The Secretary's Files
Dear Horror Fans,
They say bad things come in threes, but when you let Netflix’s “Because You Watched…” feature influence your decisions, bad movies actually come by the dozens. I’m sure you’ll forgive me for deciding to limit myself to pairs that share a familiar horror sub-genre so I can weigh in on who did it better! As an aside, I stuck with recent releases in an attempt to review the best new horror. (Okay, I don’t know about “best,” but it’s definitely new!) As always, here there be spoilers.
The “SFW-Stranded-On-A-Deserted-Highway” Sub-Genre
You know the basic set-up: Single White Female on a road trip gets stranded with little hope of rescue, must find hidden inner strength to fight Generic Bad Guy. Usually, the scenario is merely a vehicle – heh heh, get it? – to transport the heroine to the dark, scary woods, deserted hotel, or run-down farmhouse where the chainsaw-wielding maniac, horribly disfigured inbred, or leathery bat-winged creature awaits. In these particular movies, however, the plot never moves much beyond the highway.
Curve (2016) – When bride-to-be Mallory gets cold feet and decides to take the road less traveled, she promptly experiences car trouble and is assisted by handsome hitchhiker, Christian, whom she ends up giving a ride against her better judgement. In an instant, his pleasant demeanor turns menacing and sexually aggressive, and the young woman is forced to wreck her SUV down a ravine to avoid her impending assault. The vehicle comes to a rest on its roof with the driver’s side door crushed against a tree, leaving Mallory dangling upside down with her left leg hopelessly trapped. Although Christian is thrown from the vehicle, the sociopathic hitchhiker is relatively unscathed and soon regains consciousness, callously leaving Mallory to her fate as he hikes off into the wilderness.
Over the next three days, the trapped heroine engages in a convincing struggle to remain alive. She rations her water, builds a small fire, catches and roasts a field mouse, bathes herself as best she can with handy wipes, and drinks her own urine, among other things; but despite these admirable survival strategies, it is all too clear that Malory will never be able to extricate herself without assistance, and that her efforts are only delaying the inevitable. Worse, Christian periodically returns to taunt Mallory with promises of food and water that never materialize, along with tales of a family he is now terrorizing in a nearby cabin. Eventually, Christian delivers a hacksaw and informs Mallory that she must amputate her pinned leg if she wants to free herself. Before the trapped woman can do more than make a few wince-inducing scratches with the saw, however, it begins to rain – and this is where the movie’s gritty realism devolves into a series of farfetched plot twists.
As the rain starts coming down, Christian returns one final time to let Mallory know that this particular stretch of mountainous highway just so happens to be prone to flash flooding and is in the process of being evacuated; thus, with no hope of rescue and the ravine rapidly filling up with water, Mallory must finish cutting off her leg or resign herself to drowning. Instead of either one of those things happening, the SUV is soon swept away down a swollen river, and the young woman’s leg is finally dislodged as the vehicle jostles along. Managing to swim to safety, Mallory laboriously hobbles to the cabin where Christian has brutally murdered a married couple and taken their teenaged daughter captive. As Malory creeps through the yard and around the side of the house, she avoids numerous bear traps obviously set by Christian, who is currently inside the cabin, monologuing about how he really can’t be blamed for his actions when people keep offering him rides and inviting him into their homes. (Apparently, sociopaths and vampires follow the same rule book.) Mallory eventually sneaks into the house and frees the girl, but neither of them manages to escape before Christian realizes he has company. Despite her exhaustion, Mallory manages to gain the upper hand and push Christian over a balcony railing and into the waiting jaws of a bear trap on the ground below. In an ironic twist too clumsy and cliché to be truly satisfying, Mallory then offers Christian a knife to amputate his leg before limping off into the woods with the rescued teenager.
Unfortunately, the final few minutes of “Curve” only serve to cheapen what was otherwise a harrowing fight for survival. Let us be clear: Mother Nature is a bitch, and She doesn’t hand out the kind of flash flood freebies that save stranded heroines right before exposure, gangrene, and sepsis set in. Realistically, Malory would have had to hack off her leg “Saw”-style, drag her maimed self to the highway before she died of blood loss, and then find a way to adapt to life as an amputee – but that would have been too much actual horror for this movie.
Wrecker (2015) – As generic as its title, Wrecker is essentially Joy Ride with none of the thrills and even less plot. The film opens with a bickering middle-aged couple stranded on a deserted stretch of California highway known as Devil’s Pass. Despite the painfully clichéd name, there is absolutely nothing ominous about the colorful panorama of rocky hills and stubby pine trees. Hubby cluelessly putters around under the hood of the station wagon before declaring the engine a goner. Wifey is content to sit in the passenger seat and bitch about the lack of cell phone reception. They’re both overweight and unattractive, so their only purpose in this film is to be brutally murdered by some bad m’f’er.
Instead of delivering the expected gore, the film cuts to a pair of young women speeding down the same highway in a sexy red Mustang. A blonde in a little white lace sundress repeatedly laughs at nothing and pushes the accelerator past 100 while a brunette in teeny-tiny shorts and a black midi top chugs beer non-stop, smokes a joint, and flashes her tits at a hitchhiker. Horror movies always punish trashy behavior, so the brunette obviously won’t make it to the end. As they zip around a curve at breakneck speed, the blonde, Emily, cautions party girl Leslie to slow down a bit; if this were a better film, the irony would have been intentional. We soon find out that Emily has ditched her probably-cheating boyfriend to go road-tripping with Leslie, yet she still cares enough about the boyfriend’s opinion to have lied about her weekend whereabouts. This revelation is too thin to constitute actual character development, but now we know that no one will be coming to save Emily because only her passenger knows her true whereabouts.
Before long, the girls end up behind a slow-moving behemoth of a wrecker towing the stranded station wagon from the opening scene. Unable to stand the foul-smelling diesel fumes, they decide to pull around the wrecker, but every time Emily gets an opportunity to pass on the twisty highway, the driver speeds up or swerves to block them. When he finally waves them around, they almost collide with oncoming traffic and have to swerve back behind the wrecker. Emily guns the car at the next opportunity, and Leslie throws a beer bottle and screams profanities as they leave the wrecker in their dust. Bad move. Cut to a shot of the wrecker’s rearview mirror, where a pentagram and an upside-down cross dangle. Clearly, they’ve screwed with the wrong… Satanist? The massive truck promptly chases them up the highway at speeds that shouldn’t be possible while still towing a clunker, appearing at every turn. The girls are really screwed when the psycho finally decides to ditch the station wagon to pursue even faster. Much like any Friday the 13th movie, no matter how fast they run, the crazy trucker always catches up. Even when they pull the mustang off the road and the wrecker whooshes past on what has to be America’s longest road with zero turn-offs, it always manages to end up looming in their rear view again. Of course, there is no cell phone reception, and the pay phone in every diner and rest station kiosk along the way is out of order.
After what seems like hours of some of the most lackluster chase scenes ever filmed, the Mustang blows a tire, and the girls have to make a run for it across a field. Emily promptly trips and hits her head on a rock. Because that’s what blondes do in horror movies. When she wakes up, Leslie is missing and her faceless stalker has… changed her tire for her. You know, so he can chase her some more. And run down the state cop who pulls her over for speeding. And drive through the one working gas station pay phone in a three-hundred-mile radius just seconds after she identifies herself to a 911 operator. And so it goes, all through the night and into the next day. At this point, I was so bored I hardly had energy to groan when I noticed that one of the panoramic views of the “deserted” highway actually showed… a few houses. You know, those nice wooden structures that have people, and phones, and back yards where you can hide your car? Who the hell edited this film? By the time the overtaxed sports car started having engine trouble and Emily decided she was tired of running and wanted to play chicken, I… didn’t care. Nor did I care when she realized that her missing friend had been dead in her trunk the whole time; or when she used her battered sports car to push the wrecker the rest of the way off a cliff; or when she drove away to God knows where without calling 911 at the scene of the accident, even though she finally had cell phone reception. I didn’t even care that we never saw more of the driver than his boots, or that there was absolutely no back story for why he was a psychopath. And I really, really didn’t care when the final shot was of some stranded female wandering into a junkyard where a strikingly similar wrecker (in impossibly good condition, if we are supposed to believe that this is the same vehicle that went over a cliff) apparently waits to menace her.
Ignore the fact that “Wrecker” is trending on Netflix. Not even free is a selling point! While both movies are entirely predictable, “Curve” is definitely the superior of the two! I’m not going to say “Curve” was a great movie, but at least it managed to be engaging throughout.
The “SFW-Stranded-On-A-Deserted-Highway” Sub-Genre
Limited settings such as an old house or a creepy woods can make or break a low-budget psychological horror, or one that wants to capture the feel of one. In these cases, both “Big Sky” and “VANish” went the extreme-claustrophobic route with the bulk of the action limited to the insides of vans, with mixed results.
Big Sky (2015) – When a van carrying psychiatric patients to a treatment center is attacked by a pair of gunmen who kidnap a rich kleptomaniac and shoot the other passengers, a severely agoraphobic teenager named Hazel must brave the great outdoors to save her badly injured mother, Dee. Although Hazel’s torturous inch-by-inch trek across a barren wasteland takes her out of the safe haven of her cargo box in the rear of the van – which is how the kidnappers didn’t notice her, in the first place – the camera makes effective use of first-person POV by focusing on the narrow span of her faltering steps through a peephole in the scarf wrapped around her head, thus conveying a sense of enclosed space despite the wide-open landscape. Neither is the van-as-storytelling-device entirely abandoned, since the camera often revisits Dee’s plight. Initially concerned only with not bleeding to death from a nasty gunshot wound to the gut, Dee must eventually battle the kidnappers with the dead van driver’s gun when they return to clean up the crime scene.
Unfortunately, that’s just about the sum total of “what works” in this movie. Kyra Sedgwick is so convincingly pathetic as a washed-up alcoholic with a never-ending series of junkie boyfriends that Dee is almost entirely unlikeable. Likewise, Hazel’s phobias are so crippling that her plight swiftly becomes irritating to watch. Yeah, I get it. Psychological horror doesn’t work unless the protagonist is absolutely terrorized, and obviously the girl has significant issues or she wouldn’t be facing impending institutionalization. But there are only so many times you can watch the chick count her chill-pills or whisper “just have to get to the next little cactus… and then the next one… and then that rock…” before you want to scream at her to move her ass, her mom is bleeding to death, FFS! At least the mother and daughter characters are believable; the same cannot be said of the bad guys, who turn out to be a cop and his gun-happy mentally handicapped half-brother, who appear intent on reenacting “Of Mice and Men,” minus the rabbits. Or the brains of the operation doing the right thing and putting a bullet in the feeble-minded one’s head as soon as it becomes apparent that he’s a homicidal loose cannon. Or the audience giving a crap about either one of them.
Eventually, Hazel manages to get rescued by a hippy-dippy rancher couple who own the trading post that was her intended destination. The couple figures out that the cop isn’t at the crime scene to be helpful and prove that ranchers know how to use shotguns to kill pesky varmints, then call an ambulance for Dee just before she finishes bleeding out and release the kidnapped debutante from the trunk of the cop car. Despite this “happy ending,” nothing is truly resolved. It’s fairly obvious that Hazel’s cross-country trek didn’t overcome her phobias, and it’s doubtful that even a near-death experience will cause Dee to become Mother of the Year. For this reason, the psychological journey in “Big Sky” simply feels like a brief, pointless detour.
And this movie wasn’t one bit scary. It just wasn’t.
VANish (2015) – Another van, another kidnapping. This time, there is only a single victim, the daughter of a drug cartel kingpin played by none other than Danny Trejo, and the lead criminal is considerably more likable than the cop in “Big Sky.” As it turns out, nice-guy-kidnapper is using the girl as bait to force a confrontation with her kingpin father, who murdered nice-guy-kidnapper’s dad and dad’s new Latin lover… who just happened to be none other than the kingpin’s estranged wife. Once the girl hears nice-guy-kidnapper’s story and realizes the truth behind her mother’s disappearance, she’s ready to help him off dear old dad, whom she hasn't seen in two years, anyway; unfortunately, the other two kidnappers just want the ransom money, and one of them keeps waving a gun.
Unlike “Big Sky,” the entirety of the movie really is shot inside the van, to great effect; and despite the pun-ny title, the camera work is so natural that the single setting doesn’t feel gimmicky or forced until the last few minutes, when the interior of the van turns into an improbable setting for an all-out bloodbath. It was inevitable that the kidnappers would turn on one another, although the way it plays out rather jumps the shark. While nice-guy-kidnapper is out taking a leak, squirrelly-wheelman-kidnapper savagely stabs trigger-happy-halfwit-kidnapper to death following a brief struggle for the gun, then speeds off, ostensibly to save the girl from being senselessly murdered… but, as it turns out, he really just wants to rape and murder her without interference. The kingpin’s daughter does a fine job of turning her would-be rapist into mincemeat with various implements in the van, though she takes a few stab wounds, herself, and ends up covered in more blood than Carrie. She then drives to the meet-up spot, coerces a confession out of her father, and signals nice-guy-kidnapper to leap up from behind the seat and start spraying bullets at the man who killed both their parents, revealing that she'd circled back for him. Unfortunately, bullets go both ways, and nice-guy-kidnapper is fatally wounded. With a shrug, the kingpin's daughter shoves his body out of the passenger seat and complacently drives away in a gore-spattered van that probably wouldn’t make it a mile down the highway without attracting attention from the state police. Somehow, I don't think she's going to make it home in time for her psychology exam and live happily ever after in a nice private practice...
Ultimately, while “VANish” is more entertaining (and gory) than “Big Sky,” it isn’t one bit scarier, no matter how much murder and mayhem the description promised. In fact, it feels like a Quentin Tarantino “Grindhouse” sequel, and not just because of Danny Trejo – but at least THAT flick was accurately billed as a horror movie! Ultimately, if you’re looking for scares, don’t watch either one of them.
The Reinvented Zombie Sub-Genre
Zombie movies have become rather passe despite the popularity of post-apocalyptic survival horror, particularly since "The Walking Dead" does it better in 48 minutes than most films can do in two hours. It is therefore no surprise that recent zombie flicks have sought ways to reinvent the sub-genre, either by altering the nature of the virus or the method of delivering the story, and these two films accomplished the task admirably.
Maggie (2015) – Arnold Swartzenager takes the surprisingly understated lead in this intentionally slow-paced zombie-drama about a father struggling to come to terms with the inevitable demise of his oldest child, the eponymous Maggie. The dusty Midwestern setting would have equally suited a Depression-Era biopic about the mundane tragedies of dustbowl farmers, but these widespread crop failures have been caused, not by soil erosion, but by a series of solar flares. In an already-dying world, the withering fields provide both literal and symbolic counterparts for the simultaneously occurring “necroambulist” virus, an incurable disease that slowly turns its victims into the walking dead.
The Latinized moniker for the zombie plague is not the only clever way “Maggie” seeks to reinvent the sub-genre. In this not-quite-apocalypse, the survivors have developed a system for dealing with the infected: monitor the progression of the disease until its final, terminal stages, then turn the victim over to the authorities for euthanasia before he or she turns cannibalistic, succumbs to advanced necrosis, and resurrects. Granted, rumors abound that the quarantine facilities are not nearly as humane as advertised, and the family doc confidentially admits to Maggie’s father that a bullet to the brain is a far less painful method than the lethal injection – but at least the infected have the opportunity to spend a few final weeks with friends and family instead of being killed on sight. Of course, the reality of consigning a family member to his or her fate is no more sanitized than the clinics themselves, and therein lies the “meat” of the story: Would you relinquish your spouse or parent or offspring to the authorities, or would you have the strength to end their suffering with the dignity of a bullet? And if the latter, how do you know when it’s time to pull the trigger?
Although far more drama than horror, “Maggie” does deliver a few truly creepy moments. A fully-turned necroambulist provides a jump-scare in a seemingly deserted convenience store, offering Swartzenegar a single opportunity for hand-to-hand action, even if we are treated to the labored grappling of an aging farmer rather than the CGI-enhanced badassery we’re used to. A father-daughter zombie pair shambling through a dark woods provide the only other glimpse of the ultimate result of the disease, though the moment is as poignant as it is creepy, since our protagonist must put an end to what used to be his neighbors, an act that foreshadows what he must do for his daughter. But mostly, the horror in this film is Maggie’s literal decay, an excruciatingly slow advance of milky cataracts and spidery black veins. We are simultaneously treated to the zombie plague from the perspective of the dying, not the surviving, even as we share the death watch with her father. In standard zombie fare, gaping wounds and putrid flesh are rendered for maximum gross-out, the gorier the better; here, a single gangrenous finger stirs only pity.
Unfortunately, the torturously slow progression of necroambulism does cause the movie to drag near the end. There are only so many times the father can ward off the authorities while continuing to delude himself about how much longer Maggie can resist her cannibalistic urges before the film becomes philosophically tedious. Instead of allowing Maggie to experience every possible minute of her life before upholding a father’s duty to ensure the most painless ending possible, it becomes clear that he probably won’t have the cajones to pull the trigger – and his inaction, which only serves to prolong her now-considerable suffering, is almost as cruel as the ravages of the disease itself. When Maggie finally spares her father by flinging herself off the second-story roof, her suicide is simultaneously her father’s failing and her own triumph, for she dies with her humanity intact, remembering sweet moments from her childhood as she falls.
Re-Kill (2015) – The trailer screamed low-budget travesty, and I really, really expected this one to suck. Actually, it was incredibly entertaining, and for once, I didn’t mind the shaky-cam found footage storytelling. Sure, all the grainy shots and bouncing around was probably a way to save money on zombie prosthetics, but at least there was a lot of action.
Much like “Maggie,” the survivors of the zombie plague have found a way to deal with the undead, which they call Re-Ans, short for the Re-Animated. Five years after the outbreak, the remainder of the population lives in housing developments surrounded by huge concrete walls. Apparently, Reality TV managed to survive the apocalypse, as well. Cheeky commercials promote sex to repopulate the earth and tout the benefits of smoking (“Hey, you’ll never live long enough for cancer to get you – enjoy!”), and the number-one rated show is a “Cops”-style program that follows the men and women of the R-Division as they hunt down the remaining Re-Ans in mostly urban settings. It’s a fun and clever way to justify the found footage gimmick, although the plot itself is considerably less inspired. The Re-Ans are fast zombies, and incredibly hard to kill; sometimes, not even a head shot is enough. When the squad leader realizes that there sure are a lot more of the dead than there used to be, and that a second great outbreak is inevitable, naturally a government-run experiment that was supposed to wipe out the virus but instead created a smarter, more organized form of Re-An is to blame.
And that is where the movie hits a bit of a metacognitive snag. If the Re-An situation is totally FUBAR and all those nice communities are about to be swarmed by thousands of the running dead, why is anyone still watching TV instead of circling the wagons? Or could this be a re-run of a threat that was already nullified, even though we are repeatedly informed that the program is live via satellite feed? “Re-Kill” does eventually address these issues, though rather clumsily. As it turns out, the program was being watched by a little girl all alone in a badly trashed condo, and by the time the TV loses signal and the picture turns to snow, she has succumbed to a bite that was likely inflicted by her absent parents and taken to eating the mice that have invaded the house. The scene then cuts to a huge government bunker where the surviving R-Division member has discovered that the religious fanatic-cum-conspiracy theorist on her squad had been right all along. There really is a giant ark, and the government really has been hand-picking survivors to wait out the second wave of the plague on the high seas… dun dun dun!
I have no idea if they’re planning a “Re-Kill” sequel, but I have no doubt it would be horrible if they did. Without the “Cops”-style gimmick, it would just be low budget zombies on a boat. I’ll just tune in to Fear the Walking Dead for that!
Bottom line: I recommend both movies. Neither is perfectly satisfying, but they both have enough merits to make them worth watching. That said, there is no clear winner in this round of “Who Did It Better?” because the films are incredibly dissimilar. If you’re in the mood for philosophical feels, go for ‘Maggie”; if you want your zombie fare cheesy and full of machine gun clatter, “Re-Kill” is your movie.
And that’s it for this edition of the Secretary’s File 13 Horror Review. Next time, I’ll be reviewing “The Final Girls” (truly excellent movie!), “The Visit,” “Pay the Ghost,” and "Tiger House,"
