Frozen Terror! COLD PREY, WIND CHILL, DEAD OF WINTER (AKA LOST SIGNAL), DEVIL'S PASS, COLD PREY 2

It's always nice to ride out the brutal chills of February with horror films more frozen than oneself. I'm writing this during the Winter Olympics and watching people shooting and skiing and luging and getting massive air on snowboarding can leave one feeling inordinately guilty for being so lazy and warm, but watching winter strand poor folks in the middle of nowhere, leading to the collapse of objective reality and fights for survival that for all you know may be already lost, that's cool. Go figure.

Here are four solid examples I've seen this week, some of which via streaming. So make sure the flask on the collar of your St. Bernard is filled with good brandy, board up and insulate the windows, keep the heater on and keep the generator close --so no thing or person can cut the power.

Of course there's already some classics of this genre which have the gold now and forever. The Thing 1951, The Thing 1982, The Thing 2011 (here). And there's also a recent Netflix stream favorite, Pontypool (my praiseful review here). But why stop there - the cold night beckons.

COLD PREY

2006 - ***

Viktoria Winge (above) is a gorgeous Nordic alien hybrid gone snowboarding way off the Norwegian grid with a group of friends, but when one breaks his leg so they seek shelter at an abandoned ski lodge. But hey, it's not totally abandoned. And the generator still works. Cold Prey isn't ashamed of its generic slasher roots, and indeed builds up from the premise with measured quality, wit, and great moody dark cinematography that studiously avoids the usual dripping industrial torture basement look of so many similar 'wayfarers stranded in a remote killer's lair' horrors. There's even some cozy ambience in the beginning, some tick-tock momentum, as the kids take over the ski lodge lounge area, helping themselves to the booze on the mantle, starting a fire, goofing around but not in annoying American sneering perv kind of way. The film keeps unleashing ghoulish little surprises, the acting is solid through and through (characters interact and play off each other's dynamics very well) and the climactic battle way out in the middle of the frozen emptiness is unique and totally chilling. In Norwegian with English subtitles, not that you really need them. There's apparently a solid sequel that picks up where this leaves off (like Halloween II) and then a third that totally sucks (like Halloween VI).

WIND CHILL

2007 - **1/4

Emily Blunt plays a character few films realize exists: the old-before-their-time hottie who's gotten away with being 'difficult' for so long (if the girl is hot, dudes will put up anything) she doesn't know how to stop. Now she has become so used to being alone she barely knows how to make a friend. I've been her friend, girls like that, one is even in one of my own movies! I can say that because I know she'll never read this, just like Blunt's character wouldn't. She's impervious to threat, she thinks, even accepting a ride from a creepy freshman (Ashton Holmes) home to Delaware for the holidays. Director Gregory Jacobs' film might have been creepy enough just from Ashton Holmes slowly revealing he doesn't actually live anywhere near where he's taking her, and the whole ride share thing is a ploy to meet her, but that gradually fades away once they're stuck in a weird ghost time loop on a lonesome side road, visited by an array of ghosts, including a scary psycho cop played in a way that sticks with you by Martin Donovan.

 Snowman skull subliminal!

Produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, there seems to have been some original intention to make this a creepy two hander with a stalker and an antisocial narcissist, but along the way a bunch of ghosts and a complete disconnection from reality overkills it. We can dig the way the collapse of the social sphere and disorienting symbolic structure can make one privy to the tricks of ghosts as long as there's some awesome twist or gotcha moment to snap all the disparate elements into place. There isn't, but at least Blunt gets a chance to carry a film. The journey is supposed to be through Pennsylvania, a very creepy place, but was actually shot in Canada, where life is cheap! 

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DEAD OF WINTER

 (AKA LOST SIGNAL)

2007 - ***1/2

Driving at night in wintery weather when you're tripping way too hard is a very nerve-wracking and bizarre experience, especially wearing smudgy glasses. For one thing, your 3-D space is way off so the road feels like it's just a 2-D postcard in your lap and the frost on the edges of your windshield seems to extend before you like a tunnel of ice.When the traffic lights change your heart jumps in your throat as the newly arrived colors prism through the salty windshield in extreme primary and secondary color blasts that come out of nowhere, like UFOs. Taking place over one long New Years night, the film follows a young couple (Al Santos and Sandra McCoy) who do some shots they don't know are spiked with LSD at a New Years party, before splitting and having the drugs hit on the drive home. From there they get lost and wind up either killing or be killed-ing. This doesn't make too much sense as the couple does lines of coke at the party, so they should at least know they're high on something when they start hallucinating strange pursuers on the drive home (one never knows all the shit they cut coke with, such as meth, PCP, aspirin, or B-12, so has to be prepared), instead of abandoning their car and getting lost in the woods. But are they crazy or is someone really out to get them? Kudos to the film that for a fair chunk we cannot tell.

I like to think that if director Brian McNamara had the budget he could have created some nice effects in that vein. And I hiss like a rabid snake at this film's detractors, who clearly have never been lost in the woods at night, or taken too much LSD or become convinced that their girlfriend is trying to kill them, or been feeling the pressure from ghost bathroom attendants to 'correct' his naughty wife and child. I also know the feeling of seeing a face -- usually a townie with a thousand yard stare -- who always seems to be watching from behind some partition at the party and he represents your death, your psychopomp, and no one else can see him (you think). He's just a quiet dude at the party, he wishes! When you finally go up to confront him he turns out to be a mix of shadow and a macrame owl on the basement wall. Now you get scared because you don't know where your death went, he's not in your sights. You turn to the 1.75 of Old Granddad to wipe the electric madness from you with a soft black cloth, and if you're me, what do you put on the VCR to come down with once you finally get that car home? That's right. Pre-code Betty Boop cartoons.  and The Cocaanuts (1929). Train of thought, reverse!

Good as it all is, McNamara should have checked imdb before naming his film, there's about eighty movies called Dead of Winter. Lost Signal is a pretty weak title, too. May I suggest Acid Snow? Or Ice Tripping?

Another problem is how constant cutting back and forth to the toasty police station and various phone calls amidst law enforcement saps the trippy momentum (it would have been great if we never saw who was on the other line, and had the lady cop just shows up out of the darkness), and yet this is all apparently based on a true story, with recorded 911 calls to prove it! Hell, I believe it. The woods are mysterious, dark and deep, and anyone who's been to them at night, on psychedelics (or a spooked kid), knows how their ancient magic can bend reality and expose deep archetypal roots too vivid and real for normal adult daytime senses to decode (and, if their senses can't decode it, they tend to block it out as unimportant, even violently suppress those whose senses aren't so hindered). The hallucinations here are much less elaborate here than, say, the top shelf 'becoming-animal' visions of Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) but it tries, and that's what counts. Even without CGI or LSD, Dead of Winter allows us to can see what schizophrenics, animals, and psychic mediums see all the time, the fifth dimensional vortex intelligences of the woods, and how the trees are in on it. Which came first, the ghost or our ability to finally see it?! The only answer isn't.

The low budget is no problem in that regard and in its small way Winter is a sleeper little icicle of modernist ambiguity which anyone whose every been lost for hours whilst a mere block from their apartment or who appreciates the great works of modernist 'collapse of objective reality' ambiguity like The Shining or Antonioni's Red Desert, will understand what director Brian McNamara and writers Robert Egan and Graham Silver are aiming for. These cats clearly know the full range of horrors that LSD in a receptive mind can create out of the winter sights and sounds, and having gone to college (and all that entails) up in wintry Syracuse I can authenticate their every last impression. Your mileage may vary but the world can't wait all day for you to catch up and Dead is, at least for a decent chunk, a great entry in the modernist alienation collapse-of-the-symbolic horror genre, and one of those few and rare mysteries wherein we can't tell whether or not the protagonist/s (and by extension the viewer) are being fucked with by external (ghosts - gaslighting spouses, tree spirits) or internal (latent psychosis, LSD, cabin fever) forces --and if quantum physics tells us anything it's that there is no difference.

 COLD PREY 2

2008 - ***1/2

The first was so good I had to go back for seconds, especially after learning that the sequel picks up right where the last one left off, ala Halloween 2, covering similar 'later that night' and following the final girl to the local hospital territory. Character development is solid, actors likable (no vile cliche like H2's sleaze bag goomba EMT), and the vibe and beautiful cinematography from the first film carry over flawlessly. The action takes its sweet time regrouping, chronicling the interaction of a sleepy little hospital in the process of closing, but there's a good sense of tick-tock momentum, and a vivid sense of the vast emptiness of Norwegian mountain regions. Those of us who have misgivings about the medical community's insistence on saving the lives of even psychopathic killers will be very pleased at the comeuppance rewarded the unexamined practice, and the crazy loner sociopath Viking murderer figure is a nice representation of the bloody past of the Norwegian people, rising up into the country's current sleepy socialized medication and education and uniform fraternal sophistication to smite the complacent youths. And it's pretty gratifying to see our heroine finally wise up and go all Ripley in Aliens. Nordics rock -- if you have any doubt about the Nordic awesomeness, just look at the high scoring teams of the Olympics -- Norway, especially. And then check out the whole issue of Acidemic devoted to their grace and hotness -- issue #7 - The Nordics. 

  DEVIL'S PASS

2013 - ***

Renny Harlin is back, his ear low to the ground, like an Indian! Has there been a director who's both made and lost so much money so fast? Now he's playing it a little wiser, ala recent work by De Palma, slim in budget, returning to an off-the-cuff approachwith no chance for budgetary bloating. Devil's Pass (written by Vikram Weet) is definitely lean and mean as a result, with a plot that combines elements of many other films including The Blair Witch Project melded to the very real mystery of the the 1959 Dyatlov Pass incident. And there's rounds of wodka shots!

That's a good beginning but the thing about a great mystery like Dyatlov is that any 'answer' formulated in a fiction film is going to be a let-down. Harlin manages to keep the cameras whiplash-free and to ensure there's always some new layer to penetrate, and the acting is pretty top flight, especially Holly Goss in the "I gave you back the map" Heather role (she's brave, resourceful, and up for whatever). But Harlin never lets the inhospitable barren winterscape tear the fabric of objective social reality, and so the paralyzing fear associated with being unmoored from the symbolic order vanishes with the first explanatory note. In the future, Harlin, don't let the symbolic or explanatory contextualize the mystery! The refusal to commit to a set point of view about what's going on is part of what made Blair Witch and The Shining work so well. Explain it all with scrapbooks and old photos and the unknowable vanishes. If you can't handle the impossibility of objective truth you should never have looked farther than your own backyard, and certainly not ventured into the white abyss... that's for trippers with balls of ice!

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A Girl must have her Ghost: AMERICAN HORROR STORY: "Smoldering Children" & Lana Del Rey: "Video Games"

 "Me...love 'dead'." -- Monster (Bride of Frankenstein, 1933)

If the rest of the media universe is playing it safe and cuddly there's at least two chunks of media that strike a deep unnerving chord of the 'real' in the last few weeks of 2011: Fx's American Horor Story and that found-Americana video for Lana Del Rey's one song, "Video Games."



Passing the 10 million hit mark, inspiring the usual countless remixes, the song+video+singer taps into a nerve of sadness and loss that has the authentic feel of a drunk night IM-ing friends you never hooked up with while you thumb through stashed photos of exes. Watch the video ten times in a row and you can get that feel even at work, sober, IM-ing no one. A lot of people seem to think she has no right to be sad, though, and there's a huge internet bloglash (read Awl's "Who's Afraid of Lana Del Rey"). Lana Del Rey's hot lost little girl from 1965 look -- the thick hair, Julia Roberts lips, black eyeshadow, vintage dresses and paisley headbands-- make her come off like Evan Rachel Wood in THIRTEEN now grown backwards into her own grandmother, dating a hot young rocker incubus who's always on tour, leaving her alone but 'safe' in our care, we being the ghost of a lover long dead (so she'll only see us smoldering, never old or charred). We don't have to worry about Lana's deep sadness overwhelming us via a real relationship because we're just ears. She's just a hot mess friend, and she doesn't even exist... she's a ghost in the machine, like Samara in THE RING. She even looks like Hayden, Ben's 19 year-old ghost ex-mistress in American Horror Story!

So what does this broad have to do with American Horror Story, specifically this week's episode, "Smoldering Children," where (Spoiler Alert!) we find out Violet, the lost little daughter has been dead since a few episodes ago when she overdosed on pills?

Everything. It has everything to do with it.

Look at Lana's photo above, with the cigarette and white dress. She could step right into any David Lynch film and be either in the flashback to the early 60s or a current retro hipster with ironic collagen, either way she's an American ghost story ready to haunt your iPod. The photo above is the kind of thing you find when cleaning out your deceased grandparent's room. Who is that beauty? And suddenly you realized you swooned, just a little bit, for your own mother. Lana Del Rey may just be playing dress-up but she nonetheless radiates a sadness that's not fixed in any one generation. It's not even sexual. The sexier she tries to be the older she becomes, creeping through decades like vintage clothing and DNA, and the flag outside a semi-abandoned post office. America strong!

For comparison, let's look at another pretty, lost, augmented little girl who is talented, driven, and also trying to be re-born, in this case as a sitcom star, Whitney Cummings. Her self-titled show comes on after The Office (read Meghan Wright's solid recap here), the key time slot for any current sitcom, which is how it's drawn my indignant attention. Am I the only one who is suspicious? No. In "Understanding Screenwriting," Tom Stempel writes:

In Whitney, Cummings plays the title character. She is living with her boyfriend of three years, Alex. They make jokes. They are afraid of marriage. They go to a wedding and make jokes with their friends. Whitney dresses up as a nurse to seduce Alex and he ends up in the hospital. They make jokes. Most of the jokes are variations on material from Cummings' stand-up act, and so the show falls into the trap of a lot of sitcoms based on a comedian's act: all jokes, no story, no characters. Half an hour of this just gets tiresome. 

Part of why this show is doomed can be summed up right in the above paragraph, particularly one sentence "She is living with her boyfriend of three years, Alex." - what kind of dumb idea is that? Has anyone ever done such a thing? Be wary of Whitney and her conspicuous displays of enjoyment. She misunderstands the fundamental basics of romantic comedy. "Tiresome," indeed!

The most fundamental comedy truth is that a couple is only cute when they are not quite together - either always about to hook up--the will they or won't they of Sam and Diane (Cheers) or Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd (Moonlighting) or Fox and Scully (X-Files), or Ross and Rachel (Friends)-- or already hooked up before the show began and are now just friends (Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld).  All but Seinfeld gave in to audience's demands of seeing the leads hook up and get married or live happily in congress, and viewers dropped off like flies once they got their wish and the wish didn't make them feel how they thought it would. Smart shows know in advance this is doomed to happen.

As I've written before, the original 1970s Charlie's Angels was ingenious in this regard. Aaron Spelling wrote the book, which we now open to examine the reverse case of guys like Ashton Kucher and Howard Stern. As long as he was married to older Demi, Ashton had some gravitas --his flirty douche bag qualities were tolerable, even amusing. He's in the process of now of realizing the extent Demi's presence kept him from getting Sheen-level skeevy. And as long as Howard Stern was married and unable to 'do anything' with his strippers he was funny and edgy. Once the chains were off, that edge was lost, he was just another skeevy guy trying to drag all his smelly buddies into the bedroom with him. As long as Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned he was terrifying; escaped and free and he's suddenly just another dude trying to get a piece of the action. The tortured misery of Ben and his crazy wife in AHS made all his yields to temptation exciting. Once the wife is gone, however, giving into those temptations would become mere softcore boredom, Hannibal instead of Silence of the Lambs --hence his heroic resistance, as I wrote about last week. This week he got his reward: he even got to vent his rage on the tormentor of his wife, the evil Tate!

Tate is an ideal representation of the 'absent lover'--the animus, the incubus -- in that he is actually dead - and his grisly past makes him a 'bad boy' in ways we never want to compete with - he's like Lana Del Rey's lost rockabilly guitarist come back from the dead to demand beer and fidelity. If you listen to the lyrics of Rey's songs they're like the dream girl words bound to have any video game playing bad-girl loving boy blushing at the thought he just might be able to hook up with this doomed, sweetly tragic, DSM-IV type of lost little girl: 

"Open up a beer / 
and say get over here / 
and play a video game."

Dude, she likes beer and video games and guys in fast cars! She's not singing "Come meet my family  / earn a six figure salary / your stupid game can wait." In short --Lana del Rey is the type of girl Whitney is trying to be, but as Yoda says, there is no try, especially when you bring your boyfriend with you to Dagoba so he can shout encouragement like a fan in the bleachers and spy on you with your handsome ski instructor and not do anything about it except feel he didn't cheer loud enough.

And as for' bad' boys who encourage you to skip school, drink beer and play video games, they don't come any badder than Tate, and so in a way we can respect him because he is evil and yet he still loves Violet and protects her and that's what makes his loving relationship work on TV, a loving relationship that would creep us out otherwise. It's only because he is truly evil that he can be sympathetic. We identify with Tate as viewers because like us, he is dead - like Edward in Twilight is dead, or Spike on Buffy. Our perspective as viewers (we can move through walls and time and infiltrate up close even the most intimate moments of characters without them ever seeing us) mirrors that of the watching dead, for who else but the dead and the viewer have such omniscience?

Lance Kerwin, 1977

And so are we not all in love with ghosts one way or the other, just as we are in love with the movies or music, which are all just ghostly traces of sound and image? I remember being ten years-old and dreaming of holding hands and walking around my old Lansdale PA neighborhood with Kate Jackson, and all my friends seeing us and being super jealous. Jackson appeared on this show James at 15 as a woman who befriends runaway James (The Tate-ish Lance Kerwin, left) thus enabling huge fantasies for boys my age of running away to live on the street with this cool older woman... to escape, as it were, from the terrible onslaught of adult responsibility and social castration that only the city, or death, can bring. I still grieve over Kate. That shit never goes away. Fuck Lance Kerwin.

In AMH, Violet will never have to go back to school now that she's dead, but at the same time she's not entirely sure a life playing cards with Tate is the answer to all death's prayers, or so it seems by her coldly bemused response towards his devotion. In a way she's already 'cooler' than Tate just from knowing him. Perhaps what is happening to Violet now that she's just as dead as Tate is the same thing that happens to us watching Whitney: without obstacles and uncertainty the ultimate emptiness of our coveted prize comes into focus. The only reward for our struggles was temporarily forgetting what a disappointment the prize is. Violet's love was wild and Brontë-esque when it was forbidden by her father but now that she literally can't escape Tate's devotion, her love is like a fenced-in cowboy. Jessica Lang's character understands this and her final bit of cruel torment to the disfigured burning man shows her Dietrich-like insight into his masochistic condition. She's giving him what he needs, knowing anything less than torment and heartbreak would be destroy him.  It doesn't matter if she really loves him or not, as long as she denies it he'll keep going...

Frances Farmer, 1891

What does matter is that, like Lana Del Rey and very few others, Violet has chosen darkness. Now she dwells within it, nevermore to return to school or write a resume or sit, bored, on the bus.  We can hope the same thing won't happen to Del Rey in 'real life' but the other options are grim as well. Based on the hot young musical prodigies that have come before her--Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Bjork, and Alanis M.- there's a very real danger she will get 'quirky' or slick or try too hard to cram in as many jarring chord and tempo changes as possible to every song in her next album, and eventually even become a surgery addicted gargoyle or a seducer of hot young boys half her age, like Jessica Lange's eternally sexy Constance.

At least we'll always have that first album, song, or movie. We'll always be able to marvel at JL's youthful sexy sizzle in 1981's POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. We don't want to lose our Violets or Lanas, or let them grow up or let them die or even keep them just how they are for that matter, but we have no choice. We can only watch and listen to them from our Lazyboy graves, aging and decaying while they stay eternally young, even if it's just for that one damned haunted song.

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Honeymoons of Terror! EDEN LAKE (2008) and A PERFECT GETAWAY (2009)

Who loves movies about rich douchebags in love? Not us! But what if said bags take their trusting, materialistic new wives or girlfriends off to the woods or some remote beach to get away from it all, and then maybe pop the question or have a honeymoon? Nope. But what if they get chased, murdered, tortured and eaten and deprived of cellular phone service once at said remote area? Everybody loves that! Eat 'em up!

See, the thing is, these hidden woodsy places ain't like our  protagonists remembered from their privileged youths; times are always getting tougher, and poor people settle into the fissures and dead ends the rich leave as they chomp chomp up the world and leave Wal-Marts like giant droppings on the now parched with tar and concrete landscape. Soon abandoned for bigger spaces, these Wal-Marts, along with woods and isolated beaches (forgotten or not yet chomped) become infested with in-bred, torture-lovin', meth-smokin' white trash.

In their misguided bid for 'a little adventure' the protagonist couple--douchebag and trophy, if you will--find more than they bargained for, something they never found in Home Depot or Bed, Bath and Beyond. Whether they fight back or cower all the way to the grave will depend on the script God gave them, but in the meantime, man, break that champagne bottle, for a jagged champagne bottle edge is a fine weapon! And damn but I got a slow-burn smitten on the Eve Mendez-meets-Ava Gardner hottie on the left (Kiele Sanchez), who gives Milla a literal run for the money in A PERFECT GETAWAY (2009).

Timothy Olyphant and Steve Zahn co-star as the boyfriends, and there's more screwy twists and turns for both than the Union Square subway station, but its in Hawaii and the scenery looks good and om--om-shakti--you can vibe on rainbows and lush vegetation instead of the heated rush hour throngs outside the Exit sign of your own real world love, New York.

Movies are more than an escape, they are an escape without consequences! They give you a round tour of the paradise you might want to see, and leave you knowing you're better off where you are, close to the dream screen and with lots of locks on the doors. What was it Carol Clover said? Something about the land being raped by the gov'ment? So the land rapes back via its people, dirt-poor rednecks? It makes these films both much more enjoyable to forego that kind of rough business and stick to straight up killin' and maimin', as the good lord intended for His flock, rather than sexual molestations. Frankly, I loved PERFECT GETAWAY, but my expectations were rock bottom as I think I was confusing it with reviews I'd read of Turistas. So if you've never seen it, presume it lame and let it take you on its almost too "perfect" thrill-away... a horror film where characters actually make smart decisions!

 

Nothing could have prepared me, then, for the genius of EDEN LAKE (2008) an Australian shocker that aims high, clear above the usual WRONG TURN elements, and into STRAW DOGS territory, keeping a smattering of the old ultra-torture porn, with the heroes having a substantial hand in the evening's violent escalations and yet nothing getting as full-blown traumatizing as WOLF CREEK, thanks to, again, no sexual violence. Yes, the shock ending is downbeat, but not depressing, if you're worried about that sort of thing, and I was. If something's too ugly it can take me months to recover. So don't worry, it's all about family and the kids being all right, and a little burning and barbed wire as it creeps quietly out of the muck of exploitation and into the realm of social commentary so stealthily it's at your throat before you know it. And don't act like you don't got it comin', eh?

On the other hand. I love WRONG TURN too! And HILLS HAVE EYES and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW remake for that matter. I mean, why not? If you're going to order a steak dinner, don't enjoy your meal and then act shocked when you learn what people had to "do" to certain living creatures for the red flesh to reach you. If I ran the world, you'd need a special "Killer" card to eat meat, and the fee would entail two days of slaughterhouse work a year... just enough for everyone to be a little less hypocritical when they weep for the beautiful soulful eyes of a sheep, then go into a magic black-out until the bones are off the table. You'll know what I mean..  in the words of the great Bertolt Brecht: "For once you must try to face the facts / mankind is kept alive by bestial acts." And hotties, of course.

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