philosoraptor42 | Reviews: Let Me In, Outcast and The Wolf-Man

Let Me In (2010)

I should probably begin by noting that there was barely a hope in hell of me being happy with this movie. First I saw "Let The Right One In" and I loved it. Then I read the book and I loved that too. It would have been very impressive indeed if this film ended up living up to these two preceding versions of the story.

One of the things that bothered a few people with the last movie was that it takes a while to get started. So perhaps it's surprising to discover that in this case the movie takes EVEN LONGER to get started. Yes, really. They attempt to get us into things faster by starting off with an event part way through the timeline. We begin with two police cars and an ambulance racing to get someone to hospital. The patient is suffering from extreme injuries, but the police need to question him. Because it's the eighties they are concerned about a possible Satanic connection. So yeah, all very promising. Then finally we see the title "two weeks earlier" and the movie starts again from the beginning. Now we still have the same wait to go through, only this time we're already expecting more excitement. Plus, the interesting stuff that will happen later is partially revealed already, removing the surprise.

When we are introduced to Oskar... I mean Owen, he is sitting eating sweets and singing the song from the tv advert for them "eat some now, save some for later". It felt a bit bizarre to me. Shortly after this he's indoors and we finally reach the beginning of Let The Right One In, where he's imagining himself as a threatening figure and will later turn out to be imitating the boy who bullies him at school. In the original "Let The Right One In" he was taunting the imagined subject of his threats by calling them a "pig", but in this new movie it feels especially worrying since he has a weird mask that he decides to wear and he's threatening a "little girl". Sure, it's explained (asides from the weird mask), but it's quite an odd way for this to begin.

The music doesn't work very well. To start with it seems like everyone and their cat is listening to "Let's Dance" by David Bowie. (Okay, we get it, it's the eighties!) Then eventually this gets changed for some other less well known and generally dreadful eighties "hits". Bizarrely Eli... I mean Abby, is not so much simply curious about eighties music, but seems entirely at home in this decade. Okay, so this isn't "Let The Right One In" so they can do things differently, but the whole previous aspect of the movie and the book whereby the vampire girl was much older in her attitudes than she would appear has been entirely lost.

The atmospheric music is problematic too. It always feels like it's trying to get us to feel emotions. In "Let The Right One In" the music felt rather less insistent and the director wasn't afraid of leaving us with no background music at all in order to avoid messing with the ambiguous mood. The way the movie tried to make me feel emotions just served to highlight how unemotional the whole thing really was. There simply doesn't appear to be any chemistry between the two children, with the boy having all the charisma of Haley Joel Osmond (i.e. not much). The bullying scenes are admittedly brutal, but yet somehow they seem disjointed from the scenes where our male protagonist child interact with Abby.

While in "Let The Right One In", Oskar seemed to be trying to get over the stress of being constantly bullied and Eli seemed to be helping his confidence somewhat, in "Let Me In" the bullying scenes seem entirely unrelated to the scenes when Owen is at home talking to Abby. It feels like the movie has a whole bunch of things it needs to include, but doesn't really understand how to make them into a full consistent narrative. Including the police reaction to events in the story (left out of "Let The Right One In" for the most part) only serves to break things up further because, while they have a good enough actor for the detective involved, he's not actually got that much bearing on the overall story.

Quite a surprise was how ineffective the effects were. One thing that's described well in the book is Eli's transformation whenever she needs to climb up the side of buildings. She grows larger hands and claws to allow her to climb. In the movie this transformation is never seen. One time when she's killing someone we see her leaping about (which, for the record, is not at all how her murders are described in the book). Even then it's as a sillouette, so it's not as if we see anything terribly impressive.

There's a scene where we see what happens when you don't "let in" a vampire, but they walk in anyway in both the original movie and the new movie. Oddly the original movie with a (presumably) smaller effects budget actually does a better job, showing close-up footage of what happens. In the new movie the vampire mainly just appears to be shaking and the amount of effects used seems pretty minimal; not to the point of being subtle, but to the point of having no emotional effect whatsoever. Similarly unemotional is the demise of a vampire who ends up in hospital after her vampire attack. She's finished off pretty quickly and her whole emotional turmoil over her transformation is entirely ignored, but admittedly in her case the special effects are rather more impressive, if entirely unsubtle and emotionally unengaging.

Perhaps one of the most cathartic and explosive scenes in the original movie is best known as "the swimming pool scene". In preparation for this scene in the new movie, the lights seem to randomly turn off. As such, the effects are harder to make out because there's less light. The whole scene is rather unimpressive. Meanwhile the fully lit and clearly visible effects with a fixed camera shot in the original movie were far more effective. This is a clear example of the new movie's effects entirely failing to capture the emotional effect, or even the visual effect, of the original movie's (presumably) lower budget equivalent. Also, I liked the cat scene in the original movie. This new movie does not include the cat scene so I can't tell whether they'd have done the effects better.

It feels like some of the dialogue in this movie is entirely lifted from the book. It's less a matter of staying true to the material as it is laziness on the part of the scriptwriters. The lines seem to be delivered rather plainly, perhaps partly due to poor direction, but also because the impact of the lines hasn't been considered in terms of the wider story. The various revelations about living as a vampire in the modern world and about the relationship between the two children have only a very limited impact because the moviemakers do not seem to have considered how to make scenes progress in a way that builds up our emotions in a meaninful way. The movie ends up simply being one event after another rather than a properly moving story. I suppose it's nice enough to look at and the ideas from the original are still in there, but the execution is rather pants overall.

2/5

Outcast (2010)

Okay confession time, I can't really tell the difference between Scottish accents and Irish accents. Not well anyway. Though to be fair to me, in many cases these are Scottish actors who might be putting on an Irish accent. The movie involves an ancient group of celtish people who have stuck to their old ways.

A boy and his mother are on the run and the mother is using powerful witchcraft to try to keep her son safe. Part of this means that if an ordinary person finds their home she can know for certain that they mean them no harm. On the other hand, if a figure from social services finds themselves bizarrely unable to track down their flat, it does not bode well for them. In the meantime James Nebitt has been blessed with a magical tattoo on his back which gives him extra special powers. He's been enlisted by these celtish people to destroy the boy. Apparently it's necessary. However, these celtish people don't really trust Nesbitt's character. But in the end, who are we actually supposed to trust?

This is most certainly an example of urban fantasy. The magic exists in a very urban setting and there's an element of politics involved in what happens. The characters aren't always especially deep, but the world-building is done very well indeed.

As well as relatively shallow characters, another problem is a fairly shallow plot. While some attempt is made to leave it reasonably mysterious, the end product is quite by-the-numbers and there aren't really many massive surprises. Still, the movie does keep you interested, the emotions of the characters are very real indeed and, as already noted, the mythology of this urban fantasy is built up very well. That magic words are spoken in gaelic is rather cool.

Sadly Karen Gillian is not in the movie for very long and isn't the vibrant character we know from Doctor Who at all. (Her character in this is decidedly chavy.) Also, you'll most likely need the subtitles on for this one. The accents are decidedly thick. It's a good little story, with a good mythology too. Could have been a little more complex in the plot department and the characters could have been fleshed out a little more, but this is a good solid film. 4/5

The Wolf-Man (1941)

A classic black and white horror movie with 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. It must be said that this mainly has its rating for both being a classic and not being entirely awful. Bela Lugosi plays a part in this as a gypsy fortune teller, which is cool.

On a more negative side, the protagonist begins his relationship with his romantic interest by stalking, He aims a telescope at her room above her shop and then proceeds to begin a conversation with her telling her all the details he discovered from snooping (on the pretence that he was psychic). Pretty weird and disturbing.

Oddly the movie makers seem unsure as to whether their wolf-man actually changes into a wolf or turns into a half-man half-wolf person. In general this wasn't bad so much as boring, but I must admit I can see why it is viewed as a classic. I didn't give up on it and I cannot claim that I didn't care about what was happening in the story.

3/5