Pedophobic fever dreams: HELLIONS (2015)

I am not good with children. That maternal instinct--the one society will quickly tell you all women have sooner or later--has yet to manifest itself in any way. Kids just intimidate me; their bizarre social skills and complete lack of self-awareness leave my delicate social graces in shambles and I simply freeze up. Anyone who knows me will quickly tell you I'd sooner light myself on fire than be left alone with a kid, and those are the same people who will gleefully hand me a baby at the first opportunity just to watch me squirm. (My friends are mean.) Of course there are choice exceptions, like my nieces or the occasional tiny angelic bookworm who comes into the library where I work, but for the most part I am best left around adults.

Horror movies have only encouraged this anxiety by bringing my nightmares to life on the screen. Creepy kids are always a surefire way to unnerve your audience, and there are few movies that haven't used it against us. There are the kids who see things (The Shining, The Others, The Sixth Sense), the kids that serve as gateways for evil forces (Poltergeist, Pet Sematary), or the kids who are pure evil incarnate (The Omen, The Ring). Even further, and sadly less often, there are the movies that take on the horror of motherhood itself--the invasion and harvesting of one's body for another life (Rosemary's Baby, The Brood, Lords of Salem), the sacrifices one would make for their own child (Grace), and even the possibility of rejecting the one thing you're supposed to cherish most in this world (The Babadook). The movies have only validated my fears, encouraging me that I have made the right decision in remaining steadfastly childless.

But don't worry, I'm sure one day I'll change my mind.

I won't.

As it is, I love creepy kid movies because they are one of the few elements in horror I haven't been completely desensitized to. You can only see so many decapitations before they lose their magic, but those girls jumping rope in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies will always send chills down your spine.

So it didn't take long for me to spot Hellions on Netflix. From what I had heard, this movie had everything I like: spooky kids in crude masks, home invasion, all set on Halloween. I am a big fan of director Bruce McDonald's previous film Pontypool, with its claustrophobic one-room staging and unnerving twist on the zombie apocalypse. It couldn't be more perfect!

It's a Canadian Trick r' Treat!

Quick story: Netflix tried its best to warn me against this movie. The one-star rating wasn't promising, but I dove in anyway under the promise of Blumhouse.com's recommendation. About 15 minutes in, the movie suddenly stopped and returned to the description screen, as if to say, "You've seen enough." I hit play, and about 30 minutes later, it happened again, like, "Okay, there's still time to bail out on this." I grabbed my WiiU controller, screamed "You don't know me, Netflix!" at the TV, and resumed playing once again. In hindsight, I probably could have stopped when it told me to and had a better experience.

The plot is simple (spoilers, sort of): After finding out she's pregnant, 17-year-old Dora spends Halloween night alone when some trick-or-treaters begin attacking her home. Over the course of the night, the children outside become more and more violent--banging on doors, egging windows, quickly dispensing with anyone who could possibly help Dora. The house itself seemingly gets sucked into Hell, and it becomes evident that these creatures have come for the baby. The climax reveals itself in a series of feverish time loops, quick cuts of nightmare imagery, dreams within dreams, and wake-up fake-outs. The film itself ends on a loop, the last sequence being the very place the film began--Dora walking dreamlike down a hospital hallway to gaze longingly at the newborns in the maternity ward.

There's also a weird, roundabout Shining reference somewhere in there.

It should be said up front that this movie is all about atmosphere. It's a perfect Halloween movie, thick with that chilled October feeling like Trick r' Treat or Halloween III. It takes place in one of these sleepy small towns that only seem to ever exist in the movies, where Halloween is treated with the same reverence and decadence as Christmas. Falling leaves, decorations, trick-or-treaters, and jack-o-lanterns abound. There's even a broadcast of the local Halloween parade! Why can't I live here?!

Once the terror starts, the atmosphere only gets more intense. We descend into Hell by way of camera filter and wind machine, the world bathed in a pink and grey haze and harsh gusts of wind that gives the feeling an otherworldly hurricane was about to strike. The power's out, the phones are dead, and who knows when Mom will come home? The child-demons get closer to the house with hatchets and their nursery rhyme death hymns on full blast. Pumpkins come busting through windows, and later an endless field of pumpkins begin to explode like land mines. All the while, Dora is stumbling around the house in a blood-stained angel costume trying to believe that this is actually happening. It's just nuts, and I have to give it an A for eye candy.

The plot....I've pretty much explained everything there is to that.

Hey look! Robert Patrick!

I'd rather not get into the ending, or rather, what is implied by the 3-4 endings we get in a row before the credits finally roll. We are presented with so many "it was a dream--NO IT WASN'T" sequences near the end, that it's fair to say the entire movie was all a dream. It's unfortunate that the "dream ending" is so lauded in popular culture because it isn't always a cop-out. Sometimes the entirety of a movie can be one long metaphoric journey, and in this case, I'll accept that ending.

I will say that the "unwanted pregnancy nightmare" is great for an atmospheric horror movie, projecting Dora's anxieties to us exactly as she sees them in a trippy nightmarish haze. Besides being young, we see she is naturally unnerved by kids (like someone else I know), so the thought of being a mother manifests itself in nasty little brats attacking her house, blood gushing from between her legs, and grotesque abominations clawing out of her belly. And even worse, despite having people she can call, no one can help her. She alone must face this terror. That's a pretty good metaphor for teen pregnancy if I've ever seen one.

If only they hadn't tried to weave in an Antichrist angle into all that. Then it just becomes nonsense.

Overall, Hellions doesn't quite deserve its one-star rating on Netflix. It's got rich atmosphere that pulls you in and lets you deep into the world. Unfortunately, the thin plot does somehow elbow its way into the imagery, leading to a baffling finish.

Either way, I'll probably be watching it again around Halloween. Only, maybe next time I'll bail out early around the halfway mark. (You win again, Netflix, you smug bitch.)




Images come from the film Hellions and are property of Storyteller Pictures and Whizbang Films.

Jaws with a soul -- ORCA: The Killer Whale

 

It wouldn't be right to kick off this blog with any other than the very movie that inspired me to start the blog in the first place. So let's dive in!

This country of ours may be divided on many issues, but one of the few things we can all agree on is JAWS. Even those who don't love it are still affected by it. All these years later, and we're still skittish every time we go swimming. Spielberg didn't invent the creature feature, but he set the bar inconceivably high for every monster movie that came after it. So, naturally, the following years brought many, many poor attempts at recapturing Spielberg's magic formula. A few of these were decently received and are fondly remembered; but most clung like hungry ramora fish to JAWS' 25 ft underbelly, riding on his massive appeal and hoping to snap up a few crumbs of his glory, only to shrivel and eventually die off.

ORCA is one of the more notorious of the JAWS rip-offs, largely because it sounds so fucking stupid. Even adding an ominous "The Killer Whale" to its title does it no favors. Predictably, it did poorly at the box office and quietly retreated to its new life on home video. This was a blessing for ORCA, since in the age of the video store, you didn't need a terribly compelling title or even a shred of plot to draw an audience. All that truly mattered was the box art! Those colors! Those teeth! Those eerily expressive eyes!

This was a truly eye-catching video for a certain 10-year-old girl who had seen FREE WILLY enough times to have it memorized and still cry. I was crazy about whales when I was a kid, especially orcas (and I still am to this day, only now it's on a much more scientific, spiritual, and outraged activist level). But it's funny how horror movies can change you, nip at your most vulnerable parts and make you question innocent things, especially at that age. Despite being so intrigued by the box, I could never bring myself to actually watch the movie. Even for a cheesy B-movie, it suggested a level of brutality I could not yet handle, at least not with my delicate 10-yr-old sensibilities. Many years later, I encountered it again on Netflix Instant. The cover art was now reduced to a tall dorsal fin slicing through dark water--meh--but it still brought Movie Gallery memories rushing back to me, of standing frozen in the stare of that furious whale, knowing I didn't have the courage to face him on the screen.

Now, I am one of the not-so-many that actually defends this flop as an overlooked gem. Despite its contrived plot, rail-thin characters, repetitive use of stock footage, all topped with a heaping pile of melodrama, it is simply too hard not to love it.

The plot, as it is, is thus: wily fisherman Captain Nolan (the late great Richard Harris) seeks out big fish to sell in order to pay off his massive debts. While hunting great white sharks, he and his crew cross paths with sexy marine biologist Dr. Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling), who tells them they shouldn't be fishing in the area due to the delicate whale population. She lectures him about the nobility and intelligence of the animals, which only makes Nolan see dollar signs. Now wise to the power and rarity of the killer whale, Nolan sets his sights on catching one and selling it to an aquarium. He eventually comes upon a couple of orcas and shoots a harpoon, aiming for the male. He instead hits the female, which leads into one of the most horrifying, dramatic, and helplessly funny sequences put to film.

Iconic.

After such heartless carnage, the surviving orca swears revenge against Nolan, threatening his boat, his home, and his crew. In an appearance that's baffling even for this film, Chief himself (Will Sampson) appears and interprets the whale's intentions through First Settler sorcery: the whale apparently wants to settle things on his own turf. Nolan eventually reveals to Rachel that years before, a drunk driver killed his wife and child, and now he has done the same to this whale, and he's starting to feel pretty bad about it. The orca leads Nolan and company on a merry chase all the way out to the Arctic to hold their final showdown. The film ends with the whale overpowering the crew, destroying the boat, and dragging an utterly humbled Nolan into the water and flipping him like a pancake straight into an ice wall. The whale then serenely dives below the ice and swims out into the frozen sea, finally at peace.

One of the more unique and interesting aspects of this movie is that the "monster" is an actual character. From the opening shot, we spend a great deal of the movie with the whales, to the point that the scenes between human characters feel like filler. The film grinds to a halt whenever we check in what's going on topside, almost as if the film itself acknowledges that these scenes only exist out of obligation. I believe the romance between the two whales a hell of a lot more than I believe beautiful brilliant Rachel falling for a crusty old fisherman who is actively hunting the animals she studies. Frankly, it seems like someone was shoehorning in their own thinly veiled Quint/Hooper slash fiction into a plot that could quite do without it.

Despite the orcas largely being depicted in clips of stock footage, they are edited in a way that really does bring sympathy to them. It's hard not to smile at the images of two whales in love, as silly as it seems, and it's hard not to feel heartbroken at the brutality that tears them apart. In my ideal ORCA movie, we would get the entire experience from Daddy Orca's point of view: many eerie shots of looking up at a boat from underwater, the muffled sounds of explosions and screams above the surface, lonely whale songs hummed into empty blueness. But alas, whales don't speak English, so Bo Derek pops up now and then to bring us up to speed.

She doesn't get naked in this movie, but something does come off in a hurry.

All the JAWS similarities aside, it's likely this movie suffered largely from the fact that people generally aren't afraid of whales. I mean, sure, if you're like me and the idea of any large dark mass arising from the unknowable depths of the sea makes your blood run cold, then sure, whales are just as scary as sharks. But unlike with sharks, rationally we know that whales don't really pose a threat to us. The late 70's and early 80's gave way to an enormous amount of new information about orcas, and the more we learned, the less we fixated on that "killer" moniker. More than anything, the idea of a bloodthirsty killer whale only got funnier over time, as the image of the orca became inexorably linked with that of a cuddly theme park attraction.

Cut to:

Aw, we were all having such a good time...

The shocking documentary BLACKFISH did more than effectively make everyone hate Sea World; it opened our eyes to the idea that these animals have consciousness. They feel love, grief, and rage, and we have hunted them and put them in cages. And they have retaliated in a big bad way, time and again.

Knowing what we know now, is the idea of a heartbroken creature of such size, strength and intelligence seeking revenge such a farfetched idea? Who knows, maybe if we had listened to the message of ORCA all those years ago, things might be different now...

Still more believable than JAWS: THE REVENGE.

I'd say it's about time to give ORCA another chance. Sure, it's nowhere near the sheer goodness of JAWS, but who could hope to be? Sure, it's cheesy and soap opera level dramatic given the subject matter, but some of us (me) get really emotional when it comes to animals, so in that sense, it fits. It's a Man vs. Nature story that lends sympathy and pathos to its creature unlike anything I've seen. The story being told by that stock footage and sappy music is reason enough to see this movie and treasure it.

That, and the Orca Evil Eye.

Make this a meme.