October Hacks: Wrong Turn (dir by Rob Schmidt)

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor West Virginia!

Seriously, I’ve been to West Virginia. It’s a beautiful state and the majority of the people that I met while I was there were just lovely. And before anyone trots out all the usual stereotypes about rural communities, let me say that one of the nicest used book store that I’ve ever been to was in West Virginia. It’s a nice state, one that feels like a throwback to a less cynical universe. Even all of the bridges and the streets named after the loathsome Robert Byrd added to the lovely quaintness of the place.

And yet, when it comes to the entertainment industry, West Virginia is rarely portrayed in a positive light. The coastal elite has never had much use for West Virginia or the surrounding states and that’s something that comes out in the films and television shows that are made in New York and California. Whenever anyone says that they’re from West Virginia in a movie or a television show, you can be sure that they’re either going to be a meth cook or a villainous redneck. West Virginia is one of those regions that’s never given much respect in Hollywood and that’s a shame.

Take Wrong Turn, for instance. First released in 2003, the original Wrong Turn taught an entire generation that West Virginia was full of cannibals and blood farmers. If you’re going to go for a drive in the wilderness of West Virginia, this film tells us, keep an eye out for barb wire booby traps. If you’re going to hiking in the mountains, notify your next of kin because you probably won’t be coming back. Wrong Turn follows a group of friends as they are tracked by a family of cannibal hillbillies and the main message seems to be, “For the love of God, stay out of Appalachia!”

(When I first started writing for this blog, I caused a mini-controversy when I said that no one would pay good money to see a film called The Vermont Chainsaw Massacre. My point was that Texas has a reputation, albeit one that has more to do with fevered imaginings of out-of-staters than anything rooted in reality, that made it the only place where that film could really be effectively set. The same is true of Wrong Turn. It’s a story that people wouldn’t buy if it was happening anywhere other than in Appalachia. Nobody would care about cannibals living in Minnesota, for instance.)

West Virginia slander aside, the original Wrong Turn holds up well. It’s a slasher film from the era right before slasher films started taking themselves so seriously. It’s a throwback to the rural horror films of the 70s, with an attractive cast getting picked off in various gruesome ways. The cannibals are frightening and the victims are all likable without being so likable that you can’t handle seeing them killed off. Jeremy Sisto and Lindy Booth both bring some comic relief to the film before their characters are dispatched. Desmond Harrington is a sold-enough lead. When I first saw Wrong Turn, my main reaction was that Eliza Dushku kicked ass and that was still my reactions when I rewatched it. The film is bloody, shameless, and fully willing to give the audience what it wants without scolding them for it. In short, it’s a perfectly fun slasher film and, watching it, it’s hard not to miss the era before horror films started taking themselves so damn seriously.

Wrong Turn‘s a fun movie. But West Virginia is a lovely state and that should never be forgotten!

Film Review: The Witch (dir by Robert Eggers)

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Consider this:

After causing quite a stir at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, the horror film The Witch has finally been given a general release. It is a genuinely creepy and thought-provoking horror film, one that works as a historical recreation (it takes place in 17th century America), a psychological thriller (you’re never sure who is allied with the witch and who isn’t), and an atmospheric horror film. The film has been critically acclaimed and, for those who care about this sort of thing, it currently has a score of 86 over at Metacritic. For once, I agree with most of the critics.

And yet, The Witch is underperforming at the box office. According to Cinemascore, audiences have given The Witch an average grade of C-.

That’s sad but it’s understandable. The Witch moves at a deliberate pace, it requires that the audience have at least a rudimentary knowledge of history, and a good deal of its horror comes less from shock and more from the anticipation of that shock. The Witch is a very cerebral horror film and, as a result, it’s not a crowd pleaser. It’s not for everyone. Instead, it’s a film for discriminating horror fans like you and me.

The Witch opens with William (Ralph Ineson) and his family being kicked out of a village in New England. William is a deeply religious man and apparently, his style of Calvinism has offended everyone else in the village. After leaving, William and his family end up settling on a stretch of land that is right next to a dark forest. William builds a house and a farm on the land, his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) gives birth to a fifth child, and all seems right with their world.

Or is it?

As quickly becomes obvious, William’s family is not as content as they may originally seem to be. His teenager daughter, Tomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) and son, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) are both struggling with the burden of growing up totally isolated from the rest of civilization. Katherine secretly years to return home. Twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) are both rambunctious and keep playing with an aggressive black goat that they’ve named Black Phillip. William, himself, is struggling to make ends meet and has even resorted to secretly selling a silver cup, a present from Katherine’s mother. The crops are dying and the farm animals are just as likely to produce blood as they are milk.

And, then, the baby disappears. One day, while Tomasin is playing with him, something drags the baby into the woods and kills him. At first, the family assumes that it was a wolf but we know that it was a witch.

If there’s one thing that I wish this film had done, I wish it had left it a little bit more ambiguous as to whether or not there was actually a witch out in that forest. The Witch appears extremely early in the film. The actress playing her, Bathsheba Garnett, has a genuinely unsettling screen presence and provides the film with one of its creepiest scenes but, at the same time, it’s hard not wonder what The Witch would have been like if the audience had been forced to wonder if there really was a witch in the forest or if the family was just being paranoid in seeking a supernatural reason for their increasingly bad luck.

And make no mistake about it, things go from bad to worse for William’s family, with William growing increasingly fanatical and all of the children accusing each other of witchcraft.

At the end of the film, we’re told that The Witch is based on historical records and that a good deal of the dialogue was lifted directly from diaries, court transcripts, and letters from the 17th Century. The Witch does have a genuinely authentic feel to it. At no point do you doubt that you’re watching a historically accurate recreation of the 17th century. That accuracy works in the film’s favor, giving it an almost documentary-like feel. At the same time, it also means that the audience has to adjust its thinking. This is a film about people who lived in a far different culture from today and, to the film’s credit, the characters react like 17th Century Calvinists and not 21st century film goers.

In many ways, The Witch is a demanding film. It’s not for everyone. I enjoyed the film but, for the record, I can understand why a lot of people in the audience did not. (And, I have to admit, that even I occasionally got frustrated with the film’s slow pace. It pays off in the end but The Witch still demands a bit of patience.) Though there are a few shockingly bloody scenes, The Witch is largely a mood piece. Almost of the film’s scares come not from jump scenes but from an unrelenting atmosphere of darkness and doom. Making his directorial debut, Robert Eggers accomplishes a lot with just a few shots of that dark forest, the trees ominously looking down on the humans who have foolishly wandered too far into the wilderness to ever come back.

It may not be for all tastes but I recommend taking a chance on The Witch.

A Dark Glimpse of The Witch

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Arleigh

It’s been a great couple years when it comes to what the snooty cinephiles would consider as horror in cinema. Sure, we still get the slashers, zombies, found footage paranormals and even the odd cannibal exploitation, but of late we’ve also been getting some great atmospheric and truly disturbing horror of the gothic kind.

The last couple years alone we’ve gotten such great horror films as It Follows, Babadook, The Conjuring, We Are What We Are and The Sacrament to name a few. We have a film straight out of Sundance that looks to join this list.

The Witch is the first film for writer/director Robert Eggers. Working off of his own script, Eggers’ film won him the Directing Award in the Drama Category during Sundance. With critics at the festival lauding the film, The Witch was soon picked up by A24 Films for a theatrical distribution.

The Witch is set for a 2016 release.

Horror Review: The Colony (dir. by Jeff Renfroe)

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Arleigh

“You’re going to need every bullet.”

The Colony was this little-seen horror film that came out in early 2013. From the trailers shown it looked like it was going to be a decent looking post-apocalyptic, scifi-horror that looked to evoke the sort of icy desolation and paranoia that Carpenter’s The Thing did so perfectly. Under Canadian-filmmaker Jeff Renfroe’s command the film’s high, lofty horror goals didn’t exactly come to fruition.

The film itself wasn’t awful by any stretch of the imagination, but it does suffer a lot from having it look like it was one of those mid-2000 SyFy film productions. At times some of the sequences even looked like it was copied off from one of those the SyFy “New Ice Age” disaster flicks starring Dean Cain. Yet, there’s some genuine tense moments in The Colony that should make this film a look-see if there’s nothing else to see.

Yes, the film is about the planet going through a sort of artificially-created Ice Age due to weather tampering. It’s a story that could’ve been lifted from early Twilight Zone episodes. Humanity barely survives inside spread out colonies using former factories and government bunkers. These colonies don’t just have the danger or dwindling supplies, simple diseases and the cold weather to deal with, but as we soon find out there’s now a new danger that’s much closer to home.

The Colony’s ad campaign and trailers have focused on it’s two American stars in Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton to sell the film. Both actors do some workman-like performances which helps anchor the ensemble cast’s performance. It’s the cast’s performances that elevates The Colony above it’s SyFy counterparts and one of it’s few saving graces. The other being the filmmakers’ success in creating a sense of freezing isolation through the use of arctic-like location shoots and some very well-done CGI icy landscapes.

The horror part of the film comes from the so-called “other” survivors who have adjusted to the scarcity of food by turning on the only abundant source of nourishment left in a world where there are no more growing things. Yes, The Colony tries to revive that old horror staple of the late 70’s and early 80’s which we know of as the cannibal-subgenre.

Cannibal films never truly went away but they remained mostly in the very outer fringes of the horror scene. They tended to be quite awful affairs that went for extreme shocks to bring in the horror crowd, but that only works when there’s a semblance of a narrative to explain things. With The Colony the film does a good enough job to try and explain why some have turned to a diet of the so-called other “white meat”. To add a new wrinkle to these feral antagonists the filmmakers they decided to update them for the modern audiences by giving them free-running skills that makes them seem more than human once they enter the screen. If the film has any sort of lesson to impart it could be that eating “long pig” might just give one parkour-like abilities.

The Colony definitely tried to be one of those scifi-horror that wanted to elevate itself to something beyond it’s grindhouse and exploitation roots, but it’s trying to be somethng it wasn’t meant to be that became it’s biggest flaw. The set-up of an Ice Age created by man is a time-tested story and the reintroduction of the cannibal thread to the film’s storyline was ripe for a grandg uignol-like production that could’ve been done using practical effects. But the filmmakers tried to mimic the CGI-smorgasbord of the Roland Emmerich-style, but they just barely distinguished themselves from what amounted to be an enhanced SyFy-production.

It’s a film that has enough entertaining moments, but overall it was a nice try that that just failed short of it’s goals.