We’re back for our first week of 2012 here at Weirdfictionreview.com. What have we been up to? Read on…
If you’re a weirdie, then it might be expected that right before you leave to visit friends in the wilds of New Hampshire, you watch a movie with a description like this:
One Morning in New England, 1940, the entire population of Friar New Hampshire – 572 people – walked together up a winding mountain trail and into the wilderness. They left behind their clothes, their money, all of their essentials. Even their dogs were abandoned, tied to posts and left to starve. No One knows why. A search party dispatched by the U.S. Army eventually discovered the remains of nearly 300 of Friar’s evacuees. Many had frozen to death. Others were cruelly and mysteriously slaughtered. The bodies of the remaining citizens are still unaccounted for.” Now, a documentary filmmaker has unearthed the coordinates of the trail…
Well, that’s what we did, anyway. Yellow Brick Road is highly recommended – much scarier than the overrated Blair Witch Project, with some synergies with a story like Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” The movie manages to accomplish a lot on a limited budget, and it is often absolutely terrifying while retaining its sense of mystery. The acting is also excellent for the most part, and the ending does a better job than most of not giving the viewer an easy answer.
Another film viewed over the holidays, The Kill List, fares slightly worse despite its stylish noir inventiveness, although we also recommend it highly; if you’re not fond of brutally realistic violence, skip it, however. A hired killer and his partner sign up for a series of killings that come to have more and more of a supernatural sense to them. There’s more than a bit of The Wicker Man in The Kill List, and in the latter stages an amazing tunnel sequence, as our anti-heroes get in way over their heads, is somewhat undercut by tricksy editing at the very end to disguise a Very Unnecessary Twist. That said, this filmmaker has our attention – the movie is stunningly shot, with an underlying throb of unease throughout that has the viewer on the proverbial edge of the seat.
Of course, “weird” is often in the eye of the beholder – proof being that the trailers for Paranormal Activity 3 made us laugh – and today we have two film posts for you, including an appreciation of a Dr. Seuss movie that isn’t truly “The Weird” but is just too surreal in its weirdliness for us to pass up, especially in such an energetic essay.
Did you see any creepy movies over the holidays that you’d recommend? Please let us know.
And come back Wednesday for a great long story by Tanith Lee…
Rare Exports. Terrific.
The Kill List is an excellent choice. It was actually the best (and scariest, too) horror movie I’d seen in a year or two. It’s enveloping you like a cocoon, and you don’t have other choice but to follow the glutinous logic (illogic?) of this nightmare.
Another good example of weirdness is Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere. Even though it fails to make you empathize with the characters, it’s pretty successful as a garden of forking realities, erasing the border between cinema and actual world. Still, Hellman’s film is an exercise in intelligence rather than a real story, or Lynchean clot of atmosphere, or anything.