Smile

Cheese
Reflex

Smile
USA 2022
Directed by Parker Finn
Paramount Pictures
UK Cinema release print.

Warning: Very light spoilers.

So there’s a moment in the trailer of Smile which really got me to take a trek out to a preview screening of this in the UK (although, by the time this review sees the light of day, it will have just come out on general release). I dunno, preview windows seem to be getting smaller.

Anyway, the scene in question... and I don’t mind talking about it because it’s technically not a spoiler, as it’s included in most (possibly all) of the various Smile trailers... is when the lead protagonist is sitting in her car and somebody comes up to her window and taps on it. As she looks up, the head of the person outside the car dangles down like it’s been released from a bungee cord, a smile on its face. It’s a nice piece of imagery and, it’s a shame that surprise moment in the film is given away in the trailer but, it’s a heck of an image to sell it to people.

Smile stars Sosie Bacon as psychiatrist Dr. Rose Cotter and, one of her emergency patients is terrified out of her wits. She tells Rose about a smiling demon that’s been following her since somebody killed themselves in front of her and, when she clearly starts to see it in the room with them, Rose turns to the phone to call for security. By the time she’s turned around the patient has a big, rictus grin on her face and is staring straight at Rose as she cuts through part of her own face and then her throat with a shard of broken china. And, of course, from that point on, Rose starts getting hassled by the demon.

So, yeah, it’s yet another one of those pass the curse films but, that’s okay, I love those. They can trace back their roots at least as far as M. R. James’ short story Casting The Runes, which was adapted into a great movie called Night/Curse Of The Demon (reviewed here), a TV play (reviewed here) and, of course, many popular, unofficial modern variants such as the Ringu (aka Ring) films, Drag Me To Hell, It Follows (reviewed here) and Truth Or Dare (reviewed here)... among many others.

Like most of those films I just mentioned, the central curse or demon has no real origin story made clear (Ringu is a big exception to this rule, obviously) and, like many a zombie apocalypse film, the main protagonists are usually in the dark as to the why and who of the situation, in terms of said demonic entity. This film, then, follows the standard formula of the main ‘cursed’ individual trying to figure out the pattern and rules of the game in order to be able to stop it. Luckily for Rose (and the audience, for that matter), her ex-boyfriend is a cop and so she calls on him to help her in terms of bringing to light certain aspects of the case and to identify the presence of a ‘chain’ linking her to all the other victims... all but one of whom ended up taking their own life in a spectacular fashion in front of somebody, passing the curse on.

Two things which give this story credibility in terms of the way the Rose character is treated are quite clever. One is that they set up her character as somebody who does 80 hour working weeks and doesn’t really rest that much. So when she starts acting a little loopy, people assume this is just because she’s not getting enough down time. The other thing this movie does is give Rose and her sister a back story of a mother who suicided when Rose was a little girl... Rose choosing to run in fear rather than help save her from an overdose (which she didn’t realise was happening at the time)... so we also have a big dollop of guilt to throw into the mix and give the demonic entity something else to play with, which is nice.

My one slight criticism of the film is that it doesn’t really land the ending for me. These kinds of stories either end with disaster for the recipient of the demonic spirit or said recipient finds a way to pass the curse on (rarely can they break the chain)... and in this film the modus operandi of the demonic entity is that you either have to kill yourself, or somebody else, in front of someone to pass the curse. So, obviously, it’s not going to end well for anyone. And, although some misdirection is deliberately set up with one of those two rules... yeah, you’re probably going to see the ending of this one coming, for sure.

But, it’s a really fun ride, it has to be said. And there are some nice moments to be had. One is the head dangle scene I described earlier and the other, without giving too much away, is a nicely surreal special effect when you see just how the demon comes to inhabit its victims near the end of the movie.

Oh, and the score by Cristobel Tapia de Veer... it’s amazing. Like the best kind of modern horror meets sound design but with a decidedly strong ‘musique concrète’ vibe to it. And it really goes for it in terms of assaulting the audience in the audio space and being mixed in to the foreground of the movie loud and clear (as movie music should be). Such a shame there’s no CD of this one as I’m sure I would play it to death.

And that’s me done on Smile. It’s a fun little horror flick which is aided by some lovely cinematography, a great score and a wonderful central performance by Sosie Bacon. I would definitely recommend this to all the horror fans out there and I’ll definitely be trying to pick up a Blu Ray of this thing at some point soon. Fingers crossed it gets a proper physical release.

It Follows

Casting The Hormones

It Follows
2014/15  US
Directed by David Robert Mitchell 
UK cinema release print.

Okay then. What we have here is a movie which has been warmly welcomed by afficionados of the horror genre, from its tour of various one off and preview screenings on the festival circuit and the usual venues this kind of movie rears its head at before getting a general release or distribution deal... and it deserves its warm welcome in spades. It’s also been called fresh and original and, there, I think, I’d have to disagree although I will say that, while anything but original, I don’t think it’s supposed to be. I’m sure the writer/director would be the first to point out the postmodernistic references he’s wearing so warmly on his fear tinted sleeve but, even though this film takes no prizes for new ideas... it does do what it aims to do extremely well and, frankly, with a lot of affection towards the genres and styles it’s eclectically gathering together in its warm, parodic embrace.

So lets unmask a little of its historical legacy here and say that, like the title of this review suggests, this is yet another version of the old “pass the curse on” story popularised by writer M. R. James in his short story Casting The Runes. Of course, there have been numerous versions of this story at the cinema and on TV over the years and my readers will probably best remember both the ones that were freely adapted from this tale such as Night Of The Demon (aka Curse Of The Demon 1957 - reviewed here), Casting The Runes (1979 - reviewed here) and probably the modern variants which were, like this one, using the story as a starting point such as Ringu (aka Ring 1998) or just not being very open about their sources, such as the excellent Drag Me To Hell (2009 and with a mini review here).

The basic plot of the original story is that a man puts a curse on a man who will be escorted from this mortal coil by a demon unless he lifts the curse by passing it back somehow within a certain amount of time. In the Japanese movie Ringu (loosely based on Koji Suzuki’s novel, which still very much owes a debt to M. R. James' original short) the curse takes the form of a virus caught by watching a cursed video tape and the way you pass the curse on to another is to copy the movie (thus perpetrating the act of widening the scope of the virus) and then showing that duplicate to another person. In It Follows, writer/director David Robert Mitchell strips out the elaborate ‘cure all’ concept and complications behind said solution that Ringu added to the mix and boils it down to this: you have to have sex with someone to pass the curse on to them. If that person then dies, the demon, if that’s what IT is in It Follows, will then kill the next person back up the line and follow the chain back... so if you are a victim you have to not only pass it on, but convince the next person to pass it on and so on.

Another thing that Mitchell cleverly does here is not bother to explain or enlighten as to the origins of the shape-shifting, relentless and ultimately unstoppable demon in this story. And, similarly, the teenage characters in this one refreshingly make no attempt to try and trace back the history of the curse and to stop it in its tracks. Which is actually fine because, as amply demonstrated with this very smart and self aware genre movie, modern audiences really don’t need to know the origins of a character in a story to be able to reap the benefits of the way that character - hero, villain or thing - interacts with the immediate environment... as long as it does interact in the most entertaining way possible. They just need to know what the rules of engagement are, so to speak, and just leave it at that. Which is something, I have to say, that the makers of various superhero and comic book movie adaptations in the last decade or two still haven’t managed to cotton onto yet... although it’s something horror movie makers have known for quite some time (you’d think they’d share the secret with the comic book people at some point, no?). In this film, the teenage protagonists are going for the short route... lure the thing in and then try kill it. Whether they have any measure of success at that is something I will certainly not spoil for you here.

Now It Follows, it has to be said, gets a lot of things right in its all too brief running time and I’d have to say, in terms of the genre, it’s just about a near perfect example of this kind of movie that you’re likely to get. I think this one is going to be talked about by people and written about in academic studies on sex, gender politics and horror movies, for decades to come... and I’m happy to say that one of the things that the film absolutely gets right is the teenage characters. I’m 47 years old and I have to say, the teenagers in this movie weren’t in any way scripted to annoy the buggery out of me (like a good deal of teenage horror movies are these days... just compare this to the awful Ouija - reviewed here) and I found that I could actually identify with them. Now, part of that may be because the characters aren’t fleshed out to any great detail but the dialogue seems fairly adult and the various actors and actresses cast in the roles, especially the main, cursed protagonist Jay, played very low key and convincingly by Maika Monroe, all knock it out of the park in terms of their performances. This is a smart movie populated by smart actresses and actors, so this is all very good.

The other great thing it’s got going for it is a sense of reverence and respect for the good old mid-1970s to mid-1980s teenage horror flick, and you see it in every frame of the film. Now, I didn’t like a lot of the American horror flicks from around that time (most people my age would have first caught them on dodgy VHS tapes rented out from the local off-licence) but this has a lot in common with the best of them and it seems like the whole movie has been shot through some kind of special lens which gives it a sort of built-in filtered nostalgia for people my age. And I really appreciated that.

It’s not afraid to be silent and reflective, for example. There are lots of quiet patches in this movie where people are just looking or, more often than not, the camera is making voyeuristic passes at the surrounding scenery while the characters are doing their thing off screen. This is epitomised in a shot where two of the main characters go to find out the true identity of the man who passed the curse on to Jay. The two go into an office reception area at a university but the camera stops following them before they reach their destination and, instead, starts doing slow, 360 degree pans around the general vicinity... which is the kind of thing you would probably get a lot more of in European cinema than standard US film-making, at least contemporary US film-making, it seems to me. Of course, what the director is also doing is building tension and milking the suspense by constantly checking out the periphery of the characters... once the audience knows to look out for something, never the same figure twice, the director can start playing with the voyeuristic angle and start creeping out the audience by showing things happening in the background to raise the hairs on the back of the neck before the creature actually, legitimately, arrives... which is what all good horror movies do to a certain extent, of course.

The other thing that helps considerably in this movie is the soundtrack by a group called Disasterpeace, which is also very much feeding off a late 1970s American horror movie vibe. If you think back to scores like Phantasm and, more pointedly, John Carpenter’s great scores to Halloween and The Fog, where rhythms and jarring, jangling effects on repeat mode resembling Bernard Herrmann’s famous Psycho musical stings on acid would key in and inform the ears and heartbeats of the audience, elevating the suspense and fear factor up to eleven, then you’ll get an idea of what this score is like. It’s not just modern, horror movie sound design embracing dissonance. In some sequences it’s quite melodic and its definitely “the real deal” as far as this humble audience member is concerned. And, again to the director’s credit, he doesn’t bury the score in the mix like most modern directors do with their product... he knows exactly what his composers and musicians have delivered to him here and he lets it breathe... pushing it right into the foreground and floating it above the sound effects for a lot of the movie. Such a shame, then, that you can only currently purchase the score digitally as I would really like to get a proper CD soundtrack of this one... it’s a really great score.

And it’s a really great movie.

Horror afficionados of a certain age should get a lot out of this film. Sure it’s filled with clichés but what modern horror movie isn’t... in fact, those kind of key moments are absolutely essential, a lot of the time, to making a genre piece like this work and Mitchell certainly seems to recognise this. The point being, that the rules and tropes of the horror movie are executed absolutely perfectly in this one... so younger audiences should get a good hit off of this movie too. And, of course, since we still know nothing about the creature who is pursing the human chain of sexual encounters, we still have the possibility of sequels sharing that mythology and expanding on it in future versions of a franchise... so that should keep the Hollywood bean counters happy on this one and I wouldn’t be surprised if I am writing the review up on here for the sequel in a couple of years’ time. Either way, this one’s a bit of a masterpiece and I urge anyone who likes a decent horror movie, especially those who have a certain affection for the stylistic leanings of 1970s movies, to give It Follows a look soon. I doubt you’ll regret it.

Casting The Runes (ITV Playhouse)

The Rune Show


Casting The Runes (ITV Playhouse)
UK 1979
Directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark
Network Region 2

Warning: There are ending spoilers here 
if you don’t already know the basic story.

This review wasn’t originally intended to go up until next week sometime but I just found out that today is M.R. James' 150th Birthday (not that he’s around to celebrate that fact). Thanks to Mr. Jim “Hypnogoria” Moon , who also shares the same birthday, for alerting me to that fact... although I don't believe Mr. Moon is also 150 years, as yet.

Finally got to see this 1979 adaptation of the great ghost story writer M. R. James’ Casting The Runes. I may have seen it back in 1979 too, little things were ringing bells ever so slightly as I was watching it, but if I did I suspect it didn’t make too much of an impression on me as an eleven year old trying to survive school. I was probably a lot busier getting thoroughly freaked out by two TV shows I loved at around the same kind of timeframe, and which this adaptation actually bears a little similarity to in tone, methinks - The Omega Factor and Sapphire & Steel. 

I have read the short story on which this is based in a collection of M. R. James stories available at a very “value-for-money” price from Wordsworth Classics (check out their website here) but that story didn’t make much impression on me as much as some of the other brillant tales in that same volume. I was also familiar with the tale in two movie versions (one of them uncredited) which, to be fair, are best termed as being “inspired by” rather than being full blown adaptatons. The first of these, Night Of The Demon (aka Curse Of The Demon, reviewed here) is a great movie by Tournier and well worth having a watch if you like fifties British horror movies. The second adapatation is not in any way credited as being such, and I am certainly not wanting to accuse anyone of doing something they shouldn’t. Especially when it’s such a great film, too. However, in my humble opinion, Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell (reviewed here) was very much... um... an homage to the original story idea, shall we say. It even, like the end of Night Of The Demon, ends on the railway tracks.

The 1979, 50 minute TV adaptation of Casting The Runes is a much less grander affair, but it still plays quite loosely with the original and, like Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, transforms the central male protagonist into a female character, to give more balance to the cast I suspect. That female protaganist being played by Jan Francis, who I remember very well from a UK romantic comedy TV show from the 1980s called Just Good Friends, but who some of my readers might better remember (certainly better than I) from playing Mina in the 1979 movie version of Dracula. Here she is a TV producer who has said unfavourable things about the Alaister Crowley-like Julian Carswell, played here with much menace by Iain Cuthbertson. Carswell slips her some paper with a runic curse on it and, as the story always goes, she has to somehow get him to retake posession of this paper-based curse unawares before a month is up, or an invisible demon will come to claim her life.

It’s actually quite a good piece of entertainment as a whole. Not exactly as chilling as it possibly would have been in the context of what people had to compare it to at the time of its original broadcast, but certainly it has an atmosphere all its own and the bit which involves a big, tentacled rubber spider turning up in Jan Francis bed when she least expects it, was immediately followed by a commercial break, because it possibly would have been a “bit of a moment” back in the day (and this was one of the things that vaguely rang some bells with me while I was watching). It foreshadows, in every way, a similar and even more terrifying “lurking in your bed sheets already” surprise in the Japanese horror movie Ju-on (aka The Grudge).

One of the things that this did bring back to me, and hit me in the face with an epiphany of understanding about 60s and 70s TV production in general, was the fact that the sets and spaces that the cast inhabit are all very sparse and uncluttered. Now, it may be because we have become more materialistic in real life due to the sheer amount of goods manufactured and consumed - that this was indeed the way we lived back then and I’ve just forgotten. But everything seemed to be so “underdressed” in terms of the sets that, well, they did look like the cast were just standing around on sets rather than actually existing within a credible environment. And I think this is a trait of this kind of television back then and, to be honest, I know I wouldn't (nor I’m sure, would many of the original late 1970s audience) have given it a thought at the time... it’s just the way it was. It does, however, look more than a little fake now, which as I said, it certainly wouldn’t have then. Dated, perhaps, is the conclusion I’d have to reach. More so than a movie set would, though, so maybe budgetary and time elements were more of a factor too, rather than just mere cultural differences through the decades.

Of course, with less to worry about in terms of the sets getting in the way, the manner in which the shots are framed and the placement of the characters within those shots are done quite meticulously and are a joy to look at. I’m not the biggest fan of the traditional, pre-21st Century 4:3 TV aspect ratio but, if done right (and you only have to look at the early cinema of Akira Kurosawa to see this for yourself), the shot design and the flow created by the editing of those shots together can be just as valid in this “shape of canvas”, so to speak, than any other alternatives.

All in all, I must say, it was a thoroughly entertaining 50 minutes and the ending, where our heroine succesfully passes the curse back but at the cost of the lives of the innocent passengers in an aircraft shared with Karswell, when the demon comes to kill him and take his soul, gives one pause to think about the consequences of an act once things are set in motion.

As an aside... I wouldn’t normally watch an ITV programme these days. I tried watching a sci-fi series they’d made themselves about six years ago, screened after the 9pm watershed, and after wading through all the adverts (something I’m not prepared to do, so I taped it) they still managed to bleep out a swear word... after 9pm... and in their own show. At least write it out guys... not bleep it out.

Anyway, I mention this because, back in the seventies, there still was the occasional good TV show on “the third channel”, believe it or not, like the aforementioned Sapphire & Steel and, of course, the fourth and final of Nigel Kneale’s groundbreaking Quatermass seriels (the previous three had been BBC productions). So here I was, watching an ITV Playhouse of the week and, right there and then within the first ten minutes, Jan Francis says "p*ss off!" Now I’m really not bothered much by swear words, to be honest. I think if you’re writing a character that would use them, you use them. If not... don’t. Pretty simple. But I did cheer a bit inside when Jan Francis said that because, as I’d imagine you well know, there’s no way they would get away with that nowadays on prime time TV and I think it’s good when something from our very recent past holds a mirror up to modern society and reminds us all how backwards and Victorian we’ve become over the last few years... where political correctness has reached new lows of incredulity and creeping, insidious foolishness.

So, yeah... Casting The Runes. Nice adaptation and if you are a fan of 1970s TV and spooky stories then very much worth a watch... and very much worth a read in a collection of M. R. James stories for that matter. A thorough recoimmendation from me.

Night of the Demon

Name That Rune

Night of the Demon

(aka Curse of the Demon US) UK 1957

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Screening as a double bill in a pub

as part of the Classic Horror Campaign. http://www.classichorrorcampaign.com

I’m not much for big celebrations of Easter. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, for me personally, there’s only two really great things about Easter. Number One is I can stay away from work and be with family or friends and Number Two would be that it’s an excuse for my yearly ritualistic screening of It’s The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown.

This year, however, my Good Friday wasn’t just that... it was actually a really great Friday. This is because the Classic Horror Campaign (a campaign to bring back the classic, late night BBC2 horror double bills from the 70s and 80s... check out their website right here) had organised a pub screening of one of my favourite British made horror movies Night of the Demon and also a classic Hammer Horror which I don’t think I’d seen before, Vampire Circus.

The venue and organisation of said event were great and the relaxed atmosphere, comfy sofas and knowledge that you were watching these classic movies with like-minded individuals did a lot to make this run-in to Easter truly one to remember.

Warning! Okay... so this review is only about Night of the Demon and, because I want to reiterate some points about it I probably already made in a review of another movie, this one will have some pretty big spoilerage in it... so desist from reading this right now if you’ve never seen this or the slightly truncated and alternate US version Curse of the Demon.

Night of the Demon is a 1957 movie made in Britain and based on the M. R. James short ghost story Casting the Runes. It was directed by the legendary Jacques Tourneur who was certainly no stranger to the horror genre as he had directed three of the best of producer Val Lewton’s famous and critically acclaimed RKO low-budget alternatives to the Universal Horror cycle in the 1940s... notably the original version of Cat People plus The Leopard Man and I Walked With A Zombie.

Now this isn’t actually, when you get right down to it, exactly a faithful adaptation of the short to be honest... but like other less than faithful movie adaptations (I might mention Jaws or Blade Runner) it plays around with concepts and ideas which are thrown up by the original source material and manages to be a movie that conjures up a chilling atmosphere which is reminiscent of the spirit of the original and, quite apart from this, is certainly one of the most watchable and entertaining British horror movies of all time.

Like the original short story, the movie takes up the idea of a demon coming to destroy the possessor of a piece of paper with a runic curse on it. Once the initially unknowing owner of said piece of runic scribble is aware of this, the movie becomes an exercise in a) the characters progression from “do I really believe this” to “bugger this I’m in trouble here” and b) how do I pass the curse back to the originator without him being aware that I’ve done it before the demon comes to take me.

The original story was a small character sketch on fear with the presence of an actual demon implied but not actually verified by the writer... a kind of “make your own mind up” conclusion as to whether the death of a character in the short story was down to a demonic force or whether it was a freakish and coincidental accident caused by the act of fleeing a suspected reality, in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way.

The movie plays things a little less vaguely with a pre-credits sequence that includes a scene which shows the demon coming to kill the last victim of the runic symbols in a quite charming "Ray Harryhausen-style" stop motion animation. I understand that the director did not want to make the demon implicit himself and hated the scenes where the demon is actually shown and I guess this would in fact fit in with his modus operandi from when he was working for Lewton over at RKO in the decade before. Still, whether the director wanted it there or not, it’s there and it’s curiously effective for something which is so obviously a stop motion element to the movie. The demonic murder itself is called into question because the car of the victim is electrocuted trying to flee the monster in question.

The very real villain of the piece, however, is a black magician called Dr. Julian Karswell who may or may not have been based on the real-life Alesteir Crowley, played by Niall MacGinnis who really gives a brilliant performance in the role. An absolutely charming character who will be quite happy to provide you with some charming chit-chat over tea and cake before slipping you a runic scroll and setting a demon on you.

The main protagonist is Dr. John Holden, played by Dana Andrews who was presumably cast to ensure the film’s distribution in the US. He plays a doctor who has journeyed from America to disprove Karswell’s claim of being a witch and thus finds himself, cynically, on the receiving end of one of Mr. Karswell’s nasty runes. His romantic interest is the daughter of the previous victim of one of Karswell’s demons played by Peggy Cummins... but she doesn’t really seem to do that much but provide a female Mulder to Dana Winter’s skeptical Scully.

By the way, if any of the plotline to this movie is starting to sound just a little too familiar to fans of modern horror cinema, that’s because this is basically the same storyline (with a few modern adjustments) of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell a few years ago... I haven’t actually come across anything where the makers of Drag Me To Hell have admitted that their movie is a direct remake of Night of the Demon... or even “inspired by” M. R. James Casting The Runes... but it does seem pretty obvious to me that this movie was just a thinly and inadequately disguised remake of Night of the Demon. Still, Drag Me To Hell was a pretty good horror movie too... my review of it is here.

Asides from the opening confrontation with Karswell and the aforementioned and subsequent death of victim number one at the hands of the demon, the movie keeps a brisk but discrete pace and keeps everything else under wraps while exploring the psychological effects of the events of a man’s death foretold on th characters. It’s only towards the last half an hour or so, after Last of the Summer Wine actor Brian Wilde throws himself to his death out of a window while reliving a demonic encounter in a hypnotically induced trance that things begin to kick back into high gear with a cat wrestling scene, a pursuit by a shiny bright demonic light through a forest (including brilliant Michael Bentine’s Potty Time invisible creature footsteps) and a race along some train tracks involving the runic paper and the death by one of the characters at the hands of the stop-motion demon. The railway track setting, of course, means the injuries sustained by this character can be explained by a train having rolled over him... something that Raimi used a couple of years ago as the scene of the final denouement of Drag Me To Hell. Hmmm... wonder where he got that idea from.

Shot in a stark black and white which perfectly evokes an eerie mood, Night of the Demon is the perfect film for fans and students of the Great British Horror Movie and I would heartily recommend this movie to people who fit that description. A shorter cut-down version of the film was released in the US as Curse Of The Demon and at one time I understood that this version was made from different takes of the same scenes... although I can’t seem to verify that claim at the present and I’ve never bothered to watch that version (as yet) so I can’t honestly say it is or it isn't.

The second half of this double bill, Vampire Circus, will be reviewed soonest!