Three years ago, cop Danny O’Brien (Chuck Norris) got his ass kicked by
frightening – and decidedly uncultured, you Hannibal fans will be disappointed
to hear – serial killer Simon Moon (Jack O’Halloran). Moon more or less knocked
himself out while pursuing the fleeing Danny. Danny, despite being honest about
what happened, earned himself the un-ironic – and hated by him – nickname of
“Hero” for it nonetheless, as well as a nice case of PTSD.
Danny certainly managed to live up to the hero moniker afterwards, though.
Now, his pregnant girlfriend, his former therapist Kay (Brynn Thayer), is moving
in with him, so things are definitely looking up for him. Curiously, though, his
nightmares about Moon are returning. This will turn out to be prophetic when the
killer manages to break out of psychiatric care and continues right where he
began.
This, one among a handful of films in the Cannon canon that tries to have one
of the studio’s action heroes work through a horror film plot, is certainly one
of the more interesting outings of Chuck Norris. One of the film’s more
remarkable aspects is that it is about what its title promises metaphorically as
well as literally; it is a film about a Chuck Norris style male macho hero
fighting his fears, in a genre where most protagonists aren’t even allowed to
admit they have such a thing as emotions. And it doesn’t seem only to be the
fear of getting one’s ass kicked by the mute animalistic serial killer Norris is
fighting here – having Norris playing a character suffering under a form of
post-traumatic stress after his first encounter with the big bad, is certainly a
thing to behold – but also a doubt of being a good enough person to be allowed
to have the peaceful, traditional family life he clearly craves.
In a curious twist, it’s not Norris’s Danny O’Brien who is suffering from an
actual fear of commitment here but rather his pregnant girlfriend Kay. Danny’s
doubts are not about not wanting to commit, but rather about perhaps not
deserving to commit. Now, there seems to be a simple macho logic at work here
where Danny once lost his fight against his greatest enemy and is therefor not
deserving of claiming his female prize until after reclaiming his manly
accolades in a rematch, but this reading is complicated by several facts.
Firstly, there’s the simple fact that Kay’s never played by the film as an
object, and it is indeed one of its surprising pleasures that the many scenes
between her and Danny are played for warmth and hint at the complicated feelings
between two people who know and love one another well, suggesting the film knows
that kicking serial killer ass or not does not a man make. The film, in another
choice that pleasantly surprised me, also never uses the old cliché of Moon
threatening Kay as part of the plot; there’s Danny fearing this, but
it’s not actually happening, suggesting that this one enemy and event that
defines Danny in his own eyes might not be quite as objectively central to his
life as he assumes. Nor he to the life of his arch enemy, for that matter.
It is, however, certainly central to his self definition. It seems to have
been Danny actually losing against and fleeing Moon, and getting dubbed “hero”
nonetheless when his enemy simply goes down in an accident that’s pushed O’Brien
to become an actual hero, the fear he now fights what pushed him into becoming a
better person. One also shouldn’t forget that Kay was his therapist when his
PTSD was at its worst (obviously one of somewhat dubious ethics), so meeting the
woman he wants to marry is also a product of his losing this fight. I really
can’t help looking at all of this and thinking that Hero and the Terror
doesn’t buy into a part of the (often intensely entertaining, don’t get me
wrong) macho bullshit that is part and parcel of its genre at all, and really
rather suggests that being Chuck Norris, decent human being, is a much greater
achievement than being Chuck Norris, ass-kicking machine.
Speaking of Norris, as a great detractor of the man’s acting abilities and
particularly his line delivery, I am rather dumbfounded by his performance here.
Dialogue flows from his mouth as if he were an actual human being that talks to
other human beings on a regular basis. Even better, he actually gives a good
show of himself on the important job of portraying Danny’s more fragile side.
Following what Norris does here, I can actually imagine a parallel world where
he became a decent actor specializing in the more complicated macho characters
instead of the walking, talking cartoon he actually ended up as.
As a Cannon action movie, this is a rather slow one, as befits its more
thoughtful approach to the action genre, apparently finding it at least just as
important to spend time on Danny’s inner life and his relationship to Kay than
on the all out shooting, shouting and explosions fest you’d expect coming in.
That doesn’t mean William Tannen’s film is boring, mind you – for one, the quiet
scenes are actually effective and involving, and secondly, the film does
generally put in a bit of action or another slasher-style murder by Moon when
things threaten to slow down too much. Generally, the action and horror
scenes are staged efficiently and competently, with a couple of scenes
concerning Moon and his hide-out even becoming atmospheric and tight.
Plus, there is always at least a bit of Cannon insanity coming through, my
particular favourite in this regard being the death of Steve James’s character.
It takes place in the empty Wiltern cinema, while James, nominally on guard
duty, starts off his work out routine by jogging through the empty seats of the
place to the heady beats of Mozart, until he is fatefully interrupted by Moon.
It’s an absolutely absurd scene, obviously, yet it’s also imaginative and really
rather beautiful.
The film makes fantastic use of its Los Angeles locations in more than just
this one scene. The Wiltern clearly is the star of this aspect of the film –
whoever had the idea to shoot there and enable the very mild echoes of
Phantom of the Opera that come with its use here deserves much praise –
but there’s quite a bit of personality to many of the film’s other locations
too, providing the film with a sense of place not terribly typical of Cannon’s
action output.
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
In short: A Song for the Living (2018)
When the mother of Brandon (Grayson Low) dies, he is heartbroken. He and her
were particularly close and were even still living together – the script
pleasingly not reading this as creepy for once in a movie. He doesn’t understand
why she didn’t even leave him a suicide note. However, Brandon’s mother did
indeed leave one, though it has only been found by the town’s funeral director
Fiona (Nicole Elizabeth Olson), who reads the note, keeps it, and starts a
strange kind of seduction on Brandon. When the film leaves us alone with her
sister Caterina (Kate Linder) and Caterina’s half-crazy and rather mistreated
husband Lassiter (Bob Buckley), their conversations suggest Fiona has more or
less decided to fall in love with Brandon for some reason everyone does
not quite make precise. It’s only clear it’s not a completely healthy reason,
and that there are very sinister undertones to Fiona’s understanding of
love.
Colin Floom’s and Greg Nemer’s dark fantasy tale is an interesting little film, at times poetic, at times a smidgen disturbing, and at times a bit peculiar. It mixes folkloric elements – the importance of a song for what is going on here is a particularly fine example in that regard – with a view of love that seems informed by the Romantics in their darker hours and a tone and style that’s close to the more indie side of slow horror, and certainly more interested in people and ideas than in having a spring-loaded cat jump out of a cupboard every five minutes.
Despite some frayed edges that usually come with a low budget, the film’s visual side is strong, making much out of some fine locations to create a mood that wavers between the naturalistic and the dreamlike.The acting is fine as well, Olson giving off just the right mixture of attractiveness, strangeness as well as a darker and crueller undercurrent, while Low seems perpetually lost and puzzled, which seems to be absolutely appropriate to the situation he finds himself in.
It’s not a film everyone will enjoy as much as I did, I think: there will certainly be too much ambiguity about the characters, the ending, and even what the film actually thinks about any of what it is showing for some, and the film’s particular strain of Romanticism will strike others as a bit too much. Today, I find myself much fonder of this approach than having to go through yet another film where everything’s clear but also completely conventional.
Colin Floom’s and Greg Nemer’s dark fantasy tale is an interesting little film, at times poetic, at times a smidgen disturbing, and at times a bit peculiar. It mixes folkloric elements – the importance of a song for what is going on here is a particularly fine example in that regard – with a view of love that seems informed by the Romantics in their darker hours and a tone and style that’s close to the more indie side of slow horror, and certainly more interested in people and ideas than in having a spring-loaded cat jump out of a cupboard every five minutes.
Despite some frayed edges that usually come with a low budget, the film’s visual side is strong, making much out of some fine locations to create a mood that wavers between the naturalistic and the dreamlike.The acting is fine as well, Olson giving off just the right mixture of attractiveness, strangeness as well as a darker and crueller undercurrent, while Low seems perpetually lost and puzzled, which seems to be absolutely appropriate to the situation he finds himself in.
It’s not a film everyone will enjoy as much as I did, I think: there will certainly be too much ambiguity about the characters, the ending, and even what the film actually thinks about any of what it is showing for some, and the film’s particular strain of Romanticism will strike others as a bit too much. Today, I find myself much fonder of this approach than having to go through yet another film where everything’s clear but also completely conventional.
Monday, October 15, 2018
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Epitaph (1987)
aka Mommy’s Epitaph
The Forrest family has had to move house repeatedly, their semi-nomadic lifestyle pissing off teenage daughter Amy (Natasha Pavlova) in particular. But then, this is the sort of thing you have to cope with when you’re the daughter of Martha (Delores Nascar), serial killer of men when she doesn’t manage to seduce. The whole family knows about mommy’s little problem but they all agree they do not want to see dear mother locked up somewhere, so Dad Forrest (Jimmy Williams) gets rid of the bodies while the rest pretends everything is okay. This way, Martha’s at least having sex with Forrest once in a while, as the married couple’s way of saying thank you.
However, something has to give eventually. When Martha’s already killing some poor painter before they have even properly moved into their newest home, Daddy decides to go to a psychiatrist who is supposed to take a look at his murderous lunatic of a wife. Of course, Martha would never go to a shrink herself, so he manages to convince the woman to come to the house undercover as a neighbour and try to win Martha’s trust.
As bad as this plan is, things become even more awkward when the painter turns out to be buried with quite a few knife wounds but most certainly not dead. Instead of going to the police, he instead tries to kill Amy (no idea why) and then murders Forrest with the trusty family pickaxe before Martha can kill him a second time, leaving her the only grown-up in the house. Add to this little problem that Amy is getting her first boyfriend, something the perhaps mildly misandrist Martha of course mightily disapproves of, and further violence is guaranteed.
Usually, when the tired cult film viewer sees the name of Joseph Merhi (here, as ever, paired with his eternal partner Richard Pepin who this time around co-produces, edits and shoots), he can expect to encounter a sometimes shoddy, but usually highly entertaining action film shot on the cheap. Epitaph, one of the man’s earliest films, is obviously a horror movie, but it is ridiculously entertaining, at least for viewers who can cope with cheap looking films that barely have a plot and feature highly dubious acting.
Or really, viewers like me for whom many of the film’s flaws are the actual fun. For example, nobody would ever confuse Delores Nascar’s performance with any portrayal of an actual human being, mentally ill or not, but as a combination of shrillness and grimacing buried under a ton of make-up frightening even for the 80s, she is an absolute winner, stealing hearts and carving up grandmas with the best of them.
I draw particular joy out of the lack of self-consciousness the film shows. As is so often the case, the film takes clearly place on a different planet Earth than the one we know. It’s a place where nobody ever asks after the professional painter who goes missing, where psychiatrists go undercover as fake neighbours and also aren’t missed after they encounter the deadly combination of a metal bucket, a rat, and a blow torch (insert absurd little gore effect here), where a family is bitching about their mother’s murderous way but never tries to get help going beyond a secret agent psychiatrist. It’s Direct to Video Earth at its finest, but Merhi and co treat this nonsense with conviction, as if what they are portraying weren’t goofy nonsense but serious, dark, horrifying drama. You also gotta love this thing’s enthusiasm for little dumb details, like the bloody handprints on the wall of the never finished room the painter had started on nobody ever bothers to paint over, or the fact that Amy’s school in most outside shots clearly is no such thing as a school but at least features what looks like the same cat sneaking through the background of more than one scene.
There is, not surprisingly, a grubby quality to the filmmaking. Merhi and Pepin have clearly started to develop a sense of what they are doing when shooting on the cheap, but there are still moments when the frame becomes awkwardly cramped or when locations are very obviously not what they are supposed to be. If one is of the kind of mind for this sort of thing, one can read the whole affair and the style it was made in as an attack on the idea of squeaky clean suburban living, though I’d be very surprised if anyone involved in the making of this movie did it for more than making some bucks off a cheap little horror movie. I’m not complaining, mind you, for I enjoyed my time with Epitaph quite a bit.
If you’re like me, you are now hoping for a Lifetime Channel remake of the film. It would absolutely fit into the tone of contemporary Lifetime, given the absurdity of its plot and its focus on the domestic. At least if you crank up the winking and cast Martha with Eric Roberts.
The Forrest family has had to move house repeatedly, their semi-nomadic lifestyle pissing off teenage daughter Amy (Natasha Pavlova) in particular. But then, this is the sort of thing you have to cope with when you’re the daughter of Martha (Delores Nascar), serial killer of men when she doesn’t manage to seduce. The whole family knows about mommy’s little problem but they all agree they do not want to see dear mother locked up somewhere, so Dad Forrest (Jimmy Williams) gets rid of the bodies while the rest pretends everything is okay. This way, Martha’s at least having sex with Forrest once in a while, as the married couple’s way of saying thank you.
However, something has to give eventually. When Martha’s already killing some poor painter before they have even properly moved into their newest home, Daddy decides to go to a psychiatrist who is supposed to take a look at his murderous lunatic of a wife. Of course, Martha would never go to a shrink herself, so he manages to convince the woman to come to the house undercover as a neighbour and try to win Martha’s trust.
As bad as this plan is, things become even more awkward when the painter turns out to be buried with quite a few knife wounds but most certainly not dead. Instead of going to the police, he instead tries to kill Amy (no idea why) and then murders Forrest with the trusty family pickaxe before Martha can kill him a second time, leaving her the only grown-up in the house. Add to this little problem that Amy is getting her first boyfriend, something the perhaps mildly misandrist Martha of course mightily disapproves of, and further violence is guaranteed.
Usually, when the tired cult film viewer sees the name of Joseph Merhi (here, as ever, paired with his eternal partner Richard Pepin who this time around co-produces, edits and shoots), he can expect to encounter a sometimes shoddy, but usually highly entertaining action film shot on the cheap. Epitaph, one of the man’s earliest films, is obviously a horror movie, but it is ridiculously entertaining, at least for viewers who can cope with cheap looking films that barely have a plot and feature highly dubious acting.
Or really, viewers like me for whom many of the film’s flaws are the actual fun. For example, nobody would ever confuse Delores Nascar’s performance with any portrayal of an actual human being, mentally ill or not, but as a combination of shrillness and grimacing buried under a ton of make-up frightening even for the 80s, she is an absolute winner, stealing hearts and carving up grandmas with the best of them.
I draw particular joy out of the lack of self-consciousness the film shows. As is so often the case, the film takes clearly place on a different planet Earth than the one we know. It’s a place where nobody ever asks after the professional painter who goes missing, where psychiatrists go undercover as fake neighbours and also aren’t missed after they encounter the deadly combination of a metal bucket, a rat, and a blow torch (insert absurd little gore effect here), where a family is bitching about their mother’s murderous way but never tries to get help going beyond a secret agent psychiatrist. It’s Direct to Video Earth at its finest, but Merhi and co treat this nonsense with conviction, as if what they are portraying weren’t goofy nonsense but serious, dark, horrifying drama. You also gotta love this thing’s enthusiasm for little dumb details, like the bloody handprints on the wall of the never finished room the painter had started on nobody ever bothers to paint over, or the fact that Amy’s school in most outside shots clearly is no such thing as a school but at least features what looks like the same cat sneaking through the background of more than one scene.
There is, not surprisingly, a grubby quality to the filmmaking. Merhi and Pepin have clearly started to develop a sense of what they are doing when shooting on the cheap, but there are still moments when the frame becomes awkwardly cramped or when locations are very obviously not what they are supposed to be. If one is of the kind of mind for this sort of thing, one can read the whole affair and the style it was made in as an attack on the idea of squeaky clean suburban living, though I’d be very surprised if anyone involved in the making of this movie did it for more than making some bucks off a cheap little horror movie. I’m not complaining, mind you, for I enjoyed my time with Epitaph quite a bit.
If you’re like me, you are now hoping for a Lifetime Channel remake of the film. It would absolutely fit into the tone of contemporary Lifetime, given the absurdity of its plot and its focus on the domestic. At least if you crank up the winking and cast Martha with Eric Roberts.
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Three Films Make A Post: Mary thinks there is something alive under her bed. Mary is right.
The Gate II: Trespassers (1990): Where the first The
Gate was a prime example of the early inspired phase of straightforwardly
good to great films in the directing life of Tibor Takács, this sequel pretty
much marks the man’s career turn to the more goofy nonsense side of the street.
Unfortunately, unlike many a later of Takács’s films of this kind, Gate
II doesn’t turn its silly ideas and plot full of goofy supernatural
bullshit into anything of much entertainment value. It feels less like an
attempt to go all out with fun – if not intelligence – like much of later period
Takács, but instead like a failed attempt at making a proper teen horror movie,
situating the film in that awkward place where it’s not just not a good movie,
but also a damnably uninteresting one. There are a couple of okay scenes in
here, but if you go into this for something even approaching the level of the
first film or of I, Madman, or the pure fun of Mansquito, you
will be sorely disappointed.
Redline (2009): Whereas this SF anime (apparently seven years in the making) about a far future rogue racing event as directed by Takeshi Koike is pure, goofy, fun insanity. While the plot of the thing is pretty damn minimal, every single frame of the film is stuffed full of ideas, framed by parodies and mutations of visual elements of Japanese, European and US graphical art, and set to a pounding techno beat (finally a reason for me to use that cliché!). This visual mix is surprisingly beautiful to look at, a Japanese style lens distorting and transforming ideas of other artistic streams into a beautifully grotesque, majestically goofy thing all of its own. It hardly needs mentioning that the film is breathlessly paced, full of characters shouting – often pretty funny – declarations while around them stuff explodes, nor need I say that it moves very fast or looks utterly bizarre (or, in the movie’s favourite move, all of this together). Surprisingly enough, the film finds time and space for a romance that’s actually sweet and likeable, even suggesting something like (gasp) partnership between a gal and a guy.
Waltz with Bashir (2008): And now to something completely different, yet still animated. An animated narrative documentary made by a filmmaker who has never worked in animation before, which sounds like a hard sell, particularly when said filmmaker, Ari Folman, uses the animated form to speak about his – and others - past as a soldier during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and his attempt to reconstruct a war he has lost most of his memory of. However, the result is actually a brilliant movie, speaking about memory, guilt, and the way they converge in our dreams as loudly as about the experience of war. The animated form turns out to be the only right fit for the film, providing Folman with an opportunity to turn his dreams into moving pictures without a hundred million dollar budget. At times, this is as heart-wrenching a film as I’ve seen, driven by an honest willingness to confront the repressed – be it personal or political.
Redline (2009): Whereas this SF anime (apparently seven years in the making) about a far future rogue racing event as directed by Takeshi Koike is pure, goofy, fun insanity. While the plot of the thing is pretty damn minimal, every single frame of the film is stuffed full of ideas, framed by parodies and mutations of visual elements of Japanese, European and US graphical art, and set to a pounding techno beat (finally a reason for me to use that cliché!). This visual mix is surprisingly beautiful to look at, a Japanese style lens distorting and transforming ideas of other artistic streams into a beautifully grotesque, majestically goofy thing all of its own. It hardly needs mentioning that the film is breathlessly paced, full of characters shouting – often pretty funny – declarations while around them stuff explodes, nor need I say that it moves very fast or looks utterly bizarre (or, in the movie’s favourite move, all of this together). Surprisingly enough, the film finds time and space for a romance that’s actually sweet and likeable, even suggesting something like (gasp) partnership between a gal and a guy.
Waltz with Bashir (2008): And now to something completely different, yet still animated. An animated narrative documentary made by a filmmaker who has never worked in animation before, which sounds like a hard sell, particularly when said filmmaker, Ari Folman, uses the animated form to speak about his – and others - past as a soldier during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and his attempt to reconstruct a war he has lost most of his memory of. However, the result is actually a brilliant movie, speaking about memory, guilt, and the way they converge in our dreams as loudly as about the experience of war. The animated form turns out to be the only right fit for the film, providing Folman with an opportunity to turn his dreams into moving pictures without a hundred million dollar budget. At times, this is as heart-wrenching a film as I’ve seen, driven by an honest willingness to confront the repressed – be it personal or political.
Friday, October 12, 2018
Past Misdeeds: Black Zoo (1963)
Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns
for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them
here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
Superficially, Michael Conrad (Michael Gough) leads a charmed life. He is the owner of a small, yet successful private zoo in Los Angeles, where he can live out his love for animals by holding a lot of big cats in way too small cages and feeding a guy in a gorilla suit. By night, the lions, tigers, panther and cheetahs are chilling in Michael's living room while he plays the organ for them. Curiously, seeing as he's obviously quite mad, Michael isn't living alone with his animals. He is married to chimp trainer Edna (Jeanne Cooper). She copes with Michael's erratic and abuse behaviour (he's one of those "I hit you but it won't happen again until it of course happens again and again" types) with the help of lots of booze.
Then there's Michael's mute assistant Carl (Rod Lauren). The zoo owner has had the young man under his thumb for years, systematically destroying his self respect to have a better class of helper than the mere hired help like his animal-hating zoo keeper Joe (Elisha Cook Jr.) can offer.
Of course, this very particular idyll can't last forever. Various people are real and imagined threats to Michael's lifestyle, and the zoo owner deals with these threats by letting his very cooperative animal pals loose on them, exceedingly puzzling the hilariously incompetent police with his murders.
Things come to a climax when Edna realizes how mad her husband truly is, and packs up her chimps and Carl and tries to leave.
Robert Gordon's Black Zoo is the classic case of a film that has all the elements that could make a thriller digging deep into the messed-up relationships and power imbalances in a deeply dysfunctional family by way of not exactly healthy psychology but instead applies all its energy to being as silly as possible.
Although it's easy enough to be disappointed by Gordon's - or producer and writer Herman Cohen's - decision not to make a film that's as much in the vein of Peeping Tom or Psycho as the better written parts of the script pretend it to be, the film's utter silliness does make it practically impossible not to be entertained by it. It all starts out innocent enough, if Michael Gough throwing pointed gazes around as if he were a basilisk is one's idea of innocence, at least. But before long, the film juxtaposes psycho thriller typical scenes about Michael Gough being a jerk to everyone close to him with scenes of a lot of big cats our villainous protagonist calls his children looking very relaxed on couches and settees in his living room (there's a big painting of lions on the wall, of course) while their buddy Mike creates an unholy racket on his organ.
And that's before the film presents us with a dignified big cat burial with the whole cat gang in attendance, again chilling very relaxed on a blue-lit, foggy graveyard set right out of a gothic horror movie, listening to a heartfelt speech by Gough about the deceased's particular kitty virtues.
Another moment of great hilarity follows when our hero visits the multi-cultural animal-lover cult he is a member of (which I didn't mention in the little synopsis because it has no import at all on the film's plot). There, the soul of his dead kitten is transferred to an adorable tiger cub by a high priest wearing the upper half of a dead tiger on his head (that is how true animal idolators dress) while a shirtless black guy plays the bongo and the audience mumbles rhythmically. In one of the greatest moments of acting I have ever had the joy to witness, Gough manages to keep not just a straight face throughout the scene, but one that is so full of fake intense emotion I found myself riveted and laughing tears at the very same time.
There's also an awesome swirly flashback late in the movie that explains Carl's origin story, a final battle to the death in the rain that would be dramatic and poignant if not for all the awesome nonsense that happens before, a gorilla costume that looks really good if you can overlook the fact that it doesn't look like a gorilla at all, and oh so much intense, overly dramatic ACTING by Cooper and Gough, who both manage to treat their roles with total, unwinking earnestness like the true professionals they are.
Surprisingly, given the usual budgetary standards of Cohen productions, the tenor of the script, and director Gordon's nature as typical hired gun director, all this intense, ridiculous beauty is presented with a degree of style that came unexpected to me until I realized that Black Zoo's director of photography is Floyd Crosby. Crosby was of course also the cinematographer of most of Roger Corman's best gothic horror films (and of some other fine budget productions too). His use of contrasting colours - just look at the interplay of deep blues and reds in some of the film's silliest yet most effective scenes - work exceedingly well with William Glasgow's (himself a man with an interesting filmography) more carefully realized art direction, creating a style for the film which may not be as gloriously dream-like and artificial as that of the best Corman productions of the time, but that still lifts the ridiculous up towards the sublime more than once. In fact, the sillier the given scene, the more creative energy the crew seems to have invested in its look, with the burial and the organ playing scenes ending up as particular aesthetic high points.
It's this obvious effort everyone involved put towards a script that really doesn't deserve it that explains Black Zoo's particular charm for me. I see in this not just a demonstration of dogged professionalism, but the result of a group of filmmakers putting everything they have into their cheap drive-in movie fodder instead of just phoning it in. It is this on-screen enthusiasm that helped turn every moment where I should have been laughing at the film into one where I was laughing with it, congratulating it on a job well done.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
Superficially, Michael Conrad (Michael Gough) leads a charmed life. He is the owner of a small, yet successful private zoo in Los Angeles, where he can live out his love for animals by holding a lot of big cats in way too small cages and feeding a guy in a gorilla suit. By night, the lions, tigers, panther and cheetahs are chilling in Michael's living room while he plays the organ for them. Curiously, seeing as he's obviously quite mad, Michael isn't living alone with his animals. He is married to chimp trainer Edna (Jeanne Cooper). She copes with Michael's erratic and abuse behaviour (he's one of those "I hit you but it won't happen again until it of course happens again and again" types) with the help of lots of booze.
Then there's Michael's mute assistant Carl (Rod Lauren). The zoo owner has had the young man under his thumb for years, systematically destroying his self respect to have a better class of helper than the mere hired help like his animal-hating zoo keeper Joe (Elisha Cook Jr.) can offer.
Of course, this very particular idyll can't last forever. Various people are real and imagined threats to Michael's lifestyle, and the zoo owner deals with these threats by letting his very cooperative animal pals loose on them, exceedingly puzzling the hilariously incompetent police with his murders.
Things come to a climax when Edna realizes how mad her husband truly is, and packs up her chimps and Carl and tries to leave.
Robert Gordon's Black Zoo is the classic case of a film that has all the elements that could make a thriller digging deep into the messed-up relationships and power imbalances in a deeply dysfunctional family by way of not exactly healthy psychology but instead applies all its energy to being as silly as possible.
Although it's easy enough to be disappointed by Gordon's - or producer and writer Herman Cohen's - decision not to make a film that's as much in the vein of Peeping Tom or Psycho as the better written parts of the script pretend it to be, the film's utter silliness does make it practically impossible not to be entertained by it. It all starts out innocent enough, if Michael Gough throwing pointed gazes around as if he were a basilisk is one's idea of innocence, at least. But before long, the film juxtaposes psycho thriller typical scenes about Michael Gough being a jerk to everyone close to him with scenes of a lot of big cats our villainous protagonist calls his children looking very relaxed on couches and settees in his living room (there's a big painting of lions on the wall, of course) while their buddy Mike creates an unholy racket on his organ.
And that's before the film presents us with a dignified big cat burial with the whole cat gang in attendance, again chilling very relaxed on a blue-lit, foggy graveyard set right out of a gothic horror movie, listening to a heartfelt speech by Gough about the deceased's particular kitty virtues.
Another moment of great hilarity follows when our hero visits the multi-cultural animal-lover cult he is a member of (which I didn't mention in the little synopsis because it has no import at all on the film's plot). There, the soul of his dead kitten is transferred to an adorable tiger cub by a high priest wearing the upper half of a dead tiger on his head (that is how true animal idolators dress) while a shirtless black guy plays the bongo and the audience mumbles rhythmically. In one of the greatest moments of acting I have ever had the joy to witness, Gough manages to keep not just a straight face throughout the scene, but one that is so full of fake intense emotion I found myself riveted and laughing tears at the very same time.
There's also an awesome swirly flashback late in the movie that explains Carl's origin story, a final battle to the death in the rain that would be dramatic and poignant if not for all the awesome nonsense that happens before, a gorilla costume that looks really good if you can overlook the fact that it doesn't look like a gorilla at all, and oh so much intense, overly dramatic ACTING by Cooper and Gough, who both manage to treat their roles with total, unwinking earnestness like the true professionals they are.
Surprisingly, given the usual budgetary standards of Cohen productions, the tenor of the script, and director Gordon's nature as typical hired gun director, all this intense, ridiculous beauty is presented with a degree of style that came unexpected to me until I realized that Black Zoo's director of photography is Floyd Crosby. Crosby was of course also the cinematographer of most of Roger Corman's best gothic horror films (and of some other fine budget productions too). His use of contrasting colours - just look at the interplay of deep blues and reds in some of the film's silliest yet most effective scenes - work exceedingly well with William Glasgow's (himself a man with an interesting filmography) more carefully realized art direction, creating a style for the film which may not be as gloriously dream-like and artificial as that of the best Corman productions of the time, but that still lifts the ridiculous up towards the sublime more than once. In fact, the sillier the given scene, the more creative energy the crew seems to have invested in its look, with the burial and the organ playing scenes ending up as particular aesthetic high points.
It's this obvious effort everyone involved put towards a script that really doesn't deserve it that explains Black Zoo's particular charm for me. I see in this not just a demonstration of dogged professionalism, but the result of a group of filmmakers putting everything they have into their cheap drive-in movie fodder instead of just phoning it in. It is this on-screen enthusiasm that helped turn every moment where I should have been laughing at the film into one where I was laughing with it, congratulating it on a job well done.
Thursday, October 11, 2018
In short: The Haunted Cop Shop II (1988)
Original title: 猛鬼學堂
Apparently, Hong Kong has a big problem with (mostly) Western style vampires now. Why, even a big meeting of various government suits to discuss the solution to said vampire problem is attacked by the blood-loving fiends. The city’s best bet is apparently to team their worst, most cartoonish police officers with the most ridiculous nicknames as a vampire fighting force. This group does of course include Jacky Cheung’s and Ricky Hui’s returning characters from the first movie – these nitwits are what goes for vampire hunting experts. Kitty Chan is back too, but for some reason, she’s playing a completely different character. And hey, one of them gets bitten early on and from then on turns into a one-toothed half-vampire (don’t ask) whenever the light of the moon touches him, so he actually knows quite a bit about being a vampire.
Before the bunch of idiots can actually go to work, they’re supposed to train on the grounds of a some sort of former military property. Said military failed to mention the place is full of vampires and other undead, though. Supposed hilarity ensues.
I say “supposed”, for this sequel to the actually really funny Haunted Cop Shop, again directed by Jeff Lau Chun-Wai, is about as funny as getting a tooth extracted by a ninety year old dentist. One of the film’s biggest changes in comparison to the first one is that it replaces its predecessor’s approach of having a serious horror film invaded by its comedy protagonists by just throwing goofy shit at the audience without any coherence. Now, I’ve nothing (well, not much) against randomness in comedy, but if a film consists of ninety minutes of random nonsense, it damn well better be really funny nonsense. Perhaps Wong Kar-Wai’s (who appears here in an acting cameo) contribution to the first one’s script was more important than I had initially believed.
What Cop Shop II delivers instead of fun is a series of tedious and aggressively unfunny scenes full of unlikeable characters – and way too many of them to boot – clowning around for what feels like centuries, until a finale of running through corridors, random deaths, and vampire electrocution occurs. The first film’s impeccable sense of timing is gone from nearly all of the proceedings, as is Lau’s hand for atmosphere. Even the funny duo of Cheung and Hui seems to be phoning it in. That the film seems somewhat inspired by the dreadful Police Academy films does obviously nothing to improve matters.
Apparently, Hong Kong has a big problem with (mostly) Western style vampires now. Why, even a big meeting of various government suits to discuss the solution to said vampire problem is attacked by the blood-loving fiends. The city’s best bet is apparently to team their worst, most cartoonish police officers with the most ridiculous nicknames as a vampire fighting force. This group does of course include Jacky Cheung’s and Ricky Hui’s returning characters from the first movie – these nitwits are what goes for vampire hunting experts. Kitty Chan is back too, but for some reason, she’s playing a completely different character. And hey, one of them gets bitten early on and from then on turns into a one-toothed half-vampire (don’t ask) whenever the light of the moon touches him, so he actually knows quite a bit about being a vampire.
Before the bunch of idiots can actually go to work, they’re supposed to train on the grounds of a some sort of former military property. Said military failed to mention the place is full of vampires and other undead, though. Supposed hilarity ensues.
I say “supposed”, for this sequel to the actually really funny Haunted Cop Shop, again directed by Jeff Lau Chun-Wai, is about as funny as getting a tooth extracted by a ninety year old dentist. One of the film’s biggest changes in comparison to the first one is that it replaces its predecessor’s approach of having a serious horror film invaded by its comedy protagonists by just throwing goofy shit at the audience without any coherence. Now, I’ve nothing (well, not much) against randomness in comedy, but if a film consists of ninety minutes of random nonsense, it damn well better be really funny nonsense. Perhaps Wong Kar-Wai’s (who appears here in an acting cameo) contribution to the first one’s script was more important than I had initially believed.
What Cop Shop II delivers instead of fun is a series of tedious and aggressively unfunny scenes full of unlikeable characters – and way too many of them to boot – clowning around for what feels like centuries, until a finale of running through corridors, random deaths, and vampire electrocution occurs. The first film’s impeccable sense of timing is gone from nearly all of the proceedings, as is Lau’s hand for atmosphere. Even the funny duo of Cheung and Hui seems to be phoning it in. That the film seems somewhat inspired by the dreadful Police Academy films does obviously nothing to improve matters.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Capture (2017)
Warning: I will have to spoil at least a couple of the film’s cool bits!
Hong Kong ex-pat living in the USA Sarah (Sarah Lian) has to return to the city of her earlier years because her grandmother has fallen ill, and she’s the only member of the family left that can take care of the old lady. Because this is a POV horror film, Sarah uses the shiny new camera phone her med student boyfriend gave her to film a travel diary for him. She’s mostly planning to show off her home city and her encounters with the friends – clearly the kids of rich parents and ex-pats who sent their children to a posh English language school – she hasn’t seen since the end of her high school days when she moved to the USA, but there’s quite a lot of disturbing stuff going on around her. It’s July, ghost month, you see, so the gates are open for a rather nasty series of supernatural events. At first, it seem to be random supernatural shenanigans, but it slowly becomes clear the events taking place now are connected to the reason Sarah left Hong Kong in the first place, and something is working towards a rather unpleasant goal for her.
I didn’t expect much at all going into Georgia Lee’s Capture, for POV movies supposedly filmed on the cells of their doomed main characters are a dime a dozen now, and horror films about Americans – which Sarah functionally is – meeting horrible ends in foreign countries are as a rule a pretty dire group. However, the film at hand turned out to be quite a bit better than I expected (or feared).
Firstly, Lee doesn’t use the cellphone source of the footage as an excuse to not put any thought into staging and blocking of scenes; instead, she seems to treat this basic conceit as a challenge to still create a film that’s moody and carefully staged. There are some very impressive moments shot with relatively static camera angles that use the strange intimacy of the POV form to creepy effect, but the camera also moves a lot in suspiciously non-shaky ways where the characters always get the right angle on something.
Of course, and here we come to the spoilers, there’s a reason for the cameras in this particular POV film always filming the interesting stuff – unlike many a camera in other POV films - for this is one of the examples of the style that turns the cameras themselves into parts of the supernatural menace, even going so far as giving us a literal murder cam later in the film. Even better, the ghost possessing the cameras and cellphones in the film is actually written as the ghost of a person for whom this particular habit makes sense, filming Sarah – if she wanted to or not – having been one of his habits when he was still alive as well, the film doubling down on the horror of being stalked. There’s obviously a nice bit of mirroring happening between Sarah returning to a place where a guy stalked her and filmed her only to start filming herself there, too, in hindsight adding a particular frisson to the film’s early stages.
So, yes, this is indeed a POV horror film that doesn’t just look really good but that’s also written with a degree of thought and care you don’t often find in the format (well, unless it’s a Koji Shiraishi film), with actual thematic heft circling not just the menacing element of cameras being everywhere but also thinking about the way this might reshape human relationships.
Capture further recommends itself with a dark ending that actually hits home for once because the film does indeed put in the effort to make Sarah likeable and human, her past guilt not as huge as the horror-affine viewer would at first suspect, and so her final fate genuinely upsetting and unfair. A possible feminist reading concerning a very concrete male gaze should be rather obvious, too, but Lee doesn’t feel the need to emphasise this aspect of her movie specifically; it’s there for anyone to see as a part of Capture, but it’s not the only reason for the film to exist.
The script, as should be obvious by now, is really rather good, suggesting elements of the character backgrounds without feeling the need to endlessly reiterate them, drawing characters and scenes quickly yet thoroughly. There is indeed quite a bit of suggested stuff going on in the background, of Sarah not just leaving an old friend behind in high school but eschewing him stepping up the class ladder, of her being disquieted by now returning to Hong Kong and realizing that her former home isn’t quite a place she can as instinctively manoeuvre in as you should in the place you think of as home. There’s more intelligence to the script than might be strictly needed for a relatively straightforward film, even, but one shouldn’t complain about a film doing more and thinking more than it strictly needs to.
There are also quite a few nice shots of Hong Kong locations that find the good middle between touristy showing off of the places this was shot in and using them well for the plot – there’s a sense of place to this movie version of Hong Kong I wouldn’t have expected of it.
All of this comes together to form one really rather fine horror film, as well as one that suggests that there’s no problem with POV horror a good director like Lee can’t solve.
Hong Kong ex-pat living in the USA Sarah (Sarah Lian) has to return to the city of her earlier years because her grandmother has fallen ill, and she’s the only member of the family left that can take care of the old lady. Because this is a POV horror film, Sarah uses the shiny new camera phone her med student boyfriend gave her to film a travel diary for him. She’s mostly planning to show off her home city and her encounters with the friends – clearly the kids of rich parents and ex-pats who sent their children to a posh English language school – she hasn’t seen since the end of her high school days when she moved to the USA, but there’s quite a lot of disturbing stuff going on around her. It’s July, ghost month, you see, so the gates are open for a rather nasty series of supernatural events. At first, it seem to be random supernatural shenanigans, but it slowly becomes clear the events taking place now are connected to the reason Sarah left Hong Kong in the first place, and something is working towards a rather unpleasant goal for her.
I didn’t expect much at all going into Georgia Lee’s Capture, for POV movies supposedly filmed on the cells of their doomed main characters are a dime a dozen now, and horror films about Americans – which Sarah functionally is – meeting horrible ends in foreign countries are as a rule a pretty dire group. However, the film at hand turned out to be quite a bit better than I expected (or feared).
Firstly, Lee doesn’t use the cellphone source of the footage as an excuse to not put any thought into staging and blocking of scenes; instead, she seems to treat this basic conceit as a challenge to still create a film that’s moody and carefully staged. There are some very impressive moments shot with relatively static camera angles that use the strange intimacy of the POV form to creepy effect, but the camera also moves a lot in suspiciously non-shaky ways where the characters always get the right angle on something.
Of course, and here we come to the spoilers, there’s a reason for the cameras in this particular POV film always filming the interesting stuff – unlike many a camera in other POV films - for this is one of the examples of the style that turns the cameras themselves into parts of the supernatural menace, even going so far as giving us a literal murder cam later in the film. Even better, the ghost possessing the cameras and cellphones in the film is actually written as the ghost of a person for whom this particular habit makes sense, filming Sarah – if she wanted to or not – having been one of his habits when he was still alive as well, the film doubling down on the horror of being stalked. There’s obviously a nice bit of mirroring happening between Sarah returning to a place where a guy stalked her and filmed her only to start filming herself there, too, in hindsight adding a particular frisson to the film’s early stages.
So, yes, this is indeed a POV horror film that doesn’t just look really good but that’s also written with a degree of thought and care you don’t often find in the format (well, unless it’s a Koji Shiraishi film), with actual thematic heft circling not just the menacing element of cameras being everywhere but also thinking about the way this might reshape human relationships.
Capture further recommends itself with a dark ending that actually hits home for once because the film does indeed put in the effort to make Sarah likeable and human, her past guilt not as huge as the horror-affine viewer would at first suspect, and so her final fate genuinely upsetting and unfair. A possible feminist reading concerning a very concrete male gaze should be rather obvious, too, but Lee doesn’t feel the need to emphasise this aspect of her movie specifically; it’s there for anyone to see as a part of Capture, but it’s not the only reason for the film to exist.
The script, as should be obvious by now, is really rather good, suggesting elements of the character backgrounds without feeling the need to endlessly reiterate them, drawing characters and scenes quickly yet thoroughly. There is indeed quite a bit of suggested stuff going on in the background, of Sarah not just leaving an old friend behind in high school but eschewing him stepping up the class ladder, of her being disquieted by now returning to Hong Kong and realizing that her former home isn’t quite a place she can as instinctively manoeuvre in as you should in the place you think of as home. There’s more intelligence to the script than might be strictly needed for a relatively straightforward film, even, but one shouldn’t complain about a film doing more and thinking more than it strictly needs to.
There are also quite a few nice shots of Hong Kong locations that find the good middle between touristy showing off of the places this was shot in and using them well for the plot – there’s a sense of place to this movie version of Hong Kong I wouldn’t have expected of it.
All of this comes together to form one really rather fine horror film, as well as one that suggests that there’s no problem with POV horror a good director like Lee can’t solve.
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Enter the Devil (1972)
Warning: I need to spoil some of the film’s details, but I do believe anyone
has had enough time to see it by now.
All around the hunting lodge and part-time mine of one Glenn (Joshua Bryant), people disappear or die under mysterious circumstances. Well, mysterious circumstances if you aren’t the audience, for we know they are killed by a cult of robe-wearing evil-doers carrying crosses (the proper way round) who like to walk picturesquely through the desert night carrying burning torches while chanting in Latin. Most of their early victims are racist rapists, though, so we’re not sure how bad this cult actually is.
While hunters are leaving because the body count doesn’t quite run the way they want, anthropologist Leslie (Irene Kelly) arrives at the lodge. She believes the area to be a hot spot of some kind of religious activity that mixes pre-Christian rituals with the accoutrements of Christianity and tries to find someone, anyone, willing to talk to her about it. Which would probably be easier if she spoke Spanish or actually, you know, made efforts to talk the people around. She also finds time to let herself be romanced by Glenn. What woman, after all, doesn’t lust after the kind of 70s macho who always interrupts her when she starts expounding on her theories? I am being sarcastic, if you didn’t notice. But then, Glenn will turn out to be evil in other regards, too.
Texan filmmakers Frank Q. Dobbs’s Enter the Devil is, as they say in modern parlance “problematic”. Hell, I think its racial politics were even “problematic” for 1972, what with this being all about a cult of evil Mexicans – with one token white guy who surprises the pulp reader by at least not being their leader - sacrificing white people for their Catholic/pagan religious mash-up. It certainly doesn’t help that impression when I add that the film’s climax consist of all the brown people being gunned down by a group of white Texan good old boys. So yeah, if you want to watch an early 70s horror film and not be offended by this sort of thing, this is certainly something to avoid.
Despite my objections against the film’s racial politics – which I suspect not to be the point of the film but just prejudices drifting in combined with a lack of reflection by the way – I actually enjoyed it quite a bit once I started to look at it more as visual pulp. While the pacing is a bit too slow even for the tastes of 70s regional cinema, the film is carried by an exceptional sense of place and time (one might argue the film’s less than pleasant racial politics even add to that) that seems as close to putting the viewer into desert country in Southwest Texas in the early 70s as we can get from here. Particularly responsible here is Michael F. Cusack’s (whose only credit this film seems to be) beautiful photography that mixes early 70s grit, clever camera placement and a poetic eye for the use of natural light, torch light and so on to create a remarkable feeling of place.
The final third, with a series of sequences taking place in the desert and various caves at night, is particularly great, Cusack’s work adding a truly eerie mood to what otherwise would have been a pretty bland story of a somewhat random cult.
All around the hunting lodge and part-time mine of one Glenn (Joshua Bryant), people disappear or die under mysterious circumstances. Well, mysterious circumstances if you aren’t the audience, for we know they are killed by a cult of robe-wearing evil-doers carrying crosses (the proper way round) who like to walk picturesquely through the desert night carrying burning torches while chanting in Latin. Most of their early victims are racist rapists, though, so we’re not sure how bad this cult actually is.
While hunters are leaving because the body count doesn’t quite run the way they want, anthropologist Leslie (Irene Kelly) arrives at the lodge. She believes the area to be a hot spot of some kind of religious activity that mixes pre-Christian rituals with the accoutrements of Christianity and tries to find someone, anyone, willing to talk to her about it. Which would probably be easier if she spoke Spanish or actually, you know, made efforts to talk the people around. She also finds time to let herself be romanced by Glenn. What woman, after all, doesn’t lust after the kind of 70s macho who always interrupts her when she starts expounding on her theories? I am being sarcastic, if you didn’t notice. But then, Glenn will turn out to be evil in other regards, too.
Texan filmmakers Frank Q. Dobbs’s Enter the Devil is, as they say in modern parlance “problematic”. Hell, I think its racial politics were even “problematic” for 1972, what with this being all about a cult of evil Mexicans – with one token white guy who surprises the pulp reader by at least not being their leader - sacrificing white people for their Catholic/pagan religious mash-up. It certainly doesn’t help that impression when I add that the film’s climax consist of all the brown people being gunned down by a group of white Texan good old boys. So yeah, if you want to watch an early 70s horror film and not be offended by this sort of thing, this is certainly something to avoid.
Despite my objections against the film’s racial politics – which I suspect not to be the point of the film but just prejudices drifting in combined with a lack of reflection by the way – I actually enjoyed it quite a bit once I started to look at it more as visual pulp. While the pacing is a bit too slow even for the tastes of 70s regional cinema, the film is carried by an exceptional sense of place and time (one might argue the film’s less than pleasant racial politics even add to that) that seems as close to putting the viewer into desert country in Southwest Texas in the early 70s as we can get from here. Particularly responsible here is Michael F. Cusack’s (whose only credit this film seems to be) beautiful photography that mixes early 70s grit, clever camera placement and a poetic eye for the use of natural light, torch light and so on to create a remarkable feeling of place.
The final third, with a series of sequences taking place in the desert and various caves at night, is particularly great, Cusack’s work adding a truly eerie mood to what otherwise would have been a pretty bland story of a somewhat random cult.
Monday, October 8, 2018
Sunday, October 7, 2018
The Haunted Cop Shop (1987)
Original title: 猛鬼差館
Macky Kim (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) and Man Chiu (Ricky Hui Koon-Ying) are your typical Hong Kong comedy cops, which is to say, they are of dubious mental capacity, morals, and work ethics, like a couple of nasty little boys somebody thought it to be a good idea to arm. Not that anyone else we meet in their station is any better, of course.
As it happens, the titular cop shop our protagonists are based in was a Japanese officer’s club during World War II, where quite a few suicides took place once the Japanese side lost their part of the war. So clearly, there’s going to be no problem at all when the high point of ghost month comes around.
Well, except for the part where the excellently named Sneaky Ming (Billy Lau Nam-Kwong), brought to confession by our heroes by pretending to be ghosts in one of the film’s best scenes, loses a rigged Mah-jongg game against some of the place’s ghosts and is tasked with bringing Japanese general Issei (Rico Chu Tak-On) back to the world of the living. Issei, it will turn out, is a Western style vampire for no reason the film ever explains, complete with awesome/ridiculous and definitely snazzy high-collared cape, and Sneaky is going to be his first victim. When Sneaky attempts to explain the situation to our cop heroes, they don’t believe him until contact with the sun turns him to dust. Their boss is so displeased with this turn of events – and certainly doesn’t believe any of their talk about the supernatural – he calls in Chief Superintendent Fanny Ho (Kitty Chan Ga-Chai) to exclusively supervise Macky Kim and Man Chiu. Eventually, these three incompetents will team up to fight the vampires running round Hong Kong.
Jeff Lau Chun-Wai’s The Haunted Cop Shop is pretty much exactly what you assume a Hong Kong horror comedy made in 1987 to be. As in many a comedy from the city, its heroes would be absolutely vile if they weren’t as ridiculous as they are, and still the film manages to make their misadventures entertaining for other reasons than mere Schadenfreude. Having as a film’s – comedy or not – protagonists police personal that’s quite this hilariously incompetent wouldn’t fly at all in contemporary Hong Kong – not to even speak of mainland China – anymore, so viewed from today, Macky Kim’s and Man Chiu’s personalities even look a bit like social criticism. I am pretty sure it wasn’t actively meant that way in 1987. These are just standard Hong Kong comedy characters who look like something a bit different in hindsight.
Anyway, nobody’s going to watch this because of hard hitting social criticism but for the series of often actually funny, usually weird, and plentifully absurd things our supposed heroes encounter. Lau, working from a script by himself and a young Wong Kar-Wai – who is the last guy you’d expect to have written any of this – is very good at giving a film that’s actually mostly a series of loosely connected episodes a feeling of directed movement, making the whole affair much more satisfying than you’d expect. It does of course help rather heavily that many of the episodes are really rather funny, from time to time even playing with audience expectations of its genre.
My favourite bit of this sort of business comes when our heroes, looking for the vampires randomly stumble into the convenience store of Chung Fat Pak (indeed played by Chung Fat). Chung Fat Pak, it turns out, was once a successful Taoist exorcist. So successful there wasn’t anything left for him to exorcise, therefore the convenience store. Which he at once proves by having a short yet wonderful kung fu fight against two vampires, demonstrating the most awesome staking technique ever put to celluloid. Chung Fat, the audience will probably assume, is going to be the film’s Lam Ching-Ying type character (see the Mr Vampire films), the ultra competent master to the bumbling idiot protagonists. Then the boss vampire appears, rips off one of his arms, and Chung Fat sacrifices himself so that said bumbling protagonists can get away.
As in practically all Hong Kong comedies of this style, there are scenes of inspired slapstick – the bit early on where Sneaky Ming is ghost-bullied into confession is a perfect example –, scenes of wonderful surrealism, as well a couple of scenes that bring home this isn’t a film made anywhere but in Hong Kong. How about that bit where our heroes decide their new boss is going to believe their tales about ghosts and ghoulies when they ruin her luck by getting her to eat dog meat? Or several scenes that teach the importance of wearing one’s panties on one’s head when trying to fend off ghosts? I never got any of that reading M.R. James, that much’s for sure.
Lau does some rather fine work not only with the film’s pacing but also when it comes to staging the supernatural encounters in the right – often blue as you might imagine – light. When the film’s not laugh out loud funny, it is very moody indeed, never making the mistake of turning its supernatural threats into slapstick characters too. That’s after all what the protagonists are for, so large parts of the film consist of the three idiots stumbling through sets, set pieces and situations that would be rather fine straightforward horror if The Haunted Cop Shop weren’t populated by the kind of guys who dress up like their big antagonist just to teach their friends some pithy lesson.
Macky Kim (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau) and Man Chiu (Ricky Hui Koon-Ying) are your typical Hong Kong comedy cops, which is to say, they are of dubious mental capacity, morals, and work ethics, like a couple of nasty little boys somebody thought it to be a good idea to arm. Not that anyone else we meet in their station is any better, of course.
As it happens, the titular cop shop our protagonists are based in was a Japanese officer’s club during World War II, where quite a few suicides took place once the Japanese side lost their part of the war. So clearly, there’s going to be no problem at all when the high point of ghost month comes around.
Well, except for the part where the excellently named Sneaky Ming (Billy Lau Nam-Kwong), brought to confession by our heroes by pretending to be ghosts in one of the film’s best scenes, loses a rigged Mah-jongg game against some of the place’s ghosts and is tasked with bringing Japanese general Issei (Rico Chu Tak-On) back to the world of the living. Issei, it will turn out, is a Western style vampire for no reason the film ever explains, complete with awesome/ridiculous and definitely snazzy high-collared cape, and Sneaky is going to be his first victim. When Sneaky attempts to explain the situation to our cop heroes, they don’t believe him until contact with the sun turns him to dust. Their boss is so displeased with this turn of events – and certainly doesn’t believe any of their talk about the supernatural – he calls in Chief Superintendent Fanny Ho (Kitty Chan Ga-Chai) to exclusively supervise Macky Kim and Man Chiu. Eventually, these three incompetents will team up to fight the vampires running round Hong Kong.
Jeff Lau Chun-Wai’s The Haunted Cop Shop is pretty much exactly what you assume a Hong Kong horror comedy made in 1987 to be. As in many a comedy from the city, its heroes would be absolutely vile if they weren’t as ridiculous as they are, and still the film manages to make their misadventures entertaining for other reasons than mere Schadenfreude. Having as a film’s – comedy or not – protagonists police personal that’s quite this hilariously incompetent wouldn’t fly at all in contemporary Hong Kong – not to even speak of mainland China – anymore, so viewed from today, Macky Kim’s and Man Chiu’s personalities even look a bit like social criticism. I am pretty sure it wasn’t actively meant that way in 1987. These are just standard Hong Kong comedy characters who look like something a bit different in hindsight.
Anyway, nobody’s going to watch this because of hard hitting social criticism but for the series of often actually funny, usually weird, and plentifully absurd things our supposed heroes encounter. Lau, working from a script by himself and a young Wong Kar-Wai – who is the last guy you’d expect to have written any of this – is very good at giving a film that’s actually mostly a series of loosely connected episodes a feeling of directed movement, making the whole affair much more satisfying than you’d expect. It does of course help rather heavily that many of the episodes are really rather funny, from time to time even playing with audience expectations of its genre.
My favourite bit of this sort of business comes when our heroes, looking for the vampires randomly stumble into the convenience store of Chung Fat Pak (indeed played by Chung Fat). Chung Fat Pak, it turns out, was once a successful Taoist exorcist. So successful there wasn’t anything left for him to exorcise, therefore the convenience store. Which he at once proves by having a short yet wonderful kung fu fight against two vampires, demonstrating the most awesome staking technique ever put to celluloid. Chung Fat, the audience will probably assume, is going to be the film’s Lam Ching-Ying type character (see the Mr Vampire films), the ultra competent master to the bumbling idiot protagonists. Then the boss vampire appears, rips off one of his arms, and Chung Fat sacrifices himself so that said bumbling protagonists can get away.
As in practically all Hong Kong comedies of this style, there are scenes of inspired slapstick – the bit early on where Sneaky Ming is ghost-bullied into confession is a perfect example –, scenes of wonderful surrealism, as well a couple of scenes that bring home this isn’t a film made anywhere but in Hong Kong. How about that bit where our heroes decide their new boss is going to believe their tales about ghosts and ghoulies when they ruin her luck by getting her to eat dog meat? Or several scenes that teach the importance of wearing one’s panties on one’s head when trying to fend off ghosts? I never got any of that reading M.R. James, that much’s for sure.
Lau does some rather fine work not only with the film’s pacing but also when it comes to staging the supernatural encounters in the right – often blue as you might imagine – light. When the film’s not laugh out loud funny, it is very moody indeed, never making the mistake of turning its supernatural threats into slapstick characters too. That’s after all what the protagonists are for, so large parts of the film consist of the three idiots stumbling through sets, set pieces and situations that would be rather fine straightforward horror if The Haunted Cop Shop weren’t populated by the kind of guys who dress up like their big antagonist just to teach their friends some pithy lesson.
Saturday, October 6, 2018
Three Films Make A Post: VENGEFUL GIANTS...STORMING ACROSS A TERROR-GRIPPED LAND!
Húsið: Trúnaðarmál aka The House (1983):
Egill Eðvarðsson’s haunted house movie about a teacher for deaf kids and her
composer boyfriend getting a house very, very cheaply and paying for it dearly
is well-directed, well-acted, and from time to time oh so very 80s even though
it is pretty much the opposite of what you’d call an 80s horror film. It’s also,
the IMDb informs me, the first Icelandic film to have a screen credit for a
stunt double, which is a bit ironic in a film that is quite as slow-going as
this one. Now, I generally don’t mind a slow film but there’s being slow and
careful, and then there’s slowing everything down for no particular reason, the
film at hand slowly crawling into the latter category. Despite some moody
moments and the exotic bonus a film gets by being one of the handful of
Icelandic horror films, this one’s also not terribly effective: neither as a
ghost story nor as the sort of psychological study it clearly has ambitions on
being.
Ice Queen (2005): If you have always dreamed about a film that grafts bits – mostly the “jokes” – taken from atrocious sex comedies to a would-be SyFy movie said channel wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole because it’s so bad, you’re in luck with Neil Kinsella’s epic. If you’re, well, sane, you’ll have to look forward to snowboarding scenes, a fake avalanche from planet fake, a monster that is basically an ice-based version of Smurfette after a very bad week, hilariously weak acting, and of course a lot of feet-dragging. It’s not pretty.
Lake Placid 3 (2010): If you’re generally not convinced by the charms of the SyFy Original movie, this second direct-to-SyFy sequel to “Ally McBeal vs. The Gators” directed by Griff Furst certainly won’t change your mind, what with it being, well, pretty crap. It goes through the usual SyFy Original dance of really bad jokes (well, admittedly there are one or two that made me snort), the usual family stuff made worse by the fact that the more typical teenage-daughter-as-portrayed-by-an-actress-in-her-mid-20s has been replaced by a particularly stupid little boy, and features blurry CGI crocodiles that seem to float over their surroundings. Unlike in a lot of the more entertaining films of the Channel, the action and suspense sequences aren’t much fun, and apart from a somewhat funny turn by Yancy Butler as a poacher, and a bit of Michael Ironside slumming, there’s really no one else on screen who either can or is willing to act. It’s still much better than Ice Queen, mind you.
Ice Queen (2005): If you have always dreamed about a film that grafts bits – mostly the “jokes” – taken from atrocious sex comedies to a would-be SyFy movie said channel wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole because it’s so bad, you’re in luck with Neil Kinsella’s epic. If you’re, well, sane, you’ll have to look forward to snowboarding scenes, a fake avalanche from planet fake, a monster that is basically an ice-based version of Smurfette after a very bad week, hilariously weak acting, and of course a lot of feet-dragging. It’s not pretty.
Lake Placid 3 (2010): If you’re generally not convinced by the charms of the SyFy Original movie, this second direct-to-SyFy sequel to “Ally McBeal vs. The Gators” directed by Griff Furst certainly won’t change your mind, what with it being, well, pretty crap. It goes through the usual SyFy Original dance of really bad jokes (well, admittedly there are one or two that made me snort), the usual family stuff made worse by the fact that the more typical teenage-daughter-as-portrayed-by-an-actress-in-her-mid-20s has been replaced by a particularly stupid little boy, and features blurry CGI crocodiles that seem to float over their surroundings. Unlike in a lot of the more entertaining films of the Channel, the action and suspense sequences aren’t much fun, and apart from a somewhat funny turn by Yancy Butler as a poacher, and a bit of Michael Ironside slumming, there’s really no one else on screen who either can or is willing to act. It’s still much better than Ice Queen, mind you.
Friday, October 5, 2018
Past Misdeeds: Day of the Animals (1977)
Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
It's the late 70s, and the ozone layer has become thin. So thin, in fact, that animals living in higher altitudes begin to act rather strangely. Our former furry friends become more aggressive, begin to hunt in packs even when they're not pack animals, and also develop the sort of fiendish intelligence that leads to things like dogs driving people into cars full of snakes, and what looks like a non-aggression pact between all non-human species. As further developments during the course of the movie will show, the phenomenon - except for the "becoming more intelligent" part - does not stop with animals; the lowest form of human life on the planet - ad executives - can be influenced by it too.
Consequently a merry little - unarmed, foodless - hiking trip of professional hiking trip leader Steve "let's send the hurt woman and her husband alone to the ranger station" Buckner (Christopher George) and a whole load of disaster movie fodder characters through the Sierra soon turns rather unpleasant. Steve really should have known better than to make a trip with a bunch of city slickers consisting of a couple going on an extreme hiking trip to fix their marriage, a freshly divorced woman from Beverly Hills (Ruth Roman) and her son (Bobby Porter), a former professional American Football player dying of bone cancer (Paul Mantee), a professor of exposition (Richard Jaeckel), a TV anchor-woman (Lynda Day George), a racist asshole of an ad executive (Leslie Nielsen shortly before he transformed himself into a deadpan comedian forever), and a random young couple (Andrew Stevens and whoever that actress is). Even with the tempering influence of Native American - of course wise to the ways of the woods and the heart - Daniel Santee (definitely not Native American Michael Ansara), it wouldn't need raving animals to lead these people into a disaster.
But as it stands, disaster in form of raving animals does strike soon enough, with animals attacking in the least typical manner, the group splitting up, bickering and then splitting up some more, and the people in the best position to help having their own animal troubles. It's the sort of thing that can only climax (in what is the film's actual climax even though the film's nominal one comes afterwards) in a shirtless Leslie Nielsen mud-wrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting and raving about "Melville's god" and having tried to rape a woman.
Ladies and gentlemen, even though Day of the Animals may not conform to many people's concept of a good film, it very well may be director William Girdler's magnum opus. While all Girdler films recommend themselves to people of taste with moments of utter lunacy (see for example the Grizzly versus Helicopter fight in Grizzly, or the indescribable finale of The Manitou), the sympathetic viewer usually has to cope with quite a bit of boredom and scenes without much of a function beyond bringing a film to feature length to get to them. Here, however, Girdler has found his sweet spot of all nonsense all the time. The director provides his audience with every 70s eco horror shenanigan he could think of, only to stop from time to time for always amusing classic disaster movie non-characterisation with a side-line of the most horribly wrong "romantic" dialogue this side of the 50s. Regarding the latter, let's just say that Buckner's way of romantic banter is based on inviting the TV anchor into his "woodsmen course".
Girdler could of course not afford the ménage of Hollywood has-beens and nearly-beens a disaster movie usually needs so had to go with actors with a bit or a lot of TV experience instead, but as it turns out, TV actors are just as good at eating up the scenery as Michael Caine when he needs to pay for his yacht.
As is probably quite clear by now, sensible pacing and plot logic are completely out of the question for Day of the Animals. I don't think there's any need for me to go into the film's plot holes, nor the idiocy of all characters involved, nor the bizarre logic of the way the animals act. However, a logical or well-structured movie could not contain (and I have to repeat that) a scene of middle-aged, shirtless Leslie Nielsen mudwrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting about "Melville's god", nor various scenes where our heroes are outwitted by dogs, nor one where Walter Barnes's Ranger Tucker is attacked by what can only be described as flying rats, which provides further fuel for my theory that logic and structure are just terribly overrated.
However, this kind of 70s cheese is not the only thing that makes Day of the Animals worth watching. To my great surprise as someone who has never had anything good to say about Girdler as a director, the film also features a handful of scenes where it actually works as a horror film. Those among the animal attack scenes that aren't completely ridiculous (so about half of them) are actually quite tense to watch. Even better, whenever the film puts its mind to treating its animal attack story as an apocalyptic event, it develops some of the bleak and pessimistic air so typical of 70s horror, with some effective scenes of disturbed characters wandering through a deserted small town. It is quite possible, not to say probable, that Girdler arrives at the points where his apocalypse actually works despite of himself, just because that sort of thing was in the air at the time. For my tastes, every even just slightly effective moment of world-ending doom in a movie is to be treasured, for whatever reason it comes to pass, so Day of the Animals provides me with double the joy.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
It's the late 70s, and the ozone layer has become thin. So thin, in fact, that animals living in higher altitudes begin to act rather strangely. Our former furry friends become more aggressive, begin to hunt in packs even when they're not pack animals, and also develop the sort of fiendish intelligence that leads to things like dogs driving people into cars full of snakes, and what looks like a non-aggression pact between all non-human species. As further developments during the course of the movie will show, the phenomenon - except for the "becoming more intelligent" part - does not stop with animals; the lowest form of human life on the planet - ad executives - can be influenced by it too.
Consequently a merry little - unarmed, foodless - hiking trip of professional hiking trip leader Steve "let's send the hurt woman and her husband alone to the ranger station" Buckner (Christopher George) and a whole load of disaster movie fodder characters through the Sierra soon turns rather unpleasant. Steve really should have known better than to make a trip with a bunch of city slickers consisting of a couple going on an extreme hiking trip to fix their marriage, a freshly divorced woman from Beverly Hills (Ruth Roman) and her son (Bobby Porter), a former professional American Football player dying of bone cancer (Paul Mantee), a professor of exposition (Richard Jaeckel), a TV anchor-woman (Lynda Day George), a racist asshole of an ad executive (Leslie Nielsen shortly before he transformed himself into a deadpan comedian forever), and a random young couple (Andrew Stevens and whoever that actress is). Even with the tempering influence of Native American - of course wise to the ways of the woods and the heart - Daniel Santee (definitely not Native American Michael Ansara), it wouldn't need raving animals to lead these people into a disaster.
But as it stands, disaster in form of raving animals does strike soon enough, with animals attacking in the least typical manner, the group splitting up, bickering and then splitting up some more, and the people in the best position to help having their own animal troubles. It's the sort of thing that can only climax (in what is the film's actual climax even though the film's nominal one comes afterwards) in a shirtless Leslie Nielsen mud-wrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting and raving about "Melville's god" and having tried to rape a woman.
Ladies and gentlemen, even though Day of the Animals may not conform to many people's concept of a good film, it very well may be director William Girdler's magnum opus. While all Girdler films recommend themselves to people of taste with moments of utter lunacy (see for example the Grizzly versus Helicopter fight in Grizzly, or the indescribable finale of The Manitou), the sympathetic viewer usually has to cope with quite a bit of boredom and scenes without much of a function beyond bringing a film to feature length to get to them. Here, however, Girdler has found his sweet spot of all nonsense all the time. The director provides his audience with every 70s eco horror shenanigan he could think of, only to stop from time to time for always amusing classic disaster movie non-characterisation with a side-line of the most horribly wrong "romantic" dialogue this side of the 50s. Regarding the latter, let's just say that Buckner's way of romantic banter is based on inviting the TV anchor into his "woodsmen course".
Girdler could of course not afford the ménage of Hollywood has-beens and nearly-beens a disaster movie usually needs so had to go with actors with a bit or a lot of TV experience instead, but as it turns out, TV actors are just as good at eating up the scenery as Michael Caine when he needs to pay for his yacht.
As is probably quite clear by now, sensible pacing and plot logic are completely out of the question for Day of the Animals. I don't think there's any need for me to go into the film's plot holes, nor the idiocy of all characters involved, nor the bizarre logic of the way the animals act. However, a logical or well-structured movie could not contain (and I have to repeat that) a scene of middle-aged, shirtless Leslie Nielsen mudwrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting about "Melville's god", nor various scenes where our heroes are outwitted by dogs, nor one where Walter Barnes's Ranger Tucker is attacked by what can only be described as flying rats, which provides further fuel for my theory that logic and structure are just terribly overrated.
However, this kind of 70s cheese is not the only thing that makes Day of the Animals worth watching. To my great surprise as someone who has never had anything good to say about Girdler as a director, the film also features a handful of scenes where it actually works as a horror film. Those among the animal attack scenes that aren't completely ridiculous (so about half of them) are actually quite tense to watch. Even better, whenever the film puts its mind to treating its animal attack story as an apocalyptic event, it develops some of the bleak and pessimistic air so typical of 70s horror, with some effective scenes of disturbed characters wandering through a deserted small town. It is quite possible, not to say probable, that Girdler arrives at the points where his apocalypse actually works despite of himself, just because that sort of thing was in the air at the time. For my tastes, every even just slightly effective moment of world-ending doom in a movie is to be treasured, for whatever reason it comes to pass, so Day of the Animals provides me with double the joy.
Sunday, September 23, 2018
It's that time again
when the leaves turn even more yellow than they did during the heat and the drought, and I take a bit of time off from the blog to do whatever eldritch abominations do the week before they turn even more eldritch.
Normal service will resume on Friday, the 5th October.
Normal service will resume on Friday, the 5th October.
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Three Films Make A Post: Past Passion. Past Terror. Past Murder.
A Little Trip to Heaven (2005): At first, Baltasar
Kormákur’s deeply Icelandic (for a film set in the US, at least) movie seems to
be a bit of a Fargo-alike, but the longer it runs, the more it becomes
clear this has somewhat different sensibilities. It is a bit less concerned with
futility than the Coen Brothers film, and even allows Forest Whitaker’s
character to take a half successful redemptive action and end up in a curious
sort of heaven as his reward. That’s despite the film being just as clear about
the darkness in the hearts of men, particularly those who think they are much
brighter than they actually are. It just seems to have a bit more compassion
with its characters than the Coens sometimes show.
Apart from Whitaker (who is always great even if he flaunts as dubious an accent as he does here), the film also contains fine work by Julia Stiles and a particularly good performance by Jeremy Renner.
Out of Thin Air (2017): Staying in Iceland (though this is a British film), this documentary by Dylan Howitt about two suspected murders in the country and the people the police apparently tortured into believing to have committed them, without any physical evidence (like corpses) whatsoever coming up, seems to me an exemplary piece of true crime filmmaking that tells its tale calmly, not feeling the need to construct or spout outrage because the facts of what happened, and what the audience can suspect happened really don’t need to be made more dramatic than they actually were. It’s not as if the film pretends to have no position on the case, mind you, it is just intelligent enough to assume it doesn’t have to speechify at its audience about its thoughts.
There’s also a quiet, philosophical undercurrent to the endeavour, suggesting a construction of selfhood through human memory that’s all too fragile, leaving self and truth as things always in doubt.
Jane Eyre (2011): Give me the Brontë sisters and their sense of the Gothic and the dramatic over Jane Austen’s ever so ironic tales of the marriage market any day. So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed Cary Joji Fukunaga’s version of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre quite a bit, particular as it is based on a Moira Buffini script that uses the proto-feminist elements of the novel in excellent ways, drawing Jane as a woman not quite fitting into her time because she as a matter of course takes the promises of humanist philosophy as belonging to her as a woman too. And all that with dialogue often very close to the book. I wish the film had done something about the madwoman in the attic, but honestly, I wouldn’t know how to go about that without rewriting half of the book either.
Fukunaga’s direction makes excellent use of bleak but exciting (to me, at least) landscape, period interiors that are claustrophobic or pretty depending on what’s appropriate, never trying to pop the film up too much nor letting get things too BBC stuffy.
Mia Wasikowska – whom I’ve still have to see in anything amounting to a weak performance – is expectedly wonderful, fully realizing the fragilities, the immense strength, the mix of wisdom won through pain and the naivety of the not terribly worldly Jane. Michael Fassbender is fine, too, though the film does focus quite a bit more on Jane – and rightly so.
Apart from Whitaker (who is always great even if he flaunts as dubious an accent as he does here), the film also contains fine work by Julia Stiles and a particularly good performance by Jeremy Renner.
Out of Thin Air (2017): Staying in Iceland (though this is a British film), this documentary by Dylan Howitt about two suspected murders in the country and the people the police apparently tortured into believing to have committed them, without any physical evidence (like corpses) whatsoever coming up, seems to me an exemplary piece of true crime filmmaking that tells its tale calmly, not feeling the need to construct or spout outrage because the facts of what happened, and what the audience can suspect happened really don’t need to be made more dramatic than they actually were. It’s not as if the film pretends to have no position on the case, mind you, it is just intelligent enough to assume it doesn’t have to speechify at its audience about its thoughts.
There’s also a quiet, philosophical undercurrent to the endeavour, suggesting a construction of selfhood through human memory that’s all too fragile, leaving self and truth as things always in doubt.
Jane Eyre (2011): Give me the Brontë sisters and their sense of the Gothic and the dramatic over Jane Austen’s ever so ironic tales of the marriage market any day. So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed Cary Joji Fukunaga’s version of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre quite a bit, particular as it is based on a Moira Buffini script that uses the proto-feminist elements of the novel in excellent ways, drawing Jane as a woman not quite fitting into her time because she as a matter of course takes the promises of humanist philosophy as belonging to her as a woman too. And all that with dialogue often very close to the book. I wish the film had done something about the madwoman in the attic, but honestly, I wouldn’t know how to go about that without rewriting half of the book either.
Fukunaga’s direction makes excellent use of bleak but exciting (to me, at least) landscape, period interiors that are claustrophobic or pretty depending on what’s appropriate, never trying to pop the film up too much nor letting get things too BBC stuffy.
Mia Wasikowska – whom I’ve still have to see in anything amounting to a weak performance – is expectedly wonderful, fully realizing the fragilities, the immense strength, the mix of wisdom won through pain and the naivety of the not terribly worldly Jane. Michael Fassbender is fine, too, though the film does focus quite a bit more on Jane – and rightly so.
Friday, September 21, 2018
Past Misdeeds: Agon (1964)
aka Giant Phantom Monster Agon
aka Agon: Atomic Dragon
Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
Agon is a series consisting of four twenty-five minute episodes that make up two storylines which are distinctive enough in tone and substance to not treat the short series as a traditional four part mini series, but rather as an aborted attempt at a continuing kaiju show.
In the series' first half, atom bomb explosions awaken and mutate a prehistoric monster and hobby Godzilla impersonator soon to be dubbed Agon (that's a Japanese English short form for "Atomic Dragon"). Agon has the munchies, so it soon attacks an important nuclear research facility that comes complete with its own nuclear reactor to get at all that tasty, tasty uranium. While its at it, Agon also causes a nuclear explosion, but thanks to this being the 60s, there are no repercussions to that at all.
Anyhoo, Professor of SCIENCE(!) Ukyo (Nobuhiko Shima), shaving-impaired cop Yamato (Asao Matsumoto), roving reporter Goro (Shinji Hirota) and professional professorial assistant Satsuki (Akemi Sawa) are taking on the case of the hungry kaiju. Well, actually, after an unsuccessful fight between Agon and library footage of the JDF, they just lure Agon back into the sea with more tasty morsels of uranium. The End.
Of course, Agon returns in the second storyline to walk into a plotline about two yakuza and a suitcase full of drugs that soon finds the still hungry monster walking around with a small fishing boat and a little boy in its mouth, while vaguely stomping on a small industrial town. Fortunately, our heroes contrive to poison Agon with the suitcase full of drugs, a fantastic plan that at least drives the monster back into the sea. The End again.
Agon surely is not one of the high points of kaiju film making, but at least the show has an interesting story behind it. I have to admit to certain doubts about how the official story explains why the Fuji TV series was only broadcast in 1968, four years after it was made. Officially, Toho complained that the film's monster was resembling their very own Godzilla too closely, seemingly not knowing that the monster was designed by an apprentice of their very own Godzilla-creator Eiji Tsuburaya and the much superior first two episodes were written by the frequent Toho kaiju writer Shinichi Sekizawa. Supposedly, when Toho learned of that fact four years later, they suddenly had a change of heart and allowed Fuji TV to go ahead with the broadcasting.
I can't say that story makes much sense to me, especially when we have the much easier explanation of the utter crapness of its last two episodes for Agon's absence from the screen. The Sekizawa episodes, both directed by Norio Mine (says Wikipedia), are actually pretty decent stuff as far as ultra-generic kaiju romps go. There's nothing about it anyone hadn't seen in the genre by 1968, but it's decently enough paced, and rather cleverly written around the problems of a TV budget.
It also helps the series' starting case that Mine does some quite decent work, too, using clever editing and well-chosen camera angles to let the few extras he has look as much as panicking crowds as possible, and using shots of modernist buildings and models of modernist buildings to get the proper pop art city-smashing mood going even though he doesn't actually have a city for his monster to smash. The slightly pop art-y mood is further enhanced by the strange sepia-toned black and white stock the series is shot on, which, I assume, is the best way to colour-code things when you can't afford to actually colour-code your sets. Then there's Wataru Saito's strange little score that consists of some jazzy beats and a lot of weird synthesizer warbling that suggest a Japanese version of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop and really help to pull the first two episodes into the realm of the cheap yet formally interesting.
The special effects themselves are all over the place; there are some very fine model shots, but there are also horrible moments like the one where a very bad Agon doll just stands in a pool of water standing in for the monster appearing out of the sea: The Agon suit itself does look good enough from a certain angle, but there's a lack of detail in its face and an immobility about its whole head - especially the eyes - that's never convincing, but is survivable as long as Mine shoots around it.
Unfortunately, Fuminori Ohashi, the director of the final two episodes does not keep up with these minor aesthetic achievements at all. The director instead opts for a bland point and shoot style that seems ready-made to show off all the worst sides of the series' effects work, with Agon walking around with a boat model crammed into its mouth for about twenty minutes being one of the most embarrassing - though of course pretty funny - things I've ever seen in a kaiju picture; and I've watched all of the original Gamera movies by now. For some reason, Saito's music isn't put to any decent use at all anymore, either, warbling around ineffectively and utterly divorced from what's going on on screen. It's difficult to watch these final two episodes and not think nobody involved in the production actually gave a damn about what they were doing.
Apart from Agon's boating trip, the so crap it's funny part of the later episodes also includes long shots of the monster standing around not moving a muscle (one suspects the suit actor was on holiday), and one of the more undignified methods of getting rid of a kaiju I've ever had the dubious luck to witness. Don't do drugs, giant monsters, okay?
The rapid decrease in quality is a bit sad, really, for while the script of the show's first storyline doesn't have an original bone in its body, its execution speaks of enthusiasm and creativity behind the camera, and it's not difficult to imagine the show the first two episodes promise to be a lot of fun to watch.
aka Agon: Atomic Dragon
Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
Agon is a series consisting of four twenty-five minute episodes that make up two storylines which are distinctive enough in tone and substance to not treat the short series as a traditional four part mini series, but rather as an aborted attempt at a continuing kaiju show.
In the series' first half, atom bomb explosions awaken and mutate a prehistoric monster and hobby Godzilla impersonator soon to be dubbed Agon (that's a Japanese English short form for "Atomic Dragon"). Agon has the munchies, so it soon attacks an important nuclear research facility that comes complete with its own nuclear reactor to get at all that tasty, tasty uranium. While its at it, Agon also causes a nuclear explosion, but thanks to this being the 60s, there are no repercussions to that at all.
Anyhoo, Professor of SCIENCE(!) Ukyo (Nobuhiko Shima), shaving-impaired cop Yamato (Asao Matsumoto), roving reporter Goro (Shinji Hirota) and professional professorial assistant Satsuki (Akemi Sawa) are taking on the case of the hungry kaiju. Well, actually, after an unsuccessful fight between Agon and library footage of the JDF, they just lure Agon back into the sea with more tasty morsels of uranium. The End.
Of course, Agon returns in the second storyline to walk into a plotline about two yakuza and a suitcase full of drugs that soon finds the still hungry monster walking around with a small fishing boat and a little boy in its mouth, while vaguely stomping on a small industrial town. Fortunately, our heroes contrive to poison Agon with the suitcase full of drugs, a fantastic plan that at least drives the monster back into the sea. The End again.
Agon surely is not one of the high points of kaiju film making, but at least the show has an interesting story behind it. I have to admit to certain doubts about how the official story explains why the Fuji TV series was only broadcast in 1968, four years after it was made. Officially, Toho complained that the film's monster was resembling their very own Godzilla too closely, seemingly not knowing that the monster was designed by an apprentice of their very own Godzilla-creator Eiji Tsuburaya and the much superior first two episodes were written by the frequent Toho kaiju writer Shinichi Sekizawa. Supposedly, when Toho learned of that fact four years later, they suddenly had a change of heart and allowed Fuji TV to go ahead with the broadcasting.
I can't say that story makes much sense to me, especially when we have the much easier explanation of the utter crapness of its last two episodes for Agon's absence from the screen. The Sekizawa episodes, both directed by Norio Mine (says Wikipedia), are actually pretty decent stuff as far as ultra-generic kaiju romps go. There's nothing about it anyone hadn't seen in the genre by 1968, but it's decently enough paced, and rather cleverly written around the problems of a TV budget.
It also helps the series' starting case that Mine does some quite decent work, too, using clever editing and well-chosen camera angles to let the few extras he has look as much as panicking crowds as possible, and using shots of modernist buildings and models of modernist buildings to get the proper pop art city-smashing mood going even though he doesn't actually have a city for his monster to smash. The slightly pop art-y mood is further enhanced by the strange sepia-toned black and white stock the series is shot on, which, I assume, is the best way to colour-code things when you can't afford to actually colour-code your sets. Then there's Wataru Saito's strange little score that consists of some jazzy beats and a lot of weird synthesizer warbling that suggest a Japanese version of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop and really help to pull the first two episodes into the realm of the cheap yet formally interesting.
The special effects themselves are all over the place; there are some very fine model shots, but there are also horrible moments like the one where a very bad Agon doll just stands in a pool of water standing in for the monster appearing out of the sea: The Agon suit itself does look good enough from a certain angle, but there's a lack of detail in its face and an immobility about its whole head - especially the eyes - that's never convincing, but is survivable as long as Mine shoots around it.
Unfortunately, Fuminori Ohashi, the director of the final two episodes does not keep up with these minor aesthetic achievements at all. The director instead opts for a bland point and shoot style that seems ready-made to show off all the worst sides of the series' effects work, with Agon walking around with a boat model crammed into its mouth for about twenty minutes being one of the most embarrassing - though of course pretty funny - things I've ever seen in a kaiju picture; and I've watched all of the original Gamera movies by now. For some reason, Saito's music isn't put to any decent use at all anymore, either, warbling around ineffectively and utterly divorced from what's going on on screen. It's difficult to watch these final two episodes and not think nobody involved in the production actually gave a damn about what they were doing.
Apart from Agon's boating trip, the so crap it's funny part of the later episodes also includes long shots of the monster standing around not moving a muscle (one suspects the suit actor was on holiday), and one of the more undignified methods of getting rid of a kaiju I've ever had the dubious luck to witness. Don't do drugs, giant monsters, okay?
The rapid decrease in quality is a bit sad, really, for while the script of the show's first storyline doesn't have an original bone in its body, its execution speaks of enthusiasm and creativity behind the camera, and it's not difficult to imagine the show the first two episodes promise to be a lot of fun to watch.
Thursday, September 20, 2018
In short: Ouija House (2018)
Warning: I need to spoil some of the best bits!
Graduate student – we dare not ask of what – Laurie (Carly Schroeder) decides to bring a handful of friends to a supposedly haunted house in the woods her family has somewhat mysterious connections to. It’s all in the hopes of furthering her research so she can graduate, sell her thesis to a publisher who is interested in it, and make enough money to help her mother (Dee Wallace) buy back the family home she just lost. Yeah, I don’t know either, and the film’s explanation for the whole publisher business later on actually makes less sense than what I have just written. But I digress.
Laurie’s aunt Samantha (Mischa Barton) is coming too, for she is fluent in the house’s and her family’s backstory concerning a good and an evil witch cult, baby sacrifice and a bit of nudity. The plan is to hold a traditional séance in the house, but when Laurie finds a ouija board, they just use that. Surprising nobody but the characters, this turns out to be a very bad idea.
For its first half hour or so, Ben Demaree’s Ouija House has all the hallmarks of mediocre low budget horror made in the 2010s. There are the small and tiny appearances by more or less “name” actors – besides Wallace and Barton, there are also Chris Mulkey, Tiffany Shepis and Tara Reid putting a half day of work or less in –, the boringly generic set-up, and seemingly no interest in trying to lure an audience in with atmosphere and intrigue. However, once the plot gets going, Ouija House becomes a prime example of how a film that’s really not good in a way most people would use the word becomes really rather awesome (in all senses of that word) by throwing all kinds of crazy shit at the audience while keeping a completely straight face. The film gets outright 70s/80s Italian in this regard, therefore charming me to a considerable degree.
Ouija House’s title, you see, is to be taken literally, it turns out, with the letter of a ouija board hidden away behind the titular house’s wallpaper until a possessed member of the crew (very enthusiastically played by Grace Demarco) rips the wallpaper covers off. As you may or may not imagine, there are scenes of a possessed young woman in a state of undress groping and hissing towards the letters painted on the walls, and one of the film’s dramatic highpoints sees the characters desperately trying to duct tape paper over the letters. It’s glorious. Also appearing are a young woman’s upper body (she’s wearing a bra to prove this isn’t actually an Italian film from the 80s) being used as a ouija board, an idea to which the other characters react with shrugs of “why not?”, a moebius strip road, Dee Wallace’s possessed face, and…the black guy surviving(!). It’s absurd, it’s certainly not thought through with even a bit of real world logic in mind, but damn, is Ouija House’s second half entertaining, if you like your ideas strange, and their presentation straight-faced.
Graduate student – we dare not ask of what – Laurie (Carly Schroeder) decides to bring a handful of friends to a supposedly haunted house in the woods her family has somewhat mysterious connections to. It’s all in the hopes of furthering her research so she can graduate, sell her thesis to a publisher who is interested in it, and make enough money to help her mother (Dee Wallace) buy back the family home she just lost. Yeah, I don’t know either, and the film’s explanation for the whole publisher business later on actually makes less sense than what I have just written. But I digress.
Laurie’s aunt Samantha (Mischa Barton) is coming too, for she is fluent in the house’s and her family’s backstory concerning a good and an evil witch cult, baby sacrifice and a bit of nudity. The plan is to hold a traditional séance in the house, but when Laurie finds a ouija board, they just use that. Surprising nobody but the characters, this turns out to be a very bad idea.
For its first half hour or so, Ben Demaree’s Ouija House has all the hallmarks of mediocre low budget horror made in the 2010s. There are the small and tiny appearances by more or less “name” actors – besides Wallace and Barton, there are also Chris Mulkey, Tiffany Shepis and Tara Reid putting a half day of work or less in –, the boringly generic set-up, and seemingly no interest in trying to lure an audience in with atmosphere and intrigue. However, once the plot gets going, Ouija House becomes a prime example of how a film that’s really not good in a way most people would use the word becomes really rather awesome (in all senses of that word) by throwing all kinds of crazy shit at the audience while keeping a completely straight face. The film gets outright 70s/80s Italian in this regard, therefore charming me to a considerable degree.
Ouija House’s title, you see, is to be taken literally, it turns out, with the letter of a ouija board hidden away behind the titular house’s wallpaper until a possessed member of the crew (very enthusiastically played by Grace Demarco) rips the wallpaper covers off. As you may or may not imagine, there are scenes of a possessed young woman in a state of undress groping and hissing towards the letters painted on the walls, and one of the film’s dramatic highpoints sees the characters desperately trying to duct tape paper over the letters. It’s glorious. Also appearing are a young woman’s upper body (she’s wearing a bra to prove this isn’t actually an Italian film from the 80s) being used as a ouija board, an idea to which the other characters react with shrugs of “why not?”, a moebius strip road, Dee Wallace’s possessed face, and…the black guy surviving(!). It’s absurd, it’s certainly not thought through with even a bit of real world logic in mind, but damn, is Ouija House’s second half entertaining, if you like your ideas strange, and their presentation straight-faced.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
The Open House (2018)
Because the accidental death of their husband and father leaves Naomi Wallace
(Piercey Dalton) and her son Logan (Dylan Minnette) in dire financial straits,
they have to move into the mountain house of her stinking rich sister. That
means Logan gets pulled out of school before his graduation – there’s never any
talk of him, you know, changing schools so he can actually graduate,
for reasons the script never bothers to come up with, so he can spend his time
running and moping. He also doesn’t seem to have any friends at all, at least
him missing anyone or using some of that new-fangled communication stuff you
hear so much about these days never comes up. Naomi for her part doesn’t
actually seem to look for work, which is also a thing that can be
helpful when you’ve got no money, again without the script actually giving us
any reasons for that.
Anyway, on the positive side, that mountain house is really rather more of a mountain palace. Less positive is that every Sunday an open house event takes place there and our protagonists have to leave for the whole of the day, because the sister and her husband want to sell the place. Don’t ask me why they don’t pause the open house stuff as long as they have relatives living there, I didn’t write this crap.
If you’ve heard any urban legends or read creepypasta, you can probably imagine what happens next. There’s a strange elderly neighbour (whose strange behaviour the script doesn’t bother to explain, obviously), and their time in the house is haunted by a series of mildly strange occurrences: food disappears, glasses disappear and appear again, and the hot water tends to cut out whenever Naomi is in the shower. It’s a little as if…there’s a murderous psychopath with them in the house!
On various technical levels, the Netflix opus The Open House directed and written by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote isn’t a bad little movie. The directors certainly do have a hand for pretty, competently generic visuals, and while they really rather overdo the whole “camera glides through the house while loud dramatic music plays” thing, I won’t deny the film even to be somewhat stylish, if strictly in a slickly professional rather than an artistically interesting way.
The acting is pretty okay too, or rather, the two leads do what they can with the little the film’s great weakness, the needlessly sloppy script, provides them with. There is, for example, a big fight in the between the two when Naomi suddenly assumes Logan is responsible for the strange things that have been happening, and Dalton and Minnette do their best to make this feel like a really bad falling out between actual human beings. Unfortunately, the whole scene is completely preposterous because Logan is absurdly easy-going for a teenager who has seen his father die in front of his eyes and has then been dragged away from home by his mother to escape threatening poverty, and the tensions between his mother and him have been so absurdly mild given the situation the scene rings completely wrong.
This is absolutely indicative of the script’s main problem. It sets up a situation, comes up with a couple of big scenes related to that situation but doesn’t bother to fill in the blanks that would emotionally and thematically connect any of it. For most of the time, this feels like a film written by people who can’t even imagine how their characters might feel in any given situation and so just choose not to write any reactions for them at all. Consequently, little of what anyone does here is based on anything an actual human being would feel or do. From this perspective, it’s really no surprise Logan has no friends he is missing, and that Naomi doesn’t have a single person to call when shit gets weird – when the police doesn’t help, Logan eventually calls in what must be the only other person in the neighbouring town, a salesperson who has been randomly flirting with his Ma, in a particularly absurd turn.
Now, if this were a film about social isolation and poverty, and the resulting helplessness expressed through the horror form, some of this would even make thematic sense, but it’s really the result of a script that doesn’t even begin to think the situation it puts its characters in, and the characters themselves, through, instead going through a bunch of well worn standard horror thriller plot beats without giving any of these beats a reason to exist at all.
Anyway, on the positive side, that mountain house is really rather more of a mountain palace. Less positive is that every Sunday an open house event takes place there and our protagonists have to leave for the whole of the day, because the sister and her husband want to sell the place. Don’t ask me why they don’t pause the open house stuff as long as they have relatives living there, I didn’t write this crap.
If you’ve heard any urban legends or read creepypasta, you can probably imagine what happens next. There’s a strange elderly neighbour (whose strange behaviour the script doesn’t bother to explain, obviously), and their time in the house is haunted by a series of mildly strange occurrences: food disappears, glasses disappear and appear again, and the hot water tends to cut out whenever Naomi is in the shower. It’s a little as if…there’s a murderous psychopath with them in the house!
On various technical levels, the Netflix opus The Open House directed and written by Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote isn’t a bad little movie. The directors certainly do have a hand for pretty, competently generic visuals, and while they really rather overdo the whole “camera glides through the house while loud dramatic music plays” thing, I won’t deny the film even to be somewhat stylish, if strictly in a slickly professional rather than an artistically interesting way.
The acting is pretty okay too, or rather, the two leads do what they can with the little the film’s great weakness, the needlessly sloppy script, provides them with. There is, for example, a big fight in the between the two when Naomi suddenly assumes Logan is responsible for the strange things that have been happening, and Dalton and Minnette do their best to make this feel like a really bad falling out between actual human beings. Unfortunately, the whole scene is completely preposterous because Logan is absurdly easy-going for a teenager who has seen his father die in front of his eyes and has then been dragged away from home by his mother to escape threatening poverty, and the tensions between his mother and him have been so absurdly mild given the situation the scene rings completely wrong.
This is absolutely indicative of the script’s main problem. It sets up a situation, comes up with a couple of big scenes related to that situation but doesn’t bother to fill in the blanks that would emotionally and thematically connect any of it. For most of the time, this feels like a film written by people who can’t even imagine how their characters might feel in any given situation and so just choose not to write any reactions for them at all. Consequently, little of what anyone does here is based on anything an actual human being would feel or do. From this perspective, it’s really no surprise Logan has no friends he is missing, and that Naomi doesn’t have a single person to call when shit gets weird – when the police doesn’t help, Logan eventually calls in what must be the only other person in the neighbouring town, a salesperson who has been randomly flirting with his Ma, in a particularly absurd turn.
Now, if this were a film about social isolation and poverty, and the resulting helplessness expressed through the horror form, some of this would even make thematic sense, but it’s really the result of a script that doesn’t even begin to think the situation it puts its characters in, and the characters themselves, through, instead going through a bunch of well worn standard horror thriller plot beats without giving any of these beats a reason to exist at all.
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
In short: Posse (1993)
Instead of dead as their evil commander Colonel Graham (Billy Zane) had
hoped, a group of African American soldiers (Charles Lane, Tiny Lister, and Tone
Loc, plus !bonus Stephen Baldwin) under the leadership of Jesse Lee (Mario Van
Peebles) escape the Spanish-American war very much alive and in possession of
the rather large amount of gold the good Colonel wanted them to steal and then
kill them for. The group leaves the Colonel behind for dead after a fight, but
he and a group of gunmen will start to follow our protagonists’ every move soon
enough.
As if having these particular hellhounds on their trails isn’t bad enough, Jesse Lee, prone to random flashbacks only missing the harmonica, has some vengeance to seek in and around his hometown, which isn’t conducive to anyone’s health.
As likeable as I find the attempt of the group of filmmakers around people like Posse’s director Mario Van Peebles and the Hughes Brothers to create a new African American genre cinema with a degree of social consciousness on decent budgets, as frustrating I usually find the resulting films. As is typically the case with this group of movies, it’s not the film’s cast, consisting of a whole bunch of good younger actors and a plethora of veterans and heroes of cinema like Pam Grier or Mario Van Peebles’s father Melvin, at fault here, nor are the production values the problem. It is rather the combination of a pretty terrible script, one so unfocused you seem to drift from one film to the next while making your way through Posse, and a director heavily in love with all kinds of pointless visual stylization taken in equal parts from Leone and video clips without much of an idea of how to put all the camera and post-production tricks into the service of the film instead of the other way round. I do suspect most of the time the reason for all the film’s visual busyness is the assumption it looks cool, no matter if it actually does anything useful for the film at all.
Posse is a meandering mess, wasting a bunch of great actors and a genuinely great initial idea for nothing much.
As if having these particular hellhounds on their trails isn’t bad enough, Jesse Lee, prone to random flashbacks only missing the harmonica, has some vengeance to seek in and around his hometown, which isn’t conducive to anyone’s health.
As likeable as I find the attempt of the group of filmmakers around people like Posse’s director Mario Van Peebles and the Hughes Brothers to create a new African American genre cinema with a degree of social consciousness on decent budgets, as frustrating I usually find the resulting films. As is typically the case with this group of movies, it’s not the film’s cast, consisting of a whole bunch of good younger actors and a plethora of veterans and heroes of cinema like Pam Grier or Mario Van Peebles’s father Melvin, at fault here, nor are the production values the problem. It is rather the combination of a pretty terrible script, one so unfocused you seem to drift from one film to the next while making your way through Posse, and a director heavily in love with all kinds of pointless visual stylization taken in equal parts from Leone and video clips without much of an idea of how to put all the camera and post-production tricks into the service of the film instead of the other way round. I do suspect most of the time the reason for all the film’s visual busyness is the assumption it looks cool, no matter if it actually does anything useful for the film at all.
Posse is a meandering mess, wasting a bunch of great actors and a genuinely great initial idea for nothing much.
Monday, September 17, 2018
Sunday, September 16, 2018
Dead Curse (1985)
Original title: 猛鬼迫人
A couple of years ago, Inspector Ma prevented a witch (Angela Yu Chien) leading a Kali (or Carla, as the subtitles insist, leading to inspiring moments like the witch shouting “Carla, give me strength!”) cult from sacrificing a child, killing the witch and her assistants (witches in training?) in the process. With her last breath, the witch cursed the inspector and his family.
Now, four years later, Ma is sitting in a wheelchair, his wife is gone, and since it is July, ghost month, there’s nasty stuff in store for him and his family - his little daughter, his reporter sister Mimi (probably Elaine Kam Yin-Ling) and Mimi’s fiancée, cop Ah Chiu (Poon Chun-Wai). Particularly Mimi will turn out to have to fight off the brunt of the witch’s ire. Not that the family as a whole has it easy: little ghost children try to drown and then hang Mimi’s niece, the witch regularly appears to have a good laugh, the witch’s dead assistants attempt to throw Ma from his balcony – it’s quite the July for these people. And that’s before we come to the bit later on when Ah Chiu has a bit of ghost sex (or humps the witch’s coffin, if you can’t see ghosts) and becomes possessed afterwards, speaking in the witch’s voice.
Another female friend or family member – as it often goes with the more obscure Hong Kong films from this era, the burnt-in subtitles aren’t particularly clear so your guess is as good as mine – does have contact to a sifu named Kwan (Kwan Hoi-San), so spiritual help will be forthcoming eventually, but Kwan isn’t the most impressive example of his kind, so it’s not at all sure he will actually be able to beat the witch and her Carla-given powers.
As I said, Dead Curse – directed by one-timer Chong Biu Man and actor Gu Sam-Lam - is a reasonably obscure bit of Hong Kong horror of its time, but it’s a fun example of the style nonetheless.
Now, even though it was rated CAT III at the time, this isn’t as extreme and crass a film as one might hope or fear. There’s no centipede eating or puking action at all, and the supernatural elements are relatively conservative, featuring a lot of dry ice and green light and little that’s icky in any way, shape or form. In fact, the make-up for the ghost children is as traditional as they come, suggesting a film that sees itself standing at least with one foot in the less crazy Hong Kong horror of the 50s and 60s (and of course earlier). Its other foot, however, certainly stands in modern (80s) times. It’s not just the ghost sex scene or how the climax evolves into a magical battle between the Sifu, five elemental guardians he has conjured and the flying witch who can shoot a red laser beam out of her finger now. Rather, camera set-ups, movement, editing and general pacing do completely belong to its own time, things hopping merrily along with little time for film or characters to drag their heels between mild yet fun stunts, general spookery and moments of classic HK 80s goofiness (where else would the encounter between a threatened little girl and two ghost children come to murder her in a somewhat complicated manner include a running gag about ET?).
It’s certainly not a film that’ll leave a contemporary viewer in awe, disgust or terrible suspense, but Dead Curse’s forward momentum, its diligence in delivering at least one horror set piece every five minutes, its moments of craziness, its masses of dry ice fog and green light, its perfectly likeable leads and its general sense of fun do make for a very enjoyable time for a viewer with any kind of interest in Hong Kong horror of this time. I have no idea what anyone who doesn’t would make of this one, though I would assume that a flying witch shooting a red laser beam at a kung fu guy fighting her with a wooden coffin is of interest to any human being with taste and style.
A couple of years ago, Inspector Ma prevented a witch (Angela Yu Chien) leading a Kali (or Carla, as the subtitles insist, leading to inspiring moments like the witch shouting “Carla, give me strength!”) cult from sacrificing a child, killing the witch and her assistants (witches in training?) in the process. With her last breath, the witch cursed the inspector and his family.
Now, four years later, Ma is sitting in a wheelchair, his wife is gone, and since it is July, ghost month, there’s nasty stuff in store for him and his family - his little daughter, his reporter sister Mimi (probably Elaine Kam Yin-Ling) and Mimi’s fiancée, cop Ah Chiu (Poon Chun-Wai). Particularly Mimi will turn out to have to fight off the brunt of the witch’s ire. Not that the family as a whole has it easy: little ghost children try to drown and then hang Mimi’s niece, the witch regularly appears to have a good laugh, the witch’s dead assistants attempt to throw Ma from his balcony – it’s quite the July for these people. And that’s before we come to the bit later on when Ah Chiu has a bit of ghost sex (or humps the witch’s coffin, if you can’t see ghosts) and becomes possessed afterwards, speaking in the witch’s voice.
Another female friend or family member – as it often goes with the more obscure Hong Kong films from this era, the burnt-in subtitles aren’t particularly clear so your guess is as good as mine – does have contact to a sifu named Kwan (Kwan Hoi-San), so spiritual help will be forthcoming eventually, but Kwan isn’t the most impressive example of his kind, so it’s not at all sure he will actually be able to beat the witch and her Carla-given powers.
As I said, Dead Curse – directed by one-timer Chong Biu Man and actor Gu Sam-Lam - is a reasonably obscure bit of Hong Kong horror of its time, but it’s a fun example of the style nonetheless.
Now, even though it was rated CAT III at the time, this isn’t as extreme and crass a film as one might hope or fear. There’s no centipede eating or puking action at all, and the supernatural elements are relatively conservative, featuring a lot of dry ice and green light and little that’s icky in any way, shape or form. In fact, the make-up for the ghost children is as traditional as they come, suggesting a film that sees itself standing at least with one foot in the less crazy Hong Kong horror of the 50s and 60s (and of course earlier). Its other foot, however, certainly stands in modern (80s) times. It’s not just the ghost sex scene or how the climax evolves into a magical battle between the Sifu, five elemental guardians he has conjured and the flying witch who can shoot a red laser beam out of her finger now. Rather, camera set-ups, movement, editing and general pacing do completely belong to its own time, things hopping merrily along with little time for film or characters to drag their heels between mild yet fun stunts, general spookery and moments of classic HK 80s goofiness (where else would the encounter between a threatened little girl and two ghost children come to murder her in a somewhat complicated manner include a running gag about ET?).
It’s certainly not a film that’ll leave a contemporary viewer in awe, disgust or terrible suspense, but Dead Curse’s forward momentum, its diligence in delivering at least one horror set piece every five minutes, its moments of craziness, its masses of dry ice fog and green light, its perfectly likeable leads and its general sense of fun do make for a very enjoyable time for a viewer with any kind of interest in Hong Kong horror of this time. I have no idea what anyone who doesn’t would make of this one, though I would assume that a flying witch shooting a red laser beam at a kung fu guy fighting her with a wooden coffin is of interest to any human being with taste and style.
Saturday, September 15, 2018
Three Films Make A Post: Some mysteries should not be unlocked
Not of This Earth (1988): This Roger Corman-produced remake
of a Corman joint is directed by the dread Jim Wynorski pretty early in his
career of tits and boredom, so it is indeed full of female nudity (though not
quite as much as in later Wynorski epics, you gotta decide for yourself if
that’s for better or worse) and a metric crapton of boredom (just as much as in
later stage Wynorski).
The film’s main feature is the copious amount of footage taken from a load of other Corman productions, usually used for no good reason but to get the film up to length, of course, a far cry from the clever secondary usage in something from Corman’s glory days like Targets, but comparing Bogdanovich and Wynorski is really rather unfair of me. Otherwise, poor Traci Lords seems to be the only person on screen even vaguely conscious of that thing known as “acting”, little happens, horrible jokes of a sort that makes Scary Movie look funny are made, and my eyes are getting heavy just thinking about this one again.
The Body Tree (2017): Following a Wynorski film that doesn’t even seem to have the ambition to entertain, this Russian-Spanish-US coproduction directed by Thomas Dunn about a group of young horror movie characters travelling to Siberia to take part in a ritual meant to calm the spirit of a murdered friend but alas provoking a demon feels like pure cinematic gold. At least, it clearly has ambitions to be a bit more than the spam in a cabin movie you’d expect from the set-up.
Unfortunately, the film’s attempts at psychological depth come up against writing that’s just not sharp and insightful enough to sustain many, many scenes of characters arguing, and arguing, and then arguing some more, performances that mostly can’t cope with these attempts at psychological depth, and the plain fact that about half of these characters are such unpleasant assholes I just didn’t want to hear them shouting at one another for what felt like hours. But at least The Body Tree fails while actually trying.
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003): Let’s finish this on a high note, though, with Andrew Douglas’s attempt at capturing something like the heart of the weird, white American South in a sort of road trip following singer-songwriter and, ahem, “eccentric” Jim White through poverty, bars, various examples of what looks like horrifying religious mania to my atheist eyes, and sometimes awkwardly staged encounters with various alt.Country musicians from David Eugene Edwards, over Lee Sexton, over the Handsome Family, to Johnny Dowd (ironically, about half of these musicians were probably better known here in Germany than in the US at the time the film was made). The great writer Harry Crews pops in for a bit too.
I’m not terribly sure anyone will understand this South any better after watching the film, but it surely should convince one to try.
The film’s main feature is the copious amount of footage taken from a load of other Corman productions, usually used for no good reason but to get the film up to length, of course, a far cry from the clever secondary usage in something from Corman’s glory days like Targets, but comparing Bogdanovich and Wynorski is really rather unfair of me. Otherwise, poor Traci Lords seems to be the only person on screen even vaguely conscious of that thing known as “acting”, little happens, horrible jokes of a sort that makes Scary Movie look funny are made, and my eyes are getting heavy just thinking about this one again.
The Body Tree (2017): Following a Wynorski film that doesn’t even seem to have the ambition to entertain, this Russian-Spanish-US coproduction directed by Thomas Dunn about a group of young horror movie characters travelling to Siberia to take part in a ritual meant to calm the spirit of a murdered friend but alas provoking a demon feels like pure cinematic gold. At least, it clearly has ambitions to be a bit more than the spam in a cabin movie you’d expect from the set-up.
Unfortunately, the film’s attempts at psychological depth come up against writing that’s just not sharp and insightful enough to sustain many, many scenes of characters arguing, and arguing, and then arguing some more, performances that mostly can’t cope with these attempts at psychological depth, and the plain fact that about half of these characters are such unpleasant assholes I just didn’t want to hear them shouting at one another for what felt like hours. But at least The Body Tree fails while actually trying.
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003): Let’s finish this on a high note, though, with Andrew Douglas’s attempt at capturing something like the heart of the weird, white American South in a sort of road trip following singer-songwriter and, ahem, “eccentric” Jim White through poverty, bars, various examples of what looks like horrifying religious mania to my atheist eyes, and sometimes awkwardly staged encounters with various alt.Country musicians from David Eugene Edwards, over Lee Sexton, over the Handsome Family, to Johnny Dowd (ironically, about half of these musicians were probably better known here in Germany than in the US at the time the film was made). The great writer Harry Crews pops in for a bit too.
I’m not terribly sure anyone will understand this South any better after watching the film, but it surely should convince one to try.
Friday, September 14, 2018
Past Misdeeds: Hundra (1983)
Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
One day, while their best warrior Hundra (Laurene Landon) is away hunting, a generally peaceful village of amazons is attacked and eradicated by a band of ugly, hairy men riding under the sign of the bull. When all is over, a returning Hundra dispatches a horde of the aggressors in a drawn-out fight, but that still leaves her people quite dead.
Our heroine then makes her way to the only remaining elder of her kind, who for some inexplicable reason dwells among a horde of really rude little people. Though after hearing the sage's glorious plan for the revivification of her people, I'm not surprised by anything about her, for she declares Hundra to now be solely responsible for the survival of the tribe. Our poor, bedraggled heroine shall go down to the land of the men praying to the bull, and get herself pregnant stat.
But Hundra's first attempt at getting pregnant only teaches her one thing: she still has certain standards, and won't tolerate the attentions of hairy, unwashed guys who'll even turn consensual sex into rape. So, after showing off her wrestling skills and sneering at less feminist women than herself (she'd get along well with a certain type of Internet feminists), off she rides to what goes under the term of "city" in sword and sorcery land.
There she will get into trouble with the ruling cabal of religious male chauvinist pigs whose religion is orgies, meet a man who doesn't stink and isn't a jerk, learn the womanly arts, teach the warrior arts to her teacher of womanly arts, and be somewhat responsible for a death by sitting on a face.
Among the many, many films jumping on the bandwagon created by John Milius's Conan the Barbarian, Hundra is one of the most unique in that it isn't slavishly copying all of its predecessor's story beats and aping its philosophy, but actually having a head of its own. Admittedly, Hundra's head just might be as much full of nonsense as it is of clever ideas, but I find it difficult to disagree with a film that is clearly having so much fun. Plus, you can say the same about the Milius movie, too.
Still, having fun or not, Hundra is at times a film sending very mixed messages. Tonally, it's just very inconsistent, with scenes of really unpleasant slow-motion violence like the destruction of Hundra's village (ending - especially tasteful - with the rape of Hundra's teenage-at-best sister) and sequences of Hundra romping through the city and kicking guards in the balls (one of her favourite fighting moves) standing in strange contrast to each other, quite as if half of the film were made by a low-rent Sam Peckinpah and the other half by the director of one of the later Terence Hill and Bud Spencer movies. I suspect part of this curious mixture is just director Matt Cimber (a man with a career so curious someone should write a book about him, as he did Hundra as well as Pia-Zadorasploitation) fulfilling his quota of exploitational values, just that in this film, violence towards women after the big village destruction usually leads to Hundra giving the respective prick a kick in the respective balls. It's a bit like a woman in prison film where all the male bad guys are dispatched before the grand climax, and therefore don't have enough time to get really sadistic.
At times, when it's not spending its time having strange plot holes (so, the main bad guys are all about seeing Hundra “tamed”, but then they somehow don't realize when she's pregnant?) or making jokes about Hundra's cowardly male dog, Hundra actually becomes a somewhat clever inversion of the classic sword and sorcery tale, where the storyteller suddenly realizes that treating women like objects isn't alright at all, and sends out a female version of Conan to sort things out with men. The film plays with a lot of traditional sword and sorcery elements this way, turning what begins like the usual tale of vengeance into the story of a woman who learns that a lot of men are indeed shits, but not all of them, and that consensual sex is a-okay if both partners want to have it. And in a really surprising turn of events, this does not lead to our heroine giving up on her curious destiny and only ever living for her man from then on, but just sees her psychologically better prepared for it. Of course, her male love interest here is just as bland as the female love interest in sword and sorcery movies with a male hero often is, so it's not too much of a surprise she can leave him (at least for a time - the film actually is all about choice on that level).
These clever bits are surrounded by an Ennio-Morricone-scored shot in Spain series of fights, brawls and slow-motion attacks (with a bit of nudity), bad jokes, good jokes, male characters so vile I'm sure they don't wash, and Spanish actors speaking English with heavy accents. It's a bit of mess, really, but so much of the film is riding on a wave of fun, with a lead actress who may not be all that great at, well, acting, but sure seems to have as much of a blast in her slightly awkward action scenes as her character has. That sort of thing always goes a long way in turning awkward action scenes into loveable awkward action scenes. And once a film is like Hundra and mixes its loveable awkward action scenes with kinda sorta feminism that would make John Milius (and Robert E. Howard, for that matter) cry, there isn't really anything anyone could do to remove it from the warm place it has found in my heart.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.
One day, while their best warrior Hundra (Laurene Landon) is away hunting, a generally peaceful village of amazons is attacked and eradicated by a band of ugly, hairy men riding under the sign of the bull. When all is over, a returning Hundra dispatches a horde of the aggressors in a drawn-out fight, but that still leaves her people quite dead.
Our heroine then makes her way to the only remaining elder of her kind, who for some inexplicable reason dwells among a horde of really rude little people. Though after hearing the sage's glorious plan for the revivification of her people, I'm not surprised by anything about her, for she declares Hundra to now be solely responsible for the survival of the tribe. Our poor, bedraggled heroine shall go down to the land of the men praying to the bull, and get herself pregnant stat.
But Hundra's first attempt at getting pregnant only teaches her one thing: she still has certain standards, and won't tolerate the attentions of hairy, unwashed guys who'll even turn consensual sex into rape. So, after showing off her wrestling skills and sneering at less feminist women than herself (she'd get along well with a certain type of Internet feminists), off she rides to what goes under the term of "city" in sword and sorcery land.
There she will get into trouble with the ruling cabal of religious male chauvinist pigs whose religion is orgies, meet a man who doesn't stink and isn't a jerk, learn the womanly arts, teach the warrior arts to her teacher of womanly arts, and be somewhat responsible for a death by sitting on a face.
Among the many, many films jumping on the bandwagon created by John Milius's Conan the Barbarian, Hundra is one of the most unique in that it isn't slavishly copying all of its predecessor's story beats and aping its philosophy, but actually having a head of its own. Admittedly, Hundra's head just might be as much full of nonsense as it is of clever ideas, but I find it difficult to disagree with a film that is clearly having so much fun. Plus, you can say the same about the Milius movie, too.
Still, having fun or not, Hundra is at times a film sending very mixed messages. Tonally, it's just very inconsistent, with scenes of really unpleasant slow-motion violence like the destruction of Hundra's village (ending - especially tasteful - with the rape of Hundra's teenage-at-best sister) and sequences of Hundra romping through the city and kicking guards in the balls (one of her favourite fighting moves) standing in strange contrast to each other, quite as if half of the film were made by a low-rent Sam Peckinpah and the other half by the director of one of the later Terence Hill and Bud Spencer movies. I suspect part of this curious mixture is just director Matt Cimber (a man with a career so curious someone should write a book about him, as he did Hundra as well as Pia-Zadorasploitation) fulfilling his quota of exploitational values, just that in this film, violence towards women after the big village destruction usually leads to Hundra giving the respective prick a kick in the respective balls. It's a bit like a woman in prison film where all the male bad guys are dispatched before the grand climax, and therefore don't have enough time to get really sadistic.
At times, when it's not spending its time having strange plot holes (so, the main bad guys are all about seeing Hundra “tamed”, but then they somehow don't realize when she's pregnant?) or making jokes about Hundra's cowardly male dog, Hundra actually becomes a somewhat clever inversion of the classic sword and sorcery tale, where the storyteller suddenly realizes that treating women like objects isn't alright at all, and sends out a female version of Conan to sort things out with men. The film plays with a lot of traditional sword and sorcery elements this way, turning what begins like the usual tale of vengeance into the story of a woman who learns that a lot of men are indeed shits, but not all of them, and that consensual sex is a-okay if both partners want to have it. And in a really surprising turn of events, this does not lead to our heroine giving up on her curious destiny and only ever living for her man from then on, but just sees her psychologically better prepared for it. Of course, her male love interest here is just as bland as the female love interest in sword and sorcery movies with a male hero often is, so it's not too much of a surprise she can leave him (at least for a time - the film actually is all about choice on that level).
These clever bits are surrounded by an Ennio-Morricone-scored shot in Spain series of fights, brawls and slow-motion attacks (with a bit of nudity), bad jokes, good jokes, male characters so vile I'm sure they don't wash, and Spanish actors speaking English with heavy accents. It's a bit of mess, really, but so much of the film is riding on a wave of fun, with a lead actress who may not be all that great at, well, acting, but sure seems to have as much of a blast in her slightly awkward action scenes as her character has. That sort of thing always goes a long way in turning awkward action scenes into loveable awkward action scenes. And once a film is like Hundra and mixes its loveable awkward action scenes with kinda sorta feminism that would make John Milius (and Robert E. Howard, for that matter) cry, there isn't really anything anyone could do to remove it from the warm place it has found in my heart.
Thursday, September 13, 2018
In short: Crush the Skull (2015)
After what was supposed to be their last job goes rather badly awry, highly
accomplished burglar couple Blair (Katie Savoy) and Ollie (Chris Dinh, also the
film’s co-writer) find themselves in debt to a rather nasty gangster. If they
don’t want to lose any of their precious body parts, they have to find a new
object to rob fast.
Fortunately, Blair’s brother Connor (Chris Riedell) is just in the very last stages of planning a lucrative heist (as he prefers to call it instead of the too pedestrian “burglary”) on a house somewhere out in the boons. There are a couple of problems with this, though. Firstly, Connor and Ollie hate each other with a passion, Ollie taking Connor to be a dangerously irresponsible amateur responsible for landing him in prison twice, and Connor thinking himself to be a criminal mastermind. Secondly, Ollie is absolutely right about Connor, and much of what they believe about the job will turn out to be badly wrong thanks to Connor not doing his research properly.
Which is to say, the trio and Connor’s partner Riley (Tim Chiou) break into the murder castle of a serial killer and soon find themselves locked in and on the menu as they guy’s next victims.
Indie horror comedies seldom work for me. Their scripts are all too often supposedly funny instead of actually funny, filled with jokes that are tedious instead of, you know, funny, and actors who lack in comical timing. So colour me happily surprised and impressed that Viet Nguyen’s Crush the Skull is a rather wonderful small (in the sense of a film that knows exactly on which scale it can best operate) movie.
Most – I’d say eighty-five percent, which is an insanely great quota for me and humour – jokes here actually hit their mark as they are written, and they are delivered with great comical timing by actors who clearly understand why what they are saying is supposed to be funny and how to emphasize it. But even when we leave the quality of the jokes aside, the script by Dinh and Nguyen is pretty great, understanding that a film needs more than just admittedly funny lines to actually work as a whole. Characterisation is probably the film’s greatest strength. For my taste, it is relatively unusual when a couple in a movie feels like any of the actual couples I know, but Ollie and Blair work wonderfully well. It’s not just that there’s chemistry in the writing and the acting between Savoy and Dinh, it’s that they show the right kind of closeness. The film avoids being demonstrative about the relationships between its characters and instead shows us how they act together and with each other in ways that feel organic and fun. And fun these characters are, fun enough, I’d watch them doing very little at all (or, you know, wish for some further adventures for them).
As it stands, the film’s whole serial killer plot is actually more of a set up to show how these characters interact than the film’s main concern. It is, however, imaginative and clever enough when it needs to be to hold the jokes and the characters together and give them something to work against. I did mention Crush the Skull is rather wonderful, didn’t I?
Fortunately, Blair’s brother Connor (Chris Riedell) is just in the very last stages of planning a lucrative heist (as he prefers to call it instead of the too pedestrian “burglary”) on a house somewhere out in the boons. There are a couple of problems with this, though. Firstly, Connor and Ollie hate each other with a passion, Ollie taking Connor to be a dangerously irresponsible amateur responsible for landing him in prison twice, and Connor thinking himself to be a criminal mastermind. Secondly, Ollie is absolutely right about Connor, and much of what they believe about the job will turn out to be badly wrong thanks to Connor not doing his research properly.
Which is to say, the trio and Connor’s partner Riley (Tim Chiou) break into the murder castle of a serial killer and soon find themselves locked in and on the menu as they guy’s next victims.
Indie horror comedies seldom work for me. Their scripts are all too often supposedly funny instead of actually funny, filled with jokes that are tedious instead of, you know, funny, and actors who lack in comical timing. So colour me happily surprised and impressed that Viet Nguyen’s Crush the Skull is a rather wonderful small (in the sense of a film that knows exactly on which scale it can best operate) movie.
Most – I’d say eighty-five percent, which is an insanely great quota for me and humour – jokes here actually hit their mark as they are written, and they are delivered with great comical timing by actors who clearly understand why what they are saying is supposed to be funny and how to emphasize it. But even when we leave the quality of the jokes aside, the script by Dinh and Nguyen is pretty great, understanding that a film needs more than just admittedly funny lines to actually work as a whole. Characterisation is probably the film’s greatest strength. For my taste, it is relatively unusual when a couple in a movie feels like any of the actual couples I know, but Ollie and Blair work wonderfully well. It’s not just that there’s chemistry in the writing and the acting between Savoy and Dinh, it’s that they show the right kind of closeness. The film avoids being demonstrative about the relationships between its characters and instead shows us how they act together and with each other in ways that feel organic and fun. And fun these characters are, fun enough, I’d watch them doing very little at all (or, you know, wish for some further adventures for them).
As it stands, the film’s whole serial killer plot is actually more of a set up to show how these characters interact than the film’s main concern. It is, however, imaginative and clever enough when it needs to be to hold the jokes and the characters together and give them something to work against. I did mention Crush the Skull is rather wonderful, didn’t I?
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Along Came the Devil (2018)
aka Tell Me Your Name
After a childhood dominated by an abusive father who liked to cram his two daughters into a wardrobe while he was having sex, Ashley (Sydney Sweeney) has just moved in with her aunt Tonya (Jessica Barth) – or Tanya as the IMDB lists her. Ashley’s sister is off to study somewhere, apparently, and will not appear on screen again despite the film’s prologue – not to speak of the page of absolutely pointless explanatory text that came before - suggesting the relationship between the sisters to be an important concern. It’s that kind of script. No idea what happened to the father either, by the way.
Anyhow, Ashley soon has a number of paranormal experiences of the usual sort, leading her to the assumption her dead mother is trying to contact her from beyond the grave. Of course – see title of the movie - it’s actually a demon, and soon (more or less) we go through the usual demonic possession rigmarole. Ashley’s only chance are the Worst Exorcist Evah (Bruce Davison) and his junior partner Pastor John (Matt Dallas) of the creepy soulless smile (alas not a plot point).
Now, I’d really like to spoil how exactly things turn out for the poor kid, but alas, Jason DeVan’s film doesn’t bother with nonsense like having an actual ending, finishing on Tonya calling in Ashley’s sister who will never arrive on screen, and the Worst Exorcist showing off the little prison he keeps in the church cellar for all the people he didn’t manage to exorcise in the past, including Ashley’s mother. I’m not sure if this ending is a demonstration of pretty astonishing incompetence or the film angling for a sequel but it sure doesn’t help a script that is all over the place anyway.
There are important plot developments only alluded to in passing (what exactly happened at Ashley’s school, just to take an obvious example not already mentioned), completely pointless scenes like Ashley’s visit to a psychiatrist we’ll never see again, a complicated backstory about an abusive father and a possessed mother the film does bugger all with and either should have cut or better have made the core of the film instead of the exorcism movie 101 yawn fest it instead uses. The characters that don’t just pointlessly come and go are right out of the exorcism horror cliché grab bag, and of course the film doesn’t put a single actual thought of its own into why demons exist in its world and what their motivations might be beyond making teens first want to have sex (clearly, the existence of the teenage sex drive can only be explained by demons), speak in foreign languages (education is demons, I suppose), and then start to stink and badly imitate scenes from The Exorcist (a film, by the way, which really did put thought into its theology, even though I never liked it much). Extra minus points go for the physical portrayal of the demon as a huge guy with horns and glowing red eyes, making it inappropriately cartoonish – and frankly rather hilarious - in a film that clearly wants to be taken seriously.
Given the state of the script, it’s no surprise the pacing can’t be anything but off, the film crawling away until there’s only enough time left to pack the possibly interesting stuff into the final twenty-five minutes.
The acting’s solid, and the photography – an overuse of lens flare that’d blind J.J. Abrams excepted – is fine, but that can’t save Along Came the Devil from its so-called script.
After a childhood dominated by an abusive father who liked to cram his two daughters into a wardrobe while he was having sex, Ashley (Sydney Sweeney) has just moved in with her aunt Tonya (Jessica Barth) – or Tanya as the IMDB lists her. Ashley’s sister is off to study somewhere, apparently, and will not appear on screen again despite the film’s prologue – not to speak of the page of absolutely pointless explanatory text that came before - suggesting the relationship between the sisters to be an important concern. It’s that kind of script. No idea what happened to the father either, by the way.
Anyhow, Ashley soon has a number of paranormal experiences of the usual sort, leading her to the assumption her dead mother is trying to contact her from beyond the grave. Of course – see title of the movie - it’s actually a demon, and soon (more or less) we go through the usual demonic possession rigmarole. Ashley’s only chance are the Worst Exorcist Evah (Bruce Davison) and his junior partner Pastor John (Matt Dallas) of the creepy soulless smile (alas not a plot point).
Now, I’d really like to spoil how exactly things turn out for the poor kid, but alas, Jason DeVan’s film doesn’t bother with nonsense like having an actual ending, finishing on Tonya calling in Ashley’s sister who will never arrive on screen, and the Worst Exorcist showing off the little prison he keeps in the church cellar for all the people he didn’t manage to exorcise in the past, including Ashley’s mother. I’m not sure if this ending is a demonstration of pretty astonishing incompetence or the film angling for a sequel but it sure doesn’t help a script that is all over the place anyway.
There are important plot developments only alluded to in passing (what exactly happened at Ashley’s school, just to take an obvious example not already mentioned), completely pointless scenes like Ashley’s visit to a psychiatrist we’ll never see again, a complicated backstory about an abusive father and a possessed mother the film does bugger all with and either should have cut or better have made the core of the film instead of the exorcism movie 101 yawn fest it instead uses. The characters that don’t just pointlessly come and go are right out of the exorcism horror cliché grab bag, and of course the film doesn’t put a single actual thought of its own into why demons exist in its world and what their motivations might be beyond making teens first want to have sex (clearly, the existence of the teenage sex drive can only be explained by demons), speak in foreign languages (education is demons, I suppose), and then start to stink and badly imitate scenes from The Exorcist (a film, by the way, which really did put thought into its theology, even though I never liked it much). Extra minus points go for the physical portrayal of the demon as a huge guy with horns and glowing red eyes, making it inappropriately cartoonish – and frankly rather hilarious - in a film that clearly wants to be taken seriously.
Given the state of the script, it’s no surprise the pacing can’t be anything but off, the film crawling away until there’s only enough time left to pack the possibly interesting stuff into the final twenty-five minutes.
The acting’s solid, and the photography – an overuse of lens flare that’d blind J.J. Abrams excepted – is fine, but that can’t save Along Came the Devil from its so-called script.
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
In short: Ghost Stories (2017)
Warning: I need to discuss the film’s ending during the course of the post,
so if you want to pretend to be surprised, better don’t read on!
Professor Goodman (Andy Nyman) is a professional debunker of psychics and psychic phenomena with a lot of personal baggage. Because that sort of thing always happens to people like him in the movies, his big role model Charles Cameron - now elderly, clearly dying and living in a trailer – invites him to his home, such as it is, to berate him and to give him an envelope containing the three cases that convinced him his and Goodman’s respective life’s works were misguided. Much of the film consists of Goodman following up on these stories, and getting them told via flashback in your typical ghost anthology style.
However, there’s something rather different going on here than it first appears to be.
Given all the excited reviews by people whose tastes I generally appreciate I’ve read about Ghost Stories, I went into Jeremy Dyson’s and Andy Nyman’s movie based on their (equally well received) stage play expecting to feel a bit of excitement myself, but as it stands, much of the film leaves me cold, while a certain amount of it just plain annoys me.
I certainly have mentioned it here over the years from time to time, but if there’s one style of ending I particularly loathe in a piece of supernatural horror, it is the old “it was all a dream, a coma fantasy or the hallucinations of people who are already dead” cop out, something that has been sucking meaning, joy and effect out of films for more than a hundred years now. To be fair to the filmmakers, in the case of Ghost Stories, this ending is not supposed to be a cop out but rather the actual point of the film. The tales we are told and their surroundings are meant to mirror the psychological state and the details of comatose Goodman’s surroundings, with even the presence of women in the tales only as ghosts and shadows being a point made about the man’s life, and nearly everything we see actually meaningful. Unfortunately, meaningful doesn’t necessarily mean interesting, and while the ghost stories themselves are loaded with connections to Goodman’s traumata and hang-ups, they are only very basic as ghost stories, though stuffed with many allusions to other movies and books, with little happening in them any viewer won’t have seen a thousand times before. They are meant to be pretty bland, I believe, but the boringness of a film’s elements being purposeful doesn’t actually make them less boring.
I’d probably be quite a bit more tolerant of the film being all metaphorical about everything if I ever got the impression Goodman’s actually interesting enough of a character to spend a whole movie in his coma fantasies, but as far as it goes, his psychology seems terribly generic to me, the supernatural as metaphor not enhancing our view into his mind as much as it should but rather working as a way for the film to avoid actual psychological insight. Bergman this is not.
All this is a particular shame since the level of filmmaking craft on display here is considerable, genre knowledge and a technical eye for detail standing in service of a film that is not as deep as it seems to think it is.
Professor Goodman (Andy Nyman) is a professional debunker of psychics and psychic phenomena with a lot of personal baggage. Because that sort of thing always happens to people like him in the movies, his big role model Charles Cameron - now elderly, clearly dying and living in a trailer – invites him to his home, such as it is, to berate him and to give him an envelope containing the three cases that convinced him his and Goodman’s respective life’s works were misguided. Much of the film consists of Goodman following up on these stories, and getting them told via flashback in your typical ghost anthology style.
However, there’s something rather different going on here than it first appears to be.
Given all the excited reviews by people whose tastes I generally appreciate I’ve read about Ghost Stories, I went into Jeremy Dyson’s and Andy Nyman’s movie based on their (equally well received) stage play expecting to feel a bit of excitement myself, but as it stands, much of the film leaves me cold, while a certain amount of it just plain annoys me.
I certainly have mentioned it here over the years from time to time, but if there’s one style of ending I particularly loathe in a piece of supernatural horror, it is the old “it was all a dream, a coma fantasy or the hallucinations of people who are already dead” cop out, something that has been sucking meaning, joy and effect out of films for more than a hundred years now. To be fair to the filmmakers, in the case of Ghost Stories, this ending is not supposed to be a cop out but rather the actual point of the film. The tales we are told and their surroundings are meant to mirror the psychological state and the details of comatose Goodman’s surroundings, with even the presence of women in the tales only as ghosts and shadows being a point made about the man’s life, and nearly everything we see actually meaningful. Unfortunately, meaningful doesn’t necessarily mean interesting, and while the ghost stories themselves are loaded with connections to Goodman’s traumata and hang-ups, they are only very basic as ghost stories, though stuffed with many allusions to other movies and books, with little happening in them any viewer won’t have seen a thousand times before. They are meant to be pretty bland, I believe, but the boringness of a film’s elements being purposeful doesn’t actually make them less boring.
I’d probably be quite a bit more tolerant of the film being all metaphorical about everything if I ever got the impression Goodman’s actually interesting enough of a character to spend a whole movie in his coma fantasies, but as far as it goes, his psychology seems terribly generic to me, the supernatural as metaphor not enhancing our view into his mind as much as it should but rather working as a way for the film to avoid actual psychological insight. Bergman this is not.
All this is a particular shame since the level of filmmaking craft on display here is considerable, genre knowledge and a technical eye for detail standing in service of a film that is not as deep as it seems to think it is.
Monday, September 10, 2018
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Requiem (2018)
Warning: I won’t spell things out completely, but there are certainly some
spoilers towards the nature of the series and its ending in here!
Things are going swell for cellist Matilda (Lydia Wilson) and her musical partner – who is more of a further appearing kind of guy in their promo materials – Hal (Joel Fry). They seem to be hitting the big time as much as a chamber music duo can today, with a big London show coming up and important American tour dates in their future.
However, directly before the start of said big show, Lydia witnesses her mother Janice (Joanna Scanlan) committing suicide by cutting her own throat right in front of her. There weren’t any warning signs at all, and Matilda is very distraught. Sadness and pain mixes with confusion when she finds a shoebox on her mother’s bed. It is full of photos – apparently shot stalker-style – of people Matilda doesn’t know, newspaper clips and a videotape with TV news features about the disappearance of a small girl named Carys in a Welsh village twenty years ago. Thinking about what these things mean is like an itch she can’t stop scratching for Matilda, so she and Hal make their way to Wales, where their questions open up old wounds and suggest increasingly more occult explanations for what has happened to the girl and what all of this has to do with Matilda.
This six part BBC/Netflix series is a mix of mystery and supernatural tale, written in most part by its creator Kris Mrksa and directed by Mahalia Belo, both with TV experience – Mrksa a lot of it - but with not much else coming up on IMDB. It’s a genuinely excellent mixture, using the parallels between modern mystery and crime tales about cold cases and what at first seems to be a ghost story, but ending up in a somewhat different direction than you’d at first expect, the ghost story rather elegantly escalating into an occult conspiracy story.
The writing is not above using clichés, but this is more the case of the piece using well-worn tropes because they fit its needs, not because it can’t come up with something better. Even the crime standard of the lost child isn’t the easy emotional in for the audience it sometimes tends to be but an intrinsic part of this tale, for the story is indeed about it instead of using it as an easy way to grab the viewer. The mystery is well enough constructed that even once I had figured out the shape of the story relatively early on (subjective thousand years of genre cinema and literature consumption will do that to you), it was a pleasure to follow the series into the details, the obvious ones and the less so. The characters are interesting throughout, usually starting from a point a viewer will have a handle of as a cliché, but eventually showing more complexity and facets that turn them into people. Very often, the characters feel more like they are the people on whom the clichés were based, rather than clichés.
I did find myself somewhat exasperated by Matilda’s approach to, well, anything, (while still rooting for her) in part because of the socially anxious person’s discomfort at someone being quite this direct and immune to what strangers might think of her, but also because Requiem makes very believable how someone genuinely hurt by her past and recent events might end up bursting through human niceties, proprieties and other people’s lives in a way that can only lead to something very bad for everyone involved. In fact, I wouldn’t see things ending much better for our protagonist if there were nothing supernatural involved here at all. At the same time, the way Wilson portrays her, she never becomes a caricature, but a pained and sometimes frustrating human being that really deserves better.
Speaking of the supernatural, one of the most pleasant surprises for me was the actual nature of the beings involved, the clever way the show portrays and uses them, basing them on a certain historical magician and his beliefs and practices, without either getting too much into the minutiae of occult practices nor ending up with people in robes muttering about Satan. Obviously, used and portrayed as present but mysterious and not truly understandable but us humans, these beings are rather disturbing not just because they are involved in spookiness, but because of the ideas about the cosmos they represent.
Belo’s direction is generally of the slick, contemporary TV style that may not have as much money to work with as a blockbuster, but that never feels cheap and suggests not the classic picture of some work-for-hire hack quickly shooting away at a script she doesn’t care about. The direction is as composed and thought through as you’d wish from every director worth your time as a viewer.
Some of the horror sequences will not be exactly new to the discerning viewer of this sort of thing, but Belo’s handling of Matilda’s shifting states of consciousness, and the intersection between the more visible horror effects and those that are just in her mind or might just be in other characters’ minds is flawless, and often wonderfully creepy without ever only wanting to creep you out. However, this is not the kind of tale that cops out on the supernatural in the end. As a matter of fact, the ending, while elegantly not showing a lot things, is consequent and rather brutal in this regard, while also keeping with what the series has set up about its supernatural world before.
So, Requiem is a rather lovely piece of work.
Things are going swell for cellist Matilda (Lydia Wilson) and her musical partner – who is more of a further appearing kind of guy in their promo materials – Hal (Joel Fry). They seem to be hitting the big time as much as a chamber music duo can today, with a big London show coming up and important American tour dates in their future.
However, directly before the start of said big show, Lydia witnesses her mother Janice (Joanna Scanlan) committing suicide by cutting her own throat right in front of her. There weren’t any warning signs at all, and Matilda is very distraught. Sadness and pain mixes with confusion when she finds a shoebox on her mother’s bed. It is full of photos – apparently shot stalker-style – of people Matilda doesn’t know, newspaper clips and a videotape with TV news features about the disappearance of a small girl named Carys in a Welsh village twenty years ago. Thinking about what these things mean is like an itch she can’t stop scratching for Matilda, so she and Hal make their way to Wales, where their questions open up old wounds and suggest increasingly more occult explanations for what has happened to the girl and what all of this has to do with Matilda.
This six part BBC/Netflix series is a mix of mystery and supernatural tale, written in most part by its creator Kris Mrksa and directed by Mahalia Belo, both with TV experience – Mrksa a lot of it - but with not much else coming up on IMDB. It’s a genuinely excellent mixture, using the parallels between modern mystery and crime tales about cold cases and what at first seems to be a ghost story, but ending up in a somewhat different direction than you’d at first expect, the ghost story rather elegantly escalating into an occult conspiracy story.
The writing is not above using clichés, but this is more the case of the piece using well-worn tropes because they fit its needs, not because it can’t come up with something better. Even the crime standard of the lost child isn’t the easy emotional in for the audience it sometimes tends to be but an intrinsic part of this tale, for the story is indeed about it instead of using it as an easy way to grab the viewer. The mystery is well enough constructed that even once I had figured out the shape of the story relatively early on (subjective thousand years of genre cinema and literature consumption will do that to you), it was a pleasure to follow the series into the details, the obvious ones and the less so. The characters are interesting throughout, usually starting from a point a viewer will have a handle of as a cliché, but eventually showing more complexity and facets that turn them into people. Very often, the characters feel more like they are the people on whom the clichés were based, rather than clichés.
I did find myself somewhat exasperated by Matilda’s approach to, well, anything, (while still rooting for her) in part because of the socially anxious person’s discomfort at someone being quite this direct and immune to what strangers might think of her, but also because Requiem makes very believable how someone genuinely hurt by her past and recent events might end up bursting through human niceties, proprieties and other people’s lives in a way that can only lead to something very bad for everyone involved. In fact, I wouldn’t see things ending much better for our protagonist if there were nothing supernatural involved here at all. At the same time, the way Wilson portrays her, she never becomes a caricature, but a pained and sometimes frustrating human being that really deserves better.
Speaking of the supernatural, one of the most pleasant surprises for me was the actual nature of the beings involved, the clever way the show portrays and uses them, basing them on a certain historical magician and his beliefs and practices, without either getting too much into the minutiae of occult practices nor ending up with people in robes muttering about Satan. Obviously, used and portrayed as present but mysterious and not truly understandable but us humans, these beings are rather disturbing not just because they are involved in spookiness, but because of the ideas about the cosmos they represent.
Belo’s direction is generally of the slick, contemporary TV style that may not have as much money to work with as a blockbuster, but that never feels cheap and suggests not the classic picture of some work-for-hire hack quickly shooting away at a script she doesn’t care about. The direction is as composed and thought through as you’d wish from every director worth your time as a viewer.
Some of the horror sequences will not be exactly new to the discerning viewer of this sort of thing, but Belo’s handling of Matilda’s shifting states of consciousness, and the intersection between the more visible horror effects and those that are just in her mind or might just be in other characters’ minds is flawless, and often wonderfully creepy without ever only wanting to creep you out. However, this is not the kind of tale that cops out on the supernatural in the end. As a matter of fact, the ending, while elegantly not showing a lot things, is consequent and rather brutal in this regard, while also keeping with what the series has set up about its supernatural world before.
So, Requiem is a rather lovely piece of work.
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