Wednesday, January 22, 2025

The clown is down: See, it's just a scary movie


ALL HALLOWS' EVE

2013
Written and directed by Damien Leone

Spoilers: moderate


The film year of 2024, while of course suboptimal in many respects, also foisted upon me one unique burdenat least if I had any desire to survey the year with any degree of completenessand while it's more my fault for being lazy and incurious for a long time before 2024 even started, I still hold it against it.  You see, the year produced not one but two third films in two important horror film series, firstly MaXXXine, the conclusion to Ti West's X trilogy, and then Damien Leone's Terrifier 3, and I've got so much homework to do.  Leone's films always sounded like they'd be up my alley, and, accordingly, I've decided to stop kicking that can down the road, even though I suspect I could continue doing so: I understand that 2024's Terrifier 3 is not the conclusion to any "trilogy," and Leone seems as likely as not to make a Terrifier 4 (especially after Terrifier 3 made such a large amount of money, proving how legitimately important his horror series has gotten).  There's also the matter of how, actually, there were three feature films in the Terrifier series already, indicating, I guess, that Leone has made it his straight-up life's work to ensure that his signature nightmare, Art the Clown, remains in the public eye.

Still, we're doing this one first, so let's hark back to 2013, which was the year I set out on my apparent life's work (of maintaining an unpopular film blog in an already post-literate world), but, more importantly, the year Leone made All Hallows' Eve, an "anthology" film which Leone wrote, directed, edited, and (suggesting the niche Leone fills in our cinematic ecosystem) did the special makeup effects for.  One thing we should get out of the way, right away: this is not an anthology film, really, or at least it's very dysfunctional as one, and that classification was simply the easiest way to sell what it actually is, which is an excuse for Leone's preexisting short films, "The 9th Circle" and "Terrifier," to interact with each other and with a framing narrative, rather than any sort of properly-described "real movie."  (The most "anthology" thing about it, the inclusion of a newly-shot short film, is the part that meshes least-well in a system of imagesagain, not "a real movie"that clearly doesn't consider "meshing" to be any especially urgent goal.)  It'd been tabled, anyway, by producer Jesse Baget as a true anthology filmas a fan of "Terrifier," which had already achieved an independent legacy on the horror Internet, Baget had invited Leone to tender "Terrifier" as his entry in a compilation that included other horror up-and-comers.  However, Leone had pridefully refused, countering with an offer to give Baget "Terrifier" but only if Leone got the feature-length showcase all to himself.  I suppose this must've worked out better for Leone's career than if he'd just been the standout in a grab-bag of crap, though this seems counter-intuitivebecause it is still a grab-bag of crap, only this time it's all the work of the exact same dude, so now you have to wonder if his good one was a fluke.

If you say so, Leone.

History vindicates him, it seems, and I'm being more hostile to All Hallows' Eve than I intend, though I don't think it benefits much from Leone deciding to, effectively, make an Art the Clown feature film several years before its time.  In any case, that's how we find Art managing to appear in every single segment, including the framing narrative, despite not being highly relevant to two of those segments, and being jarringly alienso to speakto one of them in particular.  But whatever, we have the movie we have, and so we begin: one Halloween night, we find Sarah (Katie Maguire) doing her friends a favor by looking after their spawn, Tia (Sydney Freihofer) and Timmy (Cole Mathewson).  They've just gotten back from trick-or-treating, and amidst the usual trove of candy, Timmy has discovered that someone had surreptitiously placed in his bag a VHS tape.  Timmy and Tia, who have never seen The Ring, demand they watch it right away, so as to see what nasties this video contains, and their irresponsible babysitter grudgingly grants her permission.  Thus does Sarah prompt the "anthology" part of this nominal "anthology film" by some uncreative means that basically render this an unacknowledged V/H/S sequel, though I still expect that the V/H/S films didn't posit anything quite as implausible as an average young family in 2013 still building their living room media center around a VHS playereven if it wouldn't shock me (it would still annoy me) if the later V/H/S movies' formal recreation of "videotape aesthetics" did likewise posit that VHS cassettes had the same native playback aspect ratio, 16:9, as an HD television screen.  (Oh, I don't know, maybe it's a D-VHS, and this average young family somehow has that in the middle of their living room.)

Anyway, this "framing narrative," if we accept for convenience's sake that that's what it is, does somewhat prefigure (though it was probably the last thing filmed) the weaknesses of most of the anthology segments: it's stiffly-acted, with something of the stiltedness of performers who have read their lines literally right before reciting them for a camera (it's telling that the kids aren't noticeably much worse than Maguire), and it isn't "written" so much as it's a collection of shortcuts to get to the horror ideas that Leone is aiming for, and it looks bad.  On the last count, it looks bad in a different way than its subordinate segments look bad; in the framing narrative's case, what All Hallow's Eve looks like is if somebody had Dean Cundey's photography on, well, Halloween described to them secondhand, an orange-and-teal concept that seemingly delights in smudging blue moonlight, from a huge yet somehow invisible window, all over one side of Maguire's face, and orange houselight all over the other, and it's starkly overlit in all respects (it's unclear which of the film's five cinematographers to blame this on).  Meanwhile, Leone demonstrates that numerous intervening years had taught him only a little about shot scales*, though it's not as bad as the first segment, the oldest part of the movie.  This is "low-budget, inexperienced" stuff that can be forgiven, of course, but the big thing is Leone's editing, and while I don't think all of the individual segments show a strong grasp of editing (the oldest part of the movie is, oddly, not the worst about this), the strategic decision he makes here is a real disaster, to cut out of the individual segments, with a surprisingly regular frequency, and back to the frightened, disgusted reactions of Maguire and the kids watching them; this, as I hope would be needless to say, has the tendency to fuck up whatever nightmare logic momentum they ever accrue, but it has the further effect of a horror filmmaker insisting on his own skill, which is an even more serious imposition when a lot his film isn't very good, or scary, in the first place.


But let's dig into "The 9th Circle," which resolves out of a static-creation algorithm on Leone's laptop, and tells the story of a weary traveler on Halloween (Kayla Lian), waiting for a train only to be accosted by a certain aggressive clown (Mike Giannelli), who, after failing to amuse her, drugs her and renders her off to a lair beneath the station, where he keeps two other women (Marissa Wolf and Minna Taylor), who relay the distressing news that until recently there'd been yet a fourth, who was dragged down the corridor by her chains and, they assume, met a grisly end.

This was actually Leone's very first anything, and I don't rightly know if he understood that this clown was going to be his meal tickethe's really only preface to a lumpy, slapped-together story about, like, Satan (Eric Diez).  (Hence the title, although I truly can't imagine that Leone had consulted Inferno recently.)  As we'll see later in "Terrifier," but to an even greater degree here, at this early date"The 9th Circle" was shot in 2006!Leone's influences appear to have not been limited to the likes of Tobe Hooper or John Carpenter, but went deeper, and the vibe in this one is very much "William Girdler in his Asylum of Satan and Three On a Meathook years, if he worked with more brevity, but with even less concern for coherent execution."  The clown, in any case, only serves to bring the woman into captivity, and the more thoroughgoing horror is some chintzy nonsense that is, nonetheless, clearly where the budget went; the prospect that this segment's actual goal was no more ambitious than just showing off Leone's makeup skills could go an awful long way towards explaining why it is the way it is.  As it cycles through its no-effort and atmosphere-free story and a variety of (decent) creature and gore effects, the question I kept asking is, "so what are we even doing here?"  (3/10)


To Sarah's credit, and I suppose to Leone's, "The 9th Circle" was unpleasant enough to get her to shut the tape off and send the kids to bed, though out of curiosity and boredom the babysitter turns it right back on to see what it does next.  This is "Something In the Dark," and, gosh, does Leone rub its 2013 vintage right in your face, since this is "the haunted VHS tape" where the frightening film contained therein revolves to a huge degree around a woman (Catherine Callahan) talking on her mother fucking smartphone.  She's just moved out to a fancy rural house with her husband, an artist, though this doesn't really matter (his voice is provided by Michael Chmiel, though this matters even less).  Something bright lands outside, however, and knocks out the powerin fact, it seems to be some kind of transient electromagnetic eventand while you might not have guessed this until Leone springs it out at you, because it feels extremely counter to "the more or less unsubtle supernatural horror" tenor of everything elseincluding the framing narrative!in retrospect it was pretty obviously going to be an extraterrestrial (Brandon deSpain).

So it's a Signs-ish kind of scenario (an incredibly spare one, even for an anthology segment that exists solely to bump the package up to feature length, and spare even for Leone's whole "anthology" approach, which isn't really about telling "short stories"); and if it could have been frightening, it sure isn't the way Leone's done it.  The most obvious thing is that this rural home with the power off is crazy overlit, and if I can sort of appreciate that here in these literally-dark days, there should still probably be somewhat more of a distinction between "normal interiors" and "a house illumined solely by moonlight, or, despite its explicit rural location, what appear to be extremely bright streetlights."  (Yet the segment does peak, as frightening horror, with the power going outwhich is probably a bit damning all by itself, right?)  The problem is less that it's too bright, though, than that it's too bright for this monsterthe overriding influence is just "greys," but consciously or not there's a ton of The Man From Planet X in this, and that is simply not where you want to find your resonance, alien visitor-wise.  It looks stupid, and is not well-treated within the worst editing of any of the segments, with some really amateurish failures of how shots fit together (lots of weird buffering exterior establishing shots that don't compress time or, frankly, do anything), as well as a near-total lack of concern about how the tone is going to be impacted by several longish takes of deSpain swanning about with interpretive dance, which don't even provide any real compensation by being silly fun.

The saving grace, to the extent there could be one, is the score: composed by one "Noir Deco," who effectively vanished after this film, it's testament to the enormous talent pool in the retrowave community; going by the credits for the film, Leone must have scrapped the original scores for the pre-completed segments, and I guess I can't gainsay that decision, since this is, after all, very good.  In the case of "Something In the Dark," it even grants it the occasional illusion of being intense and scary, and the worst thing about the way that it ceaselessly thrums underneathhell, up enough in the mix that we should say "over"the chase phase of the segment is that sometimes it does stop, in what are pretty clearly directorial impositions, which are inevitably also mistakes, but that's kind of this whole segment anyway.  And if you're wondering how Art the Clown manages to push his way into these proceedings about an alien, I won't spoil it, but Leone probably thought Art's cameo was "tasteful." (3/10)


This seems like a lot of hostility for a movie I'm allegedly not hostile to, I realize, but now we arrive at the main event, "Terrifier," shot in 2011, and it is immediately clear how it got Leone a "feature" which itself was mainly just a vehicle to get this short film in front of a wider audience; even knowing how his career evolved, it's very difficult, even within a few seconds of this segment kicking off, to refrain from audibly asking the screen, "why the hell didn't you just make this the whole movie?"  I have mentioned that this entire movie looks "bad," but "Terrifier" looks "bad" with proper malice aforethought, this hideous simulacrum of early 70s grindhouse cinema (better yet, an Internet upload of early 70s grindhouse cinema), that's been artificially aged through various means, none more effective than the ugly digital treatment that washes everything out and makes every light source burst in ways intended to scrape your eyeballs, while the colors are being pushed into disgustingly synthetic places, especially some freakishly lavender skintones.  (Christopher Carafo, mostly a camera assistant, shot it; "inept cutting" is an option that remains open to Leone due to "Terrifier's" faux-grindhouse complexion, but when he takes it here, it's effective just like the "bad lighting" and "bad color grading" are.  And there's way less, almost none, of the "cut back to the living room" stuff.)

This scenario's spare, too, but alone amongst the segments, not harmed by it.  So: a woman (something of a theme, huh?; Marie Maser, who's also giving the film its best human person performance) is out traveling, and stops at one of those filling stations with an actual attendant (Chmiel again).  (Incidentally, "Terrifier's" "VHS footage" at least has the decency to keep its telecommunications technology to a flip phone.)  The attendant is in the midst of giving the bum's rush to a gross clown of our previous acquaintance, who's pretty much ruined the bathroom; despite this, she has a pleasant friendly interaction with him until the clown comes back and she witnesses the harlequin decapitating her new pal.


It's pretty much a Final Girl sequence with neither build-up nor rationality (the tinge here is decidedly supernatural), and there's some pretty stark limits to how good that can be, I suppose, but this absolutely must hit that ceiling: there's some terrific adrenaline to how Leone (and Maser) pursue it, and enough convolution that it can at least elaborate on its initial notion, while Art is, as would be proven numerous times afterwards, pretty much an instantly iconic figure.  He's good enough, anyway, to overcome my prejudiceI don't think clowns are automatically scary and one of the reasons I dragged my feet on the Terrifiers is that "scary clowns" are almost as passé as zombies (in fairness, less so in 2011)but this "scary clown" is real good, and the one particular thing I didn't like about Art, his dumb tilted tiny hat, is much less distracting than in still promotional images.  Certainly, his colors have a lot to do with how well he worksa rather restrained satiny black-and-whiteand while Giannelli didn't stay in the role (he was replaced by David Howard Thornton), there's a lot to be freaked out by in his playful physical performance, both the self-amusing joy he takes in murder and the disconcerting way he bounces and shakes when he's excited, and it's already about as close to a modern Freddy Krueger as I've ever seen.  (I'm not sure "Terrifier" has a single image as intriguing as the interstitial cut in "The 9th Circle" where Art appears to be a poorly-fitting skinsuit encasing some kind of unearthly glowI don't actually know, so don't tell me, but I believe this image prefigures an even Freddier-than-Freddy place that the Terrifier films will eventually lead tobut, as of 2011, Leone had obviously arrived at a much more complete idea of what his creation was for.)  As for the actual slasher part, it's slashing in a torture porn vein, and I won't describe it more explicitly than that, except to say that it shocked these jaded old sensibilities, navigating a path that takes it right between "try-hard edgelordliness" and "the product of a genuinely diseased mind obsessed with misogynistic, violent fetishism," and hence into something of a sweet (or whatever) spot for it.  It certainly feels authentically gross, with novel, upsetting, and (indeed) terrifying imagery to close things out on. (8/10)

The framing narrative ends quite well, tooalmost as unexpectedly cruellyand with some importation of the formal elements (not all) of "Terrifier," as the film takes a meta swerve (that's not the unexpected part, obviously, more like the "completely expected" part), but it believes in it and does it well.  (Let's go ahead and call the framing narrative a 6/10.)  A lot of All Hallow's Eve sucks, and doesn't so much as suggest competence; but Leone at least had the wisdom to leave you enthusiastic about where he might go next.

Score: 5.01/10

*Screenshots and pirate copies of the movie online (I watched it legally, relax) are discombobulating me viz. what the "proper aspect ratio" of some of these segments is, though.

Reviews in this series
Terrifier (2018)

4 comments:

  1. It's so frustrating they didn't make Art a mime. He pretty much already IS a mime! Just call him a mime! They wouldn't have to change anything.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think part of my soul dies every time I see someone say "VHS player." You were there so I can take some solace that maybe you did in fact use that term back in the day (I think I knew some folks who referred to the machine as "the VHS") but running into adults who have no idea what a "VCR" is is a very specific kind of melancholy for me, hahaha!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I want to be clear that I have NO IDEA why I said "VHS player" instead of "VCR" but I will leave it as is.

      Delete
    2. Hmm I can see it being mental shorthand for "improvised solution for playing a VHS tape seeing as how actual VCRs are getting increasingly scarce."

      Delete