Pigeon Army
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33. The Exorcist (1973, Friedkin, USA) - 4.5/5
A slow-burning, grotesque chiller, The Exorcist's place in the horror canon is well-known - and, thankfully, well-deserved. Linda Blair is Regan, the little girl possessed, and her slow descent from giggly pre-teen to destructive, demonic presence is perfectly captured in her performance and in the magnificent special effects and make-up work on display, the little flourishes (the creeping cuts on her face, the tongue wagging in a positively unnerving fashion as Father Merrin recites the ritual) just as effective and perturbing as the big 'shocker' moments (the head-spinning, the terrifying spider-crawl, the genital mutilation with a crucifix). The voice acting from Mercedes McCambridge as the demon infecting Regan is also well-done, though it does suffer from an overdose of ham at points ("DO YOU KNOW WHAT SHE DID" never fails to raise a laugh). Friedkin also uses all manner of tricks and quirks to create an atmosphere where the villain is so inhuman that it twists and destroys everything it touches - the haunting slowly focuses itself on Regan's room to the point where it looks and feels like a quarantine zone or a freezer in which specimens are stored for safekeeping, and Friedkin nails this transition, actually building the room in a freezer and progressively putting more and more distance between Regan and the camera. Meanwhile, the actors surrounding her ground the film in reality and give it an undeniable urgency - Ellen Burstyn and Jason Miller, in particular, are riveting as Regan's committed mother and the tormented Father Karras respectively, and it's exceedingly difficult not to empathise with them. If it weren't for the meandering Iraq prologue that serves to only offer some heavy-handed foreshadowing, The Exorcist would be damn near perfect. As it is, it's just immensely satisfying and profoundly creepy. Which is a pretty big 'just'.
86. Drag Me To Hell (2009, Raimi, USA) - 4/5*
Second time around and on a smaller screen, Drag Me To Hell is a lot less scary, but a hell of a lot funnier (though some of the laughs are unintentional, deriving as they do from some clunky dialogue delivered badly). Raimi's penchant for gross-out slapstick violence complements the film's narrative, as we follow the basically good-hearted Christine Brown and her increasingly bizarre, overblown attempts to beat a gypsy curse. The setpieces are heavily reliant on the use of silence and the breaking thereof, almost to the point where it becomes predictable, and they work better when he's taking the disgusting and knocking it up a few levels, or when he's unashamedly playing the whole thing for laughs (the scene in the graveyard and the seance are both deliriously funny, and the seance even packs a good couple of scares in it). It helps that Raimi has a great lead in Alison Lohman, whose sweet-as-pie demeanour and wholesome good looks belie a heavy insecurity and a need to be everything to everyone, even if it means forgoing who she is (the hints at her recurrent body issues reinforce this, and add another level to the large number of horror scenes focused on things invading Christine's body). Raimi seems to flip-flop a bit on whether the curse is deserved - the way the film seems to frown on Christine's increasingly amoral attempts to shirk it conflicts harshly with the unpleasant portrayal of curse-granter Sylvia Ganush (Lorna Raver), a disrespectful and irrational old gypsy woman - and that hurts the film's portrayal of Christine as someone to root for, but we're there with her despite this, and it gives the film a heart to go with the funnybone; and what a funnybone it is - the comic highlights are numerous indeed (the best is still clearly the kitty, though).
147. Night of the Living Dead (1968, Romero, USA) - 3.5/5
Seven people. One farmhouse. One truck. One gas pump. One gun. A few dozen zombies. What could go wrong? According to Romero, everything, because humans are cavalier dicks more obsessed with power plays and laying blame than co-operation and survival, and Romero uses this as the basic thematic foundation of Night of the Living Dead, an ambitious and progressive, but horribly patchy, debut from the zombie maestro. A lot's made of Romero's colour blindness in his casting of this film, and rightfully so, as that colour blindness gave us Duane Jones, whose performance as the assertive and forward-thinking Ben is a studied, clever performance, making the character a level-headed guy whose grasp on the situation is constantly challenged by his more irrational farmhouse friends and the escalating crisis outside. The film's also an incredibly interesting 'cabin fever' tale and a stealthy critique of patriarchal power structures, with the women - at least one of whom is a voice of lucid reason - sidelined by the men, whose different ideas on how to survive clash violently and constantly undermine even their most basic attempts at co-operation and communication (it's worth noting that Karl Hardman, a dead ringer for Rob Corddry, provides a more-than-capable sparring partner for Jones, his aggressive, cowardly Harry almost the perfect source of conflict). However, this isn't helped by some terrible acting that almost serves to reinforce the very views Romero criticises - Judith O'Dea is unbearable as terrified Barbra, and Judith Ridley is basically a doormat for a bland-as-cardboard country bumpkin boyfriend - and Romero spends too much time pointing the camera at the television for Exposition Time and needs to work on his dialogue.
196. Huozhe (To Live) (1994, Zhang, CHN/HKG) - 3/5
Too many times, To Live suffers from feeling like a film built around an idea, rather than built around characters and narrative - a subtle and interesting critique of the early years of Communism in working-class China, To Live frequently treats its characters and story as vessels for the criticising of historical events or the overarching tenets of Chinese Communism - take the public trials as they pervade the township married couple Fugui and Jiazhen live in, or the reaction to Youqing's actions in the communal kitchen, or the events arising from the District Chief's visit to the local school. It's perhaps because of this that the human moments, particularly earlier in the film, feel overwritten and slightly unnatural - something not helped by overly-literal subtitles and a performance from Ge You that's half heartfelt and half crazy-eyed and inappropriate. Gong Li's exceptional performance and the two great child actors playing their children ground those moments somewhat, as does Zhang Yimou's unintrusive direction, but it frequently doesn't feel enough. On top of this, the attempts at critiquing Communism are hurt by the portrayal of the 'positives' - it's all well and good if we're meant to look at them and understand how hollow they are, but it's not so good if the actors and writing seem to be in on the critique, and it feels overly disingenuous rather than authentic. On top of this, it's a melodramatic affair that rather too often stoops to personal tragedy without grasping quite how to make it kick, but when it does kick, it's truly heartbreaking stuff (and considering Gong Li does most of the heavy lifting when it is heartbreaking, that's not entirely surprising).
204. Gin gwai (The Eye) (2002, Pang Chun & Pang, HKG/SIN) - 3/5
Quite possibly South East Asia's answer to M. Night Shyamalan, the Pang brothers are excellent at devising stories, but really need to get other people to write their screenplays. Piggy-backing on the "I see dead people" mini-craze of early last decade, The Eye has a swell concept - a blind woman gets a cornea transplant, only to find herself seeing dead people all over the show. The first half an hour of the film doesn't let on that the premise's promise won't be fulfilled - it cleverly hints at what's to come and crafts some surprisingly creepy sequences around until-recently-blind Wong Kar Mun's coming to grips with the abnormality of what's really happening to her. Angelica Lee also convinces in the lead, her wide, expressive doe eyes and trusting manner emphasising her vulnerability and inability to fathom just what the fuck is going on with her eyes. However, the Pangs frequently get mired in pointless subplots (the exorcist, Kar Mun's violin playing, the boy with the lost report card), their dialogue veers between terrible and decent quite frequently, and their schizophrenic direction means virtuoso sequences can be immediately followed up with laughable zooms, whip pans and fade ins accompanied by inappropriate music cues. Then the film's twist takes hold, and it's either ridiculously stupid or brilliant, and I'm still not entirely sure which - all I know is that it was delivered terribly, and led into a final half an hour that was even more frenetic and jerky than the previous hour. That said, poor Ying Ying. 
< Message edited by Pigeon Army -- 22/8/2010 2:46:48 PM >
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