Past Misdeeds: Late Phases (2014)

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.

His son Will (Ethan Embry) helps move blind, retired soldier Ambrose (Nick Damici again proving the fact he’s one of today’s great genre actors when it comes to playing working class people - if you watch the right movies) into a gated retirement community. Things haven’t gone well between the two men for years, Ambrose wearing his sightlessness like an armour around his emotions, and Will clearly having lost most of his patience with the old man years ago.

On his very first night, something that looks a lot like a werewolf to the audience kills Ambrose’s friendly neighbour. Afterwards, it attacks him as well, but thanks to his seeing eye dog Shadow (Raina) and the curious fact that the ocularly disabled are still allowed to own guns in the US of A (!?) the old man stays safe. Shadow, alas dies. The local authorities don’t seem to let a little thing like a dead old lady and a nearly murdered blind man disturb them much. The area of the gated community is well-known for animal attacks, so the whole thing ends up with everybody around shrugging it off as just one of these things.

Everyone, that is, except for Ambrose, who very quickly decides there’s a werewolf attacking during the night of the full moon, and that he’s the man who will get rid of it, blindness be damned. Consequently, Ambrose starts preparing for the next full moon, by very pointedly not burying his dog while still running around with a shovel, buying a huge gravestone, and annoying the most easily annoyed group of neighbours with his mixture of cantankerous humour and soldier-as-working-class member directness in an attempt to ferret out the werewolf. He somewhat comes to like the local priest (Tom Noonan, winner of this week’s price for the most impressive off-handed performance in a movie) but there’s still a werewolf to kill and – so Ambrose seems to plan – to die decently in the process, on one’s own terms.

Who’d have thought that director Adrián García Bogliano would go from often sleazy – yet certainly worthwhile - backyard horror and exploitation to making something like this (or his last two or three movies before it) - a clever, character-based piece of low budget horror that seems old-fashioned in all the good ways? Though I should probably call it classicist instead of old-fashioned, for Bogliano’s particular forte here lies in evoking the spirit of low budget genre films of the 70s and 80s. Not in a “retro” kind of manner, mind you, but via an approach to his material that seems inspired by a different era without using that era’s outward appearance as a signifier of coolness.

So his first US film – for Larry Fessenden’s (who of course also has his mandatory mini-role, this time around as a mildly sleazy gravestone seller) Glass Eye Pix – isn’t very interested in irony, or in jump scares, or in a making a movie based on other movies, but rather in exploring his main character with the help of some suspenseful werewolf shenanigans. This works out very nicely for the audience and the film, thanks to a script by Eric Stolze that uses a not exactly original character and problem (the capital-m Man who can’t express his feelings, and pushes everyone away he cares about; the old man looking for a decent way to die), and a set-up that could feel painfully gimmicky exceedingly well. And while this certainly isn’t the first (nor will it be the last) film about a man who only ever expresses himself through violence (for Ambrose’s often very funny cantankerousness is a mild form of violence too) I’ve seen this year, I don’t think there will be many others that’ll manage to make the character feel quite as real, and that are able to show the flawed humanity behind the mask without feeling the need to lay the blame for his flaws on everyone else.

As the film plays out, I found Ambrose’s (too) late attempt to reach out to his son to be quite touching, with Bogliano and Stolze resisting the temptation of laying it on too thick. The film isn’t just about Ambrose and his emotional problems, though, it also explores his and other characters’ reaction to their aging, to the realization that they are indeed in the last part of their lives and won’t ever be able to make up for their sins perceived and real, and never be able to truly change again. Unless they are a werewolf, of course, but that’s not the sort of change that does much for one’s personal development.

And while this all sounds rather nice in a character study sort of way, Late Phases also works well as a suspenseful little werewolf film. There aren’t – of course, given the film’s financial means – many large set pieces, but Bogliano has grown really good at staging suspense scenes with whatever means he has available, as well as at creating the correct mood for the tale he’s going to tell, pacing the character parts and the action effortlessly and actually building to quite a fine climax.


There are a few niggles to be had with the film, but there's really only one larger point I can come up with. It's the werewolf. While the make-up and costume certainly has individual character, it also looks a bit too much like a costume, and a very cute one at that, with Bogliano spending no effort at all hiding how awkward it looks in action. If that sort of thing distracts you terribly, I foresee distraction; I can cope with a weakness like it when the movie surrounding it is as clever and tight as Late Phases is.