Halloween Viewing

Every Halloween, my family has a tradition: junk food and scary movies.

This year, we gave Emily (our eldest) the job of picking out the movies we'd watch, because on the whole she has good taste in films.

The Happening was up first.

M Night. Shal..whatsisname rarely lets us down, and The Happening is a departure from his recognised formula; there is no discernible twist, so what we get is a straight story with characters and a situation. The Happening is a nice little ecological parable, with the Gaia Hypothesis at the core. What happens when the planet decides it's had enough of humanity?

The human story at the core is low key; a high school science teacher and his wife, who may be having relationship problems, are forced to care for a young child and attempt to survive a situation which pits them against human nature and Mother Nature.

The teacher, Eliot Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) are isolated from the herd of humanity by an ever decreasing circle of horror. Humans aren't a herd animal, but we are social creatures, and one of the things the movie exposes is the smallest common denominator of human society - the family. As the events of The Happening close in around the characters they are forced closer and closer together, finding strength in each other and growing to accept their feelings for one another.

In some senses, this is a cliche. Rarely do we see a Situation Movie where the estranged male and female leads don't come out of it with renewed bonds of love. In another sense, though, the movie shows us what we are at the core: a society of families, with the bonds that we choose to make being the most enduring and important to us as individuals. We also get a long, hard look at trust and friendship - again, choices that we make which are far more solid under pressure than we might initially believe.

The Happening is chilling in a very small scale way, and although the movie has been roundly panned by critics, professional and otherwise, it works. Wahlberg plays against type, his character isn't a hero and instead comes across as an intelligent and earnest man out of his depth. There are no heroics here, he doesn't save the day, the decisions he makes are small on the global scale but intensely personal and all the more interesting for that.

I enjoyed the movie, not because of the scare factor - Shyamalan uses the R rating to show grisly death after grisly death, although with a remarkble lack of gratuitous gore, using the horror to underline the hopeless nature of the crisis. It also works better because of the lack of twist. This defeat of expectation is probably why a lot of people felt let down, but that's a good thing: directors and movies should not be product.

The Strangers is torture porn. Although scary, tense and well constructed after watching the film I couldn't find a reason for it to exist.

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman play a couple who have just had one of those relationship mis-steps, where one person wants a deeper level of committment than the other, and don't know what to do in order to resolve this issue. Luckily for them, they are subjected to psychological and physical peril by a trio of roving psychopaths and this solves to resolve them both to love each other, shortly before being butchered.

And that's it. The scares are of the "boo!" variety, there is a load of creeping menace that is deftly and unnervingly put together which keeps you either on the edge of your seat or forces you to curl up in the back of it. All well and good, but the movie doesn't do anything else. It's entertainment of a form I am deeply uncomfortable with - for one thing, it's based on a true story and, at the very beginning, tells you that no one is quite sure of the events that took place that fateful night. Which tells me that our lead characters don't, in fact, make it out alive. With this knowledge in place, with almost no script and therefore no real character development possible, all we're left with is being helpless witnesses to an episode of insane brutality.

The one bright spark is Liv Tyler, who manages to create an emotional journey for her character and who stands out as the one reason to watch the movie at all. But not more than once.

Oh, and as noted above, the couple do come out of the situation with renewed ties and love. They just don't get to enjoy it.

The Mist is a Stephen King yarn, dealing with the ties that hold communities together when faced with things beyond their understanding. There are tentacles, a base under seige, religious mania and claustrophobia - a neat examination of modern America in the face of the War on Terror, in fact.

I will actually review it when I have watched it at not 2am, and when I can remember more than that initial paragraph. It should be noted, however, that the direction and acting are enough for me to want to see it again. Good movie.

Iron Man we got because Dad is a geek and on a superhero kick.

Yes, it's a popcorn movie and yes, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have created yet another flawed hero who is, nevertheless, a hero. It's a tale about responsibility, power and really neat technology and it has everything I wanted from an Iron Man movie. Robert Downey Jr. was a perfect choice for Tony Stark; I think Hollywood has caught on to the big point about superhero flicks, that beneath the fights and the cool stuff these are stories about people and their choices. We've seen it in The Dark Knight and we see it again in Iron Man, but in both situations it;s not as forced or rammed down our necks as it has been in the Spider Man sequels: with great power comes great responsibility. Shouldering that responsibility is the mark of a hero, at least according to Marvel.

It works.

If you aren't interested in that, RDJ and the movie deliver on absolutely every other score. The action is pacey and suitably huge. The technology is cool, and it's fun that Stark has a better relationship with his household robots than he does with the people around him. Watching him attempt to break out of this situation is as entertaining as the CGI antics of the suit of armour.

My one gripe is that the trailer used "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath for Tony's breakout from his terrorist captors - which was a 'punch the air' moment, but the movie leaves this music for the end titles. A shame, it worked better in the trailer.

An excellent blockbuster, with loads of room for sequels and extrapolations, and RDJ is apparently on the Tony Stark gravy train for at least another three films, which makes me happy because he has the character down to a tee and is extremely watchable.

And that'll do for now.