Shark Exorcist

Jawless

Shark Exorcist
USA Directed by Donald Farmer
Kaleidoscope DVD Region 2

Wow. I don’t know where to start. I think it’s quite possible I’ve never seen a film so badly made and, also, so incredibly and irritatingly dull at the same time. I don’t know what went wrong with Shark Exorcist but, from a brilliantly stupid idea like a demonically possessed shark going around eating people... and possessing the first woman it bites... you have to wonder how this monstrosity turned out so bad. I mean, with a high art concept like that, you’d have to work really hard to actually screw it up, right?

Okay, having seen the most one and two star reviews of my life on IMDB for this movie, I thought I’d better give a review of this a go but... I don’t know how to talk about this without it sounding like a lot of fun. All I can say, people, is... it really isn’t. I had high hopes that this movie would be so bad it’s good. A lot of companies are doing that now, right? After the success of movies like Birdemic and Sharknado (neither of which I’ve seen but I should probably give Birdemic a go at some point, at least) it seems some really stupid concepts are turning up as deliberately bad movies to entertain the more discerning cine enthusiasts out there. They all, it seems to me from the few films like this I’ve seen, have their tongues wedged firmly into their cheeks and taking the ‘over the top but, you know, the cast and crew are in on the joke’ style of attitude, which served Stephen Sommers so well on his reboot of The Mummy, as their mantra. Unfortunately, as demonstrated with this movie, sometimes the people both in front of and behind the camera are less than able to deliver a truly ironic movie. This thing is way worse than I could possibly have imagined.

So the plot, as far as I can make out (I’m apparently not the only person who couldn’t make head or tail of half the stuff seen here) involves an evil nun who stabs a woman at the start and offers her up as some kind of sacrifice in her local lake. The nun then doesn’t turn up again until the end (in another of many sequences throughout the film that make no sense at all) but this is presumably how the demonically possessed shark, who you will only ever see floating in a stand-in tank or background and using what was probably almost the entire budget for wonky CGI, came into existence. It then bites someone, off camera and, the teeny tiny bite she has imbues her personality with the shark’s too. So she goes around eating people with some... actually quite nice looking shark teeth. The teeth are good, not the actress but, I think you only see them briefly in one or two shots.

And there’s a load of shenanigans with the lady from the local reality TV show Ghost Whackers, who also accidentally gets possessed by the shark and... some shenanigans with at least four lots of women writhing on the ground at various points for totally unknown reasons. Maybe the reasons are in some of the dialogue you don’t get to hear...

Oh right. Did I tell you this film was badly made? I’m pretty sure no post synch dubbing or building of  foley was used (apart from on the priest character, who’s barely in it and is somehow out of synch). When certain locations are used (the whole film seems shot on location), the wind in the microphone is so bad that you can’t hear half the dialogue. Seriously, the sound goes in and out randomly. And also, there’s one scene where you wish the sound did go out because... well, I don’t know if the producers could afford a second camera or not but I swear there’s a scene where you can hear what is either the sound of another scene being shot simultaneously or, I dunno, maybe they’re just rehearsing another scene in the background while they’re shooting this one. And don’t talk to me about the fairground scenes, which were perhaps be too much for the microphones to be able to handle, so they just lost the sound and replaced it with a cheap sounding score altogether. Seriously. You wouldn’t believe the level of easily fixable incompetence here. Stay with me, it gets worse.

There are some very un-shark like deaths in terms of aftermath in this movie. Don’t expect to see the shark ever interacting with anything on screen. Even when it’s stalking in less than a foot of water, you will still see it swimming in the big, blue tank. So you’ll see people hurling themselves under the water and then, when their bodies are found, they might have a little blood on their mouth or... well, this is more badly handled than I could possibly describe. And when I tell you the shark has glowing eyes, that sounds like it at least could be cool in a silly way, right? No. When you do see these shots... and you’ll have time to be familiar with them because I’m pretty sure it’s the same two or three quick shots reinserted and recycled throughout the entire movie... the glowy eyes which have obviously been put on after, have trouble sometimes staying in the right place or shimmering about and not quite always being where the eyes of the shark actually are. This is beyond shoddy.

If you’re looking for exploitation in this... you’ll be as disappointed on that score too, as you would expect some gory violence when the shark lets loose. There’s lots of shots of women in bikinis... being incompetently filmed with way too long takes, just like one of the post credits sequences in this film... where lots of barely watchable footage is followed up with something completely incomprehensible and possibly not even connected to... whatever the story is supposed to be about. If I hadn’t paid out money for this film I would have not bothered seeing this one through to the end. And bearing in mind the film is only one hour and eleven minutes long... you ‘d be surprised how much a film could drag. This thing seemed like I was watching it all day and, honestly, this film makes The Beaster Bunny (reviewed here) seem like something on the level of Star Wars. I have no idea why Shark Exorcist was even allowed onto the home video market. It should be illegal that people are being charged money for this. They should be paying us.

So that’s me done with Shark Exorcist... because I’m sitting here now trying to figure out just why I’m wasting time typing this one up. This film has only three good things going for it, which I shall reveal now. It has a good title/concept. It has some brilliant cover art... of a scene that’s not even in the movie... and it has one good line, “We’re going to need a bigger cross.” And that’s it. I wouldn’t be so cruel enough to recommend this disaster of a film to even those people who I know, like me, appreciate a bad movie. That’s 71 minutes of my life I am never getting back again and I feel like almost suing the company that allowed this one a release. Half the scenes look like they’re just there because the director and producers needed to get various family and friends in it... that’s the only reason I can think that some of the scenes are in here. Steer clear of this one folks. My only compensation is that I doubt if there’s a worse move out there I could possibly, accidentally stumble on. Just awful and it gives both shark movies and bad movies a bad name, so to speak.

The Possession Of Hannah Grace

Saving Grace

The Possession Of Hannah Grace
2018 USA Directed by Diederik Van Rooijen
UK cinema release print.

Well this is an entertaining little horror movie I saw the other night, based solely on the strength of the trailer I saw about a month before.

Now, it has to be said, the promotional trailer for The Possession of Hannah Grace is cut so that it seems to be a lot more subtle and atmospheric than it actually is... at least in terms of a slow burn film, that is. This one is anything but restrained and even during the opening pre-credits sequence we are treated to an ‘exorcism gone wrong’ with all the kinds of post-Freidkin possession shenanigans you’d expect to see in something like this, thrown at you in the first five minutes or so. It’s quite hokey, in all honesty but that’s okay, there are many kinds of horror films and this is just not one based on any sense of deepening mystery, is all.

The story is the tale of Megan Reed, played ably by Shay Mitchell. An ex-cop who is cursed with the cliché of failing her partner by not using immediate, deadly force and who has left the service because she can’t cope with the hesitancy that killed her colleague. And, yeah, if you think this back story is just setting her up for a shot at redemption and recompense towards the end of the movie... bingo. Like I said, not subtle but that’s okay, it’s a fun enough ride.

So anyway, shortly after we join Megan, she starts the first night of her solitary graveyard shift at the Boston hospital and, of course, as you would expect, the body of the victim of the exorcism gone wrong, Hannah Grace (played quite dextrously by Kirby Johnson), is brought in and starts causing all kinds of trouble for poor Megan, as it’s clear the exorcism didn’t quite take. And... yes, if you’re thinking this sounds a touch like The Autopsy Of Jane Doe (which I reviewed here) then you’d be absolutely right. This is a little like that film but with no slow build up or mystery and lots of demonic battles pushed to the fore. I mean, all pretense at mystery on this one is taken away at the end of the first pre-credits sequence anyway, when it’s made clear to the audience that Hannah Grace... or at least the cadaver of her which is inhabited by a demon of some kind... is not exactly dead.

Now, the film tries to have its cake and eat it by showing us Megan working alone in a dark suite of the hospital morgue while, at the same time, having her connect with, or sometimes meet and make, new friends and acquaintances over the evening. The reason why the story does this is very simple... the somewhat less than static corpse of the title character is slowly healing herself and, basically, the more people she kills, the less crippled, burned and wounded she is. So we get a steady stream of potential victims visiting Megan for various reasons over the course of the evening, specifically so they can be stealthily killed by Hannah in some kind of supernatural way. Which kind of works okay and I didn’t mind this way of doing things here... once I’d figured out the director was going for full-on demonic showdowns rather than trying to build a scary atmosphere. It’s a valid way of going about things and it... just about... works here.

There’s also a nice sense of symmetry in the mise en scene to this movie and, by that, what I mean is that this director seems to really love the middle of the screen. I would guess that for over 90% of this movie, the camera favours shots which pitch the main action or focus of the shot dead centre. It’s almost like Van Rooijen and his cinematographer have an obsession with this way of doing things. Sometimes he will just use the vertical slabs made by corridors, doors and windows to pull everything to the middle and often he will be moving his camera around, sometimes hand held, so that whoever the character he is following will still mostly stay at the centre of the frame. Occasionally, he will use the twisted, fast, creepy crawling cadaver of Hannah Grace and deliberately pitch her off centre in order to contrast this style and attempt to surprise the audience but, even some of the jump scares are pitched directly centre of the shot and are done by masking off visibility with fluctuating light and shadow rather than with peripheral details.

Strangely, there’s an obvious set up early in the film and he never seems to yank on that string later... at least not in this cut of the movie. Very early on the filmmakers go out of their way to make us understand that about 90% of the lights in the morgue are sensor operated on movement to save energy and this is further highlighted by constant scenes of Megan having to go into dark areas and wave her arms about so the lights come back on. So, yeah, I was just waiting for this to be used as some kind of set up to some big kind of jump scare but... no, surprisingly the director doesn’t really utilise this here. That being said, there could well have been a scene which did just that in an earlier cut, for all I know. I’m just guessing here though because, why shoot all those instances as a set up unless you were going to take advantage of it later on in the movie? Unless he just wanted an excuse to keep everything darkly lit, I suppose.

At the end of the day, The Possession of Hannah Grace has some nice acting, some likeable characters and also, I should add, a nice soundtrack by composer John Frizzel which, alas, doesn’t seem to have a CD release. The downside on this is it’s fairly predictable and there are no real scary bits in this one. However, as a ‘comfort horror’ film is works quite well and I think most lovers of the genre will quite like this one. Or at least not find much to complain about. So there you go, that’s me done on this one. If horror movies, no matter how hokey, are your thing, then you might want to give this one a go. If not... yeah, you can probably miss this one. I quite liked it and will be happy to watch it again when the Blu Ray goes into the bargain bins, for sure.

The Conjuring

Conjurlingus

The Conjuring
2013 USA
Directed by James Wan
Playing at cinemas now.

Hmmm.

You know, back in the 1970s and 1980s, I used to claim that there were only, maybe, between five and ten decent horror movies ever made. Now, what I meant by that is actually, between five and ten “scary” horror movies ever made. Clearly, for example, The Bride Of Frankenstein is probably going to be on most people’s top ten horror movies but it’s probably not in any way an effective horror movie in terms of scaring anyone... unless that person is two or three years old maybe. So for when I was making that claim... I stick to my guns. There are lots of great horror films, such as Suspiria, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Night Of The Living Dead etc... but none of these movies are in any way scary.

Nowadays, however, I’d have to say my opinion has been forced to change given the influx of really well made horror films coming out in the last ten to fifteen years. Loads of films where the creeping and subtle terror, has started to make a come back in a more than competent manner. We have films that get the job done right, now, like The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, The Last Exorcism (reviewed here), Paranormal Activity 2 (reviewed here) and Paranormal Activity 3 (reviewed here) and, you know, The Blair Witch Project. Even just the last couple of years there’s been a steady increase of freshly made horrors which actually don’t fail to scare and I can probably add a lot to the likes of my original list from way back when... which included stuff like The Haunting (1963 version), The Fog (1980 version), The Shining and, tentatively, The Exorcist (The Version We’ve Already Seen). I think it’s fair to say that during the last decade or two, my list has probably doubled.

The reason I’m dredging up this stuff now is actually by way of an apology. You see, The Conjuring is actually something of a great and powerfully scary movie. That being said, though, I’ve reviewed a fair few effectively scary new movies over the past three years and so, if what I say here about this movie sounds like something of a bit of a repeat review of any of the other of the better horror movies I’ve reviewed on this blog, well I apologise.

Of course, that makes this review no less valid and the movie in question no less great.

The films is a dramatisation of the real life events of a demonic possession which plagued the Perron family back in the early seventies and the people who helped them, the real life husband and wife team of psychic investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (portrayed brilliantly in this movie by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) who, among others, investigated one case which is known to modern cinema audiences as The Amityville Horror. It’s also a very effective “scare the pants off you” movie which is not to be missed by fans of the supernatural and the unknown.

Three things distinguish this movie a little more than a lot of the other horror movies doing the rounds the past few years... the first being, of course, that we have a real life couple of protagonists who have investigated hundreds of cases which could be prepped for a sequel if this movie is successful (they are and it is, by the way... I’m expecting to see another one in a couple of years and I look forward to it greatly). So genre characters who can keep on running in a number of movies, thus filling a void left when the two movies made as extensions of the TV show The X Files turned out to be... well... a bit lame.

Another thing which make this a little different is that it’s set in a period around about 1971 (until 1973 in real life, is my understanding of events) and although there are a lot of accidental anachronisms on show for the time portrayed here, the movie generally manages to capture the spirit of this period without resorting to too much postmodernistic nostalgia... it’s not a movie about the past, in other words, it is just set in the past and this is not a ‘feature’ of the story... it is just another fact.

The other element which sets it apart is its confidence in breaking the narrative flow to put in little diversions and emphasise points with a bit of visual punctuation, so to speak, not unlike a 1960s Godard movie... although with a completely different motive. It’s also to the credit of the director in question that this never really breaks the spell of the film... merely serves to enhance little points at key moments. Also, it’s not done all over the place either. It’s a tool which is used on the odd occasion and which doesn’t outstay its welcome.

A couple of “mini past cases” from  The Warrens are highlighted, for example, one of which... involving the much loved horror film staple of “a creepy doll”... is even used to clarify certain events pertaining to the case The Warrens are working on in the main timeline of the movie in no uncertain terms (you’ll know it when you see it... Ed and Lorraine Warren are not the only people besides their assistants and The Perron Family who are placed in demonic peril... but I really don’t want to spoil it for you so I’ll say nothing of this here).

And now we come to the stuff which is possibly going to sound a bit like one or two of my other reviews... but I write this because it’s the truth. The film-makers obviously know horror movies inside out and, though I had my reservations about the last 20 minutes or so of this director’s Insidious (which turned me off that whole movie, to a certain extent), this guy certainly knows how to run almost every horror cliché in the book throughout the film’s, never overlong, running time and still get away with it. That is to say, he has honed his feel for horror cinema to the point where, even though you are expecting quite a lot of what goes down in some of the key scare sequences, they are always so beautifully and effectively executed that you really can’t find fault with them. Indeed, you don’t have time to find fault because the sequences in question, coming ready or not, will make you jump out of your skin at some points. So if you are already a jumpy person... consider yourself warned.

Also, the director is not one of these people who is inclined to keep the camera moving all over the place at high speed to make it look like it’s moving along at breakneck place but, that being said, he does tend to have a very slow shifting field of vision which gives the feeling of static master shots when, in fact, they didn’t seem to be. Very slow takes and edits seems to be the order of the day here (thank goodness) and the slight sense of motion inherent in every 24 frames of film is really hypnotic and helps to draw you into that all important atmosphere of terror the crew is trying hard to create here.

And it works really well. Right down to Joseph Bishara’s original score which really supports the film well and which I have to wait a month to arrive on CD because, for some reason I can’t fathom, it’s only available from US Amazon and not the UK Amazon. Go figure. So I can’t tell you as yet what it’s like as a stand alone listen but it’s really effective in the movie and I’m sure it will scare me loads when I finally get around to listening to it. Certainly goes for a mood of terror and unease and gets it right all the way.

The one thing this movie really has going for it though, right throughout the entire movie, is that all the human characters (and by that I mean, people who aren’t dead and are ghostly or demonic spirits) are completely likeable characters who you really wouldn’t mind hanging around with at a pub and who really promote a certain, solid set of loving family values. And of course, this makes the spiritual and deadly attacks on them even more frightening. You care about all of these characters... so you’re invested in them right from the outset.

And of course, the actors portraying all of these people are just great in their roles. There’s honestly not a bad turn among them. These are skilled craftsmen and craftswomen who, along with the rest of the crew, have come together to make a horror movie which will literally, for want of a more eloquent term, “scare you up good”. And it’s to their credit that, in The Conjuring, they do just that. If you call yourself a fan of horror cinema then, although it might all seem a little overfamiliar perhaps, you really ought to go and see this movie and have some kind of opinion of it... good or bad. I had a lot of fun with this one... and so did the packed out audience I saw it with, if the jumps and screams are anything to go by.