The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

In 2010 a gaggle of monsters that hadn't been considered 'scary' in a long time came crashing out of Norway in the form of found-footage hit Trollhunter, the most profitable film to come out of that particular frostbitten country in history. It would be a full six years before director Andre "Name With a Bunch of Accent Marks I Can't Replicate Unless I Reset My Keyboard to Norwegian Which I'm Not Gonna Do" Ovredal would release another film, this time in English, and while it couldn't be more different in tone and style from Trollhunter, I'm pleased to say The Autopsy of Jane Doe is just as impressive in it's own right.

We start off following a sheriff arriving at a home that also happens to be the sight of a grizzly triple homicide in which it appears all the victims died desperately trying to leave the house. But that's not the strangest thing; that would go to the partially uncovered body of an anonymous young woman --our titular Jane Doe-- in the dirt-floor basement. She's taken to the local funeral home, run by a father/son combo, both of whom are still grieving from the wife/mother's death two years before, for the procedure of the title. They open her to find shattered wrists and ankles, dozens of lacerations on her internal organs, and lungs like she inhaled enough smoke to smother four or five people, yet there are no indicators of any injury whatsoever outside. Far from it, her skin is alabaster perfection. Then, things start to get weird, with hallucinations, dead animals, and a very clear link to the occult.

Gone is the found footage aesthetic and all it's trappings of Trollhunter (though don't let the found footage thing scare you off from watching that film if you hate that style, because as April Snellings wrote in a review of the film it "owes more to Jurassic Park than The Blair Witch Project"), and in its place is an assured, fluid camera and careful lighting that recalls an antiseptic version of the gothic works of Terrence Fisher. Whereas Trollhunter wanted you to oogle over the titular creatures in all their glory, Autopsy is somewhat secretive, with very few on-screen special effects --except for the actual autopsy stuff, of course.

As far as acting goes, it's actually kind of amazing the best performance in the entire film is given by Olwen Catherine Kelly, who plays the corpse at the center of the mystery. Don't get me wrong, the other actors are fine; Emile Hirsch pulls off the idea of a character who wants to leave the situation he's in but doesn't know how to say it, and, frankly, I might have a little bit of a crush on Brian Cox and think he's wonderful in everything, but there's just some type of magnetism Jane Doe has that forces your eye to her every time. The minute changes to her facial expressions depending on what's going on in the scene make her feel almost more alive than any of the other characters whom are all stuck in the past in their own ways.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm a fan of this Norse master of genre cinema and you should definable check out both films discussed here.

It (2017)

1986 saw the release a 1,138 page behemoth of a novel by insanely-prolific writer Stephen King titled It, his 22nd novel and yet another New York Times number 1 bestseller --indeed, Publishers Weekly listed It as the best-selling book, both fiction AND nonfiction, in the US for that year. It proved to be so popular, in fact, the story of a group of misfit kids fighting an ancient evil in a small Maine town only to be forced to return 27 years later when it was proved they didn't quite finish the job found its way to television in the form of a 2 part, 4 hour long miniseries in 1990. The series, directed by Tommy (Halloween III) Lee Wallace, is still well-regarded and has become something of a cultural landmark for those of my generation thanks to years of syndication. Therefore, given how iconic the book and the character of Pennywise the Dancing Clown (played to perfection by Tim Curry in the miniseries) have become, you could understand the trepidation when a new adaption was announced. The fact that it took several years to see the light of day after numerous re shufflings in the crew, including multiple changes in writers and directors, didn't help. Luckily, all that worry was for nought!

 Before I go any further, I want to address the red-haired, pasty-faced elephant in the room; the new Pennywise. Like a lot of people, I was unimpressed when the first pics of Bill (Hemlock Grove) Skarsgard's Pennywise, and the thing I didn't much care for was the fact that his makeup and costume seemed so....easy. It was an obvious, Horror Movie Clown (c) type of place to go with it. The thing is, both the book and miniseries clown are visually unremarkable, they just look like regular-ass clowns. The fear was generated by actions, like Pennywise appearing in locations a clown absolutely should not be. By comparison, Bill's Pennywise seemed like he's trying way to hard to look scary. But then, something happened. Randomly one day an interview I read with James Wan popped into my head where he was discussing his film Insidious. He was asked why the Lipstick-Face Demon was smearing the bright red cosmetic on himself, and Wan answered he was doing that in an attempt to replicate the appearance of clown to draw people to him. Suddenly, everything clicked! Pennywise is not a man, he is an entity, and Pennywise is simply its interpretation of a clown. I had the same epiphany when the film started and we finally got to hear the voice Skarsgard went with; it's an utterly bizarre voice, but again, it's an incomprehensible being from beyond space and time trying to replicate human speech, so it makes perfect sense the cadence and whatnot hit the ear wrong.

 And those perfectly sensible changes aren't limited just to the main baddie either, most characters and events in the film differ from their source material in smart ways that brilliantly update the material not just for the late-80s setting but for a 2017 audience. The seven members of The Losers Club, as they proudly refer to themselves, are fleshed out in ways that make them feel more like real characters, as opposed to both the book and miniseries where they're a bit more archetypal, and it's a real delight just watching them interact with one another. It helps that the casting was pitch perfect, of course, and not just when it comes to our young protagonists.

The pace clips along at a nice pace that belays the 2hr 15min runtime, and I found Andy (Mama) Muschietti's direction more palatable here than in his previous works, and considering this movie completely shattered a half dozen box office records I think we'll be seeing his name attached to It: Part 2. Frankly, despite a script that feels a bit shaky at times and a couple other minor quibbles, I think this is a fine updating of a modern classic and I'm excited to see what happens with the second half of the story.