Horror comes home

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This article was published 27/10/2011 (5430 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It is significant that Winnipeg makeup artist Bruce Morrow stars in the documentary extras of two different DVDs released this week.

In the movie Faces in the Crowd, Morrow reveals the technical aspects of making a guy look as if he’s had his fingers shot off. Over on the DVD extras of Wrong Turn 4, Morrow is front and centre in sequences depicting far more disgusting mayhem, including one man being pulled limb from limb by an automatic door-opener and another sequence in which a hapless victim watches as bits of his flesh are cut off and dipped into a boiling fondue.

You may think movies along these lines are a sign of an impending apocalypse. But more likely, it’s a sign that Manitoba has become something of a hotbed for genre movies in the last couple of years.

We’ve had our share of horror cheapies shot here, such as Population 436, The Plague and a pair of direct-to-video Wishmaster movies. But in the past couple of years, Manitoba saw production of a rash of genre movies including Mother’s Day, Darren (Saw) Bousman’s as-yet-unreleased gruesome hostage thriller; The Divide, the Xavier Gens-directed apocalyptic thriller set for a theatrical release in January; Faces in the Crowd, starring genre specialist Milla (Resident Evil) Jovovich; and Father’s Day, a Troma-produced horror-comedy from the guys at local film collective Astron-6.

In February of 2011, Wrong Turn 4, an inbred-mutant-cannibal franchise shot in a disused Brandon mental facility.

Halloween week sees the DVD release of two of those thrillers. Let’s take a closer look… if you dare.

 

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings

• Starring Jennifer Pudavick and Sean Skene
• 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
• R
• Two stars out of five

 

“They’ve probably turned Porter into Porterhouse by now.”

— Kyle (Victor Zinck) in Wrong Turn 4

 

The first Wrong Turn movie, made in 2003, was a high-tech variant of the low-fi killer-cannibal genre begun by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with roughly the same premise: attractive young people find themselves at the mercy of an inbred, backwoods clan of killers. Produced by visual effects wiz Stan Winston, the movie brought style and a grisly veracity to the depraved carnage.

The two subsequent sequels stayed true to the direct-to-DVD dictum wherein, as the numbers get higher, the quality is diminished.

At least Wrong Turn 4 reverses that trend. It is not as bad as the shot-in-Bulgaria Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead, which saw the crazed Three Finger hacking his way through the usual slasher fodder as well as a busload of escaped convicts.

Like No. 3, the series prequel Bloody Beginnings was directed by Declan O’Brien and the movie pretty much announces its exploitation esthetic in the first few minutes. We see how the juvenile mutant brothers One-Eye, Three-Finger and Saw-Tooth escape from their cell in a remote sanitarium and wreak havoc, including ripping apart the institute’s chief physician (Arne MacPherson) and electrocuting another well-meaning doc (Kristen Harris) in the electroshock therapy room.

This flashback cuts to a double sex scene among a quartet of college students: one hetero couple and one lesbian couple. They’re all getting a little pre-skiing trip nookie before designated Final Girl Kenia (Jennifer Pudavick) good-naturedly orders them to get their clothes on and get in the van.

But their adventure in the wilds of West Virginia sees the students taking the titular erroneous detour and forced to find refuge from a winter storm in that abandoned hospital, where the now-adult trio of Three-Finger (Sean Skene), One-Eye (Daniel Skene) and Saw-Tooth (Scott Johnson) are intent on whittling their numbers in various gory-painful ways.

No question about it, this is crass, quickie horror at its most formulaic. None of the designated victims has much in the way of real personality. The genre requires only that they be attractive, libidinous and stupid enough to think splitting up is a good idea.

But the movie is nevertheless a step up from the truly appalling last entry, mostly due to the fact that the setting — an old, abandoned mental institution — gives the film a creepy atmosphere.

The fact that O’Brien eschews ridiculous digital hoo-haw for more grisly practical effects at least gives the film a modicum of low-fi appeal, along the lines of ’80s horror at its most exploitative.

 

Faces in the Crowd

• Starring Milla Jovovich and Julian McMahon
• E-One Entertainment
• 14A
• Two and a half stars out of five

French-born writer-director Julien Magnat was aiming for a Hitchcock groove with this locally shot suspense thriller about a woman who survives a serial killer’s attack, only to find herself afflicted with an inability to recognize faces — any faces.

After a night out with her friends, school teacher Anna Marchand (Milla Jovovich) walks home and witnesses an attack by a serial killer known as Tearjerk Jack, a slasher who cries over his victims. In evading the razor-wielding loony, she falls off a bridge (in fact, the Provencher Bridge) and suffers a head injury that causes her to wake up with a case of prosopagnosia, a kind of facial dyslexia, in which facial features become unreadable. For Anna, that includes the faces of her friends, her lover, her own father, and, of course, the killer.

That puts a crimp in the investigation by a desperate detective (Julian McMahon). When Tearjerk Jack discover’s Anna’s malady, he engages her in a sick game.

Truthfully, the face blindness might have worked better if director Magnat employed any kind of visual flair. Rather than being Hitchcockian, the film is actually a perfect set-up for a contemporary giallo thriller. In the hands of a ’70s-era Dario Argento or an ’80s-era Brian De Palma, this really could have packed a powerful punch.

Of course, I mention those two directors because they have in common a baroque visual style and a lack of restraint that usually results in potent shocks. (A person betrayed by his or her own senses is especially common material for De Palma, who explored that theme in films such as Sisters, Obsession and Body Double.)

Unfortunately, Magnat’s visual style is strictly TV movie. One murder scene consists of the killer raising a straight razor in the air followed by a shot of blood spattered across the ground. The last time that kind of thing was scary was back in 1957. As for the face-blindness thing, Magnat chooses to portray it simply by casting multiple actors in key roles and dubbing the voices so Anna’s audio matches, even if her video does not. Apart from missing an opportunity for some cool visual hijinks, this choice results in making the movie seem like a badly dubbed foreign film.

If Magnat was going for baroque, it might have excused the film’s two central performances from Jovovich and Julian McMahon, who plays the tough police detective out to capture the killer. Both are pitched in a range just shy of hysteria.

Faces in the Crowd is a textbook example of a good idea indifferently executed.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca