Results tagged “horror”

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Now this wasn’t what I signed up for. I went into X-Cross thinking it would be a gory throwaway, and instead got something closer to Sam Raimi’s gleeful everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. We start off in conventional horror/thriller territory, then roll on through action-comedy, black humor, cyber-thriller, and even girl-girl relationship flicks. Five movies for the price of one.

This could have been a ghastly mess, but instead it’s goofy fun. The whole thing’s been adapted from a novel (not yet in English) written by Nobuyuki Jōkō, with director Kenta Fukasaku (Yo-Yo Girl Cop, son of Kinji) at the helm. I’d been tempted to write him off as a featherweight before — his first movie was, sort of, Battle Royale II, which he took over when his father died and which stunk for reasons unrelated to who was at the helm. (I blame whoever was behind the typewriter.) X-Cross is no Battle Royale, but it’s definitely no Battle Royale II. It’s got absurd, offbeat energy oozing from every pore.

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What a surprise. I didn’t expect much from The Midnight Meat Train, and I got what easily ranks as one of the better horror movies of the last few years. That might have something to do with the involvement of a) Clive Barker as the author of the story it was based on, and b) Ryuhei Kitamura as director. Apparently he wasn’t the first choice for the chair, but you could have fooled me. He understands the real impact of a horror movie is after you leave the theater, not just while you’re watching it.

Train is about Leon (Bradley Cooper), a photographer with an attraction to the seedy underbelly of the big city. One night he wards off a gang of thugs who’re about to attack a young woman in a subway. She thanks him, steps on her train — then turns up on the 11 o’clock news as a missing person. Leon goes back over his pictures and realizes he might have also taken pictures of her killer: a hulking giant of a man named Mahogany (Vinnie Jones). He’s a serial killer, cornering late-night riders on this particular train and beating them to death with a giant hammer reminiscent of a meat tenderizer.

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Kaidan’s an experiment in contrasting forms, shilling for conflicting. Take one of the samurai-horror flicks of the Fifties and Sixties, bring it up to date with modulated acting styles, psychological realism and understated visual style, and then force the conceits of the first to co-exist in the same story with the manner of the second. It’s probably not a huge surprise that the scientist responsible for this experiment is Hideo Nakata, he who gave us the sum total of modern Japanese cinematic horror in Ring and all of its derivatives.

As with many such experiments, I enjoyed it in the abstract more than I did in the particular. As a filmmaking exercise, it’s impressive; as a story, it suffers from having the conceits of two totally dissimilar approaches forced to share the same film. This doesn’t mean the old-school approach worked better than a more modern one; they’re both of a piece. It’s just that when shoehorned together, the end result is a kind of cinematic cognitive dissonance. Individual moments may work, but the whole thing doesn’t quite hang together.