Retrospective :: Silent Hill 2

This trend of reviewing or discussing games here is starting to upset me. Nevertheless...

For the past year, ever since I was made aware of its existence, I've been trying to hunt down a copy of Silent Hill 2 for the Xbox. Not one of the stores here in Saskatoon have stocked it in years, which isn't surprising, and I've been sitting on the Goozex queue for over a year, which is a bit more surprising. People who have it don't want to part with it, it seems. I finally got a used copy of it from Amazon.com. After a year of patiently waiting, I finally clutched it in my trembling hands. Reverently, I placed it in my Xbox. I felt like I was about to have a religious experience. I tingled all over. I shivered and quivered. I broke into a sweat. I was terrified that it wouldn't live up to its legendary reputation. I, in other words, was more excited to finally play this seven year old game than I was to play almost anything else released this year, including Gears of War 2 or Fallout 3. I closed my eyes, closed the tray, and played the game.

And it was nearly sublime, as sublime as a game can be I suppose. I thought I'd experienced most of what games have to offer at this time. I thought things like Braid and Bioshock represented the best argument for games as art. I knew that the medium's potential had been hinted at in the past but I had no idea that someone had actually crossed, with bold step and stern gaze, the invisible threshold separating entertainment and art upon which games always stumble. I thought I'd already seen the medium used as effectively as anyone knew how to use it yet. I was wrong. Silent Hill 2 is the single best argument for games as art. Or perhaps it's an argument for how games are not art, since its exceptional nature only casts all other attempts into shadow. I've always known that the series had some serious punch to it. I liked Origins, which was the first Silent Hill game I played (lame, I know), I liked the action-oriented Homecoming probably more than it deserves, and I loved The Room... but those games are nothing - and I mean nothing! - when compared with the genius of Silent Hill 2. (Okay, The Room is still damn brilliant. It is much, much better than either Origins or Homecoming.)

As I was playing it, everything just felt right. The game mechanics, the dreamy sometimes atonal, sometimes discordant music, the ambiguous dialogue scenes, and yes even the dated graphics engine that powers this "last generation" title, all seemed to perfectly coalesce into an experience unlike any other. Silent Hill 2 transports you. You play as James Sunderland, an emotionally damaged man looking for his wife, Mary. Mary's been dead for three years, however, having died of a terminal illness. Yet inexplicably, James receives a letter from her saying that she is waiting for him in Silent Hill. So James sets out to find her, to discover the truth, and in doing so is propelled into a nightmare that is poignant, haunting, horrifying and absolutely beautiful.

The Silent Hill franchise is famed for its horror, and rightly so. Its twisted human shapes, dredged from the depths of eros and thanatos, can be truly disturbing projections of agony and despair. What the series is less famous for, though, is its beauty. The Room hints at this beauty but the American efforts at the series, Origins and Homecoming, basically banish it from town in favour of a constant sense of oppression that developers seem to think horror gamers require. Silent Hill 2 is beautiful, however. Tonally, it's like Braid meets Hellraiser. And shockingly, it retains the intelligence of both (and by Hellraiser I mean the Clive Barker film and not the bastardized sequels that followed in which, like the recent entries into the Silent Hill franchise, the parts that made it special were jettisoned to make room for the more spectacular parts that only made it conventional). Silent Hill 2 isn't just a survival horror game, you see. Like Braid, the game is an exploration of a theme. It is a psychological landscape translated into game mechanics. It is the projection of a troubled psyche. If you just want to be dropped into a town and be able to start blasting away at beasties, stay away from this. Play Resident Evil. Or Homecoming. Silent Hill 2 requires something more from the players, though. It requires human sympathy and a familiarity with the ambiguous. The game won't fill in all the pieces, won't launch into scenes of unnecessary exposition in which what you are seeing and doing is explained. The game doesn't interpret itself for you. It lets you feel the game. The metaphors are never mentioned, they are played. James rarely, if ever, comments on what he is doing. The player directly experiences the horror, the pathos, and the bright shining moments of insight, and the developers leave it up to the player to make of those moments what he can.

This sort of story-telling is rarely found in games. Developers almost always, and I don't know why, feel as if they need to spell out the game so explicitly that every single moron that picks up the game can follow it. Even Dead Space, my choice for Game of the Year, is pretty obvious on the story end of things, though it is admittedly more maturely crafted than most major releases. And I think that is what's missing in most games, maturity. Silent Hill 2 is mature. I don't mean "mature" as in Rated M (though it is); I mean mature as in grown up, sophisticated, self-aware, meta, etc. It feels like a game made for a truly adult audience, not the prurient adult audience that simply looks for blood, breasts and bad language.

2008 is being considered one of the best years for gaming in a long time. Aside from a few notable releases, however, most of the games currently being celebrated are the quivering fascinations of the moment - the shiny, hot, but ultimately shallow ephemera of an always insatiable market. Not one of the major developers show much interest in crafting compelling, introspective, thematically tense games. They are only after the spectacle. We have an entire industry scrambling to foist upon the market nothing more than summer blockbuster-style extravaganzas... and we have an audience gobbling it. Silent Hill 2 demands a higher standard.

A while back, I wrote that gaming grew up with Braid. I was wrong. Gaming grew up a long time ago with Silent Hill 2 but, outside a few of the upright heart and pure, nobody seemed to notice or care. You should care. Silent Hill 2 is a masterpiece, the type of game rarely attempted and even more rarely executed. It has flaws and limitations, but those are mostly matters of technology and software. In vision it is nearly perfect.

Review :: George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

Imagine that you are watching George A. Romero' seminal horror flick Dawn of the Dead. Now imagine that after all the delightful mall carnage and beautifully crafted social satire, an utterly redundant narrator comes on and says, "In case you missed it, the film's about consumerism. It's a metaphor. Get it?" Well, that is unfortunately what it's like to watch Romero's latest zombie foray, the miserable Diary of the Dead, a movie so obnoxiously mediocre and insipidly derivative it makes efforts like Cloverfield seem downright brilliant.

There isn't really much of a plot to summarize. Instead of continuing the established universe that every other Dead movie has built upon and expanded, Diary, in a poorly conceived (and an even more poorly executed) act of "revisionism," decides to go back to the beginning. The twist? Diary of the Dead follows a group of student filmmakers who were filming their own cheesy horror movie when the outbreak began and who, armed with the cameras and more "the people need to know" and blogs will save the day sentiment than is easily stomached, decide that they should document the deterioration of civilization. And that's the movie. Every single predictable zombie flick convention is present and accounted for, from the tense interpersonal relationships, to the inevitable and by now entirely procedural killing off of characters, and to the morally suspect militia and/or military groups, everything that you've come to expect is here. And it's just tedious.

It's hard not to think that Romero hasn't pulled a Lucas on us and simply revealed himself to be a bad filmmaker. The original trilogy of Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead are three of the most revered horror movies of all time, and rightly so. They were a nearly perfect combination of shock and gore horror, social satire and artistic vision. Land of the Dead, which I still enjoyed, was a disappointing misstep but still managed to carry the torch. But here... it's like Romero simply has no idea what he's doing. From the ghastly narration, which more often than not just makes horribly explicit whatever ghosts of subtext may have awkwardly floated into the previous scenes, to the third-rate special effects and gore sequences that simply look like made-for-cable sloppy seconds, Romero seems incapable of making the right decision on this film.

But the film's biggest problem is that it fails to execute its central conceit, that this is amateur footage shot by film students. The Blair Witch Project may have been more annoying than scary and Cloverfield may have been more hype than substance but at least both of those films obeyed their own rules and gave us films that stayed within the expected parameters. Romero, on the other hand, seems to think that splicing together several different feeds of video, using some awkward and non-traditional camera angles, and having whole lot of people tell the camera man he's insane for filming during a time like this translates as "amateur video." But instead of feeling like something you could stumble across on youtube, Diary not only still feels like an actually shot and edited film, it feels like a badly shot and edited film. Sure, there's a thin pretext for the film's "polish:" one of the students, for some reason, somehow completed, edited, scored and narrated their little apocalyptic documentary during the crisis because, apparently, uploading the movie and "letting the people know" is more important than survival, as if blogging or some tightly grasped notion of journalistic integrity would suddenly de-animate the dead and save the day.



I'm tempted to think that Romero has just run out of steam and is at this time running on name recognition only. Like Lucas, Coppola and Spielberg, perhaps he should just retire and leave the film business to a younger generation. Films like this tempt me to think that older directors should just stop before they make themselves look ridiculous. But last year William Friedkin released Bug, one of the most psychologically taught and ferocious horror thrillers I've ever seen. It was remarkable not only for it's audacity but also because it felt like the creation of an exciting up-and-comer, someone bristling with new ideas and concepts, someone like a smarter (much smarter) Eli Roth. There are plenty of matured filmmakers that still produce amazing works of art: Cronenberg, Herzog, and Scorsese, just to name a few. Romero, sadly, isn't one of them... and Diary of the Dead is the sad proof of that.

experto crede: unless you are a cinematic masochist, or someone who wants to see the mighty fall, avoid Diary of the Dead. It will only ruin your picture of Romero.

Miike Marathon :: Audition (1999)

Perhaps it was always inevitable that I would make my way to the films of Takashi Miike, not only because he is one of the most important names in horror today but also because his films, like David Lynch's, are often experimental, are usually drenched in surrealism and metaphor, and are constantly pushing the thresholds of the medium past their normal tolerances, all of which are elements that, in the hands of a competent artist - dare I say, auteur - like Miike, results in some truly spectacular cinema. Though his chosen grammar may contain a slightly more than healthy helping of arterial spray, Miike is a legitimate filmmaker who deserves to be taken seriously not only by the horror hounds but by serious film critics everywhere.

The Japanese precursor to (and one of the primary inspirations behind) such films as Saw and Hostel, Takashi Miike's Audition stormed onto the world's cinematic stage while the North American film industry was still trying to tell us that self-parodic films like Scream were scary. While not really a horror film, though its final act is rather horrific, Audition laid waste to many Western ideas of what was frightening and redefined what it meant for a film to be scary or disturbing.

A lonely Japanese man, Aoyama, is told by his son that he should remarry. His friend, a movie producer, offers to stage an audition that would allow Aoyama to pick and chose the kind of woman he would like to be with. Almost immediately he is drawn to Asami, even though his friend is unnerved by her and even though she seems to be lying about who she is. Aoyama and Asami begin a courtship that is awkward and charming and which, except for a few hints dropped to the audience, appears normal enough. Aoyama, it seems, is genuinely a decent man and he is more than a little ashamed of the false pretenses that brought them together. However, while he may have some skeletons lurking about his closest, they are nothing compared to Asami's, which include abuse, torture, murder and a very monstrous idea of what it means to love someone.

Unlike most horror films, Audition takes its time. Not worried about filling the screen with a constant barrage of blood and guts (Miike will do that in other films... but that's another story for another time), Audition is a slow burn. The first two acts simply smolder, laying the foundation and dropping the occasional and disconcerting hint about what might actually be going on. Even when its final act does begin and Miike's trademark penchant for nerve-jangling shock images takes over the style remains surprising restrained and deliberate, especially when compared to the outright psychosis and strobe light editing of Dead or Alive, which Miike also released in 1999.

While it may sound like an exercise in sensationalism (and this is one of his less sensational efforts), it is hard to ignore Miike's mastery of the medium. In one of the film's more daring sequences, Aoyama, drugged, is thrust into a dream-like altered reality in which he hallucinates things that we as an audience are already aware of but which he himself has not yet learned. Miike, in an act of dizzying virtuosity, has crashed the walls of dramatic irony and actually used the device as a narrative point.

This brash willingness to ignore convention, coupled with a wicked and bloody sense of humour that borders on - but never completely gives itself over to - sadism, defines Miike's work and makes him an important director not only in Japanese horror but also in all of world cinema. If I were to make a comparison, I would compare Miike with Canada's own David Cronenberg since both of them feel free to use often shocking or extreme images but they use them within a very specific and metaphoric context. William Blake wrote "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." While Audition may not lead to the palace of wisdom, or to any palace for that matter, its excesses and the excesses of many of Miike's films are artistically justifiable, I think, and make for a breathtaking, if somewhat unsettling, cinematic experience.

Here's another take on the film.

Mini-Review :: Black Sunday (1960)

One of the first films by Mario Bava, the original master of Italian horror, Black Sunday (1960), though tame by any and all of today's standards for modern horror, was and remains a cinematic landmark. Nearly every gothic convention ever used in horror is being brought to life here, possibly for the first time. This is pure horror, before it became a stale victim of its own conventions. Like a more macabre and slightly less restrained Hitchcock, Bava executes his tale of vampires and satanic curses with great confidence and success. And while it may not be genuinely frightening anymore it's still damn entertaining.

Review :: Halloween (2007)

I think Rob Zombie fancies himself a bit of a Hollywood renegade, a genre auteur bravely recapturing a bygone true horror aesthetic. And maybe he is. His previous efforts, the ambitious but far too campy schlock-horror flick House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and the ultra-violent hillbilly torture/road trip flick The Devil's Rejects (2005), both tried to recapture the gritty and blood-soaked idioms of a pre-mainstream horror genre, the sub-culture that created films like The Last House on the Left and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Zombie's filmography demonstrates both the heights and the pitfalls of being too obviously self-conscious: House of 1000 Corpses was a self-referential mess; The Devil's Rejects came close to macabre genius. Zombie obviously has talent and the amount of growth he demonstrated between his first and second films left me almost giddy with excitement.

Enter Halloween, Rob Zombie's third film and a remake of the John Carpenter slasher. Part grindhouse exploitation and part horror slasher, Halloween is unfortunately a very mixed bag. Why Zombie felt the need to update a classic instead of develop his own property is unclear, especially since he frustratingly dedicates himself whole-heartedly neither to the source material not to his own reinterpretation of it. What we get instead is a movie that sometimes feels like the cutting edge of modern horror, a la the so called "torture porn" sub-genre, and sometimes like a derivative and almost anachronistic rip-off. Halloween works best when Zombie ignore the source material and tries to make a movie that no longer resembles the original. Unfortunately, other an an almost too long prologue/first act which tries to explain the childhood factors that created the legendary slasher Michael Myers and other than an added plot element that clumsily explains Michael's motives after he escapes, Zombie does not alter the story all that much and ends up making a rather conflicted film that seems at odds with itself. Most of his "updates" are really just added brutality and sexuality. And let me tell you, Rob Zombie's Halloween is a very brutal and very uncomfortably sexualized film.

Not like this is anything new. The combination of death and sex has always meant that horror and exploitation films flirt with outright misogyny. Zombie, aware of what's preceded him, is I think trying to be sly and comment on this particular feature of the genre. Unfortunately, his use of horror conventions is not so much ironic as it is troublingly sincere. The men in the movie are dispatched efficiently but the girls, often naked or mostly so, dies in protracted and bloody fashion. If Zombie is winking at us, he is going so with the straightest of faces. If this is irony, it is exploitive and clumsy irony. Maybe Zombie should take notes from fellow splat-packer Eli Roth, who has a much more developed sense of irony, on how to properly kill girls in a movie without offending everyone in the theater.

But as far as most genre fans are concerned, blood and sex is all they want in a horror flick. Going into them, I can't say I have much hope for these films even though the genre fan in me demands that I see them anyway. In the end, Halloween will not make much of a splash and will probably disappear rather quickly, as it likely should. Hopefully, Rob Zombie himself will not turn out to have been a one hit wonder. Maybe his next flick will be better. Here's hoping. After all, it's so hard to be a self-respecting horror fan and we need as many good directors as we can get.

Experto crede: not recommended for anyone except those die-hard fans who, like me, never learn from their mistakes.

Review :: Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II

[It's hard to legitimately review a horror film. It's aimed at a very specific audience, most of whom will see it no matter what critics say. So let me just disclaim this: I like horror movies. Some of my favourite directors have worked in horror, such as Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg. At the same time, though, I want more, much more, than just blood. Horror can be a legitimate genre only in as much as it has wit or intelligence. I liked Hostel. I thought it was clever and so I went into Hostel: Part II hoping for a decent film that had some chills and some interesting social comments. Now, on to the review... ]

The last several years have seen the rise of a new sub-genre within the larger realm of horror movies, the so-called "torture porn" or "gorno," films such as Saw, The Devil's Rejects and, of course, Hostel, the most obviously exploitative of the three. These terms are often used derogatively and with great moral outrage and yet Eli Roth, writer and director of the Hostel movies, is likely right to say that this it is an an unfair term, one that deliberately fails to recognize these movies as legitimate attempts to create art. Horror, especially good horror, is often rather more intelligent, subversive and ironic than most critics and pundits ever give it credit for. That being said, it seems to me that in horror movies there is in fact a very fine line between art and pornography, wit and exploitation, actual intelligence and raw bloodlust. And all too often, that line is crossed as soon as a film becomes a franchise and spawns sequels.

In Hostel, three American men travel to Amsterdam to enjoy the thriving sex trade; while there, they are told of a remote, little-known hostel in Slovakia that is supposedly home to some of the most beautiful women in Eastern Europe, towards which they immediately set out. Of course, the hostel is a front for something far more sinister and they soon find themselves in the clutches of an evil syndicate of wealthy businessmen who, bored with their own excesses and with more traditional forms of exploitation, such as prostitution, have turned to human torture and murder as a form of entertainment. As one character in the sequel describes it, murder is the "next level." The obvious connection between the flesh trade and the new flesh-torture trade were readily apparent, if not a little on the nose. As a comment upon exploitative American tendencies, Hostel was clever enough and so, in its own eyes at least, it provided a fair enough justification for its sequences of brutal violence.

Hostel: Part II, follows much the same premise except that in this iteration its justification is rather more thin and less obvious. The movie follows three American women who seem to be in Europe getting a taste of the Old World. Unlike the men from the first movie, though, nothing these girls do could be construed as a reason, metaphoric or otherwise, for what will befall them. They are average, regular college-type girls doing average, regular college-type things. More interesting than them, though, is the two American businessmen on whom the movie also focuses, clients of the hostel that come to Slovakia with the express purpose of torturing and murdering these girls. Roth is surprisingly deft at portraying these two men and what, I suppose, could be the psychology of the decisions they make. Roth tries to make some comments upon sexual politics and male insecurities but, really, there isn't much here by way of social commentary that hasn't been said before or said better.

And that's the problem I have with Hostel: Part II, or with any horror movie sequel for that matter. In almost every case, sequels are redundant and nothing is done in them that hasn't been done in the first one. Sequels just add more blood. Sure, sometimes they try to be clever and fiddle around with the tropes and conventions established by the first one. Here, for instance, Roth changes the protagonists from men to women, which affords him the chance to make a few interesting changes. More importantly, he almost found a new angle by focusing of the torturers. And had he focused exclusively on the American businessmen and their psychology/psychosis, Hostel: Part II might have been an interesting film. Instead, however, we are given a film that is predictable and, unfortunately, not scary. Perhaps I'm jaded, but I was never once scared. A bit nauseated and uncomfortable in some sequences, yes, but never scared. While the first film had a growing sense of dread built around this mysterious and menacing place, the second film has all its cards already spread on the table. We know what the hostel and the factory are and we know what to expect. Devoid of any real scares and without any interesting social comments (aside from several thin feminist themes that have run through horror for a while now and which have been treated so much better, such as in Death Proof most recently), Hostel: Part II comes dangerously close to actually being this so-called "torture porn."

In the end, the film is a lot less clever than it thinks it is, is more disgusting than the first one, and comes off, unfortunately, as a rather obvious and mediocre sequel. It felt like Saw II: bigger, bloodier and less intelligent. Roth has stated that this will be the last Hostel film. Personally, I hope he remains true to his word. I had high hopes for Roth after Hostel. Perhaps his next film will be better.