I'll wrap up October here with a couple of Halloween-style scary flicks of recent vintage, both, in a nice touch for these tough times, involving bad-guy bankers. Drag Me to Hell got good reviews and has an old-fashioned horror movie plot: someone falls under a curse that will supposedly send her to Hell, and she has three days to break the curse. Alison Lohman plays a banker who evicts an old gypsy woman for not making her house payments. The gypsy (pictured) puts her under the aforementioned curse and horrible things start happening, though many of them wind up being in her mind. Her boyfriend (Justin Long) and an expert in the occult (Dileep Rao) try to help her, leading to what should be a climactic seance scene, but as with current Hollywood movies, there is at least one ending too many, and here, a final predictable "Carrie"-style twist that looks good but isn't very scary and doesn't really fit. I didn't like Lohman at all--there is no way her character shows enough backbone at any point in the film to be up for an important promotion at the bank--but the scare scenes work well enough, and the I did like the seance, especially the surprise appearance by a goat.
I seem to have developed a fondness for recent B-movie thrillers, both the kind that wind up going directly to video (see
Night Train) and the kind that wind up on cable (see
Kaw). Messengers 2: The Scarecrow sounds like a late-night Sci-Fi Channel offering (I'm boycotting the "SyFy" spelling for now), but it's actually a prequel to a theatrical horror film from a few years back. However, you don't need to know anything about that earlier film to enjoy this one. A struggling farmer (Norman Reedus) is about at the end of his rope and almost ready to consider giving up and selling the farm when he finds an old scarecrow in the barn. A neighbor encourages him to put it up, and sure enough, next day, the crows have all fallen dead and his corn is healthy. As his fortunes rise, people who stand in his way (including a banker about to foreclose) wind up dead. Reedus starts drinking, upsetting his good Christian wife, and it turns out, in a kind of "Wicker Man" twist, that the helpful neighbor and his young, slutty wife are pagans, and Reedus begins to realize that scarecrow may require a blood sacrifice to keep him and his farm going.
Reedus (at right), who I liked a lot in a small role in Cadillac Records and a bigger role in John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns in Showtime's Masters of Horror series, is a perfect B-lead, reminding me of someone like Tom Neal, star of the classic 40's B-noir Detour; handsome in a quirky way, soft-spoken, intense, and capable of giving resonance to a character, but also someone you know will never get to tackle a mainstream Hollywood lead role. He's good here, if maybe a little too low-key at times, considering what his character goes through. The mood is well sustained and the scarecrow manages to be creepy without looking ridiculous. I'd recommend this one as a Netflix rental, if not necessarily a purchase.
I'll wrap up October here with a couple of Halloween-style scary flicks of recent vintage, both, in a nice touch for these tough times, involving bad-guy bankers. Drag Me to Hell got good reviews and has an old-fashioned horror movie plot: someone falls under a curse that will supposedly send her to Hell, and she has three days to break the curse. Alison Lohman plays a banker who evicts an old gypsy woman for not making her house payments. The gypsy (pictured) puts her under the aforementioned curse and horrible things start happening, though many of them wind up being in her mind. Her boyfriend (Justin Long) and an expert in the occult (Dileep Rao) try to help her, leading to what should be a climactic seance scene, but as with current Hollywood movies, there is at least one ending too many, and here, a final predictable "Carrie"-style twist that looks good but isn't very scary and doesn't really fit. I didn't like Lohman at all--there is no way her character shows enough backbone at any point in the film to be up for an important promotion at the bank--but the scare scenes work well enough, and the I did like the seance, especially the surprise appearance by a goat.
I seem to have developed a fondness for recent B-movie thrillers, both the kind that wind up going directly to video (see Night Train) and the kind that wind up on cable (see Kaw). Messengers 2: The Scarecrow sounds like a late-night Sci-Fi Channel offering (I'm boycotting the "SyFy" spelling for now), but it's actually a prequel to a theatrical horror film from a few years back. However, you don't need to know anything about that earlier film to enjoy this one. A struggling farmer (Norman Reedus) is about at the end of his rope and almost ready to consider giving up and selling the farm when he finds an old scarecrow in the barn. A neighbor encourages him to put it up, and sure enough, next day, the crows have all fallen dead and his corn is healthy. As his fortunes rise, people who stand in his way (including a banker about to foreclose) wind up dead. Reedus starts drinking, upsetting his good Christian wife, and it turns out, in a kind of "Wicker Man" twist, that the helpful neighbor and his young, slutty wife are pagans, and Reedus begins to realize that scarecrow may require a blood sacrifice to keep him and his farm going.
Reedus (at right), who I liked a lot in a small role in Cadillac Records and a bigger role in John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns in Showtime's Masters of Horror series, is a perfect B-lead, reminding me of someone like Tom Neal, star of the classic 40's B-noir Detour; handsome in a quirky way, soft-spoken, intense, and capable of giving resonance to a character, but also someone you know will never get to tackle a mainstream Hollywood lead role. He's good here, if maybe a little too low-key at times, considering what his character goes through. The mood is well sustained and the scarecrow manages to be creepy without looking ridiculous. I'd recommend this one as a Netflix rental, if not necessarily a purchase.
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