Inside Shadows

Short synopsis (from the film’s website):

When a young couple move into a converted shop, they are filled with excitement and ideas as to how they will make the house their own.  But it would appear the property is still clinging to its past, and unbeknown to them they are living inside its shadows.

My thoughts:

Having recently watched The Orphanage (again), The Awakening, and The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh, it seems clear that I’m a sucker for a slow-developing ghost story.  This really isn’t a surprise, but it’s something that is reinforced with each movie I watch.

Inside Shadows fits comfortably into that genre.  Calling it a slow-developing ghost story is a completely accurate description.  It may even be even slower moving than the aforementioned films, which is really saying something, seeing as how none of those movies move at a breakneck pace.  It’s very good once it gets moving, but it takes a little while to get to that point.  It would be extremely easy to lose focus before the good stuff kicks in.  The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh was slow, but it had a sense of tension that started early and kept up throughout the entire film.  There was none of that here.  This was more like Entrance: a slow-building movie that doesn’t really even try to build tension until late. 

Once it gets going, it’s pretty good.  And there are a handful of moments that hint at the upcoming insanity.  They do a pretty good job at teasing it.  But, like I said, it would be pretty easy to lose interest before it gets to that point, especially if you’re not in the right mood for this type of movie.  It’s less a “slow burn” and more “lighting fireworks with punk sticks”.  

Even when the craziness started, I had a couple issues with it.  They felt the need to give a big musical blast every time the ghost appeared for an instant.  It was somewhat reminiscent of the musical goosing we got when Michael Myers showed up in Halloween, but this less subtle.  It was extremely distracting, and completely unnecessary.  Seeing a shadowy figure appear in the background is startling by itself; there’s no need to throw it in our face.

I also had a pretty major problem with the decision-making of some of the characters late in the film.  For spoiler reasons, I can’t really get into the specifics.  Suffice it to say that a couple characters had some highly dubious logic late in this film.  It almost ruined the movie for me.

Overall, I would say that I enjoyed this movie, but I didn’t love it like I hoped I would.  Superficially, it suffers from the same problems that plague a lot of low-budget movies: mainly, poor lighting and inconsistent sound (although I will say that the sound was better here than a lot of low-budget movies I’ve seen).  I’ve never had a problem getting past those things as long as the story is good, but, if you have a problem with those things, you should probably stay away.

But, if you like a good ghost story, it’s definitely worth giving a shot.  It was pretty well-acted, and had a pretty cool style to it.  Pick a quiet night, shut off all the lights, and dive in.

Rating: 3/5

Inside Shadows is now available on VOD.  Check it out here.

What Comes Next: Mama

Welcome to the first post in my new series, where I chronicle what I think would happen after the credits roll.  (If you’re curious as to how this idea came about – and why wouldn’t you be? – you can read my original post here.)

For my first post, I thought I would tackle Mama, mainly because it’s one of my favorite movies of the year, but I also left the theater wondering about a lot of the loose ends that were left dangling at the end.  (You can read my original review of Mama here.)

These posts are going to be extremely spoiler heavy.  So, if you haven’t seen Mama and don’t want to know how it ends, I suggest you stop reading now.    So I’ll just put a SPOILER ALERT here, and let you know that it applies to the entire post.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

First of all, I’d like to say a few words about the ending.  I know a lot of people had problems with the ending, but I kind of liked it.  I loved the build-up to it.  They make a big point of finding the bones of Mama’s lost child, and pretty much say that giving her those bones (and thus helping her to find the child she lost) will placate her.  This is a common theme in ghost stories.  To help the ghost move on, a wrong must be righted.  So they give Mama the bones of her child, and everything seems like it’s going to work out.  Mama changes from her freaky ghost figure into her freaky human figure.

But it doesn’t work.  She literally tosses the bones of her child aside in order to go after Lilly & Victoria.  Because Mama was crazy before she died, and even death can’t cure crazy.   

I loved that.  It took a scene we’ve seen hundreds of times and turned it on its head. 

Of course, I was a little sad when Mama ended up taking Lilly as a replacement, but the movie had been set up to show that, while Victoria had a real shot at fitting into society, Lilly never really had that chance.  So, while I was sad (if you’re not sad when an innocent child dies, there’s probably something wrong with you), I understood why it happened.

So…what comes next?

When the movie ends, Annabel, Lucas and Victoria seem poised to go on with their lives.  They’ll mourn Lilly, but they’ll try to get back to as normal a life as they can.  It’s not really a happy ending, but at least they didn’t all die.

But their lives probably won’t be good for very long.

On top of dealing with the death of a child, Annabel and Lucas are probably going away for the murder of Jean.  Who, on top of being the grandmother of Victoria and Annabel, was also the woman they went to court with for custody of the children.  The last time she is heard from, she is calling social services from outside the house of Annabel and Lucas, then proceeds to break into the house to get pictures that could show evidence of child abuse.  She is killed in the house by Mama, and her skeletal corpse ends up at the cabin where the girls were originally found.

Speaking of the cabin…

They are probably also on the hook for the disappearance of Lilly.  There’s evidence of all of them in the cabin, and yet they come back home with only one child.  Just because they’ll never find the body of Lilly (unless they just start looking for butterflies matching her description, which is highly unlikely in a police investigation) doesn’t mean she’s not presumed dead.  She went over the cliff and disappeared in the water.  It happens all the time.  Furthermore, the fact that Mama is no longer plaguing the family means that there’s no chance of her showing up and convincing an open-minded detective that all of this was the work of a ghost.  Mama is gone.  Along with her are the stories that paint Annabel and Lucas as innocent.

Last but not least, they’ll also be on the hook for the death of Dr. Dreyfuss, the psychiatrist.  He is killed in the cabin, and Annabel has a box of evidence stolen from his office in her house. 

With Annabel and Lucas in prison – and Jean dead – Victoria will most likely end up in foster care, which doesn’t bode well for her chances of living a normal life.  Even though she warmed up throughout the movie, her ties to reality were tenuous at best.  Without the constant presence of Annabel and Lucas in her life (the only people who know about Mama, so the only people who can really relate to her), she’ll probably crawl back deeper inside of herself, possibly going back to the feral state they found her in.  In a few years, it wouldn’t be a shock if she threw herself off that same cliff.  It’s grim, but that would more than likely be her fate.

It’s pretty depressing, but that appears to be where their story leads.

I welcome any comments that might add something else to this conversation.

V/H/S/2

First things first.  I watched the first movie at some point last year and reviewed it.  You can read it here, or I can just sum it up for you: I didn’t like it very much.  I gave it 2/5, and I probably could’ve gone a little lower.  I don’t really have a desire to ever watch it again, if that tells you anything.

Needless to say, I wasn’t overly excited about watching this one.  But I’m a professional (like, an unpaid professional.  So I guess not really much of a professional at all), so I decided to put my head down and power through.

Let’s get right to it.

  

“Tape 49” [Directed by Simon Barrett]

We follow Larry (a private investigator) and Ayesha (his wife/girlfriend/P.I.C./whatever) as they investigate a missing college student.  They break into his house and find a very familiar sight (to us, at least): a bank of TVs and a stack of VHS tapes.  As the characters in this series are wont to do, Ayesha decided to start watching the tapes.

Like the first one, we catch glimpses of the house between the tapes.  The normal things happen.  We see a strange figure (presumably the missing student) moving in the doorways.  We see Ayesha being affected a little more by each tape.

As far as a wraparound story goes, it was pretty good.  There were even some genuinely creepy moments, which surprised me a little bit.  At the very least, it was a good set-up for the rest of the movies.

“Phase 1 Clinical Trials” [Directed by Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die, V/H/S “Tape 56”)]

A man who lost his eye in an accident receives a robotic eye.  The person who installs it tells him that it’s new technology, and there are bound to be glitches.  He may see strange things.

Nope.  Everything seems fine so far.

Of course, he immediately begins seeing strange things, in the form of an undead man and little girl in his house.  Naturally, these are not glitches, and he soon finds himself hiding in his bathroom while they try to break the door down.

He ends up running across a woman who had a similar experience when they fixed her hearing.  She began hearing sounds of dead people.  She tells him “the more you interact with them, the more they can hurt you.”  When the dead show back up, they attempt to ignore them by focusing on each other.

With sexy results

Of course, the dead will not be ignored so easily.

Especially the fat dead

The verdict: I really liked this story.  There were quite a few jump scares, and most of them worked really well.  I was on edge for the majority of this story. 

I really liked how they worked the camera into this.  We see what he sees.  It was a creative way to work the camera into the story, and it was very effective for scares.

  

“A Ride in the Park” [Directed by Eduardo Sanchez (The Blair Witch Project, Lovely Molly) & Gregg Hale]

A man goes on a bike ride with a camera on his helmet.  Before long, he comes across a bloodied woman.  The biker finds figures slowly shambling in his direction.  He turns back to the woman only to find that she has been turned into a zombie.  She bites him.  He falls.  He dies.  He reanimates.  He attacks a pair of bikers.  He munches on them.  They die.  They reanimate.  The big happy group of them attack a children’s birthday party in the park.

Just what I wanted, Mommy.  Corpses!

The verdict: Needless to say, once I saw this was going to turn into a POV zombie movie, I was thrilled.  And it delivered.  This was my favorite story of the bunch.  It didn’t really have the scares/tension of the other movies in this collection (it was the funniest one in the bunch), but it was really well done.  I absolutely loved this one.

“Safe Haven” [Directed by Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid: Redemption) & Timo Tjahjanto (ABCs of Death “L isfor Libido”)]

A documentary crew is granted permission to go inside the compound of an Indonesian cult, headed up by a strange man who refers to himself as “The Father”.  Once inside, the crew realizes that there might be more going on than mind control and the possible rape of underage girls (not that those things aren’t horrible.  Because they are.  I cannot stress this enough).  “Father” becomes crazed, violent, and borderline incoherent.  And then it all goes to hell.

The verdict: Even though I really liked this one, I had a few problems with it.  Nothing that stopped me from loving it in the end, but they were big enough problems that I feel the need to talk about them.

1. It started out really slow.  I could tell pretty quickly where the set-up was leading, but it still took a long time to get there. 

2. There was some drama between members of the documentary crew, but it felt pretty tacked on.  It didn’t add anything to the story.  In fact, it seemed to drag it down a bit.  This could’ve easily been cut.

3. There were some really terrible effects at the end of this one.  Laughably bad. 

“Chip, I’m gonna come at you like a spider monkey.  With a box cutter.”

Again, I really liked it, but these were issues that I had a hard time overlooking.  Still, once everything starting going bonkers towards the end, I thought it was a lot of fun.  Insane and fun.

“Slumber Party Alien Abduction” [Directed by Jason Eisener (Hobo With a Shotgun, ABCs of Death “Y is for Youngbuck”)]

The title does a pretty good job of telling you exactly what this story is.  A group of elementary school/middle school boys are having a slumber party at the house of one of the boys.  His older sister is having a slumber party of her own, mainly involving lake partying and sexytime.  The brother torments his sister.  The sister torments her brother.  Then the aliens show up.

We want to party with youuuuuuuu…

[Slight SPOILER ALERT]

The dog dies.  You’ve been warned.

[END SPOILER]

The verdict: I liked this one a lot.  The only problem I had with this (besides the spoiler listed above) was the noise that hit when the aliens showed up.  It was a loud, long horn, and it was a bit much after the second time.

Still, that’s a minor issue.  Once the aliens show up, this story is relentless.

Here’s how I have ranked all the stories in this collection:

1. “A Ride in the Park”

2. “Safe Haven”

3. “Slumber Party Alien Abduction”

4. “Phase 1 Clinical Trials”

5. “Tape 49”

Overall, I loved this movie.  At first I thought I only liked it because I had lowered my expectations after the V/H/S, but that wasn’t the case at all.  This is a great collection of films.  Not a dud in the bunch.  And, thankfully, the only sharking we see is a short clip from the first movie.

For the most part, this was a collection that was pretty scary and tense throughout, with more than a little humor sprinkled in for good measure.  This was a tremendous anthology film.  Highly recommended.

Rating: 5/5

Mama

Description from Netflix:
Two girls left to fend for themselves in the forest for five lonely years after the death of their mother find refuge in the home of their uncle.  But it soon becomes clear that the girls have not arrived alone in this woodsy supernatural thriller.

Notable actors: Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

My thoughts:
I had wanted to see this as soon as it came out, but fate and timing did not allow it.  Thankfully, I was able to catch a matinee yesterday.
And I loved it.
It had the same kind of feel as The Orphanage (I know that's kind of a lazy comparison, seeing as how Del Toro has ties to both of them, but it doesn't mean that it's not accurate).  It had a great atmosphere throughout the entire film.  They really set the feeling of dread and overwhelming creepiness up pretty early, and it cast a shadow over the rest of the film.  Even in the slow moments, I couldn't help but feel a little tense.  They used a lot of wide shots, so I was always looking over the shoulder of the characters.  Looking for any movement at all.

It was a beautifully creepy movie, which is why the comparison to The Orphanage is so accurate.  Both movies are overwhelmingly eerie.  But, where The Orphanage only goes so far as to be "creepy", Mama hits the "downright scary" button a few times.  The Orphanage had some tense and scary moments, but nothing came close to the terror that Mama slung around.

I'm not ashamed to say that I jumped a few times during this movie.  There were times when I knew something was coming, and I still jumped.  And yet, I never felt that any of jumps were cheap scares.  They worked hard for them, and they delivered.  That's no easy feat.

The acting was terrific.  It's no surprise that Jessica Chastain was fantastic.  With as great as she is, it's kind of amazing that she's just now breaking out (she was also terrific in Lawless and Zero Dark Thirty).

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones) was also great, though his role was a bit more limited than I thought it would be.

The real surprise here were the kids.  This movie relied heavily on them, and they pulled through.  They were amazing.  Megan Charpentier (Victoria) was outstanding.  She had an especially complex character to play, and she did a terrific job.  She was torn between her old life (with Mama) and her new life (with Annabel & Lucas).  She had to run a gauntlet of emotions, and she nailed all of them.
Even the actress who played young Victoria (Morgan McGarry) was terrific.  An adorable little kid.  And her dad was going to kill her.  Some people, man...

Isabelle Nelisse (Lilly) was also terrific.  Even though she had slightly less of a character (a feral child who never really seemed to grasp the concept of the real world), she was still terrific.  She had a simple innocence to her, and she played it perfectly.  Even with the overwhelming creepiness, there were still a lot of playful moments with Mama, and Lilly was at the heart of those.

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the one massive complaint I've heard about this movie: the CGI of Mama. It's quite possible that I had heard so many negative comments about it that my expectations were lowered so far that the actual CGI couldn't possibly be as bad as my mind had made it out to be.
It could also be that I have recently made peace with CGI.  My deal with CGI is this: as long as the movie is good, I don't really care if the CGI isn't amazing.  I refuse to let bad CGI kill a good movie for me.  Now, if it's a bad movie with bad CGI, all bets are off.  But less-than-stellar CGI is not a deal breaker for me.
Also, I really don't think the CGI was that bad.  Not enough to distract from the creepiness of the movie, anyway.

This has nothing to do with CGI, but I really love this shot

One small fact before I end this review.  The part of Mama was played by an actor by the name of Javier Botet.  He is a horrifying man.  All those weird, disjointed stances Mama took?  All Botet.  Which is simultaneously amazing and horrifying.  (For the record, Botet also played the role of Nina Medeiros in all of the [Rec] movies.)

Overall, I really, really loved this movie.  As I mentioned before, it has a great atmosphere, which gives the entire film a creepiness that never lets up.  I really loved everything about this movie.  I'm already looking forward to watching it again when it comes out on DVD.  This could easily become my favorite movie of the year.

I have a handful of questions about the ending of the movie, and the fallout that would occur.  I don't want to bring them up here, as they would include a lot of spoilers, none of which I necessarily want to bring up here.  Very soon, I'll either do a post about the fallout from certain horror movies (using Zombie's Halloween 1 & 2 as a guide), or start up a discussion blog filled with spoilers (I doubt this will happen, as I doubt enough people read this blog to necessitate another one starting up).  If anyone has a preference, leave a comment.

Rating: 5/5

I can't end this review without a few words about Jessica Chastain's character, Annabel.  Her character goes through a pretty big transformation as well: from a punk-rocker who cheers when she finds out she's not pregnant to a protective and loving mother for Victoria and Lilly.  (Even her wardrobe changed: from low-cut tank-tops to, eventually, a turtleneck sweater.)
It is her punk-rocker side that I want to point out.  They spent a little bit of time on it, and it kind of made me laugh.  My favorite part was when her and Lucas were trying to get custody of the kids.  Part of the case against them featured the statement, "Annabel is in a band."  Granted, the point was more, "how can they support these kids when they don't make any money?", but it sounded more like, "She can't take care of these kids...she plays the devil's music!"

Here are a few pictures showing her transformation (and, again, featuring some of the wide shots this film used).