Collins’ Crypt: 2013 Drawn And Quartered Part I

The first third of 2013 is coming to an end, and thus it's time to recap the theatrically-released horror offerings we've enjoyed or endured so far. As far as Hollywood is concerned, horror is hot again - nearly all of the genre films released have exceeded their production budgets, which is always a good sign (and not always the case, even in this lower-budgeted area). For a brief period the year's highest grossing film was a horror flick, and that was with a lot of competition both in the genre (which tends to "spread the wealth" and leave them all performing under par) and out of it - who would have guessed that Mama would outgross the newest Die Hard sequel? But were the movies any good?

Well if you consider entertainment value only, than the year's first offering certainly qualifies as a winner. Texas Chainsaw 3D, if nothing else, was never really boring, though I'm not sure the filmmakers wanted crowds to be laughing more often than screaming. In a year no one will remember a single scare moment, but will still be making "Do your thing, cuz!" jokes and trying to comprehend the film's baffling timeline, which either takes place in 2012 and 1991, depending on what elements you pay attention to while ignoring others. The huge opening weekend (21 million) prompted the usual Monday morning sequel announcement, but its record-breaking freefall (by its 4th weekend it was in 36th place, a record for a film opening at #1 - even last year's similarly polarizing The Devil Inside took another week to drop that low) seemed to have stalled those plans just as quickly. Profit is one thing, but just as Platinum Dunes have seemingly learned, it's not worth following up with a presumably more expensive sequel when there are multiple studios/companies with a stake in the property and everyone hates the (for lack of a better word) original.

The following week, audiences were assaulted by A Haunted House, a Paranormal Activity spoof from Marlon Wayans. The only interesting thing about this shockingly unfunny movie is that Wayans was one of the forces behind the Scary Movie franchise before bailing after part 2, and that series was about to be revived with Scary Movie 5, the first installment in 7 years and ALSO a Paranormal spoof. By beating them to the punch, Wayans' film grossed nearly double what the (superior, for what it's worth) Scary Movie sequel would pull in a couple months later while spoofing some of the same movies. However, Haunted House's success seemed to have directly impacted its competition - reshoots occurred shortly thereafter that changed SM5's focus (almost impressively so) to a pretty close parody of Mama, with the Evil Dead remake getting some "love" as well. It wasn't just some stuff they took from the trailer - you actually have to have SEEN Mama in order to fully understand some of the jokes in SM5, which has to be a record for this sort of material. But the long gap between entries and fatigue from Haunted House (which is, sigh, getting a sequel of its own) proved costly; after three weeks the film has yet to even gross the opening weekend totals of most of its predecessors, likely signaling the end of the series (unless Dimension opts to go DTV with future installments, like many of their franchises).

But I keep getting ahead of myself. Mama was released on January 18th, and unless I'm mistaken, helped Jessica Chastain - also starring in Zero Dark Thirty, which had just been put in wide release - become the first actress to star in the top two films for the weekend box office*. It was also a pretty solid effort; the CGI could be problematic and there were a couple of pacing issues (THREE scenes of people driving out to the same remote locale while looking at a map!), but it was an effective, surprisingly grim affair for a PG-13 horror film, and should provide some ammo for a defense of the rating - it was scarier and more daring than the R rated Chainsaw. Or, for that matter, the following week's Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, which earned its R rating through gore but not scares. Director Tommy Wirkola clearly loves Sam Raimi, but he doesn't quite share Raimi's ability to mix scares and laughs effectively, offering up repetitive action scenes and clumsy comedy as window dressing for a pretty underdeveloped story about witches kidnapping children. A sequel is planned (it did OK here, but grossed 165 million overseas); hopefully it will focus on Edward - the troll character who is also the best thing about it.

The genre train kept rolling with Warm Bodies, the fifth wide release in as many weeks. Also PG-13 and clearly aiming more for laughs than scares, it was a charming entry in the "zom-com" sub-genre, and was loaded with reverence to the more traditional zombie classics - when's the last time you saw Fulci's Zombie given a shoutout in a major studio production? It eventually grossed a very respectable 66 million; less than 10m shy of the all time biggest grossing zombie film in the US (Zombieland), not counting inflation. And I don't know if it had anything to do with it, but it certainly couldn't have HURT that it was directed by Jonathan Levine, who made his debut on All The Boys Love Mandy Lane - shortly after its impressive box office run, it was announced that Mandy would FINALLY be released here in the US after a whopping SIX year delay due to various legal issues. If you haven't given up and imported a DVD from another country (it's been released pretty much everywhere else), look for that one later this year.

Hollywood then took a break from horror fare for a couple of weeks, during a pretty dire February that saw lots of huge flops (Beautiful Creatures, Bullet to the Head, and Die Hard 5, which did OK overseas to save face) and disappointments - Steven Soderbergh's reported final feature Side Effects was mostly ignored, which is a shame as it was one of his best movies in years and a love letter to Brian De Palma, which automatically makes it worth a look. On February 22nd, Dimension tried to get into the "From the producer of Paranormal Activity" game by distributing Blumhouse's Dark Skies, which applied their "family in danger" formula to an alien invasion thriller. It wasn't too bad (it's certainly director Scott Stewart's best film yet), but audiences were pretty indifferent, as it grossed a mere 17 million - a fine number compared to its 3.5m budget, but far below his average with his other very-low budget offerings like Insidious and Sinister (plus the Paranormals, all of which combined cost less than any of their opening weekends).

A week later, the genre suffered its first true flop of the year, with The Last Exorcism Part II's entire take failing to even match the opening weekend gross of the original. It was a wise move to drop the found footage aesthetic, but by focusing on Ashley Bell's character of Nell and ignoring just about every other unresolved plot point of the original (Cotton's fate is still unclear; none of the other surviving characters appear or are even MENTIONED except for Nell's dad), it felt aimless and pointless, with horrendous and overused CGI effects just making things worse. Some failures are undeserved, but this was not one of them - I truly hope it is never replaced as my choice (as of now) for the year's weakest big-screen horror movie (though thanks to Hemlock Grove it's already replaced my "Worst thing with Eli Roth's name on it" slot, which bums me out as I'm actually a big fan of pretty much everything he's done in the past).

Two weeks later, I finally got to fulfill my dream of seeing a big success from the director of Session 9. Unfortunately that movie was Tri-Star's The Call, and while it started out pretty decently thanks to Brad Anderson's ability to wring suspense out of very little (in this case, a girl in a trunk), the entire 3rd act was a disaster, inexplicably taking on a more traditional horror/revenge approach than the Hitchcockian first hour, with a final scene even dumber than the one in the Last House on the Left remake. But audiences didn't care; the movie grossed a very healthy 50 million (Halle Berry's biggest success in the lead role since Gothika) and Anderson has already lined up another genre project titled Eliza Graves, which sounds like an unofficial remake of the 1973 horror-thriller Don't Look In The Basement.

Tri-Star was also behind Evil Dead, the long-threatened remake of Sam Raimi's original classic. There have certainly been worse remakes, and I fully appreciated the gore (and the decision to not have a "new Ash" but instead offer up five completely new characters), but the film lacked any real soul - I never felt the least bit surprised or scared by anything. When the Blu-ray comes along I'll probably skip right to the bonus features on the makeup FX (the film is like 99% practical as opposed to a CGI shitfest), and hopefully a collection of deleted scenes with more information about our heroes than their names and relations to each other, which is pretty much all the film offered. But at 51 million and counting, it's a huge win for R-rated horror, and unlike the other times that "untouchable" classics were remade (Dawn of the Dead, Halloween), this time there aren't a lot of properties left to remake, so hopefully it will inspire more original fare that also pushes the boundaries of the restricted rating. It was released on the same day as Jurassic Park 3D, a post-convert that celebrated the 20th anniversary of the adventure/monster movie classic that performed decently (40m+ so far). It's nice to see these movies on the big screen again, though my hatred of post-conversions (not changed one bit with this entry) leaves me with little interest in them usually.

Closing the "season" off was The Lords of Salem, the newest film from Rob Zombie (and also produced by Jason Blum's company). Unlike the other Blumhouse productions that were distributed by studios like Paramount and Summit, this one was picked up by Anchor Bay, who can't put movies out on thousands of screens just yet. Indeed, at a mere 357 screens it was their largest release ever, but the polarizing, very non-commercial film didn't catch on as well as Zombie's previous franchise movies (this is his first non sequel/remake since 2003's House of 1000 Corpses), grossing a mere million dollars and likely to disappear from most theaters this coming Thursday (the end of its standard two week run).

But that's a fortune compared to the other smaller releases that have come and gone over the past four months; I do my best to see them all but even I missed out on many as their release windows get smaller and the theaters showing them get more obscure. I drove an hour for the privilege of seeing The Haunting In Connecticut 2 theatrically, as Lionsgate is seemingly up to their old tricks of sitting on movies for months or years before dumping them in out of the way theaters to fulfill contractual obligations. And I have no idea why anyone thought Spiders 3D deserved a theatrical release now that 3DTVs are a thing and it was the only element about it that didn't scream "Syfy Original Movie", but hey, I saw it, in a tiny little theater inside of a mall in Burbank (the same screen I saw fellow "Why isn't this direct to video?" entry Chain Letter a few years back, in fact). Having seen Come Out And Play at the AFI festival last year I knew better than to add to its laughable (and deserved) $2,638 gross, though I'm curious who, if not me, were the brave souls that ventured out for Midget Zombie Takeover, because I never even heard of it and yet it managed to top Makinov's "masterpiece" with a comparatively impressive $6,771 take on a third of the screens.

Sadly most folks skipped the year's best genre film, Chan-wook Park's slow burn Hitchcock homage Stoker. It scored an impressive per screen average when it opened on 7 screens on March 1st, but couldn't sustain those numbers when it began to expand. Not that I expected it to be a huge grosser, but it deserved better - hopefully it will find its audience on DVD, and furthermore I hope Park lines up his next film sooner than later. Same goes for Boris Rodriguez, whose charming but dark cannibal dramedy Eddie The Sleepwalking Cannibal should have just gone straight to VOD rather than suffer the indignity of a pitiful $1,521 gross. Seek this one out, folks - it was one of the highlights of last year's Screamfest (and that's with one of its strongest lineups ever in my opinion). And of course Magnet/Magnolia could be counted on to put out a couple movies: Storage 24, John Dies At The End, ABCs of Death... but like most of their genre acquisitions they focused all their efforts on the VOD portion of the release, leaving their theatrical runs looking unimpressive compared to their other recent movies like To The Wonder (Storage 24 currently has the "honor" of being the year's lowest grossing film with a mere 72 dollars from its 1 screen/1 weekend release - a shame as it's a pretty fun little Alien ripoff).

And now the summer season is kicking off, which means horror takes a backseat to the superhero epics, franchise entries, and high concept comedies that will be assaulting us over the next four months. But there will be a couple in there: Universal's The Purge looks to be a winner, and the mega budget World War Z, if nothing else, should be worth a discussion. July has James Wan's Insidious followup The Conjuring, already scaring the shit out of people from its trailer, and in August, AT LONG FUCKING LAST, Lionsgate remembers that they're sitting on a goldmine and puts You're Next into theaters where it belongs. Plus Pacific Rim will offer monster nirvana and possibly be the summer's biggest hit if response to the trailers are any indication, which is a good thing for me as I've been wishing for a monster movie rebirth for years now. So far 2013 is a pretty solid one financially but lacking any true creative knockouts - I'm confident that will change soon, and it's ironic that it's the summer portion of the year that'll do it.

*Starring roles only, I mean - I looked for a while and couldn't find an earlier example.