A New Direction

I like to think of myself as a large wad of Play-Doh, able to be moulded with ease to adapt to uncomfortable social situations and exacting yoga positions. Aptly, I also consider myself able to adapt to the suggestions of others as to how the whole Terror Bites venture is panning out. So in this post I'm going to outline a few things that will happening on this blog in the future...

1. Shorter Reviews
I'm reasonably verbose - if there's something I want to say, I'll generally manage to get it out somehow. However, I appreciate that people don't really have much time to read my musings, and after a couple of people have reacted in a mildly shocked fashion after noting how much content goes into each review, I've realised that I may need to lock it up a bit. So I'll be keeping it more brief for here on in.

2. More Consistent Uploads
While I'll try to watch two horror films each week, you may have noted that my uploads are quite inconsistent. Now, this is not my fault (yeah, I'm passing off the blame... can you blame me?). The other contributors to my blog (including DJ Cheeky Wingz, Albert von Hammerschmidt OBE, Esteban, Bevan from Paul's and Susan) are all real people (obviously under false names of their own choosing), and I'm often waiting on them a week after watching a film to send me their paragraph which I then piece into the review. I've decided now to a) remove this reliance by watching more films by myself (I'll be taking one for the team and trying to not be too damn terrified) and b) skirt around this issue by - if I'm waiting for another contributor's input - posting about other horror related news.

3. Branching Out
As I mentioned above, I will be trying to keep my readers up to date with things outside of the films that I choose to watch. This will include heads up for upcoming films that look worthy of your attention, links to articles on other sites if they might be of interest and other cool horror related stuff I find online.

So, thanks for sticking with me in the last number of months as I iron the kinks out of my blogging style, and I hope you can continue to enjoy Terror Bites.

Yours in looseness,
Callie Babe

V/H/S - Kickin' It Old School

As one ought to approach any film that can be considered a 'compilation', I began V/H/S with a certain trepidation - I'm not usually a fan of anthologies as they tend to place characterisation and atmosphere at the back of the priorities in favour of cheap pay-offs. But V/H/S transcends this with a group of talented young directors and a found footage flavour that accelerates familiarity with the characters.

There are five small horror films in this flick, with another framing film which explains why the audience is subjected to the remaining five. We meet a group of mates who generally get up to no good - they molest strangers, they smash up abandoned properties. Then one of them announces that he's got a job for them, and a very well-paid one at that - to retrieve a video tape from some old bloke's house. They have very few details, and when they rock up to the house, things go smoothly until they notice that there happens to be the body of the old dude sitting in front of a bank of TVs with VCRs attached and a number of tapes sitting around. They split up to find the tape in question, and a number of things happen. A couple of them opt to watch a couple of the videos. A couple of them start to disappear in suspicious circumstances. And the cadaver disappears to. As one could probably see coming, they're not in for a pleasant evening.

Given the unusual structure of this flick, I'm going to just tackle each individual short in V/H/S in a separate paragraph, ending with the wraparound tale of our youths. I'LL BE LIBERAL WITH SPOILERS HERE, SO LOOK OUT.

The first - Amateur Night - involves some college (loose) youths deciding to make an amateur porn film with a spy cam in a pair of glasses. The take some girls from a bar back to their room, but one of the gals - who's been acting odd - gets odder, ultimately killing a handful of them and transforming into a succubus and flying off with our protagonist in her talons. Directed by David Bruckner (who you may remember shot that shocker The Signal), this was actually my highlight of the film. It's tense throughout (perhaps down to the obviously foreign  nature of the devil-dame), decently acted, nicely edited, and the audience develops a strong empathy for the wearer of the glasses (probably because he looks like Mother Teresa when compared to his dickheaded and borderline rapist mates). Though the VFX at the finale drop the ball somewhat (it's très low budget...), the gradual practical transformation of Lisa into fully-fledged harpy is phenomenal, with the canyon splitting her head in two an absolutely haunting image. The gore isn't subtle, but the whole vibe of V/H/S is crowd-pleasing in this vein - a packed viewing of this film would be undoubtedly a engaging affair filled with cheering at spilt blood. So a strong start then...

We then get Second Honeymoon, a tale of a youngish married couple on a roadtrip in America looking for a little excitement. The wife has her future told, and a past loved one is predicted to re-enter the picture. Then someone begins filming the couple sleeping at night with their own handycam, and when their knife comes out, it moves beyond creepy to kinda threatening. Our secret filmer is female, and is revealed to be the past lover once their lesbian dalliance is rekindled after she murders the husband and they elope. Although the brainchild of Ti West - a bright star on the modern horror scene - this felt like the weakest of the lot. Honestly, it's a tad boring, and coming after the firecracker that was the first short, it's attempt at a long build-up falls flat. There aren't many scares, and while it's not an obvious pay-off, it's not a clever finish simply because the audience haven't invested enough in the leads to care that one's now a cadaver and the other's gay once more. The actors seem constantly bored, and I couldn't blame them. I regret to say it, but this was a real waste of talent.

Tuesday The 17th (the next piece in the puzzle) isn't much better. We follow Wendy leading her friends through the woods to a lake. Our cam malfunctions a little on the journey, flashing up visions of slain corpses. They share a spliff. They engage in shitty banter. Then a couple of them head away from the group and get murdered by a form blurred by a technical glitch. A couple more follow. We're left with Wendy, who tries to trap the killer with some MacGyver-like contraptions - turns out she knew about the killer and was trying to thwart him/her/it. The haze escapes the trap and mercifully takes Wendy out too. While the piece has potential, Glenn McQuaid's (I Sell The Dead) direction isn't quite up to the challenge - our actors are pretty shite, the plot feels illogical (even for handycam horror), the use of the camera feels the least organic out of the segments, and the characters lack any reasonable human response. At this point, viewers are justified in wondering how many more of these we have to endure, but then along comes:

The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger, the brainchild of director Joe Swanberg and an original take on the whole haunting situation. Composed purely of Skype chats, we watch Emily and he BF discuss the haunting of her apartment long distance, and he naturally tries to help he out. She eventually gets attacked by two ghouls and knocked out, and we watch her BF come into the frame in her apartment and remove a foetus-like thing from her body. We cut to sometime later when they're chatting again and she seems convinced a car accident took place. Finally, we're treated to a quick snippet of Emily's BF talking to another gal on Skype, who starts to complain about a lump on her body too... It's very cool - a mixture of warped romance, strong chills, distinctive story-telling and a twisted government conspiracy. Swanberg maintains the fear once we get past the set-up, and the pay-off is a real sucker punch. The acting is pretty solid, and the chemistry between the lead couple feels tight but almost too stretched, which takes on  a special significance once the denouement takes place. This one really grabs you back into the film after a disappointing preceding couplet.

We finish with 10/31/98, a Halloween set tale directed by the quartet Radio Silence. We follow some friends to an October 31st party, but they rock up to the wrong house, and upon exploration, they think it's a haunted house set-up for the party. Then they find a brutal exorcism taking place in the attic, and being nice lads, they grab the girl and escape the house, besieged by supernatural forces. They drive off, but lo and behold, the car dies, the girl vanishes, the doors lock, and as they realise they're stranded on a railway crossing, a train begins to approach. Squelch. Radio Silence do an excellent job here. Our leads don't deserve to perish - they do everything right; save the girl, behave themselves, appreciate a nice haunted house gag - and yet they die. Our actors feel nicely chummy and like average, decent blokes. But the effects truly steal the show. Largely practical (I imagine), we get hands reaching out of walls, disappearing windows, levitating crockery (later utilised as missiles by angry spirits), unwilling bodies being hurled about and a squirm inducing train collision. It's a brilliant finish to the whole film, and the producers (or whoever dictated the placement of the shorts) made an excellent call in saving this for last.

Now, to discuss the framing piece, entitled Tape 56. Directed by Adam Wingard (whose film You're Next I'm incredibly toey to catch - please comment below if you have any idea where I can find it), Tape 56 does its job effectively. Our group of miscreants are effectively characterised as bad seeds, and their penchant for filming their anarchy feels justified given their unusual line of work (getting paid money to randomly assault strangers and get their breasts on celluloid). The editing is well-handled - chaotic to begin with but settling into a classic horror vibe once the house is breached. Though the plot seems obvious and you will see the 'twist' coming, the zombified dude does his whole stalking/murder-by-numbers thing in a remarkably creepy fashion which is just fine with me. If I had to poke holes in a strong package, the willingness of the group to split up at every opportunity feels too convenient, but the fact that they needed to design a framing plot for the other shorts almost totally justifies our protagonists' stupidity/bravery.

It's a mixed bag. 4 out of the 6 films are well worth watching, and I'd say that sitting through the 2 stinkers is little price to pay for enjoying their stronger companions. Is it the 'biggest horror release of 2012' like it was hyped up to be? I'd have to say no, but I'm sure it'll carve a niche at the box office regardless. Accordingly, I'm showering it with a rating of 4 out of 6 VHS tapes, and I think that there is definite potential for this raw format to have a stronger example in the coming years...

Enjoy a pretty fun red band trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uOISibzrUI

Battle Royale - And You Thought Seppuku Was Bad

In one of Donald Glover's comedy sets, he asks why we have the stereotype that all Japanese people are weird or crazy. He answers his own question: 'Because we dropped a RADIOACTIVE BOMB on them! If you filled me with radioactivity then got me to design a mall, that mall would be fucked up!' I feel that this film is a logical progression from this gag - it's seriously 'fucked up' plotwise, but it's a strong genre piece that is apparently quite a good leaping pad for those trying to get into the extensive work of Kinji Fukasaku.

Essentially, it's like the Hunger Games except less overtly political with the whole 'districts' spiel and a lot more explicitly violent. A class of Japanese school children are nominated by a former teach to partake in the annual Battle Royale, in which the kiddies must fight to the death over the space of 3 days on an abandoned island observed by a number of soldiers and game supervisors in a high-tech control room. They each get some food and water and a random bit of kit that could be useful e.g. a crossbow or entirely 'the joke's on you' e.g. a saucepan lid. Some mysterious guests with mysterious agendas are also thrown in the mix, so the sole survivor will really have to work for their life. Friendships get tested as do survival instincts and adaptive abilities. There's only one certainty - when the Japanese spill blood, they aren't afraid to make it gloriously unsubtle, or the blood of a frighteningly young citizen.

While not explicitly a horror film (I'll pay thriller), it's certainly a genre piece, and on this credential (along with Tarantino's wholehearted recommendation) I felt that it warranted a peek. The premise of its strong source material - Koushun Takami's 1999 novel - is its greatest strength. It's wacky, but there is a lot of exploration enabled in the relationships on-screen and in the audience's expectations of human behaviour being twisted in the sick combat we witness. The director's son Kenta adapted this film, and he's done a great job. There appear to be some leaps in logic as to how exactly the absurd program came about from within the government and how it can possibly be perpetuated, but once you're in the actual game there is really no time available to sit back and question. With 44 competitors (42 school kids, 2 of the aforementioned mystery guests) starting out on the island, there is going to have to be a lot of dispatching shown to whittle down the possibilities. And this dispatching is split into two fairly distinct subgroups - touching, slow, character deaths and indiscriminate, swift, murder enacted on background players. I could muster no real complaints in how these are distributed - enough of each to satisfy both the blood-lust that we all deny we have and the innate desire for human connection.

The cast is the second strongest aspect of this film. Working with children is renowned for the difficulty that comes with wrangling the youngsters, but Fukasaku overcomes this adage by allowing their rawness to shine through. They are kids, and they react as such. They weep very openly. They have their little circles of friends. They chuck a wet one when there's a hint of betrayal within said circles. While some characters definitely blur into each other (there are just so many running around), you do ultimately care for them, and when they go on their merry way to Hell you feel pretty down. In this manner it's closest to a horror - calling the stuff we're privy to in this flick horrific would be like calling a Wednesday night at college a little rowdy... a grade-A understatement. It hurts. Pretty badly if I'm honest. But that doesn't detract from the experience - it's kinda the whole cruxof the film-maker's statements about the state of the youth and the helplessness of society when it comes to providing structures to help them. The older members of the cast - particularly Kateshi Kitano as their phenomenally barless class teacher - do hold up their end of the bargain, though noticeably fade into the background.

I had some troubles with the photography, which never quite nails it in the night set pieces. It gets a kind of overwhelming blue wash which just messes with your appreciation of the action as much of it gets swallowed in this kind of inky blackness that creeps in around the subjects framed in a distinctly dark blue tone. The editing and score do their respective bits well, though aren't particularly memorable. While the blood is liberally strewn across this film, there is some room for improvement in terms of realism - although perhaps it's simply part of Japanese cinema culture that a certain lack of reality when dealing with the blood of grade 3 kids is a good thing for both the audience and the ratings boards.

Now, Bevan from Paul's and Albert von Hammerschmidt OBE will purvey their respective takes on the modern Japanese classic.

Bevan from Paul's input:

Pubescent homicide... A movie about mortal combat between a group of 48 teenagers sounds and is awesome; for there is no other demographic that is as unstable and psychopathic than the 14-15 aged girl- and they don't disappoint. No west-written script (the hunger games) could have possessed the unique ability to make a film such as this; contrasting the vulnerability and innocence of these pimply half-men and women with cruelties inherent the modern world with the touch of the writer Koushun Takami and director Kinji Fukasaku. That said, the dialogue in the subtitles deserved a more considered treatment for there was, how do you say it, something "Rost in transration". Don't go and see The Hunger Games, watch this. Out.

Albert von Hammerschmidt OBE's input:

The best way to sum up Battle Royale would be if Home and Away was set in Japan and between the romantic love interests the characters killed each other. Tis a crazy, crazy ride, where you aren't sure what is happening 100% of the time due to questionable translation of the subtitles and an insane culture gap. That aside it’s a definite recommendation, so much so that it inspired me to set up my own battle royale on one of my islands in Micronesia. The kills and gore in this film are very imaginative, with winks to this film being found in works such as Tarantino. 4.5 sobbing Japanese schoolgirls (literally) out of 5.

So, this is a strong genre piece. It's what I wanted from The Hunger Games but never got - a darkly comic, highly involving, bloody thrill ride with lashings of political commentary. It's earnt a respectable 34 out of 42 Japanese youths, and it's certainly ignited a desire in me to look further into some renowned J-horror movies a la Ringu.