(The) Devil’s Box (1984)

Original title: 鬼戰

Warning: there will be spoilers for the film’s resolution!

Commercial director Tong (Simon Yam Tat-Wah) is not terribly happy with his life, because he’s doubting the moral and artistic merits of the ad hawking biz. Much to the chagrin of his boss (Edwin Tsui Yuk-Wan), Tong finds so little joy in what his work is actually about, he’s shooting his ads as weird little short films in which the product he’s supposed to sell might have a three second guest stint.

Things become less existentially depressing and more supernaturally dangerous for our protagonist when he’s doing a location shot in some old, rather impressive looking empty building. Tong orders his crew to drag away a heap of garbage which includes a large chest secured with Buddhist amulets. The first guy to touch the chest is dangerously wounded by a fall in the very next scene. He isn’t the last victim of whatever supernatural force has been accidentally unleashed, though. Suicides and strange deaths surround Tong’s agency now, and Tong himself is haunted by threatening and dangerous dreams that seem to foresee various deaths. And that’s before he learns he’s suddenly suffering from a brain tumour.

Apparently, Tommy Chin Ming-Cheung’s Devil’s Box was shot some time around 1984 and shelved until 1991. It’s a bit of a shame, really, for this is such an atypical entry into Hongkong horror, it would have been interesting to see its influence on its actual contemporaries in the 80s – or rather, if it would have had one. Typically, HK horror is either nasty and brutal in the CATIII manner, or a bit goofy, energetic and surreal. Devil’s Box really doesn’t fall under any of these descriptions, and is rather an attempt at ambiguous horror, where the audience becomes increasingly unsure how much of what we see are the delusions of our main character and how much of it is real.

Even the movie’s ending doesn’t make things completely clear: did Tong commit all of the murders, or did the supernatural force take on his shape and act out his resentments and personal troubles? Or is Tong’s existential crisis the supernatural force, and he’s rather more aggressively doing what his painter buddy and friend in artsy existentialism does when he burns all of his pictures? The film isn’t telling, and it’s good enough at being ambiguous to get away with it instead of being frustrating.

In part, this works because Yam – looking incredibly young – is rather great at embodying this ambiguity and suggests Tong as a man who knows all of his frustrations but doesn’t seem to know why they are there or how to cope with them productively at all. Yam being Yam, he does so looking pretty as well.

Devil Box’s other big ace in the hole is Chin’s direction. There’s liberal use of the expected blue lighting and dry ice fog, dreamily slow camera movements to secure the proper air of unreal. Chin also demonstrates a productive eye for a kind of mild surrealism that fits the character going through it excellently – of course Tong is the kind of guy whose visions would show him the death of a friend on a television screen. Another character killing himself (or is he?) with a roll of film makes perfect sense in a metaphorical space centred around a film director as well. All of this creates a dreamy flow and vibe, yet one that feels clearly and surprisingly straightforwardly connected to the film’s central ambiguities surrounding Tong’s personal crisis.

It’s not at all the thing I usually expect from old Hong Kong horror, so Devil’s Box has turned out to be a bit of a surprise; even more so because the film is not just doing something uncommon for its time and place, but doing it rather well and thoughtful.

Three Films Make A Post: Some Live to Climb. They Climb to Live

Sherpa (2015): What starts as a bit of a picture postcard paean to the Sherpas – particularly the nearly record book touching mountain guide Phurba Tashi Sherpa - doing all the hard work for the hordes of hardcore tourists packaged by professional climbing businesses, turns serious after the great avalanche of 2014 kills sixteen Sherpas. Growing anger and frustration with the danger and exploitation inherent in the work lead to what’s really a strike movement. Director Jennifer Peedom raises to the unplanned occasion and turns out to be just as good at getting people who really aren’t into sharing their inner feelings to talk and to explain, showing how capitalism ruins everything – even the ability for some decent people to be honest to themselves - as she is at filming spectacular climbing scenes. Much of the film suggests the filmmakers truly care about the Sherpas and their situation.

The only element of it I’d criticize is its overuse of a clichéd and treacly emotionally manipulative score by Antony Partos that’s so over the top, it sometimes sounded like satire to my ears.

Slash/Back (2022): Nyla Innuksuk’s Inuktitut teen horror movie is a little wonder. Wearing some of its influences proudly on its sleeve – or rather, it feels like on its heart – it uses these influences to make the kind of horror film that has all the good qualities of local/regional horror filmmaking of decades ago. So expect the local applied to genre tropes, on one hand, to make both strange and new, on the other to be able to talk about things – here the lives and feelings and divisions between young Inuktitut girls living in the kind of small town at the polar circle where a solstice dance is pretty much the most exciting thing their parents generation experiences in a year.

Innuksuk touches her scenes with a light hand, never letting them getting swallowed by the horror tropes, but also never going the other way either. So things stay fun but never dumb, unless dumbness is point of the fun.

Alta tensione: Il gioko aka School of Fear (1999): The late 90s were not a good time to make horror or giallo in Italy. Still, Lamberto Bava did from time to time manage to get some money for a mini series anthology or two from Italian TV, like the series this fine TV movie is part of. It is often cleverly written (by Roberto Gandus and of course Dardano Sacchetti), using creepy kids tropes as well as a discomfort with conservative institutions to great effect, finishing ambiguous and dark, and surprisingly coherent.

Bava’s direction often creates genuinely suspenseful and creepy moods, usually finding some way to make every scene more interesting and effective. There’s also some fine locations work, which you don’t always get in TV work.

Short Film Friday: Clan

In short: Edge of Sanity (1989)

A very late (19)80s version of Victorian London. Genius physician and medical researcher Dr Henry Jekyll (Anthony Perkins) uses cocaine and other substances in his attempts to open the doors of perception a couple of decades early. After a monkey-related accident, he gets a full dose of his experimental concoction, and turns into a guy in bad panto make-up calling himself Jack Hyde (still Anthony Perkins, but in the aforementioned bad panto makeup, obviously). Where Jekyll simply represses his sex drive – even towards his wife Elisabeth (Glynis Barber) – Jekyll is a full-on sexual sadist. He’s heavily into prostitutes and loves to involve them in various kinky and often violent scenarios that do tend to end in him murdering them. Soon, the streets of New Wavechapel are terrorized by a certain Jack the Ripper.

Watching Gérard Kikoïne’s very weird and very 80s Jekyll & Hyde/Jack the Ripper mash-up Edge of Sanity I could never shake the impression Kikoïne really rather wanted to make Ken Russell’s Jekyll & Hyde, or possibly Ken Russell’s Emmanuelle. The problem there is of course that Kikoïne is no Ken Russell (as little as I get along with Russell as a filmmaker) but really a somewhat ambitious and highly prolific softcore filmmaker who somehow managed to get enough money out of good old Harry Alan Towers and co to hire Anthony Perkins for his very own overblown, sleazy Jekyll & Hyde movie. Perkins for his part is in all-out scenery-chewing mode even when he’s Jekyll, doing bizarre line-readings of the film’s awkward and melodramatic dialogue there, and opening up to his inner Klaus Kinski when it’s time to grab some – well, a lot of, actually – breasts, help out a young lady in her stick masturbation, and do a bit of murder. It’s still a better version of the Joker than Joaquin Phoenix did.

Anyway, thematically, this thing is probably meant to attack the always returning spirit of puritanism and sexual repression by overloading it with sleazy sexual imagery, but the plotting and writing is generally so bizarre and uncontrolled, you could just as well sell me on it as a parable on the religious impulse, or something about strikes.

While there’s little sense or characterisation or actual character exploration to be found, Edge does have a manic energy nearly as huge as the one shown by Perkins. The film’s basically cackling going from scene to scene, throwing 80s fashion not really pretending to be Victorian, lovely, ultra-artificial light, uncomfortable sex, Perkins, Ken Russell rip-off moments, sleaze and whatever else seems to have come into the filmmakers’ heads at the viewer with what feels like intense glee. All of which is shot beautifully by Tony Spratling, to make things feel even stranger, I suppose.

It’s quite the thing, really. Probably not the best movie to watch with the whole family, or to see expecting for things to come together, but certainly the kind of film worth the time of anyone who can appreciate a bit of misguided ambition and weird intensity.

Station (1981)

Original title: Eki

The first half of the film portrays various occurrences in the life of policeman and sports shooter Eiji Mikami (Ken Takakura) that eventually come together to bring to a quiet crisis of conscience and grief.

In the second half, Mikami returns to his snowy home on Hokkaido for a family festival and to decide on quitting the police and finding some better way to live. Here, he also meets bar maid Kiriko (Chieko Baisho), another slightly lost and damaged soul with whom he might find a degree of peace and even love.

Yasuo Furuhata’s drama with mild crime movie elements Station (called so for reasons of metaphor, but also because train stations take on a central role in various decision points in Mikami’s life) is a film I found very difficult to get into. The first hour of this two hour plus movie often seems pointless, draggy, and confusingly edited. It’s not very easy to even grasp the form and structure of what’s going on – let’s not even speak of character relations and timeline – because the film jumps around in the chronological order of Mikami’s life from scene to scene, often without any visual markers suggesting that it does so; there are no attempts at making Takakura look different in any part of the timeline either. So, for quite some time, it’s rather difficult to figure out what’s even going on in the movie at all, so much so, there’s little space to understand where all of this is actually going. Many scenes only make sense in the hindsight of the second hour, when the timeline collides into a linear narrative thread and we can begin to appreciate what we’ve seen before, how it connects, and how it brought Mikami to the emotional low point he is at now.

And once he has brought his film into this calmer rhythm, Furuhata turns out to be rather great at exploring this middle-aged kind of quiet grief and regret for the things one has done and encountered in the past, for the roads not taken, for the unkindness towards others and oneself, in a manner that never becomes melodramatic or whiny but carries a depth of emotion and understanding (also of the fact that one can’t really escape oneself, ever) under the poise of small gestures and quietly spoken (or unspoken) words, and lots and lots of snow.

Takakura – one of Japan’s great actors of the small gesture in most cases – is absolutely fantastic in the role. He suggests much of the weight of the past, the small fire of awakening hope, and the depths of his sadness through tiny shifts in his body language, the telling small gesture, and the way he says his most important lines in the most incidental manner. Baisho meets him gesture by gesture, and even has to do him one better by having to also suggest an hour of backstory about her we don’t get to see, using the same methods by which Takakura shows the results of his past on his present state. It’s all wonderfully understated, yet also precise and clear (not simplistic, mind you).

This is very much a film that rewards re-watching, obviously, because once the viewer understands the whole of Station’s structure they can also appreciate all the emotional and incidental detail contained in its first half. Which to me seems to be rather a huge risk to take for a film, structurally, but it does work for Station, if you have some patience with it going in.

In short: Door into Darkness: Il tram (1973)

Original title: La porta dul buio: Il tram

The cleaner of a tram discovers the body of a murdered young woman half hidden below a seat. Commissario Giordani (Enzo Ceruscio), a young up-and-coming policeman with the habit of snapping his fingers rhythmically when he’s trying to think, is tasked with solving this puzzling crime. He quickly establishes who shared the last night tram with the victim, but his handful of witnesses seem to have seen or heard nothing whatsoever out of order, leaving the policeman with a murder taking place in front of multiple witnesses who didn’t actually witness it. It’s as if he had stumbled into a modern variation of a golden age impossible crime mystery.

Il tram is the second of four short movies in a 1973 Italian thriller (not quite giallo as we would use the term outside of Italy today) anthology TV show that was at least in part responsible for putting its writer, producer, as well as in this episode director, Dario Argento into the high profile, yellow-press alluring, rock star like popularity he had for a decade or two in his home country. From the here and now, I’m not completely sure why: the four movies are certainly good – particularly on a European TV budget of this time – and Argento is put front and centre via short introductions before each episode, but good filmmaking does not exactly turn a director into a star, and the intros don’t exactly present the mix of wit and shtick you’d get from Alfred Hitchcock. If you’re Italian and know what the special attraction was, please explain in the comments!

As an Argento movie, Il tram is actually an interesting little artefact, in many scenes – thanks to the budget – prefiguring his post Sleepless turn to forms of less visually dreamlike intensity. Here, after his early three giallos for the big screen, Argento is clearly a bit more enthusiastic about ways to still make naturalism sing to a stranger tune. While complex camera work is only in the cards for a couple of scenes, many of the sequences here are edited to a beat – the snapping of Girodano’s fingers and the rhythm of the tram are mirrored in the rhythms of the editing, not just helping to provide visual interest but also making a minimal plot with one single core idea and rather a lot of scenes of people talking lively and suspenseful. Until everything ends in a really tense stalking sequence that’s so Argento, you wouldn’t actually need to see his name in the credits.

Music Monday: Dead Horses Edition

Blood Song (1982)

Late teen Marion (Donna Wilkes) is having a bad time: one of her legs is in a medical brace after an accident, and at the beginning of the film, it’s not at all clear if she’s ever going to walk without one again. Her family life is rather terrible, thanks to her alcoholic, controlling and abusive father Frank (Richard Jaeckel), who also just happens to be responsible for the accident that caused her injury. Obviously, he uses his recurring bouts of guilt as yet another excuse for his drinking.

Things are so bad, Marion has concrete plans to run away with her boyfriend Joey (William Kirby Cullen). It’s only a question of time, and of Joey getting a job somewhere as far away as possible.

Because when it rains, it pours, Marion starts having visions and daymares of the killing spree of a guy with a flute fetish (Frankie Avalon). Why? Because she once had a transfusion of his blood, of course!

It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that the musical killer and Marion are headed for a collision course.

I found Alan J. Levi’s Blood Song a decent attempt at finding the point where ABC Movie of the Week style thriller and actual slasher meet. It makes decent use of its somewhat melodramatic mock-social realism, putting effort into building Marion and her social life up well enough to make her a more interesting heroine it is easier to care for. Of course and alas, it then finishes on exactly the sort of horror movie bullshit ending this sort of character was not made for, going for the boring trope when a semi-happy ending would have been much more fitting. Cynicism has its place in horror, obviously, but cynicism as an empty gesture is not really all that more interesting than the automatic happy ending it wants to replace while strutting around with typical edgelord non-grace.

Levi’s direction is very typical for a TV guy putting in some time in the horror mines early in his career: there’s a solid grip on all technical basics of filmmaking as well as the basic techniques of suspense, but also a certain lack of visual flair. Though, to be fair, Levi does put his locations in the part of town where the working class with aspirations lives to effective use, and has some success with flash cutting into and out of Marion’s visions.

The acting is very solid as well. Wilkes is convincing playing down six or so years of age, and is a generally likeable and believable heroine. Jaeckel does assholes rather well, and does his best with the script’s somewhat misguided attempts at trying to make Frank more likeable without him ever actually doing anything that would make him so until he catches a knife meant for his daughter. It’s the old “heroic self-sacrifice as the cheapest way to redemption without all that unpleasant need of having to actually change” move. Avalon clearly enjoys escaping his clear-cut image here, and, as is so often the case with this type, only needs to play up his natural creepiness until everybody in the audience notices it. He also plays the not exactly great idea with his trademark father-built flute (Professor Freud on line one, please!) so surprisingly natural, it works as a killer’s weird trademark despite of itself.

So, as an early 80s attempt at a non-typical slasher, Blood Song isn’t half bad. It’s not the sort of film I’d fall in love with or champion as a big lost masterpiece, but it does have enough virtues to be absolutely worth one’s time. Which is a lot more than I’d say about many a slasher.

Three Films Make A Post: It’s a Cop-Out!

Meurtres à domicile (1982): I’m not quite sure how “great comics writer Jean Van Hamme and director Marc Lobet adapt a story by great Belgian writer of the fantastique Thomas Owen” turned into this often very farcical end product, but if you enjoy your mysteries on the less than serious side, this one’s probably worth seeking out beyond the very different film I initially hoped for. Lobet is certainly good with putting his inspector (Anny Duperey) through many an encounter with her highly peculiar neighbours, and also hits some of the expected moments of anti-bourgeois humour you expect from French comedy of this style rather nicely, so there’s quite a bit of fun to be had here.

Focus on Infinity (2014): Joerg Burger’s documentary concerns the scientific search for the outer ranges of the cosmos and our existence in it, demonstrating individual perspectives, places, and devices through an awed eye. There’s a lot of room for scepticism towards the whole endeavour – though I’m not completely sure the film chooses the best arguments for it – but also for a deep exploration of the very different perspective very different people can and will bring to the Big Questions of the universe and our place in it.

Visually, Burger has a particular affinity for showing the places where science is done emptied of people, in marked contrast to the the very close and personal way his interviews with various scientists, a scientist-priest and an ex-scientist turned depressed writers work. It’s often genuinely thought-provoking, though I wouldn’t have given the last word to the last one of these interviewees, even in my role as a depressed pessimist.

The Cherry Tree With Gray Blossoms (1977): I have already lavished rather a lot of praise on Sumiko Haneda’s Poem of Hayachine Valley. As far as I’ve been able to read up on it, this short documentary was her first truly independently produced piece of work. It is a focussed, highly poetic and personal in the kind of way that also can become universal, exploration of an ancient cherry tree, the people living around and with it. Haneda uses this to explore personal grief, the idea of – for us humans – great spans of time, and how we as human beings can and do relate to these spans of time in the natural world. She does so rather brilliantly.

Short Film Friday: The Manor

In short: Last and First Men (2020)

Last and First Men is the only full length (or thereabouts) feature directed by well-loved around here as well as elsewhere composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Completed after his death, this is a fascinating bit of poetical, experimental narrative cinema, certainly influenced by Chris Marker in the way it mixes its sources visual and audio-visual to create something new.

In practice, this consists of Tilda Swinton (always up to any interesting project offered) calmly and carefully reading parts of the final chapters of Olaf Stapledon’s titular wonderful far future history, underlaid by swelling and descending drones by Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman, while the camera pans over – sometimes strangely angled – black and white shots of spomeniks, those brutalist-abstract World War II monuments built throughout what was then Yugoslavia, here meant to evoke the ruins of a future past; additionally, there’s an oscilloscope.

It all combines into something highly evocative, suggesting dimensions of time, as well as a feeling of nostalgia and melancholia for all the things we can’t experience that will already have been lost in the far future from where our narrator speaks, which is the place where nostalgia gets weird as in Weird Fiction. There’s horror for the future terrors and the inevitability of the end of everything (us, the universe and everything in between) yet also awe, awe for the now, the times in between, and even the wonder and terror of our end.

In other words, this film’s basic concept, mood, and execution seem to be directly made for me, seeing as it involves Cosmic Horror and Cosmic Awe (see also Lovecraft for the pessimistic version and Arthur C. Clarke for the optimistic one), drones, weird art shot weirdly (that’s a compliment), and one of the best novels of one of the great underread SF writers. If you’re in the proper mindset to appreciate this sort of thing, you may very well be moved as much as I was watching it.

DNA (1996)

aka Genetic Code

Borneo. Dr Ash Mattley (Mark Dacascos) has found some bug based enzyme that – if synthesized – could result in completely undetailed and unexplained medical progress that will save millions of lives. How? Why? Huh? The film ain’t telling. Alas, Ash has found no way whatsoever to actually synthesize said enzyme, which, given that his research is a side project he’s doing while he operates an underfunded and understaffed free clinic, is not too much of a surprise.

One day, one Dr Wessinger (Jürgen Prochnow) walks into Ash’s life. Wessinger has found the solution to Ash’s problem, and really only needs his help to find another of those wonderful bugs to realize Ash’s dream. Of course, Wessinger is no mere scientist but a mad scientist, and in truth only wants to use Ash’s enzyme to clone (or whatever) the bones of an ancient, unidentified beast the locals saw as a demon. After the following sudden and inevitable betrayal by the German madman, a cave explodes, and Ash believes Wessinger to be dead as his enzymatic dream.

Two years later, Claire Sommers (Rob McKee) arrives in town. She’s positive Wessinger is still alive and has come to stop whatever he’s up to, and she needs Ash’s help to find him. The expected mix of old jungle movie tropes, an antagonistic “romance” and a monster suit that badly rips off H.R. Giger’s most popular creation ensues.

If a viewer is willing and able to make their way through what William Mesa’s DNA laughingly calls its plot, can survive a long game of trope bingo, and is okay with the film’s bizarre ideas about human relations, speech, and general patterns of behaviour, they could actually get quite a bit of enjoyment out of this one. Really, it’s only the plot’s insistence on pretending to be complicated and deep that could get in the way of enjoyment, for the character work (such as it is) and dialogue are often very funny indeed. There’s really something to be said for a film whose creators genuinely seem to believe 50s B movie mad scientist dialogue is still a good idea in the mid-90s.

To be fair, they then make the good move to hire Jürgen Prochnow for the mad scientist role and somehow manage to convince him to go all-out on it. He’s thundering his lines with greatest conviction and enthusiasm, as if this stuff were Shakespeare or Das Boot, putting so much physical effort into his line delivery, he’d put Ben Kingsley in his “vigorous vicar” mode to shame.

Poor Mark Dacascos has it rather worse than Prochnow. Where the bad guy at least gets all the most ridiculous lines, Ash is such as straightforward white hat kind of good guy, there’s really very little he can do with the role. Apart from showing his expected and typical competence in unarmed fights, knife fights and shoot-outs. Ash, it turns out, must have studied jungle warfare and melee fighting as a useful side-line to medicine sometime. This way, he’ll never be without patients. Alas, he’s also pretty boring. Which seems rather symptomatic for the career of Dacascos, a guy who never really seems to have gotten his fair shake - and no, having to pretend to get beaten up by Keanu Reaves is not what I mean - despite talent and looks and the ability to not be an asshole in public.

The action sequences are generally competently done, Mesa usually staging and shooting them clearly and concisely. Whenever things are supposed to be scary, on the other hand, things do tend to get out of the director’s control.

But then, what could anyone do with a rip-off of the xenomorph this blatant (but crap and green)? Apart from showing it not quite as clearly and as often, of course. Or, just filming it in a way that would not suggest the size of its head will cause the poor guy inside the monster suit to lose his balance any minute now?

But then, what would be the fun in that?

In short: Ishtar (1987)

A bit of a flop in its time – though not quite the commercial bomb some made it appear to be – this is the film that killed Elaine May’s career as a director, though with a lot of scripting and script doctoring still to come in her career. Some of the stories about the production suggest she’s not completely without fault there, though directors with a penis would probably have survived this film as well as the combination of lack of professionalism on set and utter brilliance she appears to have shown during production, and still gone on to better things. And really, getting any finished film out of this particular tortured production history, with actual politics and studio politics working their hardest to squash the film’s production, it is definitely quite an achievement of May’s to even have managed to get a finished film together at all.

Ishtar as it has come down to us is not as terrible as most critics of the time would want one to believe – why, the first act is even pretty great – though I don’t see as many charms as some of today’s reappraisers suggest in it either. The film is always at its best when it ignores its developing adventure comedy plot with weird racist moments (as were all adventure comedies mandated by law to include) in favour of showing the interactions of its singing songwriter (in the most gracious interpretation of the terms) duo played by Dustin Hoffmann and Warren Beatty. Both are pretty damn funny, playing somewhat against type, spouting May’s lovingly absurdist dialogue, and doing whatever it is they’re doing with Paul Williams’s very funny songs. Of course, after a couple of minutes of this, it’s always back to badly staged adventure movie tropes and flabby jokes, so these parts don’t make the movie good, exactly. What they do indeed achieve is to make this much maligned film worth watching at least once.

Music Monday: False Dichotomy Edition

Shake, Rattle & Roll X (2008)

Apparently, this was the commercially most successful entry into the long-running Filipino horror anthology series. It’s also far from the best of the movies in the series I’ve managed to see, so go figure. Which doesn’t necessarily make this a film not worth one’s time, though. But let’s go through the segments one by one to explain, as usual.

The first episode, “Emergency”, as directed by Michael Tuviera is the long and surprisingly tedious tale of a hospital that comes under siege by a bunch of angry aswangs following an unfortunate aswang baby death. Which should be good, cheap fun, at least on paper, but in practice turns tedious thanks to a script full of needless distractions that tries badly to pump a twenty minute chiller up to forty. So expect many a scene of soap operatics concerning the relationship problems between an ambulance driver and a female doctor, as well as two separate comic relief guys – one of them a mildly offensive gay man. Even the aswangs tend to go on a bit before getting to the human killing business.

Tuviera’s direction isn’t terrible helpful either, with little sense for the rhythms of suspense and even less ability to distract from the pretty terrible CGI all three segments suffer under.

On the positive side, with this, the worst part of the film at hand is already over. From now on, things do at the very least keep to the somewhat entertaining side of the tracks.

Case in point is Topel Lee’s “Class Picture”. A group of students are staying over the weekend – and over night - at their university’s main building to prepare an exhibition. Alas, their first night is haunted by the spirit of a crazy murderous nun seeking a replacement for the three kids she tortured to death before she killed herself. The script isn’t exactly anything to write home about, as it mostly uses well-worn clichés, a lot of running through corridors, and exactly the sort of scares you’d expect, but it is effectively enough structured and paced. Lee’s direction is working on a comparable level. He’s not doing anything fancy – apart from using enough handheld camera one might suggest a love affair with it – but he gets a decent little horror short together, which is all I ever ask from any segment of any horror anthology.

Michael Tuviera returns for the third, final and longest segment, “Nieves, the Engkanto Slayer”, which isn’t quite as close to the adventures of a certain vampire slayer as the title would make one suspect, but is certainly the most fun part of the movie. That is, if you get through the first five minutes or so which are a pure dose of the sort of very broad humour that simply translates badly into different languages.

Country gal Nieves (Marian Rivera in a pretty unforgettable performance) is sassy, shouty, and very much in love with her husband Adonis (Pekto), who, in one of the segment’s better jokes, doesn’t actually look like one. Nonetheless, various nature spirits think Adonis is the hottest thing since sliced bread, too, so Nieves has learned all the ways of driving the buggers away: spells, rituals, potions and knife fighting are all part of her repertoire. Which of course also turns her into the local trouble-shooter for supernatural trouble. One night, when she returns from her unpaid spirit fighting work, she finds her home empty, and just manages to witness how Adonis is literally swallowed by the ground. Well, a large CGI face in the ground, to be precise.

Afterwards, she retreats into herself, stops hunting the supernatural and grumps very prettily. That is, until the city family of young Junie (Robert Villar) moves to town and really big trouble begins to stir.

Tonally, “Nieves” is all over the place. Humour, sentimentality and mild folklore based horror don’t always mix as effectively as I would have wished, but there’s real charm and cleverness in the way it uses urban fantasy tropes with Filipino folk traditions and creatures. Even the bad special effects – practical and digital – add to the charm instead of distracting from it here; they feel in good fun and perfectly in keeping with the cartoonish humour, rather like a shared joke. It’s not really the sort of thing I looked for going into the movie, but offered with so bright a smile, I’m certainly taking the film’s offer.

Three Films Make A Post: The Love Story is Never the Whole Story

Deep Water (2022): Adrian Lyne’s attempt at adapting Patricia Highsmith is most definitely the worst Highsmith adaptation I’ve seen. It’s not a terrible film, exactly, but Lyne, as is the director’s wont, is all about the surface level thrills, without any of the depth and insight into broken and often horrible people you get from Highsmith and most adaptations of her work. So there are many slick looking scenes of Ana de Armas being naked and Ben Affleck repeating his performance in Gone Girl, but worse in so far as Affleck mostly goes for constipation than actual acting. There is, alas, little to see on screen that ever provides any insight into why the characters here are the way they are, the way they explain themselves to themselves when they are alone; I’d love to believe the film is supposed to be about exactly that inner emptiness, but neither film nor actors do anything to convince me.

Even less well realized is the portrayal of the social connections between these bored rich people. Most of the time, you can’t even tell in whose house these bores are partying.

Strawberry Mansion (2021): There’s quite a bit of positive buzz about this twee SF indie arthouse comedy thing directed and written by Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney (who also star and act a little in here, respectively) in mid-brow critical circles (we are of course always low-brow around here). It is, admittedly, difficult to hate a film that’s so clearly made with as much blood, sweat and tears as this one is, and that has an aesthetic so genuinely its own. My problem is, said aesthetic is so unbearably, relentlessly twee (and I’m someone who loves Gondry, Wes Anderson etc), and the film’s main “they are putting ads into our dreams, maaaaan!” metaphor so simplistic and half-baked, I found myself reacting to the movie mostly with pained annoyance.

Lux Æterna (2019): This is never going to be my favourite Gaspar Noé movie. There’s a bit too much of the whiny tone particular arthouse filmmakers love to take on when speaking about the filmmaking process, not made better by couching it in irony, which ruins the middle part for me. What stays with me, however, are the early sequence of Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg talking – clearly improvising – about an actresses’ life in filmmaking country and witches, and the climax, when the whole film breaks down into its director’s beloved epilepsy inducing visual and acoustic drone and the leads have rather fantastic breakdowns, swallowed by art, the shittiness surrounding it, or the whims of their director.

Short Film Friday: Leviathan

In short: Unhuman (2022)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

The bus harbouring the usual bunch of contemporary high school clichés on a field trap crashes, with an apparent big explosion of blood. The minor injuries incurred thereby will be the least of the kids’ and their cynical idiot teacher’s problems, though, for some mysterious chemical incident does cause a bit of a rage zombie issue. The survivors manage to get into a large, dilapidated building in the woods, where you get a mixture of bad, “psychologically insightful” monologues and some siege action.

Until a particularly idiotic plot twist turns the up until now already pretty terrible movie into something downright insulting. Spoiler: it’s not zombies, but a bizarre, nonsensical plan of the two (male and white, of course, because it’s just that kind of movie) outsider kids to get closer to girls and express their pain (or something equally stupid) going very wrong indeed.

The best thing that can be said about Marcus Dunstan’s Unhuman is that it made me realize how unfairly I have underrated the movies of Christopher Landon until now. This really, really wants to be a Landon-esque mixture of broad, often physical, comedy, bloody horror, social consciousness and serious exploration of teenage emotion, but where Landon is always in control of his material and shows impeccable timing with most of his tonal shifts, Unhuman just wavers from tonal shift to tonal shift, stumbles over the stupidity of its plot, and couldn’t land a joke to save its life.

Of course, to do any of what it attempts successfully, it would need a script – unlike the one it has by Dunstan and Patrick Melton – that includes joke that are actually funny, characters that are more than the most basic clichés interacting in exactly the ways you’d expect, or an idiot plot. The filmmakers certainly aren’t helping their case by bringing up Breakfast Club as a comparison, which only brings the lack of substance and quality in their dialogue to the fore, as well as the lack of young actors playing their asses off.

Also, what’s with all the slow motion?

Veneciafrenia (2021)

A rather loud and somewhat obnoxious group of Spaniards arrives at Venice for a bit of partying and general mayhem as a sort of send-off before Isa (Ingrid García Jonsson) gets married to her absent fiancée. But don’t call it a hen party, please.

As it goes in these films, the gang gets into trouble soon enough, or really, more than one kind of trouble. There’s a murderous, stinky guy in a harlequin costume going around murdering tourists in silly, brutal ways, for one, but there may also be a greater conspiracy between parts of the Venetians who have had enough of the loud and unpleasant type of tourist arriving on a ecologically problematic cruise ship. Despite their best efforts, our Spanish protagonists actually take some time to get into truly dangerous situations, but once the first member of the group has disappeared, there’s little hope for the rest of them anymore. Particularly since these idiots are rather bad at providing the local police with any worthwhile hints or suggestions. Why, Isa can’t even produce a single photo of her own brother! And no, this isn’t setting up a plot twist.

I have a curious relationship with the body of work of director Álex de la Iglesia. His films are much beloved by many people whose opinions about these things I appreciate, but mostly, his general air of shrillness and crudity, often presented with an added bit of misogyny, does very little for me.

So, ironically as well as logically, those films of his I do enjoy are usually exactly those everybody else seems to have a problem with. This Venice-set modern giallo is a case in point, apparently, and most de la Iglesia fans seem to think this a very minor example of the director’s art and style. I, on the other hand, enjoyed this mix of giallo and somewhat ugly foreigner abroad tropes, with a pinch of conspiracy based on a very real problem. (Though de la Iglesia goes out of its way to not pretend every Venetian anti-cruise ship activist is a lunatic movie murderer).

I found myself particularly fond of the leisurely plotting of the whole affair, where long scenes of our tourists acting out and annoying the locals are used to very slowly build up tension and paranoia. Even though De la Iglesia is not the kind of visual stylist the great giallo masters in whose steps he follows here were, he finds quite a bit of creepy imagery. Carnival masks and cities going to ruin are of course gifts that keep on giving in this regard, but the film is also genuinely good at creating a general air of tension (rather than a more precise feeling of it) through many a shot of pissed-off Venetians, of dark canals and streets, and many a masked person who may or may not be involved in any of the plot(s). This does of course not for a zippy film make. I believe this works to this particular film’s advantage, though, and is most certainly keeping in the spirit of the giallo, as are some rather strained examples of randomness throughout that don’t really make much sense.

The film’s pace is a bit peculiar in other regards, as well. Particularly the climax is placed strangely. The actual dramatic centrepiece of the film happens rather earlier than you’d expect, and what comes after builds up to another big confrontation that then never actually comes to pass. This kind of refusal of gratification only a director of great experience and eccentricity could pull off – or even just be interested in - and de la Iglesia certainly is that, whatever else I may think of him.

A small break, as usual

Like every July, I'm taking a week off from the blog to wet my poor, dry tentacles. Or to do something really eccentric like leaving my apartment.

Normal service will resume on Wednesday, July 13.

Music Monday: Amberlit Morning Edition

The Poem of Hayachine Valley (1982)

aka Ode to Mount Hayachine

Original title: 早池峰の賦

Ostensibly, this long – the version I’ve seen is two and a half hours long but there appears to be a different cut for the Japanese market that adds at least another thirty minutes of material – documentary movie by pioneering, brilliant, female independent documentarian Sumiko Haneda is about the culture surrounding a traditional, devotional folk dance called the kagura as practiced in two villages situated around Mount Hayachine, in Iwate Prefecture (as far as I understand the least modernized part of Japan at the time). It certainly is about the two different versions of the dance the two villages practice, showing long, loving sequences portraying its practice, the way its masks and costumes are prepared (and the important differences between these masks in both villages, and the divergent interpretations they take on), training and education in the dance. Haneko also portrays the way the dance’s meaning to the villagers has shifted over time from religious practice as well as a form of entertainment to a bit of a saleable commodity for people who don’t have many of those.

At the same time, this is also a film about the way traditional Japanese village culture is shifting and changing with the times, containing a degree of sadness and nostalgia for the disappearance of traditional living – as is only right and proper – but – as is just as right and proper - never pretending the past was a perfect place and the influx of modern living is only a destructive force. I believe there’s a reason why Haneda shows a ninety-two year old gentleman early on, sitting and musing at the place where people over sixty-one were – at least according to local lore – left to die in the old times. Tradition, the film suggests without ever actually needing to say it, is wonderful, complicated and yet can also be horrible. The same goes with a more modern way of life.

But – as it is with the lives of the population of these villages – the film is not all about the kagura or a past slowly drifting away, but also the daily life of the people living there, the rhythms of their daily work, all still turning with the changing of the seasons. There’s a meticulous sense of the filmmaking itself shifting with the seasons as well, Haneda changing the calm rhythms of her editing and narration through the year she shows in the film.

As the two English titles suggest, there’s a sense of poetry running through a film that at first glance is just a bit dry and slow, a sense of a less visible but palpable additional quality to it and the quotidian things it shows, a luminescence won through calm and patient observation of human and natural rhythms and their intersections.

Three Films Make A Post: An Edge-Of-Your-Seat Thriller!

Murder 101 (1991): This TV mystery by Bill Condon with Pierce Brosnan really wants to be a twisty, cleverly constructed example of its genre, further emphasising this by adding certain meta elements via Brosnan’s hilariously melodramatic creative writing lessons. Unfortunately, the kind of clever-clever mystery this wants to be really needs to actually be cleverly constructed, whereas Murder 101 is more confused than elegantly confusing, and simply not terribly interesting for most of its running time. Brosnan’s character is such an egotistical twit that it’s pretty hard caring about what’s happening to him, as well.

Fire Music (2018): Apart from not really managing to squeeze as much of twenty years of free and avant jazz history into ninety minutes as one would ideally want to see, and then bizarrely pretending forward thinking jazz stopped with the advent of the Crouch/Marsalis bubble, this is as wonderful a music documentary as one would hope for, working as an excellent antidote to the conservatism of something like Ken Burns’s jazz documentary series. It’s chockfull of valuable and incisive archive material, wide-ranging interviews with a good handful of surviving musicians. It also really works as a movie, for director Tom Surgal does not use the interviews as sound bytes but lets them inform the structure and rhythm of his film, using archive material and visual collages very much in the spirit of the kind of music the musicians are talking about.

Synth Britannia (2009): Not quite a great as Fire Music, but still far away from the talking head nostalgia fest this easily could have turned into, this is a serious exploration of the roots and development of what would become British synth pop, not just aiming for the most obvious and successful examples of the form but also finding time for its more avantgarde roots. Some more details about how synth pop lost its more experimental impetus beyond “it’s the money” would have been nice, but there’s still quite a bit of substance to the interviews.

The film is not quite free of the tiresome rockism versus popism nonsense British music writers are so obsessed with, but it’s fortunately not really concentrating on it.

Short Film Friday: Bakulu