieve.  Since these scenes also involve spending more time with Thomas and his band of merry men and women, it's like a Monkey's Paw wish of epic proportions.

That's the story of the movie for me.  There are bits of it that I really liked, but for every one of those bits we get like 10 minutes of tedious explanation scenes.  All of the exposition, background and biology lessons take up what seems like a third of the running time of this movie, and it ain't no short one - at 103 minutes, it's LONG for a found-footage movie.  And since these characters are so one-dimensional and forgettable, I didn't give a shit about what happened to any of them.  There's a long sequence where the group find their way into the lair of a group of trolls that might have negative tension for this reason.  And the climax, involving a giant troll with some sub-name that I long ago forgot and refuse to look up on Google, is the drizzling shits. 

It's kind of a shame, because, again, this concept is cool.  I can't help but think that it would have been much better without the whole found-footage gimmick.  Supposedly, this might actually come to pass, because a U.S. remake has been in the works for a while.  I would be down for that, considering some of the possibilities.  Picture, say, Robert Downey Jr. in the Hans role.  I'd buy seven movie tickets, myself.  It's also a project that fits the definition of what a remake SHOULD be about, because there's plenty of stuff to improve upon.  Especially the characters.  Folks, these characters (again, with the exception of Hans the troll slayer) are middling at best and semi-hateable at worst, and they bog the whole thing down.  There's no tension because of them, and no sense of fear or dread in any of the troll encounters.  Fix that error, and everything else falls into place.  Book it, Vince.

With that, time to assign my annoying contrarian rating: * 1/2 out of ****.  Sorry, every film critic on YouTube.  I can't join in the fun and recommend this one.