261 Days of Horror, Day 78: Dead Mary
Apr. 11th, 2007 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiDead Mary. 2007. Directed by Robert Wilson. Written by Peter Sheldrick and Christopher Warre Smets. Released by235 Films.
You'd think that people would have learned by now not to go to remote cabins in the woods. Hell, not to go into the woods at all. Or anywhere else that isn't an urban center. It doesn't matter if we're talking Cabin Fever, The Blair Witch Project, The Hills Have Eyes, or even Deliverance. If the place doesn't have cell phone reception, late-night sushi bars, and at least one major sports team, it's not fit for mankind.
Even if they're dumb enough to go into the woods, most folks surely know better than to play some "silly" game that promises to summon up a malevolent spirit, right?
Unfortunately, horror movies have a bad habit of being populated by characters who don't know that they're in a horror movie, and by the time they realize what's going on, it's too late to worry about such basic mistakes. And Dead Mary, today's movie, does a nice job of taking two horror cliches and squeezing some surprisingly original moments out of them.
We start with Dominique Swain in a car, sitting by the side of a country road. We get about three minutes of her looking in the glove compartment, sitting with her feet out the car window, and just looking bored. Now, I certainly can stare at Dominique Swain for three minutes at a time (and have, in fact, done so), but this is a sure sign that this is going to be a slow-paced movie. Eventually, a guy approaches, and we learn that Kim (Swain's character) and this guy -- her now-ex-boyfriend Matt -- have broken up, but that they're still headed to a remote cabin to spend time with their old college friends. They'd run out of gas en route, and he'd hiked to a deserted gas station to fuel up.
Over the next half-hour, we meet the entire gang, and there's surprisingly little horror. And by "little horror," I actually mean "no horror at all." This would be great if the movie were giving us a bunch of well-developed, interesting characters with fascinating backstories. Alas, these are seven generic late-twentysomething folks, still drinking and smoking pot, hooking up and breaking up, and fighting and backstabbing*. The married couple is having issues; The beatnik-looking guy has a young (barely out of college) girlfriend who doesn't get along with the other girls; the eighth friend, Tom, never shows up; otherwise, nothing much happens other than lots of drinking and whining.
But once the angst and tension have gotten too thick, they decide to play a game called "Dead Mary," which, amazingly enough, is exactly like "Bloody Mary," only with a different name. Because there were two movies named Bloody Mary last year, and the third Urban Legends movie also bore that subtitle. So by naming the game (and the movie) "Dead Mary," they're being original**.
Anyway, Mary is an evil spirit who will "breathe death into you," if you say her name while looking into the mirror while alone in the bathroom at night. Bet you didn't see that coming, right? Turns out that in this case, that means that "summoning" her actually causes her to possess one of the folks randomly and turn them into a killer (thus cribbing from Night of the Demons and, more recently, The Hazing). Needless to say, the friends will soon learn this the hard way.
Sure enough, later that night, Matt wakes up and hears a noise. Naturally, he grabs a golf club as a weapon and heads outside and into the woods to investigate***. After the usual false scares (this is another scene that just drags out), he eventually runs into a brunette, but we can't tell which of the two brunettes it is. He says,"hi," and we fade out of the scene.
Only to fade back in to one of the brunettes, a girl named Lily who is the newest member of the group (by virtue of having just started dating one of the guys), running into the cabin in hysterics. Eventually, it comes out that she was outside, and saw Eve (the other brunette) and Matt together in the woods, and then she saw Eve kill Matt. Everyone is skeptical, but they investigate, and sure enough, Matt's dead and mutilated in the woods. And while the rest of the gang is deciding what to do, Kim screams in terror, claiming that Matt grabbed her! Wait, could this somehow turn into a zombie flick?
Why yes, it most certainly can!
Well, not really. Matt grabs the leg of one of his buddies (for one of the few jump scares in the film), then sits up. But he's of the Deadite persuasion of undead creature, able to hold full conversations and retain full memories of his life, and naturally, he starts taunting his friends, revealing dark secrets about them (one slept with the other's wife!), and making vague threats about how bad things are going to get. Eventually, Kim has had enough, and she whales on him with a shovel. Kim and Eve decide that Lily is responsible, and chase her down, while the two remaining guys fight each other based on their dead friend's accusations. Before we get any resolution to the chaos, we fade to black, then to the sunrise.
The next day, the cars are dead, Lily is tied up and gagged in the closet****, and the rest of them decide to burn Matt's body. They follow this up with some good, classic horror movie paranoia, debating what to do, who to blame, and whether any of them could also be walking corpses (after all, lesser injuries might not be visible). They angst and debate for a while, and question each other about how long they were alone in the bathroom during the Dead Mary game. Finally, the cameraman gets bored and fades to black, coming back at sunset to show them still moping about the cabin, too paranoid to go out into the woods, too paranoid to be alone.
They finally start manufacturing some weapons, and Eve and one of the guys, Dash, head outside to the woodshed looking for weapons. When Eve follows Dash inside (even though they've agreed to stay apart), and then grabs a small rake, we know that Lily was telling the truth, and Eve's really the killer*****! Dash isn't a complete moron, though, and he whacks Eve a shovel as she attacks him. Alas, Eve is already dead, so it doesn't do much good, especially when she grows fangs and bites poor Dash to death.
Of course, no one else sees this, so when Eve runs screaming for "help," after stabbing herself in the side with the rake, no one has any reason to believe that Dash wasn't really the killer. To prevent Dash's wife from going into hysterics, they don't go back to the house to tell her what happened. They tie Dash up, and we then get a fucking brilliant scene in which the remaining guy, Baker, tries to torture the undead Dash to find out why Dash and the other animated folks are doing this. It's brutal, funny, and perfectly acted. Dash makes threats about the apocalypse, and how even those who survive will be fucked for life, constantly afraid of their dead friends coming after them. Baker finally stalks out.
At this point, Baker notes to Eve and Kim that no one else is around the cabin area. No campers, water skiers, etc. Matt never saw anyone at the gas station when he went to refuel the car, and their friend Tom never made it up there. He thinks that the entire area is in danger, and gets Eve and Kim to go with him, leaving Amber (Dash's widow) to guard Lily, who is still trapped in the closet (just like R. Kelly and Tom Cruise). Lily has gotten out of her gag, though, and she tries to convince Amber that Eve is a threat to Kim and Baker. She convinces Amber (who is sitting in the bedroom guarding the closet door) that Eve must have snuck into her room and changed clothes after killing Matt, and that Amber should check it out as proof.
When Amber leaves, Lily, who has gotten free of her bonds, is able to force her way out of the closet. Alas, as she tries to sneak out, Amber beans her with a shovel! But Amber's not evil, merely misguided, and as she sits there in shock over what she's done, she hears Dash calling for her.
Back in the woods, as Kim leads the way through the rainstorm, she hears a grunt. When she turns around, she sees that Eve is attempting to strangle Baker!
We cut back to the cabin, however, where Amber follows the sound of Dash's voice to the shed. He's still tied up, but his wounds are all healed. He tells Amber that Kim and Baker captured Eve and tied him up, and Amber's all ready to free him when she finally questions why the living dead would just tie him up. As he realizes that she's not buying it, he starts taunting her with news of all the affairs he had while he was still alive. She finally gets some lighter fluid and takes care of her ex-husband once and for all.
We cut to a wounded Baker, running through the woods. He gets to the cabin, where Lily (who was only knocked out by that shovel hit, it turns out), won't let him in. He begs, but when she asks if Eve bit him, he simply says, "good girl," and as he passes away, Lily finally tells him that she loves him. Awww!
Kim finally shows up, although we still don't know if she's living or dead. She buries the shovel in Baker, then asks Lily to let her in, but Lily wisely says no. Kim asks about the fire at the shed, and Lily says that Amber left after setting it. So it's just the two of them. Kim drags Baker's body away, and we fade out until dawn.
As dawn breaks, Eve makes it back to the cabin, coming across Baker's slowly-healing body. As she looks up at Kim, she mentions smelling gas. Kim pulls out the flare gun she'd grabbed from Matt's car earlier and points it at the two undead. Eve asks Kim and Lily what they'll do if they're the only ones left alive in the world, and then taunts Kim by saying that she slept with Matt. As she pulls the trigger, Kim says, "we broke up," and we fade to credits.
Dead Mary is everything Cabin Fever should have been. It's a suspenseful horror movie that treads familiar ground, then manages to surprise the viewer with sudden bursts in new directions. The most obvious inspiration for it isn't any of the recent horror flicks, but Carpenter's The Thing. We only meet seven characters throughout the entire movie, and their sense of paranoia and fear is as much a part of the film as any direct threats posed by the zombies (none of whom, other than Eve, ever end up posing a physical threat to the living). Like the Deadites from the Evil Dead movies (another clear inspiration), the bad guys also accomplish much by their constant taunting of the victims; the secrets they reveal serve to undermine and demoralize them as much as the physical dangers.
I also like the lack of answers we get here. We never do discover if "Dead Mary" has possessed Eve, or if there's some sort of supernatural plague affecting the entire world, or if it's something else entirely. Likewise, we don't know what happens to Amber, or if burning the dead does any good, or what happens to Lily and Kim after the credits roll. Given the lack of cell phone coverage or televisions/internet at the cabin, there's no way the characters would know most of this, and it's perfectly fine not letting the audience find out, either.
The entire cast is solid. Swain is always fun to watch (although she's aging poorly -- I was surprised to find that at 25, she's younger than the character she plays) , but I was surprised at just how good her co-stars -- Marie-Josée Colburn, Steven McCarthy, and Maggie Castle, in particular -- were. There are many theatrical releases with performances half as good than this straight-to-dvd film.
Director Robert Wilson, on only his second feature, does a nice job of avoiding cliches (almost no fake jump-scares at all!) and keeping his cast acting believable. There are a few disjointed moments (the ten-second scene in which Eve attacks Baker), and some slow bits early on, but things pick up nicely. Writers Peter Sheldrick and Christopher Warre Smets provide a solid script that, once it dives into the meat of the horror, is constantly entertaining. If the movie as a whole is derivative of many of the classics, Dead Mary still ends up as a surprisingly fun and intense guilty pleasure. Highly recommended.
*It's like St. Elmo's Fire. Only with more killing. And less John Parr.
**Other movies from the same studio include The Legend of Drowsy Hollow, George the Ripper, and The Night Before All-Saints Day.
***He does not, technically, wear a neon sign saying, "please kill me." But really, even if you don't know you're in a horror movie, you know better than to do this.
****Not in the happy fun way.
*****Not much of a surprise. When one character accuses another, it pretty much narrows the list of suspects down to two.
You'd think that people would have learned by now not to go to remote cabins in the woods. Hell, not to go into the woods at all. Or anywhere else that isn't an urban center. It doesn't matter if we're talking Cabin Fever, The Blair Witch Project, The Hills Have Eyes, or even Deliverance. If the place doesn't have cell phone reception, late-night sushi bars, and at least one major sports team, it's not fit for mankind.
Even if they're dumb enough to go into the woods, most folks surely know better than to play some "silly" game that promises to summon up a malevolent spirit, right?
Unfortunately, horror movies have a bad habit of being populated by characters who don't know that they're in a horror movie, and by the time they realize what's going on, it's too late to worry about such basic mistakes. And Dead Mary, today's movie, does a nice job of taking two horror cliches and squeezing some surprisingly original moments out of them.
We start with Dominique Swain in a car, sitting by the side of a country road. We get about three minutes of her looking in the glove compartment, sitting with her feet out the car window, and just looking bored. Now, I certainly can stare at Dominique Swain for three minutes at a time (and have, in fact, done so), but this is a sure sign that this is going to be a slow-paced movie. Eventually, a guy approaches, and we learn that Kim (Swain's character) and this guy -- her now-ex-boyfriend Matt -- have broken up, but that they're still headed to a remote cabin to spend time with their old college friends. They'd run out of gas en route, and he'd hiked to a deserted gas station to fuel up.
Over the next half-hour, we meet the entire gang, and there's surprisingly little horror. And by "little horror," I actually mean "no horror at all." This would be great if the movie were giving us a bunch of well-developed, interesting characters with fascinating backstories. Alas, these are seven generic late-twentysomething folks, still drinking and smoking pot, hooking up and breaking up, and fighting and backstabbing*. The married couple is having issues; The beatnik-looking guy has a young (barely out of college) girlfriend who doesn't get along with the other girls; the eighth friend, Tom, never shows up; otherwise, nothing much happens other than lots of drinking and whining.
But once the angst and tension have gotten too thick, they decide to play a game called "Dead Mary," which, amazingly enough, is exactly like "Bloody Mary," only with a different name. Because there were two movies named Bloody Mary last year, and the third Urban Legends movie also bore that subtitle. So by naming the game (and the movie) "Dead Mary," they're being original**.
Anyway, Mary is an evil spirit who will "breathe death into you," if you say her name while looking into the mirror while alone in the bathroom at night. Bet you didn't see that coming, right? Turns out that in this case, that means that "summoning" her actually causes her to possess one of the folks randomly and turn them into a killer (thus cribbing from Night of the Demons and, more recently, The Hazing). Needless to say, the friends will soon learn this the hard way.
Sure enough, later that night, Matt wakes up and hears a noise. Naturally, he grabs a golf club as a weapon and heads outside and into the woods to investigate***. After the usual false scares (this is another scene that just drags out), he eventually runs into a brunette, but we can't tell which of the two brunettes it is. He says,"hi," and we fade out of the scene.
Only to fade back in to one of the brunettes, a girl named Lily who is the newest member of the group (by virtue of having just started dating one of the guys), running into the cabin in hysterics. Eventually, it comes out that she was outside, and saw Eve (the other brunette) and Matt together in the woods, and then she saw Eve kill Matt. Everyone is skeptical, but they investigate, and sure enough, Matt's dead and mutilated in the woods. And while the rest of the gang is deciding what to do, Kim screams in terror, claiming that Matt grabbed her! Wait, could this somehow turn into a zombie flick?
Why yes, it most certainly can!
Well, not really. Matt grabs the leg of one of his buddies (for one of the few jump scares in the film), then sits up. But he's of the Deadite persuasion of undead creature, able to hold full conversations and retain full memories of his life, and naturally, he starts taunting his friends, revealing dark secrets about them (one slept with the other's wife!), and making vague threats about how bad things are going to get. Eventually, Kim has had enough, and she whales on him with a shovel. Kim and Eve decide that Lily is responsible, and chase her down, while the two remaining guys fight each other based on their dead friend's accusations. Before we get any resolution to the chaos, we fade to black, then to the sunrise.
The next day, the cars are dead, Lily is tied up and gagged in the closet****, and the rest of them decide to burn Matt's body. They follow this up with some good, classic horror movie paranoia, debating what to do, who to blame, and whether any of them could also be walking corpses (after all, lesser injuries might not be visible). They angst and debate for a while, and question each other about how long they were alone in the bathroom during the Dead Mary game. Finally, the cameraman gets bored and fades to black, coming back at sunset to show them still moping about the cabin, too paranoid to go out into the woods, too paranoid to be alone.
They finally start manufacturing some weapons, and Eve and one of the guys, Dash, head outside to the woodshed looking for weapons. When Eve follows Dash inside (even though they've agreed to stay apart), and then grabs a small rake, we know that Lily was telling the truth, and Eve's really the killer*****! Dash isn't a complete moron, though, and he whacks Eve a shovel as she attacks him. Alas, Eve is already dead, so it doesn't do much good, especially when she grows fangs and bites poor Dash to death.
Of course, no one else sees this, so when Eve runs screaming for "help," after stabbing herself in the side with the rake, no one has any reason to believe that Dash wasn't really the killer. To prevent Dash's wife from going into hysterics, they don't go back to the house to tell her what happened. They tie Dash up, and we then get a fucking brilliant scene in which the remaining guy, Baker, tries to torture the undead Dash to find out why Dash and the other animated folks are doing this. It's brutal, funny, and perfectly acted. Dash makes threats about the apocalypse, and how even those who survive will be fucked for life, constantly afraid of their dead friends coming after them. Baker finally stalks out.
At this point, Baker notes to Eve and Kim that no one else is around the cabin area. No campers, water skiers, etc. Matt never saw anyone at the gas station when he went to refuel the car, and their friend Tom never made it up there. He thinks that the entire area is in danger, and gets Eve and Kim to go with him, leaving Amber (Dash's widow) to guard Lily, who is still trapped in the closet (just like R. Kelly and Tom Cruise). Lily has gotten out of her gag, though, and she tries to convince Amber that Eve is a threat to Kim and Baker. She convinces Amber (who is sitting in the bedroom guarding the closet door) that Eve must have snuck into her room and changed clothes after killing Matt, and that Amber should check it out as proof.
When Amber leaves, Lily, who has gotten free of her bonds, is able to force her way out of the closet. Alas, as she tries to sneak out, Amber beans her with a shovel! But Amber's not evil, merely misguided, and as she sits there in shock over what she's done, she hears Dash calling for her.
Back in the woods, as Kim leads the way through the rainstorm, she hears a grunt. When she turns around, she sees that Eve is attempting to strangle Baker!
We cut back to the cabin, however, where Amber follows the sound of Dash's voice to the shed. He's still tied up, but his wounds are all healed. He tells Amber that Kim and Baker captured Eve and tied him up, and Amber's all ready to free him when she finally questions why the living dead would just tie him up. As he realizes that she's not buying it, he starts taunting her with news of all the affairs he had while he was still alive. She finally gets some lighter fluid and takes care of her ex-husband once and for all.
We cut to a wounded Baker, running through the woods. He gets to the cabin, where Lily (who was only knocked out by that shovel hit, it turns out), won't let him in. He begs, but when she asks if Eve bit him, he simply says, "good girl," and as he passes away, Lily finally tells him that she loves him. Awww!
Kim finally shows up, although we still don't know if she's living or dead. She buries the shovel in Baker, then asks Lily to let her in, but Lily wisely says no. Kim asks about the fire at the shed, and Lily says that Amber left after setting it. So it's just the two of them. Kim drags Baker's body away, and we fade out until dawn.
As dawn breaks, Eve makes it back to the cabin, coming across Baker's slowly-healing body. As she looks up at Kim, she mentions smelling gas. Kim pulls out the flare gun she'd grabbed from Matt's car earlier and points it at the two undead. Eve asks Kim and Lily what they'll do if they're the only ones left alive in the world, and then taunts Kim by saying that she slept with Matt. As she pulls the trigger, Kim says, "we broke up," and we fade to credits.
Dead Mary is everything Cabin Fever should have been. It's a suspenseful horror movie that treads familiar ground, then manages to surprise the viewer with sudden bursts in new directions. The most obvious inspiration for it isn't any of the recent horror flicks, but Carpenter's The Thing. We only meet seven characters throughout the entire movie, and their sense of paranoia and fear is as much a part of the film as any direct threats posed by the zombies (none of whom, other than Eve, ever end up posing a physical threat to the living). Like the Deadites from the Evil Dead movies (another clear inspiration), the bad guys also accomplish much by their constant taunting of the victims; the secrets they reveal serve to undermine and demoralize them as much as the physical dangers.
I also like the lack of answers we get here. We never do discover if "Dead Mary" has possessed Eve, or if there's some sort of supernatural plague affecting the entire world, or if it's something else entirely. Likewise, we don't know what happens to Amber, or if burning the dead does any good, or what happens to Lily and Kim after the credits roll. Given the lack of cell phone coverage or televisions/internet at the cabin, there's no way the characters would know most of this, and it's perfectly fine not letting the audience find out, either.
The entire cast is solid. Swain is always fun to watch (although she's aging poorly -- I was surprised to find that at 25, she's younger than the character she plays) , but I was surprised at just how good her co-stars -- Marie-Josée Colburn, Steven McCarthy, and Maggie Castle, in particular -- were. There are many theatrical releases with performances half as good than this straight-to-dvd film.
Director Robert Wilson, on only his second feature, does a nice job of avoiding cliches (almost no fake jump-scares at all!) and keeping his cast acting believable. There are a few disjointed moments (the ten-second scene in which Eve attacks Baker), and some slow bits early on, but things pick up nicely. Writers Peter Sheldrick and Christopher Warre Smets provide a solid script that, once it dives into the meat of the horror, is constantly entertaining. If the movie as a whole is derivative of many of the classics, Dead Mary still ends up as a surprisingly fun and intense guilty pleasure. Highly recommended.
*It's like St. Elmo's Fire. Only with more killing. And less John Parr.
**Other movies from the same studio include The Legend of Drowsy Hollow, George the Ripper, and The Night Before All-Saints Day.
***He does not, technically, wear a neon sign saying, "please kill me." But really, even if you don't know you're in a horror movie, you know better than to do this.
****Not in the happy fun way.
*****Not much of a surprise. When one character accuses another, it pretty much narrows the list of suspects down to two.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-11 10:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-12 12:41 am (UTC)Most of my ragging has to do with the self-ingulgence of those scenes, and the general perception amongst some groups (like the Chud folks) that it helped save the genre.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-12 12:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-12 12:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-12 03:04 am (UTC)