Three Films Make A Post: They’re watching…They’re waiting…They’re back!!

Visitors of the Night (1995): 1995 was of course peak alien abduction time in (at least US) popular culture, and once the X-Files (still beloved around these parts) opened the flood gates, TV movies like this alien abduction tale directed by TV veteran Jorge Montesi quickly followed. Despite featuring Canada’s finest Stephen McHattie in a smaller role, the film at hand sure is no X-File, but a tepid family melodrama about some nice bourgeois lady and her nice bourgeois kid troubles. Sure, there’s a bit of generational abduction business, and some suited government people are in the game as well, but the way this plays out, the film really rather would avoid the SF/horror trappings completely and go through a lot of family whining and hand-wringing about not understanding one’s teenage daughter. That you might actually use the fantastical elements to strengthen the family melodrama and vice versa seems to be beyond the film’s grasp or imagination, but then, the family melodrama itself isn’t exactly sharply written, either, so what does one expect?

Wretch (2018): How much anyone will get out of this very indie little horror movie by Brian Cunningham about the consequences an encounter with a supernatural entity during a druggy night in the woods has for three friends, will certainly have something to do with one’s willingness to just let a film unfold slowly and in its own way and pace. At first, the whole thing did feel a bit too muddily structured and ambiguous to me, but the film actually goes somewhere specific, and the at first obtuse looking way it gets there is a planned and proper approach, at least if you’re willing to follow the film where it leads. Which, as it turns out, is to one of my favourite supernatural entities, so that’s a bonus, too.

But the movie’s rather strong in other regards too: the acting, particularly by Megan Massie, is better than usual in this sort of thing, and the film does some great work starting out with rather typical character and relationship types but then complicating them repeatedly. Because this aspect of the film is so strong, it also recommends itself as a portrayal of destructive human relationships that is – unlike in the quite a bit more “professional” Visitors – indeed strengthened and made clearer by its supernatural element.


Roadkill (1989): Much less perfunctory and much more entertaining than Visitors and rather more playful than Wretch is this Canadian indie movie, that is so late 80s/early 90s Canadian indie, it involves the talents of Bruce McDonald, Don McKellar and Valerie Buhagiar while of course sporting a soundtrack by Nash the Slash and various Canadian luminaries. It’s the sort of black and white road movie that tonally and stylistically fits with the type of thing Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki were doing at the time, including these directors’ use of the local and the specific, so it’s clearly part of a very particular international style of indie filmmaking, but also rooted in places and people the directors find in Canada and punk rock adjacent art. Of course, while it is taking efforts to demonstrate it is coming from a particular time and place, this isn’t mumblecore (this particular kind of filmic horror lurking in the future of none of these filmmakers), so there’s also a fabulist and imaginative streak to the film, and a personal sense of weirdness and peculiarity visible in basically every moment of its road movie tale.