UNSUNG HORRORS: LAKE MUNGO

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre.

So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now… one at a time.

Dir. Joel Anderson

2008

Lionsgate Films

Australia

“Liked found footage movies” could one day be etched on my tombstone, and not only because it’s true, but also because I’ve spent most of my blog systematically beating those words to death. But I do. I like found footage movies. Except for rare, rare gems like Insidious, it’s become almost impossible to make a traditional narrative film that effectively scares. Most filmmakers, despite their best intentions, just don’t know how to do that. They claim to know. They claim to use “Hitchcockian” techniques (a term I have grown to loathe). Really what this means, however, is that they reenact the Psycho shower scene, but instead of leaving it to your imagination, they show you heads falling off and geysers of blood. Something about the way found footage movies are made easily manipulate the viewer. All bets are off, really. So long as you have a valid reason for why your cameraman hasn’t long dropped the camera in fear instead of stoically filming the gigantic King Kong-sized monster standing above him in Central Park, then you have the freedom to pretty much show whatever you want and get away with it. And not only that, but even the most mundane things seem creepy. You see a dark room, and in that dark room you see a darker shape suddenly move in the corner. Already you can feel the chill ride down your spine. You wait for it to materialize, to be something with malicious intent. Found footage movies are that one scene in your traditional horror movie where a character is walking around the corner and the music is mounting—only it’s like that for the entire running time. Once that first creepy thing happens, anything can happen at any time.

Movies like Australia’s Lake Mungo are a rare bird. Not only are found footage movies still rare when compared to the number of more traditional stuff that gets greenlit every day, Lake Mungo takes it one step further: instead of the movie seemingly taking place in real time as characters stumble around the dark, the movie is comprised of sit-down interviews with the main characters as they reflect on the events that inspired the “documentary”—events that have already taken place. Yes…Mom, Dad, and Brother aren’t risking being possessed by ghosts or sliced in half by zombies run amok. The event that triggered this “documentary”—the horror the characters endured—is already behind them. (One comparison that immediately comes to mind is Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, a movie about the assassination attempt of Adolf Hitler—something the world knows never came to fruition, yet watching the attempt unfold still manages to be incredibly suspenseful, anyway.) In short, we spend the entire running time with characters that are not in any danger.

And despite that, it never fails to make the movie any less creepy.

The movie begins with the death of sixteen-year-old Alice Palmer (perhaps a nod to Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, yet another doomed teen girl whose own death was a mystery) after her drowning at a local lake, her family’s vacation spot (which, before you get ahead of yourself, was not the titular lake). Naturally her family is torn apart by the incident, and with her death taking place just a few days before Christmas, they each walk around in a stupor, unwilling to believe that the worst has happened. Each of them deal with Alice’s death in a different way: Dad goes back to work in an attempt to keep busy; Mom refuses to accept that her daughter has indeed passed on and is instead merely missing (Dad, only, identified the body); and Mathew, Alice’s brother, embraces his hobby of photography more than ever. But despite their different ways of mourning, all of them soon come together when they begin to experience the same thing: the potential haunting of their home by Alice’s ghost.

Lake Mungo plays like your typical “Dateline” special, utilizing the aforementioned sit-down interviews with immediate and extended family and friends, as well as home movies and photographs to tell its story. It honestly all plays out so realistically—even when the supernatural elements come into play—that it really feels like something you might watch one night on a news channel. 

The supernatural elements come into play once Mathew kicks his photograph hobby into high gear. Images of Alice seem to show up everywhere—inside the house as well as outside in the backyard. Because of this, Matt begins to set up a stationary video camera (pre-dating Paranormal Activity) to see if he can capture anything of note. What he captures is Alice.

It’s important to note that while Lake Mungo isn’t a full-fledged horror movie per se, that doesn’t mean it has no intention of trying to scare you, because it does. Again and again. But it chooses its moments to do so, so that when they do occur, it is far more shocking than it would normally be. Five minutes of creepy footage mixed into 85 other minutes of other creepy footage is just footage. It gets lost. But five minutes of creepy footage woven into a narrative about mourning and regret becomes jarring and real. And that’s what this movie is, really: a reflection on loss, and dealing with death, and with facing the notion that you can never truly know someone if they don’t want you to. There’s a great line in the film spoken by Alice’s best friend: “Alice kept secrets. She kept the fact that she kept secrets a secret.” Because as the story unfolds, we begin to realize that Alice was not the person her family believed her to be. And while such a proclamation immediately makes one assume Alice was in actuality a devious character, or a murderer, or something worse, that’s not the case here at all. It’s just that the Palmer family didn’t know everything about Alice they should have…and maybe Alice regretted that. Maybe, in death, Alice wanted her family to know who she truly was—her good faults as well as her bad.

The acting in this film is across-the-board fantastic and convincing. With a movie like this, one false performance can derail the proceedings. Because if you don’t believe what you’re seeing has happened, or could potentially happen, then you, the viewer, are left behind. No one in the film appears as if they are giving a “performance”—they just sell what has to be sold, which is that they are a grieving family undergoing strange events in their home and trying to make sense of it all.

While the movie’s running time is 10% “found footage,” and while a large portion of that “found footage” is simply every-day video taken by various family members over the years, there remains a scene, created with a cell phone video camera, that is extremely unnerving. It is the strength of this scene that demands Lake Mungo be included with the other found footage heavyweights The Blair Witch Project, Cannibal Holocaust, and Paranormal Activity. I know that a lot of folks out there disown movies like BWP and PA because, frankly, “You don’t see anything! They never show you the witch/ghost!” Well, number one, those people are foolish, anyway. And number two, Lake Mungo does indeed show you the villain—the antagonist. It shows you the force that has come and stolen the life of a young girl and left her family in tatters. It shows you death, coming at you from the darkness of Lake Mungo in shaky, blurry two-inch-by-two-inch camera phone video. It’s a scene that will literally chill you, and stay with you long after the movie is finished.

Lake Mungo was released in 2008 as part of the generally terrible After Dark Horror Fest/8 Horror Movies to Die For platform. For the uninitiated, these consist mainly of movies that are basically direct-to-video low-budgeters that are randomly picked and marketed as “the movies they didn’t want you to see.” Well, that’s partly true…because most of them are pretty terrible. And it feels dirty to see Lake Mungo bare the same banner as Lake Dead and Monster Man, two of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Soon after its release in 2008, it was announced that the producers of The Ring remake would be shepherding a remake of Lake Mungo, due for release in 2011. With 2011 coming to an end in less than two months and the movie not even entering pre-production, hopefully this is an idea long abandoned. While the movie is perfect just the way it is anyway, the damn thing is also in easily understandable, Australian-accented, English. And unless they were to pump recognizable faces into the American remake (which would defeat the whole purpose of this movie trying to feel real in the first place), why on earth would you bother?

I love horror movies. I’ve seen more horror movies than anyone I know. When I was a kid, and other kids my age were watching The Goonies, I was watching Friday the 13th or its derivatives. Whenever our family went to an uncle/aunt’s house for a holiday, it wasn’t long before I was sneaking away to watch whatever horror movies (on VHS, no less) they had in their cabinets. (This is how I first came to see Night of the Living Dead, Re-Animator, and A Nightmare on Elm Street.)

I say this to you because of the quite literally thousands of horror movies I have seen, only three have ever actually affected me: The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, and Lake Mungo. That’s pretty good company, I say. And I truly mean it. I look at a movie like Lake Mungo, and I see everything horror fans claim to want—real performances, real terror, intelligent writing, a supreme lack of horror clichés, and absolutely no pandering to its audience—and I wonder why more people do not know about this movie. Frankly, it’s a goddamn shame. It’s an unsung horror. 

(Oh yeah...be sure to watch the closing credits.)

REVIEW: BOY WONDER

Movies like Kick-Ass and Defendor should be embarrassed that other movies like Boy Wonder exist. Though the movie hews closer to classic vigilante movies like Death Wish and even The Crow, shades of superhero DNA are inherent throughout the movie; it’s about a boy taking matters into his own hands when justice fails to locate the criminals responsible for the death of his mother. And the movie tells its story in a way that never sensationalizes what the boy does when he prowls the streets at night, hidden from sight in his black hooded sweatshirt. While Kick-Ass lends more towards kids beating the shit out of criminals, all the while getting the shit beat out of themselves, there’s never real danger in that movie. Because it’s supposed to be “fun” and “goofy.” In Boy Wonder, you feel for your protagonist and understand why he is out on the streets doing what he is doing, though you wish he wasn’t. You wish he could overcome the emotional torment that forces him to do the things he does. And that is the success of the movie.

In the film’s prologue, we witness through the boy’s eyes the death of his mother—seemingly the inadvertent casualty of a high-jacking gone wrong. We also go on to learn that the boy’s father is an abusive drunk, and responsible for the multiple bruises found on the boy’s body. Despite this, our protagonist, Sean Donovan, is a survivor (played with great brooding strength by Caleb Steinmeyer). He is a top student, though an introverted one, and has just one school friend to speak of. But like all high school students, he yearns to be accepted, as well as for the attention from the girl for whom he pines. His relationship with his father (years sober and calmed) is damaged because of their past. He spends his days at the local police station scrolling through mugshots of known criminals, trying in vain to locate the perp responsible for his mother’s death…or is he? Because when night falls, he slides on his black hooded sweatshirt and takes to the streets to locate people who feels has escaped justice (in "Dexter"-inspired fashion).

Meanwhile, a detective new to the precinct, Teresa Ames, notices Sean in a way that no one else has seemed to and almost immediately begins to suspect Sean of wrongdoing. Though the two begin to form an unlikely friendship, the idea of Sean living a double life is never totally out of Ames’ mind. Little do either of them know just how intertwined their past and future will become.

Boy Wonder is a brave movie, and a pretty remarkable film debut for Steinmeyer. It’s up to him to carry the movie—to make the audience feel his pain and to understand the gruesome things he feels he must do. And he pulls it off with ease. James Russo is also remarkable as Sean’s father, and while his part could have been more lazily written as the constant antagonistic drunk father, he is instead written as a man who has gone above and beyond to reform himself, and wants nothing more than for his son to love him the way the boy loved his mother. In fact, the acting is pretty stellar across the board, the only weak spot being Zulay Henao as Detective Ames. While not a bad actress, she is woefully miscast in the part of the hardened defective struggling to juggle a career and a broken family. Her pretty face betrays the past the screenwriter has given her, and her first scene in the movie (a fairly formulaic, and by now, cliché meeting of her new partner who accidentally comes off sounding racist despite meaning well) does not lend her any favors in trying to come across as an original take on a typical movie archetype.

I've read some reviews of the movie that call it "conceptually confused" between a superhero movie and a vigilante movie, and to a point, I can agree. However, I wouldn't describe it as "confused" as much as a careful hybrid of the two. And after all, what is a superhero if not a vigilante? Batman is a superhero, but is he also not a vigilante?

Boy Wonder takes its time in setting up each of its characters, leading to the climax that you may or may not see coming. Let’s face it, movies of today feel they need a twist, and when there’s one character whose identity remains mysterious throughout the movie, yet is ultimately responsible for the movie’s entire plot, you always go for the person you “least” suspect. In this case, it’s not a fault of the script, nor of the story the writer wanted to tell—but perhaps the movie would have been better off telling us upfront the sins of this character, so that Sean’s journey towards justice would have felt more suspenseful and heartbreaking.

GRADE: A-

EVP

"You can [faintly] hear the three females talking throughout the recording. You will hear a female – the family member – say, 'Hello, baby,' and another long conversation. Those are all human voices. But what sounds like a struggle or attack is going on as well.

"The male [voice] you hear was not present at the hotel. You will hear a cuckoo clock (which was not present) a ticking of a hall clock (which was there); you will hear what sounds like the microphone being moved (which was not touched) and then the sound becomes clearer.

"You will hear a creaking door and slamming of the door, which is real. Then you will hear a [unknown] woman say, 'Get off me,' and what sounds like the woman being attacked. The struggle continues for awhile, and during the EVP you can hear some of my investigators' conversations. After interviewing my investigators, they said they went and sat on the stairs of this hotel, because they heard from an above floor, what sounded like footsteps and conversations, not what you hear on this recording. When the noises stop, you hear the investigators participate in a lulled conversation. They stated that they started to talk when the noises stopped. In their conversation, you will hear a male voice say, 'Help me' several times."

Read more.

UNSUNG HORRORS: THE INTRO

Horror fans (and I of course am one) are often unfairly maligned by the rest of cinema-viewing society. Because for some reason, we can’t seem to get enough of our beloved genre. The good, the bad, and everything in between, we need it—we need to consume it; and we do, in voracious, uncontrollable amounts. We have conventions and television channels and entire clothing lines; comic books and websites and collectible figures; and every single DVD release of Halloween that’s come down the pike (five so far). We live for it. To quote from "Millennium" (hey, a horror show!), this is who we are. And people notice this, and think us weird. Because, c’mon, who in their right mind walks around in a Freddy Krueger shirt? Who has the Tubular Bells as a ring tone? Who will actually wait two hours in line just to meet the guy who played a bit part in John Carpenter’s The Fog?

We do. Because we’re horror fans.

No one’s going to conventions for romantic comedies. No one has t-shirts dedicated to The Notebook or any of Tyler Perry’s nonsense. And sure as shit is no one waiting in line to meet Rob Schneider—that much I can guarantee you.

Horror, much like life itself, is cyclical. Fads come, we relish in them, we get sick of them, and then they go. After Halloween, we got sick of slasher movies. After Scream, we got sick of teen-casted, pop culture-centered, self-aware who-done-its. After The Ring, we got sick of wet ghost girls crawling out of wells and up walls and across ceilings. After the truly anemic Saw series, we got tired of seeing someone strapped to a table while their fingernails were removed. And could it be…after the poor box office performances of Let Me In, Fright Night, and The Thing…are we finally sick of remakes? (Some would argue that they were sick of them ever since Platinum Dunes saw fit to give us their take on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre back in ‘03, but horror fans’ opinions on message boards are not adhered to as much as they would like to think—it’s the wallets of the mainstream audience that speak volumes.) And sure, while remakes are bad ideas in general, and have only illuminated just how idea-bankrupt Hollywood has become, some of them are just fine. Like that Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake I spoke of earlier. It ain’t half bad. And neither is Zack Snyder’s take on Dawn of the Dead. Sure, your fiercely protective horror fans will lambaste them in some misguided sense of loyalty, and I can understand that. But as far as both of these remakes are concerned, audiences and critics agreed, and the two movies were rightly considered successes. (Entertainment Weekly gave Dawn an A-! Entertainment Weekly! A zombie movie! An A-!)

But what about the other hundreds of remakes and sequels that have come out? Did the world really need Rob Zombie’s truly abhorrent take on Halloween (2007)? Did we really need to find out the back-story of Billy in Black Christmas (2006)? And my goodness, how do you fuck up Friday the 13th (2009) so badly? We’re not talking Shakespeare here, people—we’re talking Voorhees. It’s a pretty cut-and-dried concept, and yet these tepid filmmakers managed to produce a movie filled with annoying characters, boring deaths, and the lazy presence of an iconic figure whose own myth was underrated and disrespected. I’d rather have seen a sequel to the truly ridiculous Jason X than this mess. And speaking of sequels, did you know that with the recent release of the by-all-accounts-terrible Hellraiser: Revelations, there are now more Hellraiser entries that went direct-to-video than were released in theaters? Did you know there are now TEN Children of the Corn movies? Fucking ten! (One of them being a big budget remake in the hands of Dimension Films.) Who the fuck is still renting Children of the Corn ??

So why am I railing on this genre I so claim to love, you ask? What does this have to do with anything? Because I have a problem with horror fans. A huge problem. I love them all, and I count myself as one amongst their flock, but they are a very persnickety bunch. Though they consume every subgenre of horror in bulldozer-sized chunks, they are constantly begging for something new and different; and yet, when something new and different finally comes their way, they ignore it. They claim to desire something fresh and unique, and not just a rehash of everything that has come before, but at the end of the day, they’re sell outs—the same they accuse their beloved filmmakers Carpenter, Romero, and Craven of being for selling off the rights to their film properties for many of the ill-advised remakes that have assaulted our community (and in most cases were not even owned by the filmmakers in the first place). Horror fans speak loudly, but do not carry a big stick. They stay home. They download Hostel 2. They fight on IMDB. But they do not support the original horror that needs to be supported. They instead rent Hellraisers 6, 7, and 8, which has now led us to 9.  Those movies are garbage, and they know they are. And while they claim to want more, they simply don't deliver. Why do they eagerly pony up their money to go see bullshit like The Hitcher (2007), in some cases more than once, but let something like the brilliant Zodiac fall by the wayside (which was released the same god damn year)?

Before finally coming to the end of my rant, allow me to explain what a horror fan is, first, in order to help mend fences: We’re the ones who stick by all the bullshit that gets released. We’re the ones keeping the candle lit for further (pure) adventures in Haddonfield, Springwood, and Crystal Lake. We’re the ones who (used to, anyway, while they still existed) sifted through the bargain bins of mom-and-pop video stores looking for an unheralded little gem to thrill us for 90 minutes. We’re the ones who ultimately ended up dipping into European cinema to grab at their take on the zombie subgenre, whose levels of gore and violence blew our own out of the water. We’re the ones who grin and bear it through tedious franchise pictures (looking at you, Child’s Play ) in hopes that the next installment will actually be good. (We know it’s possible; there have been high points in long-running franchises: Halloween 4 for one, The Exorcist III: Legion, another, and even Freddy vs. Jason—yeah, I said it.) We’re even the ones who every once in a while actually have a bit of power and help shape a movie like, say, Snakes on a Plane. (Sorry about that one, by the way.) And sure, sometimes those “other” people—read: mainstream audiences—dip their toes into our pool and walk away with a Paranormal Activity, a Silence of the Lambs, or a Seven. And good for them. But we remain behind, like ever-loyal soldiers. We suffer through horseshit like One Missed Call and the Resident Evil movies, and my goodness, Prom Night (2009). Because it’s our genre. It’s our family, and like family, you take the good with the bad. For every fun Cousin Dave, there’s a thousand creepy Uncle Chesters with whom you’ve got no choice but to co-exist, and we’ve made our peace with that. Like wedding vows between a bride and groom, we’ve signed on for the long haul—through good and bad, health and sickness, [REC] and Quarantine. For every Dracula, there’s a thousand Twilights. But horror fans need to be more discerning. You want to rent one of the rip-offs produced by the Asylum? Fine. I can't tell you any different. But why not keep an eye out for the movies actually worth your time? Why not keep an eye on message boards, or any of the top horror movie websites out there (ShockTillYouDrop.com, DreadCentral.com)? Except for radical misfires every so often (people love Repo: The Genetic Opera? Really?), these guys are on the money, and they know their shit.

Horror shapes the world—it’s a part of our history, our culture, and our subconscious. Fear is our most primal emotion. As John Carpenter states, we’re born afraid. We die afraid. It’s the only emotion we’re guaranteed to feel as human beings. It’s the first and last emotion we’ll ever experience.

The very first narrative film is believed to be Edison’s take on Frankenstein. To date, there have been more books written about Jack the Ripper than Abraham Lincoln. In fifty years, no one will be talking about The Social Network, "NCIS," or even Snooki. They’ll be talking about Michael Myers, "The Twilight Zone," and George Romero. They won’t be breaking down the events of "House" or "Big Love," but they’ll still be analyzing "Twin Peaks" and "The X-Files."

The horror genre is staggering—it’s an aphrodisiac. It has the power to stay with you long after you leave the theater. It’s that palpable force that makes you cautious to turn off the light—that makes you check your backseat, or gives you pause before flashing your high beams at a passing car whose own headlights are off.

Every once in a while, a genuinely great horror movie—one that would rightfully be considered a classic, had it gotten more exposure and love at the box office—makes an appearance. It comes, no one notices, and it goes. But movies like this are important. They need to be treasured and remembered. If intelligent, original horror is supported, then that's what we'll begin to receive, in droves. We need to make these movies a part of the legendary genre we hold so dear. Because these are the unsung horrors. These are the movies that should have been successful, but were instead ignored. They should be rightfully praised for the freshness and intelligence and craft that they have contributed to our genre forevermore.

So, better late than never, we’re going to celebrate them now…one at a time.

Part one: Lake Mungo. Coming soon.

KILL YOU ALL

“He reached out with one bird-claw hand. He closed it around my wrist and I could feel the hot cancer that was loose and raving through his body, eating anything and everything left that was still good to eat.”

DID YOU HEAR THE NEWS ABOUT EDWARD?

Edward Mordrake was reportedly the 19th century heir to an English peerage. He supposedly had an extra face on the back of his head, which could neither eat nor speak, although it could laugh and cry. Edward begged doctors to have his "demon head" removed, because it whispered horrible things to him at night.

No doctor would attempt it. 

He committed suicide at the age of 23.

HAPPY EASTER

 

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