100 Scariest Movie Moments: #88 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

This is not an easy movie to objectively assess. It was released in the days when most sci-fi films were B-movies. Coming out 3 years before The Twilight Zone, I don't think there's a single scene with production values high enough to allow an otherwise ignorant viewer to determine that it was from a theatrical release, rather than a work of Rod Serling.

My personal view is that this movie hit a cultural nerve because of the time it was released. Much of the population saw this movie as a commentary on Communism. Still others saw it as satirical, sarcastically mocking McCarthyism and the Red Scare, with the suggestion that good law-abiding American citizens were going to sleep one night, and evil Communists were waking up the next day. That does indeed appear to be all that the original is remembered for. Personally, I find this to be a bit of a stretch. The film was neither the first nor last to suggest that inhuman monsters looked exactly like normal people.

The setup for the film is that Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), a Doctor, has been called back early to his small town practice from a conference, due to a large build-up of patients. When he arrives, however, they all mysteriously cancel their appointments. He and his former lover (Dana Wynter) then begin to hear reports of citizens claiming their loved ones have been replaced by impostors. It gradually becomes clear that this is in fact the case. Duplicates of the originals are being grown in mysterious pods, which then absorb the memories of the originals, replacing them.

What I find interesting about the film is the creatures themselves. In most films about humans being assimilated into a collective there are scenes that establish the assimilated as monsters. This film doesn't seem to have that. While they try to prevent the protagonists from leaving town, the Pod People never seem hateful or malicious. In fact, they try to negotiate the humans into surrender. To me, this suggests that they don't see themselves as invaders, but as symbiotic. By absorbing the memories, they believe that the original human lives on. In this sense, the conflict is of two creatures with fundamentally different ways of thinking: Collectivism vs. Individuality (I'm not saying the Communism metaphor doesn't work, by any means. It’s just that I doubt it was intended.).

The obvious comparison to this movie is The Thing. Both films deal with aliens replacing humans, and are based on two separate works on literature that have both been adapted multiple times in film. The major difference that gives The Thing a definitive edge is that John Carpenter knew the real horror of assimilation was complete uncertainty in regards to who is friend or foe. That's the great weakness of this movie. While that element is used in passing, we come to understand that the aliens cannot mimic the personalities of the original perfectly, thus anyone who knows the original well will be able to distinguish an impostor with fairly little effort. So, once the villains are established, there's little real effort to keep their identities secretive.

One thing I have to give the writers credit for is that the book-ends of the film, forced on by the studio at the last possible second, do not weaken it. In the original ending Bennell, the last unassimilated person in the town, makes it to the Highway, but no one is willing to pick up the crazy guy ranting about aliens, let alone believe him. The film would then have closed on him looking at the camera, and telling the audience that they were next.

The studio felt this ending was too depressing. And so instead, scenes were added to the beginning and end, showing that Bennell was picked up by the government and told them his story. The government initially assumes that he is crazy, but then found out about pods being shipped from the town. This was actually a fairly good choice. Because rather than ending on clear defeat or victory, the movie ends with uncertainty, and it works.

I recommend this movie about as strongly as I would recommend a really good episode of The Twilight Zone. It's certainly not a film anyone needs to rush out to see. But likewise, I can't imagine anyone demanding that the sparse 80 minutes of their lives be refunded to them. It's not like the film is hard to find.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #89 Alice, Sweet Alice

I’m uncertain if the title of Alice, Sweet Alicewas intended to be ironic, or if the movie was named by marketing people who’d never actually seen it. Given that the original title was Confession, I find the latter explanation more plausible. The movie was re-released two years after its initial premiere to cash in on Brooke Shields' popularity.

Shields plays Karen, the younger sister of the eponymous Alice (Paula Shepard). Karen is better behaved, and the favorite. Alice, feeling unloved, acts out, stealing from Karen and generally being a little bitch. Then, Karen is killed at her first communion and Alice is found with her veil, leading to the suspicion that Alice is the killer. It certainly doesn’t help her case that her hated aunt is then attacked by someone in a raincoat and a mask identical to a mask Alice wore earlier in the film to scare her sister.

It’s a bit difficult to pin down the exact protagonist of the film. A great deal of screen time is given to Alice, but we’re never given a great deal of insight into her mind. We also see her parents (Niles McCaster and Linda Miller) and the police trying to understand what’s going on.

The fact that Alice is innocent is a foregone conclusion. She’s clearly a red herring, and who the actual murderer is seems largely unimportant to me. The movie is an exercise in empathy, intended to make you feel as miserable as possible for all of the characters. Everyone speaks slowly with many sighs, unless they are yelling. Alice creates havoc wherever she goes. Hell, they make the landlord (Alphonso DeNoble) a fat pedophile just in case a murdered child wasn’t sufficient.

We are led for a while to believe that Alice is insane. Under a lie detector, test it comes out that she believes her sister attacked her aunt. She clearly believes that Karen is punishing her from beyond the grave. Whether that punishment is for being a bully, or being a murderer is the real question.

This movie is indeed extremely scary, but it’s quite difficult to pin down why. The attacks themselves? The death of a child? The threat of Alice being institutionalized? The fat pedophile? In general they all seem to combine into a sense that the universe is a miserable place to live in, and life is nothing but suffering.

The final shot of the movie seems to imply that Alice, while not guilty of the murder of her sister, is in fact destined to become a murderer herself anyway. She’s shown with the knife of the killer, which she conceals in a shopping bag, and examines with a resolved face.

So, life sucks, and then you become a murderer. There is no escaping, and there is no happy ending. The movie's constant use of religious imagery against such a tragic story underscores this idea, with religion serving merely to help these poor, deluded fools move on with their lives. The killer, before being taken away by the police, demands communion, and stabs the priest when he refuses to give it to her. The movie could almost be called Lovecraftian thematically, even lacking any supernatural elements.

The movie, while cheap, is effective. It feels a bit assembly-line, as if the director wasn't so much telling a story as designing a product specifically to manipulate the emotions of his audience. That said though, it worked. So, yes, this movie is definitely worth checking out.

Wednesday Review: The Gift

I've said in the past that I want to keep my Wednesday Reviewsspoiler-free. However, this is one film for which I can't give my opinion without spoilers, because my opinion of the movie is so strongly influenced by the ending. The movie ends with Gordo (Joel Edgerton) sending Simon (Jason Bateman) a video showing that Gordo may or may not have raped Robyn (Rebecca Hall), Simon's wife.

I, and a number of the other opinions I've read, interpret his dialogue to more strongly imply that he didn't rape her, but wanted Simon to think that he did. He stood to gain nothing from actually going through with the act. That really isn't enough to save the movie on a moral level to me, though. The primary concern that the ending shows is the questionable paternity of Robyn's child. The fact that she may have been raped seems to be treated as secondary.

I have to bring this up, because if I leave out this issue all I have left to say about the movie is positive. For the most part, it's well acted, directed, and written and that it has some really good scares. It also manages to avoid many of the typical cliches of stalker movies, with the movie never descending into a home invasion thriller. Gordo's primary goal is to make Simon suffer, not to come at him with a baseball bat. At one point his tactic of coming to their home and leaving them gifts is described as “reverse burglary.”

This movie seems determined to break through one cultural lie we all tell ourselves: Nothing in High School matters. It's something I hear a lot, but the truth is that those formative years have real lasting consequences that reverberate through the rest of our lives. Bateman's performance is fabulous, actually reminding me of many bullies I've known, who constantly find ways to blame their victims. Edgerton kills it as a man who clearly can't let the past rest.

When Gordo approaches the couple Simon shows obvious signs of resentment towards him, but tries to cover them up as if he has nothing to hide. Robyn, on the other hand, sees Gordo as a socially awkward guy who just wants to be friends, and is quite open to him. The tension between the two becomes more and more overt, and we spend much of the film with Robyn as our protagonist trying to discover what her husband did that hurt this man so deeply. Had we stuck with her perspective at the end, and shown her as caught in a conflict between two equally horrible people, it might have been less appalling.

For a thriller the movie has a very slow pace, without much action. The primary driving forces are psychological. There's exactly two scenes of physical violence in the film, only one of which is between two main characters, and that scene is both short and extensively built up.

I recommend this movie if you think you can morally tolerate the film I just described. It reminds me of The Birth of a Nation, presenting us with a high-quality film that tells a story that I really don't care to hear. The values are like something out of the Bronze Age, and it amazes me that Cape Feardealt with a similar story in a more progressive manner in 1962, at least having the decency to show that defiling a man's family for revenge is something that only an utterly irredeemable sociopath would do.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #90 The Night of the Hunter

It baffles me that The Night of the Hunter made it past the censors in the days of the Hayes Code. For anyone unfamiliar with it, the Hayes Code was a strict production standard that all major American studios went by from the 1930s until 1968 when the ratings system was developed. Among other things, it explicitly banned negative depictions of religious authorities.

My best guess is that they side-stepped this rule by opening the movie with a bible verse warning of “false prophets.” Presumably they explained to the censors that you can't blaspheme if you're film is inspired by the religion supposedly being blasphemed against.

Robert Mitchum plays a criminal preacher... or a criminal pretending to be a preacher... or a preacher who honestly believes that God is OK with the truly despicable things he does... it isn't really clear. He was cellmates with a bank robber (Peter Graves) who was executed and wants to find the man's money. So he marries his widow (Shelley Winters) and attempts to coerce the information from his children (Billy Chaplain and Sally Jane Bruce).

The initial hour of the film consists of this general formula as he tries to intimidate the son and sweet-talk the daughter into telling him where the money is hidden. He eventually murders his new wife, and isolates the children.

To me, the single most frightening moment is immediately after the daughter gives in. For just a second, his high-brow speech drops and gives way to a much more low-class accent (“The dahl! Why sure! The last place anyone would think to look!”). In this moment you get a clear view of the wolf in sheep’s clothing that our villain truly is. And the fact that he's able to maintain his facade so perfectly in every other scene of the movie is absolutely chilling.

The remaining half-hour of the movie is actually fairly dull, and exists mostly to make sure the villain is punished. The children escape and take refuge with a shotgun-wielding old lady (Lillian Gish) who keeps their step-father at bay. He attempts to get in, but eventually resolves himself to sitting outside, intimidating them. Any hope for an ultimate climax is destroyed when the police arrive and arrest him without incident. It’s made very clear that the town has turned against him (they barely avoid a lynching), and that he is certain to be executed for his crimes.

The movie then wraps up with a dull speech about how the children will be OK, because the Hayes code was not willing to bend on the issue of the children being OK. And the ending is a big disappointment for an otherwise almost flawless film. You could say that I'm expecting formula, but there's a reason cliches became cliches. This is the rare case in which a studio executive should have stormed onto the set and demanded an ending with gunfire and explosions. If nothing else, it would have been preferable to this Hayes Code-induce anti-climax.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #91 Shallow Grave

Having completed and reviewed all 100 of these films, I found there was only one review I really regretted, and it was the very first one I wrote. My original review of Shallow Grave was literally just three-pages of fanboy gushing about how much I loved the movie, along with way too much on my personal interpretation of the plot. The results felt more like a college film school essay than a review, so I decided to take another crack at it.

The story is about three flatmates in an unnamed British city; Juliet Miller (Kerry Fox), David Stevens (Christopher Eccleston), and Alex Law (Ewan McGregor). The three of them have a darkly idyllic life. They're young, and they're quite successful for their age. David is an accountant, Juliet is a physician, and Alex is a journalist. Furthermore, they form the perfect circle of friends, with all three of them being complete assholes who take joy in amusing each other and antagonizing outsiders.

Their favorite form of entertainment is advertising for a fourth flatmate, and then humiliating people with bizarre and personal questions in the interview. This eventually brings Hugo (Keith Allen) into the story, a somewhat older, charming man, who somehow entices them into actually taking him on as a flatmate.

The brilliance of this movie is that it has enough twists and mood shifts to keep surprising the audience, while also remaining completely logical in it's narrative. Throughout the film we get cutaways to two of Hugo's associates hunting for him, and we expect the three protagonists to end up in a crossfire. Then, Hugo dies of a drug overdose leaving a suitcase full of cash, and the three bury him out in the woods to avoid turning in the money. They decide to mutilate the corpse to prevent identification, and draw straws, with David as the loser who has to do it. This causes David to become increasingly paranoid and unhinged, locking himself in the attic with the suitcase. Naturally, the two associates show up looking for the money, but David is unexpectedly able to dispatch them both with little trouble.

This represents the real turning point in the film: David is going crazy. The film becomes a conflict between Alex and Juliet on the one hand and David on the other, as both vie for the money. At the same time, Juliet and Alex want to avoid bringing in the authorities, while also keeping David's growing lunacy under control.

This movie is almost like an inversion of the modern jump-scare film. Terrifying things are treated with casual disregard, being discussed coldly by the characters. Hugo's death takes place off screen, as does the mutilation of his corpse. Instead, the fear comes from the actors, who manage to portray revulsion and terror without any over-the-top screaming. A decision is made to draw straws to remove Hugo's hands, feet, and teeth to prevent identification before burial, and David is chosen. Eccleston shows his disgust with a simple “I can't do it!” Then, he does it anyway, contributing to his psychological decline throughout the film.

The movie's tone is all over the place, between comedy and drama. That, combined with the acting talent of the cast.  (What do you expect when you have the Doctor and Obi-wan Kenobi together?), sell everything. Both the black comedy, and the performances, serve to get you to like and care about characters who are objectively terrible people. If there's ever been a film that demonstrates the fine line between comedy and horror better than this, I have yet to see it. The finale confrontation is even revealed to be a big punch-line, in which all three main characters wind up screwed in one way or another.

This is a film that I recommend without reservation. While it's not easy for me to make a list of my top ten favorite movies (I struggle with a top three), if I ever did, this movie would be on it. It's an experience everyone needs to have.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #92 Village of the Damned

I'm a bit uncertain how to take the children in Village of the Damned. The adult characters certainly treat them as evil, but their existence isn't their own fault. The premise of this movie is that an entire town of people suddenly fell into a coma. And while they were unconscious, all of the women of child-bearing age became pregnant, giving birth to rapidly-aging, very light blond-haired psychics.

During the main portion of the film the children, while appearing twelve, are only three. So it’s never clear whether the children themselves are inherently evil, or simply immature, not yet having had time to develop empathy. Furthermore, we're told that several instances of these children being born have occurred elsewhere in the world. Most were killed as infants, and when the colony in Russia attempted to take over a small town, the entire town was nuked.

The children do repeatedly assert that they simply want to survive, and even imply that they won't try to take over the town, since that would be repeating a strategy which they already know failed once. I never see any reason to doubt them on this. On at least one occasion we see them agree not to come in person to a store anymore, because they're making the storekeeper uncomfortable. They're also perfectly open about their powers, even if they never give clear answers on their origins (although there's never any real indication they know more than anyone else).

That's what makes this film difficult for me to talk about as a horror movie. I just don't see it that way. I see it as a tragedy. Over the course of the film, the children do begin to mature; the use of their powers developing from petty revenge to self-defense.

That's not to say that the human characters were wrong either. The children unquestionably represented a very real threat. In that lies the true strength of the movie; a conflict that cannot be avoided or compromised upon. The children must fight for their own survival, and by the end of the film it's clear that the humans must also attempt to ensure their own.

The ending of the movie is fairly well-known now. The father of one of the children (George Sanders), who has acted as their teacher, plants a bomb in their classroom, and then thinks of a brick wall to prevent them from reading his mind until its too late. I think the ambiguity of this movie was very much intentional, as the movie ends on the explosion, showing us neither grief nor jubilation at the deaths of the children.

So yes, this is a good movie. As for the horror aspect, I never once felt frightened. I'd classify this more as a sci-fi movie rather than horror, but I can definitely see where some would be frightened by it.

100 Scariest Movie Moments: #93 Child's Play

Child's Play is a movie that will make anyone smile. It's absolutely no wonder this franchise eventually turned to self-parody. Even with the original movie, there isn't a single thing in the entire film that makes a bit of sense. A voodoo priest (Raymond Oliver) teaches a serial killer (Brad Dourif) how to steal people's bodies to keep from dying, and later complains that he's “used it for evil” when he sees that he's transferred his consciousness into a doll. I can't help but wonder what his definition of “using it for good” would be, since he evidently believes there is such a thing.

That makes the movie neither bad nor unscary. Chucky is creepy as hell, no matter how little sense anything that happens in this film makes. The movie is largely style over substance, with creative choices being made to create an atmosphere that is scary, rather than to tell a story.

For example, we see quite clearly at the beginning that the doll was possessed by the killer, and I seriously doubt anyone finds this point ambiguous. Yet, the movie still waits to show us Chucky moving or talking. Even knowing that it’s coming, the effect is chilling when Chucky first speaks.

The story is fairly paint-by-numbers. Chucky has two people he blames for his death; a partner who abandoned him (Neil Guiantoli), and a cop who shot him (Chris Sarandon). He takes his revenge on the former. The latter is conveniently sent to investigate the murder of a woman who was baby-sitting Chucky's owner, 6-year-old Andy (Alex Vincent). Naturally, romance with Andy's mother (Catherine Hicks) happens, and they eventually realize they're fighting a living doll.

The horror really dies in the last act. The characters just get too dumb, and you want to scream at the scream “What part of ‘destroy the heart’ are you having trouble understanding?” Even with this stupidity, though, the final confrontation is filled with enough action to remain entertaining.

Scarier movies than this are a dime a dozen and better movies are a penny. But movies that are more entertaining are few and far between.