Dark Was the Night

I've always been fascinated by the story of The Devil's Footprints, that unsolved mystery of strange footprints in the snow in Devon England in 1855. Sure, there are skeptical views, but they marks offer a wonderful "what if" and induced a lot of anxiety in their day.

I've wanted to see Dark Was the Night since I read of the Blacklist script "The Trees" by Tyler Hisel and heard that it was finally being filmed. The story transplants those odd tracks to a small town north of a logging operation and pits a local sheriff suffering the bereavement of a child against a mysterious something disturbed in the forest.

Just in time for Halloween, the film is streaming on Netflix and is a nicely creepy and atmospheric monster movie that leaves the imagination plenty of room to play. Director Jack Heller seems to have a great sense of how to deliver a building sense of menace and read.

Frequent villain Kevin Durand is the sheriff and makes a great hero and a sympathetic grieving dad who's also coping with estrangement from his wife and remaining child. Lukas Haas is his ex-New Yorker deputy who's smitten with a local girl and looking to make a quiet home.

Huge and mysterious footprints, like the ones that were  in my upstairs closet when I moved into my current house, appear one morning, stretching the length of the town, and Durand as Sheriff Shields begins first to seek a logical explanation.

He gradually realizes he'd better prep for things worse than skeptics might have expected, and gets some chilling and tantalizing glimpses of what might be lurking in the shadows.

The story builds to an intense third act with the mystery and chills piling on. It's a pretty nice dark night viewing choice.

I'd say: Worth the time.

Watch Instantly Watch: Wait Until You're Blindsided aka Penthouse North

Something's hidden in the apartment of a young blind woman, and dark criminal types turn up to look for it and glean any knowledge from her they can.

That's the plot of Wait Until Dark (1967), of course, based on the stage play of the same name by Frederick Knott who also penned the play that became Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder.

The premise gets an updating in both pace and timeframe in Blindsided aka Penthouse North, now streaming on Netflix with some airings on Lifetime as well. It's penned by David Loughery and directed by Joseph Ruben (Sleeping With the Enemy.)

In Wait Until Dark, the heroine is Audrey Hepburn, the MacGuffin a doll filled with heroin. Thugs led by Alan Arkin attempt a con game to finesse details such as the combination of a safe where the doll might be stored. Things progress to brutality. 

The brutality comes sooner in Blindsided. Michelle Monaghan is a photojournalist who's lost her sight to a suicide bomber while in Afghanistan. Three years after the incident, she's living happily with a significant other in an expensive Manhattan penthouse. 

It's more like the film I thought Wait Until Dark was going to be when I was a kid, before I saw it the first time. 

The original film is a slow burn. Arkin, Richard Crenna and Jack Weston trick Hepburn's husband into leaving then try to convince her he's involved in an affair and murder with the doll he brought home from a trip. It's the item that can time him to the whole matter, so she's urged to produce it, even though she doesn't know where it is.

Things turn brutal much quicker in Blindsided. Monaghan's Sara comes home from picking up the final touches for New Year's Eve to find her boyfriend dead. The thug that knifed him's still on the premises, and he's joined after a few twists by his boss, Michael Keaton, who's back in Pacific Heights territory. He seems like the more gentle of the two, but of course…

There's no con game, just an escalating effort to terrorize Sara until she reveals what she knows about money on the premises and more. Even a little water boardings worth a try.

It's a Wait Until Dark for our era, I suppose, with a punches contemporary audiences will appreciate, clocking in just under 90 minutes. 

There are still twists and turns, and a little does-she-know? or doesn't-she? mind play, with one moment of: "If she knew, why would she let that happen?" 

It's also interesting, if you're familiar with original, to see how Keaton and Company deal differently with issues Arkin's band tackled years ago. They're a little more heavy handed today.

Keaton's good , always love Keaton, but I think Arkin's twisted psychopath is still a little more chilling. 

Check both for yourself and see what you think. It might make for an interesting double bill on an evening at home.

Watch Instantly Watch: Donner Pass

I don't usually get enthusiastic when a horror film's premise involves a group of teens going anywhere or doing anything. It's a template that's served often and reached a fine meta place with The Cabin in the Woods and Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. OK, there's the "Tuesday the 17th" segment of V/H/S also.

But I've seen it enough. I was a little sad that framework provided the underpinning for Dead Snow with its hordes of Nazi zombies.

I'm not sure why I clicked on Donner Pass as a Netflix watch instantly. The description warns it's about teenagers on a ski trip. Maybe the name Donner Pass spurred the override. That incident inspired the brilliant "A Child of the Golden West" from Dennis Etchison after all.

I was mildly curious, and the film opened with a historic scene giving an alternate version of the Donner Party's demise. George Donner went a little crazy when the wagon train became snowbound, we learn.

Flash forward to that aforementioned ski trip. Four, just four?, kids are headed to the mountain cabin belonging to the parents of the creepy Thomas (Erik Stocklin). He's a fifth wheel in a four-person party, but he's got the cabin.

A highway worker delivers the requisite warning of a person of interest in the area, and everyone forges ahead anyway.

They're soon  joined by friends of the terminally unfriendly Nicole (Adelaide Kane), upping the potential body even though Kayley (Desiree Hall) asks them to leave. She's the good girl.

People start to die. It all looks cookie cutter for a while, and then, suddenly it's not quite. Twists and a few additional ideas are woven late into the second act, and suddenly, with infighting and double crosses, everything gets more engaging than you'd expect.

Yes, it's one more slasher, one more band of dead teens, but there' just enough departure from template to keep things moving.

Of course there's cannibalism, but it's never overwhelming on the gore side, and, well, you'll find out more if you watch. I'm not pushing, but as those movies that bubble to the top of the Netflix "Now Available For Streaming" listings go, it's not a terrible hour and 26 minutes with credits.

There's some interesting music over those, a tune called High Ground by Orenda Fink.

Sid says, do whatever you want.

Terror on Netflix Watch Instantly - Severance

I probably should have been more aware of Severance (2006), a British horror thriller with a healthy dose of humor. Somewhere I picked up a vague notion that it was a slasher film with a little something extra, but I was more than pleasantly surprised when I watched a few minutes on Netflix watch instantly.

A Cut Above

It's more than a bit of all right, just when I was starting to think, there's not much new to be done with the slasher film. Belay that notion. Severance is Hostel meets The Office, both brutal and relentlessly wicked.

It concerns itself with the sales office of an arms company headed for a remote lodge in central Europe for a team-building experience. I don't know why it's a remote lodge and not a motel with meeting rooms, but there wouldn't be much of a story, I suppose.

A slice of the familiar

The heroine is Laura Harris of The Faculty and 24. Speaking of sales offices, I'm sure someone in Severance's decided an American lead would help sell it to Americans.

Also familiar to Americans is James Bond bad guy Toby Stephens, who also provided the voice of Bond in the recent BBC radio adaptation of Dr. No.

A little dialog establishes that there are possibly people at large who hate the office mates'

Severence offers great suspense, interspersed with the occasionally zany moment. To say much more would require that I precede the statements with spoiler warning so I'll count on you getting to experience it for yourself or suppose that you're way ahead of me and you've already discovered Severance.

If not, and if Netflix's recommendation algorithm and site search are failing you, well, this one's a good choice if you have a taste for thrillers.

Netflix Watch Now and Dreams in the Witch House

The Netflix "Watch Now" option appeared almost magically for me last night. Christine was watching a PBS show on the art of quilting in the den, you see.

I believe the option was available for me for the first time, although Hacking Netflix--an excellent source for all things Netflix-- noted the feature's gradual rollout began in January.

Apparently there are about 1,000 selections available so far.

I decided to try a 54-minute entry from the Masters of Horror series, Stuart Gordon's take on H.P. Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witchouse." I'd been meaning to get around to more installments from that series for a while. (I've seen the Joe Lansdale episode and the John Landis effort and a few others.)

The Netflix viewer provided the best online streaming I've encountered--better than NBC's and ABC's. I got few blips, few slowdowns, and it offered a sharp picture that worked at full screen. It was near DVD quality from what I could tell on my monitor and with the current quality of my vision.

Looks like it might be a great way to whittle down my queue.

The episode is an interesting one, updated and modified a bit from the original short story and infused with Gordon gruesomeness. It didn't rival the banned-from-Showtime Takashi Miike entry, but I'd give it a not-for-the-squeamish ranking nonethless.

Among the interesting touches: The student renter of the witch-haunted room uses a laptop to explore the strange architecture of his rooming house.

Maybe I'll watch a few more "Masters" installments. Looks like most of the first season is available. There's a time to rental-plan ratio so one-hour shows are a positive proposition in a couple of ways.

The down side - well that's one more thing to distract me from writing.

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