Demonic

Demonic (2015)

Dir. Will Canon

Written by Max La Bella, Doug Simon and Will Canon

Starring Frank Grillo, Maria Bello, Dustin Milligan, Cody Horn, Scott Mechlowicz

DEMONIC is a movie which, at least on paper, is basically screaming at you to avoid it at all cost. It’s a haunted house movie, for one thing, which is already strike one. And it’s at least partially a found footage haunted house movie, which by all rights ought to be strike two and three immediately, right off the bat. And it has a circular flashback structure, which means we spend almost the whole movie watching the events which unfold after all the cool stuff happened, and the rest of it watching a flashback to the events which lead up to all the cool stuff that happened, and because it’s found footage, you can damn well bet that right as soon as we actually finally fucking reach the cool stuff, shoot, wouldn’t you know it, the camera falls out of someone’s hand and we don’t really catch much. It goes without saying that all the characters are corny stock types played by gloomy pouty thirty-somethings playing twenty-somethings, and they’re no fun at all, and the only two real actors in the cast probably spent about a day apiece on set, in one single location, without being involved in any way in whatever paltry “action” there is to enjoy.

And then there’s the fact that after being made in 2013, it sat around waiting for two years before it finally got a triumphant public premiere… in Brazil. And then a little bit later in Turkey. Exhausted from too much excitement, it then sat around waiting for an American release until 2017, when prestigious Spike TV gave it the red red carpet treatment (the coveted Thursday 8PM slot?) before dumping it onto Netflix, where I, clearly in an equally low-effort mood, discovered it. And if that wasn’t enough, it has such a magnificently lazy, generic name that it sounds like something the Weinstein Company* would use to retitle a new masterwork by a great Asian auteur before releasing it in America three years after the rest of the world saw it with 40 minutes cut out, just to absolutely ensure no one would pay any attention to it and they could keep claiming that Americans weren’t interested in Asian cinema.*** All you'd have to do is throw in a “produced by Charles Band” and you’d have assembled pretty much every possible red flag for an unwatchable piece of shit.

And yet, somehow, DEMONIC isn’t quite as bad as it has every right to be. I guess I can’t quite call something so infuriatingly low on real whammy “good,” but I found it inexplicably watchable, or at least much more so than you would have any real reason to expect.

The structure is simple enough: cool guy cop Frank Grillo (two PURGES) arrives at a notorious haunted house to find that a bunch of fool kids had come there to film a seance for one of those miserable found footage ghost shows, and that they have been correctly and reasonably butchered, with only one survivor (Dustin Milligan, EXTRACT) to be interviewed by psychologist (police psychologist?) Maria Bello (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, PRISONERS). He tells a flashback in the form of found footage (?) some of which the police are also watching as they recover the demonically glitchy consumer-grade cameras the kids were filming with. It’s a tale as old as time, where a bunch of infuriating stereotypes mugging for the camera decide to go to an evil house where this guy’s mom and a bunch of other kids were massacred years ago under exactly identical circumstances, and do the exact same things that led to that other massacre. Man, between this and DYING BREED I’m starting to see a lesson emerge: hey kids, if a loved one was involved in a horrific violent death, why not try not repeating the exact steps that led to that horrific violent death years later, huh?

So far I have not described a good movie at all, and that’s because I’m still stalling for time trying to think of any tangible reason why this movie isn’t total trash. The most obvious one, surprisingly, is actually the production itself. Unlikely as it may sound, this was actually produced by James Wan, right between his big rebound from the ever-diminishing SAW series**** with INSIDIOUS, and his leap into big-time cash cow fame with THE CONJURING. (Now that I’m typing all this out, I’m starting to see how it ended up with such a dopey name. Giving horror movies crushingly generic one-word titles is basically his whole career. Thank god GHOST is already a thing). I’ve never been a huge fan of Wan, but his productions always boast rock-solid filmmaking fundamentals, and that is the case with DEMONIC as well. OK, not the found footage parts, obviously. But certainly more than half the movie was shot by Michael Fimognari (Mike Flanagan’s go-to cinematographer on OCULUS, BEFORE I WAKE, GERALD’S GAME) right before he hit the big times and started shooting multiple crappy but nice-looking horror movies every year. Fimognari does something rather rare by successfully lighting night scenes in a natural way which still feels eerie, which, along with the appreciably imposing Louisiana locale, goes a surprisingly long way towards striking a good spooky vibe.

That vibe is vitally important, because not much is ever actually happening, but the filmmaking is solid enough to make even a J. J. Abrams Mysterybox™ this derivative and lazy appealing enough a carrot to make for a passable 83 minutes. It’s helped considerably by Grillo and Bello --seasoned vets of retaining their dignity even in abject crap-- who do a sturdy job of making their stock exposition delivery vehicles seem lively enough to pass for actual characters. Bello in particular is well on her way to becoming a modern-day Peter Cushing or Lance Henriksen willing to show up in whatever abysmal garbage you want to hand her and still turn in a real performance for a few scenes in a single location before she disappears for long stretches. Gotta respect that. You ever see her and Sean Bean in THE DARK (2006)? It’s a real solid mid 2000s surreal horror film from the director of GINGER SNAPS and creator of that show Orphan Black that everyone is always hassling me to watch, which unfairly got passed over at the time, but it’s an actual showpiece starring role for her and seriously worth your time, I gotta review that someday.

And yes, I’m stalling again, because now I got to say something I really don’t want to say about DEMONIC, or any film: As miserably lame as these characters are and as empty of whammy as most of this film is… I… (I can’t believe I’m saying this) I… I don’t… hate the use of found footage here, all the time. Ugh, OK, gimme a minute, I got to go sit in the shower and cry for a little while.

Here’s the thing, DEMONIC actually uses the format in what should be immediately apparent to anyone with half a brain is the correct way: for specific sequences that benefit from a first person point-of-view. And sparingly. The narrative gives a good reason why there are cameras present, and it makes perfect sense that the characters would be filming this scary shit, because that’s exactly what they came here to do. And when there are things happening which the film would still like us to see, but which would make no sense for a character to be filming or would be visually hard to communicate in that format, guess what: they just cut to a normal unmotivated shot from a real professional camera. That gives them total freedom to use a first-person-perspective to highlight the subjective intensity of particular sequences, but also the opportunity to shoot something in a way which makes more visual and narrative sense in cases where the first person POV wouldn’t work as well. The result is one of the most natural uses of the conceit I’ve ever seen, even if the actual “footage” still feels fake as fuck because these characters are ridiculous cornballs.

I'm more terrified by the camera than the ghost face.

The flashback structure, interspersed with Bello’s interview of the sole survivor, also has one other unexpected, but readily apparent, benefit: it strikes the exact familiar tone of the classic reality TV format -- raw action material edited together with “confessional” interviews filmed later which comment on the original footage. It’s hacky as hell, but it’s hacky in in a particular mode which is as comfortable as old slippers for a generation raised on reality TV, and consequently feels much less like lazy, pandering screenwriting than it ought to. That’s hardly high praise, but in a horror context, this lame-ass conceit turns out to have a second (and slightly less expected) benefit, too: it allows the dumbass characters from horror movies to retrospectively try and explain their dumbass decisions which led everyone to getting ax-murdered. Again, is this laughably lazy and hacky tell-don’t-show bullshit screenwriting? Sure, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t kind of work, somehow, almost certainly entirely by accident. If you’ve ever wondered “why the fuck would they split up and all go separately into the basement!?” -- well, here’s a survivor, let’s ask him. In the right hands (and these are certainly not the right hands) I can actually see this device allowing for quite a bit of cleverness. That’s not even remotely in the cards here, but at least it’s surprisingly functional.

So I dunno, man, all this stuff just kind of… works. Or at any rate, works better than it, by all rights, ought to. And somehow that was enough to string me along. This is pretty much the exact opposite strategy of the kind of horror film I usually feel comfortable praising: instead of making up for incompetent fundamentals with constant whammy and imaginative craziness, DEMONIC uses unexpectedly competent fundamentals to make up for its utter lack of content. I just got finished complaining about how this wasn’t enough to save DREAM HOUSE, and yet here I am just a week later with my tail between my legs, admitting that even though DEMONIC is at least as stupid and focused on the wrong things, it’s semi-watchable. Maybe because at least DEMONIC doesn’t have any pretension about interesting characters or psychological truth? All its shallow competence is narrowly focused on just churning out standard genre crap, so at least it doesn’t get distracted trying to convince us that anyone on-screen is having interesting emotions or relatable human experiences. It just wants to throw an eerie vibe, some creaky jump-scares and a daffy twist at us, and it is just mechanically proficient enough to do exactly that and no more. And it turns out that was just barely enough in this case, at least for me. But I sure don’t feel good admitting that. Not one bit.

I mean, Jesus Christ, structuring the script as some kind of clue-gathering after-the-fact detective movie, when we know god damn well there’s no fucking mystery to solve, it was just ghosts? What the fuck is wrong with me? I gotta lie down.

*Currently circling the drain after it was revealed that Harvey had privately been doing to women the same thing he’d been publicly doing to foreign imports for years**

** Yes, I realize when I get to hell that joke's gonna be the first thing they bring up. I can only beg forgiveness and try to explain how giddy I am that everyone else on Earth now has much better reasons to feel the same hate for Harvey that I have silently nursed during his notorious two decade career of either ruining or refusing to release major Asian action movies. But Jesus Christ, leave it to Harvey Weinstein to turn out to be an even bigger scumbag than I had imagined possible, and congratulations on doing what I assumed couldn't be done: somehow finding a way to lower my opinion of mankind (and men in particular) even beyond what 2017 had already managed to accomplish.

*** Supposedly its original shooting title was actually HOUSE OF HORROR, which is possibly the only conceivable title even more generic than DEMONIC.

*** Somehow against all logic and reason there’s a new one that came out literally last Friday, in 2017.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Every House Has Its Secrets, a magnificently generic tagline to go along with that title
TITLE ACCURACY	I dunno, I guess, in the most generic possible sense.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted House/ Found Footage
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Maria Bello? Granted, I’ve seen her in some of this DTV horror shit before, but come on, she’s a big deal, right? And Frank Grillo was in Captain America 2!
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Much talk about how grackles are the servants of darkness (which makes sense because holy fucking hell do they make a sound which could only come from Satan) though only one actually causes us any problems in a lame jump scare
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Oh definitely
POSSESSION?	yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	There’s a creepy room filled with dolls, though I’m unclear exactly why since the residents of the house are all described as adults
EVIL CULT?	Seems more disorganized than that, but there was a seance.
MADNESS?	Or possession
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Actually yes, but you’ll need to see it to understand
VOYEURISM?	Cameras watching
MORAL OF THE STORY	I dunno dude, I think just that my standards have finally gotten so low just putting Frank Grillo and some real camerawork in a low-rent found footage haunted house clusterfuck is enough for me to endure to find it all sort of tolerable in a dumb way?

Dying Breed

Dying Breed (2008)

Dir Jody Dwyer

Written by Michael Boughen, Rod Morris

Starring Leigh Whannell, Mirrah Foulkes, Nathan Phillips, Melanie Vallejo

DYING BREED is one of those movies they made for those After Dark Horrorfests they used to have for a little while in the mid-2000’s, arriving the same year as FROM WITHIN and a year after BORDERLANDS. And “one of those movies” really is a pretty good description of it. Like the vast majority of AFTER DARK HORRORFEST entries (or, if we're being entirely honest, most horror movies produced in the 2000s), it’s generally competent without exactly being effective, serious-minded without exactly being interesting, gritty without exactly being scary, and based on a decent concept which never exactly develops into an actual plot. The kind of thing which is good enough that you wish it was either better or worse, instead of just sort of there.

I do like the hook, though. The film begins in Tasmania in the early 1800s, with infamous escaped convict and confessed cannibal Alexander Pearce (sporting what look to be straight-up monster teeth) killing a victim and then using the flesh to befriend the local predacious Thylacines (better known as Tasmanian Tigers). Though it’s executed without much elegance, this is clearly the opening to what can only be a pretty badass movie. Except that it then immediately abandons this setup and leaps forward in time to present day (2008), where Nina (Mirrah Foulkes, THE GIFT[ 2015]) is traveling to the Tasmanian wilderness in an effort to find proof that the Tasmanian Tiger (believe to be extinct since 1930) actually lives on, hidden, in the isolated countryside. Obviously this is a worthwhile endeavor, but she also has a personal flashback-related reason to do this: her older sister died doing the same thing several years earlier. I don't know about you, but when I have a friend or loved one die while doing something stupid and dangerous, I avoid doing that thing instead of rushing out immediately to exactly repeat the experience, but you know how it is in crazy mixed-up upside-down Australia-land. Along for the ride are her accommodating boyfriend (Leigh Whannell, COOTIES, at his most bland), his obnoxious crossbow-toting alpha male buddy Jack (Nathan Phillips, SNAKES ON A PLANE), and Jack’s cannon-fodder girlfriend (Melanie Vallejo, apparently star of one of the dozens or hundreds of Power Ranger variations). They will quickly discover evidence of the elusive Tasmanian Tiger, but even more quickly discover that the DYING BREED of the title is in fact not the elusive marsupial, but actually the backwoods inbred cannibals still indigenous to the area.

And that’s actually a shame, because there’s something genuinely intriguing going on here, thematically linking the gradual extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger (nobody ever calls it a Thylacine, because that’s the kind of movie we’re dealing with here) with the slowly dying Tasmanian wilderness village culture, killed off by encroaching modernity and a lack of fresh blood, and just as vicious as the Tasmanian Tiger when cornered. It could almost be a sort of ode to the feral outback culture which --like the Tiger itself-- became a key staple of Australian identity only as it was in its death throes (it's certainly part of the DNA of 2011's THE HUNTER, which also focuses on a hunt for the Thylacine). And tying the infamous Pearce into that history (it’s implied that he founded the film's community of inbred [spoiler] cannibals, though in reality he was captured and hanged less than a year after his escape) smartly weaves a bit of Australian home-grown folklore into the mix.

Writers Michael Boughen (Producer of THE LOVED ONES) and Rod Morris (second unit director here, in his only screenplay) and director Jody Dwyer (a few short films and nothing else) definitely seem to understand there’s something tantalizing going on here with these connections, which after all have no real narrative reason to be here and seem to be included purely for thematic purposes. Unfortunately, after having neatly assembled the raw pieces of an interesting theme, they're frustratingly unable to figure out how to actually weave them into something coherent, let alone do so within the context of a plot. And unable to think of anything interesting to do with the premise they’ve set up, they retreat almost immediately into an unexceptional HILLS HAVE EYES retread. All that stuff with the opening in 1822, the maybe not-quite-extinct Tasmanian Tiger, the talk of a dying culture… it never meaningfully informs the rest of the movie. Instead, all you get is four victims being gradually picked off by a clan of murderous inbred backwoods psychos in the most standard possible mode. It’s respectable enough as far as these things go, I suppose, but it’s not a genre I have a lot of affection for; like so many things from this era of horror, it’s too cruel and humorless to be much fun, but also way too silly and phony to be seriously disturbing. It wants to shock and horrify, it really does, and it doesn’t skimp on the sadism or the gore, but it lacks much imagination for either of those things and the merely adequate filmmaking can’t make up the difference.

This was, after all, the heyday of what came to be called, fairly or unfairly, “torture porn,” and there’s certainly more than a little of that impulse on display here. Superficially, the Redneck Inbred Cannibal Killer subgenre has a lot in common with the Slasher subgenre: a group of victims get killed off one by one in gorey, over-the-top ways by a colorful villain in both of them. But to me, there’s a crucial difference between the two subgenres in the actual mechanics of the horror. Slashers tend to be structured, at their most fundamental level, as suspense movies; we know the killer is stalking the horny teens, but mostly they don’t realize what’s going on until the big climax, when the “final girl” has to confront and escape the killer in what is hopefully an exciting chase. The Cannibal Killer subgenre, on the other hand --taking its cues from HILLS HAVE EYES and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE-- tends to eschew suspense in favor of creating a harrowing experience. The victims typically know they’re in danger almost immediately, but are unable to do much about it. They spend the whole film being terrorized and brutalized by their tormentors, completely disempowered or at least only falteringly able to offer defense. Which really describes “torture porn” at its most definitional level too, no? The emphasis is on the victim’s suffering, not necessarily on the tension over how and if they will escape, since most of the time escape, or even defense, is simply impossible. I know there are people who go for that sort of thing, and certainly in a few select cases it’s resulted in real masterpieces (TEXAS CHAINSAW, obviously), but at least to me, grueling is a much less engaging mode than gripping. And grueling is definitely what’s on DYING BREED’s agenda, but it’s just not smart or creative or well-made enough to achieve the kind of visceral potency that approach requires.

I’ll give it this, though: it’s mostly pretty rote and uninspired, but it does have one thing that it’s just great at: bear traps. Its solitary two sequences of any real potency are both bear trap porn, the first being a journey through a long, black tunnel full of them which our heroes have to gingerly navigate (and will eventually have to flee desperately through), which is a fine, sturdy bit of cringe-inducing setpiecery. Later, the film’s only “good kill” comes from one of our victims stepping in a bear trap… and then falling face-first into another bear-trap. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this little antic before in some other movie (pretty sure they do that in PUMPKINHEAD IV, for example), but it’s definitely a good one, and this time I really noticed the appealing crunching sound a human skull makes when it attempts to resist the iron teeth of death. A good show, there.

Otherwise, though, it’s a film in search of a reason to exist. Despite the exotic location and the intriguing setup, there’s not much to distinguish it from any given WRONG TURN sequel, except that with only four victims it takes way too long to get going and suffers from a lack of potential victims. Most of it isn’t very well staged (the climax, in particular, feels clunky and fragmented and confusing, like maybe they couldn’t really shoot everything they wanted and just had to make do with the bits they had) and although it is appreciably gory in places, it’s just not interesting enough to make its sadism anything but a turn-off. Case in point: its idea of the obligatory dark final twist at the end is that [spoiler] Nina survives, but only to be repeated raped and used as breeding stock by giggling toothless yokels until her death. She’s barely even a character (the story seems to posit her as the protagonist, but inexplicably dumps her to follow the men once the genre stuff gets going) but even so, that’s just no fun. The movie seems pretty pleased with itself for going there, but I dunno man, maybe I’m just getting old, but sometimes going there simply for the sake of going there isn’t enough. You need a reason to go there, and DYING BREED never really comes up with one.

Still, a good bear trap death is a good bear trap death. I’d probably watch a sequel, I dunno.

There are no martini glasses in the movie, unfortunately.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Every BODY has different taste, emphasis theirs. Also, Some Species Are Better Off Dead, which seems unnecessarily harsh.
TITLE ACCURACY	Accurate
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Australia
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Inbred Cannibal Psychos (just a hair’s breath from CABIN IN THE WOODS ‘Zombie Redneck Torture Family’)
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Leigh Whannell counts, I think.
NUDITY?	Just as a dismembered corpse.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yeah, pretty bad scene there, even if it’s not graphic
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Animals figure heavily into the plot, but tend to be victims instead of perpetrators of violence. Think there might be a jump scare with a growling dog, though.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Some
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Someone is said to be watching this couple bone
MORAL OF THE STORY	If your sister died a horrible painful death while doing something incredibly dangerous, stop for a minute and ask yourself if you should now do the exact same thing which just killed her.