NoWo600Wo: C is for Crap filmed in Richmond, C is for (good) Canadian Horror

Cry_Wolf

The inherent problem with using a technological or internet fad in a film is that sooner rather than later usually, it becomes obsolete. Cry_Wolf is a film where at only 4 years old, you look at it now and laugh at the use of AOL IM, candy bar cell phones, and possibly the first version of the T-Mobile Sidekick phone – the only piece of technology that is still relevant. I seriously think 2005 was the last year I used AOL IM. This isn’t the only problem with Cry_Wolf however. When your cast of characters basically consists of spoiled, overprivileged prep school kids who are all jerks of various levels and are just minimally conceived, it’s hard to care. I imagine the pitch for this movie was “a modern telling of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” meets The Usual Suspects meets Heathers.” The filmmakers received a $1 million grant from Chrysler to make the film  after winning a short film contest (and you can understand now why car companies are in trouble). The only reasons why this movie was watched in my household was 1) it was filmed in Richmond, at the University of Richmond, Union PSCE, and St. Joseph’s campus’ – all schools that look way nicer than the university I attend and my sister and I work for, despite UofR and my university being somewhat competitive in certain areas. Although one scene I recognized as being filmed in the dingy stacks of the Main location of the Richmond Public Library, where at the time, was where they hid their tiny DVD collection; and 2) Jared Padalecki, playing a Senator’s son from Texas, whom, despite being from Texas himself, J. Pads does not sport a Texan accent in this film. I’m pretty sure only crappy movies are filmed in Richmond, although we occasionally get pretty good TV shows and mini-series filmed here, such as HBO’s John Adams series. Most of the movie was spent with my boyfriend, sister, and I asking questions such as, “Do you think Jared Padalecki went to Ellwood Thompson’s or Ipanema when he was here?” and “Where do you think Jon Bon Jovi went to when he was here?” Despite getting the “Unrated” DVD copy, there really isn’t much gore or any nudity, so there isn’t much reason for your typical horror fan to rent this. It is just a gutless film altogether, no pun intended. I’m assuming it was aimed towards teenagers, but seriously, teenagers deserve decent movies too.

Cry_Wolf is somewhat similar to another horror movie that came out around that time called Stay Alive, which was based in RPG video games, and featuring Frankie Muniz, Milo Ventimiglia, and Angelina Jolie’s brother. I feel bad saying that Stay Alive is actually the more entertaining movie and still fairly relevant.

I hate underscores, by the way.

It’s unfortunate that the poster is cooler than the movie.

Curtains

All About Eve meets Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor meets a giallo film. An aging, but still pretty Method actress pretends to be insane to be put into a psychiatric institution to research a part, and the director has her full support. But after awhile, the actress does become a teensy bit unhinged, and the director abandons her in the institution and chooses to recast the part. She breaks out of the institution and invites herself over to his weekend casting session at his house with six younger actresses, and the younger actresses begin to die one by one, just as the director is bedding almost each actress. There is a post-modern twist to this in that Samantha Eggar (from Cronenberg’s The Brood) is playing an aging actress named Samantha, and the director in the movie is named Jonathan Stryker, who is the director of Curtains (the director in the movie is played by an actor though…confused yet?). Despite Samantha being set up as the protagonist and lead suspect of the film, she is missing from this movie for long periods of time, I guess partly to lay more suspicion on her. So it is hard to know who to root for when there is no clear protagonist or villain really, other than Stryker. The film does have a good twist ending, and is really well-paced. It’s also somewhat known for the mask of the killer being pretty scary and how one woman is chased on ice skates.

I still find it interesting that Canadian horror films in the late 1970s and early 1980s primarily featured adults in the casts. Not adults portraying teenagers, such as the case with American horror films.

And yeah, I’m not going to make a habit of using “pitches” to describe movies.

Visiting Hours

One really can’t call a film full of adults (middle-aged to elderly ones at that) being killed a slasher film, true? I’m not sure why. The characters in fellow Canadian horror classic My Bloody Valentine were at least in their early 20s, holding down jobs in a mine, and that film is considered a slasher. Granted the characters in My Bloody Valentine generally behaved as American teenagers in slasher films do.

Visiting Hours is sort of a slasher film, but veering close to psychological thriller…or fuck it, “psychological thriller” just means “slashers with adults with nice houses and good jobs”. When television journalist Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) runs a report in support of a woman who killed her abusive husband in self-defense, she is later attacked in her home by a total stranger dressed like a punk rock dude for no apparent reason. She is placed in a hospital, and her producer Gary (William Shatner, who plays the role sometimes in his Shatner glory, other times like a normal actor) is sometimes by her side, but it is mostly Nurse Sheila (Linda Purl) who stays by her side throughout the entire film. The case being as sensationalistic as it is, it is not long before the news media reports where Deborah is, and her attacker makes another appearance, killing an older woman who was placed in Deborah’s room while she was moved elsewhere. He doesn’t seem to mind that he killed the wrong person, and pretty much moves on to take down anyone close to any degree to Deborah.

The killer is not a masked figure. You know who he is from the beginning, and the viewer gets to watch how he eludes just about everyone in the film (hint: disguises, sort of. Just changes of clothes mostly). He is one megacreepy dude. Since this was also a Canadian production, made by a lot of people who worked on David Cronenberg’s early films, and came out a year after Scanners, I get the feeling that Michael Ironside was asked to play the killer just on the basis of his character in Scanners, Daryl Revok.

Visiting Hours is actually a pretty good movie, way better than I expected it to be, despite some plotholes. Between this and Halloween II, and possibly some other horror movies, I don’t understand why horror films that primarily take place in hospitals never have any doctors around. I think I saw two in the entire film, and this was a hospital in what appeared to be a large city. I also don’t know why Deborah couldn’t be moved to a different hospital. Richmond is considered a small city, but we have at least 5 hospitals within city limits. It’s not as annoying plothole as it is in Halloween II, where there is an near-empty and near dark hospital throughout the entire film, nurses are okay with leaving newborn babies (where are their moms?) alone in the baby ward, and then the hospital gets halfway blown up in the end (again, what happened to the babies?!?!?).

So, I feel like I’m going to have to explain this train of thought, but the way I feel about Visiting Hours is how I feel about Slumber Party Massacre. Slumber Party Massacre, written by mystery author and noted feminist and gay activist Rita Mae Brown, and directed and produced entirely by women, was meant to turn the slasher film on it’s head. Brown has since denounced the film, saying that it played more into stereotypes than crushed them (the Wikipedia entry for Brown claims that the film was meant to be a parody, but the filmmakers decided to play it straightforward). While I’ve only seen Slumber Party Massacre once, I did think that despite the cliches, it did feature a lot of feminist elements to it (the girls working together to defeat the killer, hell, the fact that all the girls were on a basketball team, a woman telephone repairperson!). I feel the same way towards Visiting Hours, which was mostly helmed by men, oddly enough. Speaking out against violence towards women was probably still considered a pretty revolutionary idea back in 1982 (you know, possibly because the Violence Against Women Act wasn’t passed in the US until 1994), and there was a good camaraderie between Deborah and Sheila; as well as between Sheila another living victim of the killer, who exacts revenge on him, finds out that he is stalking Sheila as well and brings it to her attention, and eventually causes his arrest. Yes, you would think that Shatner is the hero of the film, but he’s barely in it.

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