April 14, 2003
The Ring
(This post will be largely spoiler-free.) I managed to miss seeing The Ring when it was in theaters last fall; our annuanl Thanksgiving host Beth was interested in seeing it, but due to fears of Black Friday crowds, we didn't make it to the mall. The Ring is a movie that will inherently be different when you see it on video. As the first five minutes of the movie reveal, The Ring is about a videotape out of an urban legend: you see a woman's nightmare and seven days later you die. The movie is surprisingly well-executed; nobody behaves stupidly, given that they aren't aware that they're in a horror movie. I guessed the twist ending, mostly, but it doesn't seem to be in there just for the sake of having it. The Ring isn't particularly horrifying, but even the best horror movies (The Exorcist, The Haunting) aren't horrifying; thinking about it, the only thing that really strikes me as properly horrific that can be carried off in film is a slow descent into madness (and I'm thinking Repulsion, not The Shining). The death video in The Ring is well done, slightly reminiscent of Un Chien Andalusia, and here's where the experience is changed by seeing it on video; I watched the sequence in which the video is first shown two or three times, totally disrupting the flow of the film and turning it into something closer to a game. V. and I tried to figure out what each of the images meant and where they fit into the narrative. I liked the effect, but it probably wrecked the slow buildup of tension that's crucial for this kind of movie. But even if it didn't leave me shuddering with terror, it was appropriately creepy, somewhere on the level of a really good episode of The X-Files or Twin Peaks. The one really masterful moment was the denoument (which I hear is even better in the Japanese version), which was wonderfully filmic; things seemed to be running at the wrong speed, as in a silent movie, and there was a great, herky-jerky Harryhausen-esque motion to it that worked as a horrifying effect in itself. The more traditional special effects, the body makeup and such, in that scene actually distracted from the spookiness. Getting the character's movements to be so unheimlich must have taken some effort, but it was a transcendant effect, the only truly otherworldly moment in an otherwise enjoyably competent movie.
February 25, 2003
Dog Soldiers
My friend Claxy summed up Dog Soldiers quite neatly: (Night of the Living Dead - zombies) + (Aliens - aliens) + werewolves + self-awareness. Still, that doesn't mean it's a bad bad thing. Being neither as uncomfortably smart and unexpected as Night of the Living Dead nor as slick and white-knuckled as Aliens is not a damning flaw; Aliens was one of the best action movies of the Eighties, and Night of the Living Dead is one of the great horror movies of all time. Dog Soldiers is a movie about a small British Army unit conducting a field exercise in rural Scotland. I hope no readers will be shocked to discover that things go horribly, horribly awry when the werewolves turn up. Once the soliders hole up, along with a mysterious and taciturn Special Forces operative and the obligatory beautiful local, Dog Soldiers succeeds by keeping things moving. The key to great horror movies is a growing sense of either claustrophobia or the unheimlich, but Dog Soldiers is really a horror film more in the late Carpenter vein, which is to say an action film, quips and all. That's not a flaw, however: the characters are largely charming and believable, the plot suffers from no gaping holes until the very end, and the special effects are quite impressive for what must have been a limited budget. If a movie willing to sacrifice what mimesis it can get from a story about werewolves squaring off with the British Army for a cheap pun sounds appealing and the idea of a self-conscious horror movie hasn't been spoiled by Scream knockoffs, then Dog Soldiers is worth a rental. Plus, V. claimed that a number of the soldier boys were cute, and the obligatory beautiful local was awfully easy on the eyes.