Evil Dead (2013)

If you ever wondered what the Evil Dead movies might have been like without the central wit and charisma of their star Bruce Campbell, the answer now awaits you at a theater near you. The new Evil Dead remake certainly doesn’t skimp on the gore; tons of the stuff spatter, pool, mist, spurt, bead up and roll off. Much has also been made of the majority of the effects being realized “practically” — that is, with old-school latex and Karo syrup, not computer-generated flesh and blood. Such things, I suppose, are to be honored in this era of hermetically-sealed fantasy film, when you know that most of what you see is not only fake but doesn’t exist in real space. The drenched and sticky actors in Evil Dead would no doubt tell you it all existed in real space, all right.

What’s missing, first and foremost, is the incomparable real-guy presence of Bruce Campbell, who in the original three Evil Dead films directed by Sam Raimi came close to defining himself as the Buster Keaton of splatstick. Raimi never tired of tormenting Campbell by making him do one grotesque, painful thing after another, because Raimi knew that Campbell, at least in his youthful prime, was fun to watch being bashed around — not because we disliked him but because he looked as though he could shrug it off. In the new Evil Dead, there is no Campbell analogue, no character named Ash; the closest the film comes is a frail-looking recovering addict named Mia (Jane Levy), who spends a good chunk of the movie locked in the basement of a cabin, possessed by a demon who makes her do things like split her tongue in half with a knife. Despite this, later on, after the demon has vacated her, she can speak perfectly well.

The plot is similar. Five college-age people come to a cabin in the woods. I use those last four words advisedly, because if you have seen last year’s The Cabin in the Woods, this film will seem kind of late to the party. The trip to the cabin, it seems, is a last-ditch effort of sorts to rehab Mia. Accompanying her is her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), his girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore), and her friends Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) and Olivia (Jessica Lucas), a registered nurse. Olivia apparently has lots of detox meds and tranquilizers to use on Mia, leading me to imagine a scene back at the hospital where a pharmacist yells “What happened to all our detox meds and tranquilizers?”

A mysterious book is discovered in the basement. Eric, being a horror-movie character and therefore staggeringly stupid, reads aloud from the book and unleashes demons, one of which promptly infests Mia, who in turn corrupts Olivia, and we’re off to the races. The movie hits the beats that Evil Dead fans will expect and perhaps be bored by. A character’s hand is possessed, requiring its removal by way of an electric carving knife. A nail gun, a shotgun and a chainsaw all get a bow on stage. What’s missing, to go further, is not only Campbell but the spirit of play and prankishness that he represented. The new director, Fede Alvarez, is no Sam Raimi, and that’s not to say he’s a bad filmmaker; he could be a fine one, given the right material. But Raimi made these films with energy and gutbucket humor, whereas Alvarez goes about his work grimly, as though the Evil Dead films were works of the utmost gravity.

Yes, yes, this is probably supposed to be a new re-imagining of Evil Dead, not slavishly following in Raimi’s footsteps. I would just as soon see Alvarez directing something fresh, and I would rather not see Raimi, Campbell and co-producer Rob Tapert lending their imprimatur to this remake as producers, thus smudging their own names and leaving a bad aftertaste on the original franchise. The main disappointment of the new Evil Dead is that it simply isn’t very fun. The original films, particularly the two sequels, were essentially comedies, and Evil Dead II achieved a level of grisly pop art. The new film seems as though it might be interesting for a while, using demonic possession as a metaphor for drug addiction (and nobody believing the hysterical and withdrawal-scourged Mia when she starts seeing the evil dead), but soon that gets buried in arterial spray and close-ups of someone pulling a hypodermic needle out of his face. To top it off, this thing is too slick. It’s beautifully lighted, and it cost $17 million and looks it. The first Evil Dead cost about $400,000, and Raimi had to invent camera rigs to get some of the insane shots he wanted. No invention here.

The Last Exorcism Part II

Not to quote myself, but when I wrote about The Last Exorcism a few years back I led with “Exorcism movies shouldn’t be rated PG-13, because demons shouldn’t be rated PG-13.” That goes double for exorcism movies about a demon that’s in love with its host body. The Last Exorcism made a lot of money, and so we now behold The Last Exorcism Part II, which should by rights be nasty and filthy, since it involves a demon trying to seduce a teenage girl into welcoming it inside her forever. Back in the ’70s, the era of drive-ins and wonderfully loose morals, this sort of thing would’ve barnstormed theaters with a hard R rating and scandalized everyone except the steadfast trash-movie fans who cheerfully chugged it down. Instead we get this pallid, waifish film with a safe PG-13, which allows for no nastiness, no filthiness, and one lonely F-bomb. I remember when demon flicks used to be dangerous and shocking. Get off my lawn.

This sequel is a conscious break from the original — it’s not a found-footage movie, but a “real” movie, in which the first film’s possessed victim, Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell), has escaped from the demonic cult idiotically revealed in the original’s climax. Nell goes to stay at a New Orleans halfway house with other wayward girls, and her demon, “Abalam,” is still very much with her. She meets a shy boy (Spencer Treat Clark) at her new job cleaning motel rooms — by the way, we see more footage of Nell vacuuming motel rugs than really deserves to be in a horror movie, unless the filmmakers are exclusively playing to the zuigerphobes in the audience.

You see enough horror movies and you’ve seen the four or five basic ways an unimaginative director tries to scare you, or at least startle you. In some respects film language is still in its infancy, but there are nevertheless many effective ways to disturb, disorient or otherwise freak out an audience, and The Last Exorcism Part II doesn’t come within a country mile of any of them. We get the standard jump scares, the standard looming shadow in the background, the standard weird voices. Ashley Bell is a good actress — she was vivid in the first film — but here she mostly shuffles around as Nell tries to be a Good Girl and can never get anyone to believe that Abalam is messing with her again, at least until the time-honored Magical Negro (Tarra Riggs), complete with a voodoo-woman head wrap, says she can help Nell, recruiting two of the most inept exorcists I’ve seen since The Devil Inside. She also briefly calls on Baron Samedi, evoking unhelpful memories of the far more entertaining 1974 flick Sugar Hill — this movie sure could’ve used a spectral dude in a top hat, grinning and chomping a cigar and bellowing “What is in it for me?” — but, no, the Baron presumably finds Nell boring and stays out of it. Pity.

There’s an interesting idea here — Abalam loves Nell and wants to be with her — but soon enough the idea coughs up blood, points its toes skyward, and is forgotten about. For this conceit to work, we would have to see that Nell is actually, y’know, being seduced, but we just see the standard ooga-booga stuff. A demon that presents as an angel, as a being you don’t want to get rid of, is a lot scarier than a demon that rattles windows, says creepy things, and generally comes off like a pervy stalker. For its other trick, Abalam apparently makes Nell have quite the hot dreams, prompting her to moan and stroke her face. Well, what turns Nell on? What could lure this chaste girl over to the dark side? Um, something, I guess — it’s a PG-13 movie, so we never find out. There’s no tension if Nell doesn’t want what the demon is offering. Haven’t these filmmakers ever heard of the first temptation? A demon will come to you as everything you ever wanted; scaring you away from it is just bad business for a demon.

I have to assume the filmmakers are big fans of the climactic scenes in the first two Paranormal Activity movies wherein nice-looking Katie Featherston went on destructive rampages. Here — spoiler alert — nice-looking Ashley Bell goes on such a rampage, and I would advise you, in a few months, to hit up a Redbox, take home this movie for a dollar, and skip forward to the last few minutes, particularly a shot in which Nell drives merrily around town while stuff on the street — including a fire truck — bursts into flames all around her. Good times. If you don’t want to spend the buck, it’ll probably turn up on YouTube titled “The Best Part of The Last Exorcism Part II.” It’s the best part in more ways than one, since the end credits appear within seconds and we get to go the hell home.

Warm Bodies

A young man in a hoodie shambles aimlessly through an airport. He can’t remember his name, but he thinks it begins with an R. The R may as well stand for Romeo, because he soon finds his Juliet, though he has to eat her boyfriend’s brains first. Warm Bodies is a “zomromcom,” a term inaugurated by 2004’s witty modern classic Shaun of the Dead, and while this film isn’t as funny, it’s more romantic and has some intriguing twists on the zombie theme. R (Nicholas Hoult) is a relatively thoughtful and sensitive zombie — he provides self-deprecating narration, and he collects things that remind him of when he was alive. He stumbles across Julie (Teresa Palmer) when she’s on a run for medicine in the city. He seems taken with her even before he consumes her boyfriend Perry’s gray matter and experiences Perry’s memories of — and feelings for — Julie.

In 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, we were told that zombies eat brains because it alleviates “the pain of being dead.” Warm Bodies pushes that notion further towards an emotional anodyne: eating brains takes a zombie out of his listless existence for a while, like a drug. R and a few other zombies of his acquaintance (including Rob Corddry) may be zombies, and they may kill and eat humans because they have to, but they’re not as far gone yet as another kind of zombie. “Bonies,” these others are called — skeletal ghouls who “gave up” and have become true anti-life monsters. Compared to them, R looks pretty decent, and Julie (who doesn’t know R ate her sweetie’s skull meat) allows R to look after her after he rescues her. Eventually she develops feelings for him, which is unfortunate, because her father (John Malkovich) is the gung-ho leader of a militaristic band of zombie-killing survivalists.

Warm Bodies isn’t a romantic twist on the zombie movie so much as a zombie twist on the romance movie. There’s a nicely fragile rapport between Hoult (who’s delivered on the promise he showed in About a Boy a decade ago) and Palmer (who resembles Kristen Stewart but has more verve and humor). R and Julie look good and feel good together. We’re asked to believe that their love not only slowly heals R but inspires his fellow zombies to do likewise. Mostly we do. We can take or leave the implied message that we must embrace life to avoid being dead — literally, in this case — but R and Julie are a strange enough couple to make the bromide go down easy. The movie also appealingly suggests that if you were a bit of an outcast in life, you’ll manage to resist becoming one of the Bonies — you’ll try to find ways to make death interesting, like piling up snow globes or listening to Guns ‘n Roses.

This is director Jonathan Levine’s second horror-themed film, after his debut, the slasher flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane; some might also count 50/50, with cancer as the remorseless serial killer. Levine’s work here is amiably rumpled, relaxing into the scenes of R playing his old ’80s vinyl records for Julie or haltingly trying to converse with her. The movie doesn’t stand out much in memory — nothing in it really pops — but it’s enjoyable while it lasts. It provides a surprisingly nuanced showcase for Rob Corddry, who is often pretty funny but too often lapses into a cartoon of himself. Here he gives us an amusingly polite zombie, and his first non-conversation with R strikes the tone the movie needs. They could be just two regular guys mumbling at each other at an airport.

Warm Bodies is not anything like the Twilight of zombie movies — for one thing, it doesn’t take itself stupidly seriously enough for that — though some horror fans offended by the softening (and sparkle-fication) of vampires in that series may likewise bristle at this film’s apparent thesis that even if you’re a zombie, all you need is love. Zombies, such people may say, eat people; that’s all. (The villain of the piece, the gun-happy Malkovich character, agrees with them.) Some of us horror fans, though, get tired of the binary us-vs.-them formula and welcome some shading, especially in a subgenre as exhausted lately as the zombie film. When World War Z opens this summer, it’s possible I’ll be looking at some of the zombies slaughtered by the heroes and thinking “Wait, one of them could be R.”

Paranormal Activity 4

The more plot-heavy these Paranormal Activity films get, the less scary they are. I’m a big fan of randomness in horror movies, because horror in real life chills us by its randomness. It’s frightening to think that you could be standing in line at the store and get shot to death for no better reason than that you happened to be there. And it’s frightening to think that a demon might decide to mess with your life for no better reason than that you happen to be there. It’s not all that frightening to think that the demon might pick you out because you’re part of a family that’s had trouble producing a male child, and that you’re destined to be possessed and kill a lot of people and kidnap your sister’s baby son, and blah blah blah on into infinity. But that’s what the Paranormal Activity franchise has become, and the fourth and latest installment follows yet another family terrorized not because a demon just wants to mess with them, but because the same damn demon has moved in across the street.

Unlike the previous entry, which covered the early days of the demonic mischief in 1988, PA4 unfolds in the present day (well, 2011), bringing in such devices as laptop cameras and the Xbox Kinect to help sell the scares, which this time are in sadly short supply. The heroine is teenager Alex (Kathryn Nelson), who lives with her squabbling parents and her adopted younger brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp). Wyatt becomes friends with a strange kid from the neighborhood, Robbie (Brady Allen), whose mother, we’re told, has gone to the hospital for a few days. Alex’s parents take Robbie in — he seems to have no other family, and nobody asks why Child Protective Services don’t step in — and things start getting weird. Robbie toddles around in the dead of night, talking to people who aren’t there. Doors open and close. Alex and her boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) catch a lot of the weirdness on camera, but of course her parents don’t take her seriously.

There’s one neat effect, courtesy of the Xbox Kinect. I didn’t know that the way this videogame system works is by throwing off thousands of tracking dots visible only to an infrared camera in a dark room. The dots then “read” your movements, enabling you to play the games; apparently they also show up on otherwise invisible demons. That’s good for a spooky image or two. But it gets overworked, as do a lot of other tropes; a cat is in the house solely to pop up and startle the audience. Paranormal Activity 4 also feels like the most conventional film in the series. In the other movies, we were forced to stare at length at darkened rooms, waiting nervously for something creepy to happen. There’s really only one scene like that here; the movie feels far too “cutty,” moving from one camera to another, and most of the cameras capture the footage in bright clear color. The eerie inertia and starkness of the past films’ imagery are mostly gone here, and that style is what had set this series apart for me.

I suppose it’s no big surprise that Katie Featherston, the possessed young woman from the first two films, returns here. She’s scariest when acting like a normal smiling mom, but when she’s stalking around quietly and doing evil things we see why it was wise to use Featherston so sparingly as a boogeyman in the other films — she just seems like too amiable a presence to sell diabolical influence. (It’s a little like imagining Jenna Fischer, whom Featherston resembles, as the Bride in Kill Bill.) Katie’s presence muddies the narrative waters: we’re not sure if the child living with her is Hunter, the baby nephew she’d kidnapped, or if Wyatt is actually Hunter. We’re supposed to come back for Paranormal Activity 5 to find out more, probably. I think I’ll stop at four.

Resident Evil: Retribution

It’s a good thing Resident Evil: Retribution recaps the previous four movies at the beginning, because I didn’t remember a goddamn thing about any of them. And a couple years from now, when Resident Evil: Tintinnabulation (or whatever they end up calling it) comes out, I won’t remember a goddamn thing about this one. Not that it matters much; as long as they’re blathering and exploding directly in front of your face, these movies are cheesy fun, if you allow them to be what they are, which is to say, stylized action-apocalypse nonsense with a formidable heroine. With this film, Milla Jovovich beats Sigourney Weaver’s record by one and Kate Beckinsale’s by two — she now boasts the longest-running major franchise anchored by a woman. Scattered golf claps for this, I guess.

Jovovich is her usual surly self as Alice, who must escape from an underwater base used for simulations. She also gets to be maternally protective towards a deaf little girl (Aryana Engineer) who may be a clone of Alice’s daughter in an alternate reality. At one point, the little girl is captured by an enormous creature that deposits her in an egg-like pod. I’d like to give writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s paying homage to Aliens instead of outright ripping it off, though the distinction is so often subtle.

In any event, Alice and the little girl and the rescue team that’s come to help them must get the fuck out of Dodge in two hours, before explosives go off. A lot of creatures, zombies, and agents working for the evil Umbrella Corporation get in their way. The agents include Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory, awful as ever), who’s being controlled by Umbrella’s “Red Queen” computer, and Rain (Michelle Rodriguez), who’s been cloned into two different characters, a merciless assassin and a kinder, gentler woman who seems to know Alice from the alternate reality where she had a daughter. The movie also throws in two characters familiar from the videogames, Ada Wong (Li Bingbing) and Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb). All of these complications seem pointless, because these movies are just delivery systems for action set pieces, some of which are slickly entertaining.

At the climax, the superpowered Rain (who’s injected herself with some sort of parasite) takes on two large men hand to hand, breaking their bones while we get to see it in X-ray-vision, and Alice faces off against Jill. The fighting isn’t bad. It never is, in these movies. And as I’ve said before, there are worse ways to spend 90 minutes than watching Milla Jovovich punch and kick and shoot and spin upside down and generally laugh at the laws of physics, though she doesn’t laugh much in these films. It’s a funny thing about Jovovich as Alice: she gives the character just enough personality, but not enough to break the somber apocalyptic mood; she knows her function is to kick ass and look cool doing it, but isn’t afraid to look dorky taking heavy hits in slow motion. Audiences seem to like her, or at least accept her, as an action heroine in a way they won’t accept almost any other woman. At the same time, Alice is seldom if ever sexualized — she gives off more of a look-but-don’t-touch vibe. I could’ve done without the maternal stuff, which was old even when James Cameron did it 26 years ago, but Jovovich is possibly the affectless action heroine we deserve.

The Possession

The Possession adds something to the long list of horror-movie rules: Never buy an old, weird-looking box at a yard sale. Said box has Hebrew carvings on the outside and no obvious way to open it — no lid, no seams. Inside the box is a dybbuk — a Jewish demon seeking an innocent as a host body. This may be an interesting take on the well-worn exorcism subgenre, but the movie doesn’t have much to say about Jewish mysticism or demonology. Apparently all you have to do is go to a young, compassionate Hasidic Jew and he’ll clear it up for you, reading loudly from scripture. It helps if your guy is played by the reggae/hip-hop artist Matisyahu, who at one point during the exorcism calls out “Everybodeeee put your hands on her!” and for a second it sounds like “Everybodeeee put your hands in the air and wave ‘em like you don’t care!”

Yet another mid-budget spook show produced by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House imprint, The Possession spends a lot of time setting up the family targeted by the dybbuk. Basketball coach Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his wife Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick) are getting a divorce; this is hard on their two daughters, Em (Natasha Calis) and Hannah (Madison Davenport). Stephanie is going out with a dentist who makes everyone take their shoes off in the house and wants to put braces on Hannah’s teeth. It’s not her teeth that anyone has to worry about, though. Em finds the dybbuk box at the aforementioned yard sale and Clyde buys it for her. Soon enough, Em is acting strangely and violently, craving the box like an addict. For too long, everyone thinks Em is just acting out; obviously all these post-Exorcist movies unfold in a universe where The Exorcist doesn’t exist and people waste valuable time looking for psychological and medical explanations for the supernatural.

Eventually Clyde goes to Matisyahu, who, unlike all the other Jews Clyde begs for help, has a conscience and is willing to risk his life to save Em. I doubt this is meant to be anti-semetic; it’s just a chance for Matisyahu to play heroic and rebellious. By the time Em is wolfing down raw meat from the fridge and an MRI shows the dybbuk living inside her chest, The Possession has defaulted to the generic demonic thrills its title promises. A few moments are effective, though, courtesy of the noted Danish director Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch), who holds himself to clean, classical filmmaking and prefers creepiness to shocks. The movie is well-appointed if not terribly well thought-out. If you wanted to get rid of a dybbuk box, would you put it in a yard sale? What if nobody buys it? And are we to believe that nobody in a hospital would hear loud exorcism-type goings-on in a deserted physical-therapy room? And what, if anything, do the doctors say when the dybbuk shows up on the MRI?

Like The Exorcist, The Possession seems to imply that a broken home opens the gates of hell; divorce will leave your daughter vulnerable to demons. Even as a metaphor, it rings no bells of truth: parents staying miserably together “for the sake of the kids” apparently cause no harm to the kids whatsoever. (Poltergeist was refreshing because the parents were happily married and the phantasms still came.) In any event, unlike The Exorcist, the nuclear family is restored here, with the cowardly dentist peeling off down the street, never to be seen again. Clyde will pass up his dream job in North Carolina the movie brings up several million times, and he and Stephanie, who in Clyde’s words “forgot how to get along,” will presumably forget how to not get along. Really, the dybbuk was the best thing that could’ve happened to them.

Prometheus

The elegantly designed Prometheus asks the Big Questions — where do we come from? who, if anyone, made us? — and kinda-sorta answers them. But if the movie is really about anything, it’s atmosphere. Director Ridley Scott, returning to science fiction after having made two of the genre’s classics (Alien and Blade Runner), brings a pleasant big-movie heft to the visuals, an almost cruel burnish only possible with lots of money and teams of well-paid techs. The look is handsomely antiseptic, much like the character David (Michael Fassbender), an android aboard the titular spaceship Prometheus. Passing the time (two years) waiting for the crew to wake up, David becomes enamored of Lawrence of Arabia, coloring his hair to emulate Peter O’Toole. It’s heartening, I guess, that in 2093 we will not only still exist but also remember 20th-century art; another character, the captain (Idris Elba), plays an accordion once owned by Stephen Stills.

These hints of personality and leisure have to last us a while, because most of Prometheus is about delving into — as mission director Vickers (Charlize Theron) puts it — “a godforsaken rock in the middle of space.” Our intrepid crew of scientists seek evidence of “the Engineers,” aliens worshipped by various unconnected ancient cultures. The Engineers, we’re to understand, created us. But why? For that, I think, you’re supposed to come back for Prometheus 2 and 3; this film is reportedly the first of a projected trilogy, though whether it’ll make enough bank to justify sequels is a more urgent question than any the movie asks. The maybe-part-one-if-enough-of-you-see-it aspect may explain why Guy Pearce appears underneath pounds of old-man latex as Peter Weyland, who funds the mission. I’m assuming the grand plan is to have the unlatexed Pearce return in a sequel or prequel as a younger Weyland; otherwise why didn’t they just hire an older actor?

The heart of Prometheus is the believer Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), whose entire career seems to hinge on proof of, well, intelligent design. I’m not quite up on what Richard Dawkins might say about this; whether we were created by a white-bearded Christian god or by strange-looking aliens gargling goo at the dawn of man, the point the film takes for granted is that we were created. Someone in the film snarks about two hundred years of Darwinism being chucked out the nearest air lock, but that’s about all the skepticism we hear among this cadre of scientists. Anyway, the impassioned Noomi Rapace is much the best thing about the movie; as in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, she moves on an angular, headlong trajectory, and Shaw is about the only character visibly capable of horror and awe, sometimes both at once. (Charlize Theron, meanwhile, plays her second ice queen in as many weeks, and seemed to have more fun last week.)

Logic will not avail us here. Forget whether it’s plausible that a species of unpleasant baldies manufactured us for reasons as yet known only to them; what about the scene in which a character takes a series of running leaps when her abdomen was lasered open and then stapled shut only hours before? Not to mention the sequence in which two crew members, deep inside the womb of the godforsaken rock, suddenly decide to head back to the ship, then promptly get lost. They only exist, we gather, as alien fodder. Yes, here be dragons, or at least phallic slimy things and a big beastie worthy of Lovecraft at his most febrile. For weeks now, the marketing for Prometheus couldn’t figure out whether to sell it as a prequel to Alien or as a stand-alone scientists-meet-monsters epic. It is, if you must, a story that takes place in the same reality as Alien, and the final shot, much derided by Alien fans, strengthens the link. If you want to rewatch Alien and not think of the mysterious “space jockey” as what you pray to on Sunday, you might want to steer clear of Prometheus.

The movie wasn’t giving my brain much of a workout, but my eyes got a nice buzz. Prometheus is straight-up gorgeous, especially in 3D; Scott has conceived the shots for the added dimension, employing it with subtlety and for the occasional matter-of-fact spectacle. If the ads have intrigued you visually, go. Just be prepared for a plot that reminds me of various reviewers over the years admitting “I’m not sure whether this movie/book just rips off some Star Trek episode I never saw.” It’s an atmospheric thrill ride, though short on thrills until near the end, and certainly neither as intense nor as tight as Alien. It’s best perceived as an experiment by a director returning to the franchise he created, not by making a direct sequel but by drifting off to tell a related story. On the evidence, though, Scott can’t scare us any more, and his characters recede into the vast canvas of his own intelligent design. We can’t really care about who made us if most of the people onscreen aren’t us.

Dark Shadows

If there’s anything remotely goth-flavored in our culture untouched by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, just wait a while; they’ll get around to it. Their latest collaboration, Dark Shadows, checks off “vampire” on the Burton/Depp wish list, a mild disappointment for those of us who’d hoped to see them remaking London After Midnight someday. (People remake well-loved films all the time; why not remake one few living souls have ever seen?) Following the lead of its forebear, the 1966-1971 supernatural soap opera, Dark Shadows doesn’t stop at bloodsuckers; it also throws in a witch and — rather randomly, I thought, and with little explanation — a werewolf. It is not the loosey-goosey fish-out-of-water farce the ads lead you to expect, though it’s far from serious — this may be the only live-action film I can recall in which a climactic explosion is a perky magenta.

Indeed, the look of Dark Shadows is intriguing; it’s the strangest-toned mainstream film out there right now. The stock appears slightly faded, as if it were aping both the left-out-in-the-sun graininess of ’70s cinema and the wretched video quality of the old show. It all coalesces into a uniquely anti-goth palette (and the opening credits, too, are bland enough to be part of the joke). Into the tackiness of 1972 comes Barnabas Collins (Depp), cursed to vampirehood by scorned witch Angelique (Eva Green) two hundred years ago. Freed from his coffin/prison, Barnabas shows up at Collinwood Manor, now occupied by a dysfunctional family headed by disdainful matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) shoehorn as much melodrama and as many subplots into Dark Shadows as an hour and fifty-three minutes can hold. I suppose they’re trying to get as much of the original show into the movie as they can. Too young to have been one of the fabled kids running home from school to catch Dark Shadows on ABC, I prepared by popping in a DVD of nine “fan-favorite” episodes. After the first one, which introduced Jonathan Frid as Barnabas a year into the show’s run, my attention wandered elsewhere. You had to be there at the time, I guess. Frid played Barnabas as a melancholy romantic anti-hero, and Depp — looking like a cross between Count Orlok in Nosferatu and Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — follows suit; though the script makes the new Barnabas boggle his eyes at the trappings of 1972, Depp mostly stays away from easy laughs (he gets them anyway, largely with his sly inflections). He brings out the tragedy and anger of Barnabas’ situation.

Barnabas’ main antagonist is Angelique, who’s stayed around all these years to put the Collins fishing cannery out of business. I can’t quite decide if Eva Green’s scenery-gnashing performance is great or terrible or both, but whatever it is, it’s memorable. Aside from Green, this is one of the more eclectic casts in a Burton film in a while, the standout for me being Helena Bonham Carter as the live-in shrink for the troubled little David Collins. She seems to be channeling an unholy combo of Jacqueline Susann and Fran Lebowitz, with a pre-punk orange wig topping everything off. Burton certainly has found his muse.

Dark Shadows isn’t top-tier Burton, but he remains a classical director who trusts the image (some would say to the exclusion of anything else). It’s a pleasure to watch a film that isn’t over-edited, that basks in elegance. The blood, as in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd, is bright Hammer red. The movie is more or less what you’d expect a Burton Dark Shadows to be, only with less emphasis on the purple-on-black color scheme and a lot of Super Sounds of the ’70s — including Alice Cooper as himself, performing two songs at a Collins mirrorball party — fighting Danny Elfman for dominance on the soundtrack. It turns into a bit of a mess towards the finish line, but at least it’s a fun mess, and if you’re looking to Tim Burton for narrative tidiness you must be thinking of another Tim Burton.

The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods destroys itself. You don’t see very many movies do that, especially movies that open on 2,800 screens. It shows you the machinery inside itself, and then blows up the machinery. It’s a horror movie about horror movies; it destroys horror movies, too. It’s a bit on the cold side, as a lot of clever films are. It’s a semester of horror tropes packed into 95 tight minutes, with sidebar snark about bureaucrats. It’s the work of two wise guys — writer-director Drew Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon — sitting in the back of the classroom, snorting disdainfully about the cheap stuff horror movies scare us with but also admitting that the cheap stuff is fun. The Cabin in the Woods has too much on its agenda to be truly scary (though it has its moments), but it’s the most fun I’ve had at a horror film since Trick ‘R Treat, which also toyed with horror clichés. It’s a big gift bag handed to horror fans with a cheerful invitation to root around inside.

Cabin starts out mysteriously, at an antiseptic facility manned by blasé techs. In the first of the movie’s really good jokes, we freeze-frame on a dull shot of two of the techs — played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford as regular-guy mad scientists — and the movie’s title comes up, in huge, red, screen-filling letters. But where’s the cabin? Where are the woods? It seems designed to confuse the uninitiated. We get the cabin and the woods soon enough, as a quintet of college kids go off for a weekend. Goddard and Whedon sketch them in for us with quick, deft strokes — the jock (Chris Hemsworth), the virgin (Kristen Connolly), the party girl (Anna Hutchison), the stoner (Fran Kranz), the brain (Jesse Williams). They don’t know that they’re in a horror film or that they represent very familiar horror-film types.

That’s about all you should know going in; there are surprises beyond the obvious twist given away in the first five minutes. I can try to be oblique, though. Horror is chaos encroaching on order: when an idyllic summer afternoon drive becomes a nightmare, to quote the opening crawl from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or when the boogeyman comes, as in Halloween. In this movie, the horror is precise and controlled — the horror is order. And eventually, when true chaos arrives to scatter that order, horror fans everywhere will break into a wicked grin, and perhaps laughter. It’s as though the collective ghosts of horror past focused their wrath on the man-children and idiots who have held horror hostage for years with boring, derivative stories, remakes, sequels: this is the Whedon film that should be called The Avengers. And maybe it’s just me, but I thought David Julyan’s score kept threatening to turn into Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” otherwise known as the ooh-spooky pipe-organ music from 1962’s Phantom of the Opera and a hundred others.

Aside from how it plays roughly and relentlessly with what we expect from a horror film, does Cabin work as, well, a horror film, or is it a meta-essay like Funny Games? Goddard and Whedon aren’t into punishing the audience for what we came to see, what we want to see; that isn’t their game. They would, however, like us to think about why we come to see and want to see certain things in a horror film — why horror filmmakers work so hard to appease our base appetites for destruction. Their project goes deeper than a comparatively shallow exercise in deconstruction like the Scream franchise. That said, yes, the movie does work as an example of what it’s examining; it’s a bit like Alan Moore’s Watchmen that way, in that it looks under the hood while acknowledging that the rusty, oily engine still runs, otherwise why bother looking at it? People still stupidly isolate themselves and die violently, and that still works our nerves the same old way.

The Moth Diaries

Rachel Klein’s well-regarded 2002 young-adult novel The Moth Diaries plays with the perceptions of a disturbed girl, whose father committed suicide. At the boarding school she attends, she encounters a dark, mysterious girl, Ernessa, whom she believes to be a vampire. Unnamed in the novel, the heroine is presented as an unreliable narrator, and her fear and dread can be explained as a melodramatic girl’s cracked filter on such hot-button issues as anorexia, sexuality, and the love that dares not speak its name. But movies aren’t as deft at ambiguity; they literalize everything they show us, or, at least, a movie as squarely conceived as this one.

The Moth Diaries is atmospheric but very slight. It’s supposed to be about a girl, here named Rebecca (Sarah Bolger), who must fight the psychological pull of self-annihilation. The supposed vampire (Lily Cole, looking like Carroll Borland in 1935’s Mark of the Vampire) seems to know everything about Rebecca’s tragic past, and beckons her to death in various dream sequences. Ernessa also befriends Rebecca’s BFF Lucy (Sarah Gadon), gradually draining her essence, or so it appears. All of this could still come across as ambiguous, and the writer-director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page) is certainly no stranger to warped narratives about self-deluding protagonists. But Harron seems on autopilot here. What’s missing is the allure of death, whether this is an actual vampire film or a psychodrama about a girl who’s read too much Dracula and Carmilla in her fiction class.

The movie runs only 82 minutes (including credits) but feels twice as long. The usually reliable cinematographer Declan Quinn (Leaving Las Vegas) tamps his palette way down, shooting everything through drab blue filters. Harron doesn’t edit to move the film along — she just lets each scene dribble to a conclusion. After the early scenes, which establish some sort of normalcy between Rebecca and her friends at the boarding school, the movie loses all humor and attends to Rebecca’s increasingly emo mood. We’re stuck with rote, tired stuff about rigid schoolmarms and a professor (Scott Speedman) who admired the poetry of Rebecca’s dad and seems to have a fixation on her. Or does he? The problem with a movie this unimaginative and amorphous that tries to be ambiguous is that we’re not sure how to take anything it shows us. Ambiguity becomes meaningless game-playing.

The young Irish actress Sarah Bolger tries hard, but as written Rebecca is too boringly straight-arrow to make us feel that her mask of sanity is about to slip. (Compare The Moth Diaries with Neil Jordan’s underseen masterpiece The Butcher Boy for an instructive lesson in how a fragmented adolescent mind can be conveyed on film.) Ernessa, as written here, has no personality other than the weird traits that Rebecca can construe (or misconstrue) as supernatural. In a night scene, Rebecca and another friend witness Ernessa apparently passing through the closed glass window of her bedroom. The movie seems to forget that once it establishes that someone other than Rebecca has seen something that can’t be logically explained, the ambiguity is dead and we’re looking at a lukewarm teen horror film. Mary Harron, who hadn’t directed a feature film in six years, must have been attracted to the book’s is-she-or-isn’t-she narrative. She doesn’t seem the type to jump onto the Twilight bandwagon (though Klein’s novel preceded Stephenie Meyer’s). But she toys very feebly with this story’s elements, ending up with a goth version of the god-awful lesbian boarding-school drama Lost and Delirious, only without the eroticism. In a movie full of blood fantasies and predatory intentions, that’s a big “only.”