Tag Archives: Jamie Clayton

Horror Film Review: Hellraiser (dir by David Bruckner)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, I started watching the Hellraiser reboot.  I fell asleep about 40 minutes in.

That’s never a good sign, especially when it comes to a horror movie.  A horror movie is supposed to be so scary that you can’t sleep.  It’s supposed to be so intense and disturbing that it gives you nightmares, even if you actually do manage to get some rest.  A horror movie is supposed to haunt you, not bore you.  That’s especially true of the Hellraiser movies, which are defined by their grotesque imagery and the terrifying implications of the Cenobites.

This morning, I finished watching the movie.  Somehow, I did not fall asleep again.

The Hellraiser reboot asks the question: “If Doug Bradley isn’t playing Pinhead, is there any point to watching this crap?”

Based on this movie (and, to be fair, the two previous Hellraisers as well), the answer would appear to be no.  Jamie Clayton takes over the role of Pinhead in the new Hellraiser and the results are a bit underwhelming.

I mean, the Cenobites still look somewhat frightening, don’t get me wrong.  And the puzzle box is a huge part of the reboot’s plot.  And there’s still a lot of blood and a lot of talk about how suffering can be music and a lot of people get ripped apart by magical space chains.  But, with all that in mind, the Cenobites still come across as being kind of boring.  They’ve gone from being frightening creatures beyond imagination to just being generic bad guys.

A big problem is that Jamie Clayton never quite captures the all-encompassing contempt for existence that Doug Bradley brought to the role.  Bradley played Pinhead as a regal sadist, delivering his lines with a withering condescension.  As played by Bradley, Pinhead was really neither good nor evil.  He had transcended such concerns in his search for experience.  Hence, he could get away with announcing that he and the Cenobites were angels to some and demons to others.  In the original Hellraiser, Pinhead (and Bradley) made his first appearance by saying, “You called, we came,” and that pretty much summed up what made the character so frightening.  Bradley’s Pinhead had no concern as to the circumstances that led to him being  called and he certainly had no patience for anyone who thought they could talk their way out of the situation.  Bradley’s Pinhead was beyond such concerns and that made him all the more frightening.

Jamie Clayton’s Pinhead, on the other hand, is smug and not much else.  She’s playing a game with humanity but that leaves her vulnerable to losing.  That’s a mistake that Bradley’s Pinhead would not have made.  (Or, at least, he wouldn’t have made it in the original movie.  The Hellraiser sequels are a different story.)  There’s nothing particularly regal about Clayton’s Pinhead.  She’s just another horror villain.  With her demanding a sacrifice from anyone who cuts themselves on the puzzle box, she’s not that much different from the little girl in Ring.

(In Clayton’s defense, she’s not the first person to replace Doug Bradley as Pinhead.  Bradley also did not appear in the two previous Hellraiser films, Revelations and Judgment.  Bradley felt the scripts were poorly written and, perhaps more to the point, Dimension Films wanted him to take a pay cut.)

As for the reboot itself, it’s about Riley (Odessa A’zion), a recovering drug addict who, along with her boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey), steals the puzzle box and then cuts herself on the box which leads to the Cenobites stalking all of her annoying friends.  Riley is an incredibly unlikable character and her friends are kind of whiny so who cares?  Gordan Visnjic plays a decadent businessman who is trying to manipulate the box to his own ends.  Visnjic has a good scene at the start of the film, one that perfectly captures the privileged ennui that would lead to someone getting involved with the Cenobites.  But, eventually, even Visnjic is reduced to being a one-dimensional character.

The main lesson of this Hellraiser film (and the previous two films as well) is that things work better with Doug Bradley than without him.

Film Review: The Snowman (dir by Tomas Alfredson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, I finally watched the 2018 thriller, The Snowman, and my main reaction to the film is that it featured a lot of snow.

That’s understandable, of course.  The film takes place in Norway and it’s called The Snowman so, naturally, I wasn’t expecting a lot of sunshine.  Still, after a while, the constant shots of the snow-covered landscape start to feel like almost some sort of an inside joke.  It’s almost as if the film is daring you to try to find one blade of grass in Norway.  Of course, the snow is important because the film’s about a serial killer who builds snowmen at the sites of his crimes.  They’re usually pretty big snowmen as well.  It’s hard not to be a little impressed by the fact that he could apparently make such impressive snowmen without anyone noticing.

Along with the snow, the other thing that I noticed about this movie is that apparently no one knows how to flip a light switch in Norway.  This is one of those films where every scene seems to take place in a dark room.  I found myself worrying about everyone’s eyesight and I was surprised the everyone in the film wasn’t wearing glasses.  I can only imagine how much strain that puts on the eyes when you’re constantly trying to read and look for clues in the dark.

Michael Fassbender plays Harry Hole, a Norwegian police inspector who may be troubled but still gets results!  He’s upset because his ex-girlfriend (Charlotte Gainsbourg) has a new boyfriend (Jonas Karlsson).  He’s also upset because his son (Michael Yates) doesn’t know that Harry is actually his father.  Or, at least, I think that Harry’s upset.  It’s hard to tell because Fassbender gives a performance that’s almost as cold as the snow covering the Norwegian ground.  Of course, he’s always watchable because he’s Fassbender.  But, overall, he doesn’t seem to be particularly invested in either the role or the film.

Harry and his new partner (Rebecca Ferguson) are investigating a missing person’s case, which quickly turns into a multiple murder mystery.  It turns out that the crimes are linked to a bunch of old murders, all of which were investigated by a detective named Gert Rafto (Val Kilmer).  Gert was troubled but he still got results!  Or, at least, Harry thinks that he may have gotten results.  Nine years ago, Rafto died under mysterious circumstances…

Now, I have to admit that when, 30 minutes into the film, the words “9 years earlier” flashed on the screen, I groaned a bit.  I mean, it seemed to me that the movie was already slow enough without tossing in a bunch of flashbacks.  However, I quickly came to look forward to those brief flashbacks, mostly because they featured Val Kilmer in total IDGAF mode.  Kilmer stumbles through the flashbacks, complete with messy hair and a look of genuine snarky bemusement on his face.  Kilmer gives such a weird and self-amused performance that his brief scenes are the highlight of the film.

Before it was released, The Snowman was hyped as a potential Oscar contender.  After the movie came out and got roasted by the critics, director Tomas Alfredson replied that the studio forced him to rush through the production and that 10 to 15% of the script went unfilmed.  Considering Alfredson’s superior work on Let The Right One In and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.  The film’s disjointed style would certainly seem to back up Alfredson’s claim that there was originally meant to be more to the film than actually ended up on the screen.

The Snowman is one of those films that doesn’t seem to be sure what it wants to be.  At times, it aspires to David Lynch-style surrealism while, at other times, it seems to be borrowing from the morally ambiguous crime films of Taylor Sheridan.  Ultimately, it’s a confused film that doesn’t seem to have much reason for existing.  At the same time, I’ve also been told that the Jo Nesbø novel upon which the movie is based is excellent.  The same author also wrote the novel that served as the basis for 2011’s Headhunters, which was pretty damn good.  So, read the book and ignore the film.

Playing Catch-Up: The Neon Demon (dir by Nicholas Winding Refn)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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What to say about The Neon Demon?

See, this is a film that you have to be careful about discussing.  From the moment that it premiered at Cannes last year, The Neon Demon was the love-it-or-hate-it film of 2016.

Those of us that loved The Neon Demon really, really loved it.

And those that hated it — well, let’s just say that they really, really hated it.  They complained that The Neon Demon was exploitive.  They found the subject matter to be sordid.  They accused the movie of being both pretentious and ultimately pointless.  The plot made no sense, they complained.  The film was overlong and featured about a handful of false endings.  It almost seemed as if Nicholas Winding Refn was taunting anyone who expected him to make a typical melodrama about life in Hollywood.

All of that is true but, honestly, what were these people expecting?  As a result of the success of Drive, many people have made the mistake of thinking that Nicholas Winding Refn is a mainstream director.  He’s not.  Refn is a provocateur.  He is a director who often dares his audience to walk away.  In The Neon Demon, each false ending challenges the audience’s assumption about how a story — any story — should end.  Some people, I’m sure, would complain that Refn is all style and no substance.  However, The Neon Demon is about a world where one’s worth is determined by their style.  Style is substance.  The world of The Neon Demon may be empty but the film is not.

For all the debate about the film’s deeper themes (or lack of them), The Neon Demon‘s story is a fairly simple and deliberately familiar one.  A teenage runaway comes to Hollywood, finds some success as a model, and discovers that the world of show business is not as romantic as she may have initially believed.  When we first see Jesse (Elle Fanning), she’s posing for her boyfriend and she’s pretending to be dead.  Death, beauty, and sex go hand-in-hand in The Neon Demon.

Jesse’s an interesting character, one who constantly challenges our assumptions.  At first, Jesse seems like a typical innocent.  She’s a virgin who is so introverted that she can barely carry on a conversation.  She lives in a cheap apartment, under the menacing gaze of her sleazy landlord (Keanu Reeves, having fun playing his skeezy character).  She has a boyfriend and on their dates, she tells him about how she’s always dreamed of being a star.  It’s only as the film progresses that you start to realize how little you actually know about Jesse.  That she’s a runway is implied early on.  We never learn what led to her running away.  In fact, we learn next to nothing about who she was before she appeared in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, Jesse is everything that the fashion industry values.  She’s beautiful and, even more importantly, she’s young.  We watch as Jesse goes to a casting call and we’re struck by the blank-look on her face.  We wonder if there’s anything going on underneath the surface.  Jesse has hallucinations, seeing a shining triangle and kissing her own reflection.  Someone asks her what it’s like to be desired.  She replies, “It’s everything.”

Jesse befriends Ruby (Jena Malone), a makeup artist who lives in a gigantic mansion, overlooking an empty swimming pool.  When Ruby isn’t working in the fashion industry, she works at a morgue, applying makeup to corpses and occasionally engaging in necrophilia.  She makes the dead beautiful so that they can be buried looking their best.  Again, beauty and death are intertwined throughout The Neon Demon.

Ruby has two other friends, Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee).  They’re both models, struggling to maintain their careers even as younger models, like Jesse, continue to flood into Los Angeles.  Gigi has had so much cosmetic surgery that none of her original features remain.  Gigi is neurotic and fearful.  Sarah, on the other hand, is confident and sarcastic.  When asked what she did the last time another model screwed her out of a job, Sarah calmly replies, “I ate her.”

Sarah isn’t necessarily joking either.  Without giving too much away, The Neon Demon features, among other things, a character eating an eyeball that another character has just thrown up.  Not surprisingly for a Refn film, there’s a lot of blood in The Neon Demon.  It’s a film that opens with fake blood and ends with very real blood.

Combining the visual sense of Dario Argento with the thematic concerns of Jean Rollin, The Neon Demon is a triumph of pure style.  The visuals are so strong that it’s impossible to look away, even when the film’s themes are deliberately obscure.  The Neon Demon is a surreal journey into the dark side of Hollywood, a mixture of ennui, alienation, decadence, and sacrifice.  It may not always make sense but it’s always fascinating to watch.

Personally, I think The Neon Demon would make a great double feature with La La Land.  Two triumphs of style, two very different views of Los Angeles.