[Review] Movie night, episode 18!
This review is a bit late, as I watched this a week or so back and was too busy to write it up at the time! Bit of an odd one, this - in many ways it's not all that, but I wasn't expecting much as I only picked it up for the setting. To my surprise, though, it struck a massive chord with me in the end in a way that many horror movies don't... so, read on if you're curious...
Catacombs is an odd little movie. Made in 2007 on what appears to have been a relatively small budget with mostly unknown actors and two unknown directors in the form of Tomm Coker and David Elliot, its only obvious claim to any kind of fame is that they somehow got singer Pink on board to play the heroine's sister. How and why I don't know, and it made little odds to me anyway since I'm not a fan, but there you go.
The reason I picked Catacombs up, though, is that it's set in one of my favourite places ever - the legendary catacombs of Paris. Six million dead people are piled up willy-nilly in the old limestone mines under the City of Romance, in one of the most macabre juxtapositions on earth, and in many places the bones and skulls have been painstakingly sorted, stacked and interlocked to form eerie decorative walls of bone that stare at you with a thousand empty eyes. I've been down there, loved it, and it's certainly a no-brainer as a setting for a horror movie. You could make a thousand horror movies down there, possibly all at the same time without running out of space given how huge the catacombs actually are.
In this case though we're following the story of a young woman called Victoria (Shannyn Sossamon), a shy recluse with some medical-grade anxiety issues. She comes to Paris for the weekend on the strength of a postcard from her much more outgoing sister Carolyn (Pink), who has promised it will be "good for her". On arriving, she's immediately dragged somewhat against her will into Carolyn's world of bohemian friends and outrageous shenanigans, and told that they're going to a party. The party, of course, turns out to be one of the illegal raves that are organised in the catacombs by Carolyn's mysterious, mischievous and strangely charismatic friend Jean Michele... and when you hold a party in a catacomb in a horror movie, you know it's got to go wrong. Victoria is told the story of the Satanist sect that supposedly used to hold rituals in the catacombs and of the goat-mask-wearing monster that they bred and raised down here in the dark... and then people start dying, the police turn up to break up the rave, and everything goes to hell in a handcart for poor Victoria who ends up separated from everyone, lost and alone in the miles of pitch-black bone-walled hell that honeycomb the depths of Paris. Will she survive? Will she escape? And who the fuck is the goat-faced psycho and indeed, is he real at all?
In many ways Catacombs is a very standard, indeed verging on substandard, rehash of the "let's trap someone and chase them and watch them scream" trope. It gets a bit slow at times in the middle, and in some ways the impact of the catacombs themselves as a setting is spoiled by having too much of the action in there - you get so used to the macabre bone walls and leering skulls that you almost start tuning them out, which is a shame. But this film worked for me on a very visceral level, because it does one thing incredibly well - it captures what every mental illness sufferer knows, which is that if your mental balance is already vulnerable, anyone who messes with your head even in so-called "fun" is playing with fire. Victoria is completely believable to me, from her edgy nervousness and defensiveness at the beginning of the film, to the way her eyes shine when she's being lured into the glamour and mystique of the catacombs by Jean Michele, to her refusal to play ball when her friends try to push her too far by asking her to bathe naked in a reservoir with them - she does exactly what I would've done under that kind of pressure, namely go "fuck you" and walk off despite the fact that she's risking getting lost in the catacombs. I was on her side the entire time.
And at the end, when it turns out that the whole affair was a prank staged by her sister and friends to try and "loosen her up" and that they'd only intended to scare her until the police broke in and interrupted things - then, when Victoria's already suffered so much stark staring terror that she's barely above the crazed-animal threshold and it seems like Carolyn still can't see that she's probably destroyed her sister's sanity and traumatised her for life - THEN this film steps squarely into the one place I thought it wouldn't go, and I was left punching the air in vindication. Because the world is full of Carolyns who think it's funny or in some way helpful to try and fuck with us crazy people for our "own good"; and watching Victoria take care of business felt like a shred of vicarious revenge for myself and everyone else I know who's ever been the victim of one of those people. So yes, I freely admit that a lot of my appreciation for this film is based on the last five minutes and on its interaction with my own particular neuroses - but hey, that's a valid reason to like something, right?
I do think Catacombs could have benefited from more consistently imaginative direction, since large chunks of the later sequences are shot with a workmanlike predictability that drags them into tedium. Run - scream - closeup of skulls in wall - run - scream - repeat. It's especially a shame because it's demonstrated it can do better with some much more vivid and memorable moments early on, primarily when Jean Michele and his comrades are coaxing Victoria to drink with them and listen to stories in their catacomb chill-out room. There were hints there of the kind of evocative sensuality I associate with the better grade of modern vampire movie, and the sequence showing the supposed cult engaged in their various rites and horrors could have sat very well in a genuinely supernatural/Satanic flick, which would have been a direction I'd have been equally happy to see this film take. Certainly by dropping back to a non-supernatural level this film does throw away a good three-quarters of the potential offered by the catacombs as a setting, which is a shame given that they seem to have been its main selling point.
But despite that, this is still a nasty little flickknife of a movie, sadistic without becoming (too) tedious and with a surprisingly sympathetic window into the mentality of those of us who find life quite hard enough without some bastard deciding we need to loosen up. If you've ever been the victim of a prank that really wasn't big or clever and still bear a grudge, you might just get a kick out of Catacombs.
Rating: 2.5/5, because its flaws do almost exactly balance its merits, and I'm aware that not everyone would share my sympathy with it. Glad I saw it though.
Laters,
Rath
Catacombs is an odd little movie. Made in 2007 on what appears to have been a relatively small budget with mostly unknown actors and two unknown directors in the form of Tomm Coker and David Elliot, its only obvious claim to any kind of fame is that they somehow got singer Pink on board to play the heroine's sister. How and why I don't know, and it made little odds to me anyway since I'm not a fan, but there you go.
The reason I picked Catacombs up, though, is that it's set in one of my favourite places ever - the legendary catacombs of Paris. Six million dead people are piled up willy-nilly in the old limestone mines under the City of Romance, in one of the most macabre juxtapositions on earth, and in many places the bones and skulls have been painstakingly sorted, stacked and interlocked to form eerie decorative walls of bone that stare at you with a thousand empty eyes. I've been down there, loved it, and it's certainly a no-brainer as a setting for a horror movie. You could make a thousand horror movies down there, possibly all at the same time without running out of space given how huge the catacombs actually are.
In this case though we're following the story of a young woman called Victoria (Shannyn Sossamon), a shy recluse with some medical-grade anxiety issues. She comes to Paris for the weekend on the strength of a postcard from her much more outgoing sister Carolyn (Pink), who has promised it will be "good for her". On arriving, she's immediately dragged somewhat against her will into Carolyn's world of bohemian friends and outrageous shenanigans, and told that they're going to a party. The party, of course, turns out to be one of the illegal raves that are organised in the catacombs by Carolyn's mysterious, mischievous and strangely charismatic friend Jean Michele... and when you hold a party in a catacomb in a horror movie, you know it's got to go wrong. Victoria is told the story of the Satanist sect that supposedly used to hold rituals in the catacombs and of the goat-mask-wearing monster that they bred and raised down here in the dark... and then people start dying, the police turn up to break up the rave, and everything goes to hell in a handcart for poor Victoria who ends up separated from everyone, lost and alone in the miles of pitch-black bone-walled hell that honeycomb the depths of Paris. Will she survive? Will she escape? And who the fuck is the goat-faced psycho and indeed, is he real at all?
In many ways Catacombs is a very standard, indeed verging on substandard, rehash of the "let's trap someone and chase them and watch them scream" trope. It gets a bit slow at times in the middle, and in some ways the impact of the catacombs themselves as a setting is spoiled by having too much of the action in there - you get so used to the macabre bone walls and leering skulls that you almost start tuning them out, which is a shame. But this film worked for me on a very visceral level, because it does one thing incredibly well - it captures what every mental illness sufferer knows, which is that if your mental balance is already vulnerable, anyone who messes with your head even in so-called "fun" is playing with fire. Victoria is completely believable to me, from her edgy nervousness and defensiveness at the beginning of the film, to the way her eyes shine when she's being lured into the glamour and mystique of the catacombs by Jean Michele, to her refusal to play ball when her friends try to push her too far by asking her to bathe naked in a reservoir with them - she does exactly what I would've done under that kind of pressure, namely go "fuck you" and walk off despite the fact that she's risking getting lost in the catacombs. I was on her side the entire time.
And at the end, when it turns out that the whole affair was a prank staged by her sister and friends to try and "loosen her up" and that they'd only intended to scare her until the police broke in and interrupted things - then, when Victoria's already suffered so much stark staring terror that she's barely above the crazed-animal threshold and it seems like Carolyn still can't see that she's probably destroyed her sister's sanity and traumatised her for life - THEN this film steps squarely into the one place I thought it wouldn't go, and I was left punching the air in vindication. Because the world is full of Carolyns who think it's funny or in some way helpful to try and fuck with us crazy people for our "own good"; and watching Victoria take care of business felt like a shred of vicarious revenge for myself and everyone else I know who's ever been the victim of one of those people. So yes, I freely admit that a lot of my appreciation for this film is based on the last five minutes and on its interaction with my own particular neuroses - but hey, that's a valid reason to like something, right?
I do think Catacombs could have benefited from more consistently imaginative direction, since large chunks of the later sequences are shot with a workmanlike predictability that drags them into tedium. Run - scream - closeup of skulls in wall - run - scream - repeat. It's especially a shame because it's demonstrated it can do better with some much more vivid and memorable moments early on, primarily when Jean Michele and his comrades are coaxing Victoria to drink with them and listen to stories in their catacomb chill-out room. There were hints there of the kind of evocative sensuality I associate with the better grade of modern vampire movie, and the sequence showing the supposed cult engaged in their various rites and horrors could have sat very well in a genuinely supernatural/Satanic flick, which would have been a direction I'd have been equally happy to see this film take. Certainly by dropping back to a non-supernatural level this film does throw away a good three-quarters of the potential offered by the catacombs as a setting, which is a shame given that they seem to have been its main selling point.
But despite that, this is still a nasty little flickknife of a movie, sadistic without becoming (too) tedious and with a surprisingly sympathetic window into the mentality of those of us who find life quite hard enough without some bastard deciding we need to loosen up. If you've ever been the victim of a prank that really wasn't big or clever and still bear a grudge, you might just get a kick out of Catacombs.
Rating: 2.5/5, because its flaws do almost exactly balance its merits, and I'm aware that not everyone would share my sympathy with it. Glad I saw it though.
Laters,
Rath