Movie Review: The Seasoning House (2012)

Some movies put you in a happy, feel-good mood. My personal favorite is Angels in the Outfield, but anyway. Some movies are sad. Some movies are pretty goddamn depressing, actually. I love Mystic River but I always have to talk myself out of committing suicide after sitting through that depressing mess. Now there has come a movie that pretty much makes me lose any faith I had left in humanity, if only for the time it took to watch it.

The Seasoning House takes place during the war in the Balkans in the 1990s. Young deaf mute Angel is one of many girls to have their family slaughtered and be abducted by the vicious militia commander Goran. He sells the girls into sex slavery at a rundown brothel operated by Viktor. Viktor takes a liking to Angel and chooses her to be the one to "prepare" the girls for clients - until one day when Goran and his men make a visit to the brothel and Angel decides to fight back.

To be honest my main motivation for watching The Seasoning House was seeing Sean Pertwee, even in an evil role. But my goodness, this movie fucking sucked. I mean, it's a really great, beautiful, brilliant movie - but the subject matter and the way it made me feel really sucked. The tone of the film is bitter and depressing throughout, with absolutely no relief ever from the horror that your eyes and mind are subjected to. However, it is still beautiful in its own way, and a masterful feat for first-time director Paul Hyett.

Rosie Day absolutely deserves all the praise she has gotten for her role as Angel, a role in which she doesn't speak a word and doesn't have to. All of Angel's character traits come through in Day's facial expression and physicality - how she is young and innocent, but still has her moments of defiance, resilience, and stubbornness. At times she makes Angel seem rather blasé about what she experiences at the brothel, which was often a bit confusing and/or frustrating. But seeing how Angel handles herself at the end, it seems more like her attitude was in part for her own mental survival, and in part her keeping tabs on all the bad shit these assholes do so that taking revenge on them is no problem for her (or for us as the audience). After being in the brothel for a bit, Angel has figured out how to move from room to room through the crawlspaces of the house, and some of the craziest shots of the movie show Day expertly slithering in and out of these tiny vents in the walls. Definite points for agility for that girl.

Sean Pertwee as the evil Goran is perhaps perfect casting because of Pertwee's look and voice, though I do hate to see him do stuff like this. He needs a romantic comedy role or something. It's actually quite strange that Goran turns out to be film's main villain because doesn't actually commit any of the atrocities that some of the other men do, like shooting innocent civilians or raping the girls in the brothel, but he is responsible for allowing and causing all this to happen in the first place. Just as bad. Actor Kevin Howarth gives Viktor a strange likable quality that makes it hard to judge his character at times and how he really feels about what he is doing. Another standout actor simply for his look is the bald-headed rapist that Angel kills. The guy looks over six feet tall and like his body was chiseled out of wood - and here he is against little bitty Angel, but you're almost more scared for him because you know this girl has had enough of seeing what happens to these girls in the brothel.

It was actually a small comfort to me that there is no female nudity in the film, but of course that doesn't make the rape scenes (of which there are thankfully only two) any easier to watch. In the first one, there is a guy who apparently pays Viktor more money to be rough with the girls, and he rapes Vanya (a girl that Angel befriends) so violently that he breaks her pelvis. I officially hate people after watching something like that. And then, just because the scene wasn't horrifying enough, here comes the doctor to check on Vanya, a kindly old man who gives her a creepy smile while telling her that she merely has some bruising and tearing "down there." I really do hate people.

Also tough to watch is a flashback scene near the beginning that shows how Angel came to be captured  after she witnessed her mother being shot to death by one of Goran's men. The militia callously shoots the family members of the young girls they are grabbing for Viktor's brothel. Almost everybody gets their comeuppance in the end, though, and particularly satisfying is what happens to Goran. There are a few twists at the end involving some other characters that are a bit too contrived, and the ending is ambiguous, so I'm still left feeling a little down about that.

You're not going to particularly enjoy watching The Seasoning House but you still should. The cinematography, though just as depressing looking as the tone of the movie, is beautiful in practically every scene with some nice slow motion work to emphasize the moody feeling. The movie really shows the talents of Day and Hyett, and I expect great things from both of them in future projects.

Random Reviews: Seven Days To Live (2000) and Meadowoods (2010)

So I watched two very different horror flicks the other day, and sadly neither one of them was good enough to deserve its own review. Yeah that's right, movies - you gotta earn that shit.

Seven Days to Live
I'm really not sure what made me put this movie in my queue. It's a very typical haunted house-type setup: a couple with problems moves into a new house and starts having strange experiences. Ho-hum. Maybe I wanted to watch it because Sean Pertwee is in the movie and he's kind of awesome.

So anyway, Martin (Pertwee) and Ellen (Amanda Plummer) are a couple from the city who move into a big old house in the country after the tragic death of their son. The house has been empty for decades and everyone in the village is afraid to tell them the history of the place. Martin starts acting strange and Ellen receives messages about her impending death.

There's a bit of The Shining feel here because Martin is a writer looking to write his next big novel in this isolated house and he starts acting like an asshole and writing a lot. The ghosts focus on him, making him crazy and wanting to murder his wife. Pertwee is great in his role, and Plummer is too, but I'd like to see her in something where she doesn't act crazy or otherwise disturbed. She makes all the wrong decisions, especially when she continues to trust her obviously nuts husband who only makes fun of her messages of doom.

This part is pretty funny. Her first message comes from a road sign saying she has six days to live, the next day she hears it on the radio, then the number "4" appears on her forehead, then she draws letters during a Scrabble game that spell out "three days." I thought the writers would take it further than this with some more clues as to what is going on in the house, but they don't. It's a complete mystery until the very end, and even then it's not that great of an ending that explains almost nothing.

Then the mud monsters show up. Oh great. I was hoping there would be mud monsters. They give a whole story about how the marshes where the couple's house is was used as a dumping ground for all the people executed in the area in the Middle Ages. Mud monsters come out of the ground in the cellar and the ghostly vision of their dead son turns into mud, too. Whatever.

But this explanation doesn't make sense with what goes on between Martin and Ellen. There are no other ghostly or haunting experiences aside from the different messages Ellen gets that count down the days to her death and the dreams about her dead son. The "ghosts" motives seem focused on Martin and Ellen's problems and really getting to them, instead of being focused on their own motives like most ghosts seem to do.

Seven Days to Live is a somewhat interesting film with great actors who are only wasted in this 2 star flick. There's some good cinematography with interesting camera moves, but the script is lacking and nothing all that exciting happens, even in the ending.

Meadowoods
Oh goody. Another documentary style movie with a bunch of annoying twentysomethings as our stars. This time we've got three college students who want to shake things up in their sleepy little town and murder a fellow classmate while filming their exploits.

This movie is so predictable and unbelievable it's ridiculous. The characters are the most unbelievable part of the film. They talk about their murder plot with complete nonchalance, which I guess is supposed to show their apathy but it just comes across as bad acting. The girl playing Stephanie is the worst. She's presented as an antisocial with the most apathy of any of the kids, saying that there is nothing in this world worth living for. That sounds a bit more suicidal than homicidal to me, but I'm no psychologist.

There big plan for the murder is also a little unbelievable to me. They get the idea from looking at horror movies in the video store - ugh - and so they decide that the best torment would be to bury their victim in a box, with cameras, so they can talk to her and listen while he or she slowly dies.

The film is predictable because in situations like this there is ALWAYS at least one of the group who is apprehensive about the plot and causes tension among the others. It's like chocolate and peanut butter - they just go together. And sure enough, it's almost immediately set up that Ryan, the cameraman, is not exactly gung-ho about the idea of murder, especially when they start to build their device of torture and murder. They fight, Ryan does the right thing, and the ringleader of the plan is killed. Obviously. Seriously no big shock there.

The girl playing their doomed victim, Kayla, is the best thing about the movie. She acts the most natural of any of them, both when she is going about her normal day and when she finally is captured by the three idiots and put into the box in the ground. However, this part of the film is far too drawn out and doesn't bring about the kind of tension and terror it's supposed to.

Forgettable movie and not worth your time. Lackluster all around with a less than satisfying conclusion.

Movie Review: Dog Soldiers

In my triumverate of horror film monsters - vampires, werewolves, and zombies - probably the one with the least room for growth, I thought, was werewolves. It's utterly simple lore - men (or women) turn into wolves at the full moon each month and if you get bit you turn into one yourself. How to kill them and/or reverse the effects of being bitten can change with each movie, but it's basically a scenario of fighting off huge wolves that rip you to shredded paper.

Bad dog.

Why not add some trained soldiers to square off with the werewolves in an isolated farmhouse? It certainly worked in Dog Soldiers. I like werewolf movies and I like war movies, with the camaraderie and loyalty among soldiers. And I got the feeling half-way through watching Dog Soldiers that this movie (as one of the actors also said) is not a werewolf movie with soldiers, but rather a soldier movie with werewolves.

The Big Fat Plot Paragraph: A squad of six British soldiers are dropped into the Scottish Highlands on a training mission. They soon find the remains of a Special Ops camp that had been killed and destroyed, but there is one survivor. Not knowing it at the time, werewolves begin hunting the soldiers, who are picked up by a woman (a zoologist) and taken to an old farmhouse where they hole up to fight off the savage enemies.

As a British film, I don't know much about the actors but they all seemed very talented and took their roles and this movie seriously. You care about these guys; they're nice and they're loyal and you really don't want to see them torn in half or turn into werewolves themselves. Sean Pertwee is actually the only one I recognized - he was in the awesome Event Horizon - and I loved his role as the Sarge who was fiercely protective of his men, even if some of them aren't too serious or are kind of wimpy.

Oh, it's beautiful.

As an enhancement to the men's relationship with each other, the dialogue is very good throughout. There's your standard dirty-mouthed soldier talk and a lot of British slang that I honestly didn't understand some of, but more importantly, the dialogue feels realistic. The soldiers seem like real guys in a real bad situation and they handle it and talk probably just like someone in this situation would talk. The dialogue is also great in that it is extremely funny. "My guts are out!" "Well, we'll put them back in!" "They won't fit!"

Speaking of guts, the gore and other effects are top notch. No CG here, but rather all practical effects with buckets of blood and stuntmen in body suits with probably really uncomfortable shoes. The werewolves look like your basic werewolf, except they seem to be exclusively bipeds. They're about seven feet tall (very menacing), quick and brutal in their kills and also happen to be a nice little family who live in the farmhouse when they're not out killing humans. Aw, how sweet. Anyway. There are some good gore gags in this flick, my favorite being when one of the soldiers is killed in a truck and when the others open the back door, a freaking RIVER of blood spills out. Killer. Also there are plenty of your random guts and people/werewolves being impaled. There could have been a bit more gore; what we get here only partially whet my appetite for blood. I'm just sayin', a little more couldn't have hurt.

Werewolves can be just as funny as zombies.

Big spoilers here.

The one flaw in the movie was Megan. If she is a werewolf, and the werewolves are her family, how is that she did not change until the very end? If we're going with traditional lore/myth here, then she should have changed as night set, UNLESS they changed the lore whereby one can be in control of their transformation. However, it is never explained either way so hardcore werewolf movie lovers or enthusiasts might have a slight problem with that.

That aspect of the film could also be a part of its success, though. The characters don't spend all their time worrying about finding out all they can about the creatures; they don't dig into a boring history of the mythology or all the possible ways to defeat them. They react much like soldiers would - they see a threat, and while they may not totally believe it at first, their only mission is to kill the threat and get the fuck out of there. Cut and dry, plain and simple.

Neil Marshall's directorial debut is no doubt a big hit, and regarded by a lot of fans as one of the best werewolf movies out there. Neil already gets big kisses from me because of his stellar film The Descent but now having seen Dog Soldiers (BTW, isn't that pretty much the perfect title? Kudos on that), I'd say this is one talented guy. Great shots and movement and action to keep the story going, but also able to make a genre picture about werewolves somewhat sentimental in how it shows the relationship and connection among soldiers. I like it A LOT. Great, great movie.