Tosar in Sleep Tight.

Sleep Tight is a creepy—but highly effective and superbly made—horror movie from Spain in which the monster is spine-tinglingly human. The logo in the ads reads “Someone Is Watching Over You,” and they’re not just whistling Vaya Con Dios. Set in an otherwise upscale apartment building in Barcelona, everything looks inviting. It’s the doorman you want to beware of.

The keeper of the keys—who goes bump in the night, in more ways than one—is César (Luis Tosar). As the super as well as the concierge, he’s privy to the needs, secrets and problems of every tenant in the building—and victim to all their complaints. He feeds their dogs. He changes their locks. He fixes their plumbing. It’s time to get even. You see, Cesar has a problem too. He was born miserable. Nothing makes him smile. The only way Cesar can feel happy is to find ingenious ways to inflict fear, anxiety and pain on others. He is also a voyeur. He watches people brushing their teeth, sitting on the toilet, taking a shower. The current object of his fascination is Clara, a lovely and perky young woman whose platonic friendliness he labels insincere enough to deserve special punishment. First, he enters her apartment with his passkey while she’s at work and injects furniture-cleaning irritants into her beauty creams. While she’s in the agony of a skin rash, he doubles her troubles by hiding rotting food that attracts an infestation of cockroaches. It’s not long before Clara’s cheerfulness is successfully scuttled and she’s headed for a breakdown. But Cesar is just getting started.

Infatuation turns to a sick obsession. Distracted from his quest by walking the dogs of an old dowager named Veronica, he feeds them poison snacks that makes them too ill to leave the building. His only nemesis is a child, nothing less than a precocious Spanish version of little Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed, who spies on him, then blackmails him into bringing her adult porno films. He has a workable antidote for her, too. When daylight becomes too restrictive, Cesar takes to hiding under Clara’s bed at night. His fascination with torment leads to an insatiable lust. After Clara’s boyfriend gets wise and Cesar, growing careless, eventually enters at the wrong time, the boyfriend confronts him. Too late—and what happens next will curl your hair.

The suspense is so nerve-wracking that comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock are unavoidable, but to me Sleep Tight more closely resembles Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, both in style and tone. Here is a unique fright flick that sets out to terrify and does it to capacity, eschewing fangs and claws to find chills and thrills in the unquenchable evil of human madness. The mood is black, but director Jaume Balagueró matches the shocks in Alberto Marini’s goosebump-inducing screenplay with the mordant beat of a zombie’s heart. Vital to the overall toxicity of both, the central performance by Luis Tosar is a key element. With haunting Boris Karloff eyes that are pernicious pools of darkness, this bogeyman conveys a brooding intensity. I wouldn’t want to meet him face to face under a streetlamp on Halloween night.

rreed@observer.com

SLEEP TIGHT

Running Time 102 minutes

Written by Alberto Marini

Directed by Jaume Balagueró

Starring Luis Tosar, Marta Etura and Alberto San Juan

3/4

Lieberman. (Jessica Shiraz)

“Turn around. Don’t move. I want to show you something.” The Observer was standing in horror film writer/director Jeff Lieberman’s office. Relics from film sets poked out of the wooden shelves, smiling photos of A-listers and even Bob Dylan peppered the walls, and one Emmy Award rested precariously on a ledge.

Then, without warning, a worm—the last surviving worm—from the film Squirm was flung at our head.

“Everything’s normal [at home], except my office,” Mr. Lieberman said through a boyish grin. Welcome to Tarrytown: thick with blue mist rolling out from the Hudson River, it’s the historic village that inspired the legend of the Headless Horseman.

It’s no mere coincidence that Mr. Lieberman decided to drop anchor here.

Mr. Lieberman’s quirky and inventive films, in line with his idiosyncratic personality and imaginative way with words, have newly acquired a cult status with younger fans. When he gave a talk in Switzerland, to his great surprise, most of the attendees wouldn’t have been born when his first movie, Squirm, was made.

“If a Rumpelstiltskin sort of figure said you’ll be speaking about Squirm to a packed audience of people not born yet in 37 years time, I’d have said, ‘What are you smoking, and where can I get some?’”

One of the older Swiss fans, a man in his 40s with long hair, was even sporting “a tattoo from his wrist to his bicep” with the original Squirm logo inked in. We asked Mr. Lieberman if he had been flattered by this bodily homage. He shook his head fervently.

“It’s so wrong on so many levels.”

It was Mr. Lieberman’s cult status as a horror film director that compelled David Savage of Cinema Retro magazine to reach out to him.

“Horror movies have taken center-stage in contemporary pop culture, so it's natural to look back at the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the genre and the filmmakers who had such a great influence on today's movies and moviemakers,” explained Mr. Lieberman.

Starting tomorrow, Cinema Retro is paying tribute to Mr. Lieberman at the Anthology Film Archives, screening his first three movies—Squirm (1976), Blue Sunshine (1978) and Just Before Dawn (1981)—from August 17 to 19.

Mr. Lieberman’s movies perhaps appeal to younger generations thanks to their originality, especially considering how much generic zombie and vampire rubbish is swamping the world of cinema. In Squirm, we are presented with an unlikely monster: worms.

“Squirm is based on a scientific reality,” insisted Mr. Lieberman. “Electricity really does make worms shoot out of the ground. We did it as kids—I magnified the source idea times ridiculous.”

Mr. Lieberman knew he had succeeded when one of the crew—“this guy we called Mango, he was about 300 pounds”—staggered off to throw up after filming one ghastly scene. “If Mango’s puking, we’re gonna have a hit movie.”

The second film, Blue Sunshine, a satirical time capsule of the ’70s hysteria surrounding drugs, will engage a wider audience, not merely horror fanatics.

“It pokes fun at the older generation in the ’70s fearful of their kids taking drugs,” said Mr. Lieberman. The effects of a new form of LSD suddenly kick in 10 years later, causing its users to lose their hair and become homicidal maniacs. Upon its release, several critics surprisingly thought that the movie was based on scientific truth, and one reviewer at The New York Post even believed the movie “chronicled” a true event. Parents and critics alike labeled the movie “a cautionary tale.”

“You’re talking about a generation that’s defined by long hair. So I thought to myself, what’s the opposite of that?” Each psychopath whips off his or her hair—or has it yanked off—in dramatic fashion before embarking on their rampages. Mr. Lieberman began to hum the tune to a Neil Young song. (“Almost cut my hair/ It happened just the other day …”)

The last of the three, Just Before Dawn, is Mr Lieberman’s favorite. The film's final struggle between protagonist Connie and her persecutor, with her iconic punch, a kind of reverse rape, is a must-see for anyone interested in filmmaking. It will chill you to the bone without resorting to the gory splattering of blood and guts.

A more recent homage left Mr. Lieberman disapproving of unoriginal imitations. “That film [Wrong Turn] made me the most angry,” Mr. Lieberman muttered bitterly. “It’s stealing … The only recent things that I thought were fresh and effective were the Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.”

But how about his original screenplays that never made their way onto the silver screen? Mr. Lieberman openly admitted that he has earned more from these than movies he actually made.

“I pitched one to Dustin Hoffman called Us about a nursing home in the future,” Mr. Lieberman told us. Even though he was disappointed when the movie was never produced, the script proved to be a turning point in his career. “That script opened up Hollywood to me.”

But now he has a script that he won’t let simply fall by the wayside.

“I have the movie I want to make,” Mr Lieberman declared. Producers and friends alike have said that this semi-autobiographical screenplay is his masterpiece. It’s about a film director who meets a young couple from Morocco, but The Observer is forbidden from divulging any more than that.

“Everything leads up to this movie.”

Jenkins, Amy Acker and Whitford in The Cabin in the Woods.

On the advice of a friend who described The Cabin in the Woods as the next cinematic “happening” in horror and mayhem, I bit the bullet and suffered through a creepfest so stupid it makes trashy slash-and-burn epics like Humans Versus Zombies and I Spit on Your Grave seem like Molière and Proust. Some films have to seek their own audience like oil seeks its own level in water. Others arrive with a preordained sort of word-of-mouth anticipation that cannot be explained. This is one of them.

A testament to the wonders of writing under the guidance of crystal meth, this nightmare spoof of everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the Scream franchise totally defies logic, and pretty much eludes description. Five college kids take a motor van to a country weekend cabin. Stopping at a crumbling shack on a deserted road to buy gas, they encounter a cretin with rotting teeth and one eye who insults the women and spits tobacco juice at the men like a cross between Yosemite Sam and the winner of a talent show for troglodytes. Just behind the bloodstained glass window stands a barrel of meat hooks. Oh, I get it. It’s a send-up constructed from old movies and the clichés in Tales From the Crypt comics. Instead of heading back to civilization, onward they plunge, across a narrow mountain pass to the cabin of cobwebs. Rooms with two-way mirrors, grotesque paintings of brutality and massacre, and the creaking door to a cellar of corpses are just the beginning of a set that looks like the haunted house at Knott’s Berry Farm.

One by one, the visitors learn the meaning of “gotcha.” Zombies rise from the swamp and eat the sexy chick’s flesh. Vampires circle the moon and suck the hot stud’s blood. Only the smart girl who reads “Soviet Economic Structures” and the reefer-smoking doofus, so stoned he has to struggle to make complete sentences, manage to survive the monsters crashing through the ceiling, windows and floors. What they fail to notice is the hidden cameras. Yes! The rooms are all being monitored on a wall of video screens in some kind of remote science lab where an army of scientists like the security teams in Russian attack movies shift the course of the game with switches, including one labeled “Zombie Redneck Torture Family,” conjuring fresh hordes of killers from childhood nightmares to rise from their graves and gnaw, stab and mutilate the screaming victims. It’s all part of an elaborate video game that allows paying customers to watch real people slaughtered according to the horror of choice. The five kids in the cabin are innocent pawns to test the mechanics of the game, the way fiends in a horror movie test the sounds of screaming babies as they feed them to the jaws of mutated crocodiles.

The game, like the movie, is a meaningless absurdity. If it sells, people with a passion for gore can experience real terror while the players are shredded, one by one. What the game testers didn’t count on was luring a pair of victims smart enough to outwit them. The game ends only if the virgin survives. Somehow miraculously managing to figure it all out, the stoner and the brainy girl (who is also a virgin) crawl into a grave and get to the other side of the “ritual.” Then the real hell breaks loose and the whole movie collapses. It’s not a movie about acting, so ignoring the unfortunate people in it is an act of charity, but somehow Sigourney Weaver shows up in a neat spin on herself and her own sad contribution to horror movies to warn that if the virgin doesn’t survive it will mean the agonizing death of every human soul on the planet. But why say more? The Cabin in the Woods has died already in a boring finale full of metaphysical explanations that filch from every horror genre ever invented.

This is a first-time effort for director Drew Goddard, who developed a loud camp following by indulging his wacko imagination as producer and writer of numerous TV episodes of Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The only imagination on view here is the creature effects. From snarling werewolves and humongous cobras to a faceless child in a ballerina costume whose entire countenance above the neck is nothing but a round hole filled with snapping razor-sharp teeth, the mythical monstrosities are awesome. The rest of the movie is the kind of time-wasting drivel designed to appeal to electronics nerds and skateboarders addicted to Xbox 360 video games whose knowledge of the arts begins and ends with MTV2. Instead of electronic wands like Nintendo’s Wii controllers, the master fiends working the control panels tap buttons and pull levers right out of Dr. Strangelove. As their victims plunge deeper and deeper, the narrative gets sillier and sillier. Maybe that’s why an entire row of what they call “fanboys” at the screening I attended laughed all the way through the movie, although I failed to see anything remotely amusing. I doubt if these people even know who Sigourney Weaver is.

At the risk of inviting a monsoon of unwanted hate mail, I admit it is indeed a brand-new world out there. I’m so glad I don’t have to write for it.

rreed@observer.com

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Running Time 95 minutes

Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard

Directed by Drew Goddard

Starring Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford and Chris Hemsworth

1/4

Owen in Intruders.

Movies about the profound effects of cold-blooded nightmares on sensitive, impressionable children should not be dull, or arty at the expense of a good hair-raising yarn, but a benign horror flick called Intruders is nothing more (or less) than ludicrous, esoteric hokum. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, a Spanish director so unabashedly infatuated with the films of Guillermo del Toro that he even imitates the shadowy lighting and copies the same jittery camera angles as Pan’s Labyrinth, has done nothing to enhance the genre of thrillers that prey on the vulnerability of children and a great deal to cheapen it.

In Spain, before bedtime, a little boy named Juan makes up a story to entertain his mother, Luisa (Pilar Lopez de Ayala), about Hollow Face, a hideous monster shrouded in a cadaverous hooded cape who rips the faces off children and attaches them to his own blank head so people will love him. Knowing he will probably never get to sleep, Luisa rushes him to bed before he can make up an ending. In the ensuing rainstorm, Juan opens a window to the outside scaffolding to rescue his cat, and sees Hollow Face climbing into the house to wreak havoc. Cut to a house in London, where another child, 12-year-old Mia (Ella Purnell, who played the young Kyra Knightley in the unforgettable Never Let Me Go), has the same dream after finding the beginning of Hollow Face’s story hidden in a hole in the limb of a gnarled and mysterious tree. This time her father, a construction engineer named John Farrow (Clive Owen), tries to convince her the ghoul is not hiding in the dark recesses of her closet. But suddenly Hollow Face appears and attacks the girl—and her father, too. Funny. Her mother, Sue (Carice van Houten), doesn’t see anything at all, and after the police install a video recorder, there’s no image on the film. To kill a monster, suggests Mia’s father, you have to enter its own fable. So he constructs a model of the creature and burns it in the backyard to the alarm of his wife. But the tension only intensifies. Hollow Face returns and more violence ensues. The shock and resulting trauma render Mia speechless.

Back in Spain, Juan’s mother seeks help from the local priest, who tries to convince the boy there’s no such thing as the bogyman, but crucifixes don’t work. In England, Sue turns to science instead of religion, but the police and the girl’s psychiatrist suspect both father and daughter of schizophrenia.

The action drags along, back and forth, attempting to demonstrate how one primal force can invade and co-exist in two different countries, environments and cultures, but because Clive Owen is a star, most of it centers on what’s happening in London. According to the overwrought screenplay by Nico Casariego and Jaime Marques, when two people experience the same psychic phenomenon, it’s called folie à deux. And all this time I thought that was a French dance step invented by Roland Petit for Zizi Jeanmaire.

With maximum atmosphere, creepy music and a few special effects such as slimy black snakelike tendrils wrapping around the beds of the children while Hollow Face tries to strangle them to death before tearing off their faces, the movie holds interest for a while. Then it makes the fatal mistake of trying to explain away the two parallel plot lines that smart audiences will have figured out already. The way Intruders cuts between the dual stories you think the action is concurrent. Once you realize the story in Spain takes place 30 years earlier than the story in England and  Juan and John are the same name, the “Aha!” elements piece together. Suddenly John is entering the house of Luisa and calling her “mother.” No spoilers, just red herrings. (Not to mention the silly inside joke: The tortured Mia’s father is named John Farrow, which is the real name of the father of Mia Farrow, who appeared to be paranoid in Rosemary’s Baby.) A really unsatisfactory ending piles on the resolutions with John Farrow whispering something inaudible into Mia’s ear. None of it honors my belief that to be truly terrifying, a movie must always be believable, but Mr. Owen is such a good actor that he makes the cardboard father more than an enigma. You can see the caring in his facial expressions even when he isn’t saying anything.

He doesn’t fail the movie. The movie fails him. As his wife, the superb Carice van Houten has so little to do or say—so peripheral a relation to everything else in the movie—that she seems to be an intruder herself. It suggests that like the triumph of good over evil, the power of suggestion can often overwhelm the weakness of logic and reason, bridging generations. O.K., but Intruders is never scary, and it’s so implausible and uninvolving that even when it’s being explained, it is still unconvincing. Talky psychology is a poor substitute for supernatural thrills.

rreed@observer.com

INTRUDERS

Running Time 100 minutes

Written by Nicolás Casariego (screenplay) and Jaime Marques (screenplay)

Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Starring Clive Owen, Carice van Houten and Izán Corchero

1/4

Mara and Craig.

In the blood-soaked hands of the hair-raising, always surprising director David Fincher, the creepy remake of Sweden’s grisly thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is dreary and confusing but technically superb—a darkly photographed and superbly acted film. It is not my cup of bitter tea laced with arsenic, but I admire its tenacity in keeping the viewer dazzled, while the toxic effect of its violence, sometimes unwatchable, left me charged. I hated the 2009 Swedish film version, my dashed attempt to read the book (the first volume in the crime trilogy by the late, overrated Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson) put me to sleep faster than a double-dose of Dalmane, and I still don’t understand why it has been recycled in an estimated $100 million remake as unnecessary as it is unoriginal. It is also impossibly long-winded. When it ended, after just under a whopping three hours, I ended up impressed, in spite of my reservations. If I had found it even half as incomprehensible as it is, I might have liked it twice as much.

Oh, my god, that plot. After being investigated for making licentious mistakes in fact-checking a magazine profile that causes a scandal, the controversial, complicated and egotistical journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) loses his job, apartment, moral compass and most of his sanity. Then he spends the rest of this interminable, head-scratching thriller trying not to lose his life and everything below his gym-ready waistline and above his walnut-cracking thighs in one scene of nasty brutality after another. He’s crafty, but he’s also a two-fisted fool for getting recruited by Swedish industrial tycoon Henrik Vanger (a wasted Christopher Plummer) to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece Harriet, who disappeared 40 years ago from a family reunion on a sinister island with an unpronounceable name off the coast of Sweden. The case was never solved, but Vanger believes she was murdered by a member of his own dysfunctional family. Here the brain-twisting plot begins to get delusional. As the reporter begins to unravel multiplying clues, he tracks down and hires Lisbeth Salander (newcomer Rooney Mara), a chain-smoking, motorcycle-riding Goth lesbian computer hacker shrouded in black leather whose invasion of his hard drive reveals the errors that have tanked his career. This zombie is a real creep workout, replete with body piercings, a dragon tattoo that encircles her body and more rings around her eyes than a rabid raccoon.

Sharing a deserted cottage by the sea in a gray, frozen Swedish winter, the reporter and his freaked-out researcher, equipped with his-and-her laptops, dig up newspaper reports from the year Harriet disappeared, connecting an entire series of homicides, and before you can yell “Holy Whitechapel Ripper!” the Vanders turn out to be a whole family of serial killers! There’s Henrik’s brother, a Nazi who died in 1940, and the brother’s son, Gottfried, and grandson, Martin (Stellan Skarsgård), the latter two of whom continually raped and sodomized Harriet, Martin’s sister, who moved to Australia and is living under the assumed name of her cousin Anita. It takes an hour and a half before the two stars of this bizarre puzzle meet and he hires her to look up all the other women who have been murdered under similar circumstances, all raped and killed, all with names from the Bible and linked by verses from Leviticus. Then, under pressure, they end up in bed in a savage sexual fury—an unconvincing twist, since Lisbeth has endured a lifetime of rape and sexual torture herself, and despises men. (We’ve just seen her sewing up an eye with dental floss, tying up a victim and tattooing “I AM A RAPIST PIG” on his chest with a carving knife.) Reckless, hostile and pretty close to being a serial killer herself, she’s seriously damaged, exacting gruesome revenge on anyone who crosses her, but when it comes to her boss, she melts, saving a naked Mr. Craig from an unbearably convincing basement torture chamber that leaves nothing to the imagination.

I’m a big fan of the kind of sleaze and terror David Fincher is famous for (think Se7en and Fight Club) and this is no exception. The great screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s elaborate, convoluted script, so muddled that even after it’s over you still don’t know what it’s all about, is a drawback—but the movie is a master class in sinister style, tense and deeply uncomfortable. The cold Swedish dreamscape of blackness is so effective that sometimes you feel like you need a flashlight. Mr. Fincher also knows how to bring out the fearlessness in actors. As James Bond, Mr. Craig is a terrific mixture of sarcastic charm and sartorial splendor, in or out of the sack, but when the role calls for something darker, he’s equally well equipped. Mr. Skarsgård is especially scary because of the sheer exploitation of power with which he manipulates people under the guise of polite, amiable calm—making his later scenes from friendly to ferocious doubly shocking. Ms. Mara is a damaged ferret, her eyes darting, her tongue rubbing her stapled lips as she helps the mentally distraught reporter try to make sense of a deepening mystery. It all adds up to a noxious brew of teeth-grinding, knuckle-whitening brutality. Merry Christmas to you, too.

rreed@observer.com

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Running time 158 minutes

Written by Steven Zaillian and Stieg Larsson

Directed by David Fincher

Starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara and Stellan Skarsgård

2.5/4

Pitt and Hill in "Moneyball" (Photo: 2011 Columbia Tristar Marketing Group)

Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
September 23
Scott Rudin, of last year’s movie-of-the-fall The Social Network is back with Moneyball, his latest attempt to prove that while a million dollars may be cool, what’s really cool is a Best Picture Oscar. The pedigree on this one’s impeccable—based on a Michael Lewis book (like The Blind Side!) it intelligently (not like The Blind Side!) looks at the Oakland A’s’ attempt to surmount their lack of money with a smarty-pants statistics system. (What is it about Mr. Rudin and computer geeks? Even his sports movies are about guys who probably listen to too much Radiohead.) Anyway, this movie stars Brad Pitt and a newly slender Jonah Hill, and is the first outing for director Bennett Miller since his Capote made everyone we know buy a copy of In Cold Blood.

Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
September 30
It’s been a long eleven years since Kenneth Lonergan’s last directorial effort, You Can Count on Me—but the years have probably felt even longer to Mr. Lonergan. The director was reportedly served with lawsuits due to his own inability to finish the film. (The high-powered producing team, including Mr. Rudin and the late Sydney Pollack, apparently couldn’t help expedite the process.) Well, as our dear great-aunt used to tell us, haste makes waste—and the years Margaret spent in development hell saw the rise of its lead actress Anna Paquin to superstar status off her role on the TV series True Blood and the continuation of America’s love affair with its male lead, Matt Damon. We’ll try to focus on the onscreen plot, not the offscreen drama. What’s it about, anyhow? Well, Ms. Paquin plays a high-school student (sorry, this was just filmed a long time ago!...)

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar)
October 14
Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie goes lowbrow—it’s based on a Thierry Jonquet horror novel about plastic surgery! After his previous film Broken Embraces, and its surprisingly sober meditation on the role of fantasy and cinema, The Skin I Live In promises more visceral thrills from the Spanish master. Antonio Banderas stars as a plastic surgeon who’s developed a miraculous unburnable skin—and the film has twists and turns, viewers in Cannes reported, that allow Mr. Almodóvar to indulge in the psychosexual madness he does better than anyone. We’re excited for Mr. Almodóvar’s return to his old preoccupations, but especially for his reunion with Mr. Banderas, with whom he worked in the 1980s. There have been some wilderness years for Mr. Banderas (albeit lucrative ones: the animated Puss in Boots comes out November 4), and perhaps only Mr. Almodovar knows quite what to do with the Andalucian actor.

In Time (Andrew Niccol)
October 28
After the summer during which we fell in love once again with Planet of the Apes comes a fall in which we’re expected, it seems, to swallow the concept of Logan’s Run. That lovable 1970s schlockfest posited a future in which humans die at 30: in In Time, humans stop aging at 25 and get a set number of remaining days. After his summer, during which he starred in the resolutely unlovable Friends With Benefits and Bad Teacher, star Justin Timberlake’s days in the acting game may be numbered as well, but his director here is The Truman Show and Gattaca writer Andrew Niccol, who knows a few things about dystopian futurescapes.

The Rum Diary (Bruce Robinson)
October 28
Hunter S. Thompson’s biggest fan finally gets the vanity project that makes all those Pirates of the Caribbean movies seem worthwhile. Johnny Depp, who had previously starred in the Thompson-themed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, here plays a Thompson fictional character named Paul Kemp, a journalist who travels to Puerto Rico and drinks a lot of rum (perhaps the Pirates movies were Method preparation in tropical liquor consumption). This film has a storied, awful production process, one that reportedly drove its writer-director, reformed alcoholic Bruce Robinson, to drink. (He says he stopped as soon as work was completed.) We’re sorry it was so miserable but are eager to see Mr. Depp here, in something about which he and others were passionate, before the next Pirates of the Caribbean or Burton-by-numbers!

J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood)
November 9
It’s been a while since the last Clint Eastwood joint—a whole three years, an uncharacteristic gap for the hyper-productive senior member of the American auteur club. He’s teaming up, here, with Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the longtime FBI honcho J. Edgar Hoover. Sure, the performance will be Mr. DiCaprio’s typical glower-and-be-brilliant shtick, but the film’s most likely Oscar should be for costumes—we’re already imagining the Hoover negligees and nighties! Okay, fine, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (previously of Milk) has suggested that there’s no cross-dressing in this flick, so we should expect a tasteful, elegant, Eastwoodian take on Hoover, though the casting of the rising star Armie Hammer as Hoover’s rumored lover gives us hope that there’ll be more here than FBI procedure.

Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
November 11
It’s time for us to move past Lars von Trier’s insane, provocative statements at Cannes this year—not because they were forgivable, but because Mr. von Trier should be judged by the insane, provocative statements he makes in his films. He seems to have done it again with Melancholia, the story of feuding sisters at a wedding (so Bridesmaids!). The wedding gets quite literally eclipsed by an extraplanetary body threatening to destroy Earth—and the film becomes another artful iteration in Mr. von Trier’s series of films about women destroyed by unchangeable circumstance. Poor Kirsten Dunst must have had to consult with Mr. von Trier’s other leading ladies—Bjork, Nicole Kidman, Emily Watson, and her Melancholia costar Charlotte Gainsbourg among them—to prepare for the apocalypse. It’s paying off for the former teenybopper, though: she won Best Actress at Cannes.

Carnage (Roman Polanski)
November 18
The play God of Carnage lit up Broadway in 2009—apparently, bickering helicopter parents are a zeitgeisty subject! (Who would have guessed?) The play depicted two couples meeting up to discuss their children’s respective fight at school. It was both mundane and terrifying. Now the master of imputing the everyday with undercurrents of horrific dread, Roman Polanski, puts Brooklyn mommies under the microscope. The prospect’s made yet more appealing by the ladies playing the Brooklyn mommies—try imagining Jodie Foster or Kate Winslet doling out organic fruit snacks!—as well as their dear husbands, John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz. Don’t try looking for familiar playgrounds, eagle-eyed Brooklyn viewers: due to Mr. Polanski’s longstanding legal troubles, the film was shot in Paris, but the domestic rage is pure outer-borough.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
November 23
Martin Scorsese, New York’s most New York-y director—well, after the one who made Midnight in Paris—makes the transatlantic trip to the Champs-Élysées. As though the man’s long sojourn in Boston-mob cinema weren’t betrayal enough! Hugo is a true oddity in the long career of Mr. Scorsese: post-Oscar, he’s evidently unburdened by the type of self-consciousness that precludes making a 3-D children’s film about a magical toy shop. The film stars Sasha Baron Cohen, Jude Law, and Ben Kingsley as the grown-ups and young Asa Butterfield (all of 14!) as the young Hugo. If this Hugo thing takes off, perhaps Master Butterfield should consult with Daniel Radcliffe about growing up under the spotlight. But we hope it’s just a middling hit: Mr. Scorsese needs to come back to New York! The city’s conspiracy-minded weirdos won’t make films about themselves.

The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
November 23
It’s been a while since Alexander Payne graced us with a movie. His sun-dappled ode to Napa oenophilia Sideways was in 2004 (we’re not counting his writing work on the gay fantasia on Adam Sandler themes that was I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry). The master of small, darkly comic American stories returns with a vacation story we know will warm us up in November—George Clooney in Hawaii! Okay, okay, so it’s a tearjerker (Mr. Clooney’s character is reconnecting with his daughters after his wife enters a coma).But still! Clooney! Hawaii! We’d take that trip—especially with a guide as able as Mr. Payne at evoking the humor and sadness of the weird corners of the human experience.

ddaddario@observer.com

A clown.

A word of warning: if you are frightened by clowns, do not—I repeat, do not—see The Last Circus, a madcap, macabre fable from Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia, who has been compared to Guillermo del Toro but who, in this film at least, seems to be channeling some horror fanboy hybrid of Fellini and Almodóvar. Highly stylized and brutally dramatic, The Last Circus, which premiered last year at the Venice Film Festival, can be stunning, captivating and frightening—that is, until it loses its mind halfway through and becomes a bizarre and nightmarish telenovela.

In 1937, a circus is stormed by soldiers recruiting men to fight in the Spanish Civil War. A clown (Santiago Segura) is taken against his will, as his young son tearfully clings to him. He’s given a weapon and sent into battle in full costume (“A clown with a machete? You’ll scare the shit out of them!” his commander reasons), a role he takes to with surprising gusto. But after gutting an entire battalion, he’s captured by the rebels, and when they win the war he’s held in prison indefinitely. His now-teenage son, Javier, visits him. “Your lot in life is to play the sad clown,” father tells son. Soon after, Javier sneaks into the mine where his father is forced to labor, attempts to blow it up, attacks a colonel and watches his dad get trampled to death by a horse.

Fast-forward to 1973. Javier (taking the portly, somber adult form of Carlos Areces) is literally playing the sad clown, auditioning for a kooky circus troupe straight out of 8½. The “happy” clown, Sergio (Antonio de la Torre), is a sneering, abusive, alcoholic menace who tells Javier that he became a clown because, if he hadn’t, “I’d be a murderer.” Sergio enjoys telling dead-baby jokes and beating the daylights out of his beautiful girlfriend, Natalia (Carolina Bang), who also happens to be the troupe’s trapeze artist—and the new object of Javier’s affections, despite warnings from his fellow performers. At first Javier just wants to befriend Natalia, but, seemingly desperate to escape Sergio’s violent outbursts, she seduces him. It’s only a matter of time before Sergio comes around, and as soon as he does The Last Circus devolves into a horror farce.

First, Sergio beats Javier to within an inch of his life using a carnival mallet. Then, Javier escapes from the hospital and runs back to the circus tents bare-assed to maim Sergio with a meat hook. The carneys, who don’t want to report the crime to the police, carry Sergio’s body by elephant to a farm doctor who saves his life but leaves him horribly disfigured. Meanwhile, Javier escapes naked into the woods and lives off of raw deer meat until he’s discovered one day by—guess who?—the colonel he blinded as a teenager, who enslaves him and treats him (literally) like a dog. Instead of waiting patiently to be killed, Javier allows himself to free-fall into a complete psychotic breakdown in which he burns his face into a grotesque clown mask, dons a pope costume, procures two machine guns and goes on a killing spree.

With no end in sight despite the plot’s dive off the deep end, the movie heads into a plodding parade of camp carnage. Perhaps Mr. De la Iglesia intended to make a fatalistic farce, but even so, the loud three-ring circus he creates robs the film of any real meaning. It’s visually jarring—the film jumps back and forth between black and white, color, and some comic-book combination of the two—and the characters, who were, if not realistic, at least possible to relate to in the film’s first act, become garish monsters. After a certain point, there is nothing to feel except repulsion.

Sergio reemerges, his face a melted mess of stitches and teeth, and both he and Javier roam the streets trying to find Natalia and win her back—or to kill each other, whichever opportunity presents itself first (considering that the police are searching for Javier, and that his outfit and heavy artillery make him, let’s just say, conspicuous, he doesn’t seem to have any trouble walking around in broad daylight and terrorizing passersby). Eventually, the two clowns and their beloved acrobat end up atop a statue of a giant cross, battling to the death, but by the time the end finally comes, there’s no relief. You’re left with the vague recollection of an interesting movie you were watching before you got kidnapped and subjected to over an hour of torture porn starring a fat, sadistic clown.

Good luck sleeping tonight.

ulamarche@observer.com

THE LAST CIRCUS

Running time 107 minutes

Written and directed by Álex de la Iglesia

Starring Carlos Areces, Antonio de la Torre, Carolina Bang

1/4

Holmes.

Scary movies can get away with breaking promises to their audience. They can resurrect exhausted clichés (creepy old houses packed with things bumping in the night) and they can even toss in stale character archetypes (the clueless father, the precocious child who sees things adults don’t). But one crime even the best horror can’t get away with is presenting characters so stupid that we lose all interest in whether they live or die. Which is the heart of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.

This film was completed in 2010 and sat on a Miramax shelf for a year (never a good sign). Now it’s being billed as “presented by” Guillermo del Toro, the monster-film virtuoso who won mainstream glory with Pan’s Labyrinth. This marketing tactic has a clear goal: to convince people that this film is something more than a cauldron of stewed garbage. Yes, Mr. Del Toro did co-write and co-produce this fiasco. But those of us who love him refuse to believe his involvement was much more than a little creative direction and a few rubber stamps.

The story starts off tepid, graduates into dull and then careens into sheer idiocy: nine-year-old Sally (an appropriately cute and somber Bailee Madison) is sent by her neglectful mother to live with her father (Guy Pearce, a magnetic actor who phones in every line of this movie) and his textbook postdivorce girlfriend (who else but Katie Holmes?). Of course, they can’t live in just any house—they’re inhabiting and restoring Blackwood Manor, a gothic mansion in Rhode Island filled with secret rooms, shadowy corners and macabre history. As soon as Sally arrives, the night-bumping commences, the hellish beasties eventually emerge, and their cartel proceeds to torment poor the child while the adults ignore her screams and chalk up her behavior to “excessive nerves.”

This plot formula is used more than a Port Authority restroom for a reason: it works. The “precocious child sees what the blind adults can’t” premise can be deeply powerful and terrifying. But it works only if the child is truly precocious, and if the adults are in any way likeable/relatable. Here we have Sally (since when do modern parents name their babies Sally?) displaying a total lack of self-preservation in the face of ominous voices coming from a basement sewer—she goes so far as to steal a box of tools to remove metal bolts from a grate to set them free (since 9-year-olds have an in-depth knowledge of tools, not to mention the strength of a linebacker). Meanwhile, every adult seems afflicted with a severe case of numbskullery—a man emerges from the basement with scissors plunged into his neck and all the housekeeper can do is stare, while the accepted remedy for Sally’s terrified screams is “Oh, I just put her to bed.”

Don’t even get me started on Katie Holmes.

On the plus side, the movie looks gorgeous—everything Mr. Del Toro touches looks a little like Pan’s Labyrinth, with its magical realism and canorous sense of the natural world. No one else can anthropomorphize a set of hedges or a library to the point of menacing beauty. The mansion is magnificent, the raison d’etre of the film—every detail is sumptuous and shot with elegant classicism. Even the creatures look impressive, with their skeletal faces and Skeksis posture.

With so much visual beef to work with, director Troy Nixey manages a few genuine creep-you-out moments. But mostly he relies on a single fallback to bring the scare: Sally screaming. In the best horror, child screams are reserved for moments of extreme suspense and foreboding—think Tommy Doyle in Halloween or Carol Anne Freeling in Poltergeist. Overuse the kid scream, and you go from razor-sharp tension to “Where are my %&$ing earplugs??” Here, we get a 9-year-old screaming incessantly for 60 minutes, while her parents do nothing—it’s like being trapped in a suburban Chuck E. Cheese.

This whole debacle is a shame—after announcing he was no longer directing The Hobbit, Mr. Del Toro sustained a blow to his post-Pan’s Labyrinth armor, and this washout brings him one step closer to full career rupture. It just goes to show, no matter how burnished your backdrop or splendiferous your setting, if your script is crap, you’re stuck with a total dud.

editorial@observer.com

DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

Running time 100 minutes

Written by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins

Directed by Troy Nixey

Starring Guy Pearce, Katie Holmes, Bailee Madison

1.5/4