(You too can send me down a road of infinite horror and despair
if you are so good as to purchase my book Son Of Danse Macabre on your Kindle
Or Nook and send me photo)
Dead End starts off as unpromisingly as any horror film I’ve
ever seen.
The opening fifteen minutes of the film feel oddly tone
deaf, all the characters unpleasant to one degree or another. The dialogue strange and stilted filled with Marylin Manson jokes that were to be dated even ten
years ago when the film was made and a surprisingly large percentage of the
dialogue given over to lame, though particularly ugly, gay jokes made by the
requisite asshole teen. The writing on the characters is lazy shorthand and their
actions unmotivated. It all just a bit off, (perhaps it can be blamed on
a French director handling an English speaking cast). When people complain
about characters making stupid decisions in horror films this is what they’re
talking about, within the first ten minutes of the film the family in Dead End
have left the interstate in exchange for an ominous country road, picked up a strange woman carrying an oddly
motionless baby (that no one bothers to check or even take a passing glance
at), abandoned their grown daughter by the side of said dark country road, stopped
at a lightless shack with hatchets on the walls and wandered off into the dark
woods to masturbate (really).
Maybe that’s why the film was able to creep up on me so
effectively. Because just as I was through dismissing Dead End the damndest
thing happened, the movie began to work. On the surface nothing much changes,
the characters are still written stiffly, and behave unbelievably. But their
disturbingly offkilter actions, the monotonous, repetitive imagery, along with
a few moments of genuine unpredictability and good old fashioned scares creates
an atmosphere of real dread. Blame low expectations, blame the insomnia I’ve
been dealing with for the past week, but I have to admit that Dead End really
started to unnerve me as it went on.
Dead End follows the Harrington family on their way to
Christmas dinner. The father (played by Ray Wise) decides to take a shortcut,
onto a dark deserted country road. It soon becomes evident that something is very
wrong. The road continues on a repetitive course, traveling though an apparently
never ending stretch of woods. They stop and pick up a hitchhiker who soon vanishes, after apparently killing and mutilating the
grown daughter’s boyfriend. Desperate for help the group continues driving
trying to reach the town of Millcot which despite the signs never
seems to get any closer.
One by one the characters are picked off, spirited away by
an ominous black car, only to be found later in various gruesome states of disrepair.
The radio and their cellphones are filled with bursts of white noise and the
crying of infants, the forest filled with odd shapes that one of them claims to
be dead friends. As their numbers dwindle and they begin to crack under the
pressure things, long buried secrets are unveiled and the situation grows
steadily worse.
You’ve probably got a pretty good idea where this is going
(and if you don’t consider that Dead End was made in 2003 when the term
Shyamalanesque could still be construed as a compliment) , as they say you get
three guesses and the first two don’t count about the nature of the
Harrington’s plight.
Which brings me back to what’s so strange about the film,
its not as I've said, as if any of these flaws go away. Ray Wise, and Lin Shaye are both
talented character actors but even they stumble around some of the awkward
dialogue they are forced to say.
The film remains predictable,
familiar and clumsily written, but it works anyway. At just under eighty
minutes the film still manages to feel like an act of endurance (in a good
way). The sheer isolation of its characters, the maddening monotony of the dark
woods through which they travel, the utter hopelessness of their situation, the
inherent awful tension of having a family member go mad, the cumulative effect
of it is all disconcertingly eerie.
For all of director Jean Baptiste Andrea’s clumsiness with
actors he manages he does know how to stage a sequence. The moment where the
first body is discovered is very well handled, suggesting much and showing just
the right amount of graphic detail to give you a full unpleasant picture of
what has happened. Andrea knows how to stage a scene, time a jump scare, or
unveil an unsettling detail just right for maximum impact.
Of course on his way out the door his worst instincts
reassert themselves, unnecessarily shoving in as much explanation as possible
on its way out the door, including unnecessarily giving a rib nudging “Eh see
what I did there?” wink, ruining one of the few subtle details that the movie managed
to slip in by accident.
Look I’ll level here, I have absolutely no idea whether I
can honestly recommend Dead End. I’m baffled. There are large stretches of it
that are unambiguously flat out bad. Yet I have to be honest that the film
worked on me, and made me as genuinely uncomfortable as any horror film in
memory. Whether the film would work on me again with the very specific set of
circumstances that have been the last couple of weeks (not to bore anyone with
details but woooboy) I cannot say. It’s a conundrum.
2 comments:
yea. this was a mixed bag for me. but an unsettling movie. very offbeat.
Yep, that's a totally fair look at this movie. I'd say it's worth seeing because the inherent subject matter, the setting and the pitch-black comedy sequences toward the end really do make it a tense and unnerving experience, but calling the movie flawed is an understatement. You're also spot on about the ending; it's a movie much more about the journey rather than the destination, which is probably the most apt cliche you could apply to it.
Thanks for taking a look at this, Bryce!
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