Another Halloween season comes to a close...
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Trick 'r Treat (2009): 8.5/10
Delightful horror anthology set in Warren Valley, Ohio, where they
really get into the spooky holiday spirit each October, with a series of terror tales that overlap
Pulp Fiction style over one Halloween night. There's a group of middle-graders who play a cruel prank on a local "retard" with a trumped-up town legend that turns out to be all-too-true. There's a virginal young woman (Anna Paquin) who plays out a real-life variation on "Little Red Riding Hood" with a masked killer. There's the local high school principal (Dylan Baker) who sets out to carve more than pumpkins. And there's Old Man Kreeg (Brian Cox), a holiday-hating curmudgeon who finds himself locked inside his sprawling home and bedeviled by a sadistic, bag-headed l'il imp named Sam (who keeps popping up throughout the other tales as a sort of mascot of malevolence).
Writer/director Michael Dougherty (
Krampus,
Godzilla: King Of The Monsters) clearly has a deep-set affection for all of the trappings of the Halloween season, and the autumnal cinematography of Glen MacPherson and Douglas Pipe's playfully sinister score (based, in large part,a round that sing-songy childhood chant that goes, "Trick or Treat / smell my feet / give me something good to eat...") add an appealing gloss to the bloody yet darkly funny proceedings. And the way the tales intersect over the course of one night make it ideal for multiple viewings to catch all of the various connections both obvious and ingeniously sly. This is as good as horror anthologies get, and remember...always check your candy.
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Coraline (2009): 10/10
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The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993): 11/10
Henry Selick's pair of delightful stop-motion kiddie horror flicks are the perfect way to send off another year's worth of merrily macabre fare. 2009's
Coraline (which Selick adapted from a novel by Neil Gaiman) concerns one Coraline Jones (voiced with appealing spunk by Dakota Fanning), a young girl who moves with her parents into the "Pink Palace" apartment complex in Oregon. Coraline is bored to tears by her rainy, remote isolation, and mother Mel (Teri Hatcher) and father Charlie (John Hodgman) can't really relate, embroiled as they are in their work as horicultuists who dislike getting their hands dirty. But when Coraline discovers an old doll that's an eerie likeness of her (as well as a curiously small, bricked-off door in the wall of one room), she's drawn into a series of vivid dreams, where she's welcomed with open arms by her "Other Mother" (Hatcher again), and "Other Father" (Hodgman) who are the spitting image of her real parents...save for the glistening black buttons sewn where their eyes should be. Coraline is at first enchanted by her Other Parents, who curry her favor with delicious food and lavish presents, but it soon becomes obvious that the sweetness of their company hides a rotten core, and that her surreptitiously sinister Other Mother wants to make her the latest in a string of child victims she has stolen away over the decades.
Like all of Selick's work,
Coraline (the first production from the geniuses at the Laika animation studios) is technical marvel, with insanely-detailed environments, innovative character designs and flowing animation. Set to a dreamy, evocative score by Bruno Coulais,
Coraline is a superb piece of filmmaking craft as well as a funny & freaky take on
Alice In Wonderland, and a genuine work of art in a family movie medium that too often rewards pandering mediocrity.
Before he made
Coraline, however, Selick collaborated with producer Tim Burton on his holiday-mixing stop-motion musical
The Nightmare Before Christmas. Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon, sung by composer Danny Elfman), the "King of Halloweentown", finds himself bored with the same-old haunts each year, and longs for something new...so when he tumbles into the wintry wonderland of Christmastown, he becomes entranced by its movement, color and overall cheery disposition ("There's children throwing snowballs / instead of throwing heads..."), and desires to make it his own, going so far as to kidnap the "Sandy Claws" (Ed Ivory) and take his place on Christmas night. Things...don't go so well...
Filled with marvelously crooked sets and canted camera angles and carefully desaturated color schemes,
Nightmare Before Christmas is yet another love letter from Burton to the classic Universal Monster films of the 1930s and 40s, and Elfman's busy song score (ranging from the introductory joygasm of "This Is Halloween" to the plaintive lament of "Sally's Song") keeps the film's plot moving forward with clever lyrics and bouncy melodies. It's a terrific updating of the classic Rankin/Bass holiday specials of the 1960s, yoking Burton's love of lonely outsiders to Selick's technical wizardry in a perfect mind meld of creativity. It's one of those films that never grows tiresome, and it's the best, most wistful way to bid adieu to another's year's worth of ghouls n' goblins.
) and a fine PIno Donaggio score, but otherwise it's very dull.
Yet I can gas on for three paragraphs about a movie I love -- or loathe -- and no one seems to care. 