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?

Baskin

Baskin (2015)

Dir Can Evrenol

Written by Can Evrenol, Cem Özüduru, Erçin Sadıkoğlu, Eren Akay

Starring Mehmet Cerrahoğlu, Ergun Kuyucu

This is the official poster for this film....

BASKIN opens with a child wakened from sleep by the sounds of a woman having sex. He wanders into the living room, where an abandoned TV is blanketing the darkened room with an eerie static. When he turns off the TV, he notices a strange red light emanating from the bedroom he just left. As he tentatively approaches the door, suddenly a robed arm reaches out and grabs him.

We cut from there to a dingy diner, where five police officers are sitting around a table enjoying themselves. They’re crass and loud, shouting at the staff and discussing their first sexual experiences in the filthiest possible way (one implies he lost his virginity to a chicken). When a young waiter laughs at a tale of a mistaken transvestite hooker, the furious storyteller gets in his face and punches him. But they’ll pay for their macho redneck dickishness many times over by the end of the night, because they’re about to answer a routine call which will send them into a hallucinogenic nightmare from which there is no escape.

Yes, ladies and gentleman, this is it: The movie that Rob Zombie has spent his whole career trying unsuccessfully to make. Profane, bizarre, laden with sumptuously filmed decay, and filled with crazy crap and interesting actors with weird faces playing amusing but indefensible assholes. This is the movie HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES wants to be when it grows up. And amazingly, it’s the full-length debut of Turkish co-writer/director Can Evrenol, based on his 2013 short film of the same name.

...But this one is far, far more revealing about what you're in for.

We talked glancingly about Turkish horror last year, when I watched DJINN (2013) and JINN (2014) in an effort to watch some Islamic horror movies as penance for all the explicitly Christian imagery and motifs which dominate a huge portion of the Western horror tradition. As you’ll recall, I found that --outside of Indonesia, which I’m invoking my right as an American to forget is Muslim-- there just really aren’t a ton of horror movies from Islamic countries, even Turkey, which boasts a long and boisterous history of genre cinema. The only one I could locate at the time was a 2008 Turkish horror film unfortunately titled SEMUN. But an article from the (English-language?) Turkish newspaper Hurriyetdailynews.com lists a few more, including Hasan Karacadağ’s D@BBE from 2006 (the first in a series which it claims is now up to 6 installments?!), Biray Dalkıran’s “ARAF (Purgatory) from the same year*, and Cem Akyoldaş’s KONAK (Old Mansion) from 2009.

Author Emrah Güler writes that “An overbearing conservativeness is felt in almost all of the films, with punishment being the driving force, and those who are punished is almost always predictable.” -- the protagonist in ARAF is punished for having an abortion, for example. Hardly a rare charge in horror cinema writ large --after all, many American horror films (and slashers in particular) have been accused of draconian conservative moral schemas-- but interesting to see the same impulse put to a slightly different set of ethical priorities. Mostly, though, Güler seems to accuse Turkish horror of merely imitating the Western model, charging the genre with,

“The appropriation of traditional and Islamic horror motifs to classic examples from Hollywood, or more recent Asian horror cinema, has become the defining characteristic of these films...The string of recent Turkish horror films take haunted houses, teen-slashers and other-worldly entities and tailor them to Turkish and Islamic culture. Ghosts and zombies become jinns, exorcism is done by hodjas and the apocalypse takes its own version from the Quran. Historic Ottoman manors become haunted houses, and ancient spirits of Islamic folklore haunt sinners.”

He goes on, though, to make one exception:

“BASKIN is a genre-bending breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale genre of Turkish cinema.”  

Indeed, although BASKIN is a 100% Turkish production, I’m not even certain it belongs in the category of “Islamic horror,” because I can’t confirm if Evrenol himself is actually Muslim. In several interviews he speaks extensively about his influences (in a March 2016 Fangoria Q & A, they’re mostly Western -- he name checks Hammer, Lovecraft and Clive Barker, along with HELLRAISER, THE DESCENT, FRONTIER(S) and a few more unexpected things: the Belgian film CALVAIRE, the obscure 2008 European film VINYAN, ONLY GOD FORGIVES, CONAN, THE DARK CRYSTAL, and Iron Maiden)** but there’s no discussion of any kind about religion. If BASKIN has any distinct link to a Muslim perspective or Turkish/Islamic folklore or culture, it’s completely lost on me.

And that’s not really a huge surprise, because BASKIN is a profoundly weird movie all around. It’s not a movie which can be meaningfully described with a plot synopsis, since that would just be “there are these cops who go to this old building, and then everything gets weird and crazy and they get killed by cultists or demons or something.” And that doesn’t really capture the experience very well. Maybe a closer synopsis would be “A bunch of asshole cops gradually end up in a Turkish cenobite love nest with a raft of demonic perversity and weird, inscrutable symbolism (i.e. lots of locks and keys[?]).” That’s getting closer, but I think the best thing would probably be to eschew the plot altogether and just say: “Feels like what would happen if Turkey got HELLRAISER and SUSPIRIA the same year and some young horror nut got inspired to smash them together, complete with a vaguely Goblin-esque score and a bunch of primary colored lights.”

If you would like a movie like that, you will like this one. The low budget does show itself occasionally (mostly, perhaps, in the limited action and single location of the climax), but Evrenol mostly does a masterful job controlling the look and feel of the film and conveying an appropriate sense of surreal Caligulan overkill. And he has an ace in the hole in actor Mehmet Cerrahoglu, who plays the demonic “Father.” Cerrahoglu, who suffers from an incredibly rare genetic deformity, was certainly cast because of his startling appearance,*** but the actor (a car park attendant with no prior acting experience) commits to the role with a lugubrious malevolence which is absolutely riveting to behold. He might have been hired to save money on the makeup budget, but he absolutely walks away with the movie. As inscrutable as the character and the scenario is, I feel certain he could sustain a dozen or so direct-to-video sequels purely on the strength of his weirdo moxie. And I can certainly think of no stronger endorsement than that for a horror movie icon.

BASKIN isn’t perfect; the latter half is hobbled somewhat by the lack of meaningfully active protagonists (they’re chained up and only able to observe the debauchery), which blunts the movie’s momentum pretty significant. Without the kinetic force of an advancing plot, it gets bogged down in some typical torture porn tedium as characters get exotically brutalized but the tension gradually seeps away. It still looks great and packs in plenty of gothic weirdness, but there’s no getting around the fundamental problem with the torture porn paradigm: when characters have no means to resist danger, their plight becomes pitiable instead of exciting. But it’s weird and sick enough to get by, mostly; if it sinks into a morass of sadism instead of adrenaline, at least it does it in a fairly exotic and memorable way. Less forgivable is the final twist (SPOILER) -- yet another fucking indie horror time-loop. Just like (spoilers for all the following films) DEAD END and MINE GAMES and THE REEDS and THE ABANDONED, TRIANGLE, LET’S BE EVIL, THE HOUSE AT THE END OF TIME, YELLOWBRICKROAD, TIME CRIMES, SALVAGE, DARK COUNTRY, THE DEVIL’S PASS, THE DIABOLICAL, BLOOD PUNCH, etc, etc, etc. I think it’s time we all came together as a society and agreed to retire this stupid fucking twist for awhile, maybe pack it into a time capsule and send it a hundred years into the future when it might seem fresh again for a few minutes, or at least before every fucking indie horror hack hoping to blow your mind has to throw it in at the last minute and ruin everything.

Fortunately, though, that’s really the only part of BASKIN that feels boring and derivative, and it’s only about 2 minutes of screen time. Well, that and the title; BASKIN apparently translates as “Raid.” But the rest of the runtime, it’s a rare movie which wears its influences openly, and yet still feels like a thoroughly cohesive, uniquely idiosyncratic work. I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, or even the best new horror movie I watched recently; I watch a lot of indie horror movies, and they’re mostly pretty good (certainly, they’ve recently had a vastly better track record than studio horror flicks). But it’s definitely one of the most exciting new horror finds I’ve come across in ages. It's not just a pastiche or a clever riff on an old classic; it's beholden to those things, but also enthusiastically inventive, brazen, and ambitious to an extent which is virtually unheard of in a film this cheap, and especially from a first feature. If Evrenol can bring this level of fervor and raw talent to a project with some real budget behind it, I think we can start looking forward to a real classic, maybe something genuinely iconic.

Ah, who am I kidding? They’ll probably just rope him into directing a Silver Surfer reboot and that’ll be that. Hollywood is far more venal and seductive than any coven of demonic freaks could ever aspire to be.

* Not to be confused with Yeşim Ustaoğlu’s 2012 film of the same name.

** Here is a man who’s life will someday be changed forever when he discovers Ken Russell.

*** I know people today are a little uneasy about hiring actors with deformities (comparisons with exploitative and dehumanizing freak shows are inevitable) but reading Evrenol’s Q & A makes it clear how much he respected Cerrahoglu and worked with him to create the character. And ask yourself -- would Cerrahoglu really have been better off if Evrenol decided it would be more sensitive to just leave him to his life as a car park attendant?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Enter A World Of Suffering And Madness
TITLE ACCURACY	BASKIN translates as “Raid,” which has now been a completely terrible name for three terrific movies which deserve better.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Turkey
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Uhhhh… demons? Surrealism?
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None, although hopefully Mehmet Cerrahoglu is headed in that direction now.
NUDITY?	Some kind of topless cow demon lady
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Man made to have sex against his will. Unclear what his demonic partner’s consent status is.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Lots of frogs, though they don’t do much more than the frogs in FROGS.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	I guess the building is some sort of portal to hell? Also, there’s a story told about (presumably) a ghost, though I think we’re to assume most of the problems here are demonic in nature.
POSSESSION?	None explicit, though maybe that’s what is being attempted by our antagonists?
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Oh yeah
MADNESS?	Looks like our hero has his mind done broke by the end
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	It is possible to entirely avoid ice cream jokes in a review for a movie called BASKIN.