Rob Me Blind

Year: 2016

Director: Fede Alvarez

Cast: Stephen Lang, Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

2016 hasn’t been, like, the worst movie year ever. I dug Deadpool. And The Nice Guys was great. There has been some good stuff around the fringes, but the actual summer season has been devastatingly barren. And now here we are in the final days of August, the last weekend that could conceivably be called “Summer.” Kids are returning to school and Hollywood is closing up shop until the holidays, rolling down the shutters with the Jason Statham sequel Mechanic: Resurrection and the R-rated horror feature Don’t Breathe from the director of 2013’s Evil Dead. It doesn’t take a genius to guess which one I went to see.

And it doesn’t take a statistician to properly predict that I was at least minorly disappointed by it.

Don’t Breathe takes place in modern horror’s favorite decrepit haunting ground: Detroit. Rocky (Jane Levy) wants to ditch her alcoholic mother and escape to California with her little sister and/or daughter Diddy (Emma Bercovici). I assumed they were sisters, but a heated ride-home conversation opened me up to a world of possibilities. Rocky and her friends Money (Daniel Zovatto of It Follows) and Alex (Dylan Minnette of Goosebumps) are small-time thieves, but they decide to do one big robbery to fund their travels.

The target? A blind veteran (Stephen Lang), who supposedly received a huge settlement after his daughter was killed in a car accident. As you might imagine, things don’t go exactly according to plan, and the trio finds themselves trapped in the house with the vicious man prowling around, using his heightened senses to track them.

Yeah, the blind guy these teens are robbing is the VILLAIN.

I was very curious to see what Fede Alvarez could do with an original horror property. His Evil Dead remake is one of the better examples of the form, converting Raimi’s DIY aesthetic into a slicker but no less gonzo gore epic. Don’t Breathe provided Alvarez with two equally important challenges: 1) To prove that he is a capable filmmaker using his own unique directorial toolbox, and 2) to bring that same sense of breathless, hyperbolic gore and horror to a film that isn’t supernatural and only has a cast of three fleshpiles to choose from.

Alvarez achieves the former with far more confidence than the latter. While he doesn’t introduce too many techniques that aren't cribbed from the Sam Raimi playbook, that’s still a rich and varied resource that he co-opts well. He gets his crane shot jollies out early on, soaring high over the Detroit streets to contrast with the tight claustrophobia of the later scenes. Then his camera is all powerful sinew, slithering behind and around his characters, showing us everything they see and especially highlighting what they don’t, spinning around its prey in a glorious celebration of its own tension. It’s not a stunningly beautiful film, but it uses the camera and jagged slashes of light to ramp up the atmosphere considerably.

Detroit’s general terrifyingness also helps a bunch.

That second challenge is where Alvarez stumbles. Not only does Don’t Breathe shy away from Grand Guignol extravagance, it seems to actively abstain from using the tools that it has set up for itself. In a fabulous early single shot sequence, the film sets up all kinds of dominos (a hidden gun, a fully loaded tool shelf, etc.) that almost entirely slip its mind. Stephen Lang punches a character in the face when there is a hacksaw behind him in that very shot. Why even have it there at all if you’re not going to make bloody use of it?

I do appreciate the film’s willingness to use Dylan Minnette as a cinematic punching bag. But the only time Don’t Breathe goes as over the top as it could (and should) have, harnessing that frenetic, gooey, Evil Dead energy, is in a deeply uncomfortable, shoehorned-in rape sequence. And therein lies the biggest flaw of the whole piece. 

Inflicting bodily harm on women can achieve gross-out horror fun when it’s played the right way. You’re Next put Sharni Vinson through the winger, compounding her badassery with every injury she sustains. And Sam Raimi’s own Drag Me to Hell placed Alison Lohman in the Bruce Campbell role, using her as a slapstick crash test dummy. It can work. It’s all about proper tone management. What happens to Jane Levy in certain sequences of Don’t Breathe fails miserably to capture that. It’s ugly brutalization, as simple as that.

And it’s not like the rest of the film is unimpeachable enough that it can survive this flaw. Rocky’s backstory is marred by emotionally manipulative twaddle, desperately attempting to force feed us empathy for these three unlikeable characters, the cheapness of which is exposed by a dreadful child actress. And Don’t Breathe indulges in that eye-poppingly frustrating rope of beginning in medias res with a clip from the third act, essentially spoiling its own ending and planting a niggling seed of impatience as you wait for the movie to catch up with itself.

Whatever happened to unpredictability?

See? The second I let myself get a smidgen excited about anything this year, it’s just another disappointment ready to rear its ugly head. Don’t Breathe is one of the better disappointments of the year because it’s still a taut, stylish thriller a heart, but it’s one more uneven tile in this summer’s fresco of misery. Before we go, I would like to highlight Lang’s performance, which is viscerally chilling, using a gravelly vocality that cuts like a buzz saw. He stands out in a cast of decent but unproven young actors, and he helps goose the engine of the film when its pacing sputters. So there’s that. I don’t think I’ve felt this down about a 7/10 film before, but 2016’ll do that to ya.

TL;DR: Don't Breathe is a tense thriller without a certain spark to push it over the edge.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1006

Battle Of The Sexes

Year: 2015

Director: David Robert Mitchell

Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Sex is never a good idea if you're in a horror film. Whether it's the puritanical slashers revenging themselves upon the youthful and libidinous, the Satanic cults that want to infest your womb, or the various horrible diseases, infections, and possessions it opens you up to, just avoid doing the do at all costs. Listen closely. Can you hear faint music that sounds like this? Do yourself a favor and join a convent or something.

Sex has been a part of horror for as long as the genre's been around, dating back to classic literature and even folklore. There's a million reasons to be afraid of the illicit pleasure that has the power to wither, corrupt, cure, infect, and create with wanton arbitrariness, but It Follows has almost miraculously found a new one. 

I mean besides the fact that doing it in the backseat of a car is a cramped, sticky nightmare.

It Follows follows the story of the following: Jay Height (Maika Monroe of The Guest) is a young college student in Detroit. Her ancient rabbit ears television set would seem to indicate that she's in the 80's, but her friend is reading an eBook on some ridiculous Star Trek clamshell compact nonsense that I'm not sure has even been invented yet. So I came to the conclusion that maybe the TV is supposed to indicate that she's poor. But her bedroom is bigger than mine. So... science fiction, it is.

Anyway, Jay goes on a date with the hunkish Hugh (Jake Weary, who somehow survived the terror of being in all 3 Fred movies). All night he acts very strangely, looking over his shoulder and being profoundly distracted. Nevertheless, she finds him likable enough for a quick shag in the backseat of his car, after which he reveals that he is being followed by a relentless shape-shifting creature. It takes the form of whatever person will most help it blend in with your environment, ceaselessly walking toward you until it can reach you and perform a murder most foul. You can outrun it for a stretch, but it will always come trudging, ever trudging for your soul.

The only way to temporarily abate the following is to have sex with another person, at which point the It moves onto them. Once it murders them, it comes back to you. It's like a homicidal game of hot potato. Jay takes to the road with her useless friends: her sister Kelly (Lili Sepe), their bookish friend Yara (Olivia Luccardi), their horny hanger-on Paul (Keir Gilchrist of the tremendously underrated United States of Tara), and their half-stud, half-hippy garbage neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto) to avoid the It while trying to discover a way to defeat it.

And being very symmetrical in the process.

It Follows can be described the same way that Hugh describes the monster: "It's very slow, but it's not dumb." The film's pacing, much like its intermittently interesting electro-score by Disasterpeace, has that very same deliberate, interminable pounding. In the beginning, this is a mortifyingly dull weakness, but as the steam builds in the film's pressure cooker, it becomes an unstoppable oppressive force.

The film isn't quite scary enough to give nightmares to more than the most impressionable of teenyboppers, but the tension it creates in its later sequences is still insidiously effective, even for hardened horror viewers. 

The various forms of the It twist the mundane world into a deranged nightmare, and the unflagging determination of the slow but steady menace creates an overwhelming pressure in the background of every scene. On top of that, due to the disguised nature of the beast, victims are required to flee to less-populated areas (which are usually a death sentence in these kinds of films), creating an unsettling cognitive dissonance in the minds of the viewers.

Of course, there's also a smattering of the usual suspect jump scares that feel particularly cheap among the riches to be found here. It's like eating a bowl of juicy raspberries and finding a Cap'n Crunch crunchberry hiding in your spoon. It's startling, yes, but it doesn't make you appreciate the experience any more.

Not when I could spend my time being followed around by a raspberry instead. (I think I've lost control of this metaphor.)

That's the real problem with It Follows. For everything it does spectacularly, terrifically well, there's one small rankling element that knocks it down a peg. Much like Paula Abdul's relationship with the cartoon cat, it's two steps forward, two steps back. And yes, I just referenced "Opposites Attract" on a blog in 2015. I deserve a Pulitzer.

Seriously though, every great element of the film has a small negative one latched onto it like a remora on the belly of a shark. 

Example #1: The film is utterly gorgeous. David Robert Mitchell provides It Follows with a slick, well-polished look that balances colors and symmetry in a unique and arresting way. BUT the machinations of the monster lack internal logic, sometimes choosing the exact form that would cause it to stand out rather than blend in with the masses. The forms it picks are scary, yes, so I'm only nitpicking here, but they don't quite gel with Its motivations as we understand them.

Example #2: The monster is one of the absolute best low budget exercises in terror ever conceived. It's astoundingly cheap, but still feels effectively chilling and supernatural without requiring any extensive special effects. BUT other elements of the production value belie its low budget a little too much for a wide release. The audio can be a little muddy at times, the film's predilection for 360 degree shots is not entirely supported by the resolution of the camera, and the shakiness of the cinematography (especially in an early sequence with a wheelchair) is a constant reminder of the camera's presence, breaking the film's reality a little too often.

Example #3: It Follows is super smart. There are loads of valid ways to interpret the film, because the film is cleverly layered in a way that promotes conversation and active viewership. With today's anemic slate of original horror, this is a tremendous boon. [Highlight for my personal interpretation: Although there's a lot to talk about with the sexual angle, like the STD from Hell that prevents future loving relationships from flourishing, or the idea that sex and intimacy are dangerous and terrifying. My personal feeling is that the It represents the ever-present truth of your mortality, which you can push from your mind by seeking pleasure and feigning ignorance, but inevitably comes to retrieve you. At any rate, It Follows is emphatically NOT a date movie.] BUT there's a dismaying amount of heavy-handed symbolism, mainly in the form of Yara reading literary passages from her damn ass seashell e-reader thing that have a direct link with the events onscreen. Wow, what a coincidence. Such merit, so art.

At least the cinematography is still gorgeous no matter what.

So, for these reasons, despite desperately wanting to give It Follows an 8/10 rating, I really can't find it within myself to do so. But I still highly recommend the film. It's clever, intelligent, original horror starring one of the genre's quickly rising stars in her second role of the past year that really should put her on the map. There's a subtle sense of humor, a modern treatise on sex and dating, and a refreshingly non-exploitative use of nudity. All in all, it's a win-win-win even if it ain't perfect.

Brennan says check it out!

TL;DR: It Follows is a terrific original horror film with a clever low budget concept, but it's a little too ponderous to be truly unforgettable.

Rating: 7/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Yes! Support original horror!
Word Count: 1319