The Conjuring 2

The Conjuring 2 (2016)

Dir. James Wan

Screenplay by Chad Hayes, Cary W. Hayes, James Wan, David Leslie Johnson

Starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Frances O’Connor, Madison Wolfe

THE CONJURING 2 is a pretty OK standard-issue modern studio horror movie, which is to say it features decent acting, good production work, solid craftsmanship, and it’s mostly about how ghosts move chairs around and stuff when no one is touching them but has a couple good parts too. For some reason it’s also 134 minutes long and made 320 million dollars worldwide. In a movie which claims to be based on two (count ‘em! two!) “real-life” hauntings, I find those facts to be the most inexplicable things anywhere in sight. It’s the second-highest-grossing horror movie of all time, behind the fucking EXORCIST. I mean, guys, this almost made as much money as THE ANGRY BIRD MOVIE, a sentence so entirely demoralizing to type that I just might cry. I don’t think I understand this country anymore, and also we sort of elected Donald Trump, this has been a bad year. THE CONJURING isn’t anywhere near as soul-crushing as the success of either ANGRY BIRDS or Trump,* but it’s not all that great either. It’s the very definition of “fine,” which is what I would have expected from Wan, who has made a venerable career out of directing perfectly OK horror movies, starting with SAW in 2004 and meandering through the completely acceptable and utterly undistinguished DEAD SILENCE, INSIDIOUS, THE CONJURING 1, and INSIDIOUS 2, before taking a break to direct the sixth highest-grossing film of all time and then returning to the genre to direct this one. Next stop: AQUAMAN. Seriously. America, I don’t get you.

THE CONJURING 2 is yet another tale of Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, BATMAN VS SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE [voice cameo as “President of the United States”], and Vera Farmiga, THE DEPARTED), two “real-life” “paranormal investigators” who “document” the “Amityville Haunting” and then move on the the “Enfield Poltergeist Case” which is famous as being one of the most “well-documented” “real-life hauntings” of all time. As you can see by my condescending use of punctuation, I have my doubts about all this, for example the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Warren in any way resembled Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, and also about the absolute veracity of some of their claims. All the ghost stuff, specifically. See, it strikes me that since there’s no such thing as ghosts, probably there are also not demonic ghost conspiracies and shit. I’m not a trained logictician but I think that math works out. Normally I wouldn’t feel the need to point this out but again, Jesus, America, you’re scaring me here.

You fucking know these pricks voted for Trump.

Anyway, like the pretty decent FRIDAY THE 13th THE REMAKE from a few years back, CONJURING 2 begins with an almost completely self-contained mini-CONJURING sequel, which finds our intrepid heroes investigating the famous haunting in Amityville, NY, which was the subject of the inexplicably famous 1979 movie THE AMITYVILLE HORROR and its 2005 Ryan-Reynolds-starring remake of the same name. You’ll be very surprised to learn that they do indeed find an unspeakable evil there, which only Lorraine is able to psychically detect, because of her psychic powers, which are a totally real thing that people would have, wink wink. While she’s psychic-ing, she also has a premonition that Ed will be killed by falling onto a giant, improbable spike, so, you know, useful information I guess. Eventually. Keep away from giant spikes and all that.

With Amityville resolved, our heroes are content to go on daytime talk shows and act all unfairly persecuted when smarmy godless liberals accuse them of making it all up, humbly retorting in a wounded tone about how they are just objective scientists who happen to use Jesus and magic instead of science to solve mysteries, and remember that one time they debunked that guy? God, isn’t it just the worst when people ask for evidence to back up your outrageous claims of demonic magic? I’m sure the Warrens hate being paid piles of money to go on TV and hawk their books and stuff, but, you know, they feel obligated to do it for the greater good. Or anyway, that’s what they sadly say to each other, a single tear rolling down each cheek. Guys I don’t use the phrase “the greatest heroes since that dream I had where Jesus and Beowulf were mismatched buddy cops” very often, but I think the Warrens have earned it with the selfless willingness to constantly appear on TV and tell the American people the awful truth about ghosts and demons and stuff, like that they’re real for example, and that kind of thing.  

Meanwhile, in England (you know it’s England because they play London Calling, which they might as well just start piping in on planes landing at Heathrow by this point), strange things are happening to the Hodgson family, especially young Janet (Madison Wolfe, True Detective), much to the chagrin of working-class single mother Peggy (Frances O’Connor, A.I.). Much time is spent watching furniture move around by itself and stuff. Possibly too much. You know that eventually the Warrens are gonna show up and sort this shit out, but it actually takes quite awhile for that to happen, and for a good chunk of the middle of the film, the Hodgsons seem to take over as protagonists, while we patiently await the arrival of our heroic ghost hunters. This allows for the usual beats of an “overburdened urban family troubled by ghosts moving chairs and stuff” scenario, but not much more. When the Warrens eventually arrive on the scene, they have to solve the haunting and then realize that everyone is even more haunted than they initially thought, there is a second layer of haunting which will require some agreeably ludicrous psychic sleuthing and so forth, and yes, a giant fuck-all improbable spike does eventually show up.

There are some good parts. There’s some kind of crazy zoetrope-based “crooked man” demon that I don’t remember from the wikipedia article on the Enfield Haunting Case, which is odd because it seems so memorable, you’d think they would mention it. But I’m glad to have it in the movie, it’s a cool design and definitely the sort of chicanery only a movie with a real studio budget could pull off, which makes it something of a rarity. Mostly this is pretty standard stuff, though. Not bad, per se, just utterly lacking in imagination. Expertly executed filler. The cinematic equivalent of a great chef making you a bowl of mac and cheese. Wan isn’t exactly an auteur, but he has a very solid command of the essentials of filmmaking, meaning that even when he hauls out some pretty threadbare horror cliches --sudden musical stings to make you jump, something unexpectedly moving, a scary face appearing in a window, an innocuous song playing tinnily on a old record player, a ghostly figure zooming out of the darkness to grab you-- there’s still enough life in them to at least register, if not exactly terrify. It’s hard not to notice how heavily he leans on those old standards, though, particularly as the movie lumbers past the two hour mark. Wan’s one signature move -- creating a respectably horrific demon face and then stationing it in the near background to leer at people menacingly-- has been somewhat diluted by its centrality to both CONJURING 1 and all three INSIDIOUS sequels (and the featured demon here is functional but frustratingly generic) but it still gets the job done, at least good enough for government work.

OK not to seem like I'm obsessing about this or anything, but here's the standard scene you'd get where OMIGOD THE GHOST IS BEHIND HER! But wait, who's that lurking behind the Nun, and why does it resembled a certain President-Elect who I'd prefer not to name?

The movie only sporadically comes to life, though, and mostly when Wan gets a little creative with the filmmaking, as he does in the film’s most memorable sequences (non-”Crooked Man” edition) when he holds long, tight takes and subtly changes the lighting focus, drawing us intensely to one detail and lingering malevolently on it. Long, intense takes also work nicely with the strong performances he draws from his cast, despite the rote nature of their characterization (a sin particularly grumble-worthy in a movie with such a sprawling and unfocused runtime).

The film’s professionalism is really its defining feature, because there’s almost nothing else here you haven’t seen a million times before. Oh, it’s all executed very handily, and works about as well as you could expect this sort of thing to work on its millionth repetition. Occasionally, it’s even mildly stylish in its confident long takes and quiet moments. But its hard to get past how laboriously it struggles to deliver such conventional results. Wan is working overtime to squeeze the juice out of these old lemons, but there’s still hardly a single device or image in this movie which wasn’t in THE UNINVITED back in 1944, and the few that don’t come from that one come from the most famous parts of THE EXORCIST. And at this point, just executing the same old gags with a slick professionalism can’t help but feel a little bland, a little rote, like an uninspired cover song. I wonder, in fact, if Wan’s polished studio production actually detracts from the impact a little; we’re too aware of his presence behind the camera -- that this is a set with actors which is being carefully lit and manipulated to make it seem scary. A more primitive approach might actually help this material feel a bit more vivacious. I think I’m actually more amenable to ghost movies than many of my fellow horror fans, but I can’t help but notice that something like THE PACT traffics in many of the same tools, but gets a lot more mileage out of them with a tiny fraction of the budget and runtime. That’s not to say that every movie needs to focus on rigid realism (oh good lord, no) but if you’re going to go for slick studio artifice, I think it probably needs to be a little more fun and outlandish than CONJURING 2 is able to consistently maintain.

I guess towards the end it picks up both some energy and some appealing ludicrousness, as the Warrens uncover a ghost conspiracy that goes right up to the top, and pretty soon stuff is flying all over the place like one of those money shower boxes, if they replaced the money with crucifixes and furniture, which I for one would definitely be in favor of. It’s pretty entertaining stuff. But again, I just don’t seem able to praise this one without throwing in a qualifier. It’s a totally OK movie, with almost nothing actively bad about it, but maybe not enough good, either. So of course it made all the money on Earth, why does this even surprise me anymore? Oh, and if you’d like to be even less surprised, good news! Get ready for a spin-off focusing on the beloved character of the nun with the knockoff Marilyn Manson makeup. It’s called THE NUN. Which sounds right in line with the level of creativity here. A whole universe of Nun puns** and they decided to just go with the basics. Wouldn’t want anyone to get confused and think this was going to do something unexpected.

*Or the Disturbed cover of Sounds of Silence that I just found out about, which may very well represent the absolute nadir of all human history.

**NUN LIKE IT HOT, HAPPINESS IS A WARM NUN, NUN-CHAKU, AND THEN THERE WERE NUN, LOGAN’S NUN (possibly a Wolverine crossover?), ROGUE NUN, NUNSHINE, etc.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	The Next TRUE STORY From The Case Files Of Ed And Lorraine Warren. Keep it classy, tagline guys.
TITLE ACCURACY	I don’t think there is any specific conjuring, but there are ghosts and stuff. And it’s definitely the second one, it even says so in the tagline.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	The Warrens wrote a book about this case, but the movie doesn’t seem to be adapted from it.
SEQUEL?	Yes
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Ghost / Demonic Possession
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	I don’t know that Patrick Wilson exactly qualifies as A-list, but this is definitely a more distinguished cast then you’d usually get with this sort of thing.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	I guess James Wan?
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Nah
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None, although there’s a real asshole tree
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Ghost, demons, hauntings
POSSESSION?	Yeah
CREEPY DOLLS?	Not much in the way of dolls, although there’s a creepy toy fire truck. IIRC there is a quick shot of the “Annabelle” doll from part one at the end of the movie when they go to the Warrens’ museum of formerly haunted keepsakes.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	No
MORAL OF THE STORY	Only fools and liberals ask for evidence

The Oily Maniac

The Oily Maniac (1976) aka You Gui Zi

Dir. Meng Hua Ho

Written by Lam Chua (as Tsai Lan)

Starring Danny Lee, Ping Chen, Lily Li

THE OILY MANIAC is indeed about an oily maniac, only more so than you might imagine. When I think “Oily Maniac,” I usually think about Joe Spinell from MANIAC or something, I mean, I guess we can argue about specifically how oily you have to be before it’s important enough to mention in the title, but he was definitely not looking particularly well-showered, and was at least nominally a maniac, it’s right there in the title. Or maybe Michael Ironside from VISITING HOURS, also. But this was 1976, and the Shaw Brothers had a far grander vision: a maniac who is exclusively oil. That is to say, some kind of malevolent, anthropomorphized oil slick, which shapes itself into a rough approximation of the human form when it wants to lay some slippery smackdown on its enemies. As I noted, there are many movies which are about maniacs, for example MANIAC (1934), MANIAC (1963), MANIAC (1980), MANIAC (2001), MANIAC (2012), MANIAC COP, MANIAC COP 2, MANIAC COP 3, TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!, 2001 MANIACS, MANIACS ON WHEELS*, MANIAC KILLER, THE INVISIBLE MANIAC, NEON MANIACS, NYMPHOMANIAC, LITZOMANIA etc. But this is probably the only one which has such a strong emphasis on oiliness as well, I bet.

It wasn’t always this way, though. Once upon a time, Shen Yuan (Danny Lee, THE KILLER, CITY ON FIRE) was just a normal schlub who probably didn’t think very much if at all about the possibility that he would one day be an Oily Maniac. But when his beloved uncle (Ku Feng, THE AVENGING EAGLE) is unjustly sentenced to death for the crime of defending his daughter from being raped by mobsters, Shen is filled with remorse that his legs --crippled by polio-- will not allow him to do much in the way of vengeance. That’s when Uncle mentions that no big deal, but he has a tattoo on his back with a Malaysian magic spell that will turn you into an Oily Maniac, if that’s, you know, your thing. Well, Shen is a “try anything twice” kinda guy, so before long he’s Maniac’d himself into a hulking supernatural murder machine, which turns out to be useful almost immediately when more mobsters show up to try and rape the daughter again. It also turns out to be useful when Shen discovers that his beautiful cousin (Chen Ping, THE KISS OF DEATH) --who he’s been putting the moves on-- has to refuse his amorous advances and then have hot naked sex with some disco suit wearing lady’s man while her sexually frustrated cuz peeps through the window and decides that being an Oily Maniac would be a good outlet for his impotent possessive rage. Turns out being an Oily Maniac is like nuclear power, it can be used for beneficial and arguably less beneficial types of purposes.

The good thing about the movie is obviously the Oily Maniac him(its?)self. Considering its fundamentally viscous nature, it looks surprisingly like a stuntman in a bulky rubber suit who has to clumsily bludgeon people with his stiff rubbery arms. It doesn’t even look like they consistently grease the suit up or anything to make it look shiny. So at first I thought that wasn’t very realistic, but then I thought, you know what, they use oil to make rubber, don’t they? Probably the Oily Maniac is actually oily only in his liquid state, and when he turns into his anthropomorphic mode, he probably really is more of a rubbery maniac, like a car tire. So, 100% scientifically accurate. I guess the maniafication process requires our hero to grease himself up first, so there are many funny situations where he has to transform and needs to quickly find a conveniently placed barrel of cooking oil or something nearby.

The design of the maniac is not, in itself, all that great; it’s just sort of a blobby, undefined mass, and in fact resembles the cheesy tar monster thing from that first-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation except with the addition of some improbably well-defined legs. (I don’t want to be racist or anything but all these bulky black liquid-based monsters look alike, I know that’s not a “politically correct” thing to say but hey, at least I’m still against interning people based on religion which pretty much qualifies me as a socialist pinko elitist East Coast intellectual these days.) Observe:

But anyway it’s pretty funny to watch this Oily Maniac lumber around and subdue people with his oily might. And they compensate for his somewhat underwhelming appearance by throwing at least a few oily gimmicks at you; the maniac sneaks into an apartment through the sink drain, transforms into an oily slicks and gloops up the walls and onto the ceiling (you know, like oil does), loses a limb and then liquefies to reattach it. It probably needed a little more of that, though, because ultimately the only thing he can really do is whack people with his big rubbery arms, and that gets old pretty fast. It’s a Shaw Bros. film, but come on, it’s all the guy in the suit can do to stay upright and ambulatory, he’s not doing any fancy finishing moves or anything.

This is a problem because the rest of the story ain’t exactly gripping stuff. Mostly the maniac just encounters people he doesn’t like (usually at his job as a typewriter jockey at a sleazy lawyer’s office) and then follows them home and Maniac’s them. A lot of them are women who find various reasons to take their tops off while the camera ogles them, regardless of how contextually unappealing the situation might be (for example, a lady who takes her top off to demonstrate that she has been the victim of disastrous Cronenbergian breast surgery). The most egregious example of this is a RASHOMON type courtroom situation where a guy is being accused of brutally raping his neighbor, but claims it was in fact her who calculatingly trapped him in her apartment and took rampant advantage of him in order to try and take him to court later. We’re treated to a long vignette of both scenarios, which the film seems to regard as equally worthy of its blatantly lascivious attentions, and guess what? It turns out the guy was telling the truth, women only report rape as a means to bilk honest guys out of their cash. If only there was some kind of supernatural maniac who could teach her a lesson by murdering her in her apartment. Oh wait! There is! It was right around this point that I started to wonder if maybe THE OILY MANIAC does not have the most healthy attitude towards women, maybe.**

Obviously it would be impossible to tell you any kind of movie which consistently featured an Oily Maniac was bad, exactly, but I feel that this one should probably be better than it is. Complaining about the plot being episodic and uninvolving is probably beside the point, and if you’re going to enjoy any Asian cinema you’re just going to have to overlook a lot of casual misogyny and uncomfortably leering rape scenes, but it’s a little harder to excuse the generally underwhelming use of the film’s central gimmick. If you’ve got an Oily Maniac to play with, I need you to do more with it than just have it come out of a faucet. Have somebody drink him, and he kills them by forcing his way out their dickhole. Have him come through a sprinkler system and have each limb land on a different opponent. Have him heat himself to a boil and then dump himself on an unsuspecting mobster. Put him in a crossover with THE TRANSPORTER only to learn that Jason Statham also gets more powerful as he gets oily. Let’s have a little more hustle here guys. The film has its charms --both in terms of comically inept monster movies and cringingly bad-taste Hong Kong comedies-- plus, you gotta respect the boldness of its blatant and wholesale theft of the JAWS theme, but even so, it drags a bit and feels a lot longer than its slim 84 minute runtime. It’s OK for what it is, though. You can’t expect the filmmaking on a movie like OILY MANIAC to be especially… slick.

YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAA

Alternate Perspectives:

“Oily Maniac' has lots of nudity and lots of sexual violence. Every Female character shows their boobs, except Lily Li. Don't show this film to your feminist girlfriend because there's plenty of rape scenes that she couldn't handle.” -- IMDB user RobinsonGruesome, 4 July 2008. (Yes, of course it was July 4).

*Alternate title: ONCE A JOLLY SWAGMAN. I’m not even a little kidding.

** I was kind of shocked to see that director Meng Hua Ho did THE FLYING GUILLOTINE, until I remembered that the good one is actually its sequel, MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE. Whew, that was a close one!

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

ALIAS	You Gui Zi
TAGLINE	None
TITLE ACCURACY	100%
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Hong Kong/ Malaysia
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Monster Movie / Creature Feature
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Danny Lee, maybe?
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	Yes, many if not all the women have their top ripped off at some point
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yeah, although it turns out to be one of those unreliable narrator deals and didn’t happen; instead, they accused guy’s completely ridiculous story was apparently true, I guess? But anyway, it’s OK because early on some thugs try and rape Shen’s cousin before the Maniac stops them. So you get a real one in there, and the movie is against it.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Nah
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yep, into Oily Maniac
VOYEURISM?	Yeah, our guy watches his cousin and some dude bang through a window, classy
MORAL OF THE STORY	We actually reached peak oil in 1976.