Horror and Drama

Here are my latest two submissions it the University of Victoria's The Martlet. They actually published one of them this time. Visit http://www.martlet.ca/martlet/article/insidious-great-scare/. Bot articles in their entirety are below.

Movie Review: Insidious
After nineteen hours in five sessions under the needle I finally got my Darth Vader tattoo finished. Oh yeah, I did it. The relationship I developed with the artist/owner resulted in his generously donating his free preview movie passes to Insidious to me. In the past few years I have become something of a horror movie aficionado and this one didn't disappoint.

From the makers of Paranormal Activity and Saw, Insidious is, for all intents and purposes, a re-visitation of Poltergeist, the only popular horror film in history to deal with the repressed fear of child abduction, until now. In this version, the child's body remains in the earthly realm while his "astral projection" is held captive in a hellish netherworld called "the further" by entities with an "insidious agenda."

The premise gives rise to myriad thrills and chills in both this realm and "the further" with visually spectacular demons, monsters, ghosts, and a particularly disturbing twilight-zone-like setting in the netherworld. The film is filled with all manner of horrific deliciousness and even includes some refreshing comic relief which openly ridicules its own horror genre. In this case the comedy is accomplished with a requisite pair of ghost-hunting buffoons reminiscent of the Ghostbusters, or the Frog Brothers from The Lost Boys.

This is a great film. Unlike its production predecessors, it makes no effort at faux-documentary realism (as with Paranormal Activity a la Blair Witch Project), nor does it fall back on the easy emotional and gore spectacle of torture porn (as with Saw). It's just a good ol' fashioned horror film, but it has some fantastic innovations. There are some contrived plot conventions, and more than one moment of absurdism, but the film is unencumbered with the heavy emotion elicited by torture porn, or abused children, which one uncomfortably assumes will be the premise from the outset. Ultimately, it relies a little too heavily on the visual shocks that had me jumping out of my seat at an exhausting rate, but the visuals that caused these moments were absolutely chilling. Insidious will leave you with powerful, if not somewhat clichéd images, that will haunt your visual memory for days after. I like it more today than right after I saw it. Very cool. 4/5 stars.



Stage and Film Review: Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein broadcast live at Silver City from the National Theatre in London

Frankenstein! It doesn’t get better than Frankenstein! Ever since Mary Shelley published her wildly popular eighteenth-century novel, this tale has spawned a plethora of interpretations, especially in film. While early film melodrama made something of a camp convention out of the tale, its original text remains iconographic. Kenneth Branagh made some effort to remain loyal to the original tale, but even he could not help the impulse to take some artistic license.

Danny Boyle (creator of 28 Days) has produced a stage version that is spectacular in its effects and absolutely stunning in its performance. In Boyle’s interpretation, the first third of the novel’s original plotline is cut out. Instead, Boyle chooses to begin with the ‘birth’ of the wretch, and he maintains that as his primary perspective throughout. Boyle has his two lead actors, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, rotate the roles of Victor and The Wretch on alternating nights to focus on their dichotomy as foils: one lusts for social interaction and is unable to participate, the other rejects social interaction and is unwilling to participate; one desires a wife and lover who would surely reject him, the other is blessed with a beautiful and ever-forgiving wife and lover whom he cannot help but reject; one is violently desperate for the love of his maker-father, the other is unable to connect with a father that dotes on him. The racial differentiation between Victor and the actor that plays his father (Victor is white, his father is black) only emphasizes this latter juxtaposition.


But the real story here is the performance. The physical representation of a ‘new’ body is unbelievably convincing and dramatically horrific. The first almost ten minutes of the production are silently but physically acted as The Wretch comes to grips with his new body and the horror of his isolation. Victor only briefly appears in this opening scene to reject him and flee. Nevertheless, Victor is almost as compelling, and I only wish I could have seen a live performance of the next night’s show to see the actors switch roles, borrow from each other’s interpretations, and add their own.

This single live performance will be complemented by an encore performance broadcast on March 31st at 7:00 PM at both Silver City and Odeon theatres.

See you in hell,
Shakes.