Darling (2015) Horror Thriller

Darling (2015)  Darling is a thriller with some horror elements about a woman named Darling (Lauren Ashley Carter) who after being traumatized has a breakdown while caring for a socialite's infamous house in NY City. Broken into chapters, Her, Invocation, Thrills, Demon, Inferno, and The Caretaker it is a film drawing on some other famous films set in city apartments most strongly two from Roman Polanski, The Tenant and Repulsion. Shot in black and white it definitely often looks like Repulsion. Where it is a film about a character losing her mind it is going to get a lot of comparisons to that film too. From the beginning we see the tightness in in the character, clothes hair makeup perfectly constructed like she is holding herself together through her appearance. Played beautifully by Carter with just enough facial nuance to let the audience know that Darling is not all she is presenting herself to be. She carries an edginess that enhances the script and manages to emote the chaos that boils behind her characters eyes.
  Chapter 1: Her is an introduction to Darling but also to the house. We see the Madame (Sean Young) of the house telling Darling about its storied history how the last caretaker threw herself off the upper balcony, but not only that but that there is an earlier stories of house being haunted. Darling in her controlled way assures the woman that this is not a problem for her. Much of this chapter is exploring the house after the Madame leaves for the weekend. The house becomes a character as we get some great setup shots of the different rooms. Originally the locations was going to be a working class apartment more like in The Tenant but by chance a renovated former boarding school in Harlem became available so the location was changed. It is a beautiful multi floored place and we see Darling going about checking different rooms. When she settles in her room she finds a rosary in on of the bureau drawers, but also the noises start to startle her as night closes in. I have always like slow builds and even though this film is a tight 78 minutes it does not jump right into the scares. Instead we get little things like the rosary, was it owned by the last caretaker who killed herself? Then there is the room that gets to that balcony which is locked, and Darling's strange dream where she is standing on the balcony. Finally when Darling walks to the store and is really scared by a man (Brian Morvant) returning the rosary she dropped to her we see that although put together on the outside she is really terrified and not totally together on the inside.
Chapter 2: Invocation, Now the definition of the noun invocation is "the action of invoking something or someone for assistance or as an authority." and in this chapter we see that Darling while laying in her bed at night see a Latin phrase scratched into the side of the nightstand. "Abyssus Abyssum Invocat" or "One misstep leads to another" when she reads these words we go to a shot from the POV of where the nightstand is looking back at Darling. What is cool is they use this shot so we can also see the bedroom door behind her as she lays in the bed. It opens by itself until it slams into the all startling Darling. I have always like that kind of camera shot, the use of foreground and background to give an effect, it still is very cool.  We also see that not only is Darling a bit of an insomniac but that she is starting to stare into space a bit. It well done by the actress and director to build slight changes in her behavior as she heads down the road to insanity. Then we see she is also starting to obsess standing in front of the Man's apartment building watching for him to come out. Let's remember that the interaction she had was random and innocent but now she is thinking about him a lot.
Chapter 3: Thrills, Is about getting the Man to pick her up at a bar. Darling stalks and sets him up leading him to talk to her in a bar and then inviting him back to the house. The awkwardness of the conversation is wonderful and Carter really shows her chops in this setup portion portraying Darling fragility with a nuance performance. Leading to the biggest turn of the film I will leave a lot of the detail of this chapter out, but we do learn a bit more about the house. It was not just the last caretaker's death that built the reputation as a haunted house but also as we learn through the conversation of the Man there is a longer history. That same locked room at the top of the house was a place where the former owner of the house tried to conjure the Devil. Adding weight to the location beyond an earlier tragedy. When the chapter gets rolling we see Darling's mental state cross a threshold that she will not be able to come back from. I really liked all the way through the things shown to show the slippage in Darlings thought process. From the beginning each morning the Madam calls to check in with her and with each call Darling is less and less able to engage with her on the phone.
Chapter 4: Demon is about dealing with the consequences of actions taken in chapter three. Darling must sort of become a demon to do what she has to do. She is a changed character at this point and we the audience see the breakdown of her sanity first hand. Chapter 5 : Inferno is about the psychological consequences of her actions and the realization in Darling that she sees her own illness and finally Chapter 6: The Caretaker is where the outside world reenters the story and the full horror of the events are witnessed.
  Overall the film, called a tribute to the other films mentioned above is really quite derivative of those films. It plays so close to the plot of Repulsion that it could sort of be a re-imagining of that film. Director Mickey Keating obviously knows what he is doing behind the camera. Under the age of 30 he already has five features all tight and well drawn that were made on small budgets. He is sort of a director made for independent horror. I am sure it won't be long before he is hitting with a film from a large studio. There are some great filming techniques used in this film like quite cutting and strobe lights, a killer sound design and the starkness of the black and white that all come together to make this an enjoyable film to view. This film deals with the effects of earlier abuse on the antagonist so be warned that this theme is there and important to the story.   I enjoyed it and would recommend that you take a look at it.

Southbound (2015) Horror Anthology

Southbound (2015) - I love anthologies and this is one I was waiting to see since I read about it a ways back. Directors Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath and Radio Silence bring us intersecting stories where the participants touch each other only in the slightest way, a location or an emotion or a character but are intertwined.Then again some of the stories are connected with a vice grip. The wrap around story of two killers, Mitch (Chad Villella) and Jack (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) trying to stay ahead of their demons cross with the paths of the women in the second story only in the women are staying at the motel they pass repeatedly in the freaky cycle of going nowhere fast. Harsh and edgy with a radio DJ (voice of Larry Fessenden) connecting the stories via the FM we get slightly on the nose vignettes leading us through the stories. Mitch's guilt at not protecting his daughter at a time of danger is his own little hell in the first piece that we will learn more about later.
  Guilt carries through to the second story about an all girl band that after a blowout on a desert road are hard pressed to get help. The driver Sadie (Fabianne Therese), with band mates Kim (Nathalie Love) and Ava (Hannah Marks) are soon offered a ride by a slightly off couple who live in the area. The couple Betty (Susan Burke) and Dale (Davey Johnson) are having friends Raymond (Dana Gould) and Bunny (Anessa Ramsey) with there silent twins (Max and Nick Folkman) over for a group dinner. As the night wears on Sadie is plagued with references to her behavior that may have caused another band mate, Alex's (Karina Fontes) death? That guilt is a driver in the conflict but as the real danger is revealed we see that all the locals are more than they appear to be. Sadie is soon in a fight for her life, one that brings her to an unexpected relationship with passerby Lucas (Mather Zickel). The guilt that he now has to deal with from their meeting drives the third segment of the film. The weird turn in this second story drives Sadie out into the desert and brings her face to face and involved with the next piece, a lone girl on a dark desert highway cool wind in her hair.
  Lucas needs to do all he can to deal with a medical emergency but can not seem to get any useful help. As he drives into an abandoned town he works desperately to find some help. When arriving at the hospital he roams the halls looking for help that is not there.  Playing on a television we see Carnival of Souls (1962) playing and that certainly fits the mood of the film. A film where the lead actress is drawn to a strange carnival and later we learn she has been dead the entire time. The creepy and airy fantasy that is that movie is also building in the one we are watching. Lucas is pushed hard to do everything to save the accident victim but it is obvious to the viewer that the information he is getting is just slightly wrong. Left emotionally wrought from his experience he stumbles about looking for a way back out of the hospital. The nightmare of his night is only broken by a call from his wife, but its not her. Instead he has the same people who have tormented him on the line. Telling him to help but ultimately killing the car accident victim. He gets to live with his guilt as he drives out of town with the guilt he thinks he has been absolved of. As he goes he passes a woman on the phone and we pick up the film from there.
  She is a local in the town and walks back into a bar, in that bar are a few locals who are disrupted by a shotgun wielding man, Danny (David Yow). He is demanding to see his sister a woman he is there to save. All of them are more than they first appear with long claws and scary eyes but he does not care. He is there for his sister Jesse (Tipper Newton), and these hick demons are not going to stop him. Things are not really working out for him even as he gets the bar tender to lead him to Jesse. As the Barkeep says to Danny before he is reunited with his Sister, "You're fucked Danny and you don't even know it." This is true for all the characters involved in this film, they are all fucked when we meet them and they don't even know it. Whether it is the desert valley that is cursed or the guilt of losing your sibling or, of causing a death, it is all like the in Carnival of Souls, people caught in a hell that is unrelenting and unforgiving. Circling around the film leaves Jesse and joins a family where the guilty father's secret seals the family's fate. They are to come into contact with the pair of desparados we started the film with. When all is said and done there is little redemption for the victims or perpetrators in Southbound. It is a tale about entering that in between realm somewhere outside the normal world but not fully in the depths of hell. A purgatory where all decisions have consequences and no crimes go unpunished. A very decent dark string of tales these are waiting for you on the road heading Southbound.
  I enjoyed this one and recommend it. I thought the stories flowed one into the next in a pretty fluid motion and they are well tied together with emotion. As I have done so far this year; I am doing as an experiment my Twitter account @Soresport is dedicated to following and being followed by people in and behind the scenes. Then I am also hoping some of them follow me back. I do fear that Twitter has become too much of a promotional tool for people in film to actually get those follow backs but hey its an experiment.

I Sell the Dead (2008) Horror Comedy

I Sell the Dead (2008) - Writer director Glenn McQuaid gives us a cute little film made for a TV audience, what? it wasn't a made for TV movie? Really? Well it could have been it is short and cute with a tame story not designed to scare as much as it is to amuse. In the Story Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) is visited in the gallows as he awaits the guillotine, by Father Duffy (Ron Perlman). Duffy is there to record his story prior to death. Arthur tells him and we see through the film how her became a grave robber and then how he ended up in the gallows.
Certainly the story has more to it than that because Arthur and his partner Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden) are no ordinary grave robbers, sure they start out that way but then they start stealing more supernatural bodies. The vampire scene is very amusing with Willie playfully removing and restaking the vamp. The bodies generally supply doctor Vernon Quint, the wonderful Angus Scrimm of Phantasm fame although just a cameo I just love that he was in the film at all.
The counter to the story of the two men is a rival grave robbing gang the Murphy family who are bad ass. I will not give away too much plot here because I will recommend this and do not want to spoil it for you. Willie and Arthur have a bunch of funny bits running into different undead creatures and crossing paths with the Murphys. When they get a third person into their team, Fanny Bryers (Brenda Cooney) things get a bit more complicated. She is more inexperience and yet more aggressive than the boys and convinces them to do a job they should have stayed away from. When things go wrong it sets up the opening scene where Arthur is waiting to have his head chopped off.
There are a couple of surprises in the end of the film, well I am not sure you can call them surprises, if you were paying attention like I was you saw them coming. They do make the end fun and in general that is the feeling I had throughout. It was entertaining and fun to watch.



Rating (5.8) 5.0 and up are recommended, in the Zombiegrrlz system I say Rent It!