Sunday, September 22, 2019

Nightmare Fuel



Hidey-Ho, Horror Nuts! Welcome to another WTFHM!


So, okay, remember last week when I said that this week we’d be reviewing something a little sexy?




Yeah, well, we are...if you replace ‘sexy’ for ‘weird as hell’.



Don’t get me wrong. I like weird. Especially in my horror. In the filing cabinet of my brain, it’s filed away nice and neat in a unicorn folder marked “Weird sh*t”.




I mean, I tend to like movies and stories that take a little effort to explain to someone or horror that you have to say; “Dude, you just have to see it.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opted just to show someone something in lieu of trying to muddle through an explanation of the crap I just watched.

Once again, this is not one of those times.



Horsehead starring Lilly-Fleur Pointeaux, Catriona MacColl, Murray Head, Gala Besson, Fu’ad Ait Aattou, Vernon Dobcheff, Phillipe Nahon, and Emmanuel Bonami.




So. I struggled for most of this weekend in trying to figure out how to explain this movie. The plot is...well...I suppose I could sum up the plot.




Girl has bad dreams.



Girl’s grandmother dies and she has to go home.



Girl is studying lucid dreaming which her mother is unnecessarily angry about.



Girl finds out through her crazy dreams where she discovers her grandfather was super crazy and tried to abort her by stabbing her mother in the belly when she was pregnant with her because Jesus.



Girl finds out she was a twin, but the other twin died.



Girl stabs herself in her dreams and reunites with her dead twin.



Girl...dies in real life? I don’t know. I assume she did.


Murray Head looks like he’s regretting his decision to be in this movie.




By the way, Fun fact! If that name sounds familiar to you fellow old heads, it should. In addition to being an actor, he also did that campy song in the 80s, One Night in Bangkok.



Okay, so, let’s start with the good stuff.

THE GOOD


This movie is visually stunning. Like they went all out on the visuals. The monster effects are genuinely frightening. Like this horsehead...thing...man...whatever?




*shudder* Very frickin’ creepy.



The dream sequences are also really disorienting as far as the ambience. They aren’t just dark, some of the shots are done at weird angles and weird sepia tones. Oh, oh! And like the grandfather, Winston (Aattou)?



They lower his voice, like, what I imagine is 27 pitches lower than normal. It’s frickin disturbing.

The general tone of the movie was very 17th-century gothic, which, given the material, was a delightful idea. Unfortunately, that leads me to…

THE BAD





So, this takes place in modern times, like probably within the last four or five years or so as evident from the character clothing, hairstyles, manner of speaking, and use of technology. It’s really too bad that the screenwriter didn’t inform the rest of the movie that we’d be in the 21st century.



For instance, the grandmother has died and there is no talk of a funeral home or any use of the modern conveniences that we have in terms of the handling of our dead in the modern world. Grandmother is interred in her bedroom with a death shroud over her eyes for the entire movie.



In the dream world, Grandpa Winston is a young man...in period clothing.  Which is fine until you start doing the math. Get out your calculators.




Let’s say that grandpa was in his early thirties in the early twentieth century (and I’m being generous with those numbers). Jessica (Pointeaux) looks to be in her mid-twenties. Her mom, Catelyn(MacColl) looks to be in her 50s or 60s. Fifty or Sixty years ago lands us, obviously, somewhere in the fifties or sixties. So.




2014 (When this movie was made) minus 60 means Catelyn was born around 1954. That means if mom and dad were born around the turn of the century (let’s say 1912), they would have to be 42 when Catelyn was born. Okay. That is feasible…




Except they wouldn’t be wearing period clothing in 1954. They’d look less like this:



And more like this:




But if you’re still not convinced, there’s the matter of there being ether in the house.



Okay, so dig this, in trying to control her bad dreams, Jessica reads that to engage in lucid dreaming, one should take a sedative and go back to sleep after said dream. She says okay. Looks around the house, finds a bottle of ether and breathes that in for the desired effect.



For all you youngsters out there that don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, ether was a powerful sedative that doctors used to use for surgical procedures and was sometimes used in homes as a cleaning solvent...in the early 19th century.




The thing about ether is that it’s highly flammable and highly addictive. For that reason, they had to pass laws preventing people from just getting some at the corner store...like in the 20s. So that begs the question, WHY IS THERE ETHER IN THE HOUSE IN 2014?? And HOW IS THERE ETHER IN THE HOUSE 91 YEARS AFTER IT WAS MADE ILLEGAL?



And most importantly, WHY WAS THAT JESSICA’S ONLY OPTION TO GO BACK TO SLEEP? Mom didn’t have any chamomile tea or warm milk or a Xanax or medicinal grade weed or Ambien or Unisom or something? You mean to tell me that a HIGHLY FLAMMABLE AND ADDICTIVE SUBSTANCE WAS THE ONLY OPTION AVAILABLE? DOES MOM USE RUBBING ALCOHOL IN HER RUM CAKE WHEN SHE RUNS OUT OF RUM??




Yeah, so, I’ll bet you think I’m going to raspberry this one, huh?




I’m not. I’m not giving it a jewel either though. It wasn’t good. It was weird and disorienting and if you took away all the cool images, you’re left with this big mess of a plot...but if you watch it with the sound off and listen to Nine Inch Nails or Gary Numan, you’ll be sufficiently entertained. In fact, try watching it with Pink Floyd's The Wall and see what happens.

I’m going to give this one an “I Think I’ve Seen This Movie at the Goth Club” instead.




Next week...we’ll be seeing a surprise movie! A surprise to all of us because I didn’t have time to get out to the library this weekend.

See you next time!

  --O~
      *

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