At the movies: Hellraiser (2022).

 

A new Hellraiser that isn't mercenary or terrible!

At the movies: Silent Hill: Revelation 3D.

The PROs:

1) There's a creature in this film that I'm calling the spidermannequin. It is featured in the trailer, though it skitters quickly (and with such overstated CG speed) that you can't appreciate what an exquisite slice of nightmare fodder it is. This is up there with the Trilobite in Prometheus, or any of the reanimated pets in Frankenweenie. I've always said that a good monster can make up for a multitude of sins in any movie- this is a very good monster.

2) Deborah Kara Unger realness. She only has one scene, but she gets third billing. Damn right. She'll always be Catherine Ballard to me, and she brings all the good will she brought into the first SH to this one.

3) The nurses. Like a fusion of the Stygian Witches from the original Clash of the Titans and The Weeping Angels from Doctor Who (even though, yes, I know the Silent Hill nurses predate the Weeping Angels), these stop/start contortionist slice-and-dice artistes are remarkably effective. Unfortunately, their sequence is edited a bit too haphazardly for one to really appreciate the tension that the 3D adds to this particular sequence.

4) A carousel kept in motion by jagged pectoral hooks.

5) Some masterfully composed deep-focus shots that use stereoscopic images in an effective and unsettling way.

6) a child's birthday party turns into what looks like a meeting of the Kiss Army.

7) I hope Clive Barker got some money from this production, because this movie has a Cenobite axe battle as its climax. It's not staged particularly well, but its set-up is good, and there's a nice transformation that precedes it.

8) the female lead (playing the grown-up version of diva Jodelle Ferland from the first film) is good. She's got presence and gravitas, and she's got a Michelle Williams vibe going on that is a nice touch. The script gives her nothing, and she turns it into something.


The CONs:

1) This is a terrible script. No dialogue that isn't cliched. No motivation that doesn't feel like a cutscene (rightfully) excised from a game. No effort spent on establishing 'the real world.' No strong characters whatsoever- say whatever you want about Roger Avary, his script for the original Silent Hill had superb characterization, including five great roles for actresses. There are entire studios that haven't released five great roles for women in their entire 2012 lineup. And there's just nothing here that doesn't depend on an awareness of either the first film or the series of games. I bet dubbed into another language, this film plays like gangbusters, though.

2) It looks like they had about a tenth of the budget of the first film to work with. That's not the filmmakers' fault, but it is something you need to keep in mind.

3) There's none of the Italian horror dream logic that proved so refreshing in the first film.

4) There's no telekinetic razorwire massacre, or anything that comes even close to the transgressive, gleeful savagery of that sequence.

5) The male lead is just not very good. Part of it is that the script gives him nothing to work with, but he's also never really convincing.

6) Everybody from the first film who returns in this one... one scene each. Sean Bean, he gets a couple, and (surprise) he doesn't die (literally), so that's something. But there's a decent amount of stars involved in this film, and they all get the traditional scream queen treatment of one scene and out. When Malcolm McDowell shows up, you just have to accept that.

7) The 3D is really inconsistent. Some scenes and sequences are absolutely gorgeous, with amazing uses of depth separation and perspective shifts. Others look flat and post-converted.

8) What happened to Carrie-Anne Moss' career? She was the ass-kicking diva of the new millennium thanks to The Matrix. And she's worked continuously since the late '80s. But she deserves more- she gets to be the evil queen in this film, with pale skin and no eyebrows, but she only shines when the CG and stuntperson take over when she grows sawblades and becomes a Barkerian warrioress. She does get a great 'take him to the Asylum and cure him!' moment that resonates, but like everyone else in the cast who speaks, she is left adrift by the script. She doesn't get anything on par with what Alice Krige does in the first one, and that's sad.

9) I'm sure the studios involved were ecstatic that this entry runs just over an hour and a half, but there's never a chance to absorb any of the environments the film presents. Everything looks kind of cheap. The cinematographer, Maxime Alexander, shot Haute Tension and the remakes of The Hills Have Eyes and The Crazies- this is a man who knows how to light things beautifully. And this film looks haloed and overprocessed.

So I can't recommend Silent Hill: Revelation to you. If anything, it's the most disappointed I've been by a sequel to a film I loved since Basic Instinct. Though, in all honesty, Basic Instinct: Risk Addiction had Sharon Stone going full-tilt crazy, and there's nothing so lively or refreshing to be found here. Oh well...

At the movies: The Midnight Meat Train.

Dear Clive Barker;

I just had the chance to see the film of your short story The Midnight Meat Train that's been causing controversy all around Hollywood for the way the studio did you wrong, and I'm going to have to say that I agree with you on this one. It's a very good film, certainly much better than a lot of the horror that gets released in theatres, and light years ahead of some of the crap that Lionsgate themselves have been putting into theatres (Disaster Movie, I call you out).

I don't think that I can call it as good an adaptation of your work as Candyman, but that's one of the best films of the 90s, and, as such, a very tall goal to tackle. But Kitamura Ryuhei brings a great deal of visual strength to this one, and I think it can stand alongside the best filmed adaptations of your work. Some call Kitamura's visual aesthetic pretentious, but I don't even necessarily see that as a flaw. Horror fans (and I say this while being one) are a fickle bunch of people, and they'll find somethign to snicker at or find hilarious without any prompting from the filmmakers, so trying to stuff in any unnecessary leavening is pointless. I'd say Roger Bart handles that job admirably herein as comic relief, and more than that, he adds a certain kind of urbane queerness to the proceedings that is definitely needed.

And while we're on the subject of queerness, I've got to show the film some love for having such an expansive sexual discussion without ever really talking about sex. We've got Bradley Cooper as the world's first otter action hero, and he's up against Vinnie "human fireplug"/"Tom of Finland UK edition" Jones, and all flesh is stripped of gender and reduced to meat. It's stylish and classy and at the same time sexually-charged in the way that the best horror is.

I was inclined to like the film, just because I'm always up for a horror/suspense picture involving trains and/or subways. But more than that, I actually found the film making some rather interesting statements about art, and the merits of working in the intangible (like Leon's earlier photography) versus the tangible (like flesh). The sequence that introduces the Leon character in particular resonates in my mind (in part because of the way it is twinned by the film's final shot) in a way I find difficult to articulate. Are we, the audience, presumed to be who Leon is photographing? It's just a moment, and yet it sets up a whole new kind of expectation for how the film is going to work.

The DePalma-ish flair for baroque setpieces (the whole B&E at Mahogany's hotel room, specifically) also works well, and I am left to curse the fact that the film got treated so shabbily by its own distributors. But moving on from that- are we ever going to see a follow-up to Lord of Illusions? It really is a phenomenal picture on a lot of levels, and I'm sort of depressed that it doesn't get nearly as much love as it should. There's a viscerality in that film that I think still remains unsurpassed, and I'd like to see you return to that universe some day.

If the Hellraiser remake has to happen, please stay as involved as you can to keep them from fucking it up too badly. The "Inside" guys were an intriguing touch, but since they're out of the picture, I can't help but worry. Although I genuinely love Hellbound, and I think it does a great job of expanding the mythos and scope of its predecessor in the way that adventurous sequels should. Something that cannot be said for any of the myriad of sequels made since then. I'm sure that's got to piss you off, like how Scanner Cop has to just wreck David Cronenberg's day if he catches sight of it at the car wash in the discount DVD bin.

At this point, I'm rambling, but I just wanted to say, again, how much I enjoyed The Midnight Meat Train. Yes, Kitamura did much to be proud of, but I was never all that impressed with Versus or Alive, finding a good deal of flash but very little substance or ideas. Thankfully, in collaboration with your story and Jeff Buhler's script, something very satisfying and intriguing was the end result.

So hats off to you all, and keep doing what you do; you've made the horror fans proud.