Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009

'Paranormal' best horror movie made in years

By Gary Wolcott, special to the Herald

Saw VI just opened in theaters. FYI: Chop and slash is gorror not horror. Want to be scared? Want to see the real deal? Bag the "ew"-inducing killing and maiming of Saw and catch the real deal. Paranormal Activity is the best horror flick in years; a creepy, heebie jeebie producing scare fest.

Done with a super-low budget, it pretends to be a true story and is shot entirely inside a modern house in sunny Southern California. Something is bugging a couple. At night it moves things, stomps up and down hallways, opens and closes doors. Deciding to catch the thing in the act, the boyfriend buys a state-of-the-art camera and records everything that happens in the home.

The recording is quite disturbing.

Writer/director Oren Peli understands horror. He knows that effects tricks like people popping out from behind doors or sudden, loud sounds cause discomfort because of their suddenness, not because they're scary. The psychology of fright says we can deal with what we can see. It's what we don't see that is frightening. Pulling a page from suspense masters of the past, Peli quietly and subtly hammers you senseless.

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant

The reinvention of vampires isn't working. Writers like Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer and Darren Shan have turned the tortured to trivial. They fall in love, they don't kill people, they're philosophers, some of them even stay in high school for 80 years.

Now how boring is that? Leave them alone. Vamps don't need a revamp. Some of the best horror films in history belong to Dracula and clones.

Packed with great character actors and anchored by John C. Reilly (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant can't make up its mind if it wants to be a comedy or a straight-ahead drama. Stuck in the middle with nowhere to go, the plot turns to mush and crawls to a to-be-continued ending.

The film combines books one through three of Darren Shan's 12-book series The Saga of Darren Shan. It is directed and co-written by talent titans Paul Weitz, who did About a Boy and In Good Company, and Brian Helgeland of Mystic River and L.A. Confidential fame. They give the film a dark, authentic and original look.

Their struggle is that it's the set-up movie of what will obviously be at least two, maybe three more. Set-up movies are boring. You're given the details of how Darren and his best bud Steve become vampires and get tossed center stage into a several hundred year war between vampires -- who are good guys -- and the vampaneze, the blood-sucking evil.

Bottom-line: This vampire movie sucks.

Astro Boy

The son of a famous scientist in Metro City dies in a tragic accident. His mourning father puts his son's personality in a robot and gives him an arsenal of unique weapons for protection. Ultimately rejected by Dad, the boy goes to the Earth's surface and finds friendship and adventure.

Astro Boy is one of the few animated flicks these days actually produced for kids and not adults. Writer/director David Bowers (Flushed Away) and writer Timothy Harris (Space Jam) update the story a bit but keep the1950s and 1960s flavor of the original Japanese characters and the morals of the times. By the way, the 1963 TV series is the grandfather of the animation style that became known as anime.

I have just one complaint. It should have been 3-D. A solid, kid-friendly story with a floating city filled with high-tech gizmos and gadgets needs the extra dimension. It would have been stunning.

Waltz with Bashir

Animation isn't always kid-oriented fluff. Waltz with Bashir is an animated depiction of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon through the eyes of a soldier who struggles to remember the details of his involvement. Done via live-action and it bombs. The animation gives a surreal, nightmarish quality to the story.

Directed by Ari Folman, who also plays himself, the multi-award-winning film is ugly but powerful and, with an ethnic-cleansing under-theme, ironic.

The Maltese Falcon

Fairchild Cinemas is going to do two showings of the Humphrey Bogart classic The Maltese Falcon at 7 p.m. Oct 27, 29. Both are showings are free. It is the finale of the Mid-Columbia Libraries' The Big Read, a program designed to get people to read. They focused on Dashiell Hammett's classic book and as a treat, Fairchild is going to let those participating in the program -- and even those that didn't -- see the film. The Maltese Falcon, written and directed by the legend John Huston (Angelica's dad) is the forerunner and best of all private detective flicks.