Sinister - Super Duper 8

Sinister is one of the most bestest creations yet reviewed by Terror Bites, hands down. It reduced three 18-20 year olds to genuinely yelling in terror for a solid 10 seconds at an occasion, and kept them tensed for the vast majority of the action. I feel like I've just had a great workout.  I shed a little sweat. It was legit.

Ethan Hawke moves his young family into a new house, the former residents of which were cruelly hung from a tree in the backyard and their daughter kidnapped. Old Hawkey finds a box of Super 8 films in the attic and - upon inspection - finds all manner of horrific snuff films recorded on them. As a famous true-crime writer, he is naturally intrigued, and connects all the deaths by the inclusion of a pagan symbol and a mysterious, dark figure. He begins to hear things around the house, and as he descends into paranoia, he descends into the bottle too. An expert in the occult recognises 'Bagul', a pagan deity who snacks on the souls of children, and hops between dimensions via images and video. This evidently does not bode well for the Hawkster. The local police have little time for our protagonist, but one star-struck deputy does what he can to help. As their findings become more and more (you guessed it) sinister, Ethan must try to save his family and preserve his own sanity, before big bad Bagul gets his claws on them...

There is a certain plausibility surrounding Ethan's character that stands out in Sinister - hungry for another taste of fame, his hubris is his downfall, rendering him oblivious to the danger before it's too late. He plays the father particularly well, and some of the scariest moments occur between Hawke and a projector in a darkened room. The remainder of our players, while perhaps not memorable (with perhaps the exception of the deputy and his hilarious straight-faced discussion of the respective limbs of scorpions and snakes), are effective in filling the blanks on the cast list. Director Scott Derrickson rarely allows the audience to breathe a sigh of relief, and vamps up the tension from the squeamish opening frames. Some of the scares have been criticised as being lazy and very manufactured, but when they're this good, who really cares? That screaming for 10 seconds anecdote - not a word of a lie. The horror is palpable, and it's nice as an audience to share these jumps with an on-screen character, as we experience much of it in tandem with Hawke's character. The special effects, while low budget, are arresting and realistic - perfect for this kind of picture. The editing is tightly managed, and beautifully contrasts languid build-ups to pay-offs with other segments which bombard the audience with constant leaps. As much as Hawke and Derrickson nail their roles, Christopher Young almost manages to steal their thunder with his stellar score. It alternates between pulsing electronically, almost hypnotically, bubbling beneath the surface and traditional string-driven crescendos, which ratchets up the tension on the thin line between modern and old-school that Sinister treads.

I was lucky enough to enjoy this in the company of my good friends Albert von Hammerschmidt OBE and Esteban. Here's genuinely what they had to say. Esteban (who persisted in his loquacious response despite my lecturing him that Blogger didn't partake in emoticons and that very few would actually appreciate the full scale of his critique) said ' :p '. Albert said 'ah, AH, ARRGGHHHHHHHHHHIHHRGHGGggggHhHhHHHHH. Holy fuck.' How very apt.

Trying to write his In Cold Blood brings about Hawke's downfall. Is this trying to make a statement about the modern immunity to voyeuristic perversions in horror audiences? Again, who cares? This is a horror film, and a terrifically frightening one at that. For me, it lived up the hype generated by its trailer which I discussed in an earlier One To Watch piece, and for that, I have little choice but to slap it with a thankful 11 out of 13 missing children.

The Host - Don't Mention The War...

It's almost as though these 'industrious little fellows' (to quote the horrifically un-PC Jeremy Clarkson) set out to answer the question 'just how obvious can we possibly make a political allegory?' The answer to this question is very obvious. In fact, the anti-American sentiment (though this does simplify the whole film somewhat) was so latent that even the North Koreans managed to praise its virtues from the mountaintops. Hmmm.


When an American scientist pours hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde down his lab drain, the end result is a big ol' ugly-as-sin fish monster that rises from the deep and decides it likes the tang of human flesh. Delicious. Our plot follows dim-witted Park Gang-du, who manages to lose his daughter to the creature's tail/appendage (see poster on left). In the aftermath, Gang-du and his family are captured by the government under the pretence that the creature carries a deadly virus. But - shock horror! - Hyun-seo  calls them, still very much alive and trapped in a sewage drain along the river somewhere. So the whole family - his old father, his alcoholic brother and his archery champion sister - tag along to rescue the little one, plagued by useless government intervention along the way. When plans to gas the creature with 'Agent Yellow' (totally not suss...) threaten the little one's life, it becomes a family road-trip satirical horror comedy racing against the clock. Game on.

It's a creature film primarily, so does the creature cut the mustard? Yes. Yes it does. It's not really a spoiler because it's revealed so early on, but it's a big cross between a fish, a dinosaur and a tadpole with a handy tail. I dunno why, but I actually enjoyed the fact that they didn't muck around with the big reveal - it was very much: 'here it is, enjoy it, now watch it mess up these people's lives'. That was refreshing. Does our amphibious friend bring the necessary scares? Meh. Sometimes. But it's function is more than a few jumps (not to say that there aren't any scares - I leapt at least twice), as it's the catalyst that explores the fractures within the family that we follow, and it's these harsh realities that are often most frightening. Our cast are fairly accomplished in Korean cinema and they achieve good results here, handling the frequent switches between bizarre asides and earnest emotion with a great sure-footedness. On that note, the writing is truly different to anything you've ever seen before, transitioning between satirical, surreal, emotional and suspenseful at a rate of knots. But as I said before, maybe its political commentary was a little to transparent for my tastes, though I stress that these are very much my tastes and others may prefer their social messages applied with a liberal brush.

The Host wasn't the masterpiece that I was expecting given the unbelievably strong critical response and its megabucks at the box office. However it's definitely not a bad film - overtly enjoyable, sometimes scary and palpably silly. So for me, it's sitting on about a mid-range 13 out of 19 abducted Asian youths. Apologies for my lateness with this review, but I'm currently sitting in the middle of uni exams, so I'll be back to my usual, happy-posting self in about a week (fingers crossed).

One To Watch - I, Frankenstein

Rather than exploit this optimal study time in stuvac for that work which it was intended, I have instead opted  to keep my legions of fans (erroneous) informed on the coming horror scene. Now, this upcoming film looks solid, and the cast is just one of the reasons to get excited - Aaron Eckhart (underrated in my opinion), Bill Nighy, Yvonne Strahovski (who's great in the new season of Dexter) and Miranda Otto (another solid showing from our America-based Aussies).

Stills on set of Eckhart in make-up/costume

Behind the camera, we have Stuart Beattie (Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!), whose debut Tomorrow, When the War Began was beat up a little by critics, but the action was nice and visceral, and directors often improve with age and experience. The plot reads as follows: Frankenstein's monster, named Adam and having taken the surname of his creator, becomes involved in a war between two immortal clans in an ancient city.

Based on a graphic novel (the author of which co-wrote the script with Beattie), I, Frankenstein promises some thrills, scares and - I imagine - some full on battle scenes... After being pushed back 7 months by its studio to accommodate the movie Snitch, I, Frankenstein will have plenty of time stewing in the can for some extensive post-production work, which should turn out a polished final product.


So, a release on September 27 in the US means we'll probably see it in Australia between October-November, and I'm pretty keen to enjoy it in about a year's time.