Three Films Make A Post: Seclusion. Seduction. Survival.

The Detained aka Deadly Detention (2017): Ah, detention horror, the more high-school-y sub-genre of the corridor runner. Well, usually, it is. In the case of Blair Hayes’s The Detained, the corridors our detained high school kids run up and down and forwards and backwards and around in, above or under belong to a closed-down prison, for their high school has been closed because of an opossum infestation. Yup, this is one of those films that excuses all sorts of lame (and perhaps a wee bit lazy) aspects of its script by being all ironic and shit. So the main characters aren’t walking and talking clichés but ironic walking and talking clichés. We all know the drill by now. Does the “irony” add anything to the film? Does it help uncover any interesting insights? Of course not. To be fair, I have seen much worse in ironic horror, and much worse corridor runners. At least, the acting is decent, about every tenth cheesy joke is actually funny, and the basic aspects of filmmaking are perfectly competent. Hooray?

Jackals (2017): Plotwise, Kevin Greutert’s 80s set movie about the members of a family and a deprogrammer having to fight off a siege by a group of rather creepy cult members from whom they’ve stolen the family’s son back, is a very sparse film. The characters aren’t terribly deep either, but they are brought to life by a fine cast – Deborah Kara Unger, Johnathon Schaech, Stephen Dorff among them – and Greutert has an eye for using character archetypes in just the right way for the kind of film this is. Visually, Jackals is very atmospheric, and there are quite a few clever little touches: the cult’s use of animal masks and Greutert’s tendency to shoot them in silhouette is a prime example of how to make your antagonists feel ever so slightly worse than human. The pacing is excellent, and while I hoped in vain for an escalation in the direction of the supernatural, the whole film is just a tight, exciting little package in the best low budget movie tradition. Why, I even liked the kicker ending!


Wendy and Lucy (2008): This Kelly Reichardt film featuring Michelle Williams and a dog named Lucy might be among the saddest films I have seen in a long time. Plot-wise, it’s not about much more than an impoverished woman and her dog stranding on their way to Alaska in some horrible little town, with little outwardly happening, and that slowly. In truth, it’s a film about a personal apocalypse, a life that has turned to a dead end without the woman living it having quite noticed it (or perhaps rather admitted to herself), a society that replaces kindness with an insistence on proper procedures, bureaucracy, and money, and can’t even imagine not filtering everything through the lenses of these things. It’s also a film about what it means to be poor in the western world today (well, 2008, and things haven’t exactly improved, have they?), and how the worst cruelty is inflicted on people by other people who probably can’t even see it. There’s also an absolutely horrifying encounter with a half-crazed man played by Larry Fessenden that puts further emphasis on the way poor women have it even worse. It all adds up to something so sad, filmed and acted with such care, words – my words at least – can’t really do the film justice.