25: Funny Games

Funny games is a unique film, sort of. It is a shot for shot English-language remake of a unique film from Austria. Directed by Michael Haneke (who also made the original), this film is a horror movie in its truest sense. At first, it all seems like familiar genre territory: A nice family goes out to their vacation home to see some friends, only to have their home invaded by a pair of maniacs. But it soon becomes clear something else is going on. The bad guys seem to switch from pleasant to horrible to funny and back again. They care about the rules to their “game,” but you don't know anything else about them. The psychos practically seem chummy. It soon becomes clear that the bad guys hunting down and killing the good guys isn't really what the film is about.

This film is attackimg you, the viewer. The bad guys keep breaking the fourth wall to make little asides to you (“What do you think? Think they stand a chance?”). They have a running bet going with us if the family is going to make it. They break any and every horror taboo they can think of (right down to killing a dog).. And all the while they are still torturing the family in any way they can.

But it isn't just the bad guys. Every note of the soundtrack (classical music which jumps randomly into thrash metal), every shot of the camera, every convention and pattern created (and immediately ignored), is all just to say fuck you to the audience. Especially the camera. There is hardly a drop of blood in the entire film. It's always pointing somewhere else while the brutality goes on. Then the camera lingers on the family, bruised and frightened. For almost two hours, the film sits there and watches a family immediately before and after terrible things happen to them. There's no catharsis, no revenge, and no hope.

This film is often compared to the film Hostel by more mainstream critics, but that really sells this film short. Hostel, along with a whole host of other films use an anti-violence message as an excuse to show the audience what they want: Violence. The bad guys brutally murder the good guys, then the good guys triumph and murder the bad guys. The tension is relieved, and the audience cheers, The problem with this setup is that the violence always ends up being cathartic. It feels great to watch the bad guys be murdered, and as that is the last event in the film, people leave feeling pumped and happy. These cathartic endings are the main problem I have with Eli Roth's films, and why you won't see them on the list (spoiler alert). Funny Games choosing not to show the violence, and only showing the horrific effects, are one of the things that is striking about the film.

Funny games is probably one of the most polarizing films made in the past decade. That is exactly how it was designed to be. A furious review, accusing Heneke of creating the film as an elaborate troll, is probably just as much proof of the film's craft as an irreverent one like this. If a film that is willing to attack you in ways that you have never been attacked before sounds like something you want to watch, then this is the film for you.

26: session 9

I like unreliable narrators. They give stories depth and allow for several alternate interpretations of a series of events. The idea that what the film shows isn't necessarily what happened can be used to create suspense and tension, and the sudden realization that the main character was an unreliable narrator all along has been the backbone of numerous films.

Session 9 is the ultimate in unreliable narrators. The film follows an asbestos removal team as they try to clean up a dilapidated mental hospital, while the hospital starts slowly driving them all insane. One guy finds a bunch of old coins and quits to go to Vegas (or does he?). A second just seems to slime his way around, trying to get people fired so he can have his own guys come in (or does he?). The protagonist's one defining feature was that he never loses his cool, and he just starts going ballistic. Then there is the guy who keeps sneaking off to listen to tapes of a psychiatric patient from the seventies with repressed memories. Doubt is even cast on the doctors from the tapes, when the film brings up all the people who thought they “remembered” repressed memories only to learn that the memories had been planted into their head by well-meaning but misguided doctors.

The main story follows the asbestos removal team as they try to do the huge job on a tight schedule where everything is going wrong, but we also get to listen in on the old psychiatric sessions of one of the disturbed inmates. Mary Hughes has multiple personality disorder, and we listen to recordings of doctors trying to coax her into talking They keep asking her what happened on Christmas years ago, and asking to talk to Simon. We have no idea what is going to happen with her, but we know it can't be good. At first, it seems like the story is just a diversion from the main plot, just another way to ratchet up the tension. It winds up really tying the whole film together by the end.

The film doesn't need any tapes to ratchet up tension for it. It was shot on-location at Danvers State Hospital, which is the creepiest building in the history of creepy buildings. It is covered in dust and graffiti. The whole thing is Labyrinthine, dark, and disturbing, and that's before you get to the patient's rooms. Between the underground tunnel system, the crematorium, the high security ward (which more closely resembles a giant cage than anything else), and the room where the first lobotomy was ever performed, I am not sure which section of the building I am most disturbed by. Not to mention the cemetery (the graves are numbered, there isn't enough space for names).

A lot of times you'll have films with unreliable narrators go all-in on the concept, to the point where the films main draw is finally figuring out what the hell is going on. Films like that are good every once in a while, but way too many films try to do things like this and just fail to pull it off. Session 9 is so good because it leverages it's craziness with tension and a creeping uneasiness. These qualities play off each other, the fact that you know something bad is going on but not knowing what meshing perfectly with the atmospheric surroundings.

Paranoia and Claustrophobia: two great tastes that taste great together.

27: Ginger Snaps

Brigitte and Ginger Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabella) are as close as two sisters can be. They are each other's best (only, actually) friend. It is the two of them against the world. There friendship is tested when, on the night of Ginger's first period, she is attacked by a wolf. She becomes moody and distant with her sister. She starts having sex with strange guys, and growing hair in odd places. Then she eats the neighbors dog.

Ginger Snaps Lycanthropy as puberty angle has been done before in other movies (Teen Wolf probably being the most popular example), but what really sets this film apart is the acting and story. The main characters have great chemistry, and it is hard not to love them whenever they are onscreen together. You really care about the fate of Ginger and Brigitte, which is not the most common thing in horror movies. Emily Perkins is great as the sulky Brigitte worried about her older sister, and Katherine Isabella is amazing as the increasingly demented Ginger. Add in the sometimes hilarious and sometimes disturbing mother character (Mimi Rogers), and you have a recipe for a great film.

The film's first half has a black comedy feel to it as well. A bumbling group of adults try to help Ginger through her hard times, including the aforementioned hilarious mother character. The high school is your standard film fare of jocks and nerds and popular girls, but they all manage to entertain so I can forgive the film for a bit of cliché here. The one thing that is never funny is the films supernatural elements, which are always played dead serious. You will see this a lot in the better supernatural comedies like Ghostbusters or Zombieland, where the humor comes from the characters rather than the the fantastical elements.

When Ginger Snaps is at its best, it reminds me of David Cronenberg's The Fly. Considering that The Fly is my favorite horror film of all time, this is high praise. The idea that someone you love could change unrecognizably into something else is already disturbing, but the point of films like The Fly and Ginger Snaps is that they are recognizable. Even when Jeff Goldblum is full transformed into the fly, you are not allowed to forget he is still Jeff Goldblum. He never goes around screaming “I'm going to eat your brains.” He always says things like “Why would you want to kill my son” or “You can help me, all I need is your body.” And even when Ginger is at her most monstrous, she still cares deeply for her sister. Enough to kill for her, even.

Ginger's full transformation into a werewolf ran the risk of being incredibly campy, especially since the special effects aren't the best. But since it is treated so seriously throughout the whole movie, it manages to really be scary. Even the mother character loses her darkly comedic edge near the end, which really helps show the films major shift in tone. This is all leading up to one of the most intense climaxes I have seen in films in quite a while. I really don't want to spoil it, but the film would be worth watching just for the last 15 minutes. But you shouldn't have to watch it just for the last 15 minutes, because the first 93 are all excellent as well.

28: Insidious

The second truly scary movie directed by James Wan, Insidious is an imperfect film. The parts that work really work, and the parts that don't really don't. But underneath its problems with writing and pacing, there is a genuinely chilling ghost story with a unique and interesting visual style.

The film is at its best in the first hour. Renai Lambert (Rose Byrne) is being haunted by ghosts after one of her three sons, Dalton (Ty simpkins), falls into a coma. Her husband is avoiding the problem by taking on increasing responsibility at work, leaving her home alone to be terrorized. Most of the scares occur during the daytime, which is a bold move that helps the film stand out. She is completely alone during the day, but she can't leave her son in a coma to the ghosts. It is a great setup, and it comes with a great payoff.

There is one scene in particular that really makes this film a must watch in my opinion. It happens right after the family moves out of their house and into a new, hopefully less haunted one. Once again, it is broad daylight. The soundtrack is entertainer Tiny Tim's “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” (You might know Tiny Tim best from the pilot episode of Spongebob Squarepants). The ghost is just a small child. And yet, it is still bone-chillingly terrifying. I've studied this scene trying to figure out what makes it so good, and I haven't figured it out.

But, with a film like insidious, it is hard to gush about all the things it does right forever. The film has some real structural problems that drag it down. The film is guilty of a major plot dump about an hour into it, in which a paranormal expert talks nonstop for five minutes about the finer points of astral projection. About ten minutes later, she does it again, this time about her previous history with the family.

The story lacks cohesion. The first hour is all about the mother being terrorized by ghosts. But in the second half, the father ends up the protagonist. The film can never really decide whether it wants Dalton to be an actual character or just a mcguffin. There are actually two other children in the film, but they seem to disappear into the aether whenever they aren't saying something creepy. And each person seems to have their own personal ghost who wants to kill them and them alone for some arbitrary reason (and what's worse, Dalton's ghost looks like Darth Maul). In the end, the problem is that its not a family being haunted; it is a succession of individuals who live in the same house being haunted one at a time.

Its hard to argue that Insidious is a great film, but it does still manage to be a great horror film. James Wan squeezes dread out of every frame. Each scene manages to scare you in a new way. From a paranormal expert performing a séance while wearing a world war 2 era gas mask to a family of ghosts with demonic smiles that stand as still as mannequins, its pretty hard to not be impressed by the visuals he presents.

  

29: Final Destination

This is another case of a good movie which gets lumped in with its really bad sequels. Unlike Saw, which couldn't be more different from the films it spawned, the problem with Final Destination was that the films were all basically the same. There just really wasn't any room to innovate within a fairly restrictive Premise.

A group of college students are at the airport on their class trip to France. Before the Plane has a chance to take off, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) has a vision of the plane crashing. He causes a panic and gets kicked off the plane, along with a few others. The Plane does explode, killing everyone on board. It is a major blow, but in time the survivors begin recovering from their loss. Until they start dying. They die, one by one, in the exact order they would have had they stayed on the plane.

What's more, Alex keeps seeing signs whenever Death is coming to claim one of them. He has to desperately try to piece together who is dying, where, and how, all in the minutes before their death. His mostly fruitless struggles help enhance the paranoid atmosphere, as now the audience is constantly watching out for signs that death is coming, and for mundane dangerous objects that could prove lethal, and for whatever new twist death seems to constantly have up his sleeve.

To be honest, the reason I like the film has nothing to do with story, and everything to do with the execution. This film is just a standard slasher with an interesting gimmick. It borrows a lot of its structure and its tropes from other good films. But this film is good because of the way it is shot. When death is after the one of the people, it feels like it can come from anywhere. The death sequences really take center stage. They can be slow and messy, or they can come out of nowhere. Whenever the people think they have figured out how to cheat them, the rules change. A lot of everyday objects seem capable of accidentally killing you, and the film builds tension from that fact.

The first death, in which Chad Donella's character slips on a puddle of water in his bathroom and gets his neck tangled up in a length of wire used as a clothesline is probably the best scene in the film. It feels like it could really happen to someone if they aren't careful, and that's what makes it as memorable as it is. He just suffocated, slowly. Some of the deaths in the film's second half were campy , but the fact that the hanging was so brutal gave the film a lot of its power.

The film has a bit of a problem maintaining that atmosphere all the way to the end, however. Between the last several deaths being more silly than scary, and the ending being pure fun, it is easy to dismiss this as just another teen slasher like they make every year. That is really selling a pretty great movie short, though. It might just be me, but any film that delivers this much great atmospherics and this many cool kills deserves to be remembered fondly.

30: Saw

The Saw series gets a lot of well-deserved flak nowadays. They are just nonsensical story broken up into a series of impractical and elaborate set pieces. They aren't particularly scary, but their ability to incite controversy caused many to dismiss American horror films on the whole as “torture-porn.” People often forget that the original had none of these problems.

The story is simple: Two men wake up chained on opposite sides of a disgusting bathroom, with a dead body between them. Dr. Laurence Gordon (Cary Elwes) is told he needs to kill Adam (Leigh Whannel) if he wants to escape. The two work together to try to discover who did this to them and why. As the clock ticks down, it becomes clearer and clearer that it is a zero-sum game. Meanwhile, the plot of the movie Seven occurs outside the bathroom.

Much of the story is told by a series of flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks). It can feel a bit clunky at times, with sections of the film not really bothering to advance the main plot at all. The films most distinctive feature, the two men trapped in the bathroom, is often sidelined for the flashback sequences, which are, frankly, a rehash of the thriller Seven. But if there is film I don't mind seeing rehashed, that film would be Seven. Especially when it is this well-presented and effective.

The trap set pieces feel rusted out and cobbled together. You could really see someone making traps like this in their basement if they were motivated enough. While they don't really advance the main plot, they do serve to flesh out our villain, the sadistic Jigsaw killer.

Jigsaw was the real deal. He is a sadistic, judgmental, sociopathic monster. He targets people who he feels don't value their lives enough, and he sees just what those lives are worth to them. He tests people, he puts their lives on the line to see if they can stand up. If they can, then they are free to go and have learned a valuable life lesson. If they can't, he was right about them all along. Add in a bit of voyeurism and cruelty to make you question whether he is really in it to teach people a lesson, and you have a true monster on your hands. He has maybe a minute of screen time, but he still manages to be terrifying. What we know of him is secondhand, mostly from police reports, and the film lets us fill in the blanks on a lot of his personality. It couldn't be more different from Saw 2, where they wheel him out 10 minutes in and have him philosophize for half the movie.

You can really trace the decline of the saw series by examining how each film treats the Jigsaw killer. He started out as the unquestionably monstrous villain. Before too long, he was a sympathetic figure, a tragic character. A sequel later he was basically the protagonist, with the normal characters only serving as torture victims;. By the last few movies, he has become some kind of bizarre folk hero, whose message spreads far and wide and attracts followers whenever the writers need to cover up a plot hole or reveal a shocking twist.

The major twist in the original was great, and really brought the story together. It was both unexpected and coherent. It developed the character of Jigsaw. Revealing that he was a terminal cancer patient really helps to understand his character. It gave the whole film a new significance. And besides all of that, it was a moment of deep terror. The twist catapults the film past its other issues, and right into the best of the decade.  

31: 28 days later

Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in an abandoned hospital after being hit by a truck. He walks through the deserted streets of London. An apocalypse came and went while he was asleep. The world is fundamentally different, and he wasn't there to learn all of the new rules. This is itself a nightmarish concept, but it is only one of the many reasons 28 days later is so memorable.

It's hard to make a zombie movie realistic. There are a lot of things that need to be explained for these films to make sense: How did the zombie infection start? Why couldn't anyone stop it when there were only a few infected? Why should people even be afraid of zombies? After all, they are just slower, stupider versions of regular people.

The answer, it turns out, is to make zombies fast. If you are infected, you have ten seconds to live before you become one of them. Once you've turned, you sprint towards the nearest source of food and they have ten seconds to live. The Zombies in 28 Days Later are so fast that they seem more than capable of causing an apocalypse in under a month.

While this film wasn't the first to have fast moving zombies (that honor goes to Return of the Living Dead in 1985), it was the first movie to have the speed of the zombies be their defining feature. In Return of the Living Dead, the zombies were just normal people who happened to be dead and have an appetite for brains. They moved at a normal human speed because it only made sense for them to. In 28 days later, the sheer speed that a zombie could be upon you was the main reason the film worked.

The film switches rapidly from subdued to action-packed, from brooding to brutal. The zombie attacks are sudden and jarring. The camera will focus on a wide shot with a few survivors moving slowly through the empty streets of a dead city. Then, the film speeds up and zooms in. Zombies seem to come from everywhere (or nowhere), and the camera angles are suddenly claustrophobic. There is no way to run from them, and no good way to fight.

But just like in George Romero's “Dead” films, the true villains aren't the zombies. A military safe house alleges to have the answer to infection, and has an open invitation to survivors. Once survivors arrive, they “answer” is just to hole up and let the infected starve, and meanwhile gather as many females as they can to try to “save humanity”, by force if necessary. The scenes in the mansion are easily the film's most affecting.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this film is how good it turned out even with its small budget. Horror movies are well known for doing a lot with a little, but post apocalyptic films tend to look ridiculous without some real money. This film was shot with a digital video camera, using mostly unknown actors and actresses. But the director, Danny Boyle, uses these things to his advantage. The actors look more gritty, while glossy well-known actors might not have worked as well. The digital video gave the film a rougher look, fitting for the subject matter. This, combined with the great script and solidcharacters, gives the film a great sense of realism. Every dollar of the films budget went on screen, and the result is one of the best horror films of the decade.