Shudder: Z

It turns out Dr. Spock and most horror movies agree on at least one thing. It is definitely a bad thing when kids over 4-years still play with imaginary friends. However, horror movies are more vehement on the subject. That is especially true of the “imaginary” monster plaguing the Parsons family in Brandon Christensen’s Z (not to be confused with Costa-Gavras’s film), which premieres today on Shudder (in time for Mother’s Day).

Joshua Parsons used to be a good kid, until he started playing with an ominously controlling imaginary friend, who prefers to go by just plain “Z.” Since then, young Parsons has become disruptive in school and violent with his classmates. His parents even take him to a noted child psychologist, but Dr. Seager is not very Spockian. He assures them their son is fine, but it gives him a moment of pause when he hears the name “Z.”

Z is built around a familiar concept, but the execution is strong. There are some very creepy elements, as well as moments that will truly horrify any parent. Having previously helmed Still/Born, Christensen really seems to have it in for parenthood, but this is a much more effective film.

Z himself is nicely designed and seen on-screen just enough to maximize the dramatic impact and sufficiently withheld to build a sense of mystery. Of course, Christensen also has a genre ace-in-the-hole with Stephen McHattie, who plays a good doctor this time around, as Dr. Seager.

The Sound: Toronto’s Haunted Lower Bay Station

Even though it is allegedly haunted, Toronto’s moth-balled Lower Bay subway station is strangely recognizable. It has often doubled for other subways in movies like Don’t Say a Word, Bullet Proof Monk, and the Total Recall remake. It was only operational from late February 1966 to early September of the same year. Supposedly, it was closed because of design flaws rather than the rumored death of “The Woman in Red,” but when was the last time a government agency closed a big expensive public works project just because it was poorly laid out? An intrepid paranormal investigator ventures down to debunk the station, but she might be getting in over her head in Jenna Mattison’s The Sound (trailer here), which opens this Friday in Los Angeles.

Kelly Johansen believes in the power of twitter rather than ghosts. She has built a large following disproving supposed hauntings. Sometimes her rational worldly explanations come as a relief to the not-so-haunted-after-all. In addition to her smart phone, she also has a lot of gear for measuring high and low frequency sound waves, which are usually part of her logical explanation for ghost sightings. She will lug it all down to the shuttered Lower Bay station (sans permission, of course), where her initial readings are off the charts.

It is quiet down there—too quiet—and the infrasonic sound waves are dangerously low. Prolonged exposure will cause nose bleeds, drowsiness, and eventually madness. By the way, Lower Bay was also built over a Potter’s Field and next to a mad house. These are two significant items that turn up in the google search Johansen probably should have conducted before rushing off to Toronto. At least the wifi is strong down there. The same will not be true for her state of mind.

The cool thing about The Sound is that it takes a credible shot at fusing technology with the supernatural. Instead of being part of the logical scientific explanation, the ultra-low frequency sound waves might just an indicator of uncanny juju afoot. Plus, the station itself and the warren of support tunnels are massively creepy. Frankly, this film ought to discourage further attempts at urban exploration, because it looks incredibly sinister and dangerous.

Mattison and her design team of Jim Goodall and Iskander Alex Sayapov have created a massively eerie subterranean environment, but their work is somewhat sabotaged by Rose McGowan’s lifeless lead performance. Yes, Johansen is supposed to be slowly succumbing to the effects of the infrasonics, but even in the safety of her Detroit apartment (more likely that’s Grosse Point), she is a rather dull, pedestrian presence. Johansen also behaves rather contemptuously towards the little boy and his grandfather (played by the great Stephen McHattie) in the prologue sequence, which further hampers our feelings of suspense and tension when she finds herself in supernatural harm’s way. Still, we can always count on crafty and colorful vets like McHattie and Christopher Lloyd (as a weirdly diligent maintenance man) to liven things up.

The Sound is a pretty impressive example of horror movie mise-en-scène, but it is not McGowan’s finest hour. Still, genre fans have been able to look past wooden performances before. It is worth doing so again in this case, because Mattison shows so much potential as a filmmaker. Recommended for horror enthusiasts looking for new talent, The Sound opens this Friday (9/29) in Los Angeles, at the Arena Cinema.

Awakening the Zodiac: He’s Back

The Zodiac Killer arguably inspired two of the nastiest copycats ever. At least the New York and Kobe, Japan Zodiacs were eventually caught and unmasked. To this today, the identity of San Francisco’s original Zodiac Killer remains a mystery. Some assume (or hope) he has long since died, but the notorious serial killer is about to come out of retirement in Jonathan Wright’s Awakening the Zodiac (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Mick Branson compulsively bids on unclaimed storage lockers, because it is the irresponsible, reality-TV kind of thing to do. He thinks he and his pawn-shop owning crony Harvey Something are onto a sure thing, but this locker turns out to be complicated. There were not a lot of good re-sale items, but they did find home movies of the Zodiac Killer stalking his prey. Harvey proposes using the locker’s paper trail to track down the murderer and collect the $100,000 reward. Zoe Branson recognizes a bad idea when she hears one, but she reluctantly agrees, because they need the money.

Unbeknownst to the Bransons, the Zodiac Killer is still quite spry and rather put out that the storage company sold his unit out from under him after only three weeks (actually, our three amateur sleuths totally agree with him on that one). While the Bransons noisily chase down leads and Harvey Who sets his mind on cracking the cryptic coded messages the killer left behind to taunt the police, the genuine Zodiac gets back into the killing habit.

Straddling horror and mystery, Awakening is a nifty character-driven genre film that smartly incorporates the known facts and established urban legends surrounding the Zodiac case. The Bibbs are also a dim-witted but brightly appealing couple, who are easy to root for. It is sort of like watching Jeff Bridges and Kim Bassinger in Robert Benton’s Nadine get caught up in an exponentially more sinister caper.

Matt Craven supplies the perfect counter-point as the colorfully anti-social Harvey X. Kenneth Welsh from Twin Peaks and Nicholas Campbell and Stephen McHattie, both from Canada, also add plenty of creepiness in their suspicious supporting roles. Indeed, the entire cast clearly enjoys the crisp, sardonic dialogue written by Wright, Jennifer Archer, and Mike Horrigan.

This is the sort of under-heralded genre film that over-delivers and far exceeds expectations. The ending is a bit of the usual let-down, but the set-up of the first two and a half acts is tense but fun. Highly recommended for fans of serial killer thrillers, Awakening the Zodiac opens this Friday (6/6) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Little Brother: Dystopian Cyber-Punk Dedicated to Panahi

Is there a right to hack enshrined somewhere in the Second Amendment? One Nobel Prize nominee believes it should be, as a matter of self-defense in the digital age. Only the free flow of information can undermine a dictator’s sinister plausible deniability. When it comes to exposing the truth, she will walk the walk as well as talk the talk in Cyrus Saidi & Gautam Pinto’s Little Brother (trailer here), a Moving Picture Institute (MPI) supported film, which has recently been released on iTunes.

The country in question is not specifically identified as Iran, but its dictator bears a passing resemblance to Ahmadinejad and the film is dedicated to dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (a classy touch), so you do the math. In a sense, Little Brother is like a strictly serious forerunner of The Interview, in which Jane Vidal, an expatriate activist for freedom in all spheres of life, announces her attention to return to her homeland to challenge the dictator to a debate. This will not be Lincoln-Douglas or even Buckley vs. the statist Vidal. Instead, the dictator will do what dictators do, but Jane Vidal expects no less.

Little Brother does not let the creeping American leviathan state off the hook either. In fact, she will call out its dubious surveillance policies during the same extended interview in which she announces her challenge to the dictator. Although the film is not based on Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, it shares a thematic kinship. However, one gets a sense Saidi and Pinto are far more outraged by Iran’s restrictions on freedom of thought and expression than the American Patriot Act, which means they have a sense of perspective.

They also have a really good cast. Natalie Brown handles some pretty heavy dialogue in Vidal’s interview segment, without sounding like a Randian superhero, but is even more compelling in the grimly inevitable third act. The ever-reliable Stephen McHattie and his radio voice are also perfectly suited to the subtly hostile television interviewer. However, Saidi & Pinto’s real ace in the hole is Nevad Negahban. As he did when playing the cruel husband in The Stoning of Soraya M., Negahban portrays the dictator with a cunning fierceness that is scary because it is scrupulously believable and never cartoonishly over-the-top.

Perfect for Rand Paul voters, Little Brother is a provocative film that cuts across the political spectrum. Fans of dystopian science fiction will also appreciate its intense performances and the polished cyber-punky look crafted by cinematographer Rion Gonzales and the production design team. Recommended for discerning genre and short film viewers, the MPI-supported Little Brother is now available on iTunes.

Big Muddy: Getting Noir in Rural Canada

It is like a film noir in the middle of an Andrew Wyeth painting, except these are the plains of Saskatchewan rather than the hardscrabble fields of Maine. It is even as quiet as a canvas at times. That can be both good and bad, but at least it suggests some integrity of vision on the part of screenwriter-director Jefferson Moneo when giving his prior short film the feature treatment. Rural Canada gets dark and dangerous in Moneo’s Big Muddy (trailer here), which screens this weekend at the Catskills’ Mountain Cinema.

Martha Barlow and her current man, Tommy Valente, are no Bonnie and Clyde. Frankly, they are pretty crummy people, who specialize in liquoring up poor slobs, to set them up for subsequent home invasion robberies. At least, Barlow loves her moody son Andy. She just cannot help surrounding him with chaos. She ain’t seen nothing yet.

Unbeknownst to Barlow, her former lover Donovan Fournier is out to find her, having escaped from his prison farm. Even more ominously, Buford Carver, the horse race fixing gangster who came somewhere between Fournier and Valente, is back in town with a new horse and all kinds of bad intentions. Worried about the influence he exerts over her son, Barlow agrees to meet him at the track, but when Valente crashes the party with a gun and a poorly thought through plan things get very bad, especially for Carver’s prized horse. Suddenly, Barlow and her son are on the run, with a satchel full of Carver’s cash and a couple of highly irritated gangsters on their tail.

The two twains of Muddy will meet in Barlow’s rustic hometown, where she and Andy crash with her less than thrilled old man, Stan. In fact, Moneo handles the intersection of the two major plot lines quite deftly. However, he sure loves character-establishing scenes of Andy and Grandpa stringing up barbed wire fences. The truth is an editor with a free hand could easily trim fifteen or twenty minutes of Muddy without any ill consequences, but that is hardly unusual these days.

Happily, Muddy features the craggy gravitas of Stephen McHattie as Grandpa Stan. As usual, he commands the screen with his forceful badassery. On the other hand, Nadia Litz and David La Haye are not bad per se, but they make the strangest looking couple as Barlow and Fournier. James Le Gros is also reliably villainous, but his Carver seems a bit restrained when it comes to chewing the scenery and talking the trash.

Regardless, Moneo’s strong feel for the lonely, howling plains and Craig Trudeau’s stylish cinematography give Muddy a distinctive pastoral-noir vibe. It can be a bit slow, but it delivers when it needs to. Those who enjoy small town thrillers should find it worth seeing. Recommended accordingly, it has its premiere New York theatrical run this weekend (3/6-3/8) at Mountain Cinema and also just released this week on DVD.

Wolves: Jason Momoa Smells Fresh Blood

Evidently, werewolves can be as snobby as anyone. Sure, some humans are turned through bites, but hereditary lycanthropes look down their snouts at then. You will find a large concentration of pure-bred wolves in Lupine Ridge. It might look like hill country, but it is the Philadelphia Main Line for werewolves. It is there that Cayden Richards will go searching for answers in David Hayter’s Wolves (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Richards never knew he was adopted until he heard it on the TV news. Having discovered his parents ripped apart wolf-style after an inconvenient black-out, it is now too late for him to ask them any questions. Resigned to live as a fugitive from justice, Richards simply roams the highways, trying to keep his inner beast in check. However, a chance encounter with Wild Joe, a fellow pure-bred werewolf outcast, points him towards Lupine Ridge.

As soon as he blows into town, he seems to rub Connor, the town’s alpha-male-alpha-wolf, the wrong way. However, a wiry old farmer by the name of John Tollerman offers to take him on as a farmhand, no questions asked. Even the television reports about Richards’ previous misadventures do not seem to throw the good-hearted Tollermans. Nor does it scare off Angelina Timmons, who ought to be too young to tend the bar she inherited if she roughly as old as Richards, the high school senior-dropout. Of course, the authorities never come to Lupine Ridge, because aside from a few humans like Mrs. Tollerman, they are all werewolves.

In terms of tone, Wolves aims to be something like the lycanthropic equivalent of The Lost Boys, with hit-or-miss results. On the plus side, Jason Momoa’s Connor makes a terrific hairy heavy and Stephen McHattie has the perfect Lance Henriksen-esque weather-beaten gravitas for Tollerson. Both come into Wolves with genre cred that they only further burnish.

The problem is Lucas Till is horribly dull and awkwardly light weight as Richards. It is hard to see him as a high school quarterback—drama club president, maybe. Hayter had to notice how much verve Momoa and McHattie brought to the table (which they then proceeded to chew) and how slight Till’s presence is in contrast. Granted, dull horror movie heroes are a tradition dating back to mild David Manners in the original Dracula. However, in this case, the film depends on Richards’ fierceness, but it isn’t happening.

Despite the weak vanilla lead, there is a lot of fun stuff in Wolves. The werewolf makeup is not bad and the southern rock soundtrack nicely amplifies Momoa’s super-bad attitude. Unfortunately, too many of Till’s scenes feel like something out of Twilight instead of a werewolf movie with hair on its chest. If only there were less of him and more McHattie, but it is still kind of entertaining in a guilty pleasure sort of way. Recommended for fans of Momoa and McHattie, Wolves opens this Friday (11/14) in New York at the AMC Empire.

Haunter: One of the Scary Season’s Best

Imagine watching the same episode of Murder She Wrote over and over again.  If that isn’t Hell, it is probably close enough.  Maybe a Columbo wouldn’t be so bad, but Lisa Johnson’s parents have pretty vanilla tastes.  Do not judge them too harshly for being stuck in the 1980’s, because they are sort of dead. Recovering awareness of their eternally looping existence, Johnson will reach out to other girls like her in hopes of breaking a pernicious supernatural cycle of terror in Vincenzo Natali’s Haunter (trailer here), which opens this Friday at the IFC Center.

The Johnson family was murdered in 1986.  Every day since, they relive that fateful Sunday, unaware of their paranormal condition.  At least they still have a cool president.  Somehow, their daughter has awakened to some extent.  Cognizant of the wicked déjà vu happening, she starts having what might be described as ghostly experiences.  Soon she suspects other families are trapped in a similar stasis within the house, but in different time periods.  Eventually, she will make contact with teen-aged girls in both the past and the future, but her consciousness does not go unnoticed.

Haunter is easily one of the best horror films of this Halloween season.  Natali maintains an overwhelming vibe of creeping dread, while Brian King’s screenplay ranges into surreal, mind-bending territory.  The closest comparison film would probably the metaphysical horror of H.P. Mendoza’s ambitious indie I Am a Ghost, but Haunter has a more mainstream Nightmare on Elm Street dimension to it.

Regardless, Haunter is the freshest horror outing since probably Mendoza’s film.  It delivers about a half dozen game-changing twists and they each work surprisingly well. There is no padding in King’s script.  Everything happens for a purpose.  Perhaps most importantly, it keeps viewers on edge from start to finish.

As Johnson, Abigail Breslin is on-screen front-and-center more or less the entire time, so the film largely depends on her.  Fortunately she is convincingly smart, resilient, and increasingly freaked out as the young protagonist.  Stephen McHattie also brings a fittingly severe presence as the mysterious figure simply billed as the “Pale Man.”  However, if there is one misstep in Haunter it comes in showing too much of him.  More mystery is always better.

Frankly, this is a perfect example of the direction more indie genre films ought to take.  There is hardly any gore or special effects to speak of in Haunter, yet it completely gets under your skin.  Smart and tightly focused, Haunter is easily the horror movie pick of the month.  Highly recommended for fans, it opens Friday (10/18) at New York’s IFC Center.