“A Tale of Two Sisters” is based very loosely on a Korean folktale known as “Janghwa, Hongryeon”.  The folktale tells of two sisters who are terrorized by their brutal, sadistic stepmother. There’s no fairy godmother to save the day in either the folk story or the movie, however, and in the latter, the viewer can only watch as strange, seemingly supernatural events spiral out of control.

Right from the get-go, the sense of mystery and tragedy is palpable. When the film opens, the older sister Su-mi (Su-jeong Lim) is shown being questioned by a doctor in a mental instution. She sits expressionless as the doctor intensely quizzes her about her family. The scene dreamily dissolves into a idyllic, pastoral country scene. The contrast between the stark white-walled asylum and the lush South Korean countryside is unsettling and effective. We are then introduced to Su-Mi’s family– her distracted father (Kap-su Kim); her sweet, soft-spoken younger sister Su-yeon (marvelously portrayed by Geun-Young Moon);  and her adversary– her step-mother Eun-joo (Jung-ah Yum) who appears more Stepford Wife sinister than brutal sadist.

Even in this peaceful domestic setting, it’s obvious that something is out of place. The girls are haunted at night by strange spectres. Visitors to the home spontaneously fall into violent spasmodic seizures. Stepmom’s prized pet bird is found dead in the girls’ bed. Slowly, the secrets behind the family’s tragic, disturbing past are teased out until the situation reaches a bloody, mind-bending climax.

The ending to A Tale of Two Sisters is, in fact, rather puzzling and ambiguous. The lines between dream and reality have been blurred into a nightmarish haze. I’ll admit that it took two viewings for me to fully piece together all the strange clues scattered throughout the movie.  (The director did an in-depth interview about the symbolism behind the story, but the DVD I rented didn’t come with Cast Commentary.)  All in all, the movie is impressive in its scope– it goes beyond a typical ghost story and proves to be a surprisingly moving story about how a family copes with loss.

Book of Blood is not a masterpiece. In fact it is a largely underwhelming and uninspiring film that lacks the visceral punch one is accustomed too in a Clive Barker adaptation. Instead writer/director John Harrison opts to go down the atmospheric haunted house route – aiming perhaps for the thick and cloying mood of The Others (2001) or The Orphanage (2007). It is a brave strategy in a current marketplace overflowing with sadistic torture and gut crunching mayhem. In such a film the pressure on dialogue, performance, and suspense is increased exponentially and Book of Blood falls down in all these key areas. Harrison’s screenplay conflates the Barker short stories ’The Book of Blood’ and ’On Jerusalem Street’ and part of the films unevenness comes from this clumsy attempt to fuse together two stories. The narrative proposes the idea that on a parallel plane to our own exist highways of the dead, and on these highways are intersections. The house where the bulk of the action is situated is on one of these intersections. The film is told in the form of a flashback as Simon McNeal (Jonas Armstrong – BBC TV’s Robin Hood) explains the circumstances of his transformation into a living book of blood too a man who has been paid to relieve him of his skin.

This decision to tell the story this way reduces a great deal of suspense as we approach the narrative armed with the knowledge of McNeal’s eventual fate. This leaves us with just a series of ghostly apparitions to look forward too. Unfortunately the intersection is a mess of unconvincing digital effects, and one of numerous elements of the film that are a let down. McNeal’s attempts at hoaxing the spectral events seem utterly pointless, especially in light of the fact that the house does have a genuine ghostly presence. The paranormal investigator Mary Florescu (Sophie Ward) is a dreadfully dull creation whose character trajectory from academic researcher to scribe of the undead to someone who pays to acquire McNeil’s skin doesn’t ring true, and the potential thematic value of exploring the lengths an academic might go too in order to push their heads above the parapet set by their contemporaries is fumbled by a screenplay determined to create a villain where one doesn’t really exist. The performances are ponderous and humourless which is a surprise considering the vein of black humor that runs through much of Barker’s work. Perhaps the worst crime of Book of Blood is to be completely unmemorable. Barker’s material has a habit of clinging resolutely to one’s psyche, so that short stories one might have read fifteen years ago remain festering in the subconscious. This film had the potential to stand out, but a combination of desultory performances, mishandled digital effects, and weak atmospherics, damages this film beyond repair.

Pontypool (which is based on Tony Burgess’ book Pontypool Changes Everything) relies heavily on its storyline, a great script and strong performances from its cast instead of the more traditional emphasis on scenes of flesh-eating zombies. It isn’t very violent – blood and guts are used sparingly – and the body count is probably the lowest I’ve seen in any movie about the living dead.

But there’s something deeply satisfying about Pontypool and part of it is its concept for the virus infecting the town, which (though a little half-baked) is truly original and gives the film political undertones. The setting of a radio station in the midst of a snowstorm adds to the feeling of isolated claustrophobia, as we watch the crew try and make sense of what’s going on outside; it also calls to mind the paranoia generated by Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio hoax. Stephen McHattie deserves a special mention for his excellent performance as outspoken, world-weary radio show host Grant Mazzy.

The film begins with a monologue that will sound like poetic nonsense, with words blending into one another in a kind of stream of consciousness conspiracy theory tirade, but this is an important clue as to what will happen to the town that day.

Grant Mazzy, a hard-drinking morning radio host for the small Canadian town of Pontypool, is on his way to work in the early morning hours of Valentine’s Day, when he encounters a strange woman who keeps repeating everything he says before mysteriously disappearing. Like a true professional, Mazzy decides to use the experience as a topic for his show and poses the question, “When do you call 911?” to his listeners.

But it soon becomes clear that this isn’t an isolated incident and things aren’t quite right in Pontypool. There are reports of a strange “hostage” situation involving drunken ice fishermen and reports of a mob attacking a local clinic. As the show’s producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), and radio technician Laurel-Ann Drummond (Georgina Reilly) try to verify reports, they begin to find some unsettling facts. The radio station’s weather reporter, Ken Loney (a great voice-acting performance by Rick Roberts), is one of the only reliable, outside sources for the radio crew but even he struggles to find words to describe what he’s seeing.

There aren’t many conventional scares in this movie, but the way director Bruce McDonald builds suspense and an air of mystery during the first hour is much better than any jump-out-your-seat frights he might have served up. The film also has a good sense of humor and the tension between Mazzy and Sydney provides some hilarious moments, like when Grant is told that Ken plays sound effects from his truck to make it sound like the “Sunshine Chopper”. I think it lost some steam during the last half hour and details about how the virus could be stopped were never fully explained, but the apocalyptic ending made up for it.

This is a movie about the power of words – what they’re capable of and how they can be manipulated into something that does or doesn’t have meaning. With the ongoing “War on Terror”, this could be read as a statement warning us of the perils of labeling people and destroying what we don’t understand as a quick fix for a problem we can’t be bothered to deal with any longer. However, all of this is subtly implied in this well-crafted movie and it’s not until the climax that the political angle is made clear.

Pontypool won’t be to everyone’s liking, especially for viewers expecting buckets of blood. But for anyone looking for a zombie movie with brains (that don’t get eaten), this could be the perfect movie for a quiet night in.

Breathing Room, a low-budget film with no recognizable actors and one major setting throughout, certainly doesn’t waste money on special effects and camerawork. The whole thing looks like it was filmed on a webcam circa 2000 and has a grainy, gritty, murky feel that generally works in its favor.

The movie begins with a young woman, naked, stumbling out into a garage-like room, where a group of people where orange jumpsuits meet her. She seems disoriented and doesn’t know how she had gotten to the room. The others don’t have answers, either, and if they do, they aren’t giving them. They are a motley bunch, including the usual types you see in movies: the cocky asshole, the handsome hero, the meek woman, the tough woman, the hot woman, and the creepy guy in glasses. Although none of the actors particularly stand out, none of them ham it up so much that they distract or ruin the film, either. For the first half hour or so, the movie’s premise and central question is enough to keep the viewer interested: who are these people, how did they get here, and why are they being forced to play this game?

After Saw, the sub-genre of “oh shit we’re trapped somewhere and we don’t know why” horror movies has blossomed. Usually they involve some group of people put in a small space for reasons that slowly unfold. Identities are shifted and our perceptions are changed. Breathing Room tries to do this, too, but the movie falls apart by the end under its own insistence on there being a reason for these people being trapped in the first place.

For example, the movie emphasizes “clues”, such as keys, notes, and tape recorders that the characters find upon their initial entrance into the room. Guns and bullets are placed in locked boxes, leading to various predictable arguments about what should be done with the guns. It is revealed, by a video projection, that there is a rapist, murderer, and child molester in the group, amongst others. For a while, the movie seems to be interested in the play between the characters, the way that personalities, views of the world, and fears determine our actions. Unfortunately, the possible conflicts aren’t followed through. We are led to believe that the “game” should result in the “bad” people being punished. Instead, the movie is interrupted with with “blackout” scenes, where one character generally ends up killed for no explicable reason. The clues, videos, and audiotapes add nothing to the plot. Ultimately, the murders make no sense and give no insight into why these individuals have been placed together.

The end of the movie comes abruptly, and within a five-minute sequence, the “mystery” of the “game” is solved…but it doesn’t make sense, and it leaves more questions than it answers. In attempting to wrap-up the mystery, the movie collapses.

The director, Basil Dearden, was best know for a series of highly conservative social problem films he had made in partnership with producer Michael Relph under the auspices of Ealing Studios in the 1950’s and 1960’s. A number of themes and concerns present in films such as The Blue Lamp (1950), Violent Playground (1958 – featuring a young David McCallum and Peter Cushing) and Sapphire (1959) are reconstituted in The Man Who Haunted Himself to reflect the new found permissiveness in society that so worried old conservatives. How the doppelganger comes into existence in this film is one of its weak spots, explained away in a vague and embarrassed manner. The two Pelham’s offer representations of two differing generations clashing. The first Pelham is stuffy, conservative and impeccably middle class. Furthermore he is sexually repressed and ignorant of the desires of his frustrated wife. The duality continues with their twin sons, evidence that Pelham isn’t entirely sexually useless. One could say this Pelham represents the post war generation of stiff upper lip determination, the values of the 1950’s, the values of Ealing’s post war problem films. The doppelganger is by contrast thoroughly modern. He is not only sexually active, but promiscuous with it, he is a gambler, a smoker, a drinker and a driver of fast and dangerous sports cars. His carefree and permissive abandon situates him as the antagonist in the conservative universe Dearden creates.

The audience is never entirely certain whether Pelham is not hallucinating and cracking under the strain of pretence he lives under in suburbia. This creates much of the tension, especially in scenes where he talks to himself on the phone. It paves the way for a finale which is unexpected but very welcome. In the final minutes Dearden abandons any efforts to maintain realism and composes the most visually striking and exciting sequence in his career. The film hurtles (colourfully and violently) full pelt into the realm of fantasy. The outcome is something of a surprise as the repressed and stuffy Pelham is absorbed by the permissive Pelham. It is a despairing note and clearly indicates the direction that Dearden believes modern society to be heading toward. Apart from the finale Dearden directs in an unobtrusive and unfussy fashion. Moore is revelatory as both Pelham’s and puts to shame anyone who might claim Moore cannot act. The film deserves greater visibility and acknowledgement.

The Brood centers around a troubled family.  The mother, Nola (Samantha Eggers), has suffered from a breakdown and is institutionalized by a charismatic psychiatrist, Dr. Hal Ragland (Oliver Reed), who promotes an experimental therapy called psychoplasmics, which makes patients physically manifest their psychological problems. It’s not clear exactly what this means, but it’s clearly a kind of parody of 70’s therapies (scream therapy, birth therapy, etc.) and the sometimes self-absorbed people who fell for them. Nola’s estranged husband, Frank (Art Hindle), doesn’t trust the doctor, who insists that Nola be kept isolated from her family as she finishes the therapy.

When Frank and Nola’s daughter, Candice, comes back from her visits with Nola with mysterious cuts and bruises, Frank starts to investigate exactly what is happening during therapy with Dr. Ragland. As Frank investigates Ragland, mysterious, deformed children begin to show up and kill anyone who helps Frank. They seem to leave Candace alone, though, which is the first clue to exactly where these children are coming from. Candace is the classic creepy kid–white-blonde pigtails, blue eyes, and the spacey, otherworldly look of a pod person. When the  “brood” of deformed children show up, with their pale skin, blond hair, and lack of speech, it’s hard to tell the difference between them and her.

Cronenberg uses the family structure itself as a source of horror. Candice is bound to Nola, though Nola seems to have replaced her with the new “brood”, who can act out her anger in the world. When Frank discovers that Nola, due to her therapy, is manifesting her anger by birthing these malformed, evil, and mute creatures, Cronenburg gives one of the most daring and frightening scenes I’ve ever experienced in a movie. I’ve seen bloodier things than Nola licking clean her new anger-baby, but the mix of an instinctual, animal act into a scene between two adult human beings in a modern setting is shocking. We forget the sheer strangeness and bloodiness of birth in modern life, where women are whisked away into operating rooms and their babies are wiped clean by nurses with antiseptic towels. Cronenberg is here to remind us of exactly how strange our bodies are and how close we are to instinct.

Like many of Cronenberg’s earlier films, the lead actor is the least skilled of the bunch, which hurts the film, though at least Hindle doesn’t give the wooden-board performance of Stephen Lack, who almost ruins Scanners single-handedly. We can forget about Frank, a dull everyman, and instead focus on the wonderfully over-the-top performance of Oliver Reed, who plays Dr. Ragland as the classic psychiatrist with a god complex, and Samantha Eggers as Nola.

For a modern viewer, the idea that a gaggle of blond kids in parkas could kill anyone might seem a bit farfetched, and sometimes the death scenes involving the brood are less than frightening.  Although this certainly isn’t Cronenberg’s best,  it’s well worth watching if you’ve found his style and themes compelling in more recent films.

The Game sees Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), highly successful in the finance business, even more successful at being a complete prick, submerged within a professional “game”, recommended to him and paid for by his drug-addicted brother Conrad (Sean Penn) as a birthday present. Reluctant to engage in the game to begin with, which is shrouded in vagueness and requires countless private details/information of participants lives, Nicholas soon finds himself under constant surveillance, being followed by mysterious people, sent cryptic messages and other annoying sentiments of the sort. However, the game quickly spirals out of control, with Nicholas thrust into countless life-threatening scenarios, unable to quit the game amidst shoot-outs, the destruction of his home and his brother’s mental breakdown. As the circumstances become even more grandiose than before and the game increasingly appears as if there are no limits to what it can do (including seemingly predicting the future and participants being granted superhuman strength), it becomes quite apparent that there better be a damn good explanation by the end for all the nonsense ensuing. Assumingly, Fincher just buckled under the strenuous task of tying it all together.

Part of the problem is that no ending could be completely satisfactory after what occurs throughout the prior two hours or so. It’s not the usual action movie nonsense, such as walking away from countless high-risk situations without so much as a knick, although that is featured in abundance. The problem is that the game is on such a large scale that it isn’t feasible. It’s not just because police officers, cab drivers and pedestrians in on it, nor is it because entire hospitals, entire restaurants and entire businesses are in on it, but because nearly every single person Nicholas encounters is. It reaches the point where poor Nick and a small handful of others seem to be the only people in the whole San Francisco area not in on it. As well, the game relies entirely on knowing what Michael will do at exactly any given point in time, something impossible without the means of telekinesis. He’ll hail a cab at this exact moment. He’ll jump off a ledge at exactly that point. He’ll swivel his head in that exact direction at that exact moment. It’s enjoyable, good fun, but there’s an accompanying uneasy feeling about how it’s all going to turn out.

While no ending could be completely satisfactory, the chosen ending remains the least satisfactory. All the lapses in logic are abundant throughout the film and these plot holes are cast aside in one of the most absurd twists in film history. It’s not that it heaps a million more plot holes onto the already towering heap, but that it essentially strips every single character of any semblance of intelligence or real emotion. I’m tip-toeing around the events of the ending in case people intend to watch the film, but the reasons, motives and logic behind the “game” for those involved are so far outside the realm of any fictional reality that they would only be acceptable within the realms of comedy, and even then it would be a bit iffy (indeed, there was a comedy within the last decade that employed a similar conclusion for nothing more than cheap laughs, and yet was still more plausible than this utter nonsense).

The worst part is that The Game presents its conclusion wrapped up in pseudo-intellect and a pretentious condescension, attempting to present some sort of meaningful lesson to both its character and the audience. It’s got all the fixings typical of a smart thriller: Academy Award nominated/winning talent, a moody low-key score, a meaningful moral, but it’s got all the intelligence of something with none. I’ve seen my fair share of bad endings before: one film ended with the characters all dying in a random explosion out of absolutely nowhere, another with the characters turning to the camera before unmasking the killer and shouting in street jargon ‘Yo, we’re not going to show you who the killer is. See you in the sequel! Bye”, and yet another one where a hotdog vendor turned out to be some sort of CGI demon-thingy. However, these were all preceded by equally stupid events and at least did not pretend to be anything other than dumb finales to equally dumb movies. The Game was somewhat enjoyable throughout and then ended with the equivalent of one of those atrocious endings, but masquerading as smart.

There are countless fans of “The Game”, and while normally I’m not such an elitist snob about these sorts of things, if they truly believe this to be an intelligent film in any sense of the words, they’ve been duped. It’s got all the fixings of one, but that’s all. This is the intellectual equivalent of “Freddy Got Fingered”. “Freddy Got Fingered” ended with Tom Green being ejaculated on by an elephant. I truly believe that would be a more fitting ending for “The Game”. Sure, Michael Douglas being sprayed with semen by a sexually excited elephant would be beyond silly, but at least it would wear it’s stupidity on its sleeve, rather than layered underneath countless pretensions. It would be a slap in the face to the viewing audience who invested two hours of their time, but at least it wouldn’t presume them to be idiots.

The shifts in tone and atmosphere are subtle at first. Hints and clues as to Asami’s past and background, fragmentary flashbacks of an abused childhood, enigmatic and ghostly sequences which owe much to the Kaidan or avenging spirit motif popularised in J-horror hits like Ring (1997), the introduction of temporal confusion. The colour scheme also begins to shift, subtly at first, before drenching the film in cold blues, mysterious greens and sickly yellows that hint at the inner decay and perversion to come. Despite this formal explosion, nothing can compare to the films violent denouement. It is shocking, harrowing and difficult to sit through, mainly because of the sound effects, but also because of the obvious enjoyment Asami gains from slowly torturing her helpless male victim.

Miike denies that there is a political reading to be found in Audition but this hasn’t stopped Western critics groping to understand the film through any means possible. In the West it was hailed in some quarters for its feminist qualities, but any attempt to turn Asami into a positive or heroic figure is deeply flawed and controversial. The film also makes perfunctory attempts to discuss the female role in Japanese society, and its clear that male resentment of women in the workplace exists. The film works best from the perspective of gender and audience manipulation. What makes the film so exceptional is that succeeds in an age in which films rarely hold any surprises for us. Most of the secrets a film have are exposed by trailers or clod hopping critics. Miike consciously plays on Western perceptions of Asian cruelty, and its no surprise that its images of sadistic torture found greater success in the west. The film is a melting pot of trans-national signifiers, it plays with Japanese conventions, whilst simultaneously flirting with a western brand of horror and the politics of cult film reception. Audition confirmed Takashi Miike as a filmmaker of note, to laud him as an auteur is perhaps a step too far (Audition was cast, written and budgeted before Miike was invited to direct it), but one thing is certain, Audition is a significant and important film.

Kubrick begins this sense of dislocation and loss by introducing the recurrent motif of the maze. The Torrance’s little Volkswagen winds its way through serpentine mountain roads, a mere insect on the sublime landscape. The plodding atonal synthesizer of Wendy Carlos works in seamless conjunction with a sweeping aerial tracking shot that immediately dwarfs humanity in the maze like construction of the mountains. Individual human beings are much like the hedge maze that Wendy and Danny explore – complex, inscrutable and unpredictable – full of twists and turns. The interior of the hotel continues this theme; with its winding corridors, spiral patterned carpets, and geometrically ornate wallpaper. The hotel becomes uncanny without any recourse to the supernatural. This is realized most succinctly in the famous steadicam sequence, where we follow Danny around a corner only to be confronted by the butchered remains of two twin girls. This is one of many uses of doubling in the film, doubling that is reflected in the rapid editing which sees Danny see their bloody remains in close up. This is pure filmmaking, a sequence in which camera placement, camera movement, and composition combine superbly with editing and soundtrack to create the most chillingly effective moment in the film.

The film is about the battle between a father and son for power and patriarchy within the Torrance family unit. The power is gained by whoever is able to understand and harness a psychic ability that the chef Halloran refers to as ‘the shining’. Both Jack and Danny possess extra sensory perception, for the former it is a destructive force due to his immaturity and lack of understanding, for the latter it becomes a means of empowerment and growth. It is only natural that Jack should meet his fate after being outwitted by a child who during the film has become more of an adult than he. As a result the histrionics and over-acting of Jack Nicholson are perfectly in keeping with an adult who is regressing childishly and has gladly embraced madness and the supernatural due to his lack of understanding and his failure to fulfil his familial responsibilities. Charges of Nicholson being over the top are a compliment rather than a criticism in my opinion, over the top is exactly what the role called for. Unfortunately the rest of the cast are unable to get anywhere near Nicholson and this ultimately unbalances the film.

As a horror film one could argue that The Shining is a little too perfect. In places it has the feel of an academic exercise. This is due in part to the cool and clinical technical eye that Kubrick brought to the film. However, it is no less innovative for it; the steadicam is used to perfection here – giving the impression of an unseen and unknowable force controlling the human characters, manipulating and influencing their antagonisms and hatred. The film ends on a particularly downbeat and inscrutable note that suggests the events of the film are occurring in a Last Year in Marienbad (1961) type of time bubble – it leaves the audience with the same unsettled feeling they had at the films outset.

Polanski was a director perfectly suited to make a film detailing the gradual alienation and psychological breakdown of a vulnerable female. He had explored similar territory in Repulsion (1965), and would later take the theme even further by casting himself in The Tenant (1976). In all of these films the spatial claustrophobia of the apartment is central to the anxiety. The apartment block in Rosemary’s Baby has a history of tragedy and of evil, and this is brought to life extremely well in the way the building is almost personified. The corridors squeeze the characters, and Polanski’s camera offers a tight and restricted view. The walls are thin, the décor tasteless to the eye, the neighbours strangulating in their platitudes and good intentions. Into this is thrown a young upwardly mobile couple. Rosemary played with wide eyed vulnerability by Mia Farrow begins having strange dreams and suspicions, and her mysterious pregnancy only adds to the creeping paranoia that begins to overtake her life. The terror lies in the lack of freedom that Rosemary encounters, she has nowhere to turn as the cult draws nearer.

Much of the horror lies in the inevitability of the plot. As an audience we become certain long before Rosemary that she is pregnant with the devils child. Rather than dilute the suspense, this becomes the films masterstroke, because it affords Polanski the opportunity to really ratchet up the paranoid tension. The modern day coven of witches remains hidden by a tight network of bourgeois society folk. It is made up of doctors, and scholars, and is firmly associated with the upwardly mobile world that Rosemary’s husband Guy (John Cassavetes) so desperately craves. He sells himself out in order to progress up the Hollywood ladder, which offers a bleak view of the acting profession and the desperate measures required to succeed in the modern world. This is a horror film with an unusual amount of subtlety, subtlety that Polanski had not shown in either Repulsion or Dance of the Vampires (1967) – and perhaps shows evidence of artistic maturity. The narrative patiently builds up, and aside from a very striking dream sequence in which we briefly see the Devil making love to Rosemary, the film is marked by a visual blandness. The film offers particularly rich rewards to those seeking to explore issues of gender and psychoanalysis. But what really impresses some forty years on is the level of commitment shown by the excellent Mia Farrow and the patience and subtlety behind the camera of the brilliant Roman Polanski.