Three Films Make A Post: BUDDY HAS AN AXE TO GRIND. A BIG AXE.

The Black Room (2016): Softcore veteran director Rolfe Kanefsky here turns his gaze to the seldom effective genre of the softcore sex horror comedy, delivering nothing to write home about. Nudity-wise, the film is surprisingly restrained, probably because it managed to catch Natasha Henstridge for the protagonist role but clearly can’t afford for her to take her kit off, leaving the bit of sleaze it does offer in the hands of the other actresses and Lukas Hassel. It doesn’t much matter anyhow, for the supposedly sexy bits – apart from some pretty damn embarrassing stuff like Henstridge having her way with a washing machine or the other way round – usually go hand in hand with the gory bits, keeping The Black Room away from possible titillation for anyone but the most specialized audience. Which  of course would be perfectly okay if the film had much else to offer. Alas, the plot is a bit boring, the comedy unfunny, and while the effects are actually fine, there’s still nothing going on here to keep one awake.

The Frighteners (1996): Of course, I just might have no sense of humour at all, for I never did find myself terribly amused by the very slapstick-y first hour or so of Peter Jackson’s final horror comedy, apart from Jeffrey Combs’s hilarious FBI agent. To me, the film’s first part is a bit of a slog, with a plot that doesn’t get going because it is permanently put on hold for funny bits that aren’t. Once the film actually does get going, and the jokes and the actually rather dark story begin to seem to belong in the same film, it’s a different matter, the film turning funny and exciting and even a bit scary.

Exotica (1994): If you look at it from a certain angle, Atom Egoyan’s film could very well be your standard erotic thriller. Of course, it’s not a thriller at all but a meditation on loss, guilt, the search for closure, degrees of obsession, the lies we tell ourselves to survive, as well as the human capacity for compassion. It is shaped – quite typical of the director – like a puzzle box or a mystery, not because Egoyan seems much interested in suspense but because understanding the film’s characters and the ways their lives intersect is not meant to be a dry movement from plot point A to point B. There are complex and complicated undercurrents to these peoples’ lives we can better understand when we don’t experience them too linearly.


Apart from letting the viewer do this rather brilliantly, Exotica is also one of Egoyan’s most beautiful films, coming by poetry and beauty and sadness without feeling to strain for them, and certainly never showing any of the tendencies to artsy bombast that have marred parts of Egoyan’s films in the last fifteen years or so.