Horror/Thriller Battle #1

Watching Scott Pilgrim and then going back into Starz's epic Pillars of the Earth miniseries is quite jarring. Alison Pill is frighteningly different in the two of them. Her delivery as the new queen, of "I would like a toy too. 100 pounds from the each of you" was chilling. The series itself is far from perfect, but it boasts several fantastic performances from the likes of Ian McShane and Hayley Atwell (future Captain America love interest). But Pill owns it in her small role that has brilliantly seen her from wronged royalty all the way to power-mad devil; and we still have three hours left.


Today gives us a much closer battle. I'm well aware that horror and thriller are two very different genres, but for the purpose of these battles they're similar enough that they'll have to compete together. The films are written in the order I watched them, not by my preferences or anything else.

Mortal Transfer
vs.
The Wolfman
vs.
Shutter Island
vs.
The Ghost Writer

Let's begin!

The first film is French skin master Jean-Jacques Beineix's 2001 thriller Mortal Transfer. A psychiatrist treating a sexy, mysterious thief falls asleep during their session and awakes to find her strangled to death. He spends the rest of the film trying to hide then dispose the body, as well as figure out who killed her. Beineix relies on melodramatic blues and dodged camera angles to evoke the sleek urban mood he seems to desperately want, but the narrative falls flat after the initial discovery of the body. The doctor spends 90 minutes running around pointlessly and without any dramatic impact. The last 30 minutes are meant to discount a very visual film as suddenly characters decide to sit down and tell us all the twists in the form of painfully long monologues. It's a terrible decision that finally sinks a mediocre thriller.

This next film made a very surprising showing in the battle. Joe Johnston's The Wolfman is supposed to be an awful film, at least according to the overwhelming majority of critics. The trailers didn't look great, but I didn't think they made the film look bad either. Turns out it's both good and bad. In Devin Faraci's review over at CHUD.com (he likes it a lot more than I do), he likens it to the classic B-movies where you'd have to sit through all the boring crap for those few minutes of great material. Unfortunately we don't live in that era anymore so Johnston's film will probably be remembered as just bad. But I agree more with Devin. Every sequence involving an actual werewolf is exhilarating and scary, and expertly executed. Every other scene in the film is clearly racing to the next werewolf attack, robbing these scenes of any actual worth and really fucking with the pace. Then there's the forced, chemistry-free romance between leads Benicio del Toro and Emily Blunt. I know this film went through hell every step of its long road to the theater. It feels cut to hell. Maybe there's a lot of footage that makes these forced elements better? But as it stands, the long action sequences make the film worth a look.

Shutter Island, on the other hand, does not feature any bad anything. I've heard people calling Leonardo DiCaprio's performances here and in Inception very similar, but I'm surprised I haven't really heard anyone noting the similarities between the movies themselves. To go further would be to spoil, but trust me, they're similar. And I'll call Shutter Island the winner. It's a beautiful and frightening walking nightmare. Martin Scorcese has constructed a formalist, visual treat. People complain about the twists, but they seem almost irrelevant to me. Scorcese had no intention of hiding where the story was going. Instead it's a great character examination filled with great, creepy performances. One scene performances from Jackie Earle Hailey, Patricia Clarkson, and Elias Koteas are particularly memorable. We have our front runner, people.

Roman Polanski does his best to make a pretty standard thriller great with The Ghost Writer. He gets close. It often feels more like a drama than a suspense thriller, but it's an effectively cutting condemnation of Tony Blair, and I think to some extent, a man on the run from a shameful past. Shoe seems to fit. Polanski does successfully wring ropes of tension out of some conversations that feel about a few ticks to the left of normal. Ewan McGregor's interview with Tom Wilkinson is probably the example, but Olivia Williams gets the best material overall as Pierce Brosnan's former prime minister's suffering wife/femme fatale. I also enjoyed how not every aspect of this film is about its central mystery. The narrative flows in and out of it so efficiently that by the film's fantastic and subtly exhilarating climax, how the mystery wraps itself up isn't even the most interesting part.

The results:

Shutter Island claims 1st place with an 8.7/10

The Ghost Writer takes 2nd with a 7.9/10

The Wolfman is 3rd with a 6.5/10

Mortal Transfer comes in 4th place with a 5.2/10


Outside of the battle, IFC released a couple of VOD exclusive films in the past couple of weeks. Both were pretty good films from much better directors. Making Plans with Lena is far from Christophe Honore's best, but it is mostly successful as a darker, less sentimental imitation of Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale. One of my personal favorites Johnnie To made the decision to have most of his Vengeance dialogue spoken in English. Having everyone stuck in their second language sucks the air out of what would have been some fantastic exchanges. I think he picked the wrong film to scale back on his normally extravagant but mesmerizing action choreography. I know he's got more in him than action (someone please fucking release Sparrow, it's got to be one of the best films of the last decade!), but this film could have used more.


I think I'm about as close to caught up with2010 films as I possibly can be at this point. Hopefully I'll finally get around to Greenberg soon.