WE ARE STILL HERE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepily Effective Old-Fashioned Haunted House Thriller at the 2015 FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL in Montreal

We Are Still Here (2015)
Dir. Ted Geoghegan
Starring: Barbara Crampton,
Andrew Sensenig, Larry Fessenden, Lisa Marie, Monte Markham

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There's always room for a solid "things that go bump in the night" haunted house picture, so long as the proceedings are handled with proficiency and a minimum degree of stupidity. Ted Geoghan's first feature film We Are Still Here succeeds on both counts.

Yes, we've been down this road before. The Sacchettis are an attractive, well-to-do couple still grieving from the accidental death of their only son. They've chosen flight from familiar surroundings to heal and move into a gorgeous, old house in the wide open spaces of Inbred-ville, New England. Situated on a gorgeous estate, isolated, but not too far away from a nearby village (full of inbreds), the couple appear to have nailed the real estate find of the century.

Uh-oh.

We all know that when an old, long-unoccupied house in the middle of nowhere goes for a steal, there's bound to be some ectoplasmic shenanigans going on. Luckily, we are not the Sacchettis. We are the audience. We know better, which is always a good deal for us, yes?

Anne (played by the always-delectable Barbara Crampton of Re-Animator fame) feels her son's spirit is still with them and that he's followed them to their new digs. Paul (Andrew Sensenig), being the lowly male of the equation is far more practical about such matters, but he sensitively humours her and agrees to a visit from their longtime spiritualist friends. May (played by the gorgeous Lisa Marie of Vampira fame in Ed Wood and unceremoniously booted by director Tim Burton in favour of the ratty-mopped Helena Bonham Carter) is psychic. Her hubby Jacob (the always wonderful character actor and Habit director Larry Fessenden, looking more like Jack Nicholson in The Shining with every picture) is a dope-smoking old hippie with new-agey powers in crystals and seances.

It's always convenient when bereaved couples know spiritualist couples. It makes horror movies so much more lively, yes?

Of course, what would a New England community of inbreds be without a couple of real whoppers of inbreds? Creepy old neighbour Dave McCabe (Monte Markham) and his nutty wife Maddie (Susan Gibney) pop by for a friendly visit wherein we get all the dope on the Sacchettis' new home.

It's an old funeral parlour, situated on unhallowed ground and formerly run by a family who pilfered bodies and sold them to a nearby medical college. Or so we're told.

Yes, it's always convenient when bereaved couples move into old funeral parlours on unhallowed ground formerly run by inbreds who sold bodies to be sliced and diced by med students. It's even more convenient that the inbreds might actually have been innocent of this crime and murdered by the inbred townspeople.

Are you with me? Good. This is what our impish filmmaker has laid out for the mega-scares to follow. Though screenwriter Geoghegan doesn't really go beyond the stock tropes of most ghostly melodramas, Geoghegan the director does go through some mighty impressive gymnastics of helmsmanship to knock us on our collective butts all the way through this effective chiller.

Babe-O-Licious Barbara Crampton as HOT now
as she was in 1985's RE-ANIMATOR. Hubba-Hubba!

The real star of the film is Canadian cinematographer Karim Hussain who superbly handles Geoghegan's morbidly creepy mise-en-scene with considerable aplomb. The camera feels like a character unto itself - its gorgeous compositions and lighting make us feel like something genuinely unholy is actively observing the proceedings whilst occasionally making us feel like we're seeing stuff that may or may not be there. Hussain moves the camera so deftly and subtly that we're often chilled to the bone - not just by the gorgeously captured winter climes surrounding the house, but by the manner in which it glides and/or settles upon the dank details of the house and especially, the basement. The chilling musical score and alternately shivery, heart-attack-inducing sound design are also brilliantly rendered, giving us ample creeps and shocks.

Especially in the basement.

Oh yes! 'Tis always convenient for a haunted house to have a clammy basement with a boiler on the fritz causing temperatures to rise and a strange wall that supposedly has nothing behind it.

Then, there are the ghastly apparitions and, the blood.

They are plenty ghastly.

And yes, there is plenty of blood. (And thanks to a lovely Straw Dogs-inspired climax, the picture racks up a very impressive body count.)

All that said, if you're looking for a bit more meat on the bones of the bereaved couple horror scenario, you're not going to find it here. There's potential to have steered the film into the complex, layered territory of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, but Geoghegan seems content to keep us in the shock-o-rama territory of his more clear influence, the grand Italian shock-meister Lucio (The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery) Fulci.

I accept this.

The movie forced me to soil myself on numerous occasions. Luckily, I've learned long ago to always wear adult diapers for my sojourns into the cinematic territory of haunted house thrillers. Thankfully, this one is up there with those pictures keen on skilfully delivering all the visceral thrills and chills which, ultimately, are the hallmark for all fine horror pictures.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

We Are Still Here from Dark Sky and Raven Banner enjoyed its Canadian Premiere at the 2015 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. For further info, visit the fest's website HERE.

THE INNOCENTS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Henry James Classic on Criterion BluRay

The perfect marriage
of literature & cinema

The Innocents (1961)
Dir. Jack Clayton
Starring: Deborah Kerr, Peter Wyngarde,
Megs Jenkins, Martin Stephens, Pamela Franklin, Michael Redgrave

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There are few pieces of literature in the English language which can come close to the icky dread achieved by Henry James in his novella "The Turn of the Screw" and even fewer still that dare match its almost nectarous levels of creepy, languorous and bone-chillingly odious delights. It's writing that sticks to the roof of your mouth and short of attempting to dig the thick ooze from your maw, you're more often tempted to let it slide stealthily to the pit of your gut until it makes its abominable presence known within your intestines and sits there, like an immobile blob of mucky goo, never to be fully expunged, but just waiting for you to partake of its abominations again and again and yet again until all hope of it ever leaving you is hope worth abandoning. James hooks you for a lifetime and you never shake yourself free of his prose until you're good and dead. Even then, one suspects it will follow you to whatever place your soul ends up in.

That's just the way it is with "The Turn of the Screw" and one of the most phenomenal achievements in all of cinema is how astoundingly producer-director Jack Clayton was able to replicate James's literary power in his film version The Innocents, yet do so in ways that only cinema is capable of. Clayton, of course, surrounded himself with only the finest collaborators to pull this off including a screenplay adaptation by Truman Capote and William Archibald, astonishing cinematography by Freddie Francis, a haunting Georges Auric score and Jim Clark's first-rate cutting.

There's also that to-die-for cast. The gorgeous Deborah Kerr leads the charge. Her icy beauty is pinched and coiled within her indelible performance as Miss Giddens, the repressed, small-town preacher's daughter who takes her first step away from home to be governess to the creepy Miles (Martin Stephens) and innocent Flora (Pamela Franklin), the respective nephew and niece of the confirmed playboy bachelor Uncle (Michael Redgrave) who leaves his "inherited" charges socked away in his sprawling, isolated, lonely country estate managed by the kindly housekeeper Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins). What should be idyllic (though in fairness, creepy rural mansions can never really be idyllic), soon gives way to unspeakable horrors in a house so pernicious that each revelation of the evil and perversion coursing through the estate's very soul grips us as obsessively as it does Miss Giddens. The previous governess, you see, the prim but comely Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop), fell hard for the coarse, brutish groundsman Peter Quint (Peter Wyngarde) and their relationship was not only one driven by sadomasochistic abuse, but Giddens discovers that the children were privy to it, if not even victims of it.

And yes, Giddens see ghosts. Quint and Miss Jessel died most tragically on the grounds of the estate and worse yet, Giddens fears that their ghosts are attempting to possess the innocents, the children, in order to keep their sick, venal, sordid sexual relationship alive in the bodies of the brother and sister she's been sworn to protect.

The very idea that children, siblings no less, could be compelled to offer up their bodies and souls to a continuance of sadomasochism is the stuff of both great literature and cinema.

The novella is written primarily in the first person by Miss Giddens and her "voice" is captured quite remarkably in the trademark Henry James ultra-long sentences, replete with endless parenthetical connectors and interjections. The prose yanks you this way and that way and yet, you're never less than compelled to plough through the eerie, horrifying, mounting and ever-perverse delirium of the text. There are, of course, given its first-person, subtle signposts suggesting that Giddens's narration might not always be reliable, and that there might not even be ghosts at all, but that she's simply going quite mad from repression, longing and isolation. And yet, in spite of this, we always believe that what she's seeing, she believes.

Though one suspects Clayton's mise-en-scene would have always employed the approach he eventually took, it was finally enhanced by the happy accident of distributor 20th Century Fox insisting the film be shot in their patented ultra-widescreen format Cinemascope. This at first annoyed Clayton, but as he soon resigned himself to this format, he and Freddie Francis concocted a brilliant approach which is as faithful to James's prose style as any film adaptation of a literary source could be. Objects and figures are placed at extreme ends of the frame, movements are subtle, yet pointed, and the outer edges of the frame are always treated with distorted anamorphic effects and filtering to create the sense that you're in a world that exists exclusively within the domain of this wretched house, one which is haunted by sick, loathsome spirits.

The other astounding thing is how Clayton scares the Bejesus out of you - not by shock cuts, but by both the languorous, gorgeously composed camera movements, but better yet by the appearance of the ghosts. They appear in the frame almost naturally, sometimes in broad daylight. (James used his prose to create light and often, it's these very segments that are scariest). The POV of the ghosts is almost always via Giddens, but there's one astounding appearance of the vile Quint at a window where we see him before Giddens does. I can assure you, you'll fill your drawers when this occurs. As well, Clayton makes judicious use of dissolves which act, not just transitionally and in terms of delineating time and space, but to also add an essence of the creepy crawly whilst also capturing the very heart and soul of Henry James.

At approximately 125 words, here's a sample of James's creepy prose style in ONE SENTENCE. Note the twists and turns, the parenthetical asides and connectors, all of which are so similar to Clayton's visual style:

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look at such portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without, but within, that I had fancied I heard.

These very images and sentiments, if not literally captured by Clayton, are spiritually captured by the manner of how things are placed in the frame and how he and Francis manipulate our gaze to where they want us to go. The aforementioned passage is also important as it presents visual touchstones and feelings that should be infused with beauty and caring, but also creepily hint that things with Miss Giddens and/or the house itself are not quite right. Clayton through his miss-en-scene does the same thing, not with words, of course, but through his lens. Like some miracle, Clayton furthermore can capture Giddens's "restlessness" and infuse it with both face-vslue feeling, but something just a touch off.

At a mere 65-words, here's a sentence from James, using Giddens's "voice" wherein we're privy to one of her nocturnal wanderings. The very length and structure of the sentence, glides with a somnambulistic ease and yet, replicates feelings and actions within Giddens that induce us to feel what she feels:

Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the staircase – suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things I had seen the specter of the most horrible of women.

That Clayton replicates this very thing cinematically is beyond simple skill as a filmmaker, but is, rather, the work of an artist who himself is so possessed with James (and by extension, James's creation Miss Giddens) that his own directorial touches, whilst remaining wholly cinematic, are as Jamesian as they are his own.

The Innocents is filmmaking at its finest and it's a film that creates images and feelings that are as haunting for you as they are for the characters in the film and even more miraculously, as haunting as they were in written form in a work, so ahead of its time, yet also of its time. The repression of the very ethos of Victorian culture and literature is unabashedly created by Jack Clayton in his film to deliver a movie that will not only terrify the living wits out of you, but stick to your craw and haunt you - at least until you see the film again, and again, and yet, again.

And trust me, the movie never ceases to creep you out.

Never! No matter how many times you see it.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

The Innocents is available from The Criterion Collection on Blu-Ray and DVD. The anamorphic monochrome images have not looked this good since I first saw a 35mm print on a big screen and the gorgeously designed and mixed sound which was applied via the delectably monaural track affixed literally to its prints via optical in the late, great and lamented analogue process. Both of these elements are handled with utmost respect to the original approach via the high definition digital process of an all-new 4K digital restoration, with the uncompressed monaural soundtrack. The extra features are absolutely first-rate and this might well be one of the best, if not THE best home entertainment product generated this year. We get a fine wide introduction and remarkable commentary track by the noted cultural historian Christopher Frayling, an unbelievably wonderful interview with cinematographer John Bailey about director of photography Freddie Francis and the look of the film which, I'm happy to say (and by virtue of all the things Bailey points out), corroborate my own belief that the miss-en-scene is as faithful to Henry James as any film has a right to be faithful to its literary source without being literary, but wholly cinematic. An additional added feature includes 2006 interviews with Freddie Francis himself, editor Jim Clark and script supervisor Pamela Mann Francis - all of whom provide just the kind of insight into the making of the film that delivers pure, practical as well as artistic knowledge that will appeal to both film lovers and filmmakers. You'll also find the requisite trailer and sumptuous accompanying booklet.

REAL (aka "Riaru") - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Kiyoshi Kurosawa visits a subconscious ghosts @FantAsia2014

A fleeting childhood memory permeates a subconscious world
of love, loss and ghost-like shadows of a life once lived.

Real (aka "Riaru") (2013)
dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Takeru Sato, Haruka Ayase, Joe Odagiri, Miki Natakani

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Cure, Charisma) is nothing if not ambitious. His latest film Real is set in a future not too removed from our own in which it's possible to scan the subconscious of those we love who are deep in a coma.

Here, a young couple face their greatest challenge when a wife attempts suicide and her husband is wired to her mind as she lays dead to the living world. Here they are able to communicate in a strange living purgatory of ghosts, shadows and zombie-like replicas of life itself. The couple faces the challenge of solving a mystery which might be able to revive the wife, or at least provide some spiritual solace to her tragic decision. It involves a drawing of a plesiosaur which she gifted to her husband in their childhood and that he's misplaced.

To say more is to upset the delicate intricacies of this haunting and deeply moving tale of love and loss. Kurosawa's deliberate pacing is, as always, infectious and though he's lest interested in evoking terror, he does manage to give us the creeps.

Though the film overstays its welcome whilst watching it, you can't get the damn thing out of your head afterwards. As always, it's the mark of a genuine artist.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½

Real enjoyed its Quebec Premiere at the FantAsia 2014 Film Festival.

GOOD PLACE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Funny, moving short by one of Canada's most talented female directors, plays the Toronto Inside Out LGBT Film Festival program "Lesbian Shorts:Bound (By Love)"

When we look to the sky we look for answers.
Dyan Bell and Seamus Morrison in Gina Bucci's GOOD PLACE

Baby Brother, Big Sister
SIBLING SHENANIGANS
in the SUBURBS

Good Place (2014) Dir. Gina Bucci ****
Starring: Dyan Bell, Seamus Morrison, Alisen Down
Review By Greg Klymkiw

There are people in our lives who are linked to us so inextricably that even though we haven't seen them for awhile, their appearance is enough to bring us back to what made them special in the first place. No matter how unexpected their materialization in our world might be, the feelings they engender always seem just like yesterday. Such is the case with Connie (Dyan Bell) in Gina Bucci's gem of a short film Good Place. Things are rocky and uncertain in her relationship with Beth (Alisen Down), exemplified quite clearly one morning when some pre-nine-to-five nookie takes a back seat to affairs of the career rather than affairs of the heart. Connie is left alone with an empty house when Beth decides to sneak off to work. Rather than facing the day, Connie crawls under the blankets, but her comfy ostrich head in the sand is short-lived when the door bell rings and an unexpected visitor enters back into her life.

Reunited with her little brother Joey (Seamus Morrison), Connie dives into a whole lotta fun. The twenty-something siblings regress ever-so delightfully into childhood and soon, whatever weight is on Connie's shoulders is lifted by her baby brother's good humour, cheer and love. Though everything feels like it's back to normal, a cloud seems to hang over the events of the day, a nagging sense that the freewheeling warmth rooted in a lifetime of a big sister's love for her baby brother, can't possibly last forever.

After a day of childlike sibling shenanigans, brother and sister soon find themselves under a night sky. The limitless possibilities inherent in a universe dwarfs them and yet envelopes them in the warmth of belonging to something much larger. Life and love puts both of them in a good place and as long as faith and love remain strong, the possibilities seem limitless.

Like the best short films, Good Place offers us a simple situation, a slice of a life that acts macrocosmically for the characters involved and, in a sense, provides thoughts and feelings familiar to us while also letting us make them our own and take from them what we will and must. Bell and Morrison deliver memorable and naturalistic performances - fresh, attractive and altogether winning. Bucci's direction is assured and the film is deftly cut by Tiffany Beaudin. Visually arresting without overt flash, Director of Photography Sue Johnson tricks us into thinking she's shot the picture with yeoman rigour, but that's the clever deception. It doesn't bring unwarranted attention to itself and we're almost never aware of just how indelible the images are, serving the natural rhythm of the dramatic action. And then, we're treated to a load of chocolate fudge syrup on the ice cream and Good Place delivers a few final shots that sweep us off our feet until one simple, slow upward tilt completely takes our breath away.

It's a sweet, lovely, mystical and even phantasmagorical little picture that continues to solidify Bucci as a genuine force to be reckoned worth in Canadian Cinema. Ever since seeing one of her first short films, the original and profoundly moving A Quiet Little Riot, I've been looking forward to each new work by Bucci with baited breath.

Someone please give this lady some money to make a feature. It'll pay off in spades.

Good Place is part of a program of short films at the Toronto Inside Out LGBT Film Festival. The series is entitled LESBIAN SHORTS: BOUND (BY LOVE) and in addition to Good Place, it features Dream Date, Dyke Central: Taboo, Neighbours, Anti-Aging Ema and Curtains. For more information, visit the festival website HERE.

Here are some fine LGBT films. Feel free to order them from the handy links below and in so doing, you'll be supporting the ongoing maintenance of the Film Corner.




Full Disclosure:
I've followed Bucci's career avidly for many years.
I'm credited on this film as a Story Consultant.
It's what I do, though.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The Dreaded Hispanic Fifth Wheel

More of the same found footage activities of the paranormal kind come our way in this fifth instalment of the ghostly horror series about witchcraft and demonic possession captured by people who seem to do nothing else but shoot every second of their lives through home video cameras.

Come join me at
Satan's Tupperware Party!

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014) *
Dir. Christopher Landon
Starring: Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz, Gabrielle Walsh

Review By Greg Klymkiw

After seeing the first Paranormal Activity, I hoped there'd never be a sequel. I knew this was wishful thinking, but when I see a picture that feels perfect, I don't want its existence besmirched by an endless barrage of substandard instalments that deliver more of the same, but go out of their way to generate useless backstory and fleshing-out. After seeing the first film, I felt delectably walloped, but was also left with enough questions about what had occurred that they enriched the experience by lending an air of mystery to the proceedings. I didn't want to know that Katie was the target of an ages-old conspiracy of witches carrying out demonic possession, nor did I want to know the reasons why. What happened in the first film was enough.

Even still, I'd gird my loins appropriately and then faithfully see each and every new instalment. Parts II and III of the followups, though bereft of the power of the first, were surprisingly fun, creepy and offering enough jolts to satisfy me on visceral levels. Part IV, though, seemed like the beginning of the end and the latest instalment comes close to tarring and feathering Oren Peli's original offering.

I might be possessed, but I still
brush my teeth twixt hauntings.

The Marked Ones is set against the backdrop of California's Hispanic community. Given how scary Santeria is - at least for this fella - I thought that maybe we'd go into somewhat different territory. Alas, this is something that's never exploited for what it could have been worth.

What it barfs up instead is a Hispanic kid with a video camera discovering weird stuff in an apartment below his own family's abode.

A well-known witch in the community boasts a series of odd comings and goings including a pal from school. The pal is always distant and in a hurry. Lucky, for all concerned, we're treated to a ritual involving the naked old witch and a gorgeous young lovely displaying full frontal nudity. However, what follows is pure tedium until the last 20-or-so minutes when the filmmakers deliver a close-but-no-cigar fright-fest.

This, of course, is hardly enough to save the picture.

A clutch of Hispanic kids break into the apartment after it's been sealed with police tape after a grisly murder and then, more of the same - weird noises, odd images and the ever-mounting dread that a kick-ass climax will ensue. The movie briefly skirts with Hispanic gang involvement, but this is never properly fleshed out. Like all the sequels, we never get a sense of the characters and hence, don't really care what's going to happen.

This is all more retreading on a well worn series and the only new element is that the filmmakers have ensured a whole new marketplace amongst Hispanic audiences. Replete with vaguely ethnocentric trappings, one expects appearances from either Topo Gigio and/or The Frito Bandito.

How the mighty continue to fall - this time to the strains of La Cucaracha.

"Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones" is in wide theatrical release worldwide via Paramount.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #1 still packs a wallop on the eve of a 5th sequel

A 5th Paranormal Activity is now out there in the world. Though the sequels to the original have had a few decent frissons, nothing held up to the first serving of the found footage ghost story. For fun, I'm looking back at the very first Paranormal Activity and after a few years of not watching it, I can happily say it holds up magnificently.

Paranormal Activity (2009)****
dir. Oren Peli
Starring: Katie Featherston,
Micah Sloat, Mark Fredrichs
Review By Greg Klymkiw

Any and all clichés one could utilize to describe the overall effect of this magnificently directed, utterly extraordinary and near-perfect no-budget horror movie would be apt – it’s heart-stopping, nerve-jangling and pulse-pounding.

More than suitable, albeit hackneyed descriptions, one and all, but in some ways a disservice to use because Paranormal Activity is such an exquisitely rendered creep-fest that any superlatives it deserves (clichéd or not), will ultimately pale in comparison to the experience of bearing witness to what unfolds. There is also the fear that as much as one wants people to see it, any overwrought praise has the ability to set up the sort of high expectations that no picture could ever live up to.

Well, let it be said that I had absolutely NO expectations.

As per usual, I managed, in advance of seeing the picture for the first time, to avoid reading all reviews. No puff pieces for this fella, either, since I can’t stomach reading them anyway. I partook of no trailers, nor any of the usual hype used to hawk movies. All I knew going in was the title. Knowing even that, I assumed it would be a horror movie, and, being a rabid fan of late-night radio stars Art Bell and George Noory of “Coast-to-Coast” fame, I furthermore suspected the picture would be dealing with one of my favourite subjects in horror movies – paranormal activities, of course; those forces in the universe that are received with as much scepticism as profound belief.

With no expectations or knowledge, I sat back and let it happen.

And happen, it most certainly did.

On the surface, the picture falls into the shaky-video-cam thriller mockumentary tradition of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Quarantine. It blows all of them into near oblivion – not because there’s anything profoundly original about Paranormal Activity (well. there is, actually - more on this later), but because it’s endowed with the sort of relentless, obsessive quality one might find in the very best horror thrillers and feels less machine-tooled than the aforementioned.

It’s also just plain scary - something that I never really felt about the mock thrills within the trio cited above; due, I suspect, to the feeling that I could feel the hands of the filmmakers at work just a little too obviously.

Paranormal Activity elicits the sort of unexpected explosions of fear-induced fecal matter into my undies that all great horror films wrench out of you because writer-director Oren Peli creates mounting dread by avoiding so many of the trademarks of the shaky-cam genre.

Number one, it is not overwrought – at least not all the way through and ONLY when it needs to be.

Secondly, the performances are fresh and naturalistic. The attractive leads seem like any normal young couple flung into a situation that is clearly out of their realm of experience.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the shaky-cam is actually not all that shaky. In fact, it’s mostly very, very still. Locked off in tableau for a good portion of the picture, the camera is a silent witness to some of the most horrifying images I have yet to experience (which takes some doing since about 1/3 of the over 30,000 titles I've seen in my life are affiliated with genres devoted to terror). There’s no blood – not too much, anyway: there’s no elaborate, over-the-top digital effects and there are no cheap shocks (well…maybe just a few, but – Goddamn! – if they aren’t effective).

While we are presented with the terror in the familiar stillness and darkness of night, the manner in which many of the scares are delivered are rooted in an approach that is less common in this age of torture pornography masquerading as horror. And it is the stillnes that resonates most profoundly in the picture. This is the stuff of most of the nightmares that haunt us.

It is a terror of the creepiest kind and as such, comes far closer to the work of Val Lewton and/or William Friedkin by way of Jim McBride’s legendary mockumentary David Holzman’s Diary.

Lewton was the legendary producer and head of the RKO horror unit in the 40s where he created a series of brilliant works like The Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie and a handful of other creepy pictures that not only revolutionized how horror films were made, but still work in a current context - mainly for their adherence to finding terror in ordinary, (and mostly) contemporary situations touched by some form of psychic or psychological malevolence. As well, Lewton's pictures discovered utter horror in what is NOT seen – stillness, quiet, shadow, darkness and obsession. These are the real monsters in Lewton’s work. Paranormal Activity is replete with these attributes.

Friedkin’s The Exorcist battered us with the most horrendous, extreme images that still shock to this very day – yet the reason they shock is that they are framed in the clinical detail of how Regan, the devil-possessed child, is run through a battery of painful and intrusive tests and, most importantly, how the horror is rooted in the lives and locale of normal people. Paranormal Activity has a clinical precision in the obsessive detailing of every moment of the lives of the central figures in addition to the added delightful detailing of paranormal phenomena via a supernatural expert who's brought in to assess the odd goings-on.

And yes, because of such attention to details prior to the super-explosions of creepiness, the movie is all the more terrifying.

If the abovementioned were then filtered through the birthplace of the mockumentary, Jim McBride’s 1967 David Holzman’s Diary, an obsessively grainy vérité look at the psychological disintegration of a man who uses a camera to chart his descent into madness, one would come very close to experiencing the brilliant, visceral terror of Paranormal Activity.

Following 20 days in the lives of a seemingly normal man and woman trying to videotape and live with the horrible entities threatening the woman’s sanity and eventually, both their lives, Paranormal Activity draws from well-honoured cinematic traditions and manages to go its own unique way. In fact, it is the normal people and locales in this picture that make us squirm whenever night falls and the camera just sits there – a quiet observer of the mounting horror. These are normal people in an extraordinary situation who are recording the strange events in their lives.

Paranormal Activity is a clever variation on pinching oneself to confirm that either there is nothing to worry about or, in the worst case, that it’s not a dream. And if it’s not a dream, the only solace our characters (and we, the audience) can take is that the central figures (and by extension, us) are not completely out of our minds. Unfortunately, what befalls the two main characters is so blood-curdling that insanity, or death would be better than having to live yet another night – face to face with evil incarnate.

This is a movie that demands being experienced on a big screen. It takes the home movie aesthetic and swallows us whole. The very essence of a big-screen experience is what envelopes and virtually consumes us. Every small, subtle and horrific detail explodes in our faces with the kind of power and force that big-screen features are meant to do. Subsequent small screen viewings will also prove interesting, especially when the alternate “first version” (without the reworked and decidedly kick-ass “theatrical” conclusion) is also watched – but only AFTER seeing it theatrically.

Paranormal Activity is a corker of a horror film. Another cliché for your edification, but one that is perfectly appropriate. One leaves the theatre drained, solemnly quiet, and alternately contemplative and stunned.

It’s the magic of movies, and for that, I am most grateful.

Paranormal Activity is available on Paramount Blu-Ray along with sequels II, III and IV. Part V, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is in extremely wide release world wide.

THE UNINVITED - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy ghost thriller from Hollywood's Golden Age gets the deluxe Criterion Collection treatment on a sumptuous new Blu-Ray and (if you must) DVD.

A city-dwelling brother and sister (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) on vacation, fall in love with a gorgeous old British countryside house overlooking the sea. Pooling their finances together, they buy the house from a nearby landowner (Donald Crisp) who sells against the wishes of his granddaughter (Gail Russell) who, as it turns out, was born in the house. Once the siblings move in, they discover it's haunted. Really haunted. It harbours several tragic secrets and not one, but two ghosts. The intrepid couple begin a horrifying journey into the very soul of this diseased domicile to discover the truth and hopefully exorcise the thing that possesses it.

GAIL RUSSELL - Tragic Unsung Talent

The Uninvited (1944) *****
Dir. Lewis Allen
Starring: Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, Gail Russell,
Donald Crisp, Cornelia Otis Skinner

Review By Greg Klymkiw

During the very tail end of cinema's first half-century point, no major Hollywood studio production featured a genuine supernatural ectoplasmic phenomenon until Paramount Pictures unleashed director Lewis Allen's The Uninvited in 1944. Previous films utilizing ghosts presented them within the context of chicanery at the hands of corrupt sideshow-style mediums or as faked incidents to inflict madness, confusion or scams upon certain characters or simply real (or imagined) entities in comedies with macabre settings. Based upon a novel by Dorothy Macaradle, Allen's haunting picture is indeed a haunting yarn of a bonafide haunting within the walls of a truly haunted house. "Haunt" is the key word here.

Though decades have passed since the picture was unleashed (and how, in recent years, shocks and special effects have gone completely over the top), the movie still has the power to give an audience considerable gooseflesh and does so with a stately dignity and mutedly, shuddering horror.

What strikes the viewer at the beginning of the film, is that the two house-owners-to-be have been enjoying a gorgeous, sun-drenched day and whilst still in the thick of a far-from-nocturnal romp, they enter the beautiful old house that is as benign in its interior as it is out-of-doors. It's a bit dusty and un-lived-in to be sure, but warm light beams through every window and casts a lovely glow over all the usual nooks and crannies that normally (in such pictures) are dark with portent.

The other thing that hits us in the early going is that this is going to be a movie imbued with a genial sense of humour - not tongue-in-cheek, by any means, but rooted firmly in character, action, situation and narrative. The twosome are clearly urbane and witty - tossing off nicely-timed quips in each others' direction - and their entire discovery of the house occurs after their teensy idiot white dog goes tearing after a squirrel and disappears into the home's interior. The fact that the bantering brother and sister don't merely retrieve the dog, but use it as an excuse to snoop around is also amusingly light-hearted (and a telling touch in terms of character).

The element of natural comedy also comes into play with the romantic subplot involving Ray Milland's attraction to Donald Crisp's granddaughter. It's not quite a meet-cute, but upon her first appearance, the stunningly radiant Gail Russell does everything in her power to dissuade the couple from seriously pursuing their interest in the house. (Russell, by the way, was a lovely actress, but suffered from alcoholism that limited her participation in films and eventually killed her tragically at the age of 36. She remains still, a great unsung talent.)

Russell's combination of vulnerability and camera-loving sex appeal hints very strongly at the wonderful performances she would deliver in subsequent movies - albeit too few and far between. The character's sense of "unfinished business" with both the house and the mother she really can't remember pervades much of the latter half of the film and a great deal of why we do care is rooted in the delicate performance of this young actress who was barely out of her teens when she made the film. One of the more disturbing subplots to which Russell handily acquits herself is when her grandfather packs her off into the clutches of an especially diabolical psychotherapist (played with reptilian flourish by the great Cornelia Otis Skinner).

The relationship that does eventually blossom between Milland and Russell, however, is extremely fun and genial, though always tempered by the young lady's obsession with the house and her long-dead Mother. That we get a very funny sea-sickness sequence as Milland attempts to seduce the fetching young lady that's bizarrely buffered by some clearly disturbing events is for me, and always has been, one of the things I loved about the movie.

There's very little here that feels by rote. Perhaps so much of it can be attributed to the movie being the first of its kind, but I also feel that Lewis Allen's direction is sharply intelligent. It's an early work in his career - a first feature after a couple of documentary/propaganda shorts - and one senses a youthful exuberance in his play with the medium. As well, there's no denying that when the film delivers up the scares, Allen plunges us into a kind of overdrive in the sinister department.

Oddly, Allen never really attained the artistic success his work here might otherwise predict. His followup was an entertaining, but inferior thriller from the same studio the following year (1945's The Unseen) and of the fifteen or so features he delivered, his only real exceptional work was Suddenly. The latter title is especially well-directed by Allen from an excellent Richard Sale screenplay that rather unpleasantly foreshadowed the Kennedy assassination and, in fact, offers a super-scary parallel to Lee Harvey Oswald in fedora-adorned star Frank Sinatra's performance as a would-be presidential assassin. The bulk of Allen's career was spent in the early days of television as a camera jockeying director on some of the better genre series (Perry Mason, The Rifleman, Gunsmoke, The F.B.I.). That said, two exceptional features and a wealth of tersely enjoyable T.V. dramas is a pretty decent output.

If anyone doubts Allen's direction in The Uninvited, though, one needs only to experience the various scenes involving requisite bumps in the night, sickeningly urgent footsteps padding amongst the halls and the utterly horrendous moans and wails of a voice belonging to a woman cannot be located. If anything is amiss in the film, it might be the odd screenplay which includes back-story elements that seem far less interesting (and even a tad convoluted) to us than the visceral scares. God knows, however, that most contemporary films even more clumsily bear this flaw. The Uninvited is clearly, in most ways, well ahead of its time.

Finally, this is a movie all about creeping us out against the backdrop of psychological turmoil mixed with uncanny metaphysical gymnastics and after so many years, it has any number of moments that continue to deliver the goods and to reiterate, ever-so emphatically, Lewis Allen's direction seldom disappoints. The actual physical appearances of the ghosts (which are admittedly pretty fleeting, though aptly grotesque and very nicely rendered by good, old fashioned optical effects), were not even part of Allen's mise-en-scene and had to be added at the studio's insistence (rightly). In spite of this, though, one needs only recall how the film's director approaches the very first entrance into a top-floor artist studio in the old house that's been mysteriously locked. Sun blazes into the room and yet we, along with the characters cannot help but feel the chill in the air and the shudders created by the huge windows overlooking the rolling grounds, steep cliffs and roiling waters of the open sea.

Oh, how the sea beckons. So strangely and beautifully.

And murderously.

"The Unseen" is available on a newly restored Blu-Ray transfer from the Criterion Collection. There is, for those who love cinema, and particularly classic genre cinema, absolutely no reason NOT to add this package to their permanent movie collection. The disc has any number of nice supplements: A 2K digital film restoration, with a wonderful uncompressed monaural soundtrack, an interesting but strangely critical visual essay by filmmaker Michael Almereyda, the requisite trailer and booklet, plus the always delightful late night aural treats of a radio adaptations - though in this case featuring not one, but two different broadcasts from 1944 and 1949, both starring Ray Milland. The movie is also available on DVD, but why you wouldn't own a Blu-Ray player and HD monitor is beyond me.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK - Review by Greg Klymkiw: This attempt to rekindle the atmospheric glory of Hammer Horror films pretty much flops. Good intentions are not enough. Sometimes movies need something resembling a real filmmaker at the helm. Besides, what defines Hammer Horror? Daniel Radcliffe Porn or Christopher Lee ogling a heaving bosom and tender neckline?

The Woman in Black (2012)
dir. James Watkins
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds and Janet McTeer

*1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

Hell, as the influential man of letters Samuel Johnson was quoted as saying in Boswell's late 18th century biography, is paved with good intentions. Chances are pretty good that Johnson, if transported via time machine to the present might well have equated the act of sitting through the new James Watkins-directed film version of Susan Hill's insanely over-regarded novel as being paved with the same good intentions. Alack and alas, the roiling lava of the aforementioned Mephistophelean domicile is hardly a suitable mortar when the construction chief is a woefully unimaginative by-the-numbers (when he's able to actually put two and two together) hack.

The Woman in Black is a decent enough ghost story, adapted here by the normally reliable screenwriter Jane (Kick-Ass) Goldman and featuring a pleasing post-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe as the tortured leading man. The unfortunate fact of the matter though, is that director James Watkins is at best, bland, and at worst, hampered with a set of tin eyes. Watkins gives it the old college try, but falls painfully short of what this movie might have been if directed by someone endowed with even a smidgen of style and a sense of humour.

This lackadaisical horror movie, in spite of its lofty goals in the portentous atmosphere sweepstakes, settles for occasional cheapjack chair-tossers whilst alternatively providing yummy shots of the very pretty Mr. Radcliffe to respectively elicit screams of terror and lust from its primary demographic - the same tween-er, teener and twenty-er-something members of the "weaker sex" (in the parlance of those days of yore when such tales are oft set), who pathetically continue to look for their thrills amidst the dross of such lame items as the execrable Twilight series.

On the surface, I have little quarrel with the narrative. The widowed young 19th-century London`lawyer Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe) journeys to a small town in north country to save his ailing career and settle an estate which, not surprisingly, bears a heavy curse that befalls anyone who spies the creepy title apparition. The tragic death of a child is the result when anyone catches a glimpse of the funereally-attired residue of ectoplasm. Arthur, spending an insanely inordinate amount of time within the walls of the crumbling and creepy Victorian manse, the evocatively-named Eel Marsh House, gets not one, but several up-close-and-personal ocular treats of this pseudo-J-Horror ghost.

Well, gosh darn it all, this is enough to create a few deaths of children in the village, but worst of all, the fey, tortured Mr. Kipps is a single father to a winsomely cute tyke who will be visiting the northern English countryside with his Nanny.

Yikes! We can see what's coming a few miles away. (This is not, by the way, a narrative flaw, but one that could have fuelled the proverbial fire if the film had actually been directed.)

Kipps receives the helpful assistance of Mr. Daily (Ciarán Hinds), a friendly country gent who also lost a child many moons ago under similar circumstances, but eschews the superstitions plaguing the local townsfolk and laments how the said back-country hayseeds' belief in the ghost has influenced his wife (Janet McTeer) to the point where she's been driven completely bonkers.

The goal, as in many ghostly tales, is to right a wrong to put the malevolent spirit on its way to the white light - hopefully ending the curse. (I must admit, though, to always wondering why nasty ghosts engaging in all manner of evil behaviour wouldn't end up in Hell instead of the open arms of Jesus H. Christ?)

So what's the problem?

Decent story + good acting + decent production value SHOULD = Good Movie.

Ya' think?

Well, if said movie is rendered by a director with no discernible style, the results are dire. Some critics and genre geeks have extolled James Watkins's direction of his previous film Eden Lake. I had little use for the movie. It was a by-rote and moronically written wilderness thriller with a camping couple (the male half played by the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender) being terrorized by thugs - lower drawer Deliverance material at best and yet, on the basis of this lame picture he's handed an opportunity to direct a pretty decent screenplay by Jane Goldman (though in fairness to the great writer Nigel Kneale, I rather preferred HIS screenplay for the much-better British television version of the tale made in 1989).

What, pray tell, is happening in commercial cinema these days?

Hacks with no voice are becoming the order of the day.

This is especially disappointing here.

I'm no fan of the novel, but it's reasonably readable crap that provided a decent enough groundwork for the solid TV movie from Blighty, the second-longest running play behind Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" and could have made for an excellent addition to the canon of the newly resurrected Hammer Horror company. To date, however, the contemporary Hammer output has been a major disappointment save for the decent Let Me In, a well crafted, though utterly unnecessary English-language remake of Tomas (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) Alfredson's great Swedish original Let The Right One In.

Much has been made about the early Hammer output in terms of its atmospheric horror and while I will not dispute its value in that regard, let's also not forget that some of the greatest pictures it delivered were replete with globs of dry and/or dark humour, tasty dollops of garish colour in the mise-en-scene (especially in those Hammers directed by Terence Fisher), endless views of milky heaving bosoms and great actors working overtime to provide - on the hero front: the crazed business of Peter Cushing, and on the villain front: the sheer, sex-drenched malevolence of the cooler-than-cool Christopher Lee.

And the production value was impeccable. Though the movies were cheaply made, they never looked it. Again, so much of this was delivered by stylish filmmakers like Fisher or the magnificent cinematographer Freddie Francis who on many occasions dabbled/doubled at the Hammer studios as a director.

The production value on display in The Woman in Black is not without merit, but it's wasted in the hands of the tin-eyed director Watkins. The camera is either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or worse, it's resting easy on the side of competence. I don't necessarily want to blame cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones for the murky, milky look of the movie - he's done great work with real directors in the past - but this movie never once comes close to the pulpy colour palettes of the classic Hammer pictures. It's all so very dreary and I can only assume this has more to do with Watkins's vision or lack thereof.

The most disturbing element in the movie has nothing to do with eliciting scares. It's the preponderance of Radcliffe-porn - pure and simple. For example, one of the first shots of the ghost in the house could/should have been a corker with Radcliffe in the foreground and the ghost just being there - creepily and horrifically in the background. Unfortunately, the angle seems slightly off for maximum dramatic/visceral impact and favours Radcliffe from a perspective that's more interested in making our dreamboat teen-throb as yummy as possible to the young ladies (and assorted gentlemen) in the audience. In fact, poor Radcliffe is almost in every shot of the movie and working his thespian tukhus off and sadly, it's all for nought - at least in terms of enabling the movie. Radcliffe becomes a stylishly attired schwance to be ogled, desired and deified.

The scares in the movie, such as they are, are not genuinely rooted in atmosphere, since so much of it is of the stock variety and without the panache needed to make it rise above a merely pallid reproduction. This leaves endless shock scares to elicit screams and/or jumps from the audience.

Ho-hum.

God knows the legendary Terence Fisher didn't need to rely solely on such dull cheapjack gimmicks - his horror was rooted in relentless bloodcurdling evil incarnate and bolstered by genuine style. It was voyeuristic, fetishistic and deliciously, exploitatively nasty. This is what was creepy and scary and yes, exciting! And whilst Fisher, Francis and all the other Hammer directors engaged in bosom-porn it had the creepy-crawly effect of eyeing the plunging cleavage of a female victim-to-be, then moving up along her heaving bosom and following the slender handsome hands of Christopher Lee as he cradled the lassie tenderly, eyeing her delectable neckline which he would eventually plunge his teeth into and suck and suck and suck as the young victim would swoon and writhe in orgasmic pleasure and pain.

This is the ATMOSPHERE of Hammer Horror - not murkily photographed swamps and graveyards and nooks and crannies of old houses. Oh yes, the aforementioned existed in Hammer Horror, but they were photographed with aplomb - crisp blacks, exquisite key lighting and splashes of crystal clear colour of the deepest, richest, gaudiest kind.

Never, oh never, would a Hammer Horror film indulge in the sort of boy-toy-porn as poor talented Daniel Radcliffe is subjected to in Watkins's abominable helmsmanship. Oh yes, traditional Hammer Horror was replete with handsome men, but they were wickedly, dangerously handsome.

And finally, the best Hammer Horror had humour - not of the tongue-in-cheek variety, but vicious, dark and always rooted in the melodrama. The Woman in Black is humourless as all get out. I mean, really. This is a movie with little kiddies dying. This could surely have engendered some horrendously nasty knee-slappers. (Much of this potential is actually there for the taking in Goldman's script, but Watkins is too much of a cinematic dullard to see it in order to exploit it.)

When young Mr. Kipps' cherubic lad shows up with nanny at the train station, I'd have been more than prepared to howl at the very sight with thoughts of potential carnage dancing about in my brain. God knows, Mr. Fisher might have elicited some yucks and certainly someone like Brian DePalma would have been all over this one.

Whilst one might argue that the movie is aimed almost solely at a female audience and requires a kinder and gentler approach than what Hammer traditionally stood for in its heyday, I sincerely believe this lack of vision and faith in truly adhering to the work of Terence Fisher et al, is precisely what's wrong with movies, and in particular horror movies these days.

Interestingly enough, Hammer in the 70s began to seem tremendously old fashioned in the wake of William Friedkin's The Exorcist and in terms of what nearly destroyed the company were increasing levels of sex, violence and visceral horror that skyrocketed well beyond anything Hammer was capable of delivering in its final throes. And now, here we are in a world where female audiences are offensively treated with kid gloves - as if they need to be handled daintily. If I were a woman, this would make my blood boil. In fact, I know plenty of women who detest how mostly male movie makers go out of their way to gentrify the horror experience and render it into a maw of mawkish sentiment.

Furthermore, as horrific as Friedkin's vision was, he actually rooted his horror in an approach pioneered by Val Lewton at RKO in the 40s. Lewton decided that two things were the scariest elements of all. Firstly, the dark scared the bejesus out of people and he infused his films with plenty of shadows. Secondly, and closer to the genuinely atmospheric horror of Friedkin's The Exorcist, is that Lewton believed elements of everyday life were the stuff of horror - mental illness, loneliness, cults, marital strife, disease, sickness, despair. Lewton blended these elements of contemporary life with literal darkness, just as Friedkin did (in spite of the delightful addition of spinning heads, vomit, foul language and crucifix masturbation). Who can ever forget the endless poking and prodding poor Linda Blair is subjected to at the hands of her doctors? Amidst the supernatural, Friedkin wrung every drop of Lewton's belief in here and now horror having as much power as green-pea soup spewing upon Max Von Sydow's face. The Woman in Black has these Lewton-esque elements, but none of them are properly exploited - primarily because Watkins has no style as a director, whereas as Lewton, Friedkin and the Fisher Hammers were ripe with a voice that went beyond mere craft.

Finally and sadly, The Woman in Black leaves me with one burning question.

I ask, in all seriousness:

What's the point of giving Radcliffe's child a comely nanny, but then not, in true Hammer Horror fashion, focus at some salient point, upon her bosom?

Well, that would be exploitative, now, wouldn't it?

In reality, though, The Woman in Black, in addition to its lack of style, is exploitative in a far more insidious fashion. It believes, promotes and exploits the fact that female audiences are far too delicate and genteel to serve up the real goods.

"The Woman in Black" is currently in wide release via Alliance Films and CBS Films.