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Posted on January 8, 2016

5 Things You Should Know About Punke’s The Revenant Before Seeing the Film

Dawn Keetley

Published in 2002, The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge was written by Michael Punke, a lawyer, western historian and, currently, U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

Punke was not involved in the creation of the film. In fact, as a Washington Post article reported in late December, 2015, he cannot even talk about it due to laws prohibiting federal employees from earning money on the side.[i]

I have purposefully stayed away from most news about the film, so I have no idea if I’m offering plot spoilers for the film in what follows. If I am, it’s done unknowingly. But I thought I’d offer five crucial things to know about the novel (for those who don’t have time to read it!), so you can measure what the film has done with its source material.

Posted on January 4, 2016

Body (2015): The Many Faces of Satan

Dawn Keetley

An independent film that premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival in January 2015, Body is written and directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen and produced by Last Pictures. Body was released to Video on Demand on December 29 and is definitely worth watching.

Body traces a rather familiar plot—reminiscent of Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997)—but it utterly transcends and transforms that plot in its development of character, its superb acting (by all four main characters), its allegorical depth, and the beauty of its ending.

Three twentysomething friends—Holly (Helen Rogers), Cali (Alexandra Turshen), and Mel (Lauren Molina)—are hanging out on Christmas Eve playing Scrabble, drinking, and smoking pot when Cali comes up with the idea of crashing her “uncle’s” house. Once the friends are there, reveling in its wealth, it comes out that the house isn’t Cali’s uncle’s house after all but the home of a family she used to babysit for. As the friends are about to leave (Mel and Holly aren’t happy about Cali’s deception), a man (Larry Fessenden) comes in, alerted to something’s being amiss by the many blazing lights. As the friends rush past him to get out, Holly inadvertently knocks him down the stairs. The friends’ elaborate plan to explain his dead body to the police goes awry when they realize he is not, in fact, dead—merely paralyzed. As they struggle with what to do, deep and finally deadly rifts emerge among the friends.

Posted on January 1, 2016

Beetlejuice and the Invisibility of Childfree Couples

Gwen

I’m going to be honest with you; I really just wanted to watch Beetlejuice (1988). What emerged was completely unintended. As horror reviewers and academics we tend to read into things for postmodern interpretations of the world around us. As horror fans, sometimes we just want to sit back and indulge in some of our favorite films. Unfortunately our brain doesn’t always get the message to just sit down and shut up. That is exactly what happened on the way to Winter River, Connecticut, when I tried to join the Maitlands for a lazy Sunday afternoon. For those of you nay-sayers, yes I know that Beetlejuice is characterized as Comedy Fantasy—but, it’s my party and I’ll review it if I want to.

While my brain was supposed to be turned off, I realized something about this movie: it is all about Lydia. The film reads like a foreign adoption story about a childfree couple wandering the earth until they are made into a real family via the addition of a child. What I found most interesting about Beetlejuice was the way that Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) Maitland are devalued and almost irrelevant to the outside world until they find Lydia. This is by no means a commentary on their relationship, as Tim Burton masterfully paints them as an ideal couple before and after their introduction to Lydia. It instead reflects on the way that the world around them emphasizes and validates couples with children.

Posted on December 30, 2015

The Lurking (2015) Review

Elizabeth Erwin

82 min | 2015 | (USA) | Rob Michels (Hole in the Wall)

With an opening that immediately creates an observational vibe, The Lurking is a fun throwback to 1980s horror, capturing all the qualities that made the era such a popular one in American horror. The story begins with two roadie slackers, referred to in the credits as Wasteoid 1 and Wasteoid 2, who have taken to the woods “to trip balls.” Unbeknownst to them, a serial killer is wreaking havoc in those same woods and it isn’t long before he has the two drug-addled men within his sights.

We soon discover that the perspective from which we are watching events unfold is not the point of view of an impartial observer: we’re looking through the eyes of the killer. By having the camera consistently adopt the point of view of the killer, the audience becomes an active participant in the murders and the end result is more intimate than one would expect.

Posted on December 28, 2015

Formless Horrors: John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980)

Dawn Keetley

John Carpenter’s first three horror films—Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and The Thing (1982)—are not only exceptional films, but, taken together, they constitute a kind of trilogy in their similar exploitation of the horror of formlessness.

Halloween may be the film least self-evidently about formlessness (its monster is “human,” after all), but I would suggest that Michael Myers actually stands in defiance of all categories. He is called the “bogeyman” more than once, including at the climax of the film, when a traumatized Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) stammers out to Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence)—“It was the bogeyman.” Kendall Phillips has astutely pointed out that the bogeyman occupies a position “at the boundaries of notions of cultural normalcy”—and that he “embodies the chaos that exists on the other side of these cultural boundaries.”[i] True to form (or, rather, true to formlessness), Michael-as-bogeyman is often portrayed at boundaries—at intersections, on the other side of a road, in doorways, at windows.