Movie Moxie’s 31 Days of Halloween Day 27: Silent Hill

Studio: Sony Pictures

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Christophe Gans

Review Rating: 8

Based on the wildly popular video game, a woman goes looking for her beloved adopted daughter in the haunted town of Silent Hill.

I didn’t play the game, I did watch the husband play it, and was intrigued by the ending. So when the movie came out awhile later, many of the fans of the video game were displeased, and the movie sadly didn’t seem to generate a lot in the way of new fans of just the film. Well poo on that; I enjoyed the movie just fine, thank you. Radha Mitchell did just fine in the main role of Rose, hunting mother, though I do still think that part was a tad too generic and could have been handed to any number of actresses. Sean Bean is Christ, her husband, remember him? Poor guy. Jodelle Ferland gives a phenomenal performance as both Sharon, and Alessa. Which brings us to the rest of the movie.

So Rose and Chris adopted this girl Sharon, and she just happens to havenight fits about some town called Silent Hill. And Rose, being a caringmother, decides to take Sharon back to the old burned town of what was Silent Hill, to try and help her daughter. Once there, literally all hell breaks loose, and Rose finds herself battling psycho mutant nurses with no eyes, or Pyramidhead with his maul. A good deal of the movie is video game combat, but they try to bring back the story heavily towards the end, for the climactic scene where Alessa comes in her full dark vengeance and explains everything while she calmly rips people apart. It’s hard to guess which is more terrifying, the calm little girl with the black eyes who’s killing folk all around her with flailing barbed wire, or the circumstances and townsfolk who did this to her in the first place. Although that’s not entirely fair, Alessa made a deal with…Someone, and chose to become this dark revenging angel on the entire town. But then, according to the movie anyway, they deserved it. 

Silent Hill takes what most people thought impossible, that is a horror/action video game, and made it into a really believeable if not understandable movie. And hell, for Halloween even your signifigant other can be talked into watching Silent Hill with you!

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Alicia Glass

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Movie Moxie’s 31 Days of Halloween Day 26: May

Studio: 2 Loop Films

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Lucky McGee

Review Rating: 8

Traumatized by a difficult childhood and the lack of ability to connect with those around her, in desperation May decides if she can’t make friends, she’ll really make a friend!

The really horrific parts of the movie don’t generally happen til right at the end. Until then, save for the screaming one-eyed Angela Bettis as May in the mirror flash at the very beginning, most of the horror is just May herself being incredibly awkward and terribly alone.

She tries, oh so very hard, to get people to talk with her, to understand her, knowing all the while she’s so very different that it would indeed be impossible. Take the Boy for example, Jeremy Sisto’s character Adam. May has a serious thing – for his hands. And the would-be lesbian girlfriend, after deciding her time with May was just a fling and didn’t mean anything, gets her just desserts in a scalpel-cutting embrace that is beautiful and absolutely terrible at the same time.

Yes I am going to go ahead and ruin the ending, sorry, the film is worth sitting all the way through anyway. May decides to take only the beautiful parts from these people she’s tried to make connections with, like literally, and puts together a Frankenstein’s monster of a friend that she dubs AMY. The finishing touch isn’t May popping out her own eye so AMY can see her, oh no. There’s one last surprise that I will leave for the movie to show you; once again, it’s quite worth it. Beautiful and dreamlike with nightmarish qualities woven throughout, May tells a story of a lonely girl whose ability to sew and a love that brings dark life to scorching light.

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Movie Moxie’s 31 Days of Halloween Day 25: Todd McFarlane’s Spawn the Animated Series

Al is a former government-trained assassin, gunned down in war and returned from Hell as Hellspawn, a ranking officer in the Devil’s army.

For it’s time, and even now, Spawn the Animated series broke tons of barriers and made a great name for dark cartoons. The style of the cartoon, the violence and swearing, and even just the origin mythos of Spawn being made into an animated series on HBO of all things, combine to make an absolutely riveting show.

So Al loves his wife Wanda very much. Like, a little too much. He literally clawed his way out of Hell, by promising Malbolja (the Devil) to serve as Hellspawn, the bringer of the Devil’s will and work upon the earth, if Spawn could see Wanda again. What he didn’t anticipate is that he would look like how he died, flash-fried government assassin, and that it would be a years after he died for his actual return. Nor could Spawn have anticipated that his former best friend would marry Wanda, and that they would have a child, Cyan. Or that the Devil would send the Mad Clown Violator to watch him, or that Cogliostro himself would be haunting the alleyways Spawn decides to claim. Spawn comes equipped with flying chains, a semi-sentient red cloak, mystical powers and helpful amnesia, so when Cogliostro speaks to him in riddles, he lashes out in anger or determined ignorance. 

The first season, which does happen to be my favorite, tells the origin story of Spawn, and what he chooses to do now that he’s back. Imagine, sacrificing your whole world, face and body and even potentially life and soul, for the person you love, only to come back to earth to find them moved on. You can’t wish her ill; what does Spawn do now? He takes to the mean streets and begins cleaning up the mafia and gang wars, protecting the alley mushrooms as they refer to the homeless that hole up there, and begins hunting the people who got him killed on assignment in the first place. Enemies are closing in all around him, and Spawn is running out of time to decide whom to serve – Malbolja the Devil, or his own agenda! The show is a wonderfully dark romp, and every show when it was on HBO began with an intro from creator McFarlane himself, saying, “And now Spawn – so turn off your lights.”

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Alicia Glass

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Movie Moxie’s 31 Days of Halloween Day 24: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

Studio: New Line Cinema

MPAA Rating: R

Director: Wes Craven

Using the new Freddy Krueger movie as a conduit, demonic spirits plan to invade, and it’s up to Heather Langenkamp, the actress of Nancy in the original Nightmare movies, to stop it!

Arguably the best Freddy movie to date, it has to be understood that unless you know and love Freddy’s backstory and all his iconic moves and legend, this movie won’t mean as much to you. A movie, about the first Freddy movie on it’s ten year anniversary, a new movie being made inside the movie we’re watching – is a very Wes Craven gimmick, and one I always enjoyed. This particular episode of the Freddy Krueger chronicles styles our beloved Master of Nightmares as something much more sinister than usual – a monster from the Outside, like a Grimm fairy tale come to terrible life. These days, we have a healthy respect if not fear for those olden tales, so it actually works to make Freddy in theory that much more frightening. It even shows inside New Nightmare, where we see what we know damn well is Robert England in a lot of makeup, and then much later, when we see a much more demonic version of Freddy rise like an evil Djinn!

Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, and even Wes Craven himself all reprise their own roles in this movie, just you know, to make it all the more believeable. With the same question raised in John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness, “If enough people believe in something, does that make it real?”, brought to full frontal purported real life inside the film, that’s rather scary too. And yes I know, there’s a bunch of traditional Freddy scares – the tongue in Heather’s phone; the kid strapping steak knives to his fingers for Freddy’s glove; the oh OW death of the husband – it’s all but a requirement anyway. Half of everyone’s favorite burnt psycho nightmare, half of an in theory actually possible plot, and we have a Nightmare on Elm St. opus.

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Alicia Glass

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Movie Moxie’s 31 Days of Halloween Day 23: AMC’s The Walking Dead

Officer Rick Grimes and a dwindling handful of survivors try to survive in a world overrun by zombies.

I wasn’t convinced about this show, at least for the first season. The iconic scenes belonging to the Zombie genre – the little zombie girl with stuffed animal freakout, the sawing off of limbs to escape zombies, the waking up alone in the hospital after being shot deal, that sort of thing – is all but copied shot for shot in the first few episodes. And I suppose, as a tribute if nothing else, it works for a show all about zombies, and survivors. Thankfully the second season has finally gone into originality. Many things happen a show-goer would not expect, but can readily see happening in a world newly overrun with zombies!

Rick Grimes is of course the main character of the show thus far, taking it all on his shoulders for the difficult decisions and pain and guilt they cause. Against all odds, Grimes has already found his wife and son – but this is only after his wife has had survivor sex with his former partner Shane, who left him for dead when zombies overran the hospital. The older Dixon brother is a rampaging redneck psycho, I say serves him right to have to have cut off his hand to escape the zombies that were coming. Glen the Korean kid is awesome and adorable and brings his own merit to the show, rather than the network need for diversity. Dale and Andrea have this odd dynamic going, comfort when she loses her daughter and then contempt when Andrea is apparently not allowed to choose to take her own life. At least noone’s pregnant. But oh wait, there has been some sex on the show, which means you know that’s going to pop up sooner or later. Norman Reedus of Boondock Saints fame joined us in the second season, he’s all but becoming the leader of the group when Grimes isn’t around, interesting enough for a Dixon brother.

It’s worth it to sit through all the tribute episodes, to get to the good stuff. If nothing else, you need to know the dynamic stories between the characters in order to really truly enjoy the entire show. Watching the zombies is always fun, if a little mindless pun intended hah, but we have to have the human side of the show too. And The Walking Dead is coming into it’s own, as a show and an evolving storyline.

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Alicia Glass

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