Author Archives: Christopher Sheridan
The Woman in Black (2012)
The Woman in Black (2012) DVD / Blu-ray
By: Chris Sheridan (Four Beers) –
BEERate this movie!
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Adapted from a 1983 novel by Susan Hill, which itself was adapted into a stage production, The Woman in Black is about a young 19th century lawyer named Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) who suffers from Unlucky Protagonist syndrome: his wife is dead, his son knows Arthur is depressed, and he apparently sucks at his job too, because his last chance at the law firm he works at is to go to the small village of Crythin Gifford to prepare the paperwork of the recently deceased Alice Drablow at her large, isolated Eel Marsh House, which is out in the middle of a dark, nasty marsh and is totally not filled with evil. With the help of his only friend in town, Sam (Ciaran Hinds), Arthur must figure out what’s going on with the creepy things he continually sees in the house and the mysterious deaths of the town’s children.
A Toast
The Woman in Black certainly earns the first tip of the glass for some extremely satisfying atmosphere. Director James Watkins (Eden Lake) and his cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones display an impressive attention to detail and what occupies the frame for a creeping sense of dread. Shadows flit around, things appear and disappear in the background, and knocking sounds echo from hidden and unreachable places. These were the best bits of the movie, slowly building a creeping sense of dread and unease. The set design and art direction are second to none: the house is on top of a hill in the middle of a very creepy marsh, and is filled with evil-looking toys and other requisite haunted house miscellanea. Indeed, many elements of the film combine for some decent scares, not the least of which is the sound design. A very creepy theme knows just when to play, and admirably remains absent during the creepiest scenes, which considerably increases the scare factor. I’m normally not a fan of getting startled in horror movies, but a couple of these scares were built up very well and truly felt as though they had been earned.
Yeah, this house doesn’t have anything wrong with it. At all.
Beer Two
Be careful not to spill that second beer, because when it’s not skillfully building tension, the movie relies a little too heavily on some cheaper jump scares. It actually recycles quite a bit of them, to the point where the scares are so heavily telegraphed that by the sixth or seventh time the Woman jumps into the frame (accompanied by the ear-destroying blast of noise), it’s hardly scary because the same formula has been copied and pasted once again. Some of them were pretty good the first time, but they kept getting re-used and it felt as though the movie was sinking into the classic formula of the PG-13 horror flick.
And not always in a good way.
Beer Three
This beer is optional if you think that Daniel Radcliffe looks like a widowed lawyer with a four-year-old child. For everyone else, which is everyone in the world, you’ll need this beer to believe that Harry Potter is a widowed lawyer with a four-year-old child. Radcliffe as Arthur Kipps is simply poor casting, and the young actor does not quite pull off the role, especially when opposite the extremely talented Hinds. He’s not a bad actor, but the character calls for way more than Radcliffe delivers here.
“OBJECTION!!”
Beer Four
The final beer is for the ending, which was extremely anticlimactic and essentially negates the prior twenty minutes of the film. It’s a shame, too, because the middle segment of the movie was excellent. Unfortunately, the ending (which differs from both the book and stage production), just kind of happens. I won’t spoil it, but my reaction was basically, “OK, cool. I’m hungry.” In fact, most of the third act was fairly dull, save for an exciting segment in the marsh. However, that was followed by a failed attempt at both straight ghostly action and emotional drama, followed AGAIN by a simple ending chiller that just did not work.
Yeah, kinda like that.
The Woman in Black is definitely a bit above average for a haunted-house horror movie, and delivers some great scares at certain points in the film. It’s a kind of creepy first act, a chilling second, and lackluster third. It’s always sad when movies fall apart toward the end, especially when it is a horror film that does so well with establishing tension earlier on. That said, horror fans, especially ones that enjoy a decent mix of slow-burn tension and jolting scares, should enjoy this one enough if they’re not expecting a landmark of the genre.
Bonus Drinking Game
Take a Drink: every time you want to scream, “OMG HARRY LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!!”
Take a Drink: every time Arthur does something that a reasonable person should never, ever do in a horror movie.
Drink a Shot: every time Ciaran Hinds and his huge eyes kind of creep you out.
Take a Drink: every time you see the Woman in Black herself.
Fading of the Cries (2011)
Fading of the Cries (2011) DVD / Blu-ray
By: Christopher Sheridan (Six Pack) -
Be the 1st to BEERate this movie!
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Sarah (Hallee Hirsch) is an average girl living an average boring life in a boring town. However, when she puts on an amulet inherited from her deceased Uncle Michael (Thomas Ian Nicholas), the town is suddenly overrun with zombies. Saved at the last second by a mysterious swordsman (Jordan Matthews), Sarah finds herself menaced by the evil Mathias (Brad Dourif), who wants the amulet so that he can control night and day. Mathias employs his evil spirits and his power over darkness to try to recover the amulet.
A Toast
There are occasionally a few creative visual ideas here. It’s a neat shock a couple of times to see the “zombies”, who have bloody holes where their eyes should be. Having crows black out the sky in their numbers was kind of sweet the first couple of times it happened as well. The design of one of the evil characters, a demonic woman with a long tongue and horned face, was fairly inspired.
All right guys, I’ll give you this one.
Beer Two
The acting here is truly dreadful. It’s like taking the worst parts of a soap opera, a mattress store commercial and Saturday Night Live and combining them into the perfect storm of awful line reading. Everyone here, with the exception of Brad Dourif as the villain (who goes so far over the top he he’d be out of place in a 80s heavy metal music video), appear to be focusing on reciting their lines and not worrying about things like “emoting”. When the actors have no choice but to actually express some sort of feeling, they reach into a bag of stock responses such as “cry”, “surprised”, or “frightened”. The exception to this is Matthews as the swordsman, who just…stares.
Okay, cheap shot. It’s not that bad.
Beer Three
Drown your sorrows for a third time because in defense of the actors, they are not done any favors by the script, which features some horribly overindulgent dialogue ripped straight from a high school creative writing class. “Moody” one-liners, one or two depressingly weak attempts at wry humor and simile-laden monologues are packed to the bursting point into the script. It kind of feels like writer/director Brian A. Metcalf just took a ton of lines he thought sounded “awesome”, threw them on a page, and lazily tried to tie them together so he could legally call it a script.
Beer Four
Generally, with a movie in which mysterious horrible things happen, those things are explained before long. In Fading of the Cries, the confusion continues to stack up into a teetering tower of clumsily arranged plot elements with very little explanation. I kept waiting for some big exposition sequence but the best the movie has to offer is a couple of flashbacks, which literally do nothing to tie the characters and events together. It’s like a David Lynch movie but devoid of even that depraved logic. The already hammy dialogue tries to cryptically feed bits of the story throughout the adventure, but it never coheres into anything resembling a sensible plot, and the cries of the story threads have faded by the end of the movie (see what I did there? Drink your beer).
“I just want to understand this movie!!”
Beer Five
There’s this guy in the movie named Mathias, who seems to have walked straight out of the “Menacing Villainy for Dummies” guidebook. He’s obviously super evil because he uses absurdly theatrical monologues to basically describe the horrible evil things that he does such as bring darkness and cause the essence of nightmares (that’s literally a line of dialogue). He sneers, takes hostages, wears black robes, is old, and has a big wizard’s staff; basically the laundry list of traits for fantasy villains. I half-expected him to be somebody’s family member, but it’s never really explained where he comes from.
He’s like this, except maybe less evil
Beer Six
Remember when I said that there were “a few creative visual ideas”? I meant every word of that, literally. Unfortunately, those neat ideas look like shit on the screen. I understand that the movie had a low budget, but these special effects look as though someone stumbled across Adobe After Effects on their computer and had a blast for a couple of hours. The sloppy green screen effects on display here are innumerable. They get significantly worse as the movie goes on, which is really saying something since they were bad enough that they actually counteracted the beer vision.
Fading of the Cries is a hopeless case, a movie that does not get much better no matter what kind of alcoholic beverage you put into your body. It’s the worst bits of every dark fantasy film that’s been released in the last decade, a cocktail of cutting-room-floor footage arguably more poisonous than the copious amounts of alcohol needed to even survive it.
Bonus Drinking Game
Take a Drink: every time you can predict a horror or fantasy cliché and it happens (I recommend light beer for this one unless you’re the size of an elephant).
Take a Drink: every time Mathias says something excessively dramatic or theatrical.
Take a Shot: whenever Mathias pounds his staff on the ground.
Sip your Drink: every time Jacob’s sword flashes (sips only—I don’t want a lawsuit).
Chug a Beer: at the part where Mathias screams, “I WILL CEASE YOUR EXISTENCE!!”
