Like precious blood, I’ve been absorbing anything Guillermo Del Toro for the past few months. I’ve been reading the Strain trilogy, re-watching Del Toro’s movies, and eagerly await his upcoming book of artwork and story notes. Revisiting the Del Toro library I watched The Devil’s Backbone for the first time in almost seven years and wow, a film like that only comes once in a blue moon. Where it may not match the whimsy and magic of Pan’s Labyrinth, its emotional core and symbolic imagery may make it Del Toro’s most personal film.

The film is set in Spain, 1939, during the final year of the Spanish Civil War. Fernando Tielve plays Carlos, a young boy who’s been left behind at a reclusive home for orphans. The orphanage is run by Casares (Federico Luppi – a favorite of Del Toro’s) and Carmen (Marisa Paredes), who are aligned with the Republican Loyalists, and are hiding gold for the Republican Treasury. This creates tension between Casares/Carmen and Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), the orphanage’s greed-driven groundskeeper who wants nothing more than to take the gold. Meanwhile, Carlos must not only adjust to his harsh peers but to a mysterious ghost of a former orphan named Santi, who now haunts the grounds. What happened to Santi? To what heights will Jacinto reach to claim the gold? The stakes are high and always getting higher.

Immediately, The Devil’s Backbone strikes you with its powerful imagery. Many symbols in the film parallel to the idea of being stuck in limbo. A large bomb that was dropped during the war sits center stage on the orphanage grounds, yet has never exploded. There’s a countertop in Casares’ office adorned by fetuses in jars (born with a spinal condition called: The Devil’s Backbone) that represent life that got lost along the way. Even Santi represents a moment of pain forever immortalized as a sorrowful spirit. The film is as touching as it is tragic.

A great deal of Del Toro’s influence comes from his own background as a lapsed Catholic. The fears that we carry forever due to the struggles of life. Much in the way of its sister work, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone Shows the hardship of a troubled childhood but also the spirit to overcome that hardship. It gives me nightmares in my mind and in my heart. A must see!

AAAAHHH!!!

It’s always tiring when a horror franchise decides to milk the same character up to the point of double-digit sequels. Does Freddy Krueger need to kill teenagers over the course of three decades? Is it really worth the effort to send Jason Vorhees or Leprechaun to space? That’s why it’s always refreshing when someone decides to make a new monster with a new mythology. Jeepers Creepers has received mixed opinions for mixed reasons. It doesn’t help that it was helmed by the highly controversial Victor Salva (more on that later), but you have to give it props for being original. “The Creeper” can hang with the baddest of the bad, from Leatherface to Michael Myers… Do I smell a spinoff?

Trish (Gina Philips) and her older brother Darry (Justin Long) are driving home for spring break through the Florida countryside. What appears to be a seemingly mundane road trip is soon interrupted by a mysterious driver that tries to the run the siblings off the road. Letting the vehicle pass, Trish and Darry seem to be in the clear, whoo, that could’ve been bad. Except that later they see the same truck pulled off near a shack where a man in black is chucking a wrapped body into a large sewer pipe. Channeling their inner Scooby Doo, Trish and Darry investigate only to a find hundreds of bodies sewn together in a chapel, missing certain parts. They flee the scene and ask around town until they meet a woman named Jezelle (Patricia Belcher) who knows the secret. It turns out that this mysterious driver is an immortal creature dubbed: “The Creeper”, who every twenty-third spring hunts for twenty-three days. It does this in order to harvest organs so that it can continue to survive. Ay yi yi!

The shocker moments are big and the creeper is a uniquely creepy adversary. Sadly, there’s an even creepier story behind the filmmaker. Victor Salva began his career producing the 1986 low budget horror film Something in the Basement which attracted the attention of Francis Ford Coppola. In turn, Coppola funded Salva’s next film Clownhouse (1989). The controversy comes in when it was discovered that Salva had sex with one of his actors, a 12 year old boy. Salva pled guilty and served 15 months in prison. You think that would kill a director’s career but with persistence and the help of Coppola, Salva found his way back in to the industry. Yuck, if there was ever a case of trying to separate the artist from their art. I still like the film but it’s not easy to say that. It’s disturbing sometimes how much more terrifying the real world can be than make believe.

When will PC’s and Macs get along?

You probably remember The Others best from when it was parodied in the immortal classic Scary Movie 3, where a creepy little girl is revealed to be Michael Jackson. How do those films manage to stay so timely? Anyways, The Others is your typical “Spooky ghost/spooky kid story” but with a few twists and turns. What intrigued me the most was the knowledge that this film had a twist ending. As a horror fan, it wasn’t easy avoiding that twist ending for so many years. Was it worth the wait? Sure, why not?

Set in 1945 on the island of Jersey (A British Crown dependency off the coast of Normandy), The Others is about Grace Stewart (Nicole Kidman), a deeply religious woman caring for her two children in a remote country house, while her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston) is at war. Grace’s children suffer from a rare disease, xeroderma pigmentosa, characterized by an extreme sensitivity to sunlight. Thus, Grace must take special care in running the house. A trio of new servants arrive; Bertha, a nanny (Fionnula Flanagan), an elderly gardner named Tuttle (Erick Sykes), and a young mute Lydia (Elaine Cassidy) and not long after strange phenomena begins around the house.

The Others goes for a less is more approach, which I can appreciate. The children make contact with some kind of “other” entity but it’s never flat out shown, just suggested. Additional tension comes from Grace and the strict quality in which she dishes out mom justice. I was just as scared of her as anything else and with good cause. When we’re not being unnerved my Grace’s acidity, were being unnerved by the creaks and squeaks of the old country house. faint sobs echo, things appear to move when they shouldn’t be moving, classic.

[toggle title_open=”Major Spoilers” title_closed=”Major Spoilers” hide=”yes” border=”yes” style=”default” excerpt_length=”0″ read_more_text=”Read More” read_less_text=”Read Less” include_excerpt_html=”no”]Chances are anyone who has wants to see The Others has already seen it so here’s how it ends: They’re all dead. Everybody in the movie is already dead and “The Others” are the current not-dead individuals living in the house. I couldn’t say that I didn’t see it coming but it’s a clever twist on a tired formula. Basically, Grace was once so crazy that she smothered both her children with a pillow and then shot herself. She thought it was all a hallucination or a dream, guess again. The servants are former employees of the house many years ago and Grace’s husband (who returns to the house for a brief time) died in the war. Kind of a downer but it’s a the best part of the whole movie.

Apart from the twist ending, The Others is fairly standard. Though I do appreciate it going for atmosphere over gore or cheap scares. After this writer/director Alejandro Amenabar went on to direct the highly acclaimed The Sea Inside and Nicole Kidman went on to marry Keith Urban. So it almost worked out for everybody in the end.

Session 9 is not an amazing movie, the budget is low, it has no stars (unless you consider Josh Lucas and a pre-CSI Miami David Caruso stars), and yet it always manages to make its way into the conversation of “Best Horror Films of the 2000s”. It has a cult following, and although I don’t consider myself a member of that cult I do recognize and appreciate the storytelling of that cult. Session 9 turns a little into a lot, which is admirable when you consider how bloated this genre really is.

Session 9 follows an asbestos crew, including: Josh Lucas, David Caruso and Peter Mullan (who often steals the show) as they begin work restoring an abandoned insane asylum (filmed at a real insane asylum). They find a series of tapes from a former patient with multiple personalities, most notably the mysterious Simon who does not appear until Session 9. Soon enough, crew members disappear, we descend into the mysteries of a former patient, and characters begin to question their own sanity. It’s a slow burn with subtle scares that drip with a decrepitly spooky atmosphere.

Session 9 is directed by Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Transsiberian) who despite his blurry wikipedia profile pic is worth talking about in the realm of indie filmmaking. Though he tends to gravitate towards the thriller genre, I wouldn’t define him by that. What I’ve enjoyed in Anderson films like The Machinist or the underrated Vanishing on 7th Street is his skill to develop relatable characters in fantastic situations without the story descending into melodrama. Spectacle never takes precedent over the characters in Anderson’s film (at least his good ones) which keeps the audience focused and intrigued. Character issues outside the story are just as much at the forefront as supernatural phenomena. How one character is dealing with a romantic relationship outside of work, or a new baby. It’s these attempts to breathe life into the characters that makes everything else that more significant.

It’s hard to talk about Session 9 without spoiling anything but it’s worth seeing. Sometimes we get more questions then answers which can make the story confusing but it’s an interesting story nonetheless. Once again, I have to applaud Peter Mullan’s performance, he really should get more significant roles. Plus it’s got Josh Lucas and he’s only kind of an asshole.

It’s shoot-yourself-in-the-head chic!

Final Destination movies are the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. The combination of sexy, dumb teenagers and over-the-top executions makes for one helluva gory good time. What sets apart Final Destination is the increasingly clever ways in which teens are “grounded”. It’s like watching someone play Mousetrap but instead of a cage coming down it’s fifty knives or a rogue semi. Add in that there is no face to the mayhem, just a force. These movies may adhere to the same formula over and over again but it’s a good formula. How many other movies have Stifler being decapitated by train shrapnel? Not nearly enough.

Final Destination stars 90s teen staple Devon Sawa as Alex Browning, who right before boarding a plane on a class trip to France receives a dark premonition. Everyone on the plane will die! His panicking leads to several students and a teacher being escorted off the plane and then what fucking happens? Everyone gets exploded. Apparently, this pisses of Death something fierce, leading to each survivor being killed in a horrendous Rube Goldberg-like fashion. Can 90s teen heartthrob Devon Sawa continue to cheat death? Or will he reach his “Final Destination!”

Final Destination began life interestingly enough as a pitch by writer Jeffrey Reddick for The X-Files. Inspired by the 1996 TWA Flight 800 crash, Reddick wrote a 14-page script entitled “Flight 180”. Though series creator Chris Carter turned it down it was taken under the wing of X-Files’ writers James Wong and Glen Morgan. Wong and Morgan turned the script into a feature and with Wong at the helm made the first in a series of supernatural, gore-filled, teen murder-ramas.

The characters in these movies are dumb. They aren’t any smarter or less cliche than any other teens in your typical horror movie, which is I like these movies so much, everyone stupid dies. Final Destination is a series where you root for the bad guy, or bad force anyways. Story is irrelevant as long as we get to see plenty of “Smashy, smash, gut, guts!” Which I believe is actual dialogue from the film. Final Destination has four sequels and surprisingly, this one is starting to look like the worst. With improving effects this is a series that is only as good as its kills and each time they’ve upped the ante. It’s still my dream to marathon all these films… Or is it my premonition?

Devon Sawa has a vision: His career is over.