In short: Natty Knocks (2023)

A trio of kids and their babysitter (Charlotte Fountain-Jardim), become targets of a small town serial killer (Bill Moseley). His murders are connected to the local urban legend of one Natty knocking nine times, as well as the horrible death of a B-movie actress.

If there’s one thing about the contemporary movie landscape that can get me to whining like one of those silly “superhero movies are the doom of all human culture!” people, it’s that there’s little room for the competent journeyman director anymore, apart from mid-level TV and streaming show work with little creative influence whatsoever. So actually getting a proper new feature film by someone like Dwight “Halloween IV” H. Little is a bit of a treat.

At least on paper it is, for the actual film often feels as if it were held together by sheer willpower more than skill. Little clearly cashes in quite a few cheques from old contacts, thus the decently sized and pleasantly energetic appearances by Danielle Harris and Robert Englund.

At times, Natty Knocks has a pleasantly old-school Stephen King style US horror vibe, using 80s references without actually taking place in the 80s, because this sort of thing comes natural to filmmakers who’ve lived through them; at other times, the script seems to go out of its way to tell a very straightforward, semi-supernatural slasher tale in as overcomplicated a manner as possible. Too many characters need to be kept involved, so there’s too much running back and forth between what’s basically the same scenes from different perspectives for the film ever to feel suspenseful or tight.

From time to time, Little hits on a nice moment of suspense or two, and his straightforwardly, intensely competent style of direction never lets the pace get so slack the film actually becomes boring. Still, there’s a lack of focus here that stands in the way of this ever becoming anything more than decently watchable. Admittedly, this has one of the more fun horror movie bullshit endings I’ve seen; also admittedly, if Natty Knocks had actually been the film to fit this ending, this would have been rather more interesting.

In short: Camp Cold Brook (2018)

Among the most dangerous professions known to humanity – at least going by the movies I watch – is that of the TV show ghost hunter.

Case in point are the four bits of ghost fodder we encounter here, named Jack (Chad Michael Murray), Angela (Danielle Harris), Kevin (Michael Eric Reid) and Emma (Candice De Visser). Their show is floundering rather badly and won’t see a new season, but production lead Jack hopes that their last ghost adventure will be grand enough to ensure continued employment.

Emma’s found a rather interesting place to look for a haunting, a former summer camp that’s been empty ever since twenty or so kids died there, drugged into killing one another in ritual fashion. From a certain perspective, the team’s in luck, for the place is indeed haunted; from the more practical perspective of survival, things aren’t looking up, alas, for said haunting is highly malevolent and more than just a little murderous.

When you are working in certain horror sub-genres, delivering a solid and not particularly exciting but aggressively un-crap movie can push you right into the upper quality third of that genre. Such is the case with movies about ghost hunters becoming the ghost hunted and Andy Palmer’s Camp Cold Brook. Consequently, the film’s virtues aren’t  great new achievements in horror but a production team that seems to have done the due diligence of looking at what the greatest problems of other movies in their sub-genre are, and then simply worked to avoid them.

This may not sound like a spectacular achievement, but it’s quite the thing to find a ghost hunter movie whose characters are something akin to human beings with actual human motivations instead of total pricks who deserve everything they get. Sure, Jack, for example, doesn’t believe anymore in ever finding a haunting and is playing things up for the camera, but he comes over as a guy exhausted by a lack of success and having doubts of having a future career that would help feed his family rather than the megalomaniac arse the team leader usually is in these films. Why, one might even go as far as not to want him killed by ghosts. The characters aren’t terribly deep, yet at least they are characters.

Neither the film’s backstory nor the hauntings themselves are nail biters, though the backstory isn’t quite as played out as usual, and Palmer does know how to stage a bread and butter haunting competently enough, with perhaps even one or two scenes I’d describe as somewhat creepy; the filmmaking’s cheap yet solid.


There’s not much else to the film, but what there is turns out to be perfectly sufficient for an okay time.

In short: See No Evil 2 (2014)

I know it’s a bit unfair to try and compare Jen and Sylvia Soska’s film after the brilliant American Mary with the one that came before, seeing as it is the belated sequel nobody ever asked for in would-be slasher franchise the WWE tailor-made for Glenn “Kane” Jacobs (whoever he may be), but then, one might ask why waste talent and time on something like this?

The optimistic view would of course be: because you can probably do much more interesting things in a franchise nobody cares about than you could do with, say, Halloween. The optimists, it turns out, aren’t completely wrong, yet they aren’t completely right either. See No Evil 2 certainly is a better film than the first one, but then, so is Jason goes to New York. Seriously, though, as far as minor slashers go, the film is perfectly fine, with the Soskas showing a – after the film I’m not going to mention anymore not too surprising – great eye for making things look interesting. Even if their film takes place in the boring corridors that make up a morgue, at least it’s a morgue dominated by various beautiful lighting effects in actual colours, and while neither the sets nor what happens in them is particularly exciting (I mean, how often have we seen this exact same thing happening?), at least it is photographed well.

I also appreciated that at least Danielle Harris’s Amy and Kaj-Erik Eriksen’s Seth are better drawn than the usual final girl and boyfriend (or in this case, guy who doesn’t dare ask her out-friend), and their little love plot is actually much better observed than you usually get in a slasher. Alas, the rest of the film consists only of the most minor variations on slasher standards, and while I’m happy there are any variations on screen at all, it really makes little difference if character type A dies ten minutes earlier than usual in a slasher, at best drawing the script from boring to perhaps mildly interesting, with none of the changes to the usual clichés eventually leading anywhere worth going.

So there’s not enough to recommend See No Evil 2 as a revisionist slasher, and at the same time, while it is always nice to look at, it is by far not viscerally exciting enough to work as a traditional slasher. The killings are perfunctory, the suspense scenes too obvious, and worst of all, Jacob Goodnight is just not a very threatening killer, lacking the archetypal power that makes the Shape or even Jason so long-lived. Instead, it’s a big guy who randomly slaughters people and from time to time flashes back to his mummy and rambles a little about sin.

It’s just not enough, which is my problem with the whole of See No Evil 2 – there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it to exist at all.

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Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

To nobody’s surprise, Michael Myers (this time around Don Shanks) has survived the events of the last movie and – that part is rather surprising - has spent the year until the next Halloween cohabiting with a hermit or something. His niece Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris), on the other hand, following her attack on her adoptive mother at the end of the last movie, is now mute, and has spent the same time in a mental health facility for kids, in part guarded, in part observed as a Michael seismograph by an increasingly crazed Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) who wavers between genuinely nice and caring and ruthless bastard depending on what the script needs in any given scene.

Jamie is useful as a seismograph because her implied mental connection to her uncle from the last film is now a genuine thing that will see her writhing and mumbling a lot until someone puzzles out where the attack she describes happens, and nobody gets saved by it. In theory, Michael is out to kill Jamie but unlike the slasher mastermind he was in the last outing, he’s now drifting pointlessly through town, from time to time killing people connected to Jamie, without actually getting any closer to her through it. Then there’s a mysterious guy who dresses like the Exorcist sneaking through town who is only there to set up the thoroughly stupid ending, and really, nothing much that adds up to a plot happening at all. Loomis has a “plan” to catch Michael, but said plan makes even less sense then the rest of the film.

So yeah, all the goodwill the series won through the very decent fourth entry quickly evaporated in Halloween 5 once it became clear to me that Swiss director Dominique Othenin-Girard really didn’t know what story he wanted to tell, or how to tell it, or even just what the point of any given scene was, with characters changing traits from scene to scene for reasons of plot convenience, and many scenes that look as if they were setting up something that never get any follow-through.

I can’t even gush about Donald Pleasence this time around, even though he and a Danielle Harris who has seriously improved in the short time between the last film and this one, are clearly the best thing Halloween 5 has to offer. Unfortunately, like with anything else in the film, it doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to do with Pleasence, so it’s just wavering, dragging its feet and wasting him.

This is also another slasher sequel that contains a lot of elements that, if treated by talented scriptwriters, or writers who cared, could have made a wonderful movie – the psychic connection between Jamie and Michael, the fear she will turn into him or something very much like him, the toll the eternal hunt for an indestructible enemy has taken on Loomis are all elements that scream for a script that explores concepts like evil or innocence (or the price of trauma) via the nastiness of horror. Unfortunately, Halloween 5 isn’t that film. In fact, I find it difficult to pretend this is much of a film at all. Apart from lacking niceties like plot and character. the film doesn’t even succeed as a delivery machine for killing scenes, mostly because it prefers dragging its feet and boring its audience to anything else, blowing forty minutes of plot up to a hundred.

This is particularly frustrating because the final fifteen minutes or so suggest that Othenin-Girard would well have been able to at least make an effective conventional slasher, for the final confrontation with Michael may make little sense on a logical level but is an excellent example of tense suspense that works a bit like a nightmare.

Too bad there’s the rest of the film to get through before it.

 

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Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

It’s ten years after the occurrences of Halloween and its sequel, and Doctor Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and Michel Myers (given shape by George P. Wilbur who isn’t one of the great silent slasher bodies but serviceable enough) have both survived film number two.

Michael has spent the time in a coma, but of course wakes up while being moved to a different facility behind Loomis’s back, and starts killing his way to Haddonfield, with a bent but not broken Loomis quickly following on his trail. For Michael is still attempting to do what film number two has established as his modus operandi – killing off his relatives. Poor Laurie Strode has died in a car accident in the meantime – together with whoever her husband was – leaving behind her daughter Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris already practicing for her future in horror movies). Loomis knows that Jamie will be Michael’s main victim of choice.

Jamie has found a rather good home with the Carruthers, including a teenage step sister named Rachel (Ellie Cornell) who will turn out to be willing and able to step between Jamie and someone like Michael. However it’s questionable if Rachel, a damaged psychiatrist and the reasonably competent yet completely outgunned police force of Sheriff Meeker (Beau Starr) will be enough to stop Michael.

After the last few Friday the 13th films, Halloween 4 is classing up the joint here, featuring a script that is generally sensibly building on what came in the first two movies, hitting some of the first two films’ favourite beats yet not feeling slavishly beholden to just repeating what came before. The film is at its best when it makes clear the first two movies actually happened to the people in its world, leaving Loomis half-broken and obsessed, and having had an influence on the society of Haddonfield as a whole. Sure, the latter is mostly in the movie to provide a plot relevant lynch mob (no torches, alas) once Michael has taken out the police force, but it’s more thought than ninety percent of slasher sequels ever put into this sort of thing. It does at least give a decent explanation for things like spontaneous lynch mobs in a contemporary small town, or cops willing to trust a crazy old man like Loomis.

Even though I’ve never been a fan of the second film’s revelation of Michael having an actual motive for his deeds, turning him into something much less frightening than the boogieman of the first film because he becomes understandable to a degree, I do like how Halloween 4 runs with these now established facts, and makes Michael not just frightening and dangerous but also conniving in the way he effectively destroys the parts of Haddonfield’s infrastructure most dangerous to him. If you can’t make your monster irrationally frightening anymore, it’s a good idea to make it threatening by having it act intelligently, even if won’t keep for further sequels (which it doesn’t).

Because I’m a sensible guy, I am of course wildly in love with Pleasence’s performance as Loomis here, the way he manages to squeeze real pathos out of at times stupid dialogue (“evil on two legs!”), creating a tragic figure whose whole life has been spent in a fight he just doesn’t seem to be able to win, a fight that has cost him a lot physically, mentally and in his chosen career, and that has left him determined and afraid and painfully human. Most of this isn’t as much in the script as a result of Pleasence being an actor who only very seldom let his audience see when the material he was working with was below him, adding a veneer of truth to the silly and the dubious. If Pleasence can believe in this Loomis, so can the audience.

Consequently, one of the film’s main weak spots are the various contrivances the script makes for his frequent absences from the plot, even at moments when Loomis’s absence really doesn’t make a lick of sense, with Harris just not the kind of child actor who can carry a scene on her shoulders alone, and nobody else involved quite interesting or good enough to step into Pleasence’s shoes.

However, even when Pleasence isn’t on screen, Halloween 4 is never less than an entertaining, often atmospheric slasher movie, with director Dwight H. Little surely no John Carpenter yet at the very least someone who knows how to build a mood before the killing starts as well as able to make the traditional stalking and slashing suspenseful beyond the (nice enough) bloody effects. It helps Little’s case that Halloween 4 isn’t very interested in the killing of teenagers (we already had the in the first film and dozens of epigones, after all) and does its best to set up some variety in the victims of its violence. Why, this is even a slasher sure enough of itself it doesn’t feel the need to show the audience every single kill.

On the negative side, the film’s pace drags a little in the twenty minutes or so before the climactic confrontation with Michael, there are one or two really stupid moments of false scares present and annoying, and the final twist has little – if anything at all – to do with what came before. But hey, for the kind of film Halloween 4 is, it really is as good as anyone could reasonably have expected.

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Stake Land (2010)

It's the end of the world as we know it. Vampires (of the rude, animalistic sort that has a lot in common with the fast zombies of the last decade) have overrun the world. Governments seem to have stopped existing, and most of the new plague's survivors are huddling together in locked down communities.

The vampires are not the only threat to the survivors in this rough new world, though. An apocalyptic, racist cult calling themselves the Brotherhood sees the vampires as their god's way of "cleansing the impure". Its members spend their days helping the godhood out by raping, pillaging and attacking the locked down zones, when in doubt even by throwing vampires into them out of an helicopter.

There's also some hope. Canada has supposedly - rumour having replaced fact quite some time ago - become New Eden, a giant, vampire-free evacuation zone.

Stake Land follows the teenager Martin (Connor Paolo) and the hard-ass, damaged vampire hunter Mister (Nick Damici, also co-writer), who has taken Martin in after the death of his parents, on their way north through the United States trying to reach New Eden.

Travelling, the pair meets and kills a lot of vampires (Mister doesn't just kill the creatures in self-defence, but goes out of his way to destroy them, in reaction to some trauma in his past the film will only ever hint at), runs into trouble with the Brotherhood, witnesses the best and the worst of human behaviour, and picks up other survivors like a nun (Kelly McGillis) and the pregnant Belle (Danielle Harris). Martin will have a lot of growing up to do before - and if - he and Mister are going to reach their goal, and not everyone will survive the journey.

If you're like me, you'll probably remember Jim Mickle's microbudget "rat zombies in Brooklyn" movie Mulberry Street with fondness. Stake Land (again, like Mulberry Street, co-written by Nick Damici) turns out to be even better than the earlier movie, in part because the film's budget this time around isn't quite as micro, but only low (thanks to Larry Fessenden's Glass Eye Pix whose only price seems to be a mandatory cameo by Fessenden), which enables Mickle and Damici to give their film a more ambitious scope. "Ambitious" is of course a relative word: don't expect the film to be a tour through the post-apocalyptic tourist attractions of the USA. Mister and Martin make their way through the back roads and side streets of rural and small town USA, but really, after the hundredth film showing the deserted streets of a major metropolis, taking a look at other parts of the post-apocalyptic landscape can only be a good thing.

In Stake Land's case, it's even an especially good thing, for Mickle really has a fantastic talent for finding a sense of loss as well as a very sad kind of poetry in pictures of dilapidated buildings and beautifully photographed landscape devoid of humanity. In an interesting development for contemporary filmmaking, Mickle seems to belong to the small group of directors who actually know how to put the unending fad for colour-desaturated photography to good use: turns out a thoughtful director can use the hated blue tinge in scenes where it is useful to set the mood, and not use it where more natural colours are more appropriate, using the technology for the good of his film instead to demonstrate that he hates all colours.

Stake Land's ability to find beauty as well as terror in the landscape of the world it takes place in reminded me of Monsters, which is about as big a compliment as I can make a movie. Both films also share an emphasis on showing the relationship between their characters and the worlds they have to live in, a clear love for political commentary that (for the most part) is beyond preaching, and their disinterest in the supposed narrative need for tight plotting.

The big difference between the two films is that, where Monsters doesn't go for "action" at all, Stake Land alternates its calm moments with scenes of the old ultra-violence. These scenes are - quite in contrast to the composed down-to-earthness of the film's other half - more on the pulp action movie side of the equation, instead of coming from the "dirty realism" school I would have expected. Surprisingly enough, the action never hurts or overwhelms the film's more thoughtful side and does in fact strengthen it through the power of contrast. It certainly helps that Mickle realizes his action scenes with the same expertise he has for long, sad looks at what's left of humanity.

The only time the film's action side loses me is in what I'll just call the boss fight so as to not spoil too much for anyone. It's just way too pat, the sort of thing that probably looks good on paper because it closes certain circles in the script, but feels a bit trite and artificial in a film that's otherwise as organic as Stake Land is.

For most of the time, this is a film with a script that doesn't go in the easiest directions. Much of the characterization is based on the importance of small gestures and trusts the actors to make them, and the audience to understand them. Most of your typical mainstream movies - for example - would give us a major flashback into Mister's past somewhere around the film's last thirty minutes, probably with some shouting of "noooo!" and a tearful breakdown. Stake Land trusts us to understand without the melodrama. The only other exception to this rule is Martin's occasional voiceover monologue. It's not really necessary, does tell us things we see happening on screen, and gets a bit purple now and again, but it's used sparingly enough not to be anything that could ruin the film.

And really, if what I think are the movie's two bad decisions are a five minute scene and some voiceover work, than there's nothing at all wrong with it.

 

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