This Weekend At The Movies

Halloween may still be two weeks away, but this past weekend’s grim cinematic selections provided enough Grand Guignol for the rest of the year.

One of the weekend’s releases, a horror movie known as “The Woman,” contains some acts too unspeakable to describe in this column. I’m starting to rethink my decision not to see “Footloose.”

Matthijs van Heijningen’s remake of “The Thing” was the week’s biggest budget attempt at unsettling audiences.

The picture is meant to act as a prequel to John Carpenter’s creepy 1982 film of the same name, which was actually a reimagining of 1951’s “The Thing from Another World.” It includes the same creepy snowbound locales, which are populated by a Norwegian team of scientists and three Americans.

A trio of the scientists are out on the ice when they stumble upon a gigantic, crashed spaceship that appears to have been buried for centuries. They dig up a block of ice containing an otherworldly being and drag it back to their lab.

Of course, the creature will not remain dormant and, before long, madness ensues as the alien begins replicating the human characters, occasionally bursting out of their bodies in gory detail.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays a young scientist who has been brought on board to oversee the removal of the creature from the ice. Joel Edgerton is another of the American characters.

The filmmakers do little to differentiate their picture from Carpenter’s celebrated 1982 film. Tension and actual frights are at a minimum in this remake.

Moviegoers would be well advised to skip the film and rent one of the superior earlier versions.

“Texas Killing Fields” fared slightly better at creating suspense through a familiar storyline.

The film, which was directed by Ami Canaan Mann (daugher of Michael Mann, director of “Heat” and “Thief”), is based loosely on a series of Texas murders, during which women were picked up along I-45 and dumped in an old oil field.

The picture plays out in the typical mode of a serial killer procedural. The case’s detectives (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington and a standout Jeffrey Dean Morgan) are baffled by the murders and go to great lengths to track down the killer(s).

To Mann’s credit, there are some impressive sequences, most notably a car chase involving one of the detectives and two criminals as well as a frightening home invasion. And the film’s supporting cast of suspects is genuinely creepy.

Mann shows potential as a filmmaker, but her debut is a standard entry into this particular genre, especially after the bar was set so high by 2007’s “Zodiac.”

Pedro Almodovar’s “The Skin I Live In” includes one of the most diabolical plot twists in recent memory. And it is far and away the best among this weekend’s slate of films.

The picture unfolds in a non-sequential manner, beginning in a nondescript present, flashing back to a tragic past, jumping forward to an equally tragic sequence and winding up back in the present. It is only after we have watched three-quarters of the film that we understand its order of events and why they have been arranged in that order.

As the film opens, we meet Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, giving one of his best performances in years), a plastic surgeon who has been undertaking radical experiments involving artificial skin.

He keeps a mysterious woman (Elena Anaya) locked up in a room in his mansion and appears to be using her as a test subject. Ledgard’s maid (played by Marisa Paredes) is fiercely protective of the mad doctor and holds several secrets that are integral to the film’s story.

One day, the maid’s son shows up at the house and tells her he is on the lam. A murder occurs.

It is at this point that Almodovar’s labyrinthine story begins winding back on itself through a flashback structure. I couldn’t possibly describe the story much further without committing several paragraphs to the endeavor and giving away the picture’s twists.

“The Skin I Live In” is a nod to the classics of cinematic psychology, especially Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Georges Franju’s “Eyes Without a Face,” but it still retains the je ne sais quoi that marks all of Almodovar’s films.

And it poses thought provoking questions as to whether we are already who we are at birth or if we are, in fact, created during a series of life's pivotal moments. Almodovar's film explores this idea both figuratively and literally. 

While it may not measure up to several of the master’s great works – “Talk to Her” or “Bad Education” - of the past decade, it is still a unique entry into the psychological horror genre. It’s also visually gorgeous, very well acted and genuinely unsettling.

The picture is a proper antidote to the numerous horror movie sequels and gimmicky fright-fests with release dates scheduled around Oct. 31.