Family Reunions are Murder: TEXAS CHAINSAW (Review)

TEXAS CHAINSAW (2013)

review by AARON ALLEN

Directed by John Luessenhop

Starring Alexandra Daddario, Trey Songz, Dan Yeager, Tania Raymonde, Thom Barry, Paul Rae

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Leatherface has come out of retirement for Texas Chainsaw, which hits 2D DVD and 3D Blu-ray on May 14th. 

Ignoring the events of Tobe Hooper's 1986 sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, director John Luessenhop's Texas Chainsaw rewrites the grisly legacy of the cannibalistic Sawyer family for the latest film in the franchise. Following a montage of footage from the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Texas Chainsaw picks up where the original leaves off. In 1974, a posse of redneck vigilantes descend on the Sawyer house to get revenge for the butchery perpetuated by Leatherface (Dan Yeager taking over for Gunner Hanson) and the rest of his sadistic kin, including daddy Drayton Sawyer (played in cameo by Bill Moseley). The posse and Sawyer family engage in a violent shootout before the rednecks torch the entire property, killing everyone inside. Everyone, that is, except for Leatherface and his cousin, a little baby girl. As Leatherface escapes into the wilderness, the baby is discovered and illegally adopted by a couple of the mob members. She grows up as Heather (Alexandra Daddario) and is totally unaware of her horrific heritage. Now a young adult, Heather finds out that's she's inherited a house in Texas from her biological aunt. Packing her boyfriend (Trey Songz) and best friend (Tania Raymonde) and other teenage chainsaw fodder into a van, Heather makes the trip to Texas to learn more about her secret bloodline. She saws off more than she can chew, however, when she and her friends come face to (leather)face with her cross-dressing and chainsaw-wielding cousin who just so happens to lives in the dark, cavernous basement of Heather's new Texas estate.

Family reunions can be murder

After numerous sequels, remakes, reboots, and off-shoots, it's nice to see some effort being made to reintegrate the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre continuity back into the modern franchise. By using the original film and family as the basis for a modern sequel, Texas Chainsaw manages to borrow enough nostalgia cred to earn some interest, at least for a while. Attentive fans of the series will even catch a brief cameo by the original Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen early on. I was certainly intrigued by Texas Chainsaw's promise to continue the story from its original roots. How's Heather going to react to her only surviving blood-relative's morbid hobbies? Does it run in the family?

The Saw makes the Man

Unfortunately, Texas Chainsaw handles its family subplot with all the finesse of a speeding dump truck trying to make a hairpin turn. Despite the horrors she and her friends suffer, when Heather learns about the fate of biological family, she makes a bone-headed character turn that only makes sense if she were a sociopath with emotional short-term memory. Even given her family heritage, that's too much of a stretch for me to believe. In this way, the script is constantly weak and lacking in horror. Through Heather's reactions, Texas Chainsaw awkwardly attempts to make the Sawyer family into victims and cast the redneck locals as the real bad guys. Even going so far as to drop "Massacre" from the title, Texas Chainsaw further attempts to soften the Sawyer's nasty habits by tiptoeing around the element of cannibalism. There are some good gore moments and chase scenes, especially a pursuit through the woods that ends at a carnival, but Texas Chainsaw can never shake the fact that it looks like it was filmed as a TV movie, especially when the low-budget CGI blood and gore kicks in. After two sequels, a failed reboot, and a two-part modern re-imagining, Texas Chainsaw fails to bring anything new to the table in terms of shock value. It looks like the saw is getting rustier and rustier with age.

While the Saw is Family, the shotgun is a family friend.

I might be more forgiving of Texas Chainsaw's clunky script if not for the wooden acting and glaring leaps in logic. For one, the flashback to the original film is clearly set in 1974, but Heather's story line is clearly set in the modern day. Let's be generous and say that, at the most, Heather is very hot 30 years old. In order to have been a one-year-old baby in 1974, she'd have to be at least 39 today. Also, if she were stolen away as a baby and presumed dead, how could she ever legally inherit an entire house and estate from her aunt so easily? Anything new or interesting in terms of the family is complicated by these kinds of impossible-to-reconcile holes in the timeline, and everything else we see we've seen countless times before. Behind the mask, Dan Yeager simply amounts to a very bland and tired Leatherface -- although I have to admit that he's clearly trying to stay in the same vein as Gunner Hansen's Leatherface, for which Yeager should be applauded.

Premarital sex seals your doom
(clap, clap, clap, clap)
Deep in the heart of Texas.

The good news is that Texas Chainsaw is hardly the worst installment in the series; that honor will forever belong to the infamous Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation starring Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. At the same time, Texas Chainsaw lacks the humour of Hooper's TCM2, the relentless horror of the original, or the sinister style of the 2003 remake. Texas Chainsaw orbits around Texas Chainsaw Massacre III: Leatherface and Texas Chainsaw Massascre: The Beginning in the realm of mostly disposable schlock best watched while passing a rainy afternoon. If you can turn your brain off long enough to ignore the giant logical holes, Texas Chainsaw is a half-way decent exhumation of the original film continuity.

Seeing an older version of the original Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw certainly feels like seeing an old friend again, but this time it's like you're seeing your friend at a nursing home. How can you not pine for the time when he was in his prime as he sits before you so tired, weak, and toothless?

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF ROSALIND LEIGH (Review)

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF ROSALIND LEIGH (2013)

review by AARON ALLEN

Directed by Rodrigo Gudiño

Starring Aaron Poole, Vanessa Redgrave, Julian Richings, Charlotte Sullivan, Stephen Eric Mcintyre, Mitch Markowitz
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"It's quiet. Too quiet."

We've all heard that cheesy movie line at least once in our lives or something approximating it. When it comes to the topic of contemplative, slow-burn horror films, I for one enjoy a little quietness in my horror films. Not every fright film needs to be big, loud, and bloated with smash cuts and shaky on-the-run POV footage. But then again, there's also such a thing as a horror film being too quiet. The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh, the debut film from Rue Morgue publisher Rodrigo Gudiño, is so quiet that it might as well be whispering. It barely makes an impression, and when it does it's almost impossible to make out.

Whatever you do, don't blink.

The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh opens with some real cinematic promise. As the dearly departed Rosalind Leigh, Vanessa Redgrave reels us in with an eerily disembodied opening narration about death, the frailty of faith, and the crushing weight of loss while a roaming camera creeps over her beautiful old house adorned with a staggering collection of antiques and relics including broken dolls, stained-glass windows, gargoyle statues, suits of armor, and most importantly a host of stone angels. Into this house steps Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) who has inherited his mother's home after a very long period of estrangement. Settling himself uneasily into the home he left long ago after his father's death and his own subsequent rejection of his mother's Faith, Leon comes to realize that his mother's soul may still linger in the house and her shrine to a mysterious angel cult may hold the key (figuratively and literally) to her final urgent message. Eerie happenings, visions, and general weirdness ensue. What starts as a very (and I mean very) slow burn of dread eventually turns into a fizzle of indifference as the film becomes lost in its own self-indulgent camera work and a ill-advised, prematurely induced "twist" ending that is ambiguous to the point of rendering the whole plot moot.

Home is where the haunt is

As an atheist with deeply buried agnostic tendencies, I found myself superficially hooked by the beautiful yet creepy Christian iconography in which The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is steeped. Even in my Sunday School days, I've never found the concept of angels very comforting, and when they're rendered so absolutely and emphatically in stone statues they're particularly unnerving. Like angels, Faith itself is a terrifying proposition for the atheist, as it is for Leon, who steadfastly rejects his mother's posthumous pleas to BELIEVE. Exquisitely excessive set dressings and pitch-perfect sound design help drive home the spiritual subtext. If only the script had more substance and the story a more judicious pace.

While I contemplated napping, we watch Leon go on tapping,
forever gently rapping, tapping on his small key board

30 minutes in, The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh proves itself to be a substantial disappointment. The story is fraying at the seams because it's so thinly stretched. The pace is sluggish, to put it nicely. From the very start, the film's baffling attempt to avoid substance while allowing Gudiño to overkill the mood and atmosphere provides the audience with enough rope to hang themselves once they've reach their limit on the number of times they can sit through another scene of Leon walking around the house following sounds that go nowhere and looking at things that seem to bear only fragmentary meaning. Clearly, a healthy dose of mystery can help instill a film with intrigue and a life beyond the frame, but you need to make something happen in the frame for us to care about first. Film is a visual medium for telling stories, after all. No one's going to accuse The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh of being visually dull. It's just that pesky story part that really needs work.

I bet Leon really misses hanging with his mom

I don't understand why The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is so grudgingly slow. You could cut a solid 20 minutes of this film, and it could still establish a satisfyingly contemplative tone and preserve its most effective creepy moments and confrontations, as sparse as they may be. Even the film's theme about Faith and loneliness could retain enough presence to justify cutting a lot of the repetitive scenes and languidly long camera pans. Then why all the filler? Oh, why ask why? 

Put your faith in this: despite a thoughtful idea and beautiful production values, The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh will test your patience.

Leaving THE BROOD: An Interview with Cindy Hinds

Interview by Darrell Marsh

Picture this: you're watching a film with a pretty decent story, a good cast, and great FX, and all of a sudden a child actor pops up and proceeds to spend the rest of the film staring into the camera like a deer in the headlights. In David Cronenberg's classic science fiction horror film The Brood from 1979, this terror-struck little girl was young Canadian actress Cindy Hinds.

In The Brood, Hinds plays Candice, a child torn between her mother, who is undergoing controversial "psychoplasmics" treatment, and her father (Art Hindle) who disagrees with the methods practiced at the radical Soma Institute. Hinds's portrayal of Candice is the epitome of the quiet, withdrawn, confused child. In the film's climatic final act, you could almost believe Cronenberg failed to tell her that she was in no real danger. Her terror is as real as it gets. Let's face it, when it comes to child actors, they either have it or they don't. Cindy Hinds had it! The genuine emotions she put on screen were likely responsible for Cronenberg casting her once again in his 1983 take on Stephen King's The Dead Zone. With a later role in the ultra creepy made-for-TV movie Evil Stalks This House, you could say Hinds was well on her way to becoming a bona fide junior scream queen. We will never know for sure, however, because for personal reasons, Cindy Hinds quit acting in 1984.

Hinds resurfaced in a rare appearance as a guest at SHOCK STOCK 2013 along with her co-star Art Hindle. At the show, Horror in the Hammer had the chance to talk with the former child actor about her career and follow up with an interview via Facebook about her life today.

INTERVIEW AFTER THE JUMP
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Little Nightmares Canadian Horror Shorts Festival

Horror in the Hammer is very proud to be co-presenting the first annual Little Nightmares Canadian Horror Shorts Festival in Hamilton, ON. Handpicking the best in Canadian horror short films, Little Nightmares kicks off its debut on June 1st @ The Staircase Theatre for two hours of homegrown cinematic scares.

DATE: Saturday, June 01, 2013 | TIME: 7:00pm 

ADMISSION: Only $10.00 (cash only at the box office) 

LOCATION: The Staircase Cafe Theatre (27 Dundurn Street North, Hamilton, ON L8R 3C9

For advance tickets, contact Darrell Marsh

Shorts
The Post-Lifers (Dir. Greg Kovacs)

The dead have risen and want your brains! Or do they? This hard-hitting mockumentary chronicles a group of zombies during a world-wide infestation. Tremble with fear and laughter as you are taken along an exclusive journey into the unknown and undead. It's zombies like you've never seen them before...articulate.

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Doll Parts (Dir. Karen Lam)

A serial killer's bad day is made worse when he picks up the wrong girl.

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The Devil Walks Among You (Dir. Ryan M. Andrews)

Lilith's tale of the macabre is about a diner along a dark stretch of road that receives one final customer of the night...The Devil.

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Familiar (Dir. Richard Powell)

Through a series of tragic events, a middle aged man grows to suspect the negative impulses plaguing his mind may not be his own.

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Bio-Cop (Dir. Steven Kostanski)

A fake trailer about a mutated cop who cannot die and his struggles to stop the latest designer drug.

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Roachfar (Dir. Steven Cerritos)

A surreal animated short film following a peculiar old man's descent into madness.

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Red (Dir. Maude Michaud)

Dan has a secret obsession with making snuff films, in which he has sex and kills the women who stop by his house to use his guest bedroom. Everything is bound to change when he meets the sweet Lily, a young drifter who seems to share his passion for cinema. Will she be his next victim?

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Hellvetica (Dir. Kalen Artinian)

When a struggling writer is asked to write a short horror story, he comes to the realization that to write well, he must write what he knows.

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Fondue (Dir. Torin Langen)

Two Halloween trick-or-treaters go in search of some unexpected and disturbing sweets. Raven Cousens stars in this creepy and atmospheric mini-movie.

 
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Hooked (Dir. Zach Ramelan)

Gore, torture, and violence abound when a man finds himself at the mercy of his beautiful date as her captive.

Like the Little Nightmares Canadian Horror Shorts Festival on Facebook. 

ONE NIGHT ONLY: The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh

SilverCity's Sinister Cinema program continues to bring new horror films to the multiplex. In March, they brought us John Dies at the End. This month, don't miss your chance to see Rue Morgue Magazine founder and publisher Rodrigo Gudiño’s feature film debut THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF ROSALIND LEIGHT

ONE NIGHT ONLY: May 9 @ SilverCity Hamilton

(795 Paramount Drive ).

Reserve your advance tickets.

Leon Leigh, an antiques collector, inherits a house from his estranged mother only to discover that she had been living in a shrine devoted to a mysterious cult of angels.

Soon, Leon comes to suspect that his mother’s oppressive spirit still lingers within her home and is using items in the house to contact him with an urgent message.

Rodrigo Gudiño's ghostly tale The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh has won multiple awards and been praised as "Magnificent' by Clive Barker. It will screen on May 9th at participating theatres across Canada alongside the short film "The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow" and followed by a 15 minute making-of featurette.

Tonight: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD LIVE Premieres

It has been established that persons who have recently died have been returning to life and committing acts of murder....on stage!

Tonight, April 26, is the premiere of the new zombie stage play NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD LIVE. 

Based on the classic black and white zombie film Night of the Living Dead, Night of the Living Dead Live is the first stage adaptation officially endorsed by George A. Romero, John Russo, and Russ Streiner. Co-created by Hamilton's own Christopher Harrison and Phil Pattison (both of Nictophobia Films and hardcore horror fans in their own right), Night of the Living Dead Live promises to be an interactive re-telling of the original film staged completely in black and white under the new direction of Christopher Bond (Evil Dead: The Musical) and comedy writer Dale Boyer. The play stars several Second City members including Darryl Hinds (Ben) and Mike "Nug" Nahrgang (Harry). 

Night of the Living Dead Live is set to run April 26 - May 19th. Get your tickets now!

A HAUNTED HOUSE (Review)

A HAUNTED HOUSE (2013)

review by AARON ALLEN

Directed by Michael Tiddes

Starring Marlon Wayans, Essence Atkins, Cedric the Entertainer, David Koechner, Nick Swardson
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In 2000, I saw Scary Movie in the theatre and thought it was the most hilarious thing I'd ever seen. I laughed so hard tears were streaming down my face. I was almost and quite literally rolling in the aisles. 

I was 17. 

Until I sat down to review A Haunted House, which releases on DVD and Blu-ray today, I hadn't seen a Wayans horror spoof since Scary Movie 2. I wasn't sure what to expect after all this time. Is this stuff still funny? Comedy, like horror, is subjective, but I can confidently say that movies like A Haunted House aren't the movies for me anymore. I've apparently outgrown that point in my life where a scene with a ghost smoking weed would make me pee my pants laughing.

Fun Fact: The script for A Haunted House was dictated letter-by-letter through a Witch Board

As a spoof of the Paranormal Activity movies, with some references to recent possession horror films such as The Devil Inside and POV movies like Quarantine, A Haunted House is a lazy POV footage film documenting how Malcolm (Marlon Wayans) and his girlfriend Kisha (Essence Atkins) learn that they are being haunted by a demon. When Kisha becomes possessed, Malcolm turns to a priest (Cedric the Entertainer), a psychic (Nick Swardson), and a team of ghost-busters (including Anchorman's David Koechner). Playing out like a series of half-baked sketches, A Haunted House is a tired and unambitious comedy made even more frustrating by the fact that everyone in it has the potential to be so much better.

Essence Atkins and Marlon Wayans during a private moment 

Some bad movies are as good as they're ever going to get. Others, like A Haunted House, tease you with glimpses of the better movie they could have been. Despite his apparent interest in making low-brow concept comedies like White Chicks and LiTTLEMAN, Marlon Wayans can actually play a very charming, funny, and likable guy. He's not a bad actor. For example, when A Haunted House opens, Wayans's character is preparing for his girlfriend to move in with him. The seemingly improvised banter between them is actually quite funny and cute. They're two lovers gently ribbing each other as couples do. Wayans's off the cuff comments are sometimes surprisingly inspired. It's not long, however, before we get a incredibly contrived and telegraphed scene where his girlfriend accidentally runs over his dog. From there on in, we know that it's going to be that kind of comedy: where dumb shit happens as often and as frequently as possible in order to try and force an awkward laugh out of the audience. A Haunted House is shooting for that audience that still finds gay jokes and butt sex the cutting edge of comedy. But for this reviewer, A Haunted House gets really old really fast.

Everyone's a critic. Even the ghost wanted to get Wayans off screen.

I will give A Haunted House some credit. Unlike what the Scary Movie franchise became -- a loose assembly of parodied bits from other movies in rapid succession -- at least A Haunted House tries to tell a coherent story with a character arc. And when they're not hamming it up for the lowest common denominator, I can almost see Wayans and Atkins as very likable as a domestic couple in a different movie. The less said the better about Swardson's cringe-worthy performance as a gay psychic and Cedric the Entertainer phoning it in as the priest. At the end of the day, A Haunted House doesn't even manage to be offensively bad. It's simply lazy and incredibly boring.

A Haunted House certainly didn't appeal to me. I'd like to think that even my 17-year-old self would know better and be able to recognize that A Haunted House does nothing that funny or interesting with its premise. But there's some young kid out there this movie is going to entertain. If the thought of watching Marlon Wayans simulate sex with a stuffed animal is already making you giggle, then A Haunted House is right up your alley.