Horror

I’m not sure what was more entertaining, the movie, or the two young ladies who sat behind me in the theater with their jackets over their faces the entire time.

As the preview tells us, Alison Lohman’s character is cursed by Lorna Raver’s creepy and flat-broke bank client.  The result is a nasty haunting by an evil demon, and a series of attempts to prevent the eventual “dragging to hell” by said demon.

In one intense fright scene, Lohman confronts the image of Raver on her iPhone.  Naturally, I leaned over to my friends and said, “There’s an App for that!”

Alas, I was disappointed to learn that it was more Hollywood trickery, and, in fact, there is no App for that.  I think they missed a great cross-promotion opportunity by not releasing it on iTunes.  Of course, the iTunes people had so much bad publicity with their recent shake the baby application, that a horror film app maybe wasn’t in the cards.

Perhaps having Justin “Hi, I’m a Mac” Long was sufficient enough promotion for Apple.

Product placements aside, the movie is genuinely frightening, and genuinely funny.

If you liked Evil Dead or Army of Darkness, you will like Drag Me To Hell.  Sam Raimi delivers his own brand of brilliance yet again.

Unnecessary Spoiler: Somebody actually gets dragged to hell in the end. Can you guess who it is?

The Mist (DVD)

Don’t plan on going to sleep right after watching this one. It is not conducive to sweet dreams.

The problem with Stephen King’s tales of horror is that they are too plausible, if you can allow yourself to sretch your boundaries on what might be reality. The situation is not totally impossible, what with man screwing around with genetics, physics and anything else. And the reactions of the people involved in the situation is entirely realistic. But the story is not an accepted reality, so the horror is still “out there”.

The painter/dad, played by Thomas Jane of The Punisher fame, reacts and acts just as a man of his nature would be expected to. His son, played by Andre Braugher Toby Jones, is a normal boy thrust into a bizarre world. The acting is superb, and the story lacks nothing in character development, fast paced action, special effects, and shear terror.

The religious fanatic is entirely believable as well. And the rest of the characters, hoping to remain safe in the supermarket, each add believable detail.

It has left me wondering – did I miss something in the news, was Maine perhaps visited by strange creatures from an alternate reality, and I missed it?

If you go expecting a horror story, you will be disappointed. This is more a somebody did somebody wrong song, and a tale of revenge wrought by a ghost. Not a very original theme, but told with more restraint than most ghost stories. So the horror factor wasn’t there, but the story had a few twists that made it worth the 85 minutes spent.

There likely is a magazine publishing fake pictures of ghosts trying to connect with the living. There likely is a medium or two in Japan who can discern what a ghost is trying to communicate. These lie in the realm of possibility, given the premise that ghosts are a reality. Even if there is no such thing as revenge seeking ghosts, there are certainly enough believers to make the publishing of the magazine and the vocation of medium lucrative. I would like to know what the medium said to the couple in this film you’d think he would speak English so the wife would be able to understand. After all, the warning was for her, and with his preternatural sensibilities he should have known.

The telekinetic special effects were restrained as well, in comparison to other films in this genre. Personally, I found this made the story more believable. I was somewhat disappointed with the ending, as it reminded me of a Disneyland ride, the Haunted House. But it seemed a fitting and final revenge.

Riding the Bullet (DVD)

It seems as humans we get in trouble during puberty, either by doing things we really shouldn’t have, or by not doing things we should have. Either way, we are doomed to be haunted.

Alan Parker (Jonathan Jackson) didn’t ride the bullet after making his mom (Barbara Hershey) wait in line for this amusement park ride for hours. And that error of judgment, even though he saw at the time that he was barely stepping out of the grasp of the grim reaper by leaving, returned to torment him the fateful Halloween night he spent hitch-hiking to visit his Mother in the hospital after a stroke.

Halloween night is not the time for a young man who has already defied the specter of death on at least two occasions (although on one of these, the reaper was smoking pot, so was likely considerably more mellow than usual) to travel down a road past a graveyard. And Alan is foolish enough to wander in and take a look at the tombstones. He also didn’t show his higher education in his decision to swear at a couple of rednecks in a pickup. His Philos should have been more active at these times, but therein lies the plot.

Mick Garris’s screenplay adaptation of Stephen King’s 30-page novel doesn’t quite make it into the same class as “Sleepwalkers” and “The Stand”, but it’s still a must-see for those of us who are faithful King fans.