Shocktober #2 The Void (2016)

If the Void was released in the 1980s, it would be a cult gem well thought of by genre aficionados of 2017. As a modern release, the Void is throwback to decades before found footage, home invasion, and torture porn flooded the horror market. The Void lacks sophistication and any of deep meaning or resonance, but makes up for it with a stark atmosphere, buckets of gore, and a script that jams as many horror standards as it can for 82 minutes before the credits roll. 

Aaron Poole, who I've never seen before, stars as a small town cop whose relatively quiet overnight shift takes a turn when he discovers a crazed blood-soaked man (Evan Stern) in the middle of a country road. Carter takes the man to the local emergency room, conveniently staffed by Carter’s ex-wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe), two other nurses and an older doctor (Kenneth Welsh, the only recognizable face, notable from Twin Peaks). Things take a bizarre turn, however, when two men burst into the hospital looking to kill the man Carter brought in, while outside the building is suddenly surrounded by a horde of ominous white robed cultists. 

To say anything else about the plot would completely ruin whats to come, so suffice it to say that the Void piles on well worn tropes. We have some disgusting zombies, a death cult, an otherworldy being speaking from another dimension, some pregnancy related body horror, and Lovecraft/John Carpenter's the Thingesque beasts rampaging around the hospital. The movie becomes a cinematic soup blending together Hellraiser and The Beyond with Assault on Precinct 1s. Writers/directors Steve Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie, a make-up artist and visual designer respectively (notable works from the pair includes makeup and art from Pacific Rim, It, Suicide Squad, and Crimson Peak), throw pretty much everything at the wall here and surprisingly make most of it stick, letting the thick atmosphere, sober tone and truly gonzo visuals carry the film even while their script doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

My big problem with the movie is the mythology and story. I enjoy cosmic Lovecraftian horror that doesn't make much logical sense, but this really seems like a greatest hits collection from other movies. I was never really sure what the cult and the portal and the monsters  all have to do with each other. The third act also features a Pinhead knockoff who shows up solely to deliver some clunky exposition to tie things together. But where the story lapses, the first time directors make up for it with swift, clean editing and jaw-dropping practical gore and creature effects. I really truly appreciate that in an age when even blood is CGI I was given visceral practical effects. A minor quibble is that the editing was a bit slower in some scenes where it’s a bit hard to tell what is doing what to whom, but that may be due to budgetary limitations and not wanting to overexpose the latex creatures.

As it stands, the Void does not pulls the overarching mythos together into a coherent whole, while at the same time giving the small and over-matched band of refugees so many connection points that it straddles the line of being contrived. Nevertheless, the leads have enough charisma and charm that I was rooting for them to escape, with Poole giving a warm performance as a fairly milquetoast cop who must rise to a decidedly unprecedented challenge  Kostanski and Gillespie pay homage to nostalgia without resorting to cheap copycat tricks; as a result, I recognized the homages throughout without shaking my head. The all-out mash up and lack of a coherent story will likely keep it from classic status (this isn't a Babadook or It Follows), but it’s still 82 minutes of mayhem that embraces its genre with relish, respect and style.

6/10

Shockoctober 2017 #1 - Hush

My thoughts on Hush, an outstanding start to Shocktober 2017. From director Mike Flanagan who took the very silly premise of a killer mirror movie  in Oculus and elevated it from laughable to decent also took the home invasion movie and brought a unique sensibility without resorting to gimmicks. In the same way, in a year with Wonder Woman dominating the summer, Hush is a similarly empowering movie for females as well as maintaining suspense.

The setup is simple, author Maddie (Kate Siegel) lives alone in the woods trying to follow up a successful book. She lost her senses of speech and hearing to a nasty bout of bacterial meningitis (the exposition is delivered briefly yet effective). When a masked psychotic killer (John Gallagher, Jr., who I recognized from genre outings 10 Cloverfield Lane and the Belko Experiment) shows up on her doorstep one night, he pushes Maddie to her complete limits over the course of one night.

Hush makes a bold decision with its killer at the end of its first act, and it turns out to be a wise one. I won’t spoil it here, but suffice it to say that Gallagher is given much more to work with than your standard masked killer. The film shies away from a lengthy expository monologue, giving the character (in the credits listed as only “The Man”) the necessary menace needed to instill fear.

In a completely silent performance, the strong showing from Siegel makes the movie work. (she also was quite good in Oculus). She makes Maddie one of the best horror protagonists seen in recent memory. Her lack of dialogue in the film (save for one internal monologue, a device I'm glad that was limited) does not stop Siegel from an impassioned performance. I also have to credit the script for acknowledging and sidestepping the tropes common in this subset of the genre.

Flanagan, as expected, plays with sound design a lot in the film, albeit not as much as you might expect. The sound in the film goes out at certain points and I almost wish that Flanagan had used this technique more and had longer sequences of complete silence. There is a sparse score that never rises to the forefront of the action. I was also reminded of one of the few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I've seen featuring long sequences of complete silence. 

The film’s only misstep comes with Maddie’s neighbor John (Michael Trucco), in a sequence that almost slips completely back into the home invasion cliches although Trucco doesn't play it for comedy (no comic relief side characters here) There is also a dream scare sequence that had to have been included to pad the runtime (We were at 78 minutes when the credits rolls and I do appreciate the lack of padding). The "shocking" dream feels cheap when held up next to the rest of the film.

The film is shot competently but not necessarily creatively. Cinematographer James Kniest shoots the house and the woods surrounding it with a good sense of claustrophobia, although most likely due to the budget there is no particularly innovative camera techniques. The movie is tightly cut and I especially enjoyed the editing during the aforementioned "monologue" sequence. While incredibly suspenseful, at no point was I ever truly scared during Hush and I commend Flanagan for not falling into the "boo" scare morass that seems to plague similarly typed movies.

Hush is a terrific film, boasting some fantastic set pieces and excellent performances from Siegel and Gallagher. Additionally, it is streaming on Netflix so among the crowd of garbagey recommendations, it truly stands out. I have no doubt that it will be added to many of those “overlooked horror gem” clickbaits in the near future. It’s so good that I went and added Flanagan's next movie, Ouijia 2, to my Shocktober slate. 

9/10

U2 at Centurylink - 2017

Walking into the U2 show, there definite a mood of unease. There was a nonmoving line wrapped around Century Link field towards Safeco. Anyone could pull up Twitter and read horror stories of how the Rogers Center botched the new entry system (no tickets were issued, credit card used for purchased was swiped at the door to neuter online scalpers), causing thousands to be late. In fact, the streets around CenturyLink had the usual apocalyptic evangelicals. They carried ominous signs: "Warning: flee from the wrath to come. Repent."

When you got into the stadium, the crowd on the floor was surprisingly sparse and everyone seemed mellow. On far end of the stadium from the main tunnel entrance, other words waited. Inspirational poetry and prose scrolled down the right side of a massive video screen that took up the North end zone. In the first U.S. performance of this 2017 Joshua Tree tour, U2 turned back towards their roots and deep back catalogue as a source of inspiration, catharsis, and curiosity.

The Joshua Tree album is one that I owned on tape and was one of the first that I gravitated to in my youth. Everyone has a period where they go from listening to music that their parents happen to be playing to developing their own sense of musical identity. I am too young to have discovered U2 at an age where I really understood some of the deeper meanings of their music. I felt like they were cool to like in the early 90s when Alice in Chains, Metallica, Soundgarden, etc. were all in their heyday.

For last night, Bono paid tribute to the photographer who captured the album art who apparently had filmed the videos that played behind the band. It seemed fitting that album art, which in modern days seems to have completely disappeared in the wake the digital era, was captured in real-time behind the band as they played through Joshua Tree. One can wonder how the original set in 1987 looked but I guarantee it didn’t have the spectacle and impact that the backdrop had over the music.

I feel any music critic worth their salt can dissect Joshua Tree the album and it’s been done by professionals so I’ll discuss the visuals for those not there. The first track, “Where the Streets Have No Name” was backed a long tracking shot down a desert highway, where “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” was filmed in Joshua Tree including shots of titular plants in black and white. The majestic “With or Without You” had an orange mountain landscape filmed in time lapse.

After that trio, the rest of the songs featured people. The searing “Bullet the Blue Sky” featured black and white distorted images of the band flanked by various men and women of different ages and races putting on an old timey military helmet. The more contemplative and pastoral “Red Hill Mining Town” had slow zoom out of a Salvation Army Band

Bono said something to the point of “This is an American Adventure” before “Trip Through Your Wires” featured a woman slowly painting an American Flag onto an old wooden home and playing with a lasso in a red, white, and blue bikini. Joshua Tree as an album is Bono’s reflection on the good and bad of America told from his perspective of being an outsider. The counter to the cowgirl painter came under the next song, “One Tree Hill”, featured a Native American woman looking into the distance and a couple standing proudly and silently bring the question who America is really for in the modern times.

The next song, “Exit”, had an eerily precognitive video of an old western movie featuring a con man named Trump convincing the unbelieving locals of his plan to finance a wall. At first, I thought this had to have been dubbed, but after looking online when I got home, I found it was episode from the 1958 show Trackdown. The Joshua Trees set closed with “Mothers of the Disappeared” featuring women silently holding a candlelight vigil. At this point, Bono introduced the “soul of Seattle”, Eddie Vedder, who sang the second verse and then Mumford and Sons came out for the chorus.

Of course, there were some other songs beyond Joshua Tree. The first five came on a mini stage with no backing video or pyrotechnics and featured highlights from War and Unforgettable Fire. I personally enjoyed that Larry Mullen walked out by himself to this center stage and started playing the military style beat of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”, as the rest of the band sauntered out. This set closed with “Pride/In the Name of Love”, as Bono got 70,000 singing along.

To me, U2 as a band have diminished in the public eye since All That You Can’t Leave Behind. South Park brutally took down Bono in a memorable episode and Bono performed an odd self deprecating cameo as himself in Sasha Baron Cohen’s Bruno. I also can’t forget the band’s disastrous decision to spam the Itunes of the world with their last less than memorable album, “Songs of Innocence.” Bono’s ego and sermonizing has made him an easy target for many.

However, on Sunday night, Bono’s banter was engaging, fairly uncritical, and more inspirational and energizing. He gave a memorable shoutout to the activism of Bill and Melinda Gates and that solidarity should empower the masses. Although I know the saying is not from V for Vendetta specifically, Bono also said rephrased one of my favorite quotes: "The government should fear its citizens, not the other way around.” The encore (post Joshua Tree) featured some obvious crowd pandering with some favorite singles. We were treated to the passion of “Beautiful Day” the energy of “Elevation” the beauty of “One”  but a standout is a gem from Achtung, Baby, "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)." Especially appropriate on Mother's Day, Bono praised those who have resisted, persisted, and echoed the language taken up the 2017's post-election marchers and organizers. Behind the band during this song was a montage of important women, everyone from Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks to more contemporary figures like Lena Dunham and Michelle Obama. Instead of going with another hit single like Mysterious Ways, the last piece of the show featured “Miss Sarajevo”, the single from the U2/Brian Eno side project, “Passengers”. The final video backdrop featured a powerful trip through a Syrian Refugee camp in Jordan. Bono did call, in a fairly corny moment, for “women of the world to unite to rewrite history”. The band then played a fairly pedestrian new songs, and after a lukewarm yet polite crowd response, huddled up, and closed with their energetic original single off their debut record 1980’s Boy, “I Will Follow”. After a bow, they left the stage.

"The Joshua Tree" album is 30 now, and playing a set where the most recent song came out 17 years ago, a cynic may call the set list and the tour a nostalgic retreat into the past to ignore the recent failures. If you can’t tell by this opus (and to think I originally meant this to be one Facebook post), I at last was greatly moved by the experiences. The themes and questions brought up Joshua Tree still resonate today. The conflict, like the working-class plight described in "Red Hill Mining Town" has too much relevance. The music balances grace, force, vulnerability, and beauty. On the Link Light Rail journey back south to the lives of the concert goes, an impromptu sing along broke out to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” I can’t the question, because what are we looking for and is there any way to know when we truly have found it.