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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 9, 2015

Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976) Review

Elizabeth Erwin

In the pantheon of sharkploitation films, Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976) stands apart as a legitimately interesting take on the shark in horror trope. Unlike its predecessors, the audience isn’t asked to identify with those seeking to wrangle the flesh eating oceanic monsters. Rather, the sharks and their somewhat psychotic human caretaker become the heroes of the piece. Directed by known exploitation auteur William Grefe, the film includes all of the ridiculousness you’d expect of a B film with an underlining message about the importance of protecting the natural world from humans. The end result is a bizarre film that still resonates years later.

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 20, 2015

Aimy in a Cage Review (2015)

Elizabeth Erwin

79 mins | Hooroo Jackson | (USA) | 2015

Grade: A+

With lush cinematography and a challenging feminist infused narrative, Aimy in a Cage is unlike any other horror film in recent memory. While there are certainly traditional elements of the genre at play in the film (forced imprisonment, global plague), the narrative is less interested in creating a sense of impending doom and more focused on exploring how perceptions of sanity are dependent upon environment. The end result is a remarkable film that contextualizes adolescent female sexuality in a wholly original way.

Our entry into the story comes courtesy of comic style drawings through which each character is introduced without fanfare. Not only do these drawings set a stylistic tone for the film, but they are an effective callback to the graphic novel upon which the film is based. On the surface, the story is a simple one. Aimy, whose refusal to acquiesce to any of her family’s behavior modification demands, is deemed to be troubled and is forced to undergo a lobotomy of sorts to make her behavior more socially acceptable. Meanwhile, the Apollo Plague, a mysterious and deadly virus, begins to make the national news.

There is an unfair tendency of audiences to equate low budget with low production value but Aimy in a Cage shatters that myth with a visual flair that suggests a Hollywood style budget. Stylistically, the film is reminiscent of works by David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick in that the visuals serve to create a story parallel to the one verbalized on screen. Kubrick, in particular, appears to have been an influence on director Hooroo Jackson, not least in his framing of Aimy’s forced medical procedure: the scene instantly draws comparisons to Alex’s conversion therapy in Kubrick’s famed A Clockwork Orange.