LITTLE SHIVERS: Short movie reviews, mostly of B-horror.

Pontypool: Canadian town's destruction by zombie virus chronicled by its weird local radio station. This does a really good job at making the threat scary without showing you too much. If you like the high-concept summary, "Language is a virus which makes people zombies," you will probably like this; if the premise leaves you cold I'm not sure the movie will work for you. I really liked it. The one jarring moment is the racist Lawrence of Arabia adaptation by local schoolchildren (?). I could come up with some reason for this--art can drive us apart and strengthen our worst impulses--but that seems too heavy, so really, I just don't know why that was there.

The Howling: Ultra-sleazy '80s flick about werewolves at a hippie resort. Does exactly what it says on the tin, plus extra sleaze. Sort of awesome in an "I don't actually recommend this" way.

Oleanna: David Mamet, a college parable which is about feminism/political correctness on the surface, class and how education and language reify power disparities underneath. (Language is the villain again!) When you describe it like that it sounds like something I'd like, but the two characters are both horribly grating and one-note, and the actors recite lines rather than finding a way to inhabit Mamet's aggressively-stylized dialogue.

The Dark Hours and Creep: I'm linking these two for reasons I'll get to in a moment. At first glance they seem pretty different. The Dark Hours is a stylized, very art-directed home-invasion horror/psychological thriller, very slightly comparable to Black Swan if that's a recommendation for you, starring actors I'd never seen before. Kindertrauma reviewed it here. Creep is a movie about some kind of killer or creature living in the London subway system, with basically normal visuals, starring Franka Potente.

Both movies' protagonists are privileged white women whose social/class power over other characters becomes a major issue in the narrative. Both women are shown from the beginning in fairly unflattering moral lights: Creep's buzzy city chick is a bit self-centered, whereas The Dark Hours' psychiatrist is openly cruel and arrogant.

Creep gives you glimpses of working-class, hard-luck, or homeless characters, and gestures at their backstories in ways which make them seem like they could be interesting. But the movie itself really doesn't seem to care about them. They exist basically as props in the main character's journey... which, since it's a journey where she gets to learn about How the Other Half Lives, means that the movie (and especially its big ending visual) comes across as fairly cheap and self-praising. Poor people exist to teach rich girls life lessons about how poor people exist!

The Dark Hours forces a much tighter audience identification with its main character, not only by keeping us firmly within her POV but by constantly challenging us to figure out which of her distorted perceptions is closest to reality. That's part of what made it work much better for me than Creep. It's also crueler to her--she doesn't learn her lesson--and the psych patients under her control have their own agency instead of just reacting to her decisions. (I mean, they appear to have agency, anyway. Like I said, you can rarely be sure what is real.) This movie was tense and very sad, and succeeded in making me care about its awful main character. You can also take it--especially the final "game" between the doctor and one of her patients--as a ferocious satire on psychiatry; or, conversely, as a window into how healing and honesty can look like brutal, absurd nonsense to a damaged mind. It's a movie which works on a lot of levels, the simple ones of fear and visual interest and the complex ones of shifting meanings.

"THE SECRET OF NIMH": A Kindertrauma tribute!

"WELL IT CERTAINLY ISN'T OUR MISTAKE." Kindertrauma's "Stream Warriors" series continues to be a fantastic guide to overlooked horror/suspense gems, now available on Netflix Instant Viewing. Last night's movie was 1969's Games, a creepy, twisty little pleasure-cruise of a movie.

The premise: A plush New York couple live in the world's most awesome apartment, filled with pinball machines based on car accidents ("You're Dead, Man!"); pop art about infidelity; spirally things; crazy porcelain-and-gilt masks, and similar rich and strange flotsam. From the luscious jewel tones to the '60s seafoam and lavender, the colors in this movie are just a joy. Even the crocheted afghans are art-designed within an inch of their lives. Plus the entire movie takes place in the apartment, so although you get terrific lightning, rain, and falling leaves outside, you never really leave the glittering web.

The rich couple enjoys spooky dress-up games, living in a decadent playground free of any actual children. Then one day a mysterious European saleslady/con artist (Simone Signoret--!) rings the doorbell and insinuates herself into their lives. She holds their childish, American "games" in contempt, and begins to introduce some more dangerous varieties. There's simulated wife-beating... simulated adultery... but there's also a very real gun.

As Kindertrauma notes, several of the final twists are easy to guess if you've seen this kind of movie before, but the pleasure is in the journey and not the destination. There are a couple real scares, about a thousand stunning shots (including more meditative ones, like the wife dreaming in a garden chair as rain begins to spatter and leaves begin to blow through her long hair), a great ambiguous femme fatale in La Signoret, and a slightly vicious class-war angle. The fun of this couple's life is part of their problem (which gives a nice subtle edge of condemning the viewer for enjoying it so much!) because they have no sense of when the party needs to end.

EDGE OF FIFTEEN: On a recommendation from Kindertrauma, I watched the 1969 suspense flick I Start Counting--and found a melancholic, adolescent movie, all elbows and knees and awkward longing for what used to be and what is still to come.

The basic story: In a small English town where the old houses are being torn down for redevelopment, a Catholic schoolgirl begins to suspect that her (adoptive? step-?) older brother, on whom she has a severe crush, is the local serial killer. The movie portrays England as a culture in its awkward adolescence, childishly trying on big-girl sexy clothes, unaware that its panties are showing. The mystery moves quickly and yet the movie itself feels quiet and lingering, with the girl going back to her ruined childhood home and swaying back and forth in the backyard swing, or bumping her way down the staircase on her bottom after her first encounter with pale ale.

The movie's portrayal of adolescent girls' sexuality is surprisingly sensitive, maybe because it's based on a novel by a woman. Wynne and her friend Corinne skitter nervously from tarting themselves up and enjoying boys' and men's attention to pulling away when masculine aggression goes from thrilling to scary. The movie shows, quickly and fairly subtly, how often men pass off their threats as "only protecting you." These teenage girls' skins prickle when they're around certain older men, but they're also still the kind of foolish virgins who brag about how many men they've slept with.

The movie's flaws pretty much all come in the actual suspense/killer narrative. The two twists are both handled somewhat clumsily, the main villain's Big Villain Speech is wrong-footed in several different ways (although his final line is unexpected and good), and the pacing is strange. I didn't feel much suspense by the time we start finding out what really happened. That's fine (and anyway Kindertrauma disagrees, so you might as well), since I was so invested in the characters and their emotional journeys, but just know that this is a thriller in which a shot of a bulldozer plowing over a sewing machine is much more intense than the reveal of the killer.

HOLY CATS! (Sorry.)

I haven't watched the linked YouTube video, since I'm pretty sure it would freak me out even at age 32.

THE IMAGINATION OF MAN'S HEART IS EVIL FROM HIS YOUTH. A few more thoughts on Black Swan and its reviews.

First, here's Kindertrauma, with prose as OTT as the movie itself! Much love, but as with the movie, you have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate the review. I wonder if our mutual appreciation for this flick and Frozen (otherwise vastly different horror-shows) is because we were willing to watch two desperately flawed movies for what they did right? It's so hard to make recommendations, in general, because nothing is perfect, Nina, so it's a question of whether the misses will overwhelm the hits for any specific viewer. For me Black Swan hit hard. (Like this guy!)

Commonweal's review did one thing right, in comparing Black Swan to Repulsion. I wish I'd thought of that! But what's bizarre to me is that the review accused Black Swan of being cold, compassionless, unable to take the audience into empathy with a disturbed mind. And that's a criticism I'd make of Repulsion--despite its astonishing imagery--whereas I thought, as I tried to indicate earlier, that Black Swan actually has a lot of sympathy for all of its characters.

Repulsion also has a much more simplistic underlying psychological theory than Black Swan, I think. (Black Swan's dialogue appears startlingly on-the-nose, which is why I called it "crude," although I do appreciate that no one who speaks about Nina is actually right.)

THE WORLD IS A FROST GIANT'S CORPSE: I Netflix'd Frozen because of Kindertrauma's glowing review, and I was not disappointed. This movie is so much smarter than it has to be, you guys. It's a horror flick about three college students (I think? twentynothings at the most) who get stuck on a broken ski lift, abandoned and freezing and alone, with no help in sight for days.

Both Kindertrauma and I expected popcorn, disposable entertainment; both of us got something memorable and frightening instead. I don't recommend that you read the comments until you've watched the movie (although I sort of agree with one of the criticisms a commenter raised), but I really liked KT's Unkle Lancifer's comment that if you can get into the "there, but [for the] grace of God, go I" mindset, this movie will hurt you.

KT notes the dialogue, which I liked well enough, but I want to call attention to the use of time and of nature photography. Frozen is a short movie which feels grueling, in the best way. You feel like time is passing with agonizing slowness even as you're held in suspense, literally cringing and covering your mouth. The manipulation of the audience (at least me!) was just masterful.

And the stunning shots of fir trees, and mist shivering over snow, were deployed expertly throughout the film. These lingering beauty shots actually added to the increasing weight of the characters' despair.