The Corridor

2010
Directed by Evan Kelly

I wanted this movie to be so much more than it was. It started out so promising: Tyler (Stephen Chambers) calls his four friends out to the woods to hold a wake for his mother. Oh, and Tyler is probably crazy. The last time they were all together, Tyler stabbed half the group and probably murdered his mom, so they’re understandably a little edgy. Everyone else seems to be bringing their own issues along, too. There’s Everett (James Gilbert), the alcoholic with anger issues. There’s unfortunately balding Bobcat (Matthew Amyotte), who for some unknown reason absolutely hates Jim (Glen Matthews), who is hiding the fact that he’s infertile from his wife, who is trying to conceive. Finally, we’ve got Chris (David Patrick Flemming), Tyler’s former bestie who’s feeling a bit estranged because the last time they met he got a frickin knife through the hand.

There’s already plenty of interest in the potential exploration of these strained relationships. The cabin is stuffed to the rafters with tension, anger, and outright hostility, and that’s well before the eponymous corridor, a mysterious, shimmering rectangle of space out in the woods, even makes an appearance. Little things like Everett spiking Tyler’s drink even though Tyler warned him that his meds don’t play well with alcohol, or Chris’s hand injury screwing up his guitar playing, or Bobcat obsessively rewatching his glory days of high school football on VHS. Uncomfortable moments that underline just how far everyone has drifted apart. Later in the movie, I get the feeling that the corridor may have started this murder party, but it’s only exacerbating problems that already exist.

Speaking of the corridor, what the hell is up with that? It’s a mysterious, invisible box out by the radio tower that defies all reason. The weather’s different in there, sound carries further than it should, and it causes machinery to fail. But while I do enjoy having enough mystery in a story to allow for speculation, I wish the corridor had been a bit more fleshed out. We know it is lengthening, and causes people to get really creatively violent. But why? What’s the point? It seems to be just an excuse to add lots of violence to the story.

One endpoint of the corridor is at the radio tower (a location that seems to have some kind of significance that’s never fleshed out). It’s where Tyler goes to scatter his mother’s ashes, and it’s near where the corridor spawns, but why is it important? I get the feeling that the tower itself is meant to signify something, but I don’t know what.

The beginning and end of this movie are the delicious pieces of bread surrounding a disappointing sandwich. The beginning, from the chaotic opening up to the corridor beginning to exert its influence, is great. So is the very end, when the corridor collapses back onto itself. But I’m really not keen on the whole mysterious forces making people do very bad things angle in this movie (strange because, generally, it’s not something I have trouble with. See YELLOWBRICKROAD as a more successful example of this type of film). I would have liked to see more of these characters coming to terms with what happened at the beginning.

The corridor itself isn’t that important. It’s just there to serve as a catalyst for all the problems these characters have with one another. We don’t really get any idea of what it is, or what its aims are. (Is it meant to sow chaos and death, or are those just unfortunate byproducts? Are its effects, as in Sphere, a side effect of human brains not being able to handle the otherworldly stuff being thrown at them?) All of this mystery detracts from the estrangement and discomfort at the heart of the story. Without all the corridor stuff, this movie could have worked very well as an indie drama.

Chris serves as the point of view for much of the movie, and it works. He has a lot of trouble with his hand, at first having trouble communicating in sign language and then failing at playing the guitar. He’s also less inclined than the others to participate in their reindeer games, so he’s a pretty sympathetic guy. And I get the feeling he’s just as baffled about everything as the viewer. His issues in the movie stem less from his own faults than from his trying to reconcile with Tyler after Tyler’s psychotic break. At the same time, Chris is the odd man out, the only one without a dark secret or huge personality issue.

One thing I’ve learned from starting this blog is that I really don’t enjoy writing about movies that I didn’t enjoy watching. This is one of those movies. I’ve been working on this movie since basically after my last review was published. I’m done.

Pontypool

2008
Directed by Bruce McDonald

Not all Netflix is created equal. For example, we do most of our Netflix streaming through the PlayStation 3, and the interface has gone through lots of changes, some better than others. One of the best has been Netflix Max, a virtual game show personality from the makers of You Don’t Know Jack who uses your ratings and viewing preferences to suggest new movies to watch. The PS3 was Max’s test audience, although he is now available on multiple interfaces. Hopefully, every version of Netflix will eventually feature Max, because it’s pretty fun. I’m not sure how Max knows, exactly, but he’s been getting awfully good at predicting what I’ll like. This time, he spat out a title that was mysterious yet intriguing: Pontypool.  What started out as a late-night “Why not?” impulse watch turned out to be one of the best horror films I’ve seen in years.

Pontypool is a claustrophobic, tense twist on the zombie apocalypse movie. Borrowing from classic War of the Worlds-style radio drama, it features only three core characters: abrasive radio host Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his long-suffering producer Sydney (Lisa Houle), and their assistant Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly). As everyone in town succumbs to a mysterious infection, this small-time radio station receives only confusing, secondhand information from intermittent reports. Updates from Ken Loney (Rick Roberts), their traffic reporter, start out with a mob sighting, but it quickly becomes apparent that the townsfolk are suffering from some kind of frenzy-inducing disease. These catastrophic events are revealed to the characters and viewer at the same time–there are no changes in point of view, no changes in setting. You’re right there with Mazzy and friends as they wait in fear and confusion for more news from outside.

The setting of the film really works to create a feeling of unease that lingered long after I finished watching. Nearly the entire movie takes place in one building, and most of that in one room. Outside, it is snowing heavily.  From the time Mazzy is driving to work in the dark to the time the credits roll, we are enveloped in a sense of gloom and isolation.

One of the best and most genuinely frightening scenes takes place after on-the-scene contact Ken Loney has taken shelter in a silo after fleeing from the crazed hordes. He’s alone, in the dark, with one of the wounded infected (called Conversationalists) babbling in an eerie voice.  But there’s more to it than that: It sounds as though a baby is crying from somewhere inside the teenage boy. For me, some of the most effective horror comes from the use of blank space, which is frightening precisely because you can’t see what’s coming, or if anything’s coming at all. Scenes like this take that up to eleven–you’re hanging onto the phone with the characters, unable to hide from whatever awful thing is about to happen. If this were a movie with ghosts leaping out of mirrors and dark corridors, I could hide under the blanket when things got tense. But because the action in Pontypool is heard but not seen, I have no way to escape.

Late in the game, Dr. Mendez (Hrant Alianak) turns up to provide a spot of exposition. He explains the nature of the disease, and is just in time to witness Laurel-Ann succumb to the illness and her subsequent gruesome attempts to reach the rest of the group. Luckily, the infection is spread through and seeks out spoken words, and the group is able to barricade themselves inside a soundproofed recording booth. Unluckily, the nature of the disease means that it can be transmitted to anyone at any time–all it takes is the wrong word.

Pontypool’s take on zombies is an unusual one. Though it takes after movies like 28 Days Later in having zombification caused by a virus, the infection in this case is not physical (and according to the filmmakers, does not create zombies at all–even if the victims act that way). Infection is spread by language–specifically English–and often through simple or sentimental phrases such as “honey.” The idea that you can become infected simply by talking to someone is truly scary because, while transmission via virus means there’s something other responsible, language is something completely and essentially human. Language is everywhere around us, all the time. Without it we’re basically zombies anyway, or at least mindless animals. You can set up a quarantine to contain a virus, but how do you quarantine language?

There is no happy ending for Pontypool. It’s pretty clear that none of the characters are coming out of this alive, and while there was a pretty rapid (and overly aggressive) government response to the situation, who knows if they’ll be able to contain the disease? The unrelenting grimness serves to reinforce the sense of unease and melancholy (not to mention outright fear) that’s been building throughout the whole film. It’s a harsh move to end without any hope for the viewer, but it elevates the film from something that’s over and done with after watching, to something that lingers in the mind.

YELLOWBRICKROAD

2010
Directed by Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton

Way back in 1940, the small town of Friar, NH, mysteriously set out upon a mass exodus into the woods and never returned. 70 years later, records of the incident have finally become declassified. A ragtag team of explorers sets off to follow their trail to find out what happened. The team is led by Teddy (Michael Laurino) and Melissa (Anessa Ramsey), who are hoping to write a book about their experience. They bring their psychologist friend Walter (Alex Draper), who will be conducting psychological tests on the group over the course of the expedition. Also along for the ride are Daryl and Erin (Clark and Cassidy Freeman), the cartographers; Cy (Sam Elmore) the forestry expert; Jill (Tara Giordano) the intern; and Liv, a local who knows where the trail starts and may have other secrets as well. Following proper horror convention, once the group starts to get deep into the woods, things begin to go very wrong.

As you might expect from the title, this movie contains some references to The Wizard of Oz. I liked that the references weren’t heavy-handed, though. There’s the eponymous trail, a field with red flowers that may or may not have been poppies, and one spooky-ass scarecrow. There’s also the theme of needing to travel further into the woods in order to get home. And early in the movie, Liv shows Teddy a film reel of The Wizard of Oz, which has been completely worn out by the townspeople’s desperate attempt to escape their situation through cinema.

One admirable thing about the movie is the way it uses its soundtrack. Music drives the movie, instead of merely providing background or a cue for a jump scare. Once the group starts hearing old-timey music in the woods, it becomes an antagonistic force that slowly begins to drive the team mad. The group theorizes that the music is coming from a town that the original group founded at the end of the trail, but that doesn’t explain how excruciatingly loud it is, or how it seems to stop and start at odd intervals. Along with the music, there are all kinds of other strange occurrences. Their GPS shows their location as being in places as far away as Guam and Italy. The cartographers take different measurements moving toward the music than away from it, marking down numbers that make sense while they’re traveling but become useless otherwise. And Daryl forms a murderously strong attachment to an old hat.

Daryl is one of the first to exhibit signs of mental breakdown, and acts as a bookend to the group’s descent into madness.  He’s the first one in and the last one out. Everyone goes crazy in their own special way. Walter’s psychological tests start out with nobody taking them seriously, since they’re very easy and a little weird: speaking in gibberish, counting in prime numbers, describing the taste associated with the color red. But then as time goes on, they become more earnest about solving the tests.  Their frustration as they struggle is pretty disturbing. The actors are really good at showing the gradual breakdown, especially with Liv’s dogged determination to recite the alphabet backwards.

I won’t spoil the later parts of the movie, but things get pretty creepy, in a Lynchian sort of way. There’s a particular scene where Melissa has just finished an emotional walkie talkie call to Teddy when she hears a voice coming from a small cave behind her. “Melissa, I want you to know that I’m here. In the cave. Behind you.” Though the conversation itself is very calm and almost resigned, this scene really had me on the edge of my seat. The blackness of the cave leads me to expect something frightening to pop out at any moment. And given that the characters in the movie have been experiencing a lethal psychological meltdown, it’s not unreasonable to expect some hideous cave monster to pop out a la The Descent. It’s only Daryl, though: an entirely human sort of monster.

It’s a coincidence that I watched this after Twin Peaks, because the Lynchian adjective applies to pretty much the remainder of the movie, right through to the short-tempered usher in a theater that may or may not exist. Maybe watching Twin Peaks beforehand just made me more attuned to the more surreal elements of the movie, though. Either way, despite an ending that didn’t really do it for me, there’s enough that’s positive, or at least interesting, about the movie to make it worth seeing. And there’s a moral, too:  Be happy with your situation. Don’t go into the woods.