June 2010

June 2010

* Killer Klowns From Outer Space (Chiodo, 1988)|||||4
Make Way For Tomorrow (McCarey, 1937)|||||8.5
<--- Blubbering fool.
Southern Comfort (Hill, 1981)|||||7
Showgirls (Verhoeven, 1995)|||||8
Alice in Wonderland (Burton, 2010)|||||3.5
* The Beyond (Fulci, 1981)|||||5
* Deep Red (Argento, 1975)|||||7.5
* Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003)|||||6
* Tobe Hooper's Night Terrors (Hooper, 1993)|||||6
* Tokyo Sonata (Kurosawa, 2009)|||||7.5
* Habit (Fessenden, 1997)|||||8.5
* Wendigo (Fessenden, 2000)|||||8.5
In the Cut (Campion, 2003)|||||7

The lurid serial killer story is really ho-hum, sub-mass market paperback material, and is dislodged from the character study working through it. The film is too soaked in imagery, and the hyper-dreaminess taken on for the climax only works to take us completely out of the mind and will of our protagonist. Nevertheless, if there's anything I uniformly love about Campion's films, it's that her female protagonists are meticulously written and thought out as to be so indistinguishable from men.

Tourist Trap (Schmoeller, 1979)|||||4.5
Quills (Kaufman, 2000)|||||5.5
* Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985)|||||8.5
* Monkey Shines (Romero, 1988)|||||5.5

Monkey Shines is an intriguing and risky film, with odd, perverse psychology being rooted at and a knowing cheekiness in support of that (Fernando Croce: it's a film "expressed in satirical Hitchcockisms"), but ultimately, I don't think it's too successful. It's a little stiff, a little dry, and that psychological study is a little simplistic sometimes.

* Land of the Dead (Romero, 2005)|||||5.5
* Battle Royale (Fukasaku, 2000)||||88.5
The Princess and the Frog (Clements & Musker, 2009)|||||5.5

May 2010

May 2010

The Exterminating Angel (Bunuel, 1962)|||||7.5
Medea Goes to Jail (Perry, 2009)|||||3
Survival of the Dead (Romero, 2010)|||||5.5

Recommended Reviews: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Survival of the Dead

Satyricon (Fellini, 1969)|||||7.5
Poltergeist III (Sherman, 1988)|||||4
Moon (Jones, 2009)|||||7
Poltergeist II (Gibson, 1986)|||||3
The Science of Sleep (Gondry, 2006)|||||7

The Science of Sleep isn't as heart-achingly sentimental as 'Eternal Sunshine,' but they're very much sister films in that they both explore aspects of ephemeral relationships.

SPOILERS: Didn't expect 'Science' to be quite so bitter, though - I was thoroughly expecting a happy ending. I must have been blinded by the whimsy, though, because, thinking back, the signs all point to the ending we get. It's quite a rug-pulling film. In the first half, we think the match is made before it begins. But then the film's truth-telling comes out: if a match is too made, you can't just be friends. Friends aren't lovers. If you're dancing around each other like you're thinking it's too convenient to be adult or exciting, someone's gonna grow out of the other.

The final tantrum works too well, an uncomfortable summation of what can't exist in a fine-lined platonic relationship.

Very effective film. Shortcomings are there, gave it a 7, but won't go into those since critics already have had at it. They really didn't like this movie very much, and even my most insightful and sensitive pet online critics really hate on the self-indulgence. Perhaps it hits too close to home for too many people. Many reviews insist that Stephane is made "an intentionally unlikable" protagonist or whatnot, but in doing so they seem to ignore the bleak implications. There is concerted effort to dissociate with Stephane by focusing on all his craziness, but the final truths the film is telling in no way necessitate you being a Stephane man-child.

Memories of Murder (Bong, 2003)|||||7

Broadly played but still intelligent, a bit too "cop movie" but still nuanced with its characters. Very Zodiac - rich in cultural detail and implicit commentary, in this case dealing with political upheaval, small town complacence, and big establishmentarian impotence. Loved the small town cops and their banter. A careful mix of endearing qualities and [dumb] corruption, the bad cop's fate is a brilliant touch and a perfect encapsulation of the power and weakness wrestling within our appointed strong arms.

But, the film felt too ridden by style for style's sake, and a greater point doesn't quite come through all the bombast and conventional action movie antics. The ending proves quite haunting, though, and finally lands the punch deserved by the film's deft balance of farce and palpably dark emotions.

I got the feeling that it's a paen to the cop, in spite of the overt evidence otherwise. Even if they deserve their ridicule, the film is most beguiling when forced to tolerate their dumb humanity. It's an ode to grunts. Odd, but their dimwittedness provokes more sympathy than distaste, and their corruption is more symptom of that than the other way around. The smooth-handed suspect calls them out for their corruption, yet by that point we're as convinced as the detectives are that this guy is totally the killer and, in the finale, we understand what a frustrating, consistently demeaning and ball-busting job it is.

The House of Mirth (Davies, 2000)|||||9
Intolerable Cruelty (Coen Brothers, 2003)|||||5.5
Wise Blood (Huston, 1979)|||||6
Splice (Natali, 2010)|||||6

The first third or so threatens the same generic craft of the typical Hollywood genre flick, but as the film enters its increasingly demented, lonely-barn-set second half, Natali finally starts getting into it, enlivening the proceedings with some dripping family gothic. Natali, the up-and-coming master of the laboriously, naifly over-visualized concept film, at least isn't entirely vapid with his drama (although not that it's brilliant drama, either), and it shows in how knowingly he pushes buttons, then how willing he is to mute it all with wryness and tonal good sense, in follow-up moments that both ground and self-analyze, whether it is in the visuals or the riotous drama involved (example: the treatment of the aftermath of Brody's paternal transgression). The film is an energetic, not-at-all somber sci-fi-horror parable involving Polley and Brody playing science wunderkinds and power couple, a delightful Macbeth/Lady Macbeth variation (or Frankenstein/Lady Frankenstein, more accurately) that Natali thankfully gives much color and black dramedy.

* E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg, 1982)|||||6

April 2010

April 2010

All That Jazz (Fosse, 1979)|||||8.5
* Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002)|||||4.5
Hausu (Obayashi, 1977)|||||6.5
The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1985)|||||5.5
The Prowler (Losey, 1951)|||||8
White Dog (Fuller, 1982)|||||7
Boom (Losey, 1968)|||||8
* The Man Who Wasn't There (Coen, 2001)|||||7
King & Country (Losey 64)|||||8
Modesty Blaise (Losey, 1966)|||||4.5

Has there ever been so unsuccessful a film as Modesty Blaise? It just keeps on failing and shooting itself in the foot. I think I'm a big Losey fan by this point - he's an artsy, pretentious guy with too many ideas in his head. In this film, though, it's like, ease the hell up with the cinematic pontification - this type of material needs some sense of commercial narrativity to work and indulging in incessant musical juxtoposition is not going to engage the viewer! And I can appreciate his playing Continental iconoclasm with another culture, but those were some of the worst Arabs ever put to film.

Blind Date (Losey, 1959)|||||7.5

Blind Date was a textured, thinking-human's crime-mystery film, Losey's class-oriented concerns and stormy visual intensity figuring heavily into the subtext, but if it didn't have one of the most ludicrous premises ever. Losey's on his A-game, but again, the film shows his way of occasionally veering into very overripe melodrama.

March 2010

March 2010

Time Without Pity (Losey, 1957)|||||7.5
Eva (Losey, 1962)|||||8.5
* Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983)|||||7.5
The Sleeping Tiger (Losey, 1954)|||||8
* An American Werewolf in London (Landis, 1981)|||||8
M (Losey, 1951)|||||6.5

Febuary 2010

February 2009

Laura (Preminger,1944)|||||6
The Fantastic Mr. Fox (Anderson, 2009)|||||7
* My Man Godfrey (LaCava, 1936)|||||7.5
The House of the Devil (West, 2009)|||||6
* The 39 Steps (Hitchcock, 1935)|||||8
* The Return of the Living Dead (O'Bannon, 1985)|||||7.5
* Lifeforce (Hooper, 1985) (US Cut)|||||inferior
Bright Star (Campion, 2009)|||||6
A Serious Man (Coens, 2009)|||||7.5
* Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940)|||||6.5
King of the Ants (Gordon, 2003)|||||7

King of the Ants is a hugely satisfying movie. It's entirely opposite to my preferred sensibility and requirements for filmmaking: you know, grace and beauty, visual eloquence, restraint, gentility... Even Re-Animator is saved by some finely-made dramatic scenes... this has all the gentility packed in it of an SNL Digital Short.

But there is something eloquent about Gordon's lowbrow filmmaking that I cannot pinpoint right now. King of the Ants is lucid, relatable, and soaked in very down-to-earth emotions. This is also due to a very amiable lead performance, and generally very acute acting jobs. It goes all the way with its premise, embracing and skipping along to its tune of a trashy portrait of humanity.

Very very Stuck. Feels, smells, emotionally impresses, morally punches in the same way. Well, Stuck is, thankfully, not as fugly. They'd make a great double bill, if too much sleaze isn't a problem.

Thirst (Park, 2009)|||||6
Small Deaths (short) (Ramsay, 1996)|||||8

January 2010

January 2010

The Roost (West, 2005)|||||4.5

So The Roost, that was a very... "special" movie.

It's one of those "By-No-Means-Possible" movies. Which is a harder category to fall under than Oren Peli and Mother Hen Steven Spielberg think it is. When I tried to think of something, I came up with Wendy and Lucy, then I realized Larry Fessenden had his indie-producer mitts on that one too.

An Oh-so-clever and Oh-so-self-amused quasi-creature feature with a case of horror-hipster-itus. It's exactly as if snooty horror fans put up the time to make an especially arcane haunted house ride in order to laugh at the people not getting scared. And, of course, it's because they don't "get" that special type of "creep" sophisticated horror fans know and love.

Fancying myself one of those horror fans, I'm glad I watched this movie. It's not especially well-made, but it's inventive. Ti West, in this film at least, isn't particularly brilliant, but he's probably a really passionate [pretentious] guy. Many will very understandably think it's boring, and it's got some mildly retarded (intentionally??) moments where the film stops dead... WITH TENSION! Seriously, the movie tenses, and tenses some more, and makes you wait for it... then nothing happens. Haha, good joke, movie. You're weird and awkward.

Observe and Report (Hill, 2009)|||||5
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Fleming, 1941)|||||4.5

Far inferior to the Mamoulian film. If I had to stare at Spencer Tracy's face for another farcically prolonged minute just to see the 1940s' state-of-the-art make-up and dissolve FX, I'd have revolted.

Generally, Spencer Tracy cannot save himself from delivering a terribly neutered performance as Jekyll. All sense of consequence and the irreparable is seeped out of the story, resulting in some of the most bloodless torment you can imagine. Shouldn't really be a fault, but Ingrid Bergman is far too strong and distinctive a female presence to play Ivy. I took little productive affirmation being made from seeing Bergman being beaten around and controlled, as I did the irrepressibly common Ivy of Miriam Hopkins' portrayal.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931)|||||9

Revelatory-good. It was smart and funny, then it was resplendent and sparkling and lovely, then it was audacious, then it was despairing, frightening, tragic.

Even the Muriel character, the stable, wholesome love interest, is an uncharacteristically strong character (and even - to a lesser extent of course - in the '41 film). Seeing Rose Hobart, the socially upstanding female presence in the film, forcing kisses on Fredric March, telling him she'll do anything to be with him, whilst he (impotently, in stark contrast to a female) tries to break it off with and (full of shame) explain himself to her, was really something. Now that's spectacle.

To the Devil A Daughter (Sykes, 1976)|||||5
The Last House on the Left (Iliadis, 2009)|||||5

Last House on the Left for the 00s is exactly how you'd imagine a studio remake to turn out. Drain out to about 2% the perversity, and then fine tune its premise into a crackerjack thriller. Krug and co. are just kind of low-lives. Haute bourgeoisie Mom and Dad are terribly competent and resolve to just "do what we have to do."

But it's actually a pretty engaging and visually strong movie. If you liked the Craven film's premise but wanted it to be more exciting and more about the dignity of humanity than the opposite (or, less theologically preoccupied like the Bergman film...), this would probably be pretty satisfying entertainment for ya.

The Stooge (Taurog, 1952)|||||5.5
Brideless Groom (Bernds, 1947, "Three Stooges" short)|||||5
The Hangover (Phillips, 2009)|||||4

The Hangover was going pretty strong for me... that is, until the hangover part came in.

From then on, it was all just a mild tolerance with the occasional amusement. I thought it was all pretty uninspired. Even Baby Mama had some surprises and subversion... but I guess that just goes with actually having a premise, while this is just a f**k-all of inane, point-deprived, transparently cooked-up misadventures.

As for the film being noxious and hazardous on a moral level, I rather liked the in-between the film found in making the characters unabashed caricatures of un-PC male-ness - it properly justified this fantasy adventure in inconsequentiality. Bradley Cooper's character, particularly, was something of a revelation - a character I should hate, but who is consistently played with a sort of flair embodying both the whole bonhomie thing and the whole "Be an asshole, be kicked in the balls now and then, but forget about it later" thing that the film's pretty much all about, so that I actually enjoyed him.

Otherwise, the film is saved by the performances and awesome one-liners and kaputt, that's pretty much it.

* Gremlins (Dante, 1984)|||||6
* Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)|||||8
* A Bucket of Blood (Corman, 1957)|||||7
* The Little Shop of Horrors (Corman, 1960)|||||6.5
* The Bubble (Oboler, 1966)|||||5.5
Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin, 1947)|||||7.5
A New Leaf (May, 1973)|||||6.5
Inside Man (Lee, 2006)|||||6.5

Lee's a thinking filmmaker, who has the technique of tableau and montage down for his bold visual gestures. But with Spike Lee and Inside Man - that is, when his film's not soaked in very meticulous art design, a very personal story, or extreme thematic fervor - his work is more stylish than expressive, which is not so much bad so much as me being nitpicky and elitist with my artistes... since a stylist w/ ideas can be equally worthwhile as the artsy aesthete director I'm always wantonly digging for.

The final scene serves as a welcome reminder to Lee's visual acumen, though: beginning with the montage of insert shots of Washington removing from himself the items of his profession and societal purpose - his badge, his commemoration, etc. - that are simultaneously symbols of his material, personal well-being (that is, simply, that he has the money and means to feed himself and his dependents), the film comes into focus as one about the eternalness of that latter commonality of living, and how ethics and principles are the continuously recurring other side of that coin of common living. This flipping coin is pushed in the very final shot: a tableau of Washington's personal life, one that appears no less dignified, empowered, and deserved by Washington and his girlfriend, even though we're being dared to call it phony because the luxe aesthetic is too sexy, and Washington's white hat too debonair - as if no working class man has the right to be debonair in "post-9/11 New York." Yet sadly, we don't similarly find ourselves ironically perceiving in the same way the image of rich white bankers in their also very luxe interiors.

The Black Dahlia (De Palma, 2006)|||||5.5
* Adaptation (Jonze, 2000)|||||7
Sherlock Holmes (Ritchie, 2009)|||||6
* Transformers (Bay, 2007)|||||3.5

December 2009

December 2009

* Paranormal Activity|||||5
Two Lovers (Gray, 2009)|||||8.5

I felt like I was watching a film from the 70s a number of times. Pace and scene styling was superb. Then there's that club scene where we spend a few moments in the beginning watching a random breakdancer, and it felt like a first real revival of that venerable old movie tradition of getting to see a full nightclub act to preface scenes set in nightclubs.

Anyway, a perfectly molded look at adulthood, its predictability, and the errant factors that are romance and Leonard's weird psychology and biology.

And Isabella Rossellini's final shot = fucking killer!

* Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009)|||||9

I think I'll still take Death Proof, thick with trauma & tragedy, over Inglourious Basterds, lithe with scrutiny of history and war, but it's neck-and-neck.

The Ghost Ship (Robson, 1943)|||||7

Finely, finely drawn portrait of masculine self-image and the complex network of authority and obedience, empowerment and self-subordination it takes to withhold one's masculine place. Equal to Beau Travail in its evocation of a masculine order, with a wonderful treatment of Captain Stone as not just a crazy man, but a man slowly going crazy from the falsity that is his power over and separation from the social harum-scarum. In this way, this film communicated what There Will Be Blood should have, albeit without TWBB's speciously topical choices of institutional orders... and yet, it still manages to be more politically charged than that film even makes an effort for. But despite it excellence, The Ghost Ship is still a bit very stilted and unconvincing. It's good this film takes place in the specially neutered and cloistered social order of a ship, because I am much more convinced by the representation of men as a bunch of randy bulls instead of the complacent herded cows this film personifies the Marine employed. Mark Robson is capable of great mise en scene, but his camera and visualization of whole scenes is clunky. This film also has some awful transitions that fail to unite the mood and emotions that run through the film. Russell Wade is also kind of wooden. Richard Dix gets increasingly better as the film goes on. The good override the bad, though, and the plot developments that take place on land just goes to show the minute attention the Lewton co. gave to story and real-world logic.

Fool for Love (Altman, 1985)|||||9

A stunner. Every single bit of it, from the magnificent performances to Altman's counterintuitively liberated sense of visual possibility from working with a stage-bound play adaptation, is absolutely enchanting, in that dark and weird way of an Altman film. It never seems acknowledged enough: Altman may be an American studio filmmaker, albeit a "rogue" one, but he is totally into the weird and the arcane, and Fool for Love is one of his weirdest (haven't read Sam Sheperd's play, but now I'll only be able to see it as existential theater of the absurd, even if it isn't). He even out-Lynches Lynch here, making images of small-town America and the West a place of repressed nightmares, with the same sort of prop-world fantasticalness but with Altman's style and sense of nuance and nebulous behavior placing it firmly in a strange but undeniably real world. Altman's flashbacks that continually flux between accurateness and inaccurateness, reality and fantasy (literally at one point) are one of the more genuinely novel things I've seen in a long time.

Avatar (Cameron, 2009)|||||5.5

There's been criticisms that the film is too cliched and derivative, and then defenses citing the aptness in using archetypal story and mythic history to retrofit for both post-Post-colonial times and state-of-the-art visual technology. This works well to characterize the film's odd, unsuccessful attempt to marry classical storytelling (for him, the blockbuster film) and its capably shamanic sway over popular culture with its pioneering cinematic vision, where the presence of a camera seems completely beside the point to the illimitability of the CGI medium. Keeping with the repertoire of the shaman, it practically seems to regard itself as oral history at work, making the film's alternatingly admirable and puerile revisionist social parable seem perfectly at home. But how really can the sweeping parabolic aggrandizements and moral romanticism of a lovingly fervent oral storyteller persevere when the storyteller - the camera - is so impossibly naturalistic?
Of course, this is a problem with any CGI-fest, from a CGI animated film to the camera-inoperable tricks of a Peter Jackson movie, but I guess what makes it so artistically detrimental here is Cameron's not-inelegant but more than a little repetitive, pre-patterned directing. It's either the variation of close-ups that make up an intimate dialogue scene, his admittedly sturdy handling of action sequences, or the overly, breathlessly omnipresent handling of his more fantastic CGI sequences. Between, there is little pauses and variegation. The film has a rushed pace, too invested in its traditional screenwriting to properly justify its overwhelming intentions of aesthetic immersion, as Children of Men does. Despite very impressive 3-D immersion and the incredible textures Cameron captures in order to make Avatar such an eye-popping and sumptuous work (and I do mean it, the shots utilizing the reflection off plexiglass shielding were especially impressive), the film would be more than a little flat. The moments of tragedy and awful destruction were the moments where the film's theoretical intentions of immersion-realism were the most fit to be used (to put it nauseatingly, "Genocidal imperialism = real life") and so were the best, most effective scenes.

To bag on Cameron for not being artsy enough isn't really new. But I am trying to find a more forgiving, novel way of looking at what every detractor pretty much has (and has rightly, IMO) been getting at: Cameron's directing and the film's shopworn screenplay are no where near as interesting or worthwhile as the FX and the visual textures it creates. Instead of just saying that, how about blame the very idea of taking a shopworn tried-and-true screenplay (complete with voice-overs and propulsive, discreditably cosmetic ellipses of time) and then rendering the "simple power" of its story ineffectual by mundane directing the sheer non-virtue of its technological preoccupation. It's downfall is in its groundbreaking virtual verisimilitude... despite that being the best thing about the movie. How does that sound? Pretentiously paradoxical? Eh, I try.
Thus, its visuals should have been more "theatrical" (i.e. wielded more a sense of cinema's artifice). As it is, sure we have the artifice found in its grandiose environment and those shots floating above and aside those seed-jellyfish spirits, but again, that's the camera - aka our, the audience's, surrogate eye and mental palette - being "too powerful to be true," too limitlessly "neutral" to actually be the minds of the audience being story-told - which is why the bits of tragedy are the best parts, because it finally asks us to mourn for the aliens, instead of just gawk at their world. 3-D ashes work much like Schindler's List's red coat - visual gimmickry and a drippy symbolic sentiment, but manipulative storytelling embracing its storytelling emotional pedantry. Avatar's "verite" immersion is hollow. It should've gone all-out formally rigid, Children of Men-style. Or better yet, Barry Lyndon-style. That film would've really gotten 3-D textures to linger. ... Also, it must be said, this movie was waaaay way to long.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (Hancock, 1971)|||||6.5

A beautiful and often genuinely unnerving gothic horror film. Really rich filmmaking here. It doesn't amount to much beyond its horror trappings, which it gets too caught up in near the end, and its screenplay is the sort of pretentious that leads it into thinking having a character point at a family relic and say, "That's history," is fleshed out enough when it's a little half-baked... but nonetheless, this film has almost the soul-stirring low-fi schlockiness of Carnival of Souls. But while that film was assured and charged by 60s modern-art gung-ho, this one is a bit logy with 70s bootstrap filmmaking and realism.

Mirrors (Aja, 2008)|||||3

I realized the problem with modern horror movies when I was watching Mirrors and came a scene set in a monastery, and this monastery had all the atmosphere and character of a movie set. I suppose if the movie was making a comment on stultifying moral hygienics and the sterility of Catholic nunnery in modern times, but I just made that up and it is clearly not the case.

Mirrors is pretty lame aside from some sturdy suspense set-ups and good old-fashioned dramatic kitsch, like separated parents coming together through a concerted effort to paint over cursed mirrors. Aja is amping the gore up to 11 as usual, but his story warrants none of it so that its gratuitousness feels extra cheap.

Eggshells (Hooper, 1969)|||||4.5

Although filled with numerous highly intricate set pieces and sequences of abstract artistic brio, its utter plotlessness, rambling puerile hippie dialogue that leads to no discernible arc in any regards, and, as a result of both of those things, the film's nigh incomprehensibility, render this frequently audacious film a merely narratively-challenged, often mindless, at times intolerable piece of avant-garde hogwash.

* Shutter (Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom, 2004)|||||3.5

It tries to tell a provocative story and speak to something or other theoretics about picture-taking... I guess. But Shutter has such a tin ear for so many aspects of good moviemaking and storytelling, it's hard to feel the film has any thoughts in its head at all. It hurts watching ineptitude at times. It has no sense of pacing, build-up, character development, etc. - it's just a string of slick scares that aren't scary. It's like Hollywood didn't even have to remake it because this movie already is exactly like a bad Hollywood supernatural horror flick.

Paranormal Activity (Pell, 2007)|||||5

Oh, well that was better than I expected it to be. It's more written and character-driven than I thought it would be (I knew nothing about the plot going in), and despite being gimmicky, it's not all that gimmicky.

I really liked the way the camera was used - a nosy and troublesome toy being constantly moved around by the insensitive Micah, that soon becomes a 2nd demon to the frazzled Katie. Also, there was something about the staging and framing of the between-bedroom scenes of plot development that suggested there was thought put into where the camera was placed and how it interacted with the characters. Nothing to go crazy about, but Pell doesn't seem like a talentless buffoon behind the camera, as is common with up-and-coming hopeful horror film directors. And he seems to work well with actors, because I thought the performances were excellent and naturalistic.

It's also a slim, nicely paced film, the rigid structure working very strategically to create its effect of a creeping disease and its portrayal of Katie as someone getting increasingly fed up with living in fear. Her protestations when she's outside on the bench - the subtle venom and resentment in her voice - was probably the scariest bit for me.

On the con side, it's a limited film, both stylistically and content-wise, the screenplay nothing to write home about (oh, it's either a GHOST or a DEMON - wow, that's some in-depth demonology right there) and the scares more than a bit labored.