13 Hours Heads Heritage of Horror season on Horror Channel

British Filmmaker, Jonathan Glendening's low budget chiller, 13 HOURS hits the Horror Channel next month and it's well worth looking out for.  It's an effective little werewolf movie which espouses the usual trappings of the sub-genre to good effect.  It takes a few unexpected turns and does something a bit more interesting with the whole werewolf sub-genre than I expected.  I'm quite a fan of 'old dark house' style movies and there's some nice elements of that here.  It stars Gemma Atkinson, Tom Felton, Isabella Calthorpe and Simon MacCorkindale.

The film screens on March 16th and is part of the Channel's HERITAGE of HORROR season celebrating the past and present of British Horror.  As a lover of all things British horror related this is a damn good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Also on the bill is the influential 1973 shocker, DEATH LINE starring Donal Pleasance screening on March 9th.  This is continued by the classic 1971 film BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW (March 23rd).  The season finishes with Reg Traviss' psychological thriller, PSYCHOSIS (2010) which I must confess I know very little about but it does star Charisma Carpenter (of BUFFY and ANGEL fame) which certainly gets my interest.

Jennet Humfrye - The Total Bastard Database

The TBDB is the Net's biggest, best and most downright demented guide to horror cinema's worst villains, madmen, monsters, maniacs, cannibals, creeps, killers, beasts and, well... bastards.

SPOILERS!!!!

JENNET HUMFRYE

AKA: 

Liz White

WAS A BASTARD IN:  

The Woman in Black (2012)

SO, WHO THE HELL IS SHE?

Jennet Humfrye was a bit weird even when she was alive.  Maybe it was partly due to living in an incredibly gloomy house surrounded by a vast and lethally dangerous swamp, perpetually surrounded by a thick sea mist and only accessible by one road at certain times of the day as the rest of the time the tide completely cuts it off from the mainland.  Absolutely nothing weird about that.  Her favourite pastimes seemed to be staring out of windows looking scary and writing really angry messages on walls in blood and then re-wallpapering over them.  It does seem like a peculiarly unproductive way to spend your time but then again she didn't seem to have much use for time as she proved when she hung herself from a beam in her dead son's nursery (the same room she had so recently redecorated incidentally) which isn't massively surprising when you look at the just-fucking-mental collection of the most horrific toys known to man that were contained there.  A collection which seemed to have a intriguing fascination with monkeys it must be said.  

From there on in, it got even worse as Jennet became the thoroughly unpleasant woman in black - a ghost often seen in the grounds of the not-very-appealingly-but quite-appropriately-actually named, Eel Marsh House.  Though she doesn't really do much directly other than for float about being creepy and screaming now and then, her sheer presence always precedes the violent or horrific death of a child.  

WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY?!?

Like all the best ghosts, Jennet has one hell of a grudge to bear and it's not just because she lives in the most miserable place  imaginable.  Well, when you think about it, it sort of is actually.  You see the poor woman had a son (out of wedlock - the shameful harlot) and was subsequently deemed mentally unstable by her sister, Alice Drablow, and her family who took custody of the boy.  This unsatisfactory situation was rather exacerbated when the carriage carrying Alice and the child inevitably crashed whilst traversing the ludicrously perilous causeway which as you will remember is the only means of accessing the house.  Aside from conversations about disastrously misguided decisions concerning living arrangements, this crash resulted in the boy drowning in the mud and his body never being recovered whilst Alice managed to save herself.  Jennet was distinctly upset (if by upset you mean murderously enraged of course) by this whole situation - a feeling which didn't exactly fade with time.

THAT'S NOT A KNIFE: 

Jennet has the power to manipulate children into taking their own lives.  It's not clear where she picked up this decidedly unsociable ability but I guess it's the same place where you acquire the necessary training for imprinting your own rage onto video tapes and distributing them on the black market.  Maybe there's an evil ghost academy for learning unnecessarily disproportionate and convoluted ways of getting back at people or something.

SO, WHAT'S THE DAMAGE?

While I may not be 100% certain, I think most people can agree that every good film begins with a child's suicide. That's why the third Pirates of the Caribbean film didn't work you see, it only started with a child execution.  That's nowhere near as fun.  Anyway, this film starts of with 3 of them so it must be good.  The fun doesn't stop there either, there's a whole series of child deaths throughout the film by such interesting and painful methods as drinking lye (tasty), self-immolation (toasty) and being hit by a steam train (erm... trainy). 

IT'S A MILLION TO ONE CHANCE BUT IT JUST MIGHT WORK...

Not really being the most stable or forgiving of ghosts, there's not much chance of appealing to its good side.  It doesn't seem to have one.  The best and simplest thing to do I would have thought is to run the fucking fuck away.  Such heroics are not the stuff of major feature films however and the film's protagonist, Kipps, attempts to assuage the malevolent phantom's rage by  somehow swimming to the bottom of a marsh known for sucking people to their deaths, tying a rope around a carriage and swimming back to the top.  Easy.  Still, such impossible tasks are all in the name of a noble cause and this is an attempt to give the corpse of the dead child a proper burial with Jennet herself's corpse.

Not that this did any good, the crazy bitch killed his kid anyway.  And him as it happens.  Then again, if you spend an entire film trying to protect your beloved child, facing down angry ghosts, disgruntled locals and  taking night time dips in the local death swamp you'd think that you'd be able to keep your attention on the damn child for more than 2 fucking minutes when you're finally reunited.  I mean, even without the attentions of a deranged child-murdering apparition to fend off, you'd want to be damn sure that you hold onto your four year old son's hand on a railway platform of all fucking places.  What was he thinking for God's sake?  Oh, yeah, what's the worst that could happen if I leave my infant son to wander around unsupervised in a train station?  Because that's exactly what happened.  Damn idiot deserved to be squashed by a locomotive.

WORDS OF WISDOM:

"I will never forgive." - And she sure didn't.  Crazy bitch.

The Woman in Black - Review

The Woman in Black

Director: James Watkins

Writer:  Jane Goldman, Susan Hill

Starring:  Daniel Radcliffe, Ciaran Hinds

Any review of this film would no doubt be remiss not to make some mention of the casting of its leading man.  It's actually one of the least interesting things about this atmospheric, effective and rather stylish ghost story so probably best to get it out the way sooner rather than later. Yes, it's Daniel Radcliffe's first film since he finished with the magic stuff at Hogwart's, yes he is really a bit too young for the role and yes, despite this he acquits himself very well.  His performance is central to the film and much depends on Radcliffe's believable reactions to the assorted bumpings in the night his character experiences.  Fortunately, he handles this all very well and any memories of annoying whiny wizards are fairly swiftly cast aside.

The film itself is of course an adaptation of Susan Hill's famous novel which has been adapted twice before - once into a hugely (and deservedly) successful stage play, and once into a British television film in 1989.  This version espouses the play's framing device of an older man telling his tale in a theatre as well as making some significant deviations from the  source material.  This incarnation of Arthur Kipps begins the story as a haunted broken man; his wife having died in childbirth 4 years ago and his grief threatening to overwhelm him.  His assignment to settle the paperwork at Eel Marsh House is his last chance before the company fire him. As such the character is given much greater motivation to stay and complete his job where pretty much any other normal person would have taken his neatly trimmed sideburns back to London at the very first hint of a screaming, pale-faced, child-murdering, spectral banshee.  Though his motivation here is much more believable, this alteration to the character does drastically change the arc he goes through.  Rather than a naive and slightly arrogant young man being slowly shown the terrifying truth of the supernatural world culminating in a bleak and truly heart-rending tragedy, here we have a grieving, broken man struggling to appease the supernatural forces he pretty much suspected existed anyway.  To my mind at least, this damages the emotional core of the story and makes the character much less easy to empathise with.  I won't ruin the film's ending for you but it could never rival the sheer exhausted anguish of the novel's final line.

All this is not to say that this film doesn't work.  It does.  Sometimes it works very well indeed.  The set design and locations used are perfect.  They create exactly the right atmosphere of brooding dread and oozing menace that a story like this requires.  The set dressing is also particularly inspired with some of the most ghastly and downright terrifying children's toys ever conceived used to great effect.  The maraca-shaking monkey was bad enough but the awful, awful rabbit thing still brings me out in a cold sweat.  As for the weird clown toy with the sort of demented toothy smile and sticking out tongue - forget about it.  The scares don't all come from inexplicably unsettling playthings however.  There are plenty of genuinely unsettling  moments in The Woman in Black and even a few outright blood-chilling ones.  There is a little too much emphasis on jump scares in the first half but in honesty the film does benefit from them as so much of the film is a slow build.  Once the hauntings and ghost-related mayhem really kicks off in earnest there is more than enough pay off to make up for the occasional fake out or two earlier on in the film.  The best of these are the subtly spine-chilling visual scares such as something indistinct moving in the background or the realisation that something is suddenly present.  The sight of the woman in black lurking in the corner in a flashback scene is one of the most powerful in the film to my mind and so much more enduring than the cheap but fun 'sudden scream' gags.

It is probably unfair to compare very different art forms even when reviewing a straight adaptation.  The question, really is whether this stands up as a film in its own right and the answer to this is, for the greater part, a resounding yes.  It is a scary, old-fashioned ghost story with enough of the contemporary about it to make it work for a modern audience.  It takes itself seriously enough to be affecting but is crafted well enough to be fun at the same time.  If this led the way for many more ghost-stories set in dark old houses, well that'd be just fine by me. 

Nefarious Films Update

No reason for this picture - I just like spiders.  And skeletons.

January Update

Hello there good people who read this blog.  Just thought I'd write a quick message explaining what's going on here at Nefarious Films currently.

You may have noticed a bit of a drop off in new articles just lately.  Whilst that hasn't been entirely un-Skyrim related, there has also been a few major changes going on 'behind the scenes' as it were.  Whereas, the site has in the past included writing from regular contributors and some one-off guest writers for the time being I'm stripping it all right back and making it simply my own reviews and features.  We are not pone of the major horror websites and I don't really want to be either.  I'm not here to cover news stories on each and every new horror release or to keep you updated on all the news stories about them.  There's plenty of other sites that do that and quite frankly, I haven't got anything new to add to the mix.

Instead, I'll be concentrating on keeping up a steady supply of reviews, features and new TBDB entries.  There's also some new and exciting developments on the way for Nefarious Productions which is kicking back into gear after a rather sparse year of inactivity.

So, plenty new stuff coming - thanks for reading, please keep doing exactly that.

Inkubus Review

INKUBUS

Director: Glenn Ciano

Writer:  Glenn Ciano, Carl V. Dupre

Starring:

Robert Englund, Joey Fatone, William Forsythe

At an old police station operating with only a bare minimum of officers due to its scheduled demolition the following day, a strange and threatening being casually walks in carrying a severed head and a bloody great big knife.  It's a great set-up  with great potential for a lot of gruesome fun which this low-budget little production only narrowly misses out on delivering.

The villain here is the eponymous Inkubus (played by Robert Englund), a demon with a taste for murder and mutilation and the slight problem that his 100 year tenure in his current body is coming to an end and he needs to find a new human shell to inhabit.  In truth, it is the sort of role that Englund can play in his sleep and while it certainly won't be earning him any originality awards it is an effective enough performance.  Englund imbues the character with the requisite malevolent charm and a playful malice which suggests that despite the fact that this demon has been doing this a long long time, he still really enjoys it.  Much the same could no doubt be said of Robert Englund himself.

Of course, every homicidal demon with a penchant for chopping people into pieces needs some good guys to terrorise and these come in the form of (amongst others) Joey Fatone and William Forsyth.  Fatone does a surprisingly good job and Forsyth is his usual impressive performance though he is not given enough to work with here to really let rip.  That's the nature of his character however to be fair and he plays it well.  The villains in horror movies are usually the most interesting characters  by definition and this film is no exception though there is certainly a good amount of backstory and depth to these characters.

The overall plot is a bit hokey but serviceable enough and  certainly deserves kudos for delivering something more interesting than the standard 'monster kills everybody' fare.  The grudge match that plays out between the lead character and Inkubus works quite well even if it is a little obtuse at times.

This isn't an enormously gory film with the exception of a couple of very memorable scenes.  One in particular, involving a macabre inversion of the old magician's trick of sawing a lady in half is especially well staged and conceived.  In fact it provides one of the movie's most arresting scenes and is played with a really creepy nonchalance by Englund.  It would have been great to see and, most crucially, feel more of this throughout the film but a lot of the time it just doesn't quite hit the heights you are willing it to.

Inkubus is no game-changer but it is a quiet little piece of nastiness which introduces a surprisingly detailed and developed new villain along with a pleasingly bleak and nihilistic tone and feel which is, at least to this reviewer, oddly refreshing.

INKUBUS, will be released by Trintiy X on DVD in the UK, Monday Feb 13, 2012.