Ten Days of Terror!: The Orphanage (El Orfanato)

Film: The Orphanage (El Orfanato)
Format: DVD from personal collection on rockin’ flatscreen.

Last year, Chip Lary and I traded a list of 12 films for each other just as we did this year. One of the wild cards I picked for him in 2015 was The Orphanage (El Orfanato). I was nervous about the selection even though I genuinely love this movie because Chip wasn’t a horror guy. He wasn’t a fan of blood and gore, and while there’s only a touch of that here, this is clearly a film in the horror genre. As it happened, it was the only movie he gave five stars to from my list last year, and Chip didn’t hand out a lot of five-star reviews. I was genuinely pleased that he liked it as much as he did—it validated the choice and validated what I saw in the film.

The Orphanage, if it has a weak point, ticks all of the boxes in terms of horror movie clichés. There’s a big, spooky, old house that used to be an orphanage (hence the title). There are things that happen in the house that defy explanation. We have a child who has invisible friends who may be real and may not be real. There are paranormal investigators as in Poltergeist. There are also ghost children who are absolutely terrifying.

White People Problems

Film: The Impossible
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I have a feeling that the effect of the film The Impossible on me is very different from what was intended. The Impossible is a much more modern take on an old school disaster film. It benefits greatly from being a much more realistic version because it is based on a real disaster and a real story. That should be enough to make the film a compelling one, and I won’t say that it’s not compelling or well-made. But there is a serious problem lurking in the festering heart of this film, and it more or less ruins a great deal of what it sets out to do.

The Impossible is a survivors’ tale of the 2004 tsunami that swept through the Indian Ocean causing mass devastation and a death toll that number in six figures. That in and of itself should make for a truly compelling story. To put a human face on the story, something I would argue is required for something of this scope and magnitude, the film is focused on the Bennett family, who are vacationing in Thailand around Christmas. After a couple of uneventful days, the tsunami hits. This—the total devastation of everything within miles of the ocean—is what the audience comes to see. It does not disappoint. This is disaster filmmaking at its best and grandest, and this alone makes the film worth seeking out.