When a Stranger Calls Back (1993)

Warning: I am going to spoil some details about the killer, because only a saint couldn’t!

Having survived the strange attack of a serial killer during a babysitting gig during which the children she was watching disappeared without a trace, Julia (Jill Schoelen) is still suffering from the psychological fallout five years later.

She’s in college now, after some extensive stays in mental hospitals, but the poor kid still can’t catch a break. She is convinced that somebody, perhaps the killer from the night five years ago, is targeting her by breaking into her apartment and making little changes to her living space only somebody with the PTSD-born need to control her environment like she has would notice. Eventually, Julia is going to the police, but the (inevitably male) detectives are all too willing to laugh her off as crazy.

Fortunately, they have to call in counsellor Jill Johnson (Carol Kane), too. And Jill, having survived her own peculiar serial killer in the original When a Stranger Calls, knows a little about trauma and weird killers and is willing to believe Julia. She calls still-retired cop turned private eye and vigilante for money John Clifford (Charles Durning) for help, and together, they might just solve this increasingly strange case.

Fred Walton’s made for Showtime sequel to his classic When a Stranger Calls is a much weirder film than you’d expect from a TV movie serial killer sequel. It starts out with a wonderfully tense cold open that builds an incredible amount of tension out of one and a half performances, a couple of rooms, and most importantly a door, artfully creating a sense of suspense and of dread out of this minimalist set-up that suggests Walton is thriving on the limited funds a TV gig offers rather than suffering from it.

After, that, once we’ve witnessed Julia’s first ordeal, the film makes one of its many shifts in tone and genre, leaving the thriller for a stay in the land of TV PTSD melodrama, only to leave that place for a bit of slow police procedural action, which it in turn will leave for the realm of the weird-ass thriller, where retired cops are saying stuff like “This is gonna sound crazy, but…we’re looking for a ventriloquist!”. It’s late period CSI bizarre, at the very least.

Being the kind of viewer I am, it’s that last part of the film I found most interesting, even though the cold open is certainly its objectively best part (indeed, keeping with the tradition of the first movie, that one’s so good, the film would have been worth wading through the police procedural bits for it alone). I am constitutionally bound never to even try and resist when a film decides the best direction to take when it is revealing the style and methods of its serial killer is to make him a ventriloquist. A ventriloquist who is working strip joints with the sort of mock-existentialist act that’s actively setting parts of his audience on the run, at that. Even better/more bizarre (which is pretty much the same thing in this context), he’ll also turn out to be a master at camouflaging body paint, becoming your wall with the best of ‘em. That, as well as a pretty great climax in which Carol Kane (well, her stunt double) goes all Buffy on the guy’s behind before Durning kills a wall, is more than enough to endear any movie to me.

Sure, I could have lived with less of the police procedural business (it just isn’t my genre on most days), but even that is made tolerable by Durning’s and Schoelen’s capable and likeable performances and the off-beat air Kane brings to her role, with all the slightly atypical body language and line delivery most other police procedurals alas lack.

In short: Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight (2020)

Original title: W lesie dzis nie zasnie nikt

It’s time for another round in the eternal fight between teenagers and cellar dwelling backwoods mutants. In Bartosz M. Kowalski’s Polish version of the tale, the teens are part of a techno-addict offline hiking camp, an idea the film doesn’t use for anything but to explain the absence of cell phones, though why someone leading a three day hike with a group of teens wouldn’t still have some way to contact the outside world is kept unexplained. The mutants are huge, and icky, smell bad and have just escaped their mum’s cellar. A bit of the old ultra-violence, Polish style, ensues.

While it’s more a competently made horror film than a deeply exciting one, Nobody Sleeps is at the very least entertaining throughout. It’s decently paced and effectively written, which is quite a bit more than most filmmakers believe they can get away with when making another backwoods slasher.

But then, there are a couple of elements here not completely typical for this sub-genre. Kowalski is pretty good at shifting the film’s tone repeatedly, and uses this to go from satire on the state of Poland (he doesn’t seem impressed), to bread and butter backwoods slasher stuff, to that very peculiar style of dark humour you often encounter in Polish films, and back again.

The film also has the interesting habit of dragging its teen characters back from being one note slasher movie clichés a scene or two before it kills them off, providing the young actors with a little bit to get their teeth in, and giving the curious impression of actually liking its characters (not a thing slashers do very often) yet still showing no compunction against getting rid of them with a nasty gore gag or two.

It’s certainly a mixture that does keep a viewer on their toes.

Music Monday: Dancers Edition

May the Devil Take You: Chapter 2 (2020)

Original title: Sebelum Iblis Menjemput: Ayat Dua

aka May the Devil Take You Too

Two years after the demonic family massacre fun of the first film, Alfie (Chelsea Islan) is keeping the mental demons of the past at bay with pills and attitude, taking care of her step sister Nara (Hidijah Shahab) despite things being exceedingly difficult emotionally, psychologically and financially for the two.

Time doesn’t get a chance to provide further healing, because a group of masked people knock them both out and kidnap them (Alfie’s putting up quite the fight, obviously). When Alfie wakes up again, she finds herself in a dilapidated former orphanage in the country. Apparently, hers and Nara’s kidnapping is the best way a group of young women and men in their twenties could come up with to ask her for help, because who’s talking to people anymore, right? You see, the group grew up together in this orphanage. Quite happily, even, until the wife of orphanage head Lesmana (Ray Sahetapy) died and he became an abusive demon worshipper planning to sacrifice them, as you do. The kids did manage to save themselves by burning him alive, but he cursed them in the process. It looks as if that curse has really begun to hit hard the last couple of months.

Fortunately, the group have found a solution to lift the curse. They just need someone who has fought off demons before to read a spell from Lesmana’s old grimoire, and the thing should be done. And who just happened to be in the news a couple of years ago with a wild story about demons? Despite everything, Alfie eventually does agree to help out the nitwits thinking a kidnapping to be the proper way to ask for help, but her reading of the spell doesn’t lift the curse, and instead starts another night of horror. Well, at least Alfie has some practice in these things now.

It is difficult not to compare May the Devil 2 to director/writer Timo Tjahjanto’s former filmmaking partner Kimo Stamboel’s sort-of remake of Queen of Black Magic. After all, they both take place in an orphanage and concern the demonic misadventures of its former abused inhabitants. However, the film at hand feels somewhat nicer (if you can use that word for something with so much gore and goop as this one has), less interested in its horrors as a metaphor for cycles of abuse and more in making something for an audience to have a loud and creepy good time with; also one with far fewer centipedes, I can happily report. There’s still some depth to the film’s treatment of traumatic childhoods and its consequences, but that’s not really its point. To my eyes, both approaches to horror are perfectly valid, and I’m happy to have two films that could have been carbon copies of each other turn out so differently.

In style and tone, this one’s, like the first May the Devil Take You - which I never wrote up for reasons lost to time and the bad memory of a middle-aged guy, but which I enjoyed quite a bit – clearly made with at least one eye on the first two Evil Dead movies. A couple of moments directly quote Raimi’s films, quite a few more simple suggest the influence, and there’s quite a bit in Tjahjanto’s wild and wildly creative camera work hinting at that influence as well. However, the director then goes and mixes these by now classic US horror film moves with monsters and concepts about devil worship very specifically Indonesian, using Raimi’s early style to tell a story the US director could never have told this exact way. It’s a great example of how an artist can use their influences to build their own thing out of them, and keeps Tjahjanto far away from any accusation of using his clearly encyclopaedic knowledge of the Western horror tradition for mere copyism. Which, don’t get me wrong, can lead to perfectly fine films too, particularly when it’s non-Western directors copying Western ones (the other way round, things often become rather embarrassing).

While I’m still comparing, I do prefer Alfie quite a bit to Ash, what with her being much less of an asshole, and actively trying to protect the people around her and not just herself. Islan’s performance manages to make her courageous in the better meaning of the word (as in, a person fighting through her fear instead of one not having any), and she’s great at suggesting how Alfie uses her rough attitude as a survival mechanism.

There are obviously some plot problems here – mainly, why don’t the idiots ask before they kidnap and why do they dump Nara in the haunted house too? – but watching May the Devil Take You 2, I found myself much more interested in the next weird transformation or bloody mess the film would come up with than poking at its script.

In short: Vabank II, czyli riposta (1985)

aka Point of No Return

Warsaw, 1936. After two years of jail time, ex-bank owner and still scumbag Kramer (Leonard Pietraszak) escapes with the help of former prison mate Edek Sztyc (Bronislaw Wroclawski) and his associates. He still has a nice Swiss bank account to pay for this sort of thing, it turns out. While Sztyc would really rather make his way to Switzerland with Kramer as quickly as possible, his new employer won’t leave Poland until he has taken his revenge on safe cracker and criminal mastermind Henryk Kwinto (Jan Machulski), who tricked him into prison in the first movie.

Kwinto has actually retired now and moved to the country with Marta (Ewa Szykulska) and her little daughter, but when Kramer and his associates begin trying to kill him and his old associates – who have now gone into the movie business – something has to be done. That this something will eventually turn into a rather complicated yet fun plot to thwart Kramer shouldn’t surprise anyone.

I don’t love the second Vabank movie – again directed by Juliusz Machulski and bringing back the complete main cast of the first film - quite as much as the first one. That’s mostly a question of pacing here: despite actually being ten minutes or so shorter Vabank II feels quite a bit slower and includes, mostly in its first half, a couple scenes that simply slow things down too much for my taste. Particularly the black face (yeah, I don’t know either) musical number with the title song performed by Jacek Chmielnik seems to be completely useless to the film and could be excised for pace as well as good taste, but generally, the film does simply take a bit too long to get going.

However, once it does, Vabank II does come into its own rather well. This is not one of those sequels that simply try to copy the first movie but really stands in dialogue with it, mirroring and commenting on the first film but going its own way when it wants and needs to. The cast is still very fun to watch, and Kwinto’s eventual plot is still constructed with wit and a light hand, with funny and clever little ideas coming up with nice regularity. The only people who die here are still professional killers, everyone else gets their comeuppance in other, perfectly appropriate ways, and things wrap up with a grin by middle-aged men who aren’t arseholes. The film even takes care to give its characters an actual happy end, which isn’t that easy in a movie set in Poland this close to the Nazi invasion, but which I appreciated quite a bit.

Pleasing terrors

One of the surprise ray of lights in the (nameless) void of last year was the decision of great M.R. James, H.G. Wells and so on performer Robert Lloyd Parry to do a nearly weekly live stream of "rehearsed readings" streamed and archived (for those of us who always miss streams) on his YouTube channel, making me rather happy in the process.

These are pleasantly low tech affairs done by a master, so anyone interested in late Victorian/Edwardian ghost stories, science fiction, and weird fiction really should take a look at what Mister Lloyd Parry has been doing (and perhaps put some money his way, too, if available).

I'll embed two readings here, but there's so much more available.

In short: Resurrection (1999)

Homicide detective John Prudhomme (Christopher Lambert), once a Cajun working in New Orleans (Cajun accents are like French Canadian ones, right?), has been working in Chicago (mostly portrayed by Toronto) for some time now. His pretty abrasive character caused by the usual dead kid trauma leaves the man rather unloved by his peers. Only his long-suffering partner Hollinsworth (Leland Orser) takes to him. Everybody has to agree, though, that John’s a hell of a detective. So it’s not a big surprise that it’s him and Hollinsworth who’ll take the lead on a particularly nasty series of serial killings, the sort of combination of mutilations and murder that’ll leave even more stable men than our protagonist disturbed.

Eventually, it’ll turn out the killer is building his own personal Jesus out of stolen body parts, in hopes of achieving the second coming via serial killing. I’m not sure from which part of the bible he’s taken that idea.

Following the success of their first work together in Highlander, both director Russell Mulcahy and his lead Christopher Lambert did have rather complicated careers, often missing the luck more than the ability to catch lightning in a bottle again. In 1999, they re-teamed for this shameless Seven rip-off that rethinks Fincher’s original as an exploitation movie - ickier and bloodier, and with more cop movie clichés. The story was apparently co-written by Lambert, so we know who to blame here.

But seriously, while the moments when the film is trying to ape Seven but with less intelligence and style can become a bit much, this is actually one of the more watchable Seven-alikes. In part, that’s thanks to Mulcahy, who may be quite a few years away from his stylish prime, but still knows how to keep a film flowing very nicely indeed. And while the film is certainly rather stupid, it’s not one that ever pretends to be terribly intelligent; rather it is using its clichés honestly, simply trying to provide an audience with a good time full of mutilated bodies and Lambert staring hauntedly in the distance. Works for me.

From time to time, the film does provide something more: scenes like the discovery of the killer’s nearly finished rotting Jesus are milked for as much gross-out as you can get away with while still keeping an R-rating (there’s a rumoured harder cut, but nobody outside of the filmmakers seems to have seen it), and the climax contains a bit of baby juggling you really got to see to believe. Plus, does Seven have a pretty peculiar cameo of David Cronenberg as the hero’s priest?

Steel and Lace (1991)

Warning: there will be spoilers all over, but that’s okay, the film’s not making terribly much sense anyway!

When, after years of court sessions, the lies of his accomplice cronies help acquit Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerveris) of the rape of classical pianist Gaily Morton (Clare Wren) he did indeed commit, she kills herself by jumping from the roof of the court building.

Years later, Daniel and co have turned being human garbage into their actual professions, working as developers who still do their own thugging. So nary a teardrop will fall from the audience when these charming gentlemen are killed off – going by the sequence in which they committed perjury in Gaily’s case, no less – by a very interesting woman wearing many different faces, kitted out with useful tools like a giant drill in the middle of her chest. Underneath said faces is that of Gaily, though, for her clearly very talented and equally crazy brother Albert (Bruce Davison) has built a robot based on her, or turned her corpse into a cyborg, or something.

While that’s going on, the film also spends time with former courtroom artist turned fine artist Alison (Stacy Haiduk), who is revisiting some of her old courtroom drawings for a “then and now” project. She also happens to be the ex-girlfriend of the cop trying to solve the murders, one “Clippy” (don’t call him Clippy) Dunn (David Naughton), so she gets absurdly involved.

Ernest D. Farino’s sci-fi horror rape revenge movie is a complete mess, as if someone had taken about three movies with a similar plot but very different protagonists and tones, taken their favourite scenes, stitched them together, and called them a movie.

So expect a seriously played, if weird, scene between Gaily-bot and Albert concerning the nature of guilt, grief and revenge to be followed by a bit of exploitational horror in which a masked (that is, played by a different actress) Gaily first seduces one of her victims to then dispatch him in a ridiculous and gory manner, followed by the misadventures of Alison. That last part of the movie seems mostly made to provide the audience with more exposition than even the dumbest of us could ever need, and bring it to length without straining the budget.

To be fair, Haiduk plays her part in the boring bits of the movie with great intensity, an effort that stays in marked contrast with Naughton, who is looking so bored you’d expect him to drift off and pick his nose any second now.

The serious dramatic bits aren’t working out terribly well, either. Wren’s and Davidson’s performances are – to nobody’s surprise -perfectly fine, but the film never manages to distract from the enormous silliness of the whole cyborg affair, the sleazy way the Gaily-bot is kitted out, and so on, enough to make the melodrama actually work.

So, really, it’s the exploitational horror elements here that are memorable, be it Gaily-bot making a hug extra-special with her giant ass drill, Gaily-bot gender-confusing a guy before she decapitates him by impersonating a very weird and on first look male FBI agent with breasts, Gaily-bot castrating a guy (one assumes with the cutting vagina her totally stable brother must have built into her), and so on. These scenes are all pretty awesome tasteless fun, but they don’t jibe terribly well with the rape revenge motives. In a film with an actual brain in its head and something to say, you just might get away with a victim of rape seducing her victimisers before she kills them, but it feels less than pleasant in a movie that’s mostly about the cheap thrills. In this context, I can’t help but notice that this is a rape revenge movie where the victim doesn’t even get actual agency in her revenge, for she’s literally programmed by her brother to do what she does, and has no choice one way or the other.

A better movie might even have done something with this in combination with the glee Albert seems to feel watching Gaily’s kill footage – this one just lets these elements stand, with little idea what to do with them.

In short: Danur 2: Maddah (2018)

A year or so after the first Danur movie, college age medium Risa (Prilly Latuconsina) is still taking care of her sister Riri (Sandrinna Michelle) in lieu of their perpetually absent parents. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the next movie used their parents having been dead all along as a plot twist, so absent are they. But hey, Risa still has her trio of ghost kid friends, who – awesomely - only make a mess when they invite some of their ghost kid friends over anymore. And right now, the sisters are living close enough to Risa’s aunt Tina (Sophia Latjuba) and uncle Ahmad (Bucek), so there are some grown-ups around when the kids need them.

However, something is very wrong in the house of Tina and Ahmad. Risa’s uncle has started to act very peculiarly, spending most of the day and night in the guest house he uses as his study, and when he is home, he is creepily zoned out, apathetic, and generally useless, doing little more than filling his home with tuberoses. At first, Risa believes he is simply cheating on his wife, very badly indeed, but soon enough, the place is plagued by other supernatural occurrences as well, and not the sort of things that suggest friendly child ghosts who might occasionally suggest suicide, but the prayer-disrupting, insanity-causing kind of haunting.

Risa will need all her of courage, as well as the help of her dead friends, to put the family back in order.

Whereas I found Awi Suryadi’s first Danur movie often moody and entertaining but perhaps also a bit lightweight, its sequel ups the ante in mostly all the right ways: the stakes feel higher (even though objectively, they weren’t terribly low in the first one, either), and the mood of hauntedness is evoked more regularly as well as more consequently.

The film is also a bit more jump scare heavy than the first one, but it’s still not exclusively about jump scares. Suryadi’s main interest really seems to be building up a creepy and spooky mood through all visual tricks he can come up with, evoking a kind of Indonesian sister of the European gothic very well indeed, including the shadows of a buried past attempting to repeat themselves with the living of today and (at least implied) the sins of colonialism coming back to haunt the place.

The ghost actress this time around, Carolina Passoni Fattori, isn’t as impressive as Shareefa Daanish was in the first one, but the ghost isn’t interacting with most of the living as directly as in the first one, working more as an evil presence than a character this time around. Which makes quite a bit of sense in a film that’s as big on mood-building between the set pieces as this one is. And make no mistake, there are some very fine set pieces here, my favourites being some mildly disorienting business concerning a prayer, a ghost, and a mirror, and Risa’s big possession scene, in which Latuconsina lets loose quite wonderfully.

It’s a lovely piece of work, really, a very traditional kind of ghost story effectively told for a mass market audience nobody involved seems to be looking down on, suggesting a director totally in control of clichés and genre traditions alike.

Music Monday: Moon Rabbit Edition

Dark Angel: The Ascent (1994)

Veronica (Angela Featherstone), a young demon, is more than just somewhat unhappy with her life in hell. Hell, it turns out, is pretty boring for a young woman not satisfied with her place in the underworld. Her father Hellikin (Nicholas Worth) is sweaty and abusive, treating here dream visions of ascending to the overworld with his fists and a lot of shouting.

Eventually, Veronica, accompanied by her “beast” (or as we call them around here, German Shepard Dog) Hellraiser (Heros), flees to the overworld. Once there she falls in with and for a young physician (Daniel Markel), and spends her nights smiting evil-doers, for in this interpretation of demons and hell, Veronica’s kind is definitely doing the dirty work for heaven. She will need some time – and some heavenly “encouragement” – to learn about concepts like punishments being meant to be appropriate to the heaviness of the crime. Before that, she’s all about ripping muggers’ and would be rapists’ spines out and feeding their flesh to her dog as well as to her unwitting new boyfriend. Veronica’s not only going after the small fry, though. Having early on identified the city’s right-wing mayor as “evil incarnate”, she is planning to do something about him.

I have no idea where Linda Hassani’s (whose magnum opus this is) Dark Angel: The Ascent has hidden from me all of my life, but I’m certainly very happy that we have finally found each other. This was made in the early Romanian phase of Charles Band’s Full Moon, at a point in time when the budgets were still workable, and Band and company still seem to have been interested in making proper low budget movies instead of mostly focussing on very slow moving in-jokes about puppets and dolls.

Hassani makes a lot out of what Band gives her, turning the Romanian sets as lively as possible through the powers of inventive lighting and genuinely great camerawork by veteran Romanian DP Vivi Dragan Vasile. The film starts with a really cleverly realized low budget hell, containing the proper titbits of the more violent versions of Christianity and quite a few good jokes and continues in that mode when Veronica arrives in New York, Hassani selling fake America with the best of them.

Tonally, the film is a curious mixture of actually pretty coherent (if not exactly real-world canonical) theology, straight-faced jokes, some well done violence, quite the dollop of goofiness, and just as much seriousness. The script by Matthew Bright (who wrote quite a bit of interesting stuff like this and Freeway) clearly has a lot of fun with the sillier elements of the plot, but the filmmakers do present jokes and silliness with as straight a face as possible, as do the actors, who avoid all winking into the camera even in moments when most anyone would have been tempted to do some of it. Of course, the film’s jokes are all the funnier because they are presented with that straight a face and never get in the way of the film’s serious side of right wing bashing, light feminism, romance and fun violence. There’s a lot of actual intelligence in the writing and the staging of the film, Hassani and Bright clearly understanding that having fun and being silly does not mean you can’t also take your film seriously at the same time.

In its own wonderfully eccentric way, Dark Angel does fit snugly in between other 90s (mostly low budget) attempts at making dark superhero/urban vigilante movies, mostly getting around the problem a lot of these films had with understanding the differences between the superhero and urban vigilante genres thanks to its violent religious angle. Grimdark superheroes and visitors from hell do ponder comparable moral conundrums, it turns out, just in rather a different language. The film’s really interesting when it comes to its portrayal of Veronica’s little bits of slaughter, too, or rather, it repeatedly portrays the people she rescues as being genuinely afraid of her and disturbed by her methods, going very much against the grain of typical vigilante movies who’d never dare suggest a victim of a crime might react with anything else but a high five to being rescued in the most violent way possible. It’s interesting, and really important to the very specific kind of redemption tale the film is telling.

But before I leave anyone with the impression that this is a totally serious movie for totally serious people, let me quote my favourite scene to you. Veronica has just disrupted two police officers beating up a gentleman for the crime of walking through the streets at night while being black (and yes, the lack of improvement between then and now in this regard is pretty damn depressing). Non-plussed by a slight young woman with very big feet (that’s a plot point) talking grim-faced biblical vengeance at them (Featherstone’s pretty great at that particular note in most of her scenes), one of the cops says “How would you like to spend the night in jail – on a prostitution charge?”. To which our heroine replies “How would you like to die in a state of mortal sin?” before dispatching the cops rather easily. Which may very well be the best line a movie vigilante has ever said to someone.

The hopeful viewer can also look forward to a first date at a porn cinema (Taxi Driver was certainly not lost on the filmmakers), a floating angel lady right out of a Christian kitsch postcard, and various comments on the mores of Hell and Earth.

I honestly have no idea what more anyone could ask of any movie.

In short: Green Rush (2020)

Some stupid violent assholes assault the legal marihuana farm of some stupid violent assholes. Betrayal and idiot ploys to make a cheap buck are of course involved too.

To me, films like Gerard Roxburgh’s Green Rush feel like the poor misguided children of neo noir, throwing themselves into various nihilist poses but never actually managing to tell stories that seem to come by their nihilism by anything but overplotting. This particular example of the form is convinced humans are just animals, donchaknow, so everyone and everything in it is absurdly horrible. Which might at least be fun to watch if not for the fact that every single character here is not just a murderous, violent asshole, but also so stupid I have my doubts anyone here can open a door without help. There’s an unspoken rule in movies that assholes are great fun (or at least interesting) as long as they are competent or better brilliant at what they do; and fools are best served with a good heart. Here, alas, is a movie full of characters that are neither likeable nor interesting whose stupidity makes them actively annoying. A handful of filmmakers on the level of the Coen Brothers can still make this sort of thing work, but that’s far beyond Green Rush.

Despite a more than decent cast (Mike Foy, Paul Telfer, Kriss Dozal et al are all doing their best with the material they are given) Green Rush falls into this particular trap of nihilism as a pretty damn annoying form of poser-dom particularly awkwardly, believing some particularly groan-inducing late movie plot developments prove its point when they only prove that overwriting and overplotting to badly make a point is much worse than any sin committed by a film made only to entertain.

It’s all particularly frustrating because technically, at least on the visual front, there’s a lot of talent on display, but these talent in dire need of either a better argued nihilism, empathy for its characters, or a more interesting philosophy.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,gerard roxburgh,mike foy,paul telfer,kriss dozal,misha crosby,crime

Some music and a change

Since I've run out of posts for my Friday repost schedule now, Friday is going to be a skip day around here in some weeks. In others, I'm going to post some kind of popcultural ephemera.

In this case, it's a tiny, little playlist with some of my favourite music of 2020. I'm so very sorry.

In short: Freaky (2020)

Some days, I feel like half of what I do around here is complaining about films a lot of other viewers seem to like quite a bit. So how about Christopher “Happy Death Day” Landon’s newest effort, that continues his series of gimmicky, self-conscious romps. Well, at least in this case, I’m really complaining about a film that I found very entertaining throughout.

It’s a body swap movie between a slasher (Vince Vaughn) and a teenage girl named Millie (Kathryn Newton) and the usual attempts by the girl in the old guy’s body to reverse the swap before it becomes permanent, while the killer first proves that he has a better sense of style and knows how to apply make-up properly, before he kills his way through a few people.

We don’t really have to be too sorry about anyone the slasher kills in our heroine’s body, though, for he’s managing quite well to only kill the bullies and assholes in her life, if with very satisfying amounts of gore. He also, conveniently, never does his thing in any way that’ll get Millie in trouble if and when she returns to her own body.

Which, on one hand, is a perfectly logical direction to take for a film, but it’s also a very safe direction that leads to a film that never can be anything more complex than a violent romp because it doesn’t dare to create true emotional and physical stakes, nobody the film actually cares about ever being believably at risk either in body or in mind, or in future college prospects. It’s a bit like an ultra-violent version of Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who in this way, risk-averse to a nearly ridiculous amount.

If you can adjust your expectations accordingly (something I sort of managed while doing a bit of internal grumbling), though, Freaky does have quite a few charms. It certainly is never anything less than a fun, fast, sometimes funny romp, with some good gore gags, expert pacing, and just about the right amount of self-consciousness, looking slick but not too slick.

Vaughn and Newton give lovely performances throughout (Vaughn probably now having to fight it out with Jack Black when it comes to who is the best older guy playing a body-swapped teen girl), as does the organically diverse supporting cast (Celeste O’Connor and Misha Osherovich being the obvious stand-outs).

So, while not exactly getting the film I would have wanted, I can’t blame Freaky for being what it is.

And that’s a wrap

for this year for the blog. Normal service will resume on Thursday, the 7th January.

Until then, I wish my readers real and imaginary as good a festive season (whatever festival you prefer, of course) as they can get under the current circumstances and a happy and healthy beginning to a hopefully slightly less exciting year.

Otherwise, joining a Cthulhu cult might turn out to be an alternative.

In short: Danur (2017)

aka Danur: I Can See Ghosts

When she was a child, Risa (Asha Kenyeri) lived with her usually absent parents in the country mansion of her grandmother. Her loneliness was disrupted by a trio of children she took some time to identify as ghosts, and apart from their encouraging her to suicide as the cure for loneliness, it really wouldn’t have needed the intervention of a priest (?) severing their bonds.

A decade or so later, the family returns to grandmother’s mansion. The parents are still usually absent, so it falls to Risa (now played by Prilly Latuconsina) to take care of her little sister Riri (Sandrinna Michelle Skornicki) as well as grandmother (Inggrid Widjanarko), who must have suffered one or more strokes and is bedridden, can’t speak, and looks generally frightened and unhappy. Any time now, there’s supposed to be a nurse coming in to help Risa out with her familial duties.

One night, a creepy woman calling herself Asih (Shareefa Daanish) appears, assuring that she is indeed the nurse and not the spirit of a woman dwelling in a banyan tree with a terrible fixation on little girls out to get Riri. Ominous things ensue.

Eventually, Risa will need to reawaken her connection to her old dead kid buddies if she wants to save her family.

If I believe the Wikipedia, Awi Suryadi’s Danur was and is the highest grossing film in the new-ish Indonesian horror boom. At least it was successful enough to spawn two sequels I’m hopefully going to get around to writing up one of these days. The film at hand is stylistically a lot softer than the May the Devil Take Yous and Queens of Black Magic of this world, standing in a continuing sub-genre of films about young women (sometimes cursed with) the ability to see and communicate with the spirit world. Often, like here, the main character has to take on a protective role not only towards innocents threatened by the supernatural but also towards a younger sibling whose own mediumistic powers are just awakening.

While still having proper hauntings that are an actual physical and spiritual threat, these films feature little gore and tend to be friendlier, sometimes more openly religious than their somewhat ruder siblings.

Danur is a good example for most of these elements. Asih – a lovely creepy turn by Daanish who does make an immense impression through strange body language and staring – may very well drag your sister to the spirit world (a place looking exactly like your house but drenched in Bava colours and a bit of dry ice fog) to drown her, but she’s not going to induce anyone to cut their face off. That’s not to say the film isn’t putting the work in to creep you out: there are some excellent scenes between Asih and the grandmother, playing on the old woman’s horrible helplessness; some clever plays with the invisibility of spirits to most people (unless they look through their own legs, apparently) and a generally carefully built mood of pleasant creepiness.

Apparently, in Indonesia, unlike other parts of the world, a horror film does not need to be a jump scare fest to be a mainstream commercial success in the cinemas.

Music Monday: Seasonal Edition

The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Retired British officer Rudolf Rassendyll (Ronald Colman) is visiting one of those curious fictional Balkan countries that pop up so often in Hollywood, the pulps, and comics for a fishing trip. As a matter of fact, the country in Anthony Hope’s novel this is based on, called Ruritania there and not named in the film, is often seen as the earliest example of the made up Eastern-ish European country in popular culture.

In any case, a peaceful fishing trip it’s not going to be for the man, for he just happens to look exactly like the very soon to be crowned king of the country, also called Rudolf, and Rudolf the king is in a spot of bother no true Englishman of Rudolf the Brit’s type is going to let him hang in. Being a notorious carouser and alcoholic gadfly, the king isn’t well loved by his subjects, leaving the door wide open for his perpetually coldly angry and pretty evil brother “Black” Michael (Raymond Massey). Really, simply drugging Rudolf on the night before his coronation should do the trick, providing Michael with an opening to declare himself regent, marry Rudolf’s betrothed Princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll), and probably rename the country into Latveria.

As it happens, said drugging is taking place right when Rudolf the Brit is present, palling around with the king after a chance encounter. Because nobody would believe the truth, the king’s oldest and most-suffering retainer, Colonel Zapt (C. Aubrey Smith) comes up with a plan: why not let his king’s virtual twin go through the coronation to thwart Michael’s plans, without anyone knowing any better?

This is of course only the beginning of a series of intrigues, romantic interludes and curious adventures for our Rudolf.

The Prisoner of Zenda is, in its nature and type, a kissing cousin – or really rather a making out heavily in the backyard cousin – of the swashbuckler, really only missing that particular genre descriptor in my eyes because its moments of physical derring-do are nearly completely relegated to the final act. It’s a very fine final act, though.

And really, this is me doing genre nit-picking and not me complaining about the actual film, for the adventure and romance movie we get here is indeed one of the great achievements of classic Hollywood. Not only because it puts quite a few of the British actors working in Hollywood at the time into one movie – for what is more continental European than guys from Oxbridge to American eyes, apart from lederhosen – but because it really does wonders with them.

This is one of those films that don’t just feature a perfectly cast hero in Ronald Colman, who does the wit, the romance and the physical demands of the role more than just justice. Nearly everyone else on screen is more than just fit to type, enhancing the traditionally flat characters in a film like this through mild ironies, charisma, and a hand for the telling details of body language and intonation. Even Raymond Massey’s Michael is only not considered one of the great screen villains because he’s overshadowed by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.’s Rudolf von Hentzau, the most fun to watch bastard imaginable, whom I left out of the plot synopsis as well the roles played by Mary Astor and David Niven because synopsising the film’s finely wrought net of dramatic interpersonal relations and improbable intrigue would have to go into novel, or at least movie, length.

Apparently, this was a bit of a difficult production, director John Cromwell having some kind of beef or the other with about half of the main cast – which sounds ridiculous going by what we see of them on screen – so that some scenes may or may not have been shot by someone else. George Cukor was supposedly shooting whatever, as well as, and more probably to my eyes, W.S. Van Dyke doing work on the fencing scene in the climax. Whoever told DP James Wong Howe in any given scene what to do (or was wise enough to let him get on with his business) did a bang-up job in any case, creating one of the best fairy-tale Europes of the American subconscious, built out of sumptuous, beautiful and exotic scenes gliding into another elegantly, everything culminating in a finale that visually seems to take place in the direct neighbourhood of Universal’s backlot Europe of shadows and expressionist castles.

It’s as perfect as anything you’ll see.

Three Films Make A Post: He's good at taking friends

Come Play (2020): If you are one of those peculiar people who think The Babadook isn’t great, you might like Jacob Chase’s risible rip-off instead. After all, it does replace careful writing and thoughtful characterisation with jump scares and regurgitated tropes, grinds down the personality of the original in favour of bland slickness and basically sands down everything that’s good about the film it is ripping off into nothing, while not even acknowledging the debt officially. It’s everything that doesn’t work about contemporary mainstream horror squashed into a single film, without anything about this part of the movie universe that’s actually worthwhile and good (and there’s a lot of that to go) making an appearance.

In a way, the film’s total, nearly aggressive, blandness is some kind of achievement, I’m sure, but not one anyone should be proud of.

Boss Level (2020): By all rights, a film by Joe Carnahan about Frank Grillo as a man of violence with the usual problems finding himself caught in a time loop, fighting ridiculous caricatures again and again, should at the very least be a pretty fun watch. It never really was one for me, though. The film’s ironic use of clichés is never actually as smart and funny as it apparently believes it is, and the attempts of making an audience connect with Grillo’s character suffer heavily from him being a vapid idiot and an arsehole (and not the interesting kind) whose rise to heroism is something the film declares instead of actually doing anything to convince the audience of.

The action is perfectly okay, but I wish the filmmakers had taken a good hard look at a lot of low budget action movies with basic plots but heavy emotional stakes, skipped the ironic sneer, and instead learned something from them about how to creatively turn violence into an expression of a dozen different emotions.

Moonshine County Express (1977): Hicksploitation and carsploitation have never been my greatest loves in exploitation cinema, so I’m not sure if my enjoying Gus Trikonis’s example of the form more than most would be a recommendation to anyone who actually likes the sub-genre. It’s certainly always nice to find a female-led (Susan Howard, Claudia Jennings and Maureen McCormick) exploitation film that takes said females’ attempts at taking vengeance on the killers of her dead dad (Morgan Woodward working for William Conrad are the guilty parties) seriously, adding John Saxon as the male helper, but really not making him terribly effectual or useful, and letting the villains and the women drive the plot.

Stylistically, Trikonis moves convincingly from mid-70s style brutal-ish shoot-outs, to corny but mostly inoffensive humour, to a bit of drama, and to the mandatory car chases and back again, letting things get a little weird from time to time as they should be in exploitation cinema, yet finding his way back from there, too.

Past Misdeeds: SAGA: Curse of the Shadow (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Welcome to the extremely generic secondary fantasy world of SAGA that is – I’m not kidding – the background for a bunch of – possibly popular – fantasy miniatures!

There’s trouble afoot in whatever the damn land this takes place in is called. A shadowy cult of undead and cursed known as the Shadow Cabal (or sometimes just the Shadow) is planning a ritual to bring the Elder God of Death back from wherever he is, with hopefully resulting undead armies and other fun stuff for the junior fantasy conqueror who can’t get any dragons. One of the younger gods of good (though her interpretation of the concept of “good” will leave quite a bit to be desired during the course of the film), known as the Prophetess, gets wind of the problem and sends out her cleric (though he seems to be more of a paladin, D&D class-wise) Keltus the Wanderer (Richard McWilliams) to solve the situation, because clearly, this is the kind of problem that you wouldn’t throw a few people more at.

Anyway, Keltus will have to team up with anger management impaired elven bounty hunter Nemyt (Danielle Chuchran), cursed with the sign of the shadow and therefore eventual evilness by an orc shaman she has killed, and former orc chieftain Kullimon the Black (Paul D. Hunt), whose tribe has been taken over by the Shadow against his will, to resolve the situation.

Apart from the whole evil cult thing, other problems arise: Keltus’s plan to fight his enemy is really the sort of thing that could all too easily end up actually helping the Shadow and damn Nemyt’s soul; Nemyt hates all orcs with a passion, and Kullimon isn’t too keen on elves or human clerics himself; and Keltus’s goddess really seems to be more Lawful Evil than any other alignment.

Fortunately, these particular elves, orcs and men might just be able to get over the things that divide them, might just have quite a bit of heroic back bone when they need it, and the Prophetess just might not be the only goddess interested in Keltus (for reasons I don’t even want to speculate about).

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m convinced in these post Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit times, we live in something of a golden age of low to extremely low budget sword and sorcery and fantasy cinema. Sure, many of the resulting films look like their elves, orcs, and monsters were created with resources left over from various LARPing sessions, and their plots are generally made with secondary world fantasy cookie cutters, but that’s the kind of minor stuff that is not going to keep me from enjoying a film about people and creatures with pointy ears going at each other with swords.

Curse (or whichever of its many titles you choose) certainly has its problems in the plot department, with the basic quest being pretty bland, and its not very interesting attempts at turning the whole affair into a redemption story for Keltus and Nemyt falling flat by virtue of at least Keltus never doing anything much worthy of redemption. Instead, Keltus eventually gets killed and then revived by a goddess with a love of hopeless causes, without having to actually do anything for it, and Nemyt’s redemptive act only carries the most tenuous connections with the things she needs to redeem herself for. On the other hand, the characters are generally likeable, particularly Hunt’s Kullimon, who seems rather more worldly than his two future friends, and certainly gets all the best lines. It helps that the film’s core trio of actors is decent enough, with Hunt and Chuchran even charismatic enough it’s not too difficult to ignore all the grunting and snarling they have to do.

The rest of the script is basically competent, with decent pacing, and a clear idea of the fact that this sort of film really needs a fight against a different creature or enemy every fifteen minutes or so much more than it needs anything else.

These fights are quite well done, too, with Chuchran (who gets to have an acrobatic fighting style not too far off from that of a wuxia film character) and Hunt making for attractive screen fighters even in those moments where there’s clearly no stunt person substitution going on, and some very fun choreography that makes much of the film’s limited resources. Director John Lyde for his part provides ample space for the fights and fighters to shine in, using little obfuscation of what is going on on screen. McWilliams, on the other hand, often looks as if he’s just stumbling after his sword in these scenes, but two out of three ain’t bad.

The make-up and effects are all over the place in quality with Kullimon’s orc make-up one of Curse’s high points, the sort of make-up job that might not look real but keeps the actor’s face expressive enough for him to still act. Among the rest of the effects, there’s some ridiculous stuff (the final enemy, for example who looks like nothing so much like a mid-level boss from a video game made in 2006 or so), some neat, some mediocre, and a dwarf who looks to so weirdly artificial he actually hits the same sort of freakishness as your run of the mill evil clown.

All this adds up to something better than I’d ask of a tiny low budget sword and sorcery movie. The film does perhaps take its plot a bit too seriously for some tastes, but if the film itself didn’t why should the audience? If you’re not willing to just accept the D&D module style of the whole affair, this is not a film actually meant for you anyway, I very much suspect. I have no problems with that, and so feel myself in a good position to enjoy how much Lyde et al just go for it, and how fun the resulting film turns out to be.

And even though much of the dialogue is a bit too heavy and portentous for its own good, there’s actually a nice series of witty lines too, not so self-conscious as to rip you out of the world the film tries so hard – if cheaply - to create but enough of it to add to the sense of fun I got from the film.

All in all, Curse of the Shadow is a positive surprise, at least if you like the things D&D level fantasy or Italian sword and sorcery films have to offer, or just enjoy watching very competent people fighting on screen.

In short: (The) Devil(‘s) Kiss (1974/76)

Original title: La perversa caricia de Satán

After the suicide of her husband left their estate in ruins, the former countess Moncorn has started a new life under the identity of Claire Grandier (Silvia Solar), medium. She has partnered with one Professor Gruber (Olivier Mathot), specialist in telepathy, mad scientist, and owner of a weak heart, working their séance trade in exactly those circles her husband and she moved in once, now usually without getting recognized by her former acquaintances. Well, the Duke de Haussemont (José Nieto) does recognize her when she holds a séance at a party in his castle. Driven by what might be a bit of a guilty conscience as well as some fascination concerning what happens at the séance, de Haussemont invites Claire and the Professor to perform their further occult studies in his home.

The two agree, for this invitation is indeed part of their evil plans. The Professor is developing some sort of compound that can bring the dead back to a kind of life, and once it is ready, Claire is going to conjure up a demonic spirit to inhabit the freshly not-living body, so that the Professor can then control it with his telepathic abilities to take vengeance on Claire’s enemies. In the world of this film, zombies are complicated to make.

On paper, particularly given that it was made during the height of European horror in Spain and Andorra(!), Jordi Gigó’s Devil’s Kiss (I’m going to keep to this version of the title) sounds all kinds of wonderful, and everyone who loves this era and type of filmmaking will probably imagine all sorts of awesome and exciting things with this set-up. Alas, awesome and exciting are not to be with this one, a film cursed with pacing so leaden, you might just think you’re being too hard on poor old lead, as well as camerawork so bland and boring, calling it an aesthetic or a style would be plain preposterous.

As a rule, I am perfectly alright with things happening slowly in movies, but Gigó (who also scripted) really has no sense of drama or flair at all, making much of the film a chore to get through, the film moving slower than its own zombie.

However, apart from some eye-gougingly ugly (in the best way) 70s style in fashion and interior decoration to gawk at while one is yawning, the film, at least the subtitled version I watched, has some delightfully absurd dialogue to offer. Now, I’m not saying that lines like “Thank god, we had time to hide the dwarf and the coffin” or “Let’s hope I’m strong enough to control the satanic mind that will take control of the poor guy’s body” make crawling through the whole affair worthwhile, but they pretty much do, and I am indeed saying it, so make of this, as of the film, what you will. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,french movies,andorran movies,jordi gigó,silvia solar,olivier mathot,josé nieto,horror

At Sword’s Point (1952)

Twenty years (supposedly, for the ages of most of our heroes suggest thirty-five or so) after the original adventures of the Three Musketeers, France is in turmoil. Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu are both dead, and the kid who will become Louis XIV still has some years to go to come of age. Queen Anne (Gladys Cooper) does her best to keep the country together as best as she can, but she’s old and ill, and fighting the ruthless Duc de Lavalle (Robert Douglas) for the fate of the kingdom.

Lavalle uses his increasing power and barely hidden violence to push for a marriage with Anne’s daughter Henriette (Nancy Gates), clearly planning to do away with Louis once he is nicely positioned as the only throne candidate standing. By now, the Queen has become quite desperate, hiding Louis away at a secret spot somewhere in the country, and repeatedly attempting to ask the King of Spain for help in keeping the situation stable. All of her couriers to Spain, however, have found themselves on the pointy ends of Lavalle’s men.

In desperation, the Queen remembers the men who served their country so well twenty years past, and sends for the former Musketeers.

Because time works a bit strangely in this France, all four are now either dead or too old for action (damn that gout!). Fortunately, they have children at just the right age who all happen to share their fathers’ character traits and abilities perfectly. Who’d have thunk!

So now it is up to D’Artagnan Jr. (Cornel Wilde), Aramis Jr. (Dan O’Herlihy), Porthos Jr. (Alan Hale Jr,), and Athos Jr. to save the day. Did I say Athos Jr.? In fact, it’s his daughter Claire (Maureen O’Hara) taking up her old man’s banner!

Swashbucklers often tended to have somewhat meatier roles for actresses even outside of the villainess roles and the melodramas where they were allowed to have personalities at the time when this was made. So it’s not a complete surprise that Lewis Allen’s very free (so free the original novel isn’t “Three Musketeers: The Next Generation” at all) adaptation of Dumas’s Musketeer Sequel “Twenty Years Later”, provides O’Hara with so prominent a role even when it comes to the fights, but it’s still a joy to watch.

Interestingly, the film does so while still using some of the standard tropes a woman goes through in adventure fiction, so she still is the romantic objective of the main character, and there’s a lot of flirting; it’s just that Allen, or the handful of scriptwriters, never uses this to diminish Claire. She’s just your standard adventure movie heroine who also happens to have the courage and conviction usually left to the male heroes, and the fencing skills to back it up.

This does of course also practically automatically turn her into the most complex and rounded character on screen. Of course, it does help that the script doesn’t go the route where the badass woman is suddenly turned incompetent once she’s fallen for the hero; nor do the other three, once Claire has demonstrated her fighting prowess, try to keep her away from the action or ever doubt her capabilities. The film and its characters simply accept that being deeply romanceable and being deeply capable aren’t mutually exclusive.

O’Hara seems to relish this role, too, providing Claire with the same kind of swagger and humour the other musketeers are supposed to have. She’s really throwing herself into the fencing sequences, too.

The other musketeers aren’t quite as awesome. Wilde is certainly fine in the fights, but he’s not quite as youthful and charming as the script pretends he is, ending up a bit too stolid, O’Herlihy doesn’t get a lot to do, and Hale Jr. seems to have difficulty enough with the little he is supposed to do already. The thing is, O’Hara’s good enough to make that a matter of little to no import.

The film’s plot, while certainly not brilliant, does help there also. Things never stand still for too long, the plot is always providing opportunities for scenes of men doing hearty belly-laughs while fighting, desperate acrobatic feats, a bit of pathos and romance, and a lot of intrigue. All of it is presented in an expertly timed manner, and really never lets a boring minute come to pass, using RKO’s not titanic purse strings to their technicoloured fullest.

Speaking of intrigue, even though Douglas’s performance is more solid than truly memorable, the script does provide him with a series of somewhat sensible plots, turning him memorable and interesting as a villain simply by virtue of his plans actually making logical sense in a swashbuckling world, therefor providing the heroes with actual odds and stakes to fight against and for, respectively.

All of which only improves At Sword’s Point, a film that could have gotten away with being the Maureen O’Hara show, even more.

In short: The Owners (2020)

Warning: there will be mild spoilers, but you have seen a movie before, haven’t you?

Country numbskulls in cliché chav garb Nathan (Ian Kenny) and Terry (Andrew Ellis) team up with their equally ridiculous pro small time criminal Gaz (Jake Curran) to rob the huge mansion of their town’s – one hopes retired – physician, Doctor Huggins (Sylvester McCoy). It isn’t exactly difficult finding a time when the Doctor (tee-hee) and his dementia-plagued wife Ellen (Rita Tushingham) aren’t home.

However, because these people are risible idiots, they accidentally drag Nathan’s girlfriend Mary (Maisie Williams) into the affair, or at least the mansion. Things don’t improve when the supposedly full safe Terry has been talking about turns out to be mechanical instead of the electronic kind Gaz would supposedly be able to crack (given the lack of criminal effectiveness on display, I’m sceptical). So, the idiots decide to turn the break-in into a home invasion, against Mary’s half-hearted protests, and get the safe’s code out of the doctor by force. Needless to say, they have problems realizing this goal; and because this is a horror film, the elderly gentleman and his wife are of course serial killers, among other things.

French director Julius Berg’s The Owners is a bit of a mess, mostly because the script by Berg, Mathieu Gompel and Geoff Cox can’t find another way to drive their narrative forward apart from making every single character outrageously stupid. Sure, for one of them, there will be a plot twist-y reason to not act effectively towards the criminal goal, but that just opens a different can of him being stupid in a different way, and really makes little sense when you, apparently unlike the writers, spend more than five minutes to think about the mechanics of his specific betrayal. And the film’s really not so exciting that a viewer won’t find any time pondering these things as a viewer.

The script also has its problems with effective characterisation. At first it introduces its protagonists (such as they are) as risible clichés of poor people who don’t seem to have a single trait that seems to connect them to human beings as you can encounter them outside of bad comedy. Then, pretty suddenly, the audience is expected to care for them as if they were actual well-rounded characters with recognizable character traits; in the next scene, everyone’s made out of cardboard again, and back and forth, and so on.

Tonally, the film tries its hardest to be some kind of black comedy horror thriller, something it actually succeeds at once it becomes a film about Mary versus the crazy elderly, and can fall back on mild grotesquery and classic suspense techniques, as well as a trio of actors in Williams, the delightful McCoy, and Tushingham, who do their very best to elevate the material to something that’s actually fun and entertaining to watch, even when it is lacking in depth.

Really, it’s one third of a good – in the sense of “entertaining” – movie, grafted onto two thirds of outright nonsense.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,french movies,in short,horror,comedy,julius berg,maisie williams,sylvester mccoy,rita tushingham

Music Monday: Ferris Wheel Edition

Satu Suro (2019)

Towards the late stages of her pregnancy, Adinda (Citra Kirana) and her horror-hating atheist (so you know he knows little about genre tropes and will need to change his ways) screenwriter husband Bayu (Nino Fernandez) move into a large cabin on a mountain side. The goal is apparently to get away from the Big City (which I assume is Jakarta) and its stresses. However, the new country home turns out to not have been the greatest choice when one’s goal is stress avoidance.

Whenever she’s alone, Adinda has various threatening, and clearly supernatural, encounters. There’s also a creepy old lady (Yati Surachman, certainly this week’s winner of the “best creepy old lady in a movie” award) sneaking around, and when our poor heroine has dreams, it’s stuff like a nightmare about first puking up nails and razorblades on chains of hair, followed by a new-born.

So it is rather par for the course that the night the baby is finally coming is the one before the first of Suro, a day which, following some Indonesian beliefs, is the highest holiday of demons and spirits. So it might not come as too much of a surprise for any viewer that Adinda’s night at the hospital will turn into a series of encounters with standard Indonesian spooks, ghoulies, the ghosts of demon worshipping doctors and nurses, and other nasty entities. Bayu, on the other hand, will be rather surprised when the nice, modern hospital he left his wife in has turned into a clearly abandoned ruin while he was fetching some stuff from home and eating a bit at an expository food vendor’s stall. But don’t you worry, he’ll meet his share of nasty supernatural entities as well. Which is only fair since what is going on is connected to his family background.

From over here in Europe, it’s so nice to see the new wave of Indonesian horror and the way it celebrates its influences by classic Indonesian horror from the 70s and 80s, not falling into the nostalgia trap and instead using this as a way of broadening influences and looking for connections. Many a film, certainly Anggy Umbara’s Satu Suro, also seem to take away from the classics a willingness to let loose and just go there, not thinking about taste (and sometimes logic) so much it stifles the imagination, taking the risk of becoming a bit goofy when it also means to become more than a bit awesome (in both main meanings of that word).

Despite featuring a surprisingly complicated and involved back story, Satu Suro is a film very much in the tradition of the horror film as campfire tale or haunted house ride, firstly interested in presenting a series of creepy scenes and shocks, with in-depth plot development and deep characterisation a secondary thing. What’s here when it comes to the latter is rather perfunctory, things like Bayu’s turn to religion coming over as a bit of standard trope resolution business (and probably a nice way to calm down a censor or two), the film chomping at the bit to come to the next cool ghoul, depict some demon worshipping ritual, or feature a pretty great series of scenes in which the creepy old lady also turns out to be a badass creepy old lady (and more). Just wait until she pulls out her magical whip.

However, Umbara does not fall into the trap of making the series of spirits and demons we encounter as completely random as they at first appear. Their appearance and behaviour is actually integrated into the background, already elevating the film above the random jump scare school of horror of certain US mainstream horror franchises by virtue of actually connecting things. And even though that story is a concoction of clichés and tropes, it does push the film through its increasingly weird and inspired series of supernatural and occult encounters nicely. As do the performances by Kirana and Fernandez who provide the proper amount of humanity needed in between the loud stuff.

The digital effects aren’t always great (though about half of them are), but this is one of those films where the wonderful ideas beat the not always perfect execution nicely. Turns out I don’t really care if the magic whip of the creepy old lady looks believable, as long as it is used as nicely as it is here.

Three Films Make A Post: The Best Loved Bandit Of All Time!

On the Rocks (2020): This is another one of those films where I seem to have seen a very different movie than most other people. After comparisons with classic screwball comedies, praises for its New York-ness and with Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in front of the camera and Sofia Coppola behind it, I was pumped for a bit of light yet fun entertainment. What I actually got was a rich people’s problems film where poor people only exist as waiters, waitresses and drivers to serve as a background for some of the least interesting marital and daddy issues imaginable. Most of the film may take place in New York, but it’s certainly no part of New York anyone but the upper class twats inhabiting it would ever want to see. It’s all just very dull to look at, and that dullness runs through most of the film – it’s slow, the emotional stakes for this viewer are very low, and when it comes to light charm, humour and hidden depths, you won’t want to throw out your Nora Ephron movies.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938): So let’s get back eight decades into the past to find something more lively. Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood version of elements of British folklore is of course one of the best swashbucklers every made, and a film that still plays rather wonderfully. Sure, as always, there are elements very much of its time especially when it comes to characterisation, and I’m always flabbergasted by the Richard the Lionheart love (a guy who clearly didn’t give a crap about the country he was supposed to rule, what with him always gallivanting off to a crusade or two, or finding other business to be away on), but otherwise, this is a flawless movie, from Errol Flynn’s ability to play a smug bastard but still make him charming and likeable, over the eye-popping colour palette, to an astonishing amount of clever and playful little touches and ideas in the script. There’s never a dull moment here, that’s for sure.

The Green Room aka La chambre verte (1978): I have to admit that I’ve never been a particular admirer of Henry James, not even of his visits in the realms of the supernatural and the borderline weird, but the man’s body of work certainly has resulted in quite a few great movies. Case in point is this one, where François Truffaut mixes James’s story “The Altar of the Dead” with elements of a couple of other short stories that apparently connected with the director’s own haunted thoughts about the people in his life he lost. The result is an emotionally and intellectually complex meditation on what we owe the dead, how the memory of the dead can dramatically overshadow the ability to live life itself.

So it is very much a ghost story, though one without any ghosts but the ones the protagonist, as well played by Truffaut in his last stint as an actor, creates through his inability to let go of the love as well as his grudges against the dead. I don’t really want to pretend it’s a horror film in anything but the broadest sense, yet it does at the very least tell of a haunted man and incorporates some finely wrought gothic imagery. Beside being brilliant.

Past Misdeeds: The Machine (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

In a near future dominated by a new Cold War between the West and China with a new arms race taking place on the field of cybernetics. Scientist Ava (Caity Lotz) has brought the AI she is developing as close to getting through the touring test as any AI has ever managed. Despite misgivings, she hires on to a secret UK military project lead by the brilliant Vincent (Toby Stephens).

Vincent has been working on brain implants that will give soldiers back those brain functions they lost in various unpleasant ways, and he has been so successful some of these soldiers are actually working as guards on the underground base where his – and now Ava’s – experiments take place. On the negative side, some months after they get their implants, the soldiers lose their ability to speak and tend to become rather, well, inhuman in their behaviour. Curiously enough, nobody involved in the project seems to think anything of the behavioural changes beyond the muteness, and somehow also everybody seems to miss that the cybered-up soldiers actually can talk to each other in some kind of machine language.

While all this still sounds rather humanitarian, if badly organized, the experimental subjects are basically held as prisoners, and the experiments at large are not exactly in tune with any rules on human experiments. And of course, Vincent’s ridiculously evil boss Thomson (Denis Lawson) dreams about mind-controlled cyborg super soldiers and killer/spy androids, and little of helping people cope with brain damage. Vincent for his part is only involved in the whole project because he wants to find a way to cure his brain-damaged little daughter.

Soon after she arrives on base, Ava has quite the breakthrough with her AI, getting her to evolve what rather looks like actual consciousness; unfortunately, she also digs into the project’s secrets without hiding her trails very well, which gets her killed by a fake Chinese assassin.

Vincent, who was really rather fond of her, builds an android body made in Ava’s image to house her AI (also Caity Lotz, obviously). While he is trying to nurture the strange new artificial kind of life he has helped give birth to, and understand what it is Ava and he actually created, Thomson does of course go the killer android route faster than you can say “Terminator”, with a rather more thoughtful and complicated version of the expected results.

Caradog W. James’s The Machine is the curious case of a film that has some major and very obvious flaws yet that I’d still highly recommend to anyone with even a mild interest in clever low budget science fiction. As my – still quite abridged for a film that doesn’t even reach the ninety minute mark – plot synopsis probably shows, the major problem of the film – beyond some dubious lines of dialogue - is that it tries to squeeze too many elements into too short a running time and too low a budget to do everything included in it justice. This leads to a state of affairs where something like the eventual replacement of the human race through artificial life – reminding me of a Terminator prequel that sympathizes with the machines - which would usually be quite enough to base a film on is just one among a huge number of things The Machine is about in one way or the other.

There’s also some pop philosophical thought about the nature of humanity and love, the transhumanist element as represented by the cybernetically enhanced soldiers, the question of moral responsibility in research, the evilness of evil governments (of evil), father daughter relationships, the problems with selling one’s soul, and various assorted ideas. Come to think of it, it’s a bit of a surprise the film actually finds time to think about any of this at all while still keeping its plot together. Not that it’s a very complicated plot, or a very surprising one, but, if you ignore some plot holes that might actually be explained by shoddy “results before security” thinking by the project’s boss Thomson (as if his evil evilness of evil weren’t enough), and behaviour by Vincent that smells more of wilful blindness than plot hole to me, it’s coherent, makes sense, and hangs together well with the film’s various thematic interests – all one hundred of them.

Even more surprising is how deeply engaging the film stays even though it can’t do its cornucopia of ideas as much justice as I would have wished for, how much it still manages to do with some of these ideas, and how it builds fascinating stuff like the suggested implant soldier culture out of a few scenes and a handful of suggestions of meaning. Really, the reason for my disappointment with The Machine not getting too deeply into any single one of its elements lies in how interesting the surface here is, and how much further this wee low budget movie mostly shot in one of those warehouse-looking sets goes in thinking about transhumanism and AI rebellion (of a sort) than any contemporary mainstream production that could actually afford to do much much more but just won’t. There really aren’t – for example – many movies that suggest the replacement of the old (aka humans) by the new (aka AIs) might be a natural thing in a cosmic sense, while at the same time keeping enough sympathy for humanity, as the dramatically ironic ending demonstrates. Perhaps Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning would be comparable, if you stretch the word “mainstream” a bit far, though Hyams does of course talk a very different filmic language from James, even though both visibly appreciate the stranger edges of their given genres.

The Machine is also full of nods in the direction of the films about AIs, cyborgs and androids that came before it. It’s mostly films from the 80s of course, because that was pretty much the high water mark of films thinking about the nature of humanity via AIs etc, beyond the Pinocchio riffs. It will hardly be a coincidence how much the Ava/Machine looks like it came out of Blade Runner and even the handful of echoes of Universal Soldier included seem quite consciously positioned. It would be rather silly to pretend not to be influenced by the films that came before thinking about the same things one thinks about, after all.

A final reason for the impressive effect The Machine had on me despite its obvious flaws is Caity Lotz’s performance as the Machine, with a body language that suggests the alienness of something that never had a body before, as well as the fragility of a child, but also demonstrates an ability to switch to the appropriate body language for the more violent stuff. Her performance also makes it that much easier to get over some of the more problematic moments of the film’s dialogue like my personal favourite “I didn’t know man and clown were the same”.

The Machine really is much better than you’d expect of it, a film that perhaps attempts too much than it could reasonably achieve yet still offers a lot, if you’re inclined to look at it from the right angle.

In short: Mount. NABI (2014)

Warning: discussion of definitely non-consensual intercourse with a guy in a shitty monster costume!

A group of people shooting a shoe-string indie horror movie in ye olde POV style witness some strange light up the titular mountain. Despite a creepy guy hitting trees with a shovel warning them off, they climb towards the light and right into becoming part of an actual POV horror film.

There’s a mysterious rapey, murderous mountain monster (or is it an alien?) going about, and quickly, men are ripped apart, women are raped, and a lot of screams are screamed. Female lead Tana Akiyama is an excellent screamer deserving, perhaps, of less unpleasant stuff to scream about.

I don’t really want to play the moral apostle about Seiji Chiba’s weirdly punctuated Mount. Nabi, though, the rape is just pretty much the only thing in here you won’t see in most other POV horror movies, too. Well, it’s got more gore in it, too, but the gore, as is the execution of the perfectly fine concept of its monster suit, is pretty bad, even for a cheap little bit of horror like this one.

So, back to the film’s only notable feature. At least the rape sequence isn’t really shot to turn an audience on, but instead is clearly meant to shock, perhaps, revolt, or, when it comes to the shadow of the monster penis, make one laugh. The problem is that Chiba’s filmmaking really isn’t strong enough to invoke any of these feelings. Instead, I found myself annoyed by its use of rape as a shortcut to making an audience squirm, the whole thing becoming perfectly pointless when it doesn’t even invoke an authentic emotion in a viewer.

But “pointless” does rather seem the main word to describe the film.

Vivarium (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short: This House Possessed (1981)

After having some kind of breakdown on stage, singer (he has a spiel about not being a rock singer, but no pop singer either that is nearly as painful as his music going on) Gary Straihorn (Parker Stevenson) has a longer guest spot in a hospital. He’s hitting it off, to put it mildly, with intensely cute nurse Sheila Moore (Lisa Eilbacher). So much so that he hires her as is live-in nurse for further convalescence and romance (his infatuation is reciprocated, don’t you worry). Because they both like one of the houses he is looking to rent, he just buys the place right off. It’s an interesting house, to say the least, tricked out with all the proto smart home devices the early 80s can provide.

It also turns out to be haunted; as a matter of fact, long before Sheila and Gary move in, it has already watched them on its security monitors, clearly looking forward to their stay.

The couple’s medical ethics breaking romance does run a bit roughly: he’s about as sensitive as a rock, and she is clearly haunted by something in her past she is not sharing. The appearance of some model who really wants to return into Gary’s pants doesn’t help there, nor does the increasingly temperamental haunting that uses much lesser technology to much better (and more murderous) effect than today’s AI assistants. Why, does it all have something to do with Sheila’s past?

William Wiard’s This House Possessed is another fine entry into the history of US TV horror movies. It brings a comparatively original premise – there’s still really little done with modern haunted houses on screen today – to which it applies quite a bit of, often slightly goofy, imagination, and hits on a couple of really fine horror sequences.

The climax is a fantastic example of how to do something that feels big on a modest budget, and the way David Levinson integrates the characters with the haunting is very effective even if you see some of what’s going on between Sheila and the house coming a mile away. Plus, how many films do you know about a love triangle between man, woman, and house?

Much of this is of course also cheesy as heck. The state of the art fantasy version of 80s technology, Straihorn’s horrifying music and some choice timely fashion do really turn this into a bit of a time capsule that can ever so slightly distract from this actually being a horror film. Until we get to the next surprisingly imaginative moment of technological haunting, that is. Wiard doesn’t consciously play things camp, instead taking the romance, the haunting, and (Cthulhu help us) even the music very seriously indeed, which is one of the main reasons any of this works as well as it actually does.