6 Films to Keep You Awake: The Baby's Room (2006)

Director: Alex de la Iglesia
Writer(s): de la Iglesia and Jorge Guerricaechevarría
Starring: Javier Gutiérrez, Leonor Watling, Sancho Gracia, and María Asquerino

With some intense back pain keeping me home from work and vastly limiting my mobility, I decided to kill some time via a movie. My wife, who watches most of the films that I review with me, was more interested in getting some other things accomplished, so I was left to my own devices. After a brief search of the films on my “to watch” list, I finally settled on one that my wife has strictly assured me she would never, ever want to watch.

That film was The Baby's Room, a TV movie directed by Alex de la Iglesia as part of the "6 Films to Keep You Awake" series, who some will remember for helming such films as Day of the Beast and Accion Mutante. His films always have some elements of humor throughout, no matter what genre he is dabbling in, and The Baby's Room is no exception, though thankfully most of the comedy falls on the backburner once the suspense starts ratcheting up.

Juan (Javier Gutiérrez) and Sonia (the beautiful Leonor Watling, who I am pretty sure I fell in love with just from watching her here) are an established couple with a new baby boy, who have just moved into a large house. Their relationship is so perfect that Sonia is actually concerned about how smooth everything is going, which makes for some rather obvious foreshadowing that things won't be great for long. One day, Juan's parents make an unannounced visit, and drop off a box full of stuff for the child; at the bottom of the box are two baby monitors (an item that Juan, curiously, has never heard of or even knew existed).

The couple set them up, happy to have peace of mind, without the added inconvenience of having to get up every time they hear the baby cry. At first, the couple hear weird noises, which could be attributed to any number of things: the baby shifting, for example. Then comes the unmistakable sound of a human voice. Terrified, Juan arms himself with a piece of wood and rushes into the baby's room—only to find his baby, crying because Juan has just turned on the light to his room.

Who did that voice belong to? It quickly becomes an obsession for Juan to find out. He upgrades the monitors to infrared video, and in a rare creepy scene, catches a static figure with glowing eyes staring at the camera while sitting next to his son. He is terrified. Sonia would be, too, if this weren't one of those frustrating situations in movies where Sonia never sees what Juan sees, and so she just thinks he is crazy. And since no one else at his job is willing to believe that there are ghosts keeping him awake and making him late to work every day, they think he is crazy, too.

Then he catches a break. He sees an old photo of his house, and notices that a window has been boarded up. He looks at the wall through the baby monitor, which is his ticket to the other world, and sees there is a door knob there. He turns it, and enters into a hidden room, which we later learn to be a portal of sorts to the “real” world. By unsealing it, he has now unwittingly opened up the possibility that the ghosts that have been stuck inside the house may now “break out” and run free into the real world. And this is about the time that it pretty much derails itself, rebounding just in time to deliver a good, though rather expected, ending.

Apparently, the “6 Films To Keep You Awake” series were six (of course) films made by well-respected Spanish directors, specifically for Spanish television, and now I suppose having reviewed one, I am obligated at some point to take a look at the rest. Unfortunately, this one was so disappointing overall that I have little interest in continuing, at least any time soon, especially considering this one is generally regarded as one of the better ones.

The story gets off to a relatively quick start (and the 80 minute run-time is probably mainly to thank for that), but the deja vu also sets in almost immediately. This is a story we have seen a thousand times before; the only difference are the actors, one of whom is drop-dead gorgeous. The wife first thinks the husband is crazy, then thinks he is a threat to their child, and the perfect family quickly starts to unravel. There are a couple of genuinely creepy scenes, and the monitor idea is pretty cool (he can only see the “ghosts” through the infrared screens), but there's otherwise nothing gripping or interesting about it, save for Leonor Watling's plainly gorgeous face. In other words, seasoned horror vets can probably shut it off at the half-hour mark, and already know, within a general outline, what happens the rest of the way, save for just how natural Watling looks while holding a child, and how I would have gladly raised the child with her in her husband's absence, had she asked me.

If the other tales are similar, I don't think this series will keep you awake so much as lull you into a deep sleep.

RATING: 4.5/10

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NOTE: I unfortunately can't find individual trailers for each film in the series, so here's a trailer for the entire series as a whole.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

Director: Andrè Øvredal
Writer(s): Dan and Kevin Hageman, and Guillermo del Toro, from a story by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton. Based on the books by Alvin Schwartz.
Starring: Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, and Dean Norris

I can't think of another book series that summed up my childhood more than the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” trilogy. The stories were pretty creepy on their own, but it was the infamous illustrations by Stephen Gammell that took them from merely creepy, to utterly terrifying. And it wasn't just me that thought that: so frightening are the images, that after years of increasing scrutiny, the books were re-issued with less disturbing artwork to appease the apparently growing number of concerned parents. (And were then re-issued with the original artwork when there was a growing number of protests to the new images in a rather odd about-face).

Naturally, when I heard they were going to be adapted into a movie, I was pretty leery of the whole idea, and the more and more information that came out did little to alleviate that (not an anthology, PG-13, etc.). This wasn't just a movie, this was more or less a piece of my childhood that was going to be displayed on the big screen. And when that happens, no matter how hard you try, it's virtually impossible to head into it with an unbiased viewpoint. This is material I have sifted over dozens of times, with both words images that have been permanently ingrained in my memory from so many years before.

The one thing it had going for it was the director, Andre Øvredal, the man responsible for Troll Hunters and the Autopsy of Jane Doe, both of which are fantastic examples of the fantasy/horror genres, respectively. I still wasn't completely sold on the idea that even he could pull it off, but he was a better pick than just about everyone else that sprang to mind.

The thin plot finds a group of teenagers who sneak into a haunted house, and discover a book written by the previous tenant: a girl named Sarah Bellows who was tortured, and used that trauma as motivation to turn her life into a book of scary stories. Of course, the teens find the hidden chamber housing the book, and double of course the leader of the group, a redhead girl named Stella, decides to take the book home; this doesn't sit too well with Sarah's restless, vengeful spirit. As the helpless kids will soon discover, the twisted tales did not end after her death, and one-by-one they find themselves starring in stories written by a vengeful ghost from beyond the grave, from which there seems to be no escape...

As much as I despise the idea of using the stories within a linear narrative, rather than as separate stories in an anthology, there are moments in Øvredal's film when he really manages to make the idea work. Actually, he makes it work for about the first hour, with a variety of the familiar tales I read so much as a kid playing out in sometimes surprisingly gruesome ways (at least, as far as PG-13 rated films are concerned). The problem is that once the focus on the individual stories is gone, and the threadbare story connecting them all together—in other words, what should be the “filler” story--takes center stage, it doesn't take long for the project to sputter to a grinding halt...and unfortunately at that point there's still somewhere around an hour left.

And boy is that last hour a chore to sit through, giving me ample time to piece together a comprehensive list of some of the things that went wrong. Here's a list of some of the more egregious issues:

• The looseness of the story adaptations. You would think that being based on a book where the stories are literally only two or three pages, on average, the stories could at least be accurately adhered to. But, very few are straightforward adaptations: many of the stories are blended together, almost completely reworked, or even incoherent as-is. For example, a chapter on “The Haunted House” is started near the end, but is nothing at all like the actual “Haunted House” story from the book. In an even weirder “twist”, the terrifying creature from “The Haunted House” story appears as the ghost looking for her lost toe in “The Big Toe”, which is a completely separate story. Huh? Why?

• Confusing target demographics. Most movies play to their audiences, which is no secret. But what is confusing is just who this movie happens to be targeting: the PG-13 rating certainly suggests a teenaged crowd, but the original source material will probably be lost on most of them (which might be a good thing, as they have nothing to compare them to). Meanwhile, the nearly two-hour run time will make it a marathon for just about any possible target audience it's trying to win over. Making matters more confusing is the dark material, gross effects, and shocking number of swear words that honestly make things feel like it's literally one drop of blood away from an “R” rating. It's like that friend that so desperately wants to be liked by everyone that they adhere to everyone else's thoughts of them, rather than being their own person. What they should have done—and maybe they have—is make a PG-13 theatrical cut, and then have an R-rated version for DVD; considering producer Guillermo del Toro has pretty much stated from the outset they were going for a PG-13 rating, though, it's highly unlikely that this will happen.

• Overreliance on CGI effects. Despite his meager directing credentials, which consist of six completed credits (one of them being a short film), I would almost consider Øvredal to be a master director based on the strength of his latest two offerings (this one exempted). That's what makes the final twenty or so minutes of Scary Stories, which feature an obviously computer-generated creature that is a loose blending of two separate “Scary Stories” creatures as a “final boss” of sorts, so ferociously disappointing. Sure, there are other blatant moments of CGI peppered throughout, but they're generally quick sequences that, while hokey, aren't protracted enough to really tarnish the material. All of that is thrown out the window with the end baddie, which is so bad that I can't see anyone but the youngest of children—or most squeamish of teenagers—being able to take it with an even remote sense of seriousness.

• The deeply-political setting. The stories in the book were all based on folklore, so they were existing stories that, in many cases, were passed down from generation to generation for sometimes hundreds of years. The book's author, Alvin Schwartz, compiled all of them, whittled them down to their barest of essentials, and presented them as a horror book for children. With this in mind, this movie could have been set at any time and place while still being considered a faithful adaptation. And yet, of all time periods, it takes place in 1968, during the peak intensity of both the civil rights era, and the presidential election. But why? Despite frequent shots of the election in full swing, and a character being called a “wet back”, none of it plays any meaningful role in the film whatsoever, aside from maybe just serving as an education lesson to kids that these things happened? It just seems completely out-of-place in a “kids” film, where none of the events have any actual ties to either of those things.

• A solid beginning. This might not sound like a bad thing, but when all of your good ideas are used up by the midway point, it really does make every poor idea that ensues all the more frustrating. Look at it this way: If it was consistently bad throughout, it might have a chance at working in a campy, cheesy kind of way, where it's so awful it's at least entertaining. But once you give your audience a taste of greatness—and in the process, prove that you're not an incompetent idiot—then rapidly abandon everything that made it good to begin with in favor of strictly following a tired, by-the-numbers formula, all of the disappointment is magnified.

This isn't to suggest that there are no redeeming qualities. In fact, there are some things to like here: The make-up effects are brilliant, and on the rare occasions a monster from the book makes an appearance, they look amazingly accurate to Gammell's original drawings. There's also the issue of this being a rather large, highly-marketed film, which means chances are pretty good that there were massive amounts of studio interference guiding the film in ways that Øvredal would not have done on his own.

The acting is also up there on par with recent shows like “Stranger Things” (which seems to have been an inspiration here, especially in the groan-inducing ending that functions as concrete evidence that, despite all the dark imagery, this is an adaptation lacking bite), with the teenaged actors giving mostly impressive performances across the board. And that's no small feat: even as my interest went from “10” to “0”, and as every predictable story thread was revealed and everything started unraveling at such a rapid rate that my heart virtually dropped into my stomach, the acting was never a cause of annoyance for me.

Really, Øvredal seems to have done the best that he could do with the source material, which was deeply flawed to begin with: it all comes down to the godawful story, which wouldn't have given anyone a chance to succeed behind the camera. It starts off great, but once it goes off the rails, it does so with such gusto and fervor that nothing—including one of the most talented horror directors working today—could possibly save it.

But damn was that first half promising.

OVERALL: 4/10

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