Crawling The Catacombs Download Movies
Aminta Brauer
I'm a ghost whisperer, not a catacomb crawler. But when you live in Paris, sometimes you end up being both.Hi, I'm Alix. During the day, I'm a history student at the time-honoured Sorbonne University. After class, I hang out with the ghosts of the revolution, the many undead misunderstood Parisian artists, and adventurous scientists that glow in the dark. None of them are alive, but they come to me to solve their problems with the living.When a recently deceased catacombs tour guide asks me to retrieve a mysterious personal item from the underground, things take a turn for the weird. Suddenly, I find myself in a city of ghosts, hunted by murderous cave crawlers, and stumbling across haunting secrets.If I'm not careful now, I might end up a ghost myself.Urban Fantasy with a French twist. If you like cave-crawling adventures, hopeless romantics, and ghosts, you'll enjoy Ghosts of the Catacomb, the first instalment of the Parisian Ghosts series. Travel to Paris today to embark on your catacombs adventure.
Most of us, when we think of Paris we conjure images of cobblestone streets, sipping a cappuccino at the most adorable little cafe, or a sightseeing visit to the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, that's not what this movie is about... in case the skulls at the top of the movie poster didn't give it away.
Scarlett Marlowe (Perdita Weeks), a young alchemy scholar, is continuing her dead father's (Roger Van Hool) work searching for the philosopher's stone, a legendary alchemical substance said to be capable of turning base metals such as lead into gold and granting eternal life. With the help of a former lover, Scarlett plummets herself into the depths of underground Paris where things get a little hairy. Their guide on this journey, a catacomb expert, dead ends them (pun intended) into a tunnel that he forbids them to explore. Of course, there wouldn't be a scary movie if they just took his advice and turned around, so, they venture onward and the evil beneath the cobblestone streets turns out to be their own demons that they must face. Relentless and frightening unsettled skeletons from their closet's past.
First, you must understand that I LOVE scary movies. So, I probably am a little lenient. But, why do we watch scary movies? For academy award winning performances? Gripping story telling? No, and no. I watch scary movies to feel like that twelve year-old boy who hid under his mother's arm, one eye closed and the other tightly squinted, adrenaline pumping and sweaty in anticipation of the next horrible sight jumping at me from the screen. And, this movie delivers that.
From creepy anticipatory music to skin crawling, hair raising demons jumping at you, I loved every second of it. My friend thought it slow at first, but I enjoyed the setup and the explanation of exactly how important this stone was that they were willing to risk life and limb for. If you are a scary movie enthusiest, don't hesitate on this one. It is a lot of fun! I recommend a box of Raisinettes, a bourbon and coke and someone who enjoys scary movies as much as you do. There is nothing that brings people closer together than fear bonding. Look it up.
I had recently discovered a book about knots in a dusty, fallen-down barn. I lacked the dexterity or spatial reasoning to tie any of them but I suspected that each knot would open a universe of capability.
"Next, we'll need to lure the ninja into the snare. Ghosts don't eat, of course, but they can smell. We need to collect the sweet honeysuckle that grows in the family graveyard on the mound next to the opening to the catacombs... by the golf course."
Ben, Paul, and I stood on the soggy-squishy lawn, watching the aspen leaves quake above the entrance to the forest at the top of the hill. We had the whole day, and we were going to use it productively.
In reality, I was a pretty disturbed kid. My mother had died suddenly a few years earlier. I had trouble making friends. I was mean and bossy and I couldn't modulate my emotions very well. I was precocious so teachers loved me until I would inevitably slash another kid with a microchip I brought for show-and-tell (true story, he's dead now, but not because of that).
But the reason I remember this whole period with such fondness is that my imagination, my creativity, was a joyful place back then. My difficulties notwithstanding, my days were full of exploring, feeling out the world around me, diving into books and movies and sports and leaves and insects and music and charcoal and clay and Hypercard.
The American Millennial Parent I am now is inclined to be horrified by some of the ways I spent my time as a kid. I'm not talking about the dangerous, crawling-in-the-sewer, riding-bikes-all-over-town-unsupervised stuff... No, I'm referring to the days when I spent ten hours watching Sister Act on repeat or playing Zelda.
There was no pressure. There was nothing telling me to stop or to move faster, that something wasn't good enough or not strategically aligned with the right goals. There was no effort as i would later come to understand effort.
Fast-forward a quarter century (yikes) and I'm 15 years into a career as a writer, photographer, designer/developer, and commercial filmmaker. I've had opportunities to practice a range of creative disciplines, to write and direct commercials, to grow and lead a company that's now 15 strong, to learn about business, how complex systems work, to build a reputation as a creative director who cares a lot, and to become a halfway decent person. Along the way, I've gotten to dirty my hands in all kinds of creative work for many thousands of hours.
But there's something very wrong. Somewhere along the way, making things became a vicious brawl between should and want, even though both seemed on the surface to be aligned. This struggle between two parts of myself who ostensibly agree (I both want and need, emotionally and economically, to make things) gradually ossified into workaholism, perfectionism, and self-flagellation, to the point where I actually began to question whether I actually wanted any of it in the first place.
Then came the doubts: Are these creative dreams just the remnant fancies of a child who's now grown up? Maybe this is just about my ego. Maybe I never grew out of an unhealthy need for external validation. Maybe I don't really have anything to say. I'm just a boring stereotype now anyway...
Encouraged by a culture of, well, whatever it is this culture is made out of, I set out to make money "doing things I love" and wound up turning them into anxiety-inducing referenda on my failures to meet my potential and realize my value to society. Inside, I could still hear the whispers of that creative voice, but they were drowned out by a voice saying "Come on, let's GOOOOO."
I would experience fleeting moments of flow where a window cracked open and I was free from judgment, riding the waves to serendipitous connections just floating on the surface of the ocean of creative solutions that's just... there.
There is satisfaction in doing a really great job for a customer. There is satisfaction in getting paid. There is satisfaction in recognition and accolades. There is satisfaction, I would even say great satisfaction, in good-old honest "hard work." And I've had plenty of all of that in my career.1
But these satisfactions simply do not compare to the feeling of being deep in creative flow, making something, watching it come together, not knowing where any of it is coming from, deeply aware but not judging anything, because it doesn't even register that there's someTHING to judge. There's nothing like it.
I didn't realize it at the time, but what I was actually doing was attempting to put out the fire of creative resistance with kerosene. I was applying greater and greater force, when the state of flow is, definitionally, the absence of force.
To complicate matters further, I have a knack for turning anything I like into part of my job. Well, I love movies, stories, and music, so I soon got to the point where I couldn't even enjoy being a simple viewer or listener anymore. Everything I did became about "my work" and "my work" never got done (other than client work with deadlines, god bless deadlines). So I had now lost the ability even to do anything "for enjoyment," particularly reading or watching a movie. I needed to find some way to make it "productive."
"Maybe if I just study how Spielberg stages dialogue scenes while I'm watching this... I should really be capturing these clips somehow. I'll need to figure out Plex to get around DRM. You know, these streams really squeeze the color and dynamic range out of everything. I should really only be watching Blurays and Bluray rips. Damnit, why have I still not read Shot by Shot cover to cover and figured out how to draw in perspective. I'll never be a filmmaker if I can't explain my ideas better visually."
There is more than one problem with perfectionism, which I will note is a bullshit concept to begin with (just one tool in the ego's self-defense Swiss Army knife), but here's the worst part: It only strengthens as time passes.
Something's wrong with this. The reason I'm writing this is because I suspect I'm not the only one who is dealing with it. It appears to just be the result of following modern western cultural psychology to its most absurdist manifestation: Total Work as the prevailing consciousness: The religion is Work, the culture is Better, and success is Best (which, of course, can never be achieved).
One of my life experiences I haven't mentioned is overcoming my deadly addiction to drugs (at 19) through spiritual means, and I have been a seeker since that important milestone (July 27, 2002). So while spiraling deeper into dissatisfaction with my work, on a parallel track, I was growing in Awareness.
With solid sets, an especially good lore, a swell secret chamber deep in a monastery, and then a sturdy good vs evil story structure, one and a half stars might surprise a viewer of this movie. Let me explain. If you set up a set in which to instrumentalize horrors the scare sequences have to come out of the sets themselves and be activated in such a way that they flow naturally from the atmosphere of the place, they have to have agency, that is. But then there is the exploitational mindset which gazes in on a setup with but rationalized emulation and for that scaffolds around a quite good set an entirely illogical plot, with every character aboard acting illogically, and then an all but autistic inability to let the scares evolve from the objects and sets themselves, but imposed by some theatrical sense of fright from without. The result is nothing but a whole sequence of false positive scares, even the scares not scaring, and many sequences that are laugh out loud silly and nonsensical, as if trying to make a horror movie in a foreign language the director cannot speak. The story is not bad, in the Renaissance, a demon is bricked up in a room behind an Inquisition seal, which is not a bad prop, forever, and then we fast forward to the present. The monastery, though the exterior shots are rural, is apparently around Rome, as underneath run the catacombs, which they talk about as if (following Spectres, as well as the whole tendency of 80s movies to find horror underground) these are the famous catacombs of Rome. Unfortunately, at no time does the movie capture the where-am-I? mazelikeness of the catacombs, and they apparently forgot that they had paintings on the walls, and not tiny niches still holding skeletons and skeletal body parts some of which, now and then, shrined, nonsensically by candles, set up a gothic memento mori, move. Even more curious is that there are also some large caverns under the monastery where the monks go to work or pray in ancient surroundings. In the first serious scare sequence a monk working on identifying the seal which has come loose, releasing the demon, is surprised by an open grave, where did that come from? and why is it there? nearby and then after he is pulled by a whoosh into the grave the talisman spins on the altar causing all the dirt in the place to fill it in and bury him. While this sequence is certainly better than a few earlier random montage scares, this one ends up a cross being pushed up to kerplunkly finish the deed, as if laughing at itself for failing to make this one scare. There is another scare when, again, why? though unique, unique in a why? way, a hourglass begins to bleed, and then another time holy smoke crawls through the catacombs too. The only good set is a secret chapel of the Celestial Light, with, in a not bad Byzantine style mural, depicts the miracle of the sight regained by a light from heaven by the first head monk there, but why Fr. Orsini is giving the American girl the tour is not clear, or her part ever made clear. The fact that in addition to having the monstrance that played a zapping part in the prelude, and then a ridiculous lifesize crucifix with Spanishstyle real hair, making you know that this thing is coming alive, also is promising, but wasted. Indeed, it turns out that there are two hauntings that follow in that space. In one the comic monk comes to pray but also secretly eat a Snickers, how evil!, so sure enough Christ comes down off the cross to sneak up behind him and give him a black-eyed boo, crucifying him on that cross, all more comic than scary. Then after Fr. Orsini is killed by being scratched to death by the roaming demon and the firebrand Fr. Martorius who believes in the demon below takes over, he expels the evil American woman for being such an abominable temptation to the brothers, though she did not seem to bathe or eat the whole time there, and sure enough she makes a visit to the Chapel to find the priest, but then when pretty boy ambivalent monk sniffing at her throughout shows up it not only turns out that, yep, bad guy was right, she is evil, she has gone black eyed possessed, but after he rubs his eyes she has changed her clothes to black and is hanging upside down on the mural next to the crucified brother menacing from behind the reappearance of the Christ on the cross. At this point, pretty boy gets hold of the monstrance and is able to turn it round toward the possessing demon and zap him back to his previous state, an then zap him away, leaving him to walk out with the girl, presumably to quit the order and have sex with her real quick. Though orchestrated theatrically OK, the main problem is that for the most part the omigod stupidity of having the girl go evil after the bad monk promised it and then her hijinx when possessed is all just laughable rationalized dot-connecting of the pieces, as opposed to story telling, so entirely fails. Sometimes a movie gives away its heart of lead by single prop or sequence, and in this case it is the sliced up Snickers bar, for this is nothing more than a candy bar chew of undigested horror tropes which does not in fact make for a horror movie.
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