I'll let you in on a little secret: I love horror movies.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of them suck, or else I wouldn't keep it such a secret. Had Sturgeon forseen what the horror film genre would do to his precious law, he probably wouldn't have been so optimistic. In spite of the deficiencies of certain films, we fans soldier forward. Some of us--perhaps the wiser among our demographic--turn their attention overseas to the bountiful horror offerings of the inscrutable Orient.
Behold the new face of fear
But me? I make it personal. Which is why, when I was looking for a movie to watch the night the wife and I moved into our new apartment, I picked up Samuel L. Jackson's magnum opus (if his career started in 2007) Lakeview Terrace.
"Merican," you must by now be thinking. "That's an uncharacteristically inscrutable way to start a post. What do you mean 'make it personal?' And why do you keep leaning on the literary device of narrating the reader?"
To answer your questions in reverse order: shut up and I'll explain.
Horror movies are fantastic entertainment. Even when they're not especially scary, or even that good, horror movies are nothing if not an absolute joy to watch. For me, however, half the fun is the adrenaline-soaked 90-minute roller coaster ride, the contents of my bowels perched in indecision, ready to forcefully evacuate through one end of me or the other. Sometimes I just need to be wrapped in a shroud of unease, tingling at every extremity with uncertainty, like when I look at the fire department's charity calendar. Sometimes, the best horror isn't from the horror genre at all. Sometimes its when things hit a little too close to home.
Pictured: Things hitting a little too close to home
For me, the quintessential movie to prove that point was Arachnophobia. AND GOD DAMN DID IT EVER RUIN MY LIFE. It took a minor phobia and kicked it all the way up to 11.
Also the scale only goes from 1 to 3.
Check the IMDb page. Comedy?! Sci-Fi?! PG-13?!
No.
No no no no no no no. No fucking way, right? But if this movie freaked your shit out even half as bad as it did mine, then you see what I'm getting at. Arachnophobia was just a movie about spiders invading the suburbs. Except that it wasn't. It was 103 minutes of my two biggest fears condensed to celluloid. It was a nightmare with a rewind button. And there I was, six years old, not sure whether I should be puking or shitting.
Fortunately...
Yes, the spiders stole the show in Arachnophobia, but for all the hairy horror, there was something else there, more abstract, more cerebral that just made the experience so, so much more terrifying: the queen spider's nest was squarely in the basement of our protagonists' home. For me, home represents more than shelter--it is safety. Security. A refuge from all the evils and the of the outside world. I know who has shat in my toilet and slept in my bed and vice-versa. I totally get gun-owners. Protecting the home is something worth getting a little crazy over.
After all, there's no place like it.
It's the reason that, despite having watching the original Star Wars trilogy in its entirety upwards of 50 times, Empire Strikes Back is still stressful for me to watch. The warp drive on the Millennium Falcon suddenly going kaput is the space equivalent of your septic tank backing up.
Mrs. Merican: Why aren't they going faster?
Merican: Because my nightmare has been given form
It's the reason this...
Is the most stressful, anxiety-ridden, soul-crushing act of self-flagellation Netflix has ever been party to. And the movie isn't even good. But God damn if it doesn't sit in the top five of the "Merican's scariest flicks" list.
It does suck, though. It's just not a very good movie.
Which is why I was hoping to "duplicate" the Duplex experience with Lakeview Terrace. DID YOU GET THE JOKE WITH DUPLICATE AND DUPLEX?
Sadly, though, it just wasn't happening. Oh yeah, wasn't there supposed to be a review in here?
There was. And this is it. The review, I mean:
Lakeview Terrace was, well, not very good. I sense a theme here.
The story pretty much goes like this: an interracial couple move into a new neighborhood, and immediately run afoul of a screaming, racially-charged Samuel L. Jackson. Things escalate. People die (and occasionally burn in hell).
Wonder where he found the inspiration for the role
And now you see how I made it personal. Stick with me long enough, and I promise to bring everything full circle. Last night I told a 10-minute long story about how the old Star Wars trilogy was better than the new one, and related that to how one of her recipes was better with pork than chicken. I am not kidding. That is a true thing that happened.
Meanwhile in the review, Lakeview Terrace wasn't very good.
Ultimately, the overall mediocrity of Lakeview Terrace isn't rooted in any one particular problem. The constituent parts of the film aren't especially flawed, so much as they don't especially look like they don't belong in the same movie. I'll explain.
Ambiguous Characterization:
As the movie starts, we open with a shot of Abel Turner (Samuel Jackson) looking on mournfully at a picture of his deceased wife. He kneels at the foot of his bed, claps his hands, bows his head, and prays in earnest. It's a bold choice, framing this character as a humble Christian and devoted widower, especially considering that anyone who has watched a preview or even seen a poster of this movie knows he's a fucking psychopath and the villain.
Absolutely nothing here leads me to believe this police officer would do anything wrong
But okay, okay, movies exist in a vacuum, we'll disregard that prior knowledge and judge the movie strictly as a self-contained piece.
Moreover, Abel is portrayed as a stern but loving father. He insists upon his two children maintaining decorum at meals, corrects their grammar, and otherwise holds high expectations for his kids. When he catches them peeping in on his new neighbors, Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington), making love in the pool next door, Abel is understandably upset. He behaves the way any single father would in pulling his children away from the window and later confronting his neighbors. Which is why it's so weird that a couple minutes later we see him hold a shotgun up to a fleeing criminal's face and threaten to pull the trigger.
There doesn't seem to be a Falling Down moment here, where all the minutia of Abel's life piles up to a breaking point. There's no sudden turn of events that turns an otherwise upstanding cop and father into a madman. There isn't even a Shining-esque buildup of erratic behavior that eventually goes batshit. All we have is the say-so of Abel's daughter (Regine Nehy) that her father is crazy. I understand the director wanting to keep that turn of events in his back pocket for the second act, but with scant few indications that there is anything wrong with Abel, it's as sudden as finding out your wife hasn't been taking her birth control.
Why should I like anyone?:
Speaking of which, let's get to our protagonists. To say Chris and Lisa's marriage is perfect is to say Lakeview Terrace is a good movie--that is to say, fucking wrong. The issue of race plays a major role in how the two characters interact with each other, and it's often not for the better. It's hard to tell at times whether the director is trying to tell us that we need to move past the issues of race, or whether it's time to start throwing trashcans through shop windows and overturning cars.
When Chris is put off by Abel's antagonistic behavior, he lets his wife know. Lisa's immediate response is to play white-knight for her race (God I'm so sorry), insisting that Chris' perceptions of black people are unfair and his treatment of them has always been biased. Which might make sense, if not for the fact that his wife is black, his father-in-law is black, and they all clearly have a respectful relationship. If there were serious unresolved racial issues here, why would these two be married and presumably be in love? I know firsthand that interracial marriages aren't without their cultural pitfalls, but this woman does not believe her own husband is telling the truth about their neighbor threatening him for the first half of the movie. That is not the behavior of a life-partner. Hell, that's not even the behavior of an acquaintance. My co-workers afford me more trust than that, and we don't even like each other. And when she finds out her husband is telling the truth? No "I'm sorry," or "you were right." She just finds a new reason to be the same obnoxious soul-vampire.
And why would they like each other? Fuck, I sure as shit didn't like either of them. Chris is a selfish work-first kind of guy who keeps secrets from his wife and thinks what's best for "him" is what's best for "them." Lisa is a skeptical ice-queen who stops taking birth control and then acts indignant when her husband is shocked and upset (see, I told you everything would come full-circle).
These aren't people. PEOPLE DO NOT ACT LIKE THIS.
Tonal Dissonance:
There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene whatsoever. This scene...
and this scene...
happen literally seconds apart from each other. In the former, Abel is brandishing a chainsaw at Chris, screaming at him to "shut that bitch up," in the latter, Abel and Chris are sharing a drink while Abel tells him the sob-story about how his wife died: she died in a car wreck in the passenger seat of a white man's car, Abel suspected her of having an affair, and so now he hates interracial couples. Not only does that not make any sense, it also completely invalidates the first scene entirely. See how this whole thing is coming full circle? God damn I'm good.
Several times, Abel threatens his neighbors, attacks them, mistreats them, and not once does anyone think to do anything about this because Abel's a cop. He's not a foreign diplomat. He isn't fucking Judge Dredd. Someone please just call the police for the love of God.
Juxtapositions like the aforementioned two scenes happen all the time in Lakeview Terrace. In one scene, Lisa and Abel's daughter are poolside listening to music, and seconds later Abel storms in, takes off his pants, and slaps the back-sass and a couple molars straight out of his daughter's mouth. And then Lisa starts vomiting. At first you're like "huh?" And then you're all "oh, okay, I think I know what's going on here." And then it turns out you're right and you're like "why can't any of these characters act like people?"
The entirety of the film is a lot of over-the-top racial dialogue recalling shades of Crash with sudden crescendos of total insanity. It worked in Misery because of the dramatic buildup in each scene. Here, it feels like two writers bumped into each other in the hallway and dropped their scripts on the floor, and madcap capers ensued because each had an important meeting starting in five minutes! Hilarity!
There is no hilarity:
Crash got away with a heavy-handed, racially-charged script on the strength of its writing. At times, it seemed like scriptwriters Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco had just wrapped up a drunken viewing of the Kings of Comedy and decided to made a screenplay out of it, and they accidentally ended up winning Best Original Screenplay. Despite not being an especially subtle movie, Crash at least proved the old adage that "sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying." Or, alternately, "any movie with Ludacris in it should win at least one major award."
Ludacris makes every movie better
In Lakeview Terrace, absolutely nothing tempers the conspicuous racial discourse, which, in itself, isn't a problem. Or rather, it wouldn't be if that were the kind of movie they were trying to make. What we instead have is a total mess. The exchanges of verbal vitriol aren't punctuated by chilling suspense or action--they are interrupted by them. And without the faintest trace of scene cohesion, lucid writing, or character development, nothing makes this movie hit close to home.
The Verdict:
Lakeview Terrace is a movie I actually wanted to like. I wanted it to be a sleeper-hit thriller that had me at the edge of my seat (or, since we just moved in, edge of my broken milk crate). Samuel L. Jackson is in rare form in yet another role as an intense, shouting lunatic, but his charisma and screen presence augment a good script--not salvage a bad one. If you're looking for a case-study in how not to write your characters, I guess this is a good place to start looking. If not, don't waste your time. The Burbs was a more intense thrill-ride than this piece of shit.
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