Night 29: The Devil's Backbone

Tired of more misses than hits, I've decided to close out my selections with two known quantities. First up is Guillermo Del Toro's best film so far, The Devil's Backbone. Many will question that designation, citing Pan's Labyrinth, but I personally feel this earlier film is much tighter, more affecting, and better acted. There's no question it is more frightening.

Set during the closing years of the Spanish Civil War, The Devil's Backbone tells the story of a little boy named Carlos who enters an orphanage under the assumption that he is merely waiting there until his father returns from the front lines. We know better, of course, giving Carlos a poignance and a pathos that immediately connects him to the viewer. Inside the orphanage, a Gothic mystery unfolds and envelops Carlos, inexorably forcing upon him an encounter with the ghost of a fellow orphan. Though the war is mostly a distant backdrop, an unexploded bomb in the courtyard serves as an ominous and ever present reminder. It's these types of details that make Del Toro's films so memorable. Raised by a devout Catholic grandmother (who twice tried exorcism as a means of banishing his fascination with all things dark and monstrous), and obsessed with comic books, Del Toro developed a keen appreciation for the power of culturally-loaded iconography. His films tap the deep well of myth and history that flows beneath every story ever told, enriching what might otherwise come off as melodrama with the elan of allegory. The Devil's Backbone is a film almost completely devoid of the usual horror tricks. Much of it is filmed in broad daylight and once the ghost is sighted, the camera does not turn away and try to sneak up on us from behind. We are forced to face our fears head on. The longer the camera lingers on the ghost, the more our simple aversion turns to a strange and morbid attraction. Through Carlos, we become participants in the story and vested in the outcome. As with only the best of all horror films, fear becomes less of desired side-effect and more of a transformative rite of passage, through which we reach a more vivid understanding of the world.




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My psychological status:
Engrossed

Night 28: Frontière(s)

The larder of modern French horror is not quite as well-stocked as I thought. After Malefique left a sour taste in my mouth, I figured I should give our Gallic chefs one more chance to serve up something really sumptuous. Alas, Frontière(s) is nothing but a flaky pastry with no filling that crumbles away to dust when you touch it.

The by-now familiar ingredients are all there: massive riots in Paris, unsympathetic characters fleeing a troubled past, the country villa from hell, even the obligatory camcorder to give the proceedings a proper air of "reality." Toss in a decidedly non-Aryan band of Nazi cannibals, a mine shaft full of deformed "children" (who all look about as old as the woman who apparently birthed them), and a charming pantry full of enough corpses to feed the Fourth Reich. Shoot the whole thing with frantic shaky-cam and cobble it together with quick cuts. Season with liberal amounts of gratuitous gore and mud. Voila! Instant horror movie!

That this overhyped mess is supposed to be a reaction to France's recent turn towards George Bush-style fascism is obvious enough, but just in case viewers are too clueless to get it, writer/director Xavier Gens has one of his characters actually say as much ("Bush" sounds so kinky coming from the mouth of a Frenchman). But if there is a message here, it's mumbled and muddled, like the anarchy tattoo on a teenager's ass.

I'm not going to waste any more time or words on this movie, and I recommend that no else does either. I would, however, like to thank the Philadephia Phillies for cleansing its putrescence from my palate and replacing it with a warm reminder of how it tasted the last (and only other) time they won it all. I was seven years old and I raced downstairs in my pajamas after my bath, just in time to see Tug McGraw pick up my hometown and carry it to victory. Most Philadelphians believe that Tug's ghost was in attendance last night. And for good reason. His son Tim (the country singer) surreptitiously sprinkled some of his ashes on the mound while throwing out the opening pitch of Game 3. Now that's a ghost story I can believe in.

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My psychological status:
Elated yet bummed (that I'm missing the parade)

Night 27: The Descent

In honor of the Four Word Film Review, which is celebrating its nine-year anniversary this week, I will make this one particularly brief: Six chicks with picks.

On second thought, that wasn't very satisfying. How about, cave mouth swallows hope. Nah, that ain't cutting it either. Underground regressive therapy ordeal? Whatever length, any description of The Descent is going to carry the same b-movie connotations. The film's brilliance is in how it takes those low expectations, and the implicit inability to sucker you in, and then still proceeds to scare the living daylights out of you.

Neil Marshall has made a career of exceeding expectations. His first film, Dog Soldiers, was a low-budget update of the werewolf mythos that eschewed CGI and made the most of good acting and an original premise. It was a decent film, but The Descent marks a definite evolution as a filmmaker. He wisely chose to shoot most of the scenes with natural lighting (headlamps, flashlights, flares, etc.), giving the cave itself a truly claustrophobic feel. Although perhaps a bit too homogenous (read: attractive), the actresses all acquit themselves admirably and managed to convince me they were real thrill seekers and not just prima donnas who had spent a week on a climbing wall. One scene in particular is right out of an "extreme sports" documentary and I never doubted for a second that these chicks could kick my ass. With that said, the real stars here are the "crawlers." I don't want to say too much about them, other than that they are very realistic and very frightening. Marshall chose to use real actors, instead of stuntmen or dancers, and they bring to their roles an authenticity that rivals Alien in its ability to evoke atavistic fear of the Other. Though the gore is modest by the standards of some other films I have discussed, the icky quotient is high enough to keep most viewers out of caves forever.

To borrow a metaphor from another extreme sport, The Descent flows along at a brisk but still leisurely pace, like a Class 3 river. Though there are a few shock scares here and there, nearly a hour of the film is spent building dread as the team of spelunkers descend further and further into an unmapped cave system. Once the action kicks in, though, it's a sheer drop straight down into Class 5 hell water. Careful of the rocks, folks. They're real killers.

p.s. if the image on the poster looks familiar, that's because it copies a famous portrait of Dali by Philippe Halsman called In Voluptate Mors. The same iconography was used, though less obviously, on some posters for The Silence of the Lambs.




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My psychological status:
Claustrophobic