It Came From The Cineplex: Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak was written by Matthew Robbins and Guillermo del Toro. It was directed by Guillermo del Toro.

Robbins previously wrote the screenplays for Mimic, *batteries not included and Dragonslayer (both of which he also directed), Corvette Summer and MacArthur. He and del Toro also co-wrote the remake of Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark.

Del Toro is a favorite among fandom, and directed Mimic, Blade II, Hellboy, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Pan's Labyrinth, and Pacific Rim.

I was very much looking forward to this film, as I'm a fan of del Toro's work and the trailer I saw promised an old fashioned Hammer Studios-style horror film. Unfortunately the trailer is a filthy liar, because this is absolutely, positively NOT a horror film. It's an old school Gothic romance with a couple of ghosts tossed half-heartedly into the mix. Del Toro himself even stated in an interview that this is not a horror movie. So why'd he let the trailers sell it as one?

Sadly this deliberate deceit left a bad taste in my mouth. I feel like I was tricked into seeing a film I normally wouldn't have bothered with. I'm betting I'm not the only one who'll resent being misled by the trailer, and it's going to end up biting the filmmakers in the ass. The less-than-impressive box office seems to agree with me.

It's well-made, moody and features amazing costumes and production design, but it emphasizes style over any kind of substance. The plot, such as it is, is paper thin, and if you've ever seen even one movie before, you'll spot the "shocking twist" coming down the street from a mile away.

It doesn't help matters that the film isn't the least bit scary either. On the rare occasion we actually do get to see a ghost, they turn out to be helpful and protective rather than menacing! Jesus, if I want to see friendly ghosts I'll cue up a Casper cartoon.

SPOILERS, I GUESS!

The Plot:

As the film opens, young Edith Cushing is visited by the ghost of her mother, who croaks a cryptic warning: "Beware of Crimson Peak." Too bad the audience didn't heed her words.

Fourteen years later, Edith (played by Mia Wasikowska) is an aspiring writer living in Buffalo, who's more interested in penning tales of ghosts than love stories. An English nobleman named Sir Thomas Sharpe (played by Tom Hiddleston) visits Edith's father Carter, a wealthy industrialist. Thomas is seeking funding for his clay mining machine. Edith is smitten with Thomas, but her father doesn't trust him and rejects his invention. Edith's friend and suitor Dr. Alan McMichael (played by Charlie Hunnam) doesn't care for Thomas either. Edith is visited again by her ghost mom, who again warns her of "Crimson Peak."

Edith and Thomas become romantically involved, much to the disapproval of Carter. He hires a private eye to investigate Thomas and his sister Lucille (played by Jessica Chastain). The detective discovers that Sir Thomas is already married, along with shocking details about his relationship with his sister (gosh, I wonder what that could be?). Carter bribes the Sharpe siblings into leaving Buffalo forever. Shortly after Carter is brutally murdered (gosh, I wonder who could have done that?). Thomas then monies, er, MARRIES Edith and whisks her off to England.

He takes her to Allerdale Hall, the family home of the Sharpes. The manor is a crumbling and rotting edifice that's slowly sinking into the red clay of the estate. Edith begins seeing terrifying ghosts in the manor, but of course no one believes her. Lucille begins slowly poisoning Edith's tea, weakening her. As winter approaches, Thomas mentions the surrounding clay turns the snow red, giving the manor the nickname "Crimson Peak." Say, haven't we heard that name somewhere before?

Edith snoops around the house and discovers that Thomas was previously married to three other wealthy women, all of whom died mysteriously. She also finds out to absolutely no one's surprise that he and Lucille are in an incestuous relationship, and have been since they were children. Lucille even murdered their mother when she found out the truth about her no-good children.

Meanwhile, Dr. McMichael investigates the Sharpe siblings and comes to the same conclusion. He travels to England (very quickly for the 1900s, I might add— maybe he teleported?) and arrives at Allerdale Hall to rescue Edith. Lucille stabs him, and Thomas seemingly finishes him off. Lucille, jealous that Thomas has chosen Edith over her, murders him. She and Edith then have an epic battle inside and outside the manor (despite the fact that Edith's supposedly weak and dying). When Lucille is distracted by Thomas' ghost, Edith kills her. She finds the still-conscious Dr. McMichael, and the two limp to safety. That's it!

Thoughts:

• Like all of Guillermo del Toro's projects, this one looks incredible. The costumes and period details are all top notch. The centerpiece of the film is the vast and crumbling Allerdale Hall, which is almost a character in itself. It's just too bad that they didn't spend as much time and effort on the actual story.

• The heroine's name is Edith Cushing. I'm assuming that's a nod to frequent Hammer Studios horror star Peter Cushing?

• Every time we see a shot of the huge foyer of Allerdale Hall, dozens of leaves filter in through a massive hole in the roof. First of all, how hard could it be to patch up a roof? Maybe Thomas should take a bit of the money he's using on his clay digging machine and use it to by shingles. Secondly, at the rate the leaves pour in, there should have been twenty foot pile in the middle of the room.

Thirdly, where the bloody hell are the leaves coming from? Every exterior shot of the mansion shows the surrounding area to be bare and devoid of life. There's not a single tree anywhere near the house. Style over substance!

On a related note: later on Edith snoops around in the basement, which contains rows of large cisterns full of red clay. Snow falls through several holes in the ceiling. How the hell's that happening? How is snow falling into the basement? Are the holes in the basement ceiling lined up with holes in the roof several stories above?

I can just see del Toro on the set, yelling, "I don't care if it doesn't make sense, I said more snow in the basement!"

• The ghost in the film were all suitably creepy and very well done. It's just too bad that their combined screen time added up to less than five minutes (in a 119 minute film).

• Benedict Cumberbatch and Emma Stone were originally cast as Thomas and Edith, but both dropped out of the production. Smart people! They must have got a good look at the script.

• This is a very weirdly structured movie. The characters don't even leave New York and get to the titular haunted mansion in England until almost halfway through the film. 

You could delete the entire first half of the film and it wouldn't harm the plot one bit. It should have started with Edith's arrival at Allerdale Hall, not with her childhood and life in New York.

• The movie features members of del Toro's little repertory actor group, including Charlie Hunnam and Burn Gorman (both of whom were in Pacific Rim). Doug Jones is also in the film, and has been in pretty much everything del Toro's every directed.

• Take a good look at that movie poster. See how it says, "From the visionary director of Pan's Labyrinth?" That's starting to become a red flag word. Whenever I see a director described as "visionary," it means his movies look good, but that's all they've got going for them.

• For the past ten years or so, every movie in the cineplex has featured the exact same "orange and teal" color scheme. You see it over and over in every film-- orange faces contrasted against teal-tinted backgrounds.

Nowhere is that style more evident than in Crimson Peak. Virtually every single scene is awash with orange and teal. So much so that after a while it became laughable. I was looking at the color scheme instead of paying attention to the film.

• Most so-called "horror" films today are watered down so they'll get a PG-13 rating, so I was excited to see that this one was actually rated R.

Unfortunately I'm having a hard time understanding why. There're a few brief scenes of gore, but nothing worse than you'd see every week on The Walking Dead. So why the R rating? Is it because fans of Gothic romances won't be expecting it, and will be taken aback by the violence?

Crimson Peak squanders its considerable potential by emphasizing style over substance and giving us a simplistic plot with a twist you can see coming from a mile off. Don't be misled by the trailer, which sells it as a horror film instead of a gothic romance. I give it a C+.

Doctor Who Season 7, Episode 9: Hide

This week the Doctor and Clara get all Evil Dead up in here in an old fashioned haunted house story that takes an unexpected twist.

This was another episode that had an nice old-school feel. Doctor Who has dabbled in horror quite a few times in the past, with stories about monsters in spooky castles on fog-shrouded moors. It was nice to see a simple (well, simple for Doctor Who) straightforward story that didn't involve the end of the world.

I quite liked the fact that the story took an unexpected turn halfway through from horror into science fiction territory.

Hide was written by Neil Cross, who wrote the somewhat jumbled The Rings Of Akhaten that aired a few weeks ago. This episode is a vast improvement, in my opinion. However, Hide was written before Rings, which kind of worries me-- I hope Mr. Cross didn't use up all his good ideas in this episode.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Plot:
In 1974 Professor Alec Palmer and his assistant Emma are investigating the legend of a ghost in ancient Caliburn Manor. They're interrupted by the Doctor and Clara, who crash the party and determine that the ghost is very real and isn't quite what it appears to be.

Thoughts:
• Professor Palmer is played by Scots actor Dougray Scott. Believe it or not, Scott came this close to playing Wolverine in the first X-Men movie, but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts with Mission: Impossible II. I wonder if they'd still be making Wolverine movies if Scott had played the character instead of Huge Ackman?

• I don't want to rag too much on this episode as I thought it was well done, but... how old is Professor Palmer supposed to be? The Doctor mentions that Palmer worked for British Intelligence in WWII. That would have been about thirty years before this episode took place. I doubt there were any twenty year old secret agents, so he was probably around thirty during the war. That means he'd be around sixty in 1974. He certainly doesn't look that old; in fact he doesn't look a day over forty. Something about his timeline isn't adding up.

• The Doctor hasn't said "Geronimo!" for quite a while.

• It's also been a while since we've seen the Doctor use his psychic paper. I think. Unless my memory's faulty, which is a real possibility, it hasn't popped up yet in this second half of the season.

• (Heavy sigh) They did a variation on the "Doctor Who?" joke this week, changing it up to "Doctor What?" I said I was going to start charging showrunner Steven Moffat $100 every time he made this joke from now on. You didn't quite do it this week, but you got close, so I'll only charge you $50. You can send my payment via PayPal.

• A few weeks ago in The Rings Of Akhaten, the internet was abuzz with the fact that the TARDIS didn't like Clara. I didn't get that impression at all from the episode and dismissed it as typical internet hogwash. This episode would seem to suggest I was wrong and the internet was right: the TARDIS clearly does not care for Clara for some reason. Whether this is just a cutesy little character bit or a clue as to Clara's identity, I have no idea.

• Throughout the series it's often easy to forget that the Doctor is really an alien. This week Matt Smith does a great job of reminding us that the Doctor is anything but human. When he hears an tremendous thumping sound in the mansion, he asks Clara if it's her making it. Then later when he wants to speak privately with Clara, he tries to silently motion her over to him and when she fails to respond he says, "I'm making a face!"

• Interesting that Professor Palmer and Emma sort of parallel the Doctor and Clara. Both the Professor and the Doctor are older figures who are haunted by the death they've seen and caused, while Emma and Clara are the perky young assistants who would risk life and limb for their respective mentors.

• I loved the way the Doctor used the TARDIS to film the same spot at different intervals over a period of billions of years, resulting in a crude animation of the "ghost" running from... something. It was a complicated idea, but the way it was presented was simple and brilliant.

When Clara realizes that they've just traveled from the Earth's beginning to its end, she's understandably moved by such a profound experience, and can't understand why the Doctor is so cavalier about it. A nicely written and acted little scene that perfectly illustrates, once again, that the Doctor is an alien.

• Once again the Doctor dons his orange spacesuit that he first wore in The Impossible Planet.

• The cloister bell! It's been a long time since we've heard that. You know things are dire when you hear the cloister bell.

• When the Doctor's attempting to rescue Hila Turkurian, the time traveling lady, he cobbles together some sort of amplification device to boost Emma's empathic abilities (which looks a lot like Cerebro from the X-Men movies). This makeshift device is powered by the TARDIS, as we see hundreds of feet of glowing cable snaking from it across the grounds and into the mansion. 

Later Clara talks the TARDIS into entering the pocket universe to rescue the Doctor. So... if the TARDIS leaves our universe to do so, what happened to the glowing cables? What's powering the amplification device? Whoops!

I suppose that the big blue crystal at the center of his makeshift contraption could be powering everything, but if so, then what's with all the glowing cable coming out of the TARDIS? What's it doing?

By the way, the Doctor says that the aforementioned blue crystal is "a subset of the Eye Of Harmony," first mentioned in the episode The Deadly Assassin (is there a non-deadly assassin?) way back in 1976. Supposedly it's a piece of a black hole brought back by Rassilon that powers the Time Lord's planet Gallifrey. Yes, I am a geek.

• The forest in the pocket universe looks a lot like the one in the Evil Dead remake that's currently playing in theaters. I mean a lot like it. Nearly identical. Surely that's just a coincidence, right? They couldn't possibly have planned for this episode to air at the same time the movie came out, could they?

• Emma seems very cold towards the Doctor all through the episode. Is it because she senses there's a "sliver of ice in his heart" or something more? Maybe she's just pissed that he practically killed her three times during the episode by hooking her up to the Cerebro headset.

• The Doctor says he can't change history because there are fixed points in time, but a few seconds later he says that "paradoxes resolve themselves." Umm... those are two completely opposite statements. Which is it, Doctor?

• So I guess Hila decides to stay in 1974? I wonder which is worse for the health of the Time Stream, taking a person who supposedly died back to her own time or leaving her in the past with knowledge of the future? 

• At the end of the episode the Doctor reveals he came to 1974 not to investigate a time traveling ghost but to use Emma's empathic abilities to solve the mystery of Clara. Emma says she's just a girl, which the Doctor clearly doesn't believe.

Jasper The Surly Ghost

Jasper started out his life (or would that be death?) as another doodle in my sketchbook.

I was trying to make him transparent and look like he's glowing as well. Note that you can kind of see through his folded arms.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.
Here's the original sketch of Jasper. Yep, I drew him on lined paper. Nothing much changed, the final is pretty much line for line the same as the sketch, which doesn't happen often.