Three Films Make A Post: True love never dies.

The Crow  (2024): What a mess. There’s obviously nothing wrong with re-adapting Jamie O’Barr’s classic goth comic. Even though Alex Proyas’s film is basically perfect, there would certainly be ways to do something new and interesting with the material.

Unfortunately, this was directed by the guy that brought us the live action version of Ghost in the Shell and Snow White and the Huntsman, and is consequently the sort of remake that does make not a single good decision. The characters are insufferable – and cutting out the actual human emotional heart of the proceedings is a ridiculously bad choice –, the music choices often downright bizarre, and Rupert Sanders has no sense of style or flow as a director. I sort of dig Danny Huston chewing the scenery as the film’s Big Bad, but these are low hanging fruit.

Man of War (2026): While I can’t help but feel somewhat uncomfortable with an action movie that takes place in the early stages of the Russian attack on the Ukraine, it is difficult arguing against William Kaufman being the one director working the ever shrinking field of the direct to home viewing action industry whose particular talents are best suited to this sort of thing.

Much-feted – and rightly so - by the handful of people who care for his hyperrealistic approach to modern tactical gun combat scenes, Kaufman is also able to provide enough actual human grounding to the action for it to feel organic and in contact with those parts of the human experience that aren’t violence and/or cowering in fear. The characters are clichés for a movie of this type, but breathing ones, so there are actual emotional stakes here. That the action is pretty fantastic is to be expected of Kaufman anyhow.

Webmaster (1998): You probably won’t find many people who’d call this ultra-cheap looking cyberpunk movie from Denmark of all places an actually good movie, but it certainly is an entertaining one when one is interested in watching cheap cyberpunk movies from Europe (which I obviously am).

Its future consists exclusively of the most primitive computer animation standing in for cyberspace, grotty maintenance corridors, noir tropes and general horniness, filmed in ugly colours and with the most basic blocking.

Thomas Borch Nielsen’s film certainly has a very specific vibe; if you meet it there, it’s actually a fascinating little film of a future made out of discarded bits of the past.

Aniara (2018)

Things I didn’t learn in school: in the 70s, Harry Martinson won the Nobel Price for Literature predominantly for “Aniara”, a science fiction verse epic he wrote in the 50s. So this rather late but welcome film adaptation by Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja concerns the travails of the passengers and crew of the spaceship “Aniara” that was meant to transport settlers to Mars but is knocked off course, now pointing to eternity. The story is predominantly told through the eyes of a woman we’ll only ever know as Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson), her job title as the person responsible for a half-alive room that works a bit like a more emotionally striking and individual version of Star Trek’s holodeck. Through her eyes, we witness the increasing weirdness of the now closed society of the Aniara, which slowly turns from a kind of cruise ship into an independent world full of increasingly damaged people. The captain (Arvin Kananian) – Chefone because names are weird – at first lies about the hopelessness for rescue and slowly begins to establish a quiet-ish kind of police state, though one clever enough to do little against the increasing hedonism and weird cultishness of the ship’s population. Part of the movie is the very slow love story between Mimaroben und ship officer Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro), comparing and contrasting their different reactions to the madness of their situation.

In a move that at first seems puzzling but turns out to be rather clever, Aniara is shot in a style pretty typical for contemporary arthouse naturalism. Before things become strange, this mostly emphasises how much the interior of the Aniara looks and feels like that of a mall or a holiday cruise ship, emphasising the quotidian nature of the place and its population, even if all of this is supposed to take place in the future. The further the ship moves away from home, the stranger its people and their ideas and hopes become to us, the less natural the naturalistic filmmaking approach begins to feel to the material; the filmmakers create a conscious gap between what we expect to see shot in this way, and what they are actually portraying, making things weirder by following the visual rule book of things that are the exact opposite of the weird.

Aniara balances commentary on the contemporary world too obvious to get into with the strange psychological and philosophical states its characters enter rather brilliantly. There’s a real push here to portray emotional states akin to grief and loss and depression but not quite like them anymore, turning what could be something of a space bound disaster movie visionary and strange.

Because my tastes are what they are, I can’t help but particularly enjoy whenever hints of cosmic horror pop up. Relatively early in proceedings, Mima – the not-holodock – begins spouting stranger and stranger things in a very Lovecraftian manner, infected by the unbearable grief of the humans connecting with it, until our protagonist has to shut her down violently, which does not do much for her social standing. Then there’s the final scene, which I am not going to spoil, but which is the purest expression of cosmicism (not exactly cosmic horror) I’ve seen in quite some time, or ever.

That Aniara isn’t a film meant or made for everyone, and certainly far from the kind of adventurous science fiction you can at least sell to people (and which I love, don’t get me wrong) is probably quite obvious; one might leave this bored and confused, or get sucked into it as much as I was.

Three Films Make A Post: Just how far will a government go to hide the truth?

Defence of the Realm (1985): This British conspiracy thriller by David Drury makes an interesting contrast to comparable American films where journalism beats a government conspiracy in that the British view on journalists is much less heroic than the American one – at least once the 60s rolled in - often is. Which is what a press dominated by various models of scandal rags will do to one’s opinions. Our protagonist, wonderfully embodied by Gabriel Byrne, is a bit of a shit, perfectly willing to lie, cheat and probably steal, to then turn what he writes into melodrama; but as it turns out, he’s also – to his own surprise - unable to let the lies and injustices committed by those in power go, and turns heroic despite of himself. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much of a movie.

And it’s a bit of a classic, probably a bit slow-paced for many, I’d assume, but very good at portraying the process of research, and the looming understanding of how big and at once petty this thing that’s being violently suppressed actually is. Drury’s dry but effective direction works very well with the material, and the cast includes greats like Greta Scacchi, Denholm Elliott and Ian Bannen even in the smallest roles.

Bell Book and Candle (1958): For its first two thirds, Richard Quine’s fantastical romantic comedy is pretty much the sort of delight you’d expect this sort of thing to be, with so many clever script and staging ideas one can get a bit drunk watching it. Yet it also turns into a film that seems to be not too fond of its own supposed happy ending, something that equates romantic love with pain, and can see the process of an independent woman becoming part of a couple only in a way where the woman becomes lesser. There’s certainly a feminist perspective at the way this time and place treats women and romance buried rather shallowly in the film, but it’s also too conservative a thing (plus, a big studio movie from the late 50s) to go somewhere different than the times tell it to go.

Which leaves us with a film that tries selling a woman losing her magic, her fashion sense, and her taste in exchange for tears and fifty year old James Stewart as an actual happy end, something that leaves this heterosexual male viewer rather sceptical.

Death Comes at High Noon aka Døden kommer til middag (1964): If you want to look at it that way, you can find the influence of the giallo – or influences on the giallo – everywhere. Case in point is this Danish mystery directed by Erik Balling, where an amateur detective (Poul Reichhardt) – he’s a crime writer – stumbles upon a corpse and then a whole series of other crimes committed by a very honourable citizen indeed. Its political subtext, its stylish production, and the intense way Sander flirts with female lead Helle Virkner’s character – and vice versa, in a way that would have had contemporary censors in my native Germany screaming in horror – all seem to parallel developments elsewhere in European film while also having enough regional specificity to delight friends of the regionally specific like me.

Vivarium (2019)

Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are on the young couple’s lookout for a first house. Their search leads them to an encounter with a rather peculiar estate agent (Jonathan Aris) who is really, really keen on showing them one of his houses.

The development where it is situated looks like a nightmare of bland pastels, breathing a kind of ordered artificiality that does suggest the whole thing is the product of minds who don’t quite understand concepts like houses or home. While they are exploring the house on offer, which turns out to breathe just the same kind of nightmarishly blandness as its surroundings, the estate agent disappears. Worse still, Gemma and Tom can’t find a way out of the development of perfectly identical buildings under a perfectly unchanging sky, neither on foot nor by car. In the end, they always end up at “their” house again. They are trapped.

Somebody is dropping off perfectly bland groceries tasting like a perfectly bland simulacrum of the real thing when they aren’t looking, so they do not risk dying, at least. After some time, said somebody is dropping off a baby too, with a note explaining that the couple will be freed if they take care of it.

At first, the baby seems normal enough, but it grows much faster than a normal human being would, and the boy (Senan Jennings, later Eanna Hardwicke) it becomes is even less so, copying and imitating its “parents” in ways that seem built to break them.

While I’m sure its style and tone will be annoying to quite a few viewers, to my eyes, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium is an absolute masterpiece. There aren’t terribly many movies aiming for something parallel to the tone of modern non-cosmicist weird fiction, or Robert Aickman, but this one’s not just aiming, it is hitting perfectly what it is trying to achieve.

There’s a fantastically nightmarish quality to the whole film, a design sense that perfectly suggests the setting to be a copy of something human as constructed by something deeply non-human, emphasising the passive-aggressive power of blandness and the horrors of a place that is absolutely ordered to someone else’s rules. The place Gemma and Tom find themselves in is hell, even if it isn’t the hell of Christianity, and their captors are not demons. In fact, the film isn’t calling these captors evil exactly. Instead, in one of the most interesting aspects of the film, it makes them so ambiguous it is never clear if they are malevolent, indifferent, or simply don’t understand these or any other human concepts at all. It simply makes clear there’s little difference between malevolence and indifference if the entity that is either malevolent or indifferent has nearly absolute power over you.

It’s no wonder that the characters break in these kind of surroundings even before they are ordered to take care of their very own changeling, and the way they are breaking is very well done indeed, Finnegan portraying how a very non-realistic pressure drives Gemma and Tom apart in effectively realist ways, thereby finding a way to ground a film based in something we can’t quite relate to through the humanity of his characters. Poots and Eisenberg are both very strong here, really helping to provide the film with an empathetic emotional resonance as well as the more abstract one.Their reaction to something they can’t comprehend is utterly comprehensible, and becomes increasingly heart-breaking the worse their mental states become. In fact, I have seldom seen a film where I wished some Hollywood ending for the characters; though the whole tone and style makes it clear they are doomed from the start.

And that’s before I’ve even mentioned their horrible child-thing, copying and repeating in what feels like a cruel parody of an actual child, screeching for food, and sucking all energy out of Gemma, while Tom’s simply starting to dig a hole instead of confronting what is going on. Which does obviously more than just hint toward a metaphorical angle of this being about the horrors of conformity, the fears of young parenthood, etc. Yet even though the film’s most certainly about these things, it never loses the feel of watching people confronted with something they can’t comprehend, and which can’t truly comprehend them either. That some of this also fits into some modern Fortean ideas about transdimensional entities is just added icing on the cake.

But really, what makes Vivarium so great is that it takes all of these ideas and influences and turns them into a, sometimes very darkly funny, nightmare, holding to its mood perfectly and without wavering.

Three Films Make A Post: They Beat Him, Shot Him, Framed Him For Murder-But They Couldn't Stop Him From Busting The BLACK OAK CONSPIRACY

Black Oak Conspiracy (1977): Well, really, it isn’t – as usual – as exciting as the tagline promises. Rather, this is a very middle of the road example of hicksploitation, avoiding the weirdness of the more interesting films in the genre, or politics of any kind. In combination with the pretty low exploitational values the film has in the sex and violence stakes, this gives the whole affair a pretty bland feel, despite a perfectly okay lead in Jesse Vint (playing a guy who calls himself Jingo Johnson, so there’s that, at least), perfectly decent direction by Bob Kelljan, a perfectly decent script, and whatever else you can give that sort of adjective.

It’s just not a terribly exciting film.

Mørke aka Murk (2005): This Danish thriller by Jannik Johansen about a man (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) who begins to believe the widower (Nicolas Bro) of his sister might be a serial marrier and killer of handicapped women with a suicidal past is very much a thriller in the French mould a la Chabrol. So it moves very slowly indeed, taking the utmost interest in drawing a complicated character portrait of its protagonist, but eventually coming up to a suspense finale that’s highly engaging and dramatic exactly because the film has put so much care and thought into the work of creating its central characters. Ambiguities about suicidal ideations, the various forms of guilt in survivors, the bereft, and the terminally sad abound, but the film’s darkness never quite becomes hopeless, suggesting ways out of all kinds of misery without having to stretch into the unbelievable.

The Alien Girl aka Chuzhaya (2010): This Russian crime movie with more than just a small neo-noir influence directed by Anton Bormatov on the other hand does have a pretty nasty streak, avoiding not a tiniest bit of the shittiness of character you’ll probably find in real world gangsters but still making a viewer care at least a little about these clearly doomed fools by also not denying them the softer and more human parts everybody will inevitably have. The film also does a couple of interesting things with Natalya Romanycheva’s femme fatale, giving her more ambiguity as usual while also making her just as doomed as everyone around her, suggesting a world where everyone is corrupt, corrupts others, and so can’t help but end badly, for even the wins you achieve by betrayal are only very temporary.

In short: Possessed (1999)

Original title: Besat

A man flies to Denmark from Romania, only to die shortly after from a mysterious illness whose symptoms are rather congruent with Ebola. When his boss does his very best to downplay the thing and doesn’t even put in the proper care investigating things, highly ambitious virologist Soren (Ole Lemmeke), decides this is his best bet for the big time and waltzes off to Romania with his girlfriend and student Sarah (Kirsti Eline Torhaug) in tow to trace another case with the same symptoms there. Because he has all the diplomatic ability of a Trump, things become rather hairy.

In the film’s parallel plot-line, a mysterious man (Udo Kier!) we will later learn can be described as a rogue astrologist has followed the sick man from Romania using a fake passport. He seems rather fond of burning down things while investigating something we aren’t quite sure about, so the Danish police is after him soon enough. Let’s just say that Satan is apparently a bit like a virus, and it’s time for the end of days.

This film produced by Lars von Trier’s Zentropa and directed by Anders Rønnow Klarlund is a rather interesting effort: a horror film cleverly mixing possession horror with the viral outbreak thriller made at a time when European horror wasn’t much of a thing outside of Spain and the UK, presented on a scale small enough not to need large crowd scenes of rampaging infected. In its early stages, it can be a bit of a dry movie, taking slightly more time until it allows its audience the opportunity to see some of its big picture than is strictly necessary.

In later stages, it is exactly this dryness that makes the film’s best parts work. It can be, it turns out, an efficient tactic to create suspense by underplaying things so that suddenly, a relatively simple, cleverly thought out, action sequence like Possessed's climax can turn into a bit of a nail biter. Its general understatedness does stand the film in good stead otherwise too, helping it getting around the silliness of a plot that, after all, asks its audience to believe Udo Kier is some kind of badass member of a Satan-fighting cult of astrologists, or that even someone who is as much of a prick as Soren would go so far as to dig out some grieving people’s dead son on their own property. Thing is, in the calm manner the film portrays them, these things are downright believable and logical.

On the visual side, the film does suffer a bit from the great colour shortage that seems to have struck film productions particularly in the late 90s and early 00s, so most scenes here seem to contain exactly one colour (unlike black and white films, which at least had two) - very often vomit green or urine yellow, of course, perhaps artfully representing the characters’ wish to visit the toilet soon. But seriously, despite this visual annoyance that’s very much of his film’s time, Klarlund does manage to create a sense of a darkened mood and of slowly increasing dread.


In its unassuming (Danish?) way, Possession really is a very fine movie.

Three Films Make A Post: It's too late for exorcism!

Sick for Toys (2018): David Del Rio’s horror film with a streak of very black humour is certainly a great demonstration reel for two of its actors. Camille Montgomery solves the not exactly easy job to bring a character to life that is at once childish, childlike, childishly sadistic and over-sexual, while Jon Paul Burkhart portrays a much more self-knowing kind of movie crazy person, a guy who clearly knows how ill he and his sister are yet can’t help to enable her and himself. On the plot side, there’s a nicely realized protagonist shift in the middle, and an atrocious ending that just doesn’t work as a part of the film that came before at all. As a whole, the film left me with the feeling that it’s just not quite there; there are quite a few good ideas, quite a few moments when things come together well, but things never truly cohere to form an actual whole.

Terribly Happy aka Frygtelig lykkelig (2008): This Danish black comedy/mystery directed by Henrik Ruben Genz about a cop finding himself demoted to a provincial village after a violent incident and/or nervous breakdown and having to cope with the horrifying culture of unhealthy closeness and hypocrisy of the place while getting involved in the dubious affairs of dubious people and losing the little mental stability he still had in the process does come together rather better than Del Rio’s film. This is very much a film setting out to portray the corruption under the surface not just of supposedly idyllic country life but also under the skin of everyone who pretends to be a decent upstanding person everywhere; with a side dish of hell is other people, especially if other people won’t ever let you leave the soul-destroying way of life they decide to be the proper one. Jakob Cedergren’s lead performance is rather spectacular, showing all the absurdity of the film’s situation, all the crap his character is just ignoring about himself, all his destructive and self-destructive urges while making it look easy.

Down a Dark Hall (2018): On the visual side, Rodrigo Cortés’s adaptation of a Lois Duncan novel about a group of teenage girls sent to a very peculiar and very exclusive boarding school where very weird things are going on, is a feast of contemporary gothic, not just using fantastic sets and locations right out of a gothic novel but also the older actors in the cast as mood-building props to great effect. The acting’s pretty snazzy, too, in an artificial and somewhat big way, but then the characters are rather artificial too, so this approach is only fitting.


The whole pretty moodiness of the affair is dragged down by a script that apparently imagines the audience to be impressively stupid, treating things as revelations even the mildly addled will have figured out long before the protagonists do, and wasting some perfectly good ideas concerning the poisonous character of the concept of “genius” and the possession by spirits on a much too obvious series of plot devices. Which really is a shame, for there’s quite a bit in here that should work on a metaphorical or mood level; unfortunately, the film never realizes mood and metaphor are its strengths and emphasises plotting, its weakest point, over mood again and again for little reason and certainly little gain.

Three Films Make A Post: You can change the cards you're dealt.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995): And with the third attempt, the magic disappears completely from the Die Hard movies. Willis’s John McClane is now pretty much like every other action hero thanks to the shunting away of his wife and the non-generic parts of his character. The moments of surprising veracity from the last films are gone, too, and the less said about the film’s attempt to make gestures of tackling racism via its buddy movie plot line with a Samuel L. Jackson who gives the only fun performance in the whole movie the better. The thing additionally suffers from a limp script that doesn’t seem to have much of a clue how to turn a series of action sequences into a movie.

Even worse, returning John McTiernan is at his worst here, directing action scenes that are basically competent but never fun, interesting, or exciting. I understand why everyone involved thought removing the constraints of locality of the first films to be a good idea, but replacing their tight, increasingly outrageous action sequences with Willis and Jackson racing all over New York solving stupid riddles while random stuff breaks isn’t an entertaining replacement. And don’t even get me started on Jeremy Irons’s performance that is exactly the wrong kind of cartoonish.

Another WolfCop (2017): I don’t think I exactly needed a sequel to WolfCop in my life, even if it is by returning director/writer Lowell Dean again. I especially did not need one where half the jokes are slight variations on ones from the first film. However, its (sometimes too) self-conscious charms, its goofy-gory humour and its general Canadian-ness might not quite add up to the outrageous gore and giggle-fest its (awesome) poster and its brilliant tagline (“Sequels are a disease. Meet the cure.”) promise but Another WolfCop is as good-natured and likeable as a meta-humorous pseudo-grindhouse film can get, and that’s worth something in my book.


Mara (2013): Over in Scandinavia it apparently takes three directors to make this – sometimes very pretty to look at – film about young people in a house in the woods – etc, etc. For a time, the whole affair looks and feels like your typical low budget slasher (including quite a bit of gratuitous nudity), perhaps artier shot, then it turns out to be a double-twist thriller that at least tries to play with the audience expectations towards plot twists. While I like the idea, and find the film more than competently shot, I don’t think the plot comes together well enough for the film to be interesting. Even with the twists, it’s just not very interesting, or exciting, or even fun to watch.

In short: Red Road (2006)

Warning: there will be structural spoilers!

Jackie (Kate Dickie) is working as a CCTV operator in Glasgow. Apparently, she lives a lonely life, a fortnightly appointment (one really doesn’t want to call it a date) with a married man for some of the most loveless sex I can imagine looking like the only regular social encounter in her life.

Things change when she sees a man we will later learn is named Clyde (Tony Curran) on one of her monitors. Clyde must have been involved in some sort of crime against her – a rape would be the most obvious assumption – so Jackie at first seems panicked and desperate. However, she quickly begins to do more than panic, watching Clyde, following him in person, and getting close enough for him to touch, or for her to touch him.

Andrea Arnold’s Red Road is apparently part of some kind of filmic round-robin in which Arnold and two other directors used the same group of characters, but I don’t think one needs to know that or have seen the other films to be able to appreciate the film as what it is: a study of alienation and fear; a film about recovering from loss and guilt; and a brilliant revenge flick that doesn’t play by the rules of its genre most of the time.

Despite a colour scheme dominated by grey that suggests some sort of nearly documentary approach to filmmaking, Arnold is incredibly good at a lot of techniques very much unlike a documentary. There’s expressive editing that mirrors the mental state of Jackie, a camera that seems calm and distanced until it isn’t anymore, and little moments when the greyness and the drabness (that is as much outside of Jackie as it is inside of her) subtly clear a little. Further adding weight to the film is the strength and complexity of Dickie’s and Curran’s performances in the roles of two very difficult and very complex persons who are emotionally close in a way that is so ironic it is nearly perverse.

The film’s structure is admirable – as well as highly disciplined - including a revelation about the actual nature of the relation between Jackie and Clyde I wish scriptwriters trying to use plot twists would take a look at and learn from. Not, mind you, that it feels like a plot twist (which is more often than not a cheap surprise effect) – it is a revelation of truth that is also built to shake an audience’s assumptions.


As it goes with films quite this good, I don’t really think talking Red Road up – at least my way of doing it – does the film the justice it deserves. It’s a film to be watched with an open mind, with patience and with the greatest attention; to me, it felt very much like a revelation.

Häxan (1922) and Exploitation Movies

aka Witchcraft Through the Ages

For its large middle part, Benjamin Christensen’s intensely strange peculiar silent documentary about witchcraft (through the ages, obviously) is very much the mother (or one of the mothers, if one is in a picky mood, or really into Dario Argento) of what would follow in the realm of exploitation films as well as in the sensationalist documentary with dramatic re-enactments. Talk about being a pioneering work. All irony aside, what takes Christensen so close to the idiom we know and love is really how dubious the film’s tone is at times. Sure, the film’s last chapter certainly convinces me that the director is a compassionate man who doesn’t want to see the poor, the destitute, the old and the mentally ill either in the thralls of the inquisition nor in a 1920s style asylum, but before that, he falls into the classic ambiguity of all exploitation cinema that shows horrible stuff in great detail and with great enthusiasm while loudly condemning it. That enthusiastic approach to depravity is generally what makes a viewer doubt the truthfulness of exploitation filmmakers; if you ask me, it’s also what makes (or can make, there’s always stuff made by arseholes for arseholes) exploitation films honest and fascinating, and nearly always adds to their entertainment value.

For, if we’re being honest to ourselves, we might as well admit it: most of us – me certainly included – really enjoy watching a bit of staged depravity, some simulation of good old-fashioned human cruelty, and a bit of fake torture too. But, like the movies in which we see that sort of stuff mostly do, we would not – at least I wouldn’t – participate in the charming activities of witch hunters or baby-eating witches, nor would we (at least those among us who aren’t arseholes) be sad about a world in which witch hunts and all kinds of atrocities don’t exist. When watching an exploitation film – and Häxan absolutely is one in this sense – we are actually confronted with these very different impulses much more so than in a worthy Spielberg movie about some historical stuff we are exclusively meant to be moved by and feel good about our own enlightenment. Exploitation movies don’t give us an easy out because they only ever very mildly pretend we don’t to a degree enjoy watching the ugly stuff; turns out they are a mirror.


But back to Christensen’s film for a couple of sentences or so, before I wrap this rambling piece up. And back to joyful depravity, for particularly for the friend of the macabre, there’s some great stuff to look at and let sink into one’s dreams. The witch’s Sabbath sequence is rightly famous, seeing as it is a fever dream of sexual imagery, the director himself as a tongue-waggling devil (in a costume so great, various modern films could learn from it), a thing with a skeletal horse head, baby murder, and all the joys medieval imagination brought us. But there’s also a short visit to a nunnery that should make Ken Russell’s The Devils obsolete (don’t ask me about Ken Russell), a couple of lurid sequences set in a witch coven’s lair, and some choice demonstrations of torture devices and psychological cruelty by the inquisition. Also there and accounted for are humanoid walking pigs that would have given William Hope Hodgson nightmares while also looking patently absurd, and bizarre cat costumes. Among the wonderful weirdness on display, there are also moments of the sort of great, dream-like poetry you only get from silent cinema. In Häxan’s case, much of it can be found in the least fantastic pieces of it, in the close-ups of women’s faces: the old victim of the inquisition and the young and beautiful one both suggest a hidden depth of suffering of women at the hands of men words – and certainly not words written in 1922 – can’t or won’t express. Which of course either turns Häxan into less of an exploitation film at all, or a particularly good one.

In short: Nattens engel (1998)

aka Angel of the Night

Rebecca (Maria Karlsen) has inherited the impressive mansion of her grandmother, including the dead vampire stashed away in the cellar. Where else would you put him? While poking around with her stupid boyfriend Mads (Tomas Villum Jensen) and her stupid sexually overactive best friend Charlotte (Mette Louise Holland), Rebecca relates the tale of the vampire – a former priest going by the embarrassing moniker of Rico Mortiz (mostly Erik Holmey) – and the various idiots encountering him in beautiful Copenhagen.

All this flashbacking does of course culminate in the expected reawakening of the vampire, his final death, and a scene where the part of him that was a priest is flown to heaven by an actual angel.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say Nattens engel’s director Shaky González rather liked Roberto Rodriguez’ From Dusk Till Dawn, and who could blame him? I certainly won’t. I do blame him for his film’s sad attempt at trying to imitate the surface elements of Rodriguez’ style without showing much feeling for the way they fit together in Rodriguez good (there’s no middle ground with Rodriguez – his films tend to be very good or very bad) films. It’s the kind of cargo cult filmmaking that takes all the signifiers of cool but then doesn’t use them in cool ways, and certainly doesn’t realize they are only cool when used properly. See also my entirely imaginary book, “The Zen of Coolness”.

It doesn’t help much that the script González is working from just isn’t good at all. The episodic nature of the narrative must be a godsend when shooting a low budget affair but the way it is applied here mostly makes the film feel unfocused and disjointed, robbing it of any way to build characters that are actually cool – or at least so memorable you’ll remember anything about them. The vampire lore mostly seems confused and incoherent, while the jokes are pretty darn unfunny.

The most memorable thing about the whole affair is the opportunity it provides for the star spotters among the audience. If you watch out, you’ll see Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Thomas Bo Larsen and Ulrich Thomsen in small to tiny roles. Bully for them.

Three Films Make A Post: Don't scare to sit, Don't scream to see, Don't shock if it's.....fierce!

(The) Mark of Cain (1986): This Canadian good twin/batshit twin (Robin Ward) thriller is a pretty neat little low budget thing, directed roughly yet imaginatively by Bruce Pittman whose career mostly took place in the realm of undistinguished TV work. The script is pretty okay, the setting is tight and claustrophobic, and the film's very well worth a watch if you don't expect anything earth-shaking, or crazy, or surprising.

Trance (2013): How much one enjoys Danny Boyle's neo noir Trance will absolutely depend on one's willingness to suspend disbelief when confronted with a film of perfectly convincing style and an acting ensemble (particularly Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel and James McAvoy) much better than the over-constructed series of events in the script deserves or needs; really, not since the heights of the giallo have I seen a thriller with more dubious ideas about psychology, hypnotism, and plain logic. Which isn't to say that I hated the film, or even really disliked it. Boyle pastes over the film's problems with such verve I found myself even thinking it to be rather more clever than it actually is when the third act began, a thought I was cured of when what seemed a rather cute deconstruction of the femme fatale archetype in the final, final twist turned out to be just another manipulative movie woman who doesn't care over how many dead bodies she has to step to get what she wants (though what she wants is not money, for a change).

Opstandelsen (2010): Casper Haugegaard's Danish (fast) zombie short (about 49 minutes) movie is a particularly fine example of wonderfully effective horror filmmaking of the kind you can do on a budget if you know what you’re doing. Haugegaard clearly does, so we end up with a low budget zombie movie that hits a lot of expected beats yet does it so competently it seems to be absolutely beside the point to complain you've seen it all before; because you haven't seen it all before quite like this. The film's script is particularly fine, giving the actors exactly the amount of material to work with necessary, without trying to do too much itself, nor leaving the actors out in the rain. Haugegaard even handles the whole "zombies as metaphor" thing well, treating the zombie apocalypse as just another opportunity for members of a highly dysfunctional family to keep eating away at one another even after they are dead.

The result is a bleak, well-paced, effectively gory short film that doesn’t overstay its welcome for one second.

 

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In short: Fear X (2003)

This is the movie that drove Nicolas Winding Refn's production company into bankruptcy in the director's first attempt to get a foothold in English language cinema without betraying his aesthetic interests.

And really, it's not much of a surprise Fear X flopped pretty hard, for where the film's basic plot description ("lost man played by John Turturro attempts to understand the murder of his wife by finding her murderer") suggests your run-of-the-mill vengeance thriller, the actual film is working hard to subvert the vengeance thriller with the power of the Weird and the metaphorical. Refn uses a rigorously composed visual style that hints at the surreal despite - or perhaps even because of - its rigidity. That style turns the quotidian into the unreal by the sheer power of hyperstylization, pretty clearly not caring one bit for mainstream interpretations of how "suspense" or "excitement" are built in a thriller. That doesn't mean that Fear X isn't suspenseful or exciting, for these seemingly lost elements reappear once a viewer has accepted the non-generic way the film is built, and just goes with it.

After a point (ironically shortly after the film pretends to become clearer and more "realistic"), it becomes utterly unclear what part of the film is a dream, or a hallucination, and what part "real" (as much as anything in a film ever can be real, of course); questions of truth and reality are, as they often seem to be in Refn's movies, completely dependent on one's interpretation.

To - depending on one's position on this sort of thing - either add insult to injury or cheese to your wine, Refn's film refuses the easy way out of an ending that explains anything at all. In fact, the ending Fear X delivers so steadfastly refuses to even show the audience an important part of what is or isn't happening (though there are enough hints to build one's own ending if one is so inclined) I can easily imagine a nice percentage of the film's audience actually hating the director for it. I for my part rather want to applaud him.

Technorati-Markierungen: danish movies,canadian movies,british movies,brazilian movies,nicolas winding refn,john turturro,deborah kara unger,thriller

In short: Valhalla Rising (2009)

It's the early Middle Ages, in Scotland. A mute, one-eyed man - called, if called at all "One Eye" - (Mads Mikkelsen) has been the captive of a small clan of people prone to sitting around staring into the emptiness of the Highlands for years. They use his disturbing prowess at fighting in ritual fights against other clans, but treat the man at best as a very dangerous animal. A boy (Maarten Stevenson) of the clan helps One Eye escape his chains, giving him the opportunity to slaughter his captors quite effectively.

Afterwards, One Eye and the boy wander through the hills until they meet a small group of violently minded Christians who are, as they say, on their way to the Holy Land. The man and the boy join the group, and soon find themselves on a ship bound wherever their hosts think that Holy Land might be. One Eye is given to visions with an undertone of doom, so he doesn't seem at all surprised when their ship gets stuck in an unnatural fog bank that envelopes the vessel for days on end. Some of his companions soon think that One Eye is cursed and leading them all into hell, but the man is not the sort of person one wins a violent encounter with.

After a long time, the fog lifts, and the group finds itself in a place that might be America, or hell. Obviously, danger awaits, most of it of a more spiritual nature, but there are also arrows.

An audience expecting Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising to be the movie equivalent to Viking Metal (not that there's anything wrong with that for me, mind you) will probably be disappointed by the film, as will friends of films with obvious and "realistic" (whatever that means) plotting that make themselves so clear their contents might as well be just read about instead of experienced.

Refn's film is quite unlike that sort of movie. It's more of a very violent art house film that shows enticing possibilities for more than one interpretation of its meaning, but isn't willing to play the meaning-reducing game of allegory. Which doesn't mean that there aren't elements of allegory to be found here - it would need a certain type of IMDB reviewer to miss the religious connotations - but that only seeing the allegorical possibilities would close one's view on other aspects of the film, and very possibly the part of the movie going experience that is about seeing and feeling. Large parts of the movie add up to more than mere allegory and make use of the fact that everything we see on screen can be a metaphor and something concrete in the reality of the film at once, leaving the viewer to decide on the film's meaning instead of shoving it in her face.

Much of the Valhalla Rising plays in the spaces between what's real and what's metaphorical, and I think it will work best for an audience going into it with a very open mind, willing to confront the tension between the film's gritty violence, the awe-inspiring bleakness of its locations and its indifference towards the expectation of how narrative or acting are supposed to be done on screen.

I for my part found Valhalla utterly fascinating, and Refn's insistence on making a movie that's not too readily accessible without being hermetic admirable.

 

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