THE SHUTTERED ROOM (BRITISH, 1967) AKA: BLOOD ISLAND WRITTEN BY: D.B. Ledrov based on the book by August Derleth and H.P. Lovecraft DIRECTED BY: David Green FEATURING: Oliver Reed, Gig Young, Flora Robson, and Carol Lynley GENRE: HORROR PLOT: In this H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, a newlywed couple inherits an abandoned mill only to discover that a long string of grisly incidents is linked to the unnameable creature inhabiting its loft. The Shuttered Room is a strange yarn of monsters and madness. The setting is claustrophobic and creepy, the characters are downright bizarre, and so are the situations that the protagonists stumble into. Despite this the cinematography is expertly and artfully executed. Thus the viewer expects a conventional storyline, and it is unsettling when shocking events unfold.
COMMENTS: A newlywed couple, Mike and Susannah Kelton (Young, Lynley) travel to an island off of the Connecticut shoreline to visit an old mill which Su just inherited. It was once her childhood home. From the start she has reservations, but the couple perseveres at Mike's urging. They need to view the property with the goal of renovating the mill into a bed and breakfast.
As soon as they arrive on the island, the locals begin subjecting them to the old "Yew ain't from around here!" treatment (even though Su is). Mike meets her uncle who insists that they should leave. The uncle's employee shows Mike his mutilated face, missing an eye and reports that the injury was caused by the devil when he got drunk and spent a night in the abandoned mill. The couple also meet the local ruffians, a gang of unsavory toughs led by a psychopath named Ethan (Reed) who happens to be Su's cousin. Mike is a dignified magazine editor. Both he and Su are cityslickers -and it shows. The hooligans, waste no time expressing their country-fried contempt for the educated, well dressed pair. They brazenly leer at Su and even her cousin Ethan has incestuous rape in mind.
The initial scene in The Shuttered Room furnishes a glimpse at some sort of childhood trauma caused by an insane relative who attacked Su when she was a toddler. A dirty back room secret, the miscreant is kept confined to special quarters in the family home which Su now learns was the old mill. The restraint chamber is blocked by a sinister red door with a very weird peephole protected by cruel spikes.
Su represses her early memories and the denial is causing her to have psychological issues. The couple find Su's old toys, family furnishings, and can't help but note that strange door. What was once behind the door holds the answer to Su's latent angst. Discovering answers about her past was part of her motivation to return to the island. Due to the bizarre nature of her return to the island, she quickly begins to question the virtues of digging them up
As soon as the couple settle in, they share an intimate moment interrupted by Ethan licentiously peeping at them through a window, He leads them to a decrepit lighthouse where Su has a reunion with her eccentric Aunt Agatha (Robson) who warns the Keltons about a curse on Su's family. She learns that her parents were silled by lightening and that the old mill harbors a deadly secret. Auntie implores the pair to leave the island at once lest the curse befall them too.
As the couple explores the mill and the island, they have several unsavory encounters with the gang of nutty, violent locals. Ethan's girlfriend shows up at the mill late at night to steal a coveted item from the Keltons and is mysteriously and monstrously slashed to death.
The old mill itself is as creepy as can be with a sinister overhanging loft several stories over the entrance. The loft features a mysterious trap door in its floor once used for winching up sacks of grain. An imposing structure, it is the room behind the creepy red door and holds the danger that the islanders dread.
Ultimately the thugs ambush and waylay Mike to divert him while Ethan attempts to rape Su. Mike gets away and rushes to his wife's rescue where they discover that Ethan has unleashed the dreaded family curse. When it manifests itself, Ethan and the Keltons fight for their lives in a bizarre and cathartic showdown.
The Shuttered Room is a Gothic style story about isolation, the unknown, dreadful places, and being trapped. It is not a fast paced spatterfest of a horror movie, but the setting and situations are dreadfully creepy, unusual and memorable. Basil Kirchin's (The Abominable Dr. Phibes) lively, innovative score enhances the film's atmosphere of psychic anxiety.
SUBJECT TWO (2006) WRITTEN BY: Philip Chidel and Philip Chidel DIRECTED BY: Philip Chidel DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Rich Confalone FEATURING: Christian Oliver, Dean Stapleton, Courtney Mace, Jürgen Jones, Thomas Buesch, and Philip Chidel GENRES: HORROR, SCI-FI TAGS: GRIM, HEAVY, DISTURBING, TWISTED
PLOT: A medical student gets more than he bargained for when upon accepting an experimental internship, he discovers that immortality comes with a steep price. Subject Two is a fresh twist on the Frankenstein plot. It envisions being reanimated from the undead's perspective. It is deeply disturbing and every bit as repellent and hellish as one could hope.
COMMENTS: A misanthropic medical student named Adam who flunked his ethics exam receives a cryptic email from a Dr. Fanklin Vick. It offers him an opportunity to assist in unusual medical research and to subsequently share in revolutionary scientific advances in medicine.
He bites on the lure, but to accept the position, he must wait on an icy mountain road in the middle of nowhere to be offered a ride by a stranger. The alluring and mysterious chauffeur obviously knows more about what is going on than he does. His journey to meet the elusive Doctor Vick is itself a snowy odyssey into the isolated, surreal drifts and folds of the Colorado Rockies.
When Adam and his driver reach a landmark beyond which the driver is no longer allowed, Adam must hike up a snow covered mountain to the doctor's laboratory. Now he is stranded, beyond the point of no return. The research facility turns out to be a converted chalet. Something about it is reminiscent of Nikola Tesla's Colorado Springs retreat in The Prestige.
He meets Vick who tells him that the research is very unusual and important and that Adam is uniquely qualified. Vick avoids going into much specific detail. Adam accepts. What Adam doesn't understand is that what uniquely qualifies him is that he is now a captive audience. Nobody knows where he is, he has no means of departure, and his particular background makes him an entity who nobody will ever miss if he disappears.
On this isolated, snowbound mountain peak, Dr. Vick is indeed performing very unique research. He is experimenting with life, death, and reanimation. In combination with makeshift cryogenics, he is using a bizarre recombinant DNA serum that alters and restarts the process of cellular respiration. The problem is, because the serum, timing and method of administration are as yet unperfected and misunderstood, the process has some very unpleasant side effects. Guess who gets to be the new test subject?
VIck murders Adam, and not very nicely. Instead of shooting him up with an overdose of Seconal, he sneaks up behind him a violently strangles him. Then he reanimates him.
He ruthlessly butchers and reanimates Adam repeatedly, trying to get the serum component balance, dosage, cryogenic, and temporal factors just right. There isn't an objective control group. Adam is both subject and control group, which is to say that as Vick and Adam perfect the research, they proceed via trial and error. As Subject Two, Adam is captive to a continuum of horrible and invigorating side effects, continuously oscillating between two extremes of mortal perception.
Subject Two experiences his new reality as a twisted psychedelic nightmare. It is simultaneously clarifying and hellish. While continuing to inhabit the world of the living, he is now intellectually in the bizarre plane of the beyond.
Unsettling developments alter Adam's experience when he discovers the frozen, bloody remains of who is apparently Subject One buried in the snow. In a state of suspended animation, Subject One's head is riddled with an octopus of gruesome serum tubes. Subject One does not look pleased about it, but he is going nowhere for the time being. Then matters become complicated when a trespassing poacher stumbles onto the proceedings and Adam "corrects" him.
The film has been criticized on two counts. Adam's character is allegedly not well enough developed so that we care about him, and the film was shot in digital video. I emphatically contest these assertions.
Regarding character development, there isn't time in a standard movie to address every potential nuance. Subject Two is about a dreadful, inescapable cycle of perpetual violent death and reanimation. The film is a horrifying psychological thriller about the human condition in states of animation and morbid destruction. It grimly depicts what it means to be alive. It explores the existential nature and paradoxes of undeath. Subject Two is about the curse of immortality.
With cerebral horror paradigms like this to contemplate, I couldn't give a dead lab rat's ass about Adam's hopes and fears, his life and loves. He is an unethical, bright, curious, but naive foul-up. I want to see how he handles the situation and what becomes of him, nothing more.
While the cinematography has been accused of giving the piece the cheap feel of a soap opera, I dispute this as well. The cinematography is as sharp and precise as the frozen alpine air. It enhances the rarefied, ionic ether of the crystalline subzero setting. One can almost feel the thin, icy atmosphere paralyzing the lungs, the sting of snowy crystals against bare skin. Direct to digital bypasses the gloomy dreary look of televised productions once shot on video tape.
True, direct digital tracks movement the way video tape does, and lacks the lustrous detachment achieved by film stock. However it is perfectly suited to the white, snowbound, blue-skied clarity of the locale in Subject Two. The precision of digital is blissfully married to the stark, cold reality of this severe story.
Subject Two is mostly a mental and physical dialectic between two actors. There is a cold calculation about their dispositions, rather than the emotionally wrought yelling and screaming that is standard to other horror scenarios of its type. There is no dramatically shrieked, "Give my creature life!" Subject Two is pure science fiction and squeamish dread. The appalling nature of the irreversible psychic and physiological mutilation inflicted on Adam combines with Vick's amoral descent beyond unorthodoxy into pure evil. This profane combination provides all of the excitement and turmoil that one can endure.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: "Set against the bright, breathtaking world of the snow-peaked Rocky Mountains . . . Subject Two is as much a clever inversion of the resurrection horror genre as it is a profound and ethical examination of the value of life and immortality." - Sundance Film Festival
The Shuttered Room (Blood Island)
Unrated
Subject Two
R
