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Film, Reviews

The Awakening Review (Film, 2012)

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theawakeningposter The Awakening Review (Film, 2012)The Awakening is a haunted house film told from the perspective of a skeptic. Florence Cathcart is England’s leading paranormal investigator, debunking the schemes of spiritualists and delusions of regular people alike. In 1921, she is invited to a boarding school where the boys claim to see a ghost. A death happened on school grounds during the fall session and Cathcart is believed to be the last hope to ensure any students return for the spring.

Writer/director Nick Murphy and screenwriter Stephen Volk hit on a pleasing combination of Gothic storytelling and 1970s/80s Hammer pictures. Everything in The Awakening doesn’t quite make sense but it doesn’t have to because it sells you on the merits of Florence Cathcart and the principle conflict before it loses meaning. The sprawling school, formerly a mansion, is filled with Victorian decadence long-forgotten by the contemporary cast members. This alone justifies the moments that don’t have logical explanations. If the characters don’t even understand where they are, why should the audience understand everything that happens?

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Film, Music, Reviews

Metallica: Through the Never Review (Film, 2013)

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metallicathroughtheneverposter Metallica: Through the Never Review (Film, 2013)Metallica: Through the Never tries something very unusual for a modern concert film. The band members worked with writer/director Nimród Antal to develop an original story set to their set list to play out during the live concert footage. Dane DeHaan plays Trip, a young roadie sent on an important mission during the concert to retrieve an item for the band. What he wanders into is a world strewn in chaos. It’s as if the music of the band has altered reality, creating riots and nightmarish monsters on every corner. It’s an intriguing concept that breaks up the concert footage very well.

What we have here is a bit of fan service so well-executed that anyone not totally averse to the music of Metallica will find something to enjoy. I, personally, was in it for the Dan DeHaan narrative while my brother was there for the music. Everything is really well shot. The editing is solid. The 3D is clean and immersive without too many gags or distractions.

The real star of the film is the sound design. The balance between the music and the live audience is perfect. You’re allowed to experience the band’s skills within the context of the natural energy of the audience. Arena tours have notorious sound issues because the physical arenas are not designed for live music and this team recorded everything beautifully.

It continues on with the Trip’s story in the film. The sound effects added in–car crashes, explosions, police batons, etc.–sync well with the music. It’s a bit more subtle than the manipulation of levels in the pure concert scenes but it’s solid work. It would be all too easy to distract from the music or the storytelling by shifting the balance too far one direction or the other and that never happens.

What does happen is the sad realization that Trip’s story is under developed. It’s basically a long form music video punctuated by scenes of live performance from the band. The individual vignettes are good on their own. I’m quite fond of the opening sequence where Trip rides his skateboard past fans and band members prepping for the concert, as well as a rather unsettling sequence where Trip wanders through streets filled with hanged bodies. They just don’t actually add up to a satisfactory story.

metallicathroughtheneverdesign Metallica: Through the Never Review (Film, 2013)

The style of Metallica: Through the Never cannot be denied

The early vignettes are clearly connected. Trip is enjoying the concert until a backstage manager pulls him aside and sends him to find a broken down truck with an important package for the band. The young roadie sets out in his van after taking some medication–prescription or street is unspecified and does color your opinion of what happens–and quickly gets into an accident. The city is being overrun with angry people while a mysterious masked horseman executes public dissenters.

There is never an attempt after the villain’s introduction to explain what’s causing the chaos or even stick to the basic narrative conceit. It shifts, quite honestly, to a series of post-apocalyptic horror cliches and music video trends that fell out of favor in the 90s. The technical execution and, indeed, Dane DeHaan’s performance as Trip, are both excellent. It’s the story itself that becomes a bit too elusive to be satisfactory.

Metallica: Through the Never is part heavy metal concert film, part experimental musical and will probably be best appreciated in a movie theater. The sound design is so key to the experience and so delicately handled that something will inevitably be lost in all but the most advanced home theater sound systems. Anyone interested in the film should seek it out in theaters. Fans of the music will undoubtedly be pleased to see such a strong and stylish presentation of the music and performance style of Metallica.

Rating: 7/10

This review is part of 31 Days of Horror at Sketchy Details. Click through for more great horror content.

Film, Reviews

John Dies at the End Review (Film, 2013)

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johndiesattheendposter John Dies at the End Review (Film, 2013)If anyone could make a sensible adaptation out of David Wong’s bizarro horror/comedy novel John Dies at the End, it would be writer/director Don Coscarelli. He gets weird. From the first two entries in the Phantasm series to the wild ride of Bubba Ho-Tep, Coscarelli has made a name for himself as a director of weird films. The quasi-Lovecraftian nightmare of Wong’s fictional blog turned novel is right in his wheelhouse. His approach just might not be what you would expect.

In the present, Dave is meeting with a newspaper reporter named Arnie to come clean with his story about an alternate dimension’s drug and monsters infecting our world. Dave tells Arnie the story of how he and John came to discover this disturbing alternate world that is invisible to the naked eye. Only a scant glance out of the corner of your eye can show you the horrors lurking everywhere if you do not take the Soy Sauce.

Wong’s novel is very episodic in nature. It tells three interconnected stories with the same beats and locations about Dave and John fighting against the intrusion of an alternate dimension. The reason it works is that there are humans cooperating with the alternate dimension to control the world. They basically hit the reset button, erase the evidence, and leave John and Dave to take the fall for everything.

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Film, Reviews

Horror Thursday: The Dunwich Horror

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My new Horror Thursday column is up at Man, I Love Films. This week, we’re looking at one of the least and most faithful Lovecraft adaptations to ever grace the silver screen. It’s the Schrodinger’s Cat of Lovecraft films.

Horror Thursday: The Dunwich Horror

Art, Reviews, TV

Face Off 5.07: Living Art

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faceoff5.07alana 200x300 Face Off 5.07: Living Art

Alana’s Constructivism [click for full]

Last week on Face Off, the nine remaining artists competed in my favorite challenge ever on this show. It just stepped above the season one finale where the contestants had to create a dynamic fairy tale scene through an incongruent art style. Nothing is more inspiring for an artist of one medium than to be told to go play in another medium’s sandbox. The results are always wild and unexpected. You can’t guarantee quality. You can guarantee that the designs will be a radical departure from the artist’s previous work.

Oddly enough, this was also an art challenge. The contestants visited a huge art gallery to choose a Modern art style (capital M, people, except for Pop Art which was not of that period) to inspire a living work of art. The results were amazing.

I already took my crack at Cubism with a wild and massive eight foot by eight foot Halloween mural of a bat flying over the moon (if I have more time, I’ll add highlights and shadows to really go full Cubist), so let’s get right to the contestants.

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Film, Reviews

X Game Review (Film, 2010)

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xgamereview X Game Review (Film, 2010)Sometimes more is better. And sometimes more is just more.

X Game is a convoluted gore/thriller in the vein of Saw. A group of former friends are pulled together for a reunion with their sixth grade teacher. Three days later, the teacher is found dead and the death is ruled a suicide. Hideaki finds a mysterious video that he believes shows what really happened.

Adapted from a novel of the same name by Yûsuke Yamada, X Game attempts to play with revenge genre tropes in a novel way. The characters comment on the form of revenge and immediately swing to extreme reactions. Hideaki becomes the martyr hero, willing to do anything to bring justice to the victims of the alleged killer. His girlfriend is totally uninterested, removed from the action because it doesn’t personally effect her. The police officer in charge of the investigation into the teacher’s death is the resolute authority figure. He goes with the most obvious decision and refuses to waiver from the suicide judgment. And the girl allegedly responsible for the death is the Sadako figure, a being of infinite rage and evil who cannot be stopped; Hideaki even calls her Sadako when he first sees her in the video.

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Art, Reviews, TV

Sketchy Details @Home #7: Cubist Halloween

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This week on Sketchy Details @Home, we take a look at Face Off Season 5, Episode 7. The contestants had to take a modern art style and apply it to a makeup. Laura’s look was arguably one of the greatest to ever appear on the show (torn between that and Gage’s twisted Hansel & Gretel finale design). She did a two-tone Cubist design where half of her character was one orange/yellow and the other half was blue/green.

I wanted to play with the split color tonality and do something very iconic to Halloween. I sketched out a bat flying over the moon onto a dark and light gray sheet of plywood, then filled in the shapes with red and black (flipping on the panels) and detailed with white. There are parts that even resemble Cubism in the end. The effect is more stained glass spiderweb than Cubist, but it’s actually my favorite prop ever.

Behind the scenes after the jump.

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Reviews, TV

Face Off 5.06: Happy Halloween

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faceoff5.06halloweenchallenge Face Off 5.06: Happy HalloweenThis week on Face Off, the remaining makeup artists had to recreate a classic Halloween costume–a vampire, a skeleton, a devil, a clown, or a scarecrow–with some kind of special effects trick. This was an amazing challenge that inspired me to make one of my favorite props ever on Sketchy Details @Home this week.

The contestants, however, were kind of all over the place. I almost feel like they all got so excited by the challenge that they played it a little too loose. There were some really cool concepts onstage but I wasn’t blown away by the execution.

I also don’t like how the trick element only came into play for judging if the judges didn’t like the effect. Where is the trick in Roy fabricating a pair of wings for a challenge? He normally fabricates twice as much stuff. And if a contestant, like Alana, didn’t even incorporate their trick because of time, they weren’t knocked down for it. Very odd judging this week.

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Games, Reviews

Play It: The Witch’s House

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thewitchshousetitle Play It: The Witchs HouseIn all my years of suggesting free computer games through Play It, I’ve never suggested a game that you had to download to play. I wanted a certain level of convenience to the feature. It’s always been browser games that you could click over to immediately.

Yet, with all sorts of fun, easy to use game creation engines like RPG Maker, Twine, and Ren’Py coming out, it seems almost short-sighted not to include the occasional downloadable game. They’re not huge files, they don’t have massive processing requirements, and they don’t take a long time to download. Once you get the client to play them with, it’s just as easy as clicking over to a browser game.

The first downloadable game I’m featuring on Play It is The Witch’s House. This is a Japanese puzzle/horror game originally released last October by Fummy. He created the game in RPG Maker and has very fair requests for using the material. vgperson has the approved English translation and it’s terrifying.

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My new review is up at Man, I Love Films. This week, I took a look at an overly ambitious but totally nonsensical creature feature about man-eating, hyper-evolving geckos.

Horror Thursday: Aberration

Reviews, TV

Face Off 5.05: Dear Mom

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faceoff5.05rj 200x300 Face Off 5.05: Dear Mom

RJ [click for full]

This week on Face Off, the 11 remaining contestants were tasked with creating original mother earth goddesses. They were also supposed to draw inspiration from their own mothers in the design, but very few people actually took that approach.

You already saw what I would do on the show with this challenge–the first time I would actually do that design concept for a makeup with Sketchy Details @Home. Now let’s take a look at what the actual contestants did.

Do we need to talk about RJ? He was the clear loser. Not only did he not actually complete the challenge (no mother earth goddess in the design), he did a bad makeup. The colors were terrible. Even if you buy the kitsch approach, this was the challenge to do a beauty makeup and RJ went full-Halloween mask. I’ll miss him since I loved his aesthetic. He just let his own experience on the show get in his way.

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Film, Reviews

Short Term 12 Review (Film, 2013)

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shortterm12poster Short Term 12 Review (Film, 2013)Grace is the supervisor of the day staff at a foster care facility. She’s her live-in boyfriend’s boss and uses the strength of their relationship to best suit the needs of the young people under her care. When a new foster girl named Jayden digs up memories of her own troubled past, Grace struggles to find the balance between compassion and professionalism in her career.

Short Term 12 is a gentle, moving drama about real problems. Each child in that foster care facility has a story to tell and there’s no way to know all of them. The few that are focused on present a broad range of major issues. From a child struggling to deal with massive emotional trauma to a teenager fighting change as he ages out of the facility, the foster children are each struggling to find a way to keep going that works for them. A child being abused by a parent is not going to need the same kind of attention as a troublemaker who likes to push buttons to get a rise out of people.

The very nature of the facility–a temporary safe home for children waiting for a more permanent living situation–forces the children onto the same schedule and plans with little room for structured individual attention. Aside from medication and therapy, every child is left with the same expectations. No cursing. No closing your bedroom door. Participate in daily recreational activities. Brush your teeth. But like children do all over the world, the foster children rebel in small ways to carve out their own identities. Negative attention is still attention and the day staff have to find the balance between friendship and authority to keep everyone at the facility safe.

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Film, Reviews

Insidious: Chapter 2 Review (Film, 2013)

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insidiouschapter2reviewposter Insidious: Chapter 2 Review (Film, 2013)Warning: this review contains spoilers. There’s a big issue I need to discuss and the only way to get at it and how it embodies the biggest flaw of Insidious: Chapter 2 is to discuss one of the major reveals of the film.

Insidious: Chapter 2 is a mess. It’s a scary mess that will have you jumping out of your seat, but it’s a mess nonetheless. James Wan and Leigh Whannell (writer/director and writer/star, respectively) left the door wide open for a sequel in Insidious. The story could continue and use a lot of the same scare techniques. The ideas are there to make it work in the sequel, but they really don’t add up in a believable or even enjoyable way.

The Lambert family is still being haunted after they recovered their son from “The Further”–a dark afterlife where trapped spirits wait for their chance to return to the world of the living. Now Josh, the father, isn’t acting like himself and Lorraine, his mother, reaches out to the experts who helped her 30 years before to save the family.

There are no sacred cows in true horror. You can write and direct whatever you want to so long as it services the story you’re telling and scares the audience. Insidious: Chapter 2 doesn’t clear either threshold with it’s worst, most offensive story element.

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