MINING SCHLOCK: "ATTACK THE BLOCK" AND "DEMONIC"

The word "schlock," meaning something "of low quality or value" (Merriam-Webster), is derived from the Yiddish "shlak," which can mean a fatal blow, something evil or a nuisance. Little wonder then that so much entertainment labeled as schlock falls within the more violent genres--horror, science fiction, action-adventure, crime, etc. Of course, there's more to it than that. It encompasses most (but not all) B movies, over-produced soap operas, failed musicals, etc.

Often dismissed outright by critics and the more serious cineastes, schlock can be the site of deeper, more perplexing meanings about the culture than are found in mainstream films. The slasher films of the '70s and later said more about changing gender roles in society than many more serious films of the era. When society catches up to those meanings, schlock ascends to the level of cult film. Think of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), now viewed as a trenchant commentary on '50s nuclear paranoia, or the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), which puts '60s America into the microcosm of a remote farmhouse under siege by zombies.

We mine schlock, then for these hidden meanings, but there are other pleasures--the stray solid performance in the midst of scripts that defy any sensible analysis, surprising achievements behind the cameras, the work of talented filmmakers on the way up or struggling to survive after being inexplicably cut loose from the mainstream. And if you're a gay male, there's always the chance not just to discover some elusive (or sometimes over-the-top) sexual subtext but also to ogle some hot guys (schlock thrives on the objectification of the male and female forms). If none of that turns up, schlock's saving grace is usually brevity and, under the best circumstances, speed. Most schlockmeisters know enough not to linger over their shortcomings. So if you've done your duty to society -- you've written some deathless words, taught some students, posted something meaningful on your social media platform of choice or, I don't know, maybe invented something to solve one of the world's more pressing problems -- there are worse things you can do with your time than to settle back at the end of a day with the latest Netflix delivery or your favorite streaming service and go hunting precious minerals among the hours of dross out there for the partaking.

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The alien invaders in writer-director Joe Cornish's Attack the Block (2011) are black puffballs with row upon row of glow-in-the-dark teeth. They're not really big enough to seem truly threatening, despite the film's body count, but when they chase the cast of South Londoners through the halls of their high rise (the "block" of the title), it's like an image out of a Chuck Jones cartoon. You may be expecting Bugs or Daffy to pop up from around the corner and bean them with a giant sledgehammer.

The block's defenders are a gang of street thugs, teenagers growing up with a minimum of adult supervision and a maximum of unvoiced rage at the system. Initially, they're a difficult group to root for. In the first scene, they mug a young nurse (Jodie Whittaker), their leader, Moses (John Boyega), holding a threatening knife to her face. When the first alien attacks, Moses drives it off. He then gives chase with his gang so they can kill the thing for no purpose other than to kill it.

When more creatures land, however, and their attacks seem to be focused on the youths' block, they set out to defend their turf, something they do very well. The film becomes a comic book illustration of Simone Weil's contention that the most effective members of the French Resistance were criminals, people who had been jailed for the same behavior before the German's took their country. As the film develops, Moses and his gang even reveal their own moral code. Attempting to hide from one of the aliens, they force their way into the nurse's apartment. As soon as they realize she's a neighbor, they tell her they never should have robbed her. Moses even makes one of his cohorts return a ring they had taken from her.

Cornish's direction of all this is increasingly kinetic. There's a real showcase sequence in which the kids take to bikes and motor scooters to hunt down the invaders, only to become the hunted themselves. Cornish makes great use of the various walkways, staircases and ramps around the high rise to create a thrilling ride with moments of slapstick to leaven the horror. He also has an eye for humor based on the characters' inexperience and cultural markers. One of the group's female friends refuses to touch the dead creature for fear of catching chlamydia (a line Cornish heard while interviewing South London teens to get their slang right). When the gang wants to get the word out and warn their friends to stay inside, they start comparing notes on who has the most minutes left on their cell phones. The task seems hopeless, or as one of them complains, "This is too much madness to explain in one text!"

Although the action mainly focuses on Moses' gang and the nurse who ends up on their side, there's a really fun bit in which they hide out in a female friend's apartment (because she has a security gate, and do you expect for one moment that that's going to protect them?). When the critters break in, the boys make a muddle out of fighting them off. Instead, it's the women who get rid of them, suggesting that maybe their female friends were just as deserving of focus as the guys.

Cornish tried to cast unknowns as the street gang and came up with some really strong choices, most of them still in their teens. John Boyega made his film debut as Moses and manages an effective transition from closed-off mugger to more open if unconventional hero. His teammates include Franz Drameh, before he came to the U.S. to play Firestorm on the CW's superhero block, and a passel of other screen debutants -- Alex Esmail as the wise-cracking, flirtatious Pest, Simon Howard as Biggs, who spends the night in a recycle bin with a monster prowling outside, and Sammy Williams and Michael Ajao as Probs and Mayhem, two younger wannabes who go after the monsters to win a place in the gang. The more experienced cast members include Jodie Whittaker, who makes the nurse's transition from hostility to camaraderie believable and sympathetic. She takes on her role as audience surrogate gracefully and helps us change our views of the gang as she does. There are also two nice comic turns from Nick Frost and Luke Treadaway as pot dealers who get caught up in the action. Treadaway, star of the original London production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has some regrettably brief but inspired bits of physical comedy.

There are moments of seriousness, of course, where Cornish feels compelled to underline the social issues underlying the characters' lives. The most turgid of these are over fast. There are some, however, that really hit home. When the nurse mentions that her boyfriend is a doctor volunteering with the Red Cross in Ghana, Pest asks, "Why can't he help children in Britain? Not exotic enough, is it? Don't get a nice suntan." And when it's all over, you may be wondering what they future holds for these kids when they don't have any more alien invaders to fight off. Can these junior-league criminals adjust to life outside the resistance?

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One look at James Wan's producer credit for Demonic (2015), and you may wonder if you should be giving 83 minutes of your life to this haunted house thriller. Although he did a decent job directing The Conjuring (2013), he came to that with the script already completed by another writer. His own writing efforts have been less that fortuitous, no matter how many critics jumped to praise Insidious (2010), a truly insipid film, because it was that rarity, a relatively bloodless horror film. Of course, he's not a credited writer on Demonic. That film's three writers appear to have managed to muck up the script all on their own.

Demonic falls into the "ghostbusters-gone-wrong" sub-genre. A group of paranormal investigators go to a haunted house only to awaken something evil that knocks most of them off. Like most sub-genres, it has its good entries (the scenes with Beatrice Straight and Zelda Rubinstein in 1982's Poltergeist or 2012's Grave Encounters 2, which improves on the 2011 original simply by virtue of casting the very gifted oddly attractive Richard Harmon in the lead), and it's produced a lot of utter crap.

The gimmick this time is that the action starts after the investigation has fallen apart. A man from the house next door (Do haunted houses have neighbors? Who would want to live next door to all that bad plotting?) hears strange noises, comes over to investigate, finds the house wide open and, in a moment of clarity rare for the genre, calls the police without going in. When the police detective (Frank Grillo) comes to investigate, he finds three dead bodies, a survivor (Dustin Milligan) in shock and indications that two other people got away. He enlists police psychiatrist Maria Bello to question the survivor, who claims to have forgotten everything, while his tech team goes over the video footage captured during the investigation.

That's where the trouble starts. After making Stage Fright (1950), Alfred Hitchcock stated that he made a big mistake in opening the film with a flashback that lied. Instead of showing the crime as leading man Richard Todd related it, he should have just had him tell the story in a monologue (he wasn't too happy about working with Jane Wyman, either, but that's another story). In Demonic, it's not just the flashbacks that lie; even the video footage can't be relied on. Nor does it help that the policeman assigned to videotape Bello's interviews with the survivor has to be one of the world's most incompetent videographers, for reasons I won't state for fear of spoiling the ending for anybody still interested in seeing the film.

Were the film entirely focused on the investigation, one would at least have the consolation of time spent with Grillo and Bello, who bring a kind of grizzled authority to everything they do. Since the days when Dinah Marler killed him because he'd dumped her for Cassie Winslow on Guiding Light, Grillo has carved a nice niche with supporting roles in top-budget action films like The Grey (2011) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) and leading roles in lower-budget fare like the Purge sequels, roles that take advantage of his chiseled physique and taciturn presence. Bello has more quality credits, though that hat on Prime Suspect was a huge mistake, but has been moving into the realms of schlock a bit more recently. She somehow seems able to rise above even the worst scripts, and goddess knows, she and Grillo try to create a relationship when the writing doesn't give them much beyond the fact that he stood her up to go investigate the haunted house.

The problem resides in the fact that more than half the film is devoted to those duplictous flashbacks featuring a mostly less authoritative cast.  Scott Mechlowicz is the only shining light in those scenes, and there's really not enough of him to justify them. Mechlowicz, who looks like the product of a scientific experiment to mix the DNA of Anthony Perkins and James Dean, has given some interesting performances in the past, particularly his daringly stylized turn in the justly acclaimed independent thriller Mean Creek (2004). Here, he's cast as the head of the paranormal team, who also happens to be bitter because his girlfriend dumped him for Milligan. He's got some nice brittle moments and tries to find the subtext beneath a text that's rarely worth the trouble. For the most part, however, the flashbacks focus on Milligan and his girlfriend (Cody Horn), who seem to lack the talents to pull anything out of the sorry script (Where are Beverly Garland and Jonathan Haze when you need them?). Their profiles are poorly supported by their approximations of hysterics.

So what we're left with is a script that lies to us to create the expected shocking twist at the end. That doesn't work when M. Night Shyamalan does it, but at least he knows how to write a scene. Take a look at Demonic's trailer, and see if you can count all the clichés crammed into just a few minutes:

That's probably more time than you needed to spend with Demonic. Grillo, Mechlowicz and Aaron Yoo, who plays a paranormal tech geek, are all attractive in different ways, but you can see them to better effect in other films. I'd suggest you watch them instead.