CommentaryFilm

China Girls, Death Proof, and the Hidden Face

Old News: Old Noise Edition

Old News: April 1, 2019

Nicolas Winding Refn, Marginalia, and the Deaths of Cinema

CommentaryFilm

And now, let us praise Kanopy

Warren Sonbert and the Relief of Anti-Narrative

The World Is Ending and It Doesn’t Matter

The Best Films of 2018

FilmReviews

Madeline’s Madeline: An Unclassifiable Panic Attack Maybe-Masterpiece

Shoplifters Steals Moments of Wonder from the Mundane

Burning and Forgetting What’s Not There

Alien, Musicology, and Reading Soundtracks

CommentaryFilm

Shocktober III: Halloween 2018 Edition

Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery Traumatized Schoolkids in 16 mm

Shocktober 2018 II: Another Reshockening (of Horror)

Häxan is a movie made by a movie character

CommentaryFilm

Shocktober 2018

Unprofessional! Spring Night, Summer Night

The Wild Boys: A Luddite Robot Conversation

Kusama: Infinity Expands Beyond The Canvas

Home » Other » Reviews » Page 5
Category:

Reviews

CommentaryFilmFilmReviewsStreaming SelectionsTV

November Digest: New Films, Old Films, Good Films, Kingsman

by rick
written by rick

As November staggers to its close, amid an endless avalanche of horrific revelations about terrible men and also whatever calamitous idiocy the U.S. President committed while I was literally writing this sentence, some things are still good. Twin Peaks! Everyone likes Twin Peaks. Guy Maddin’s hockey enthusiasm. Nick and Nora goddamn Charles. We hold tight to these and other bright spots — along with their shadowy, Kingsman-and-Sacred–Deer-clad doubles, always on hand to remind us why we can’t have only nice things — presented here in digest form!

Here’s the monthly wrap. Thanks for reading! And, as the header image hopefully demonstrates, there’ll be more to come in December — your counter-programmings, your Liz & Rick Story Time Hours, your furry-themed holiday celebrations, your yearly retrospectives and #52FilmsByWomen and random asides about things that struck us at the very last moment before we were preparing to hit “publish.” All kinds of things! Stay tuned.

Liz

Rick

Streaming Selections

  • Oddball Films (Stephen Parr, RIP) — a remembrance of San Francisco’s pre-eminent archivist of the Weird, plus Beyond The Black Rainbow, The Five Obstructions, Get Out, and Romeo Is Bleeding
  • Starlet — capsules on Starlet, Hatchet For The Honeymoon, Mudbound, My Night at Maud’s, and the Shatterbox Anthology
0 comments
1 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
FilmReviews

The Rich Man’s Burden runs deep in Kingsman: The Golden Circle

by Lark
written by Lark

I remember being shocked at how much push-back I received when talking about the completely explicit classism of the first Kingsman movie in 2014. Hopefully, now that the sequel is a gimcrack turd, we can be more honest: both the original and its 2017 sequel, The Golden Circle, are Horatio Alger stories with guns.

The Kingsmen—the film’s non-governmental secret agents, who work out of a tailor’s and whose training includes instruction on how to use what knife—are the same type of secret world order that pops up in every Mark Millar adaptation. Like the assassins from Wanted or the superheroes from Kick-Ass, they serve as a secret backbone for the world, and on that framework director Matthew Vaughn (along with his co-writer, the nauseatingly twee Jane Goldman) have hung a story of the natural superiority of the ways of the rich.

Whatever, one supposes—the first one was goofy fun, and there’s a whiff of the fascist to any superhero movie. (It absolutely is a superhero movie, a fact the score betrays; our hero Eggsy’s superpower is, basically, code-switching.) But Kingsman: The Golden Circle’s peculiar seriousness reveals how deep this belief in the Rich Man’s Burden is.

Julianne Moore—who, as a perky supervillain drug dealer, is (like Samuel L. Jackson in the first) by far the most interesting part of the movie—has secretly poisoned all her drugs, worldwide. Every person who uses drugs is now paralyzed, and will die without her antidote, which she will only release if the War on Drugs ends and all drugs are legalized.

That’s already a lot of real-world politics for something that claims to be escapist goofery. It might be that dissonance that motivates the filmmakers to slather on subplots, leaving entire half-hours of its inexcusably long runtime (141 minutes, just 20 minutes short of Solaris in length!) to wander aimlessly through betrayals and half-setpieces—anything to avoid actually talking about the War on Drugs.

I happened to be watching an episode of The Punisher right before the film, the one in which our characters literally have a debate about gun control on the radio. It’s a truly stupid piece of media, partially because it pretends to have a serious conversation while shifting the terms. (The debate is apparently between “no guns anywhere” and “everyone has guns all the time.”) Kingsman pulls the same phony move: while pretending to be “about” drug use, it changes the terms of the debate: letting all drug users die horrible deaths or legalizing everything.

But this choice to deal with real-world issues is not a bug of the movie; it’s a necessary result of the world the series is building. Kingsman: The Secret Service, it is worth remembering, had a similar basic structure. Jackson’s Silicon Valley billionaire, in an attempt to avoid global warming and overpopulation, had a plan that revolved around releasing a rage virus around the world. Again, the specter of a very real real-world problem is raised.

But this is a natural result of separating our secret agent super-spies from a nation and a government. James Bond, obviously, was inseparable from the state for which he worked; even when he stopped international villains, it was only because Britain is in the world.

The Kingsmen instead function like a non-government organization which hovers between countries. The series is almost embarrassed at their materiality: once again, it revels in destroying the characters it has established (hope you didn’t get too attached to Sophie Cookson as “the only female agent”; she’s killed off unceremoniously 15 minutes into this). I suppose I won’t spoil which of our heroes dies in a dramatic sacrifice in the finale, but I will say it is one of the most unnecessary sacrifices in history.

The movie loves to kill off its characters because there are two forces pulling in different directions at the heart of its idea of a secret service. There is the material side, which is attached to a particular aesthetic, that of the British upper class, and the philosophical side, which is attached to the idea of governing the world—and particularly, the bodies of the “masses”.

Whatever: it’s a fart in the wind. Elton John and Julianne Moore tell each other to fuck themselves, while Colin Firth hides behind him, popping out to hit a robot dog with a bowling ball. Channing Tatum (whose role is basically a cameo, and whose Southern accent is a nightmare) basically re-enacts a scene from 21 Jump Street. It’s a big fluffy cloud of nothing, and its not worth the amount of attention one could pay it.

It should be added to Netflix, but only viewable after midnight by lonely drunks. In other words: it’s a Kingsman movie.

0 comments
1 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
FilmReviews

Saoirse Ronan is Greta Gerwig is Lady Bird

by rick
written by rick

Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) — the preternaturally calm, quirkily rebellious titular protagonist who has renamed herself Lady Bird — seems awfully familiar. As the heart of Greta Gerwig’s adorkable coming-of-age-in-Sacramento writing/directing debut, her mannerisms, her slightly antiquated vernacular and social gestures, her entire mode of qualified suburban angst and dubiously offhand witticisms call to mind something or someone we seem to know. This is a strength and a weakness.

Lady Bird tracks moments in its lead’s final year of Catholic high school, the collection of soon-to-be memories of 2002, as she exits her parents’ nest and comes into her own. There are the requisite, awkward couplings with boys, shitty end-of-year dances with gauche adornments, the looming threat and promise of college. We’ve seen this story a million times, but it’s whimsically rendered and Ronan is ideal for the role, a world away from her soulful turn in 2015’s Brooklyn; here she embodies the inarticulately smart, affectionate, slightly daft generosity of … well, of Greta Gerwig.

Cue the familiarity. A more generous reading would argue that this sense of déjà vu is personal resonance – that everyone will find themselves, with a mix of embarrassment and a nostalgic grin, in Lady Bird’s characterizations. That’s surely part of it, and speaks to the film’s greatest strengths. (I was, I am sad to report, a total Kyle.)

But on a number of structural levels, this is a different sort of familiarity. It relates to Lady Bird’s status as something of an origin story for Frances Ha, replete with Joan Didion epigram. (In the age of the superhero blockbuster, even endearingly clumsy, millennial anti-heroism gets an origin story.)

It emerges from the well-worn bildungsroman structure, an episodic treatment that calls to mind John Hughes with a Dave Matthews Band soundtrack. And it’s there, internally, in the generational doppelgangers: father Larry (Tracy Letts) and son Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues) vying for the same job in a fractured economy, mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) and Lady Bird edited together in a lyrical, final reminiscence of gauzy, car-culture Sacramento, the “Midwest of California.”

All of this is, for the most part, played loose and snappy. There aren’t too many truly mumblecore moments, but the spirit of that movement, from which Gerwig emerged as its most familiar voice, remains. Lady Bird is fast and often funny, sprinting, like its hero, from scene to scene at a breakneck pace, eager to get out of Sacramento and on with life. Individual moments ring true – especially anything involving best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein), the secret hero of the film – even if they seem to evaporate seconds later in the rush to get nowhere in particular. And, on that level, perhaps Gerwig has fashioned an acutely accurate portrait of adolescent longing.

Of some adolescences, anyway. For a film that self-consciously centers gender and class, Lady Bird is awfully quiet about race. The only non-white characters who play any real role – or, by and large, even show up on screen for that matter – are adopted brother Miguel and his girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott), both of whom Gerwig’s narrative sidelines with an almost comical shrug. (One conversational aside posits that they’ve become the same person since they started dating, which would be of a piece with both the focus on doubles and the amount of individual attention they receive from a story that thought they should be included but promptly forgot why, exactly.)

Of course, this forgetting is probably preferable to their cinematic cousin Long Duk Dong, who we remember all too well. Speaking of which, the outsized critical celebration of class-consciousness in Lady Bird is puzzling – one reviewer actually asks how many of these films even dare to address such things, as though John Bender and Claire Standish never existed, not to mention the entirety of Pretty In Pink. (Lady Bird, with its sartorial choices and even an explicit sequence in which a second-hand dress is altered at home, seems more aware of this anxiety of influence than its viewers, somehow.)

Still, Gerwig does ground Lady Bird in the economic anxieties of the time and place in a very non-Hughesian fashion. Marion’s entire character seems rooted in working-class privation, and it grants an almost believable edge to her unrelenting, borderline-manic pessimism about literally everything in her daughter’s life. Metcalf sells this beyond the script she’s provided – her reaction shot when her daughter’s date laughs that the family really does live on “the wrong side of the tracks” is heartbreaking – but you can feel the effort at every turn.

That groaning half-realism hamstrings the film’s central relationship – only in Lady Bird would its teen protagonist accept the mountain of emotional abuse heaped on her. This, we are told, is actually a brave reflection of female relationships, but it ends up lacking the honesty of Lady Bird’s friendships, relationships, and social group foibles, which benefit from Gerwig’s episodic approach. School does feel fleeting in the rush to adulthood; family doesn’t.

All of which might sound more negative than intended. Many of its faults – like “characters mov[ing] in the wrong direction on screen, so that meaningless little transitional scenes suddenly feel like a horror movie,” in Walter Chaw’s hilarious observation – reflect its first-film status. Others seem ingrained in the worldview presented, though not in any particularly awful fashion.

At its best, Lady Bird pulses with vitality, drawn from the strength its performances, its sympathy for the characters, and its unabashed affection, visual and otherwise, for Sacramento, or at least some sort of Sacramento-of-the-mind. Gerwig’s fans will warm to it immediately and her detractors likely roll their eyes a bit, for exactly the same reasons.

Which is fine. In an age of tentpole blockbusters and grueling reminders of the patriarchy at every turn, Lady Bird is still a welcome corrective — small-scale, female-centric, and guided by a personal vision.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
FilmReviews

Surveillance, Memory and the Image in Karl Marx City

by rick
written by rick

There’s no corner of cinema so explicit about its role as an act of remembrance than documentary film. Any film, in any genre, carries within it an aspect of memory — as a material object that dates from a certain moment and reflects its conditions, and as something more ethereal, something personal, cultural, and collective, subject to revisiting and remapping. Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker‘s excellent Karl Marx City explores this in fascinating ways.

Part Guy Maddin-indebted excavation of Epperlein’s family and their former lives in East Germany and part true-crime mystery, Karl Marx City is fixated on cinema’s power to document and the ways this power is deployed. The documentary is propelled forward by Epperlein’s quest to find out whether her father, who committed suicide late in life, was a STASI informant, but it’s the film’s complicated grappling with images and their meanings that most resonates.

Epperlein, her surviving family, and a crew of experts paint an intimate and unnerving portrait of life in the GDR, famously described as “the most heavily surveilled society in history.” The mundanity of life is emphasized, routines as drab and predictable as the architecture of Karl Marx City (formerly, and currently, Chemnitz), where they live. (At least Epperlein emphasizes this; with some amount of familiar maternal pride, her mom counters that it wasn’t all that bad on the day to day.) At the same time, so is the vast network of informants and cameras, and the looming threat of state pressure.

The evidence of that total control is at the heart of Karl Marx City. Epperlein and Tucker examine not just the sociological implications of constantly being looked at, but their existential consequences, and specifically what it means to have so much of your life documented and reflected back as film. Epperlein’s efforts to uncover the truth about her father are essentially deep dives into an archive; set against the backdrop of the totalitarian state, the act of understanding her own history and the work of the film historian start to blur.

And the work of the filmmaker and viewer, for that matter. Karl Marx City enjoys positing Epperlein as a detective in a film noir. Other times, she’s like a spaghetti western protagonist, marching through the town square or the endless archive with her handheld microphone rather than six-shooter.

In an early sequence, she remembers the East German films they watched, inverse Westerns where the imperialist, capitalist cowboys are shot down by the natives, the U.S. flag set on fire. In Karl Marx City, the image is always up for grabs, and therefore dangerous.

The question of memory’s ownership haunts the film. On some level, the central point is about the ways the state demands a particular kind of forgetting, and wresting back meaning from those would cage it for their purposes. Epperlein and Tucker insert actual STASI recordings into their film, eavesdropping soundscapes from another time echoing into ours, but remixed, reclaimed, redeployed for a voyeurism divorced from its original intent.

The irony, of course, is that the total surveillance of a state structure like the GDR demands total documentation, and documentation enables memory. The fact that the STASI relied so heavily on photo- and video-graphic evidence makes the GDR not just the most heavily surveilled society in history, but, in a weird way, the most cinematic. In the name of total control, the documentarians of the state insisted on creating an imagistic repository of cultural memory that exceeded their grasp.

It’s no accident that, in the wake of the GDR’s fall, citizens stormed STASI headquarters and installations — not, as Epperlein notes, to raze them in revenge, but to seize their own files. If the state’s power was located in their sole possession of information, and the constant threat of disclosure, then one of the first orders of business would be to take it back.

It is a rerouting of narrative on grand and personal scales. As an observer in Karl Marx City notes, the STASI had one story to tell when they collected these images, but he’s not interested in their story. The surreptitiously shot footage, the millions of annotated index cards, the miles of miscellaneous material cataloging every aspect of citizens’ lives end up both revealing and obscuring, creating a vast network of possibilities.

And Karl Marx City ends, as any cinematic interrogation must, with more questions. It, too, can now be located in the archive, for someone else to grapple with.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
FilmReviews

The Hollow Shocks of The Killing of a Sacred Deer

by rick
written by rick

It’s fundamentally irritating when someone is dead set on shocking you. Full of pride and vague malice, it’s a weirdly authoritarian impulse – a gesture of control that both insults you by assuming you’re a delicate flower who will wilt under the awesome power of the image, while simultaneously flattering itself by imagining the spectacle is so awesomely powerful in the first place. It’s a kid taking a shit on the kitchen floor during a dinner party, just to see what you’ll do. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is that kid, in movie form.

Of course, this is a Yorgos Lanthimos film, so the kid – smiling impishly, staring at you without blinking as he shits on the floor – is also impeccably dressed, and has much to recommend him otherwise. This incongruity, you can tell, thrills him; he really got you this time! You sigh, half-heartedly wag your finger, and get a mop, as he skips back into the main room to mischievously show your guests his genitals. What a rascal.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is the latest entry in Lanthimos’ career-long foray into absurdist amorality tales, and his weakest. Like his 2015 The Lobster, the similarly English-language and animal-centrically-titled Sacred Deer revels in treating its magical conceits as commonplace, right down to a Colin Farrell protagonist who speaks in clipped, distant monotone. But rather than that earlier, much better film’s purely imaginative locale – a resort of sorts, where uncoupled adults have to either pair up or accept being turned into an animal of their choosing – Sacred Deer takes place in the more-or-less real world, or at least Lanthimos’ approximation of it.

Farrell is Steven Murphy, a cardiologist. Sacred Deer wants very much for us to know that Steven Murphy is a cardiologist. Not only does the film begin – uh oh, here comes that waggish kid again, naughty bits in hand! – with an agonizingly long close-up of a beating heart in surgery, but he also gives speeches about cardiology and nearly every character mentions it at some point.

It’s surprising the people Dr. Murphy passes on the street don’t say Lanthimos-esque things like, “Ah, hello Dr. Steven Murphy, the cardiologist. You work with hearts, I understand, because you are a cardiologist.” (Was the director gleefully waiting for scandalized critics to describe this film as “The Lobster with its heart excised”? This is perhaps a question for Steven Murphy, the cardiologist.)

In any case, the cardiologist Steven Murphy is patriarch to a picture-perfect bourgeois family, a set of blandly-named interchangeables co-habitating in their immaculate, stagey suburban house, a stock company as much as a domestic unit.

His wife Anna (Nicole Kidman, in full Eyes Wide Shut mode) is an ophthalmologist. (Eyes!) They have a very companionable rapport, a sort of contented boredom; their sex seems exclusively based on doctor role-play with her being fake-anesthetized, because of course it does. Their adolescent daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) sings in the school choir and, we are repeatedly informed, just got her first period. Their son Bob (Sunny Suljic) needs a haircut, but is otherwise acceptable. When he grows up, he wants to be either a cardiologist or an ophthalmologist.

In its earliest sequences, Sacred Deer seems squarely aimed at pitiless satire, and it’s amusing enough. Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Filippou provide the kind of meaningless, platitude-heavy dialog we associate with Ionesco, full of repetitions, formal phrasing, and a clipped, robotic edge, an unsettling vernacular that draws attention to itself.

The effect is distancing and theatrical – an anti-mimetic spin on daily routines. (Did you know that some people consider the illusion of self-satisfied domesticity kind of phony and shit, and consider the suburbs not a reprieve from a violent world but in fact an escapist fantasy space, a class construction in which man’s inhumanity to man is revealed in its most distilled form amid buried secrets and casual cruelty? It’s true!) More enfant terrible stuff, really, but it has promise for a while.

Lanthimos, you will be unsurprised to learn, hurls a bomb into this Garden of the Automatons, and that bomb is named Martin (Barry Keoghan). His name brings Romero’s understated classic to mind, which seems hardly an accident – like Romero’s suburban “vampire,” Sacred Deer’s Martin is polite but off. (As things develop, there will be more explicit similarities.) The pimply teenager is introduced obliquely; for reasons initially left vague, he seems to spend a lot of time with Steven, alone in diners or parking lots, and this relationship is kept hidden from Anna. The cardiologist gifts him money, an expensive watch. We suspect the worst.

The worst arrives, but not in the way it’s been teased, and with the power structure inverted. Martin is in charge here. His late father had been the doctor’s patient, and died on the operating table. What had earlier seemed either an unhealthily close paternal relationship or a possible abuse situation is revealed to be something else entirely. The grinning malevolence, barely disguised as winsome charm, that Keoghan had brought to earlier scenes manifests instead as a full-blown revenge plot. Someone is going to die.

Through powers we cannot divine and which Lanthimos is admirably disinterested in explaining, the Murphys go down one by one, stricken first by paralysis and eventually copious amounts of bleeding from the eyes. Martin hastily but matter-of-factly informs his cardiologist friend that the entire family will slowly be killed unless the patriarch chooses one to sacrifice himself. Thus, the scales of universal justice will be balanced – death for death, anguish for anguish. (Is this actually commensurate? No, Martin/Yorgos, it’s not, but never mind.)

From this point on, Sacred Deer grinds its way through the narrative motions, following the straight line it’s laid out. A relationship develops between Martin and the daughter, muddying motives. Family members start angling for preferential treatment, like inmates turning on each other on the way to the gallows. The whole apparatus, the veneer of respectability, falls away. Eventually, the film doesn’t so much “draw to a close” as stop.

But like the mirrors, windows, and glass dividers that Lanthimos-regular Thimios Bakatakis lingers on in gorgeous shot after gorgeous shot, nothing coheres beyond the surfaces. (The cinematography is the real star of Sacred Deer, incidentally; the nihilism may be cheap, but it never looks it.)

Lanthimos isn’t in the business of underlining the moral of the story, nor should he be, but this is a film with even less to clumsily say than it initially appears. A plot involving a blink-or-you-miss-her Alicia Silverstone as Martin’s horny mom is introduced and promptly jettisoned. It’s not even a formal triumph; the aesthetic hollowness can’t even get close to the narrative distancing. No one, and nothing, is worth caring about here.

What are we left with, then? An anti-humanist shrug, too distant to be affecting and too cute to be mean. Pretty pictures. A set of wasted performances. (Keoghan is particularly grotesque, and I’d worry about him getting typecast if Sacred Deer were to become a hit. He probably shouldn’t worry too much about that.) And, of course, Colin Farrell dispassionately telling his son about the time he jerked off his own passed-out dad when he was a kid to see how much sperm grown men produce.

Oh, my stars. Are you shocked? Don’t be. It’s just how Yorgos is, sometimes; he thinks he’s being clever. Go back to the party. We’ll clean this up.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Reviews

Spooktober Wrap-Up: The Final Conflict

by rick
written by rick

Spooktober officially came to an end 2 days ago. Let’s wrap this business up!

You can find this year’s previous entries here, here, and here. I did not meet the criteria I set out for myself this time around, and I closed out Spooktober with a movie from the man who also brought us City Slickers. It’s been a weird adventure.

In any case, I did watch some horror movies — or horror-adjacent movies, at least — and that’s always a positive thing. Here’s one more round. Let’s never speak about horror again.

Blair Witch

My first viewing of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project remains one of my favorite film-going experiences. To say that the audience was “into it” would be a vast understatement: the ordinarily shouty crowd of teenage horror-enthusiasts at that particular cinema were stunned into a silence so total that some poor girl was shouted down for an innocuous moment of MST3K-style heckling. It was right and just, if a little intense — but people really were paying attention, straining to see and hear any nuance or variation, looking for clues on the screen. It’s hard to convey how different the film seemed at the time from your standard fare; it felt like something entirely new, something worth shouting down strangers for.

Nearly 2 decades later, that found-footage thrill has largely (though with occasional exceptions) been lost in the forest of imitators and head-scratching cash-grabs. At the very least, the surprise, and the silence it demanded, is a thing of the past. Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett seem to know this, and it’s reflected in their Blair Witch remake/homage. Here’s a movie so roaringly loud out the gate that no one in a theater would even be able to hear you if you shouted at them to be quiet.

There are jump-scares aplenty, the introduction of new visual technologies (YouTube, Gopro cameras, a drone), and retrofitted narrative tweaks. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, and none of it is really necessary. Unlike Wingard and Barrett’s other joints You’re Next and The Guest, Blair Witch isn’t so much nostalgic pastiche as an attempt to recreate a moment, but add more. And more. And more. The technical chops on display are predictably competent, but Blair Witch is little more than a noisy supplement to its game-changing predecessor. The paradox remains: a supplement assumes the original was already whole. We already had the masterpiece we needed.

Creature From The Black Lagoon

The Creature (or Gill-Man, which must’ve sounded silly even in 1954) is the one Universal Monster I have the least familiarity with, so this snuck onto my Spooktober list under the heading Classic Horror You’ve Never Seen. I’m not sure how that happened. As with a lot of iconic titles and characters, it seems to exist in some realm of the already-viewed, absorbed through cultural reference rather than, you know, actually watching it.

Which is both silly and too bad, because this is a fun bit of monster-mashing. As the Creature, Ricou Browning pulls off some balletically graceful underwater stunts, even weighted down by his monster get-up. As Gillianren writes,

Now, I’m a pretty decent, if not great, swimmer, and I wouldn’t even want to think about swimming in that costume, much less swimming and acting at the same time—and Browning was acting, make no mistake.

She’s right. The underwater sequences are the most memorable, but the film as a whole accumulates its B-movie power not just from stunts, costume, and early 3D gimmickry, but also from the Creature himself, who, like many a monster before and since, is more sad and lonely than terrifying, really.

The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb

Speaking of not being terrifying, heeeeeeere’s Hammer!

Mummy’s Tomb doesn’t feature any of the venerable UK house’s most famous names, but it still carries with it that particular whiff of respectable schlock. It’s impressively shot by Otto Heller, who also worked on Powell’s Peeping Tom (and 236 other titles), and traffics in colonial critiques, American hucksterism, and third-act horror reveals. A fine way to spend 81 minutes.

Ghostwatch

One of my favorite Spooktober surprises, Ghostwatch was totally unknown to me. I did not know it existed. I did not know it was something of a cultural phenomenon in 1992, or resulted in tens of thousands of calls to the BBC that Halloween night. I did not know it led to court actions and allegations that its airing resulted in actual deaths. I did not know it was subsequently banned for a decade and the BBC chided for irresponsibility in ever unleashing it on an unsuspecting audience.

All of which seems hard to fathom watching it now. It’s too funny and self-aware to trick anyone! But of course, unlike the new Blair Witch, Ghostwatch played before such things were old hat. The notion of actual BBC personalities starring in a live production about a fake poltergeist, complete with phony call-ins and familiar set locations, apparently boggled the minds of the viewing public, and scared the shit out of some people.

And even today, it goes to some unexpected places, turning in on itself at the close while also indicating that the evil it’s been documenting is now inside your machine, coming for you.

Inland Empire

David Lynch’s Spooktober offering is the story of 3 bipedal rabbits who live in the television. It is 3 hours long. Scarier than The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb but less scary than Ghostwatch. 5 stars.

The Living Skeleton

Directed by Hiroki Matsuno (his only credit on IMDB) and co-written by Kyûzô Kobayashi (of Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell fame), this is all late-60s Japanese-horror moodiness, some exploitation notes, skin-melting potions and ghost-ships and budget skeletons bobbing in the ocean.

I liked it. 

Severe Injuries

It’s hard to fault director/star Amy Lynn Best for the juvenile goofballery on display here. This is sub-Troma outsider art, and there is literally no other reason to watch Severe Injuries than to marvel at it. (Hell, if you’re unsure what you’re in for, the radical feminist professor who introduces her students to Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, thus setting the “madcap” plot in motion, wearing a Tromeo & Juliet t-shirt and the brief appearance of Lloyd Kaufman should clear things up.)

This is Spooktober at its dumbest, and I honestly wasn’t sure I would last the full 64 minutes. (Best knows her audience, though: the narrative is bookended by 10-minute-long credit sequences, meaning Severe Injuries effectively plays for less than 45 minutes total.)

But taken as it is — a poorly-acted, indifferently photographed no-budget slasher parody — it has its moments. If nothing else, the idea of a family of serial killers who’ve never been able to get the job done, generation after generation, is funny enough, and everyone looks like they’re having a good time, so that’s nice for them.

Tremors

On Halloween, most horror fans are probably putting on Carpenter or Hooper or Romero. Me? I watched some good old fashioned Underwood.

Why? Because Tremors is awesome, that’s why.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
FilmReviews

Empathy and Juxtaposition in The Florida Project

by rick
written by rick

There is a small, wordless scene very early on in Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project that, in its empathy and assured direction, could stand in for the film as a whole.

Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), the film’s constantly moving, relentlessly yammering 6-year-old protagonist, and her friend Scooty (Christopher Rivera) sit on the pavement, backs against a concrete wall emblazoned with a mural of oranges. Baker hasn’t provided much background on the characters yet, and none on the location. All we see, in the luminous 35 mm frame, are two children, sprawled a bit awkwardly, the way kids do, and a vast expanse of painted fruit. The camera is more or less eye-level to the kids, as it will be for much of The Florida Project.

A series of jump-cuts shows the two of them shift their positions slightly, growing bored and restless. Moonee slumps further and further to the ground, a comically physical embodiment of over-dramatic kid exasperation. There’s no dialog, and no change in camera angle. The scene lasts about 90 seconds, and you can feel every one of them.

Suddenly, they jump up and run to a door Baker hadn’t shown us, just off-screen. Moonee and Scooty are outside a restaurant, where, we will find out, they routinely come for free waffles illicitly smuggled out the back door by Scooty’s mom Ashley (Mela Murder), who works there. There is no hand-holding on the film’s part; like the kids, we just have to wait. And wait. Maybe they’d been there for an hour, or maybe for something closer to the 90 seconds we actually witnessed. To a couple of 6-year-olds on summer vacation, that can be an eternity anyway.

Brooklynn Prince, Christopher Rivera, and Valeria Cotto in Sean Baker's The Florida Project

In The Florida Project, Baker holds fast to this child’s perspective, telling a decidedly adult story of poverty on the margins through the gauzy, pastel filters of younger eyes. Like Andrea Arnold, whose films Baker’s sometimes recall, he prefers non-actors in key roles, and he found a force of nature in Prince. We follow this tornado of activity and conjured invention as she, Scooty, and their new friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) cause trouble in and around their rent-by-the-week Orlando motel, while the adults — like Ashley, Moonee’s mom Halley (Bria Vinaite), and motel manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) — go about their tedious adult business of not being children. (When Bobby shoos them out at one point, Moonee replies, “Whatever, you guys are boring anyway.”)

Those adventures all transpire in the shadow of Disney World, a seeming juxtaposition of the real and the artificial that The Florida Project relishes. Their lives are intertwined, doppelganger-like, with the Happiest Place On Earth, whether it’s the tour helicopters taking off and landing literally next door, the off-brand motels luring visitors with names suspiciously similar to their more upscale counterparts down the road, or the tourists who pass through, easy marks for a quick buck or a prank. (Halley will take Moonee along to sell wholesale perfume at a discount in parking lots; Moonee, a quick study, will tell her new friend that a local spot is “where we get free ice cream,” before marching up to a customer in line and asking if the grown-up will please buy the kids some ice cream. “We have asthma and the doctor says we need ice cream,” Scooty adds earnestly.)

Bria Vinaite and Brooklynn Prince in Sean Baker's The Florida Project

It won’t all be fun and games. From the start, Halley’s parenting tactics raise some questions, despite her fierce, beautiful love for Moonee, and small touches, like a creepy pedophile who Dafoe’s father-figure manager runs off the premises, hint at the dangers just outside the bubble of youthful glee in which The Florida Project mostly resides.

Like in Arnold’s Fish Tank, or Baker’s own 2012 Starlet, there’s the sense of a reckoning coming, that the center won’t hold, that infuses even the smallest moments with both fondness and something like dread. It’s both a childhood dread — that the summer will end, that the anxiety of 1st grade, where the only fun thing is recess, will have to be confronted — and a particularly adult one, a nostalgia tinged with genuine concern for these kids and their futures.

Baker’s previous film, 2015’s revelatory Tangerine, drew so much attention (including from this very site) for the novelty of its custom-lensed iPhone aesthetic that it’s easy to forget how driven it was by a deep and morally serious empathy. The Florida Project goes the opposite direction in one sense, dropping iPhones for 35 mm, while completely retaining that sympathy and emotional rigor. Baker presents flawed characters making dubious decisions for understandable reasons, and he does so not only without judgment but with abiding affection. It’s a tough line to walk, and you almost don’t notice the degree to which he pulls it off until the credits come up.

Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in Sean Baker's The Florida Project

All the performances are stand-outs. Prince will get awards consideration for this, and she should. Her performance is at least as worthy as any other child actor’s that’s been nominated for an Oscar, in any case. Vinaite inhabits both Halley’s virtues and vices so fully she seems like she’s playing herself. Dafoe, the cast veteran, delivers a master class in restraint; watching him modulate his gruff exterior, a requirement in a job that involves kicking people out of their short- and not-so-short-term homes, while struggling to mask his protective affection for the kids (and their parents) who tease and madden him is, again and again throughout The Florida Project, a thing of wonder. He’s quite simply one of the best we’ve got.

The way Baker and his long-time co-writer Chris Bergoch construct Dafoe’s Bobby is yet another great example of their dramatic tact. A lesser film would’ve underlined Bobby’s back-story; in The Florida Project, we get only the barest hint, and it’s plenty. The screenwriting gives the sense of something that has been hacked away at, extraneous narrative details expertly removed because we just don’t need them.

We understand these people because of what they do, where they live, what they say, even how they hold their bodies. The kids, especially Moonee, deliver wonderfully real physical performances, contorting their arms in funny ways, kicking at nothing in particular, spontaneously dancing to a song they just remembered, slumping their shoulders in boredom.

Brooklynn Prince, Christopher Rivera, and Valeria Cotto in Sean Baker's The Florida Project

For a film that transpires over the course of a few weeks and, until its drama-packed third act, basically spends its running time according to the kids’ lazy clock, there’s a lot to discuss about The Florida Project. The contrasts between the frivolous artificiality of Disney and all-too-real poverty are prominent but also obscured; everything seems somewhat artificial here, from Bobby’s new coat of purple on the motel to the discount businesses actively blurring the lines between themselves and the “official” ones they are mimicking.

Jancey lives in “Futureland” (not to be confused with what Jancey’s mom refers to simply as “the purple place”), complete with a no-budget sign straight from the 1950s. It’s a weird material juxtaposition that ends up seeming out of time entirely, a vintage future. And Baker films on real locations, edits things down naturalistically while deploying frequently Altman-esque overlap in the sound, emphasizes documented social marginalization, coaxes painfully real performances from non-actors … all in the service of a cinema of the unreal. We walk by wizard-themed gift shops and listen in on meetings with social services; we play make-believe with actual tourist castles looming in the distance and then bear child-like witness to explosive, unexpected violence in rooms you can’t legally rent for more than a month at a time. The Florida Project is interested in both poles, and all the spaces in between.

Gift shop in Sean Baker's The Florida Project

The film’s title alludes to Walt Disney’s working name for the theme park. “The Florida Project” was not intended to be an East Coast companion to its Anaheim sister resort, but rather a planned community, something of a utopian endeavor, a “test bed for new city living innovations.” He died before realizing this rather ambitious, and odd, dream, and then capitalism went to work, as is its wont.

Halley, Ashley, Moonee, Scooty, Jancey, and Bobby could all report back on how that’s worked out. But Baker’s film never labors the point. The Florida Project is well aware of the perils of fantasy, but — closing with a frantic race, surreptitiously shot inside the theme park in the film’s only iPhone footage, and then, finally, a still shot of castle and endless sky — also knows we need our dreams. Summer isn’t going to last forever.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
FilmReviews

Spooktober III (Scream Warriors) – The Bad Batch, Corridors of Blood, Cauldron of Blood, Happy Death Day, Jennifer’s Body, Prevenge

by rick
written by rick

Now that we’ve established the Spooktober premise in the first outing and developed some of the bit players while starting to drive home previously implicit character motivations in its arguably unnecessary sequel, we reach the third entry in the franchise, where either Dokken, Sam Neill, or cathode-ray-deploying Celtic death cults will inevitably play a central role.

Or will they? (No.) Here are 5 more new-to-me Spooktober titles, with an accidental emphasis on women horror directors this time around. (Or perhaps not that accidental, as #52FilmsByWomen remains a tacit, important commitment all year ’round.)

The Bad Batch

Ana Lily Aminpour’s debut A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night was one of the clear arthouse favorites of 2014, an assured, narratively quirky “Iranian vampire Western” that went for broke on ethereal mood and heavily contrasted B&W cinematography. In my (mostly) positive review at the time, I concluded by eagerly looking forward to her follow-up, billed, in a similarly irresistible log line, as a “dystopian love story in a Texas wasteland and set in a community of cannibals.”

Well, The Bad Batch certainly is all those things. It is not, however, very “good”. Aminpour’s ambition continues to outpace her ability to weave the strands together in any convincing way, and, although there are striking visual moments throughout (and even some actual horror), her sophomore outing is too messy and meandering to stick. In A Girl Walks Home, our protagonist had little to say, generally speaking, and The Bad Batch demonstrates in no uncertain terms that this was a good choice. People have some pretty dumb things to say and do in this desert, emptily philosophizing and glaring menacingly by turn. It doesn’t work.

There is almost certainly some truth to the idea that any director’s second feature — any director worth watching, at least, particularly of the Spooktober variety — will likely be ambitious and something of a mess. But when you have Keanu Reeves turn up as a post-apocalyptic House DJ / benevolent desert patriarch, sporting a sleazy mustache and delivering a monologue about pooping, and I’m still not engaged, something has gone wrong with the film.

Corridors of Blood / Cauldron of Blood

Corridors of Blood (1958)
Directed by Robert Day
Shown from left: Francis Matthews, Boris Karloff

 

Boris Karloff has turned out to be this year’s Spooktober VIP, entirely by coincidence. We already discussed The Mummy, a fantastic bit of classic Universal, and he turns up again not once but twice this time around.

As a testament to Karloff’s longevity and work ethic, it’s pretty amazing that The Mummy was released in 1932 and Cauldron of Blood just after his death in 1970, with the similarly-titled but very different Corridors of Blood straddling a mid-period in 1958. That’s a hell of a spread, career-wise.

Corridors of Blood is barely a horror: despite its lurid title, there’s little blood and, as far as I can remember, no corridors. But Karloff is excellent in the lead, a surgeon in the 1840s horrified by the pain his trade demands of patients and committed to discovering an effective anesthetic. An addiction to nitrous follows, exploited by a menacing Christopher Lee (is there another kind of Christopher Lee), and some deadly, gang-related hijinks ensue in the back bars of London. Despite only being released in the U.S. by MGM as a double-feature with the very Italian-sounding Werewolves in a Girls’ Dormitory, Corridors of Blood is actually a fairly high-minded affair, with most of the scares coming from the notion limbs being sawed off by sane, rather than mad, doctors. This is respectable stuff.

The same cannot be said of Cauldron of Blood, which does feature a lot of blood and, I think at one point, a cauldron. With nods to Corman’s Beatnik-satirizing A Bucket of Blood and the familiar beats of House of Wax, Karloff plays an elderly blind artist celebrated for his “sculptures.” He has a creepy wife/assistant intent on maintaining his fame. You can see where this is going, but it’s fun all the same. Directed by Edward Mann, who also wrote and directed a film called Hot Pants Holiday that it is now my mission to see based on its title alone.

Happy Death Day

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Jessica Rothe in a scene from “Happy Death Day.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

A comic-horror Groundhog Day homage that actually includes a verbalized reference to Groundhog’s Day, this was a lot of fun. Was this at least partly because I watched it, stoned, out of a Suburu hatchback at a drive-in movie theater, the first drive-in movie theater I’ve been to in nearly 2 decades?

In a word, yes. But Jessica Rothe and Israel Broussard are appealing in the leads, the whole affair is snappy and silly, and there’s exactly enough tank in the gas to get it to the 90-minute mark. That’s good enough, as far as I’m concerned.

Jennifer’s Body

Though not nearly as outright goofy as Happy Death Day, Karyn Kusama‘s unfairly maligned Jennifer’s Body is playing in a similarly haunted Spooktober sandbox; hell, even its Diablo Cody-penned script shares a meta-note or two.

But Kusama and Cody are slightly more serious with both the gross-outs and the vaguely Ginger Snaps-echoing focus on femininity and sisterhood. As the tellingly-named protagonist Needy, Amanda Seyfried absolutely commits to the role, and even Megan Fox seems to be having fun sending up her own image. The amount of disdain heaped on this movie was totally disproportionate to its actual offenses, and divorced from its many charms. (Adam Brody bro-mocking his bandmate into murder with the line, “Do you want to be working at the Moose Cafe all your life or do you want to be rich and awesome, like the guy from Maroon 5?” is worth the price of admission by itself.)

There’s probably a reason for that disdain, but I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that it was written, directed, and starred women in the leads. Nope. Not a thing. 

Prevenge

Alice Lowe wrote, directed, and stars as Ruth in this mostly creepy, often thoughtful bit of fetal terror. 7 months pregnant herself at the time of filming, Lowe certainly commits to the role in impressive fashion, playing a single mom-to-be whose gestating child encourages her to kill. The proximate cause? The unborn child’s father died in an “accident” she feels could’ve been prevented, and so revenge drives the narrative. But as Prevenge continues, things get decidedly murkier.

Lowe’s script gets a bit bogged down in its final third (and we really don’t need the “be Ruth-less” business), but there are haunting images throughout, along with a really melancholy undercurrent that unexpectedly turns the film into more of a meditation on grief and the body than the outright exploitation possibly communicated by its premise. Spooktober can also be a sad time, as it turns out.

Lowe injects the proceedings with both class-consciousness and anti-patriarchy: doctors (even female ones) that talk down to her, prospective employers unwilling to hire someone so late in their pregnancy, pathetically skeezy club DJs who think they’re doing her a favor by taking her home. Even the stray looks on the street from passersby are filled with an anxious energy — something between pity and fear.

Well, for most of Prevenge, it turns out the pity’s unwarranted, but the fear isn’t. As the body count climbs, to the pre-natal Omen-like delight of her unborn child, Lowe drives home her themes. With a knife! She drives them home with a knife.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
FilmReviews

Spooktober Scares, Part II: Hard Labor, The Lure, Mirror Mirror, The Mummy, Office Killer

by rick
written by rick

Yesterday, we kicked off our October horror movie run-down with an initial five viewings for the month. It would still be surprising if I scramble my way up the deadly, haunted heights of Spooktober to the eerie summit of 31 before Halloween, but it won’t be for lack of trying. Here are 5 more for the funeral pyre.

Hard Labor

Probably the only recent creepfest focused on the acquisition of a haunted grocery store, Hard Labor is as overtly class-conscious as horror comes. This is to its great credit! Helena Albergaria stars as Helen, who is struggling to maintain a middle-class existence with her recently laid-off husband Otávio (Marat Descartes).  The two have a young child, a live-in maid/nanny (Naloana Lima), and a well-furnished home, but finances are dwindling. Helen’s dream of owning and running her own shop becomes less a passion project than an economic necessity.

Of course, things do not go well at the store. Writer/directors Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas ratchet up antics from missing products to barely audible noises behind the walls to an uncanny mechanical Santa to some sort of black ooze seeping up from the ground. There are intimations something horrible happened here, and Helen starts to lose her grip. The kicker, of course, is that the store can’t just be closed; not in this economy. The cracks are just plastered over, the viscous liquids mopped up. There’s a growing sense that we’re in a space more like Argento’s ballet academy than your average grocery.

But Hard Labor is just as interested in the fraught relationships between husband and wife, wife and nanny, and boss and employee as it is in the growing unease on the shop floor. It’s an unusual entry, one in which the culprit is less an ancient evil than contemporary capitalism. Call it the 2017 Spooktober contribution to Austerity Horror.

The Lure

Some years ago in Poland, an enterprising person delivered this pitch: “Ok, here’s the thing. We have two beautiful young mermaids who are lured from the water by the intoxicating music of some young guy. But it turns out mermaids are vicious, Id-governed killers who thrive on blood. No one knows this yet, though, and so they are hired as exotic dancers at a club where men are extremely excited by the novelty of half-naked pubescent mermaids, which they seem to treat as a normal development in their dance-club-going routines. Ultimately, the mermaids struggle with their desires, carnal and emotional. Oh, and it’s a musical.”

And some other person heard this, nodded solemnly, and replied, “This sounds like the sort of thing people would love!”

And God bless that second person, because The Lure is utterly unlike anything else around. Every development is weirder than the previous one, the long fantasia musical segments are hallucinatory and beautiful (and the songs are actually pretty great!), the relationship between the leads develops along believably tragic lines, and it delivers on that promised mermaid gore. Director Agnieszka Smoczynska pulls off one of the weirder balancing acts of recent years, teasing out themes of adolescence, sisterhood, jealousy, sex, and the ideology of the body amid all the absurd mermaidenhood. Hands down, my favorite new watch of Spooktober, The Seconding.

Mirror Mirror

Sort of an Oculus meets Teen Witch affair, with funnier hats and fewer rap battles, Mirror Mirror tells the age-old story of a disaffected teen compelled to move to a new town, school, and house, and deal with the combined traumas by bonding with an ancient blood-spewing mirror that grants her darkest wishes. Like some sort of cool Carrie — or a Willow, if Willow had always been goth — our protagonist Emelin (Yvonne De Carlo) first resists the pull of black magic, but then begins to recognize its possibilities.

This movie was pretty dumb and pretty fun, a decent palate cleanser from some of Spooktober’s more challenging bits of weirdo cinema. Karen Black plays the mom, too, and she’s always a welcome addition. 

The Mummy

A year after Frankenstein (and sharing his 1932 roll call with The Old Dark House and The Mask of Fu Manchu, among others), Boris Karloff brought his particular brand of stoic unease to The Mummy, a film in which I frankly expected to encounter more lumbering mummies swathed in ancient cloth, but oh well. Karloff is more than sufficiently scary as the imposing Ardath Bey, a reincarnation of the Egyptian deity (and future genre crutch) Imhotep, out to raise his beloved from the dead.

With barely more than an icy stare, a rigid physical demeanor, and a kind of clipped politeness to his voice, Karloff infuses Bey/Imhotep with actual menace, a rarity (for me) among classic Universal horror. He also somehow avoids cross-cultural caricature, playing the part with a dignity you wouldn’t expect from the period, or, for that matter, from a force of resurrected evil. I will be the first to admit that I was a little stoned watching this, a tacit Spooktober requirement that may amplify certain aspects of certain films, but The Mummy is kind of scary, y’all!

Office Killer

Cindy Sherman is well-known and much-celebrated for many things, but Office Killer is generally not among them.

Sherman’s iconic, relentlessly ambiguous photographs — in which she shoots herself in the “guise” of various characters in different settings, characters who may or may not be attributes of their author — always carried with them a touch of the cinematic, like a vast collection of still frames from unstable films that would never be made. And her later work turned increasingly toward the grotesque and unsettling, seemingly at home in the experimental and uncanny.

Not all of this can be gleaned from Office Killer, her only film. It was also one which she disavowed, referring to herself as a “hired gun” despite the fact

that the general idea for the story was hers, that she was involved in preproduction, that she gave specific instructions to the cinematographer and the actors about what she wanted, and that she played a direct role in the editing. She is officially credited in the film’s titles for the story idea and her role as director.

All of which is too bad, because Office Killer is a particular kind of bonkers. Playing like a camp 9 to 5 — in which the over-worked, under-appreciated women actually follow through on their murderous fantasies — Office Killer features a truly unhinged Carol Kane whose transition to a “work-from-home” position demands she recreate the office in her basement with the corpses of her co-workers. On one level, this is like John Waters directing Working Girl, but there are Sherman touches throughout (particularly the placement of their bloodied bodies in parodies of their workplace personae).

Office Killer is filled with little in-jokes and self-mockery (Evil Molly Ringwald should’ve really been a thing), and the film blends comedy, horror, and arthouse camp with a huge sense of goofy pleasure. Had it not bombed, maybe we would’ve been treated next Spooktober to more cinematic visions for Cindy Sherman to disavow. I guess we’ll just have to make do with her enormous and influential non-film canon instead. 

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
ganja and hess 1280 Spooktober
FilmReviews

Limping Horrifically Through Spooktober

by rick
written by rick

Last year, I took part in the Scary Time Festival of Fright and Terror known as Spooktober, and watched 31 horror movies over the course of the month. It was fun!

I had every intention of doing so again this year — I even have a list; a weird list, sure, but a list nonetheless, with relevant criteria filled and everything — but I’ve fallen way behind. It’s increasingly unlikely I’ll hit that target, though I suppose I could give up some of my more time-wasting exercises, like sleeping, and make it happen. I guess we’ll see.

In the meantime, I have managed more than a few. Here are an initial five, with more to follow. As in the past, my hope was to focus on new watches — I imagine favorites like The Thing or Night of the Living Dead of The Happening will find their way on to the Spooktober menu eventually, and I’m fairly sure I’ve said enough about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at this point — but these titles were new to me.

The ABCs of Death

Magic Spooktober farts in The ABCs of Death

Anthologies are, by definition, a mixed bag. Some are more mixed than others. The ABCs of Death does boast an entrancing entry from Hélène Cattet/Bruno Forzani (whose The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears I very much enjoyed, and whose Amer is on this year’s list), and a few others make an impact. (“D is for Dogfight” is particularly good, and “X is for XXL” has a very brutal point to make). But this was, is, and shall remain the movie about magic farts.

Blood Feast

Spooktober Blood Feast

Boasting the twin honorifics “First Splatter Film” and also “Kind of Terrible”, Herschell Gordon Lewis‘ groundbreaking foray into blood, gore, and guts was reportedly born of his disappointment with Psycho‘s timidity.

So instead of Hitchcock’s narrative complexity and implication, we get an Egyptian guy with an inscrutable limp who brutally decapitates women in order to make a magic soup that will summon the Goddess Ishtar. He is tracked by the world’s worst policemen, and their squadron of two other guys who occasionally show up. It all culminates in the world’s worst dinner party, as you would expect. 

There’s a lot of fun to be had here with the transparently low budget, and Blood Feast is a genre essential. But you get what pay for, even at the discount Spooktober rate. I hear later Gordon Lewis marks an improvement, though that’s a pretty low bear to clear in this case.

Ganja & Hess

Spooktober vampirism in Ganja & Hess

Bill Gunn’s lurid, poetic experiment in form and experimentation bombed upon its release (despite a welcome reception at Cannes), and was radically recut by the distributor into a form disavowed by everyone involved. The French, as it turns out, were right the first time around, and Kino Lorber’s restoration shows why.

Mixing ancient anxieties of tradition and assimilation, meditations on the role of blood in Black Christianity and the street addictions he saw all around him, immersed in stark class divisions and predation on the lower strata, filled with either long silences, a laconic jazz-inflected score, and meandering discursive conversations that never seem to go anywhere in particular … this is heady stuff for a film that was intended, by its financiers, to be a seat-filling Blacula knock-off. The fact that Gunn even had the gall to assemble this particular vision rather than turn in the assignment remains fairly incredible.

Erotic, disturbing, and impossible to categorize, Ganja & Hess would’ve been hailed as a breakthrough if Antonioni had made it (or even Romero, whose Martin it sometimes vaguely resembles, in a mirror-image sort of way). Instead, it stabbed and bled its way into the counter-canon as one of the hallmarks of American Black cinema, steeped, dreamily, in the specific and the mythic at once.

Gerald’s Game

Spooktober terribleness in Gerald's Game

I did not care for Gerald’s Game. I’m very sorry.

The Hands of Orlac

Spooktober silent The Hands of Orlac

Four years after Caligari, Robert Wiene directed this retelling of Maurice Renard’s story about a successful pianist named Orlac who loses his hands, only to find them surgically replaced with the hands … of a murderer! Like some sort of proto-Ash, or the guy with the idle hands in Idle Hands, this doesn’t turn out well for Orlac and his poor wife. Conrad Veidt is wonderful in the lead, and there are some effective sequences, but the film drags, particularly when the narrative turns to the couple seeking additional income to supplement the money they’ve lost, thanks to his no-good hands, which are way more interested in killing people than playing the piano, and the final resolution ranks among the dumbest in the silents.

Still, it’s scary when your hands turn against you. That’s just a Spooktober fact.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
Newer Posts
Older Posts