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Posted on December 12, 2015

Nightmare Code (2014): Coding Humans?

Dawn Keetley

Synopsis: Nightmare Code follows a programmer with legal and financial problems, Brett Desmond (Andrew J. West), who goes to work at OPTDEX, a company trying to develop sophisticated behavior recognition software (R.O.P.E.R). Brett is pinch-hitting, as it were, for another programmer, Foster Cotton (Googy Gress), who went “Columbine” (as someone puts it) and shot several of the company’s managers and then himself. As Brett gets drawn deeper into the “code,” he realizes that it may be about more than mere behavior recognition—and that the code may not be confined to the computer.

Nightmare Code is sci-fi horror directed and written by Mark Netter (M. J. Rotondi also co-wrote). It is a cerebral film that exploits the increasingly blurred line between the online/computer world and the “real” world, a murkiness that’s been the subject of other horror films of late (Unfriended and #Horror being two recent examples).

I highly recommend this film: it is expertly directed; the dialogue is believable and thought-provoking (without being heavy-handed); and actors Andrew J. West (Gareth from AMC’s The Walking Dead) and Mei Melançon (who plays Nora Huntsman) deliver stand-out performances. The film is worth watching, above all, for its concept and for the unique way in which it visually renders that concept. I would fault the film mainly on the grounds of its predictability and consequent lack of suspense: I had an idea pretty early on about where it might be going, and I wasn’t surprised.

Posted on December 11, 2015

Fiction Review: David Moody, HATER (2006)

Dawn Keetley

There’s plenty of post-apocalyptic fiction out there these days—and a lot of it is quite bad. British horror writer David Moody’s novel, Hater, is one of the rare exceptions.

Published in 2006 by Thomas Dunne Books, Hater is the first of a trilogy—and is followed by Dog Blood (2010) and Them or Us (2011). And it seems a film of Hater may be imminent: there’s a producer, a script, and several interested parties.[i] Fingers crossed!

Moody does so many things right in Hater. The narration, for one, is compelling, as we see events unfold through the eyes of a distinctly ordinary character, one who (like most of us) has no ready aptitude for the cataclysm that confronts him. Danny McCoyne is shiftless and unmotivated, shuffling through his deadening life while expending as little effort as possible. In his late twenties, he has had a series of jobs for the council, being demoted from one to the next, and when the novel opens he “works” (although he tries hard not to) in the Parking Fine Processing office, mostly dealing (ineptly) with irate people who’ve had their cars clamped or been given parking tickets.

Posted on December 2, 2015

The House on Pine Street (2015) Review

Dawn Keetley

The House on Pine Street now ranks in my top 3 independent horror films of 2015, just below Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation and just above Perry Blackshear’s They Look Like People (both reviewed here).

Synopsis: A young couple, Jenny (Emily Goss) and Luke (Taylor Bottles), move from Chicago back to Jenny’s hometown in Kansas. Jenny is seven months pregnant and is recovering from some kind of mental breakdown involving her pregnancy (at least, that’s what her husband and mother think). It becomes increasingly clear that Jenny is not happy—not happy to be back in Kansas, not happy to be in the same town as her overbearing mother, Meredith (Cathy Barnett), not happy to have left her life in Chicago, and not happy about to be pregnant. Soon strange things start happening in the house on Pine Street.

Written by Natalie Jones, with the collaboration of Austin and Aaron Keeling, who also directed, The House on Pine Street is a truly independent production, made by graduates of the University of Kansas and the University of Southern California, all under the age of twenty-four. During the nineteen-day shoot, the cast and crew lived in the “haunted” house in which they were filming, conditions reminiscent of the production of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.[i]

Posted on November 27, 2015

Slow Violence, Environmentalism, and The Walking Dead

Dawn Keetley

There is much to say about The Walking Dead and many people saying it, so I feel there’s room before the upcoming mid-season finale of season 6 to write about something a little bit off the beaten track.

Especially since the beginning of season 6, I’ve been thinking that among the many things the zombies of The Walking Dead connote is the slow lurch of catastrophic environmental damage.

My theory is, no doubt, in large part due to the fact that I’ve been reading Rob Nixon’s excellent 2011 book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon coins the term “slow violence” to describe long-term ecological devastation, “a violence that occurs gradually,” a “violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Nixon argues that while sudden cataclysmic environmental disasters (typhoons etc.) are easy to narrativize, it’s harder to tell stories about often almost-imperceptible “slow violence.”[i] I would suggest that one place to look for such stories is the zombie narrative—because, for me at least, the term “slow violence” also inevitably conjures up zombies (the slow kind, anyway!).

Season 6 has offered the repeated shot of Daryl (Norman Reedus) on his motorcycle, cresting the hill of a rural road with a horde of walkers looming behind him, as he tries to lead them away from the community of Alexandria. This image suggests the way in which the consequences of a reckless use and misuse of our planet follows slowly but inexorably behind us.

Posted on November 24, 2015

#Horror Review (2015)

Dawn Keetley

101 mins | Tara Subkoff | (USA) | 2015

Grade: B

Synopsis: Six twelve-year-old friends gather for a sleepover at the fabulous Connecticut home of Sofia (Bridget McGarry), whose mother, Alex, is played by Chloë Sevigny. The girls alternately create various scenarios so they can upload pictures and verbally abuse each other. One of the girls, Cat (Haley Murphy), crosses the line, telling the one girl who’s not unhealthily thin, Georgie (Emma Adler) that she should kill herself. She’s kicked out of the house and soon the other girls realize they are being stalked online and then in deadly reality.

#Horror is the writing and directorial debut of Tara Subkoff, actress and fashion designer. She has talked quite explicitly about her interest, in this project, in marrying the horror film to social commentary. Mentioning some of her favorite horror films and directors (Wes Craven, The Exorcist, Halloween, The Shining), she describes horror’s important work of “social commentary,” its way of “talking about politics.” Subkoff’s interest in social commentary pervades #Horror, which directly speaks to our obsession with electronic devices and social media. According to Subkoff, cultural narcissism is reaching boiling point: “we’re just obsessed with ourselves and promoting ourselves,” she said, in an interview on Quiet Earth.[i] Subkoff also takes aim at cyberbullying, as the girls in #Horror pass up no opportunity to ridicule and abuse each other in person and on social media.