"Fear Is Infectious" (Unless You Shake the Camera A Lot)
Bad Movie Drive-in
To visit plague-ridden homes, they soaked the robes in wax in hopes of repelling any infectious fluids or vapors. The rest of their skin, they covered with leather boots, smocks, gloves, and hoods. These strict precautions may well have protected them against the true cause of the Black Death--bacteria-carrying fleas that hitched rides on the ubiquitous rats. The doctors' distinctive masks could be made of leather or metal. The eye holes were covered with heavy netting or glass, and the long beak was stuffed with camphor-soaked cotton and herbs. Experts vary on whether the doctors believed the herbs had healing properties or simply used them to overcome the horrible smells.---Beverle Graves Myers, Cruel Music: The Plague Doctors
"I don't have time for this," said Anna (Gina Philips), the comely archeology student in The Sickhouse. Zombos and I looked at each other. We agreed with her. Once again Paul Holstenwall, the scion of inconsequential cinema, had underwhelmed us with another exercise in pointless filmmaking.
Anna has just discovered the four punk metal wannabes who are freaking out because one of them appears to have the plague. For shame: that will teach them not to go kicking about in stolen cars for joy rides and breaking into bio-hazard excavation sites previously used as plague hospitals. And shame on Anna, too. Here she is yelling at them for breaking and entering when she did it first, releasing a centuries old evil--former member of that notorious 1665 London touring group known as the Black Priests--in the process. The five of them, the usual mix of underachieving and overachieving victims slamming into each other in supernatural slasher films, are in for a rough night of it. So is everyone else watching this whoozy camera, blurry-head-spinning-shockcut-apparition, and zoicks! music extravaganza. Whatever originality and novelty inherent in the story is undercooked by director Curtis Radclyffe's palsied camera and over-reliance on J-horror hackneyism.
"Why can't he keep the bloody thing still!" said Zombos in exasperation.
"He's sustaining the tension by forcing a feeling of disorientation with his constantly moving frame," explained Paul.
"Tension? My neck is tense from all the quickcut splicing, and visual chittering," Zombos retorted. "And those flickering fluorescent light fixtures must go. Couldn't they afford better lighting? I can't see what's going on."
Plague doctors? London's Black Death of 1665? What seems a capital idea for gut-wrenching suspense and terror is reduced to a half farthing's worth of overdone digital and cutting room trickery, making sense the first victim in this suspenseless creation of a monster-natural.
My mind drifted among the possibilities that could have been, given less confusing herky-jerky motion and more stillness, to let the actors do their thing and convey the terror overwhelming them. Gina Philips gives a fair performance, though she seems too calm, too emotionless at times when you'd expect some "oh, sh*t, it's the plague, we're so f**ked!" or "blimey, what the hell is that thing that wants to consume our souls and kill us!" Instead, she's so proper, so academic. At least the others provide some frenzied bickering and craziness, and run like the dickens through the halls of the orphanage away from the not so good doctor making his terminal rounds.
"Zoc! Zoc, help me out here," pleaded Zombos. "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"Not if it involves cocoa butter and bananas," I said.
Zombos and Paul stopped arguing and looked at me. I quickly pulled my thoughts back to landfall. "I'm sorry, what did you say?"
"What do you think? asked Zombos. "Paul thinks this bloody film is a punky masterpiece of new horror style and that I'm too old to appreciate it. Talk some sense into him will you."
I took a deep sip from my hot mocha latte, embellished with Chef Machiavelli's secret mix of herbs and spices he calls the Bombay tincture. I looked at Zombos and Paul. Each had folded his arms together and patiently waited. I took another long sip and pondered. Was it simply bad direction or bad directorial choices? Was the acting mediocre or just hacked to pieces by all the scene juggling? Was the story poorly written or intentionally ground into a confusing mash? The Bombay tincture fortified my thoughts enough to proceed.
"It's obvious the choices made here point to commercially shaping the film for a younger audience, especially with the odd addition of that acid-drenched metal song screeching over the opening credits. Kids' snippet-drenched attention spans are primed for choppy narrative these days anyway, so they probably wouldn't notice the yawning chasm of missing structural coherence in the visual narrative of this film." There. I said it. Zombos and Paul continued to look at me. Each slowly unfolded his arms. Then they gave up and started arguing again. Good. At least now they would leave me alone to enjoy my mocha latte in peace.
But what is the matter with The Sickhouse? Although it contains cliché after cliché repeated in numbing succession, the acting is strong, the historical context intriguing, and the atmosphere almost menacing, if not for the overused Saw-styled tinted and saturated lighting. Ludgate Orphanage, aside from the spookhouse flickering fluorescents, dark-- often too dark to make out what is happening--is filled with brooding rooms and hallways. Then there's the tall, unstoppable, plague doctor dressed in his bizarre clothing and bird-like mask, stalking around with a bevy of grotesque children, murdered by him back in the 1600's. There is also a kicker ending that twists the story back on itself, but it will leave you just as confused as before.
The dig that Anna's been working on, in the basement of the orphanage, leads to another chamber further down. Before she can dig deeper (hey, I made a pun), the authorities find evidence of lingering plague. Being an A student, Anna ignores the grave danger to herself-- and the public at large-- and breaks into the condemned orphanage after hours to continue her work. While she's digging around in the basement, the miscreant fun-loving four are made to crash their stolen auto near the orphanage. Finding the door open--thanks Anna-- they hustle inside to avoid the Bobbies and all those nasty lectures on grand theft auto and public menace behaviors they've heard before.
It all goes down at midnight. Time becomes frozen for everyone in the building as the plague doctor, brought back from the netherworld by Anna's academic zeal, makes his killer appearance. There seems to be a satanic, Son of Midnight, purpose to his malevolence, but in J-horror fashion, the story doesn't give you much to go on. Unfortunately neither do the writers. And the director is so hellbent on gimmicking the action, it becomes impossible to follow at times-- actually, most of the time--to the point of annoyance.
One clue is it all revolves around a baby to be born. But that is all you will get. While there is not much gore, you do have people yelling at each other and frantically running, people becoming possessed and frantically chasing, and people slippin' 'n slidin' in something white, disgustingly gelatinous, and filled with pukey-looking nasties. Which leads to a not so warm bath in thousands of blood sucking leeches (used to treat the plague back then: go figure). The ending neatly leads into a sequelization antic for another set of plague doctor's rounds ad nauseam.
Maybe Paul is right. Maybe Zombos and I are too old to appreciate the style of The Sickhouse. Or maybe a script doctor, and a steadier hand, would have made The Sickhouse a memorable, possibly even classic, frightfest instead of another victim in a plague of factory assembled horror movies infecting each other, trapping us into repeated storylines and repeated body counts.
Too bad because the imagery of the plague doctor is so perfect for horror it's amazing to think it hasn't been done yet. This could have been something. Perhaps a period piece where there really isn't anything more than the plague, but seen through the eyes of a dying patient's fear and dementia this could be mind blowing.
Posted by: Gary D. Macabre | March 28, 2008 at 10:42 PM
Yes, it's a real loss of a golden horror opportunity. Great idea on the period piece! Now that would have been exciting: fighting the plague and the black priest. Wow.
Posted by: IL | March 31, 2008 at 12:33 AM
What is the name of the horrible song in the opening credits?
Please email the answer @ end_me_or_i_will@yahoo.com
Posted by: Andrew Miller | February 06, 2009 at 09:38 PM