It's that time of year again. The leaves turn, the footballs fly, and the VCR comes out of storage so we at the Pink Smoke can do what no one else on the internet does: watch horror movies and write about them.

It may not be groundbreaking, but for us reviewing movies of the macabre while snacking on candy corn is fun and educational. This year, John is going to attempt a particularly ambitious project called "30 Days of Fright:" one horror movie a day for every day of the month leading up to the 31st. Will he survive and what will be left of him??

After surviving a truly horrific bout of strep throat (which was in no way alleviated by a viewing of Satan's Cheerleaders), I dove headfirst into this year's lineup, spending most of the week catching up with some of the well-regarded horror titles from the last decade that I hadn't seen yet which people have been excited about. And let me tell you, people get excited about some real crap these days. My theory is that modern horror movies enthusiasts, so desperate for a classic on par with The Exorcist or The Evil Dead, are willing to let unexceptional new horror entries pass as long as they're not literally the worst film ever made. Therefore most of the titles I picked up were far from masterpieces, some may actually be the worst film ever made, but there were one or two that managed to live up to the hype.

I wanted to catch up with Jack Sholder after my research into the post-production of the debacle that was Supernova. I caught up with him in a diner called Mom's in the middle of nowhere on a cold night: Martin Landau just wants to enjoy his raw fish in peace but instead finds himself accosted by a toad and emasculated by a bible-quoting Donald Pleasance while hanging upside down. The opening dream sequence, all well-lit surreal imagery, offers so much promise that it's a shame the rest of the movie struggles to find a main character and create a consistent threat for its bland heroes. The first scene does a nice job setting up the kind of weird logic and paranoia that very well might be going through the head of a nutjob like Landau's character, but by the end of the movie he's just a grinning, knife-wielding maniac...not even the lead grinning, knife-wielding maniac. He's one of three flunkies following Jack Palance, an intense schizophrenic who masterminds an escape from the third floor of a mental institution during a convenient blackout one night that shorts out all the building's security locks and allows them to start a killing spree which ultimately leads to the house of one of the ward's doctors and his family. So the film begins in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest territory, branches off to become Halloween for a while and climaxes in a Night of the Living Dead-style home invasion, with different characters becoming the main focus in each act.

The best thing that can be said of Sholder's directorial debut, which was also the first film released by New Line Cinema, is that its dramatic shifts in tone make it kind of unclassifiable: it's not a psychological thriller so the abrupt violence is surprising, nor is it a straight-up slasher so it's genuinely impressive when the movie comes up with some insightful character moments. The psychotic, however, is not in short supply. Martin Landau, Jack Palance and Donald Pleasance - in an insane asylum? I expected a ham-off but the acting is good all around, with Palance and Pleasance surprisingly subdued while Landau seems genuinely crazy. I guess I expected this to be a "cheesy old character act" turn for them, but Landau and Palance both went on to win Oscars in the 90's, they were far from washed up and this movie proves it. As for Pleasance, well he still had Phenomena and Prince of Darkness coming up, not to mention an ill-advised appearance in a made-for-TV Great Escape sequel, so he had plenty of decent work left in him before headed for that big phony volcano base in the sky. And he's real funny in this one, especially when you consider how intensely paranoid he came across as Sam Loomis in the Halloween movies. Instead of treating his patients like evil psychos who should not be released under any circumstances, his character in Alone in the Dark is overly-nurturing, insisting that even the violent psychos on the third floor aren't really dangerous. Either way, his patients turn out homicidal and make a getaway late at night when all the other inmates are wandering around dazed on the lawn. So I guess Pleasance should just stay away from the psychological practice in general.

A twist revealing that one of the good guys is actually one of the escaped lunatics is effective, but it feels like the movie goes out of its way to accommodate it (for one thing, the whole story could have taken place over one night instead of being sort of awkwardly broken up over the course of a languid 24 hours...do blackouts ever last that long?) There are too many "what was that??" and "is he in the closet?" moments to take the suspense seriously, and nothing too progressive except that one of the killers dons a hockey mask to slash a dude to death in one scene, coming close to pre-dating Jason Voorhees' use of the protective headgear in Friday the 13th Part 3-D but missing by a mere two months. Not a classic, but worth a look.

This was one of only four roles for the uniquely-figured Erland Van Lidth, who was so memorable as Fordham Baldies leader Terror in The Wanderers. Besides acting he was an alternate for the US Olympic wrestling team and an accomplished opera singer, hence his casting as opera-themed Dynamo in The Running Man, which was released two months after his untimely death at 34.

What are the chances I'd end up seeing two different movies 28 years apart that both have a character named "The Messiah" in them within a month of each other? (The other one was Gregg Araki's Kaboom.) I guess just as good as the likelihood of starting off the month of October with two different horror films set in insane asylums. And just a few weeks ago I would have stood up for horror movies set in mental institutions, but after this and John Carpenter's The Ward I'm not sure that's the case any longer. The Sender's not a Ward-level disaster, it just sacrifices sense for the sensational. Kathryn Harrold (Albert Brooks' girlfriend in Modern Romance) plays a psychologist who learns that one of her patients (future suit-wearing government agent character actor Zeljko Ivanek) is traumatized and telepathic - a bad combination. He "senders" his nightmares to those around them, forcing everybody to experience the same intense visions that he's having while also being haunted by his mother, whose specter is constantly demanding his suicide. Although it's well made with occasional smart dialogue - one asylum dweller asks Ivanek "So you think you're Jesus huh?" then spits on the floor and says, "Walk on that!" - the story just doesn't add up. Can these images he's sendering actually cause harm to anybody? Is the mother a ghost? Why doesn't Harrold up and quit when things get too intense? (We'll let the movie have that one, as no stubborn female protagonist in horror films from Barbara Crampton in From Beyond to Candyman's Virginia Madsen ever does.) Even when Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark believes in Ivanek's sender powers following an attempted electric shock scene that gets turned around on the administrators, very satisfying for someone like me who can't stomach electric shock scenes in movies, the purpose of the characters in the movie seems to be to just get him the hell out of the hospital so they don't have to deal with him anymore. Which is just a little too close to real life for my taste.

There are two parts I really liked: the mysterious opening scene where a dazed Ivanek loads his letter jacket with rocks and walks past a bunch of gawking swimmers right into and under the water of a lake (and the camera follows him) and a funny moment where Ivanek punches a fellow patient's head clean off. But as far as Carrie ripoffs go the film suffers in comparison to Richard Franklin's Patrick, and even moreso to Brian DePalma's The Fury, most notably its scene with Belloq being hurled Carrie Snodgress-style through glass in super-slow motion. The difference between the two movies is that Snodgress' character really gets hurt: in The Sender, everything is just a hallucination and there's never any real danger to any of  the characters around the sender. So what's at risk? You would think him capable of some Scanners-esque physical damage, like his thoughts literally make people freak out until they die, but the aforementioned glass flier and beheaded patient are both fine and dandy once the episode ends. Not that I'm complaining about lack of violence - there's plenty - but with a lack of any consequence it made the movie feel like it was perpetually stopping and starting again. And that final "twist" is a groaner.

This was the first movie for Roger Christian, who won Oscars for production and set design on the original Star Wars films and Alien, in the director's seat but unfortunately not his last: he would go on to direct the Scientology camp classic Battlefield Earth. I don't remember where I heard about this film, but apparently Quentin Tarantino once called it his "favorite horror movie of 1982." This is a guy who releasd an all-time "top ten" list to Sight & Sound with a Howard Hawks movie and John Carpenter movie on it, and you're telling me he prefers this generic telepath thriller to The Thing? Or, for that matter, Basket Case, Poltergeist...The Evil Dead? His predilection for stating the most retarded things imaginable never fails to appall me.

The plot is irresistible: a failed experiment to reanimate the bodies of Waffen-SS troops as indestructible soldiers who could operate U-boats without oxygen back in the days of World War II has resulted in a small squad of murderous Aryan aquamen being left to prowl around a remote island. And a group of cruise passengers who have been stranded on said island along with disgraced former Nazi Peter Cushing learn too late that "The sea spits up what it can't keep down!" (a great line which was not taken advantage of by the film's ads.) Sure it's nothing revolutionary, but it's a marvel of economical filmmaking and an impressive debut for director Ken Wiederhorn, aided by makeup artist Alan Ormsby. These are some good looking Nazi zombies, with grayish-green skin that's flaking off but can't disguise the unmistakable features of the soulless German soldier. Eerie shots of the creatures rising from the water are effective and compliment some pretty excellent underwater photography of actors in zombie make-up and SS uniforms trudging along the ocean floor (would it have killed them to throw a shark in there??) Other neat touches include the glass bottom of a dinghy which allows characters to scream at the sight of corpses floating by underwater, although on the dvd commentary set photographer Fred Olin Rey points out the visible lawn chair leg holding down the tarp in the swimming pool in one of these shots (don't be pointing that shit out, Fred Olin Rey!) Wiederhorn adds some weird moments, particularly the scene where the lens filter changes color to represent the sun doing some weird shit - it's rare for daylight to suddenly turn piss yellow in the middle of the afternoon, and such an idea is actually pretty freaky. Seriously, it's a cheap effect, but I'm glad that kind of thing doesn't normally happen in real life.

Shock Waves launched the career of the future Mrs. Tony Shalhoub, Brooke Adams, the year before she turned up in both Days of Heaven and W.D. Richter/Philip Kaufman's excellent Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake and several years before she was almost cast as Brenda Wyatt in Highlander. These were the days when you could hire two known actors for $5,000 apiece for 4 day's work, so Cushing turns up for some scene chewing and John Carradine appears for a couple scenes as the ship's captain, whose most memorable action is to throw a bottle off the side of his ship in frustration over its obnoxious passengers. Besides that the cast, including a grade-D James Caan, is unremarkable and serve just to get slaughtered but Wiederhorn manages to keep thing ominous leading up to the inevitable zombie attacks. There are plenty of things that don't make sense (ghost ship?) and nothing really inspired writing-wise, but if there's a better underwater Nazi zombie movie around I haven't seen it. You're wrong to dismiss it - it's due for a sequel, and I don't mean Dead Snow.

Hey, remember that really effective slasher movie that takes the premise of a Big Brother-type reality show that's streaming live online and totally makes it scary? Of course you don't - such a thing does not exist. I make an effort to go into these movies blind, and sometimes that turns out to be a bad choice: if I knew what this one was about I would have avoided it like...well, like a slasher movie about a Big Brother-type reality show that's streaming live online. The set up, if I really have to talk about it, is that five Real World rejects have agreed to stay in a house located in some remote area with live cameras tracking their movements for half a year in exchange for a million bucks (if they leave they get nothing, although they're constantly going outside the house so I didn't really understand what the rules were.) Even for such a dumb premise the dialogue of the movie is so badly written ("What kind of sick fucker would subscribe to this?" is one campy example) and the acting so wooden that the incessant whirring webcams and overuse of scarrrrrry green night vision cutting from one stationery position in the room to another is almost the least of the film's problems...almost. It just literally has no idea what to do to be fun or scary; when a character turns to the webcam and asks "Should I kill her now?" he might as well be talking to the movie's audience. I don't know dude, do whatever you feel like - I certainly don't care. The director's original cut apparently ran 4 hours (oh god the agony) which is surprising considering the existing footage is padded with Big Brother-type inhouse bitch sessions and red herrings that ultimately lead to a bland bad guy who shows up out of nowhere in the last five minutes and quotes Monty Python.

Run for the fucking hills, a killer who quotes Monty Python! Did I just blow your delicate little mind?? Seriously, the movie doesn't even merit this level of scrutiny, but if the big twist is that the whole thing was set up by two guys and there was no "company" controlling the experiment, how exactly did the five participants get recruited? I'm imagining a hilarious scenario in which Bradley Cooper interviews the contestants, leaves the room, puts on a fake mustache, and re-enters as an executive from the company to tell him "Congratulations, you've been selected to be on our live-streaming web reality show!" And they STILL don't recognize him when he shows up in the house later pretending to be a lost skiier? That's right - the only notable aspect of the movie (and this is pushing it) is an early appearance by Bradley Cooper, fresh off Wet Hot American Summer but still years away from becoming Hollywood's new forced-upon-the-public leading man. McKinley from Final Destination 3 is also among the cast and brings the only real personality to the otherwise forgettable cast although his character, who has been defensive from the beginning of the film, absurdly drops his guard at the moment he should be most alert. Whatever, it's not as if these are well-developed characters. The film's poster has one of the stupidest taglines I've ever heard: "Fear is not knowing. Terror is finding out." Apparently a paraphrasing of "I didn't know if this movie was any good. I found out it wasn't."

I'm a real sucker for anachronistic horror movies set in unlikely and/or historical settings, hence my appreciation of (if not love for) David Twohy's Below and dream project of a horror film based on the doomed Confederate submarine the H.L. Hunley. I also love me some Ambrose Bierce, so I was really looking forward to this Civil War-era haunted house flick, especially after reading that the characters were a bunch of rogue Dixie soldiers turned Confederacy-robbing outlaws - sorry, Timecop fans, they have not come from the future to steal carbon-dated gold - and that the gang included Isaiah Washington and the great Michael Shannon (the other members are Henry Thomas, Joy Ride 2's Nicki Aycox, prolific character actor Mark Boone Junior and Patrick Fugit, who got real ugly real fast). After a violent heist during which Thomas may or may not have accidentally plugged a kid, they hold up in an isolated farmhouse surrounded by a seemingly endless cornfield. Their hideout turns out to have been used by a previous owner for Lovecraftian purposes, allowing demons from another realm access to our Civil War-era world where they generally turn up in the form of humming children or skinless hellhounds.

All of this is very promising, so naturally the movie was bound to disappoint. Mainly it suffers from what I call "Emily Roses," those absurd looking CGI "demon" faces with caved-in eyes and stretchy Munchian mouths which normal faces contort into - here they're used almost exclusively as lame cat scares. I mean I for one would be plenty concerned that there was some strange kid hanging out under my bed in his PJs even without him going all stretchy-faced on me. Seriously filmmakers, there were a number of effective horror movies made before the days of stretchy-face technology. If that's all you got your movie is destined to get trumped by even the most mediocre of CGI-less fright flicks (except maybe My Little Eye). Even in this film, Michael Shannon reacting to something off-screen that he saw between the rows of corn is much creepier than the cheesy computer effects it so often falls back on. These kind of thrills are generic and pandering to the general public, which would be forgivable - every modern horror director is half R.L. Stine, half J.C. Penney - if screenwriter Simon Barrett (co-author of Frankenfish) was able to come up with something for the outlaws to do once they get inside the house. There's some standard talk of backstabbing partners for the gold, tension between wild card Michael Shannon and former slave Isaiah Washington (racist Shannon doesn't think Washington deserves the same share of the gold as he does, even though Washington is an executive producer on the film) and flashbacks to the events that brought Henry Thomas to this line of work. But it all feels like filler while the main action consists of little more than the Confederate crooks creeping slowly around the house with a lantern in one hand and a pistol in the other investigating weird noises. These scenes are themselves problematic since there's nobody to really root for - they're all such merciless cutthroats, yet the movie treats them like they're supposed to be sympathetic. Additionally, there are no less than half a dozen scenes of exposition but the background story is still confusing. It all becomes fairly redundant after a while and the lack of ideas soon make it apparent that this is not the Citizen Kane of Civil War-era ghost stories I had hoped it would be. And I just don't get the ending, somebody who worked on the film needs to explain it to me. The explanation better not be "we couldn't figure out how to end it," although I suspect that might be the most honest one.

EMILY ROSE-in' it

A watchable letdown. Director Alex Turner seems talented enough that I feel certain this movie got tangled up in some bad committee decisions somewhere along the production line. His next movie, also written by Barrett, is Red Sands, about a cursed group of American troops in the Middle East that sounds very similar to this movie. I have no idea why it's called Dead Birds, unless it's got something to do with the Winston Churchill quote "Dead birds don't fall out of their nests," but if so I don't understand the context (the dead people don't leave the house? I guess so, seems like a stretch...then again this movie has its stretchy faces so maybe that is what they had in mind). Anyway the point is, Michael Shannon is great. Am I going to have to eventually see Kangaroo Jack for Michael Shannon?

The movie did get me thinking: how about a Civil War-set zombie flick called Condeaderacy?

Is that title a riff on Coldplay? Guess it depends how much Norwegians like Chris Martin. No, apparently Roar Uthaug's Cold Prey is like the Saw series of Norway: two more sequels have been made in the last three years and are apparently recognizable as simply "FV2" and "FV3" on teaser posters (the movie's Norwegian title is Fritt Vilt). It's been called "one of the best modern Norwegian horror movies" by various denizens of the internet, and since the only other Norwegian horror movie I ever heard of is Dead Snow I'll have to take those crazy Swedes' word for it that this is a good example of their country's horror movie output (They're not Swedish, Mac, they're Norweigan.)

I think Wolf Creek may have been the start of a new trend involving the horror film's enigmatic first act, where there's such an extended prologue of mediocre occurrences that it heightens the sense of foreboding. Have you noticed this? The old slasher film formula used to be: an opening murder without revealing the killer's face, introduction of characters, characters hear whatever campfire story or recent occurrence sets up the identity of the killer, move on to series of deaths that make up the remainder of the film until the ultimate confrontation/disclosure. The new structure forgoes the initial death (although there may be some ominous shot of a bloody handprint on a wall or a flashforward to a future victim screaming or what have you) and elongates the introduction of the characters to 30 or 40 minutes, with little hints as to what may befall them, and then the Horrible Thing arrives. When done well, as in The Descent, it helps create an offputting sensation of imminent dread that ratchets up the suspense and makes the movie more interesting. The obvious risk of this approach is if the monster turns out to be kind of lame, as in The Descent, it feels like a big build-up leading to an underwhelming payoff, and when it's done poorly the movie is just really boring. Cold Prey has that problem, bringing a bulky Jason-type bludgeoner wrapped in military fatigues like an mummy who deserted from the army (hm...not a bad idea for a movie there) into the mix after spending too much time with its stranded band of snow-boarding buddies who will serve as victims to Sergeant Takabuti. He's an unimpressive monster, although I have to give the movie props for giving credit to its audience and not flat-out divulging the guy's past, rather providing little bits of detail with which the viewer can form a picture of who this guy is. They also make the cliched "hero finds evidence of killer's history of murder" scene more subtle than most films (even Wolf Creek couldn't help itself in this area) and manage to reveal the killer's identity without pounding the audience over the head. My guess would be that the sequel directors have been forced to divulge more about the killer's past, so that positive aspect is probably unique to the original.

The movie doesn't offer anything too fresh in terms of execution, no pun intended. Standard stalking of victims with little variation, although there's an intense scene in which the remaining two heroes only have one bullet to use against the guy, in the dark, with neither of them being terribly proficient with firearms. And there were little things I liked, like the breakfast tray left for an already-dispatched victim that remains in the hallway throughout the film, and a spilled can of beats that's still there when they run back into the kitchen while being chased by the killer. However I don't know how much of a pass I can offer the movie based on continuity alone. Honestly I think what I liked best about it is the director's name.

Snowy climates have long been a reliable environment for isolation terror from The Shining and The Thing to the more recent 30 Days of Night and non-New Mexico set Let the Right One In. And since Norway has so much of the stuff, it was probably economical to incorporate it into the narrative. I guess to me that makes it a little less special, like filming a movie on a camcorder in your backyard. I only mention that because it's clearly a big part of the movie's appeal to folks who championed its success overseas. If anything, this film validates my theory that people will allow modern horror movies to eke by simply if they aren't unwatchably terrible. It's definitely not terrible. It's much better than Dead Snow. But not as good as Ben Affleck's Phantoms.

There aren't enough movies made about graverobbing these days. I'm almost willing to give this one a pass based on that sad truth alone, added to the fact that it does its best to be the greatest graverobbers movie Hammer never made. I wanted to be won over by its charming low budget creativity, engage in its love for every kind of horror film, and have as good a time watching it as the filmmakers seem to have had making it. It just never takes off running the way it should; the script is constantly second-guessing itself and starting over again, making what should be a linear story more like a loosely-connected portmanteau of broad ideas. There's a character introduced in the third act who does nothing for the plot except steer the protagonists in a direction they could have easily headed in on their own, only one of the wasted opportunities that can be attributed to the director's overenthusiasm in cramming the movie with neat stuff he has no clue what to do with. Vampires, zombies, a Dickensian dissectionist, shriveled alien corpses and a colorful gang of deformed rival graverobbers who serve as the catalyst for cool characters but don't actually do much in the movie are all discarded as swiftly as they're introduced. I don't want to fault first-time director Glenn McQuaid for inexperience, but if he had scaled down the ambition and focused on the movie's strengths it could have possibly been a new masterpiece. As it stands, the best that can be said is that the film is full of good intentions, and for the most part the things that work make up for the things that don't, even though the things that don't outweigh those that do 5-1.

Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden play a pair of Burke and Hare-style resurrectionists who together experience a series of adventures, regaled by Monaghan to monk Ron Perlman as he awaits the guillotine. They dig up corpses for an immoral anatomist (a great cameo by Angus Scrimm, whose role makes me think he'd do great as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, and also reminded me that he ain't getting any younger - final Phantasm please!) then go into business for themselves after they start unearthing some of the more interesting things people bury for a good reason, many still alive and kicking beneath the soil. Again, a very workable premise, but after Scrimm exits the film it's unclear how these two are even profiting from their discoveries. I mean, who would pay money for a vampire maiden? A scene exploring that would be interesting in and of itself, but the movie has a tendency to end its segments with a kind of "got it? ok, moving on" impatience that make events seem less connected to one another as the film progresses. It's frustrating, because good character development (Fessenden's scallywag Willie Grimes goes from almost killing Monaghan's Arthur Blake to adopting him as a kind of son) and funny dialogue (like a conversation about the invention of the sandwich) provide the movie with a Shaun of the Dead-style charm, but it every scene feels one rewrite or one post-production tweek away from being great.

This is the only Glass Eye Pix horror movie I've actually seen besides House of the Devil - although I'm familiar with Larry Fessenden from his appearances at every horror convention on the east coast, I never bothered to check out Habit or Wendigo or The Last Winter. Although I'd classify this one as an interesting failure, its competent production makes me think I should give one or two of those other ones a shot. I was honestly surprised to learn from the dvd documentary that the movie was shot in old forts and dilapidated graveyards on Staten Island and the Scratcher bar in the East Village. Anyway, I hope it's followed by a gory sequel called I Smell the Dead.

I guess it was The Blair Witch Project in 1999 that created the "online hype" horror hit, which makes this last decade the first to be besieged by internet-approved sleepers. Most of them sucked, but what really defined these movies was how much people fell in love with films like Hatchet, Frontier(s) and House of the Devil when at best they were amusing and inoffensive little romps that never really found their own voice or breached new territory. And while I definitely prefer horror movies that become hits because of the internet rather than horror movies ABOUT the internet like My Little Eye, I just don't get what so many web professors see in these largely mediocre movies. Trick R Treat is no exception: it's competently produced, it's amusing to watch, but at the end of the day you just have to wonder what the people who put it on "best horror" lists above Texas Chain Saw Massacre are smoking. I know we're all anxious for there to be a brand new Halloween-themed horror movie, with pumpkins and costumes and celebrating in the well-decorated small town autumn streets the way no American towns do anymore (except maybe Maui), but having a couple Jack O'Lanterns in the movie doesn't make it an instant classic as far as I'm concerned.

It took me a while to realize this was a compilation film with different stories, like Creepshow. I finally figured it out when illustrated panels like in the old EC Comics started popping up to serve as transitions between segments...like Creepshow. After a useless opening that establishes that any horrible violent act that befalls anti-Halloween Scrooges is justified in the world of Trick R Treat, the movie proper begins with a faux-shocking bit of black comedy in which Dylan Baker kills a fat kid and dismembers his corpse in his backyard. This first sequence made me think of a bunch of horror movie fans sitting around a table coming up with "the most fucked up shit" they could think of to put in a compilation film - I feared the whole movie was going to be like that, but each segment manages to suck on its own terms. The second, about a group of kids playing a Halloween prank where the phony ghosts turn out to be real ghosts, is the best of the lot: some good atmosphere despite a predictable story. Then the third goes for that tired old switheroo with the maiden turning out to be the monster, complete with Anna Paquin dressed as Little Red Riding Hood (seen Hard Candy recently, fellas?) The last chapter is a redux of the Trilogy of Terror Death Doll finale, with Brian Cox struggling to survive against a tiny demonic home invader (who, I should mention, the filmmakers are so aching to make iconic they've already released a toy in his likeness). It's hard to flat-out hate this movie because it's just dumb and uninspired, fun enough with nothing to recommend in it, and you can't really fault the film for having an overenthusiastic reception. But if it's any indication, Vern - who usually finds plenty of interesting things in subpar movies to talk about - had almost nothing to say about this one in his recent review even though he liked it better than I did, likening it to tooth-ruining Halloween candy we know we shouldn't eat but do anyway. Just too much sugar for my taste.

Although I enjoyed Christopher Smith's directorial debut Creep during last year's horror marathon, the ads for his follow-up film were really unappealing. Basically they made it look like "The Office"...with butcher knives! So I ignored it for a while, thinking I could do without some snarky The Temp/Office Killer type comedy-slash-slasher, finally resolving to give the movie a slot in this year's lineup when it popped up on Netflix Instant Play. And, well, it's fuckin good! As much as I hate using phrases like "strikes the perfect balance," Severance strikes the perfect balance between a horrific situation from which there's no escape and acknowledging the absurdity of such an unfathomable scenario. It deals with a group of co-workers forced into a motivational team building exercise weekend who find themselves fighting for more than their jobs when someone starts hunting them down one by one. Jesus, there's no way to make this movie sound not awful is there? Take my word for it, it's really funny and unflinchingly brutal.

After a prologue that pays off beautifully later in the film we're introduced to half a dozen employees of a prominent defense contractor, including an icy American (The Faculty's Laura Harris), irreverent slacker (apparently-famous British media personality Danny Dyer) and a champion asskisser (guy who looks like Nick Frost). Their insufferable supervisor (Black Adder's Tim McInnerny) leads them off the path to a seemingly abandoned lodge somewhere in Hungary where something bad is bound to happen. I was just talking about the "what's the Horrific Thing?" angle that so many slashers use these days, and this one has an amusing sequence where the heroes speculate what it very well may end up being by relating their own versions of what went on at the lodge prior to their arrival, with accompanying visual narratives (my favorite being the tale of the overrun mental hospital using the aesthetics of a silent movie - incidentally, Satan's Cheerleaders, this film is funnier than The Omen and scarier than Silent Movie). The theme of Severance ends up being how impotent life as an office worker has made the characters who, like many of us, aren't prepared to handle a primal, deadly situation like the one they end up in. This isn't overstated by the film, and although the crew works for a defense contractor the political subtext is never so blunt that it overwhelms the story. I couldn't have been happier with it had it turned out to be a biopic of Joan Severance starring Joan Severance as herself.

There's a moment in the last reel that is so hilarious I wouldn't give it away. But it has to do with a rocket launcher.

I liked this movie, and I think people should see it. You should stop reading right now and go rent the thing, as there is no way to continue discussing it without a MAJOR FUCKIN' SPOILER right off the bat. Ok? You had your chance, hot shot.

The spoiler is simply this: Triangle is Timecrimes. If you've seen Timecrimes, Triangle's intricately woven Möbius strip of a plot will not surprise you. Basically Melissa George finds herself in an continuous loop she has unknowingly already traversed dozens of times and, in her progressive efforts to escape the recurring events/correct her own mistakes, she dons a heavy trenchcoat and potato sack mask and starts killing people. The upcoming English remake of Timecrimes is now doubly redundant, as Triangle is as close to an English version of Timecrimes as you are ever likely to see. I don't think it's a rip-off (for one thing they were released pretty close together), and both movies are guilty of borrowing elements from films like La jetee and Primer, but the unfortunate thing is that if you've seen Timecrimes it will be in your mind the entire time you're watching Triangle.

That's a shame, because Triangle is smart and well-made and deserves to be enjoyed on its own merits. And unlike Nacho Vigalondo's trippy thriller, you're never sure exactly why George is caught up in this violent purgatory and can only theorize what it has to do with her mysteriously absent autistic son. I've been a fan of Melissa George since her wordless early appearances in The Limey and Mulholland Dr. (unlike other people I even liked her on "Alias") and this is the best she's ever been: she carries the entire movie. Just looking at her you can tell she's been through something horrible, even in the first scene of the movie. For his part, Christopher Smith gets another hit - not a homerun, but a very satisfying double - with this Groundhoug Day variety of horror fantasy that, like Severance, has an incredible moment just past the one hour-mark. He cooks up a great atmosphere that feels sinister even before the weird shit starts to go down - the deserted luxury liner the bulk of the film takes place on is as haunting as the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. The film's twists may not be surprising, but the psychological mark they leaves on the main character are fascinating to follow along with. Furthermore, Triangle solves a lot of the problems in Richard Franklin's flawed final film, the similarly sea-set self-reflective supernatural thriller Visitors with fellow Aussie Radha Mitchell* in a role very similar to George's.

It's not a better movie than Timecrimes, but Smith's touch is more humanistic than Vigalondo's cold direction. Weirdly enough, he brings something of the kitchen sink realism to his outrageous horror films. I can honestly say I think Smith is as good a director as someone like Shane Meadows. I am really looking forward to his medieval movie Black Death with Sean Bean and Carice Van Houten.