Just a Quickie

So just a quick entry for this weekend. Went to see the Japanese horror movie remake Pulse, which features a screenplay by Wes Craven and TV stars Kristen Bell (from Veronica Mars) and Ian Somerhalder (formally of Lost). While not as creepy/scary as the best films of the Japanese horror remake genre (such as The Ring or The Grudge), it was still a pretty enjoyable movie. It was lit such that even during the daytime scenes everything was grey and subdued and almost washed out, which gave it a look and feel that perfectly set the tone of the movie. The undead beings (or whatever they were; the movie doesn’t really say for sure) are very creepy and there are a few scenes that make you jump a bit.

This is so my type of horror movie. I’ll take creepy and suspenseful and atmospheric over violent and gory and over-the-top any day of the week. And while Pulse isn’t the best example of this genre, it does a good enough job to be worth the $5 I spent to see it. Now I suppose I’ll have to track down the original and see how it compares (of course, there are numerous other Japanese horror movies I need to see first, so it’s going to be down the list a ways).

And since my Pulse review was so short, let me fill this entry out a bit with a quick write-up on another movie I watched this weekend (this one recorded off of one of my satellite movie channels). This one was also a mystery/suspense movie, but was more of a thriller than a horror film. The name of the film is The Machinist (listed on imdb as El Maquinista), and it stars Christian Bale weighing in at a frightening 120 pounds (he looks like a concentration camp survivor, he’s so skinny – check out some of the pics on the imdb page for the movie). He plays a lathe operator who hasn’t been able to sleep in a year, which is a big part of the reason for his continuing weight loss. It is also beginning to cause him to hallucinate, and he quickly becomes lost as reality and hallucination blur, until it becomes obvious that much of what he’s experiencing isn’t actually real.

The movie starts out with Christian Bale pulling a body wrapped in a rug out of the trunk of his car. He appears to be at a pier or something like that, and he throws the body over a guard rail onto a cement slab that angles down to the water. Of course the body hits with a thud and doesn’t roll down into the water. And at the same time someone with a flashlight is walking towards him. But before he has a chance to roll the body into the water, and before the mystery person reaches him, we jump back in time (as tends to happen in these sorts of movies). The rest of the movie unfolds in such a way that we almost forget we’re trying to find out about the body he’s going to dump in the water; we’re instead trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, and just what the hell is going on with this guy.

As the movie plays out and the audience starts to get a grasp on what’s reality and what is hallucination, it’s fairly easy to figure out who we’re going to find wrapped in the rug, as well as some of the movie’s other mysteries, but there are still a couple of surprises at the end, and the movie has a very satisfying and well thought out conclusion (at least, in my not so humble opinion). All in all, this was a very enjoyable and engaging suspense/mystery, and I highly recommend it.