The French Canadian film had its world premiere last week at the Sundance Film Festival and starting today it will be available via the Sundance Selects program across a number of cable provider’s OnDemand platforms. And while saying 7 Days got under the skin of a hardened horror movie fan sounds like the highest of compliments, I hesitate to consider that grounds for recommendation. Yes, it is difficult to watch. Yes, it is disturbing. Yes, it is made with the utmost craft. Yet I feel it prudent to point out that, while those are qualities we all can agree define a good horror movie, this is absolutely a film not for everyone.

On the surface, it’s the story of a doctor who uses a cabin in the woods to methodically exact revenge on the man the police have accused of raping and murdering his eight-year old daughter. But beyond the torture is a harrowing journey into what happens to otherwise healthy relationships when they’re sundered by the unimaginable. This isn’t a tale of revenge in the Death Sentence tradition. This is an unflinching magnifying glass on what it means to lose everything. It spends as much time lingering on the physical torture as it does the mental; a combination that often times becomes almost unbearable to watch.

Read the rest of my review at HorrorSquad.

The trailers for THE BOOK OF ELI did nothing for me.  It looked like an over-stylized yet still monotone vision of the future banking on Denzel Washington’s inherently badass attitude and a number of quickly cut together action scenes.  Plus, it’s been 8 years since the Hughes Brothers made a movie, so buzzing the production as the latest film from the Hughes Brothers is meaningless to me.  It is with great relief, then, that I’m happy to report, to my own surprise, I liked THE BOOK OF ELI.  Truth is, I almost even loved it.

Don’t let the marketing fool you.  The Hughes Brothers have delivered a unique meditation on life after the end of times that does its best to be the polar opposite of everything the trailer looked like.  Denzel Washington plays the titular character (Eli, not the book), a man who has dedicated his life to walking west on a mission, a mission I will be touching upon below.  I’m not going to be spoiling anything huge (or non-obvious), but if you know next to nothing about THE BOOK OF ELI and want to keep it that way, I leave you here with a simple verdict: Yes, it’s worth a trip to the theater.

The world has gone to shit.  Gary Whitta’s script doesn’t spell out the particulars of what brought about Armageddon, but the severe lack of population density and decimated landscape looks like every nation in the world with the means to do so pressed the button.  Minuscule pockets of people managed to survive the apocalypse, however, and the story follows our hero, Eli, and his often fatal interactions with other wasteland wanderers on his slow, west-bound trek across total desolation.  He encounters a man named Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who runs a small town that has access to trickles of precious H2O.  Carnegie, it is established, is looking for an unnamed book that he calls “a weapon”…

The movie doesn’t tell you right away, but you’d have to be not only blind but completely ignorant not to figure out that the mysterious leather-bound book that Eli spends every night reading and every day protecting like its the water purification chip for Vault 13 or the Garden of Eden Creation Kit is, in fact, the Bible.  But before you assume that Warner Brothers has put out a movie with a message that says only God can save all of mankind, let me dispel that assumption.  THE BOOK OF ELI is not advocating any religion.  It’s not saying the world needs Christianity to function.  Its only commentary is on faith; on how simply believing in something – anything – can motivate the mind beyond the body’s ravaged limitations.  One of the (many) things I like about the Hughes Brothers’ film and Whitta’s script is that it’s still not that simple.

To talk about why it’s not that simple would indeed be revealing things a review shouldn’t, but regardless of which side of the ideological fence the film ultimately teeters on to (and there’s little question where it falls), it’s still an interesting premise that the Hughes Brothers leverage to give the film extra dimensions worth further examination.  But let’s not forget that this site is called Horror’s Not Dead, so I’ll step away from the ideas the film rolls around with and talk about why it should appeal to anyone reading a site called Horror’s Not Dead.

For starters, death rarely looks this striking on the big screen.  I’m not talking about just the people, though they are often dispatched in the most glorious ways by a convincingly hardcore Denzel Washington wielding a long, lethal machete.  The whole package is a magnificent portrait of what happens when everything kicks the bucket.  People, animals, buildings, dreams…all of civilization.  The directing pair do a fantastic job of convincing us everything we know now has been laid waste.  An accomplishment made possible by hiring not just great actors – Washington and Oldman are great, but the supporting cast of Ray Stevenson, Michael Gambon, Tom Waits, and even Mila Kunis are all up to the bar set by the film’s leads – and not just with an outstanding sense of visual style, but by delivering a sound design so strong that even non-audiophiles should pick up on its vivid purpose.

The main thing holding THE BOOK OF ELI back from being an outright excellent film is a waffling final act that’s capped off with a poorly executed ending.  The actual resolution of the story isn’t a problem, but how the ending treats certain characters is just plain poor.  And that’s unfortunate, because everything leading up to it is really something special.  The action choreography is top notch throughout and is even, at times, a thing of dark, blood-spilling beauty.  Acting is everything you expect from the big names and even more from the littler ones.  The cinematography will swallow you up in damn near every shot.  The vigilant sound design heightens every layer of the experience.  And all of this is in service of interesting ideas that will,  flaws and all, render THE BOOK OF ELI a topic worth talking about anytime post-apocalyptic movies are brought up.

It’s not just a matter of being pleasantly surprised by low expectations, either.  Gone are the ludicrous plot devices, the endless retconing that kept re-writing the Jigsaw mythos, the need to build towards some hackneyed twist.  What remains is a tightly wound story that keeps the Jigsaw tradition alive without the need to jump through holes in space and time just to keep Tobin Bell in the picture.  Sure, the gore is still there and Jigsaw still does show up in flashbacks, but the script Dunstan and Melton have written is the most restrained, linear, goal-driven backbone the series has ever had.  And though director Kevin Greutert, who has edited every single one of the prior SAW entries, has kept the staple spinning camera and boiler room lighting, his film also has more mature aspirations towards showing the ‘big picture’ of each trap, building tension by anticipation; as opposed to the last few films that were overflowing with surprises to the point of absurdity.

Basically, if you had written the series off, as I had, you’re going to be shocked at how solid of a film SAW 6 is.  The script may be a little too topical for some, as this time around the story follows the journey of a man, William (Peter Outerbridge), who devised a formula for an insurance company to project possible earnings depending on an applicant’s probability to live long enough to pay them a tidy profit, rejecting coverage to those who don’t fit that bill.  Jigsaw, who has spent 5 films explaining his twisted philosophy that life should never be taken for granted, has a bit of a problem with this, so he has arranged for William and his complacent staff to make the same kind of life-or-death decisions for each other that they make for complete strangers.

Considering Dunstan/Melton’s script would have been written right before the recent health care reform debate reared its hydra-head highest, it actually doesn’t come off as preachy as one might think reading that synopsis.  Save for a sentence or two, there’s no grand accusations that the ’system’ needs radical changing and that Jigsaw should be Obama’s Torture Reform Czar; rather that the system is merely run by people and some of those people willfully cripple access to health care for profit, passing death sentences to other human beings in the process.  This setup finally allows the series to get back to focusing on Jigsaw’s original motivation of forcing people to come face-to-face with the moral dilemma they’ve been too glutinous to confront in the past.  That the series has moved on from helpless heroin junkies to greedy office works while still maintaining the same ideology is quite impressive.

For gorehounds the moral quandries of SAW 6 are not nearly as impressive as the gruesome setups, which are some of the best in the series thus far.  One still needs to suspend disbelief that any individual (or individuals) could meticulously engineer such intricate traps that never, ever fail to go off with perfect timing, but the kills this time around are all appropriate for the mood of the rest of the movie.  Self-mutilation has always been a requisite of the series, but this is the first time that sacrifice plays more of an important part than simply cutting yourself up to get a surgically implanted key or bleeding yourself out into a jug like some kind of twisted game of Double Dare.

Even Costas Mandylor, who has been a big part of the series for a while now, isn’t quite as flat as he used to be.  The contrast between himself and Jigsaw has never been so dynamic, which gives the series a new layer I always felt it was lacking in the past.  But the show this time around doesn’t belong to Mandylor or even Bell, but Peter Outerbridge as the insurance man dying to change.  He is a man on a terrible mission, perfectly striking the balance between greed in the beginning and raw desperation by the end.  All the other victims are solid, even if most are only ever required to look like they don’t want to lose a limb, but Outerbridge is easily given the best material to work with.  And he’s shaped the best “protagonist” the series has had since Angus Macfadyen in part 3.

Speaking of the previous entries, despite how good of a film SAW 6 is, the others are certainly a required watch before going into it.  While the film doesn’t crash between timelines, it does constantly reference things and characters that have been peppered throughout the franchise, so one needs to be at least passingly familiar with them to avoid total sensory overload.  Unfortunately that means enduring the complete mess that is 5, but at least SAW 6 is worth it.  If Dunstan and Melton are allowed to keep the script as restrained as they’ve now proven they can, I think SAW 6 is going to mark a very welcome turning point for the series.  At the very least, it no longer has me dreading the idea of going back to this well 2 or 3 more times.

Despite the integral plot element of cannibalism, there’s no abundance of body parts or organs floating about in Van Diemen’s Land. In fact, the film is remarkably light on the red, and yet there are nerve-crushing moments in which all semblance of humanity goes out the window. That loss of moral compass in the face of survival is the cornerstone of this fact-based story about a prison break that went horribly wrong: Eight prisoners in a Tasmanian penal colony overthrow their sole guard only to learn that the coast isn’t as clear as they thought, that their only true course of action is to either wait to be recaptured (and almost certainly executed) or flee aimlessly into the wilderness.

Read the rest of my VAN DIEMEN’S LAND review at HorrorSquad.

Money is the motive for Simon’s manipulation.  The Ashby parents are long dead, along with their youngest child Tony, who threw himself off a cliff as a boy when he couldn’t cope his the loss of his parents.  Simon and Eleanor are the only heirs to the Ashby fortune, under the care of their Aunt Harriet (Sheila Burrell), and if Simon can prove that Eleanor is not of sound mind, he becomes sole executor of their estate.  To that end, Simon hires a morally questionable nurse for Eleanor and carries out a simple plan to convince his sister that she might be hallucinating visions of the departed Tony.

Simon’s plan goes completely haywire when Tony actually shows up, alive and well (played with an almost comical stiffness by Alexander Davion).  Suddenly, it’s Eleanor who seems to be the sane one, while Simon quickly unravels, unable to covince himself that this man is the child they once knew.

Up to that point, Reed’s Simon is a surprisingly amusing spoiled brat, an abusive lush tempered by Reed’s oddly childlike glimmer of mischief, but as the story unfolds, and the stakes raise, Reed unhinges with a bug-eyed posturing that borders on camp.  It’s a lively role, one that helps make Paranoiac so memorable.  Personally, I’m a fan of watching actors wholly commit to a performance that walks the razor’s edge between realism and arch overacting (a couple of my favorites who’ve built careers doing this are William Shatner and Jeffrey Combs).  I like seeing how far the acting envelope can be pushed before it rips completely, and I’m sure actors like Oliver Reed take pleasure in testing how big they can go before the performance becomes phony.  Reed’s good at it, and it’s clear he’s having fun chewing the scenery as Simon Ashby.

It almost threatens to completely overshadow the acting by Janette Scott.  Alexander Davion is so wooden as Antony Ashby that it’s often up to Scott to do the emotional heavy-lifiting in their scenes together.  Eleanor Ashby is fragile and hungry for love (certainly not getting any familial support from Simon), but Scott doesn’t go for the kind of lunatic gusto that Reed is able to conjure up, despite the fact that she’s supposed to be the crazy one.  Her motivation is sympathetic but troubling–her blind adoration of the man who claims to be Antony is unhealthy and questionable.  Scott gets a few good scenes that reveal how deep her longing for Antony goes, and they’re realistic in large part to Scott’s grounded performance.

Paranoiac snakes along, offering several twists and turns on the way to its satisfyingly macabre ending (including an effectively creepy masked killer).  It’s more turgid than a Hitchcock thriller, less stylish, and certainly missing that director’s mastery of pacing, but screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and director Freddie Francis (shooting in black and white) do an admirable job of aping the type of psychological thriller that Hitch was routinely turning out.  This being my first exposure to Hammer’s non-Monster chillers, it’s better than I had hoped for, and I’m a little surprised that it’s been overlooked by Hammer fans in favor of predicatble Frankenstein and Dracula sequels.  Paranoiac is worth discovering.

FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET is about a young drummer named Roberto who begins to notice a strange man following him everywhere.  The stranger, an old man with the fashion sense of a Blues Brother, appears at his band rehearsals, outside clubs, and putting along behind him in what will go down in history as one of the slowest car chases ever filmed.  Finally, Roberto reaches the breaking point and confronts Mario Creepypants in a deserted opera house.  A couple of painfully awkward dance steps later, Creepypants ends up stabbed and also dead while Roberto is left trying to figure out the logistics of the apparent murder.  All of this is being captured on film by a freaky-faced cherub in the balcony.  What follows is a terrifying tale of blackmail, fear, and blood.

FFGV is quite a decent slasher film.  More than that, this is Argento’s attempt to make a bloodier Hitchcock film.  One of the things that is so amazing about an Argento film, just like a Hitchcock film, is watching him play with angle and perspective; with color and shadow.  He is playful and experimental and the result is typically some of the most interesting cinematography in horror.  I especially loved the shots of Roberto chasing the moustache man through the curtains of the opera house.  It was disorenting but also fascinating and gave the scene a heightened sense of foreboding.  Other classic Hitch elements are at play here, but with a twist.  We have the cat-and-mouse mystery game, but the ordinary man caught in the extraordinary situation is only ordinary by the standard of the time.  No, he doesn’t sell insurance or operate a punch press in a factory, but he IS a drummer in an aspiring rock band.  Being a rock musician in the 70’s would be as commonplace as someone who makes a living from the Internet these days; not at all a rarity.

Much like other Argento films, there is an overwhelming dream-like quality to FOUR FLIES.  It is definitely giallo, with the masked killer whose hands are often the only identifiable feature in frame.  But there are also whacky homeless detectives and bizarre music cues.  There are moments in this film that are so weird that they defy conventional storytelling.  It is no rarity that while watching an Argento film I have to shake the suspicion that I have fallen asleep and the remainder of the film is simply playing out in my subconscious.  But that is part of the fun of his work and this film was no exception.  The dream-like quality adds to the the disorientation and therefore to the overall sense of mystery.

If I had one complaint with FOUR FLIES it would have to be the “killer reveal” scene.  When the slasher is unmasked, the curtain is pulled back and the motive lain bare, the audience is left scratching their heads.  Not because it is deeply introspective and heavy with philosophical weight, but because it doesn’t make any fraking sense.  I won’t spoil anything, but it’s just plain insulting.  The amends for the stupidity, however, is one of the coolest car crash sequences ever captured on film.  It makes the absurdity of the ending well worth it.  Huzzah!

That does it for today’s AYIF.  Brian’s rating: B

Editor’s Note: I’ve asked BrianK to explore the arid wasteland of Netflix’ Watch Instantly section once a week in search of lost treasures, the only important rule being his find cannot be a film anyone has ever told him anything about.  These are his results.

Directed by Rigoberto Castañeda, 2007
Written by Ed Dougherty

The dead woman is quickly revealed to be the suicide-victim wife of Dr. Karl (Aiden Gillen), who is shown sometime later to be trying to balance caring for his young daughter with his job and his grief. Shortly thereafter, Claudia (Amber Tamblyn) – who maybe accidentally killed her grandmom by saying hello to a homeless man – and Tommy (Armie Hammer) – the sensitive semi-badass – are introduced as the other 2/3rds of our trio who will become stuck in an elevator.

So there we have our setup – this diverse group of folk (not too diverse, they are all Caucasian after all) will be within elbow range of each other for at least a few hours, while stuck high in a seemingly impossibly tall residential building elevator shaft. To make things worse, the building is under much needed renovations, and is almost vacant for Fourth of July Weekend.

Emotions quickly get the best of our triumvirate, partially due to their obvious predicament, and partially because they all have important shit to do. The early bickering is intercut with flashbacks revealing their backgrounds and why they are in such a damn hurry. The acting is surprisingly strong all the way around, especially Aiden Gillen, as the off-kilter doctor, and Armie Hammer (who I think could should have a future in action movies), as the “tough” guy.

Be warned though, it gets a tad “darker” than you might expect. This is not LIFE BOAT or PHONE BOOTH, in terms of subject matter usually presented in the people-stuck-in-small-places genre. The director, Rigoberto Castañeda, is a Mexican fellow (I apologize if that sounds vaguely racist), who, by looking at some of the scenes in BLACKOUT, and the title of his short film NECROFILIA, has some of the same predilections as early Nacho Cerdà. You get one guess as to what those are.

Those proclivities aside, Castañeda, along with cinematographer Alejandro Martínez (STAY ALIVE†), keep everything looking sharp. They make ample use of the technique pioneered by Fincher in PANIC ROOM – where the camera appears to travel through floors and walls (probably without the expense of the “previsualization” used by Fincher). Albeit a little showy, in BLACKOUT the technique was not entirely without purpose in the scope of telling the story. That’s better than most special effects can say.

Castañeda does a good job at continually amping up the tension, whether by mechanical failure or unexpected character development. Speaking of the characters, they actually earn their behavior, if that makes sense. Even abrupt shifts in personalities are supported by little things called “reason” and “purpose,” which can be all too absent in the “thriller” genre.

The script, by Ed Doughtery (his sole credit to date), does an admirable job of fleshing out each of the character’s stories. Even the backstories are enjoyable vignettes. Hammer’s character’s story could have made an interesting “romantic drama,” had he not stepped on that elevator. Characters in movies of this subspecies usually do not get that level of respect from their writers and directors.

Don’t let me go overboard here. BLACKOUT isn’t a perfect movie, by any means. It certainly isn’t the most original story in the world, there are a couple scenes that feel completely out of place, and I thought the director missed out on making it more claustrophobic. But it puts itself in the upper echelon of DTV thrillers by being genuinely tense, fun, and ultimately quite entertaining. These qualities are not expected from a film randomly picked on Netflix’s “Watch Instantly”, but movies that come up behind you with a whisper can catch you by surprise.

Note: Speaking of people being stuck on elevators, if you haven’t read the story of Nick White, you really should.  And video.

*No actual blackout.
†It should be noted that by simply mentioning this title I run the risk of Peter refusing to publish this review.

It is a reluctant way to start a review talking about what something isn’t, but this is bugging me.  I’ve seen it in almost all of the reviews.  It was what drove me to read FRAGMENT, a debut novel from newcomer Warren Fahy, in the first place.  But it’s just not true.

FRAGMENT is nothing like a Michael Crichton novel.  I can see why the lazy comparison would be made if all one knew of the book was the plot, but anyone who has read the whole thing surely must see how different they are.  Scientists discover an uncharted island.  Untouched since the dawn of life, the island has evolved an entire ecosystem unlike anything else on Earth.  Everything in it is ludicrously lethal, as the first party from a reality TV show about scientists on the high seas soon find out.

Now before I level out why the two writers are different, let me disclaim that I enjoyed FRAGMENT, because what follows is going to sound like an evisceration.  FRAGMENT reads like a half-finished manuscript Michael Crichton might write to give his editor for a taste, but that’s where the comparison ends as.  Warren Fahy has no slavish devotion to science or at times even logic, placing his book far closer to fantasy than even the most speculative of science fiction.  His scientists, several of which are supposed to be the best in their field, are often times complete morons.  All of his characters are written with the depth of a contact lens.  His monsters, which are the centerpiece of FRAGMENT, are all the kind of hybrid animal one would get if they asked an 8 year old to draw the perfect killing machine.

Take for example the spiger, which is three times the size of a tiger with eight legs, two of which are identical to praying mantis forearms, and has a tail that can launch it into the air.  Or the disk-ants (though it has zero ant like properties), a hard shelled creature that rolls around the jungle/beach melting pray with the billions of nano-disk-ant colonies that live on its back.  I know Michael Crichton’s novels got progressively more outlandish as they went along, but they were never that mindless.

And yet I liked FRAGMENT as a whole.  The first half of the book is little more than the island being discovered and the subsequent carnage that follows when people keep underestimating the ludicrous killing powers of Hender’s Island, so named after the one person to have ever documented the isolated jut of rock.  Scene after scene reads like the book equivalent of the insect pit in Peter Jackson’s KING KONG, but just as events threaten to get too repetitive the author brings a few new characters to the island while discovering a few more secrets held within.

There are times Fahy tries to go into painstaking scientific detail, but because his plot and abominations are so far flung, it’s all read with no appreciation for whatever science may actually back it.  However around the novel’s saving grace midpoint Fahy backs away from the pseudo science and dives head first into genuinely thought provoking arguements for and against man’s responsibility (which is the sole Crichton-esque element to the story) should they discover the one remain spec of Mother Nature man has yet to meddle with.

It doesn’t get preachy or overtly obvious but this home stretch is the only thing that makes the rest of the novel worthwhile.  Fahy has no outstanding gift for prose, but that also makes FRAGMENT a very, very quick read even at near 400 pages.  He also proves to have a green thumb for harvesting an otherwise insoluable plot, eventually wasting little time with the how and why of things and focusing on the conflict of containing the near plague like qualities of life on Hender’s Island.  It’s certainly not a book to recommend to anyone with scholarly pursuits, but it’s the perfect kind of book to throw in a backpack before a trip to the beach.