In short: When I Consume You (2021)

Siblings Daphne (Libby Ewing) and Wilson (Evan Dumouchel) have survived an abusive childhood but have accumulated too much trauma to get to that happy life you might have heard about. Daphne, though certainly the stronger of the two, has various substance abuse problems in her past, while Wilson seems so lost, Daphne appears to be holding his and her life together by sheer force of will alone.

After an unsuccessful attempt at an adoption – turns out being single with drugs in your past is a problem even when you’ve been clean for half a decade – Daphne dies from an overdose of prescription drugs. The police write this off as an accidental overdose, but Wilson saw someone running out of her apartment before he found her body, and is convinced Daphne was murdered.

Going by a journal Wilson finds among her things, Daphne had been stalked by someone, and quite regularly brutally beaten. Clearly, the stalker must have killed her, and Wilson decides to find him and avenge his sister. Which, given Wilson’s soft and anxious personality, doesn’t seem like a great plan. Fortunately, Daphne’s ghost begins to appear to him. She doesn’t remember what really happened to her, but she’s certainly willing to help Wilson toughen up, even if that means “killing his inner child”.

The ghost isn’t going to be the only appearance of the supernatural here, however.

There’s quite a bit to like about Perry Blackshear’s When I Consume You. The acting is very strong indeed: both Ewing and Dumouchel provide the film with a naturalistic grounding even when the plot becomes rather weird (probably even with a capital W). Blackshear’s direction is equally grounded in your typical contemporary low budget indie style, going for a verité feel that’s regularly broken by the strangeness of the supernatural intrusions into the world. This provides the film with a very particular kind of mood, where relationships and the city at night surrounding them feel authentic and real, but this reality is always threatened not so much by complete breakdown but by metaphors about inner realities becoming outwardly real as well. The sharp, and expressive editing – no problems getting out of a scene at the right moment here – further emphasises this quality.

The script – also by Blackshear - generally sells its tale of hurt people, trauma, and shit happening to people who certainly don’t deserve it very well, treating its stranger ideas with a matter of factness that makes them convincing even if you’re like me and not terrible interested in tales of the supernatural where the weird is metaphorical first. There are a couple of somewhat jarring notes of pat American kitchen sink Buddhism, but the film is otherwise so strong in its portrayal of very damaged people and a sibling relationship so strong, coming back from the dead just seems logical, I can’t get too worked up about that.

Particularly not when the rest of When I Consume You is quite this individual and genuinely interesting.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

A heist-favouring spy team working for an organization called the IMF (which stands for “Impossible Mission Force”, so not to be confused with the IWF, I assume) under the leadership of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), is wiped out during an operation in Prague meant to retrieve some kind of ridiculous master list the IMF has of all of their undercover spies. The situation turns out to be at least a double cross. This doesn’t just kill off some of the best actors in the cast, but leaves only one agent alive: a tiny, shouty, perpetually grinning man named Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Or so it seems at first.

This does of course leave Hunt under heavy suspicion from his superiors, and instead of rotting away in a secret prison, our protagonist decides to go on the run and find out who killed his friends while also retrieving the list. He gets help from a surprise survivor of his wiped out team, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Phelps’s improbable wife, and a couple of burned, I mean “disavowed”, former IMF agents, Krieger (Jean Reno) and Luther (Ving Rhames). There will be heisting and an astonishing number of double crosses.

Mission: Impossible (which I pretend to take place in universe next to the original series, for reasons obvious to anyone who liked the show and has seen the movie) falls into a weird space in the career of Tom Cruise. While wielding quite a bit of star power, he didn’t have quite as much clout as to be able to bully his directors into an infinite number of close-ups of him looking heroic/constipated, even in a film he produced; though he already was able to play down the importance of every other character in his movies, resulting in a film with Reno, Béart, Rhames, Voight, and Kristin Scott Thomas that finds no space to give any of them an actual substantial scene. Only Vanessa Redgrave seems impervious to this, joyfully chewing the scenery whenever she’s on screen and flirting at Cruise in the exact same predatory manner his heroes would increasingly take on in the coming decades.

Cruise is attempting to make up for the too sharp focus on himself by trying very hard indeed, more often than not falling into a trap that comes up regularly with him during the early decades of his career when he was trying to be a proper actor as well as a movie star – he looks like a guy trying much more than one doing, grimacing and shouting when he doesn’t seem to know how to express human feelings in a more natural manner.

Ironically, the blockbuster bigness of projects like this first Mission: Impossible can’t have helped him either, for this is not a film that lends itself to attempts at being subtle and human; being appropriately big is a skill Cruise really got better in during the years following this. And really, think what you want about the guy, one can’t fault him for being a slacker.

So that leaves Mission: Impossible to be carried by its twisty passages of a curiously predictable script full of set pieces and the great Brian De Palma’s direction alone. Fortunately, De Palma in his thriller director for hire phase is brilliant in his overblown pomposity, clearly loving the technical tricks his budget affords him, finding ways to keep Cruise off-screen at least sometimes by using POV camera, and otherwise applying everything he learned from studying Hitchcock, while also adding his own ability to melodramatically heighten every action by stylish flourishes that would make them ridiculous instead of suspenseful in lesser hands.

Now, many of the set-ups for the film’s central set pieces and the heist scene everybody still seems to remember decades later are patently ridiculous when you think them through, but De Palma’s impeccable staging and timing of thrills cheap and costly makes them utterly convincing while you’re in the moment, which is all that matters in the kind of film that only ever is about its moments of excitement and the thrills that come with that. This is not at all meant as a criticism of big, loud blockbuster movies – I love rather a lot of them, older and very new – but rather an acknowledgement of what they are typically meant to be and do. Mission: Impossible does it rather well indeed, even for someone like me who only ever likes movies starring Tom Cruise despite of him and not because of him.

In short: City Beneath the Sea (1953)

Two salvage divers – straight arrow Brad Carlton (Robert Ryan) and his friend and partner, the morally more flexible Tony Bartlett (Anthony Quinn) – travel to Jamaica for a rather delicate operation. They are tasked to salvage one million dollars in gold bouillon from a sunken ship. At first, they find nothing at the coordinates provided them by the local contact (Karel Stepanek) of their employer.

Instead of going home again, both men decide to stay on Jamaica and romance some ladies in that horrifying 50s style you don’t have to be particularly woke to raise all available eyebrows at. Brad takes time getting to know boat captain Terry McBride (Mala Powers), while Tony sets his eyes on a night club singer working under the nom de plume of Venita (Suzan Ball). Eventually, their dithering and many a scene of “romance” will lead our protagonists on the trail of the gold again. Turns out, that local contact is involved in a rather huge insurance fraud.

But what, one might ask, about the titular “City Beneath the Sea”? Well, our heroes use the awkward looking ruin to locate the gold, that’s all.

It is not only the title of Budd Boetticher’s City Beneath the Sea that emphasises the wrong things – unfortunately, what is sold as an adventure movie in the classic style really isn’t much of that. The search for the gold takes a back seat for most of the movie. Instead we have to endure Ryan’s and Quinn’s characters acting like traditional male chauvinists for what feels like hours, some unfunny comedy, a musical number and other distractions in a film that seems to have no interest at all in its purported plot. Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the distractions were actually interesting and fun, or would make use of Boetticher’s considerable talent for complex characterisation and explorations of human relationships. Alas, even with the considerable charm of Ryan and Quinn, the distractions never feel like anything but dithering, or desperate attempts at getting the film to feature length. From time to time there’s an interesting detail – like the way Tony very emphatically greets the black Dijon (house favourite Woody Strode) as a peer after having been introduced to him as their contact’s “boy” – but this is not a film where those details add up to very much, as much as I’d like them to.

Even the adventure scenes that are in the movie aren’t terribly great – the focus on slow, slow, oh so very slow diving sequences doesn’t play to Boetticher’s strengths as a director at all, what with it mostly showing our heroes bobbing up and down in their – now old-timey – diving gear.

All of which leaves City Beneath the Sea as a film only of minor interest even for Boetticher (or Ryan, or Quinn, etc) completists.

Music Monday: Variable Happiness Edition

Fear the Invisible Man (2023)

The Victorian era. Adeline (Mhairi Calvey), the widow of an experimental scientist who never quite managed to come up with the great, humanity-improving invention he was angling for, has a bit of a bad time. Her husband spent much of their wealth on his experiments, and she is now in the final stages of pawning off whatever valuables she still has left to keep the her hubby’s manor house. The bank is apparently foreclosing on the mansion soon, as well. Her attempts to positively influence the political life of the small town she is living close to by realizing a genius welfare plan is thwarted by the conservative stuffiness of the men in power as well as the little influence women were allowed to have on the public life of their society.

So she’s rather well prepared by a quiet anger and desperation to accept the strange and the dubious when her old university friend Griffin (Mike Beckingham) appears at her home. Well, I say appears, but as a matter of fact, he’s invisible. Apparently, he has invented an invisibility serum and made himself thus, with no way of turning visible again. He desperately needs shelter away from the big city and a lab to find a way for an antidote for his invisibility formula – both things Adeline can provide. Griffin’s willing to pay for it, too, though Adeline quickly realizes that he doesn’t come by the money he gives her in an honest way. She’s desperate, though, and even if Griffin is stealing, he’s not exactly hitting men who don’t deserve to be put down a peg, and if he’s talking a bit too much about the power his invisibility provides him with, what of it?

Adeline manages to convince herself of Griffin’s basic harmlessness and moral fibre for quite some time, but eventually, his escalating brutality will make it impossible for her to look away forever.

Paul Dudbridge’s low budget version of the H.G. Wells novel is a surprisingly interesting little movie, using the material with a degree of thought and care I would not have expected. The film seems genuinely interested in Adeline’s position as an intelligent and independent woman in a time and place that respects these traits in a woman even less than is the case now, and her encounter with a man who appears to share her quiet anger at the world. The difference being that she wants a better world for everyone where he just wants to rule the world as it is. So yes, the film does put this interest in talking about things social into plot in a rather melodramatic manner, but then, what’s the fun in playing in the Victorian sandbox if you don’t.

Visually, Dudbridge is a bit of a conservative director, but there’s a steady, if unflashy competence that fits the movie well. The acting is generally strong, if a little stagy, but if a million BBC productions have taught us anything, that’s how people talked in the olden-ish times, so the staginess feels fitting and even curiously authentic. This acting approach certainly does work well with the earnest and dramatic tone of the film, unlike a more conventional naturalism would, and the leads, particularly Calvey, do seem to know when to let their backs relax a little.

The effects are not very good – even some of the invisibility moments that are basically a solved problem in filmmaking even without digital effects – but they are really not the point of the film, so I didn’t find it difficult to just accept what they are meant to represent and get on with the emphasis on ideas and characters this is centred on.

And there Fear the Invisible Man works rather well, leaving it a thoughtful and clever movie, where I expected fun nonsense going in.

Three Films Make A Post: A gripping puzzle of pursuit and escape

The Lurking Fear (2023): I’m not enough of an optimist to expect something like a Tubi adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s worst – though also fun despite of itself – stories to be much good, even though you could arguably make a nice ninety minute piece of pulp entertainment out of the material. What we actually get in Darren Dalton’s film is a bit of mock-POV horror, followed by long, long, long sequences of characters wandering through underground tunnels, disrupted by bad make-up effects and what the film laughingly calls its plot. Add to that an inability to edit action sequences or parallel plot lines – of different character groupings wandering through those damn tunnels, so don’t get too excited – that borders on the anti-genius (the Anti-Christ’s less fun brother), and not even Robert Davi playing a bad guy wearing a ridiculous hat can do much to save this thing.

Reportage November (2022): In some aspects this fake documentary style piece of POV horror from Sweden by Carl Sundström is a bit more competently made than your usual movie about filmmakers/ghost hunters/random fools walking panicked through the woods, wielding cameras. At least, the script seems to have a basic understanding of dramatic structure, so there’s a pleasant lack of scenes where characters just fart around, and the plot progresses in a reasonable and mostly efficient manner.

Of course, the narrative still only works like the filmmakers want it to because a quartet of supposed professionals acts ridiculously unprofessional, and most of it consists of the usual tropes and clichés of your typical wood wandering POV horror movie (without the green night camera, though), with a bit of a vague conspiracy angle pasted on. It’s still watchable, which is more than I’d say about many of its peers. Plus, at least the forests are Swedish for a change.

The Odessa File (1974): Ronald Neame’s Odessa File recommends itself mainly through its very post-War sensibility, a portrayal of an early 70s Europe that still lies under the shadow of the kind of people responsible for World War II. This makes it unpleasantly topical in a Europe where the Right is on the rise yet again. And like the Nazis here, there’s still the assumption of victimhood, the pretence at culture, and so on, and so forth coming from these people. The films hits the tone of parts of particularly German post-War culture and the things it liked to hide from itself rather well, so much so that its more contrived conspiracy elements as well as its general sense of paranoia feel plausibly grounded.

As a thriller, the film’s pacing tends to be a little slow, but once it gets going, it does develop more than enough drive to satisfy. The acting, with a merry mix of German and British actors playing the Nazis, and Jon Voight pretending to be Gerrman, as well, is strong throughout. Maximilian Schell hits the note of the whiny, self-satisfied mass murderer, particularly well.

Short Film Friday: Caregiver

In short: The Sea Serpent (1985)

aka Hydra, the Sea Serpent

Original title: Serpiente de mar

The Sea Serpent concerns a giant sea serpent (surprise) created by an experimental H-bomb (cue five minutes or so of hilariously silly and contrived “coded” language between pilots and their home base, which does not look like a room in a military installation at all). A trio, sometimes quartet, of weirdos who witness various serpent attacks - a particularly grumpy looking Ray Milland, Timothy Bottoms, Taryn Power and Jared Martin as the on-again, off-again friend/enemy who believes Bottoms is responsible for the death of his brother only to join the fight once he finally sees the serpent as well.

If you’d tell me there were two Spanish genre directors called Amando de Ossorio, I’d absolutely want to believe you. It’s a more interesting explanation for the insanely varied quality of his work than the truth of luck, opportunity and what probably wasn’t a willingness to gilden any old crap.

Alas, this one was made by the lesser de Ossorio, so if you’re coming in expecting some moody sea serpent action, a bit – or a lot of – sleaze, and other more serious joys of a giant monster movie, you’ll be sorely disappointed. To be fair, given the quality of the sea serpent puppet, de Ossorio does his best with it, letting the adorable thing squish lighthouses or molest ships as often as he can afford it. Which, alas, isn’t all that often.

Thus much of the film has to be filled with the sort of cheap business you get up to when you have no budget for anything of visual interest and only a limited degree of imagination available. This starts with the much too long military code babble sequence and will continue through boring human interest – why the hell was the brother of Martin’s character not at least killed by the sea serpent instead of bad luck to make things at least a little less random and more dramatic? –, a conspiracy angle that makes little sense and is dropped whenever the film gets bored with it, and exciting sequences like Bottoms breaking Power out of a psychiatric clinic by putting her into a white coat and then simply wandering off with her until they encounter a guard who is beaten by some absurdly awkward flirting. An exciting giant monster movie, this is not.

Having said that, I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy my time with The Sea Serpent. There’s certainly something about the crappiness of the monster that’s more charming than annoying, and the superfluous business between the monster scenes is certainly neither clever nor relevant but also kind of fun if you’re in the mood for filler instead of a main course.

Cobweb (2023)

Little Peter (Woody Norman) is not having a happy life so far. Being without friends and bullied in school is bad enough, but his parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr in wonderfully strained and nervy performances) are a very special case as well. On the surface, they seem to go through all the right motions and say all the right words you’d expect of loving parents, but they do so in a curiously stilted and dramatic manner, like actors trying way too hard. They also don’t seem to have heard about the glorious invention of lightbulbs stronger than a weak nightlight, going by the lack of lighting inside their home. Though they do have a huge thing for pumpkins, which is certainly a point in their favour. As we’ll quickly see, the couple is perfectly willing to go from being creepy to actual emotional abuse when they find a reason for it.

And a reason they’ll find, for this October, the girl living in the walls of the home begins talking to Peter, suggesting some rather radical methods to keep away his bullies, and clearly angling to be set free by the boy. At the same time, new substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) starts noticing Peter’s behaviour, suspecting abuse, and becomes emotionally attached (which you shouldn’t do, apparently).

For the first two acts, I had a lot of fun with Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb. There’s a wonderful build-up of a creepy Halloween mood where Peter’s home takes on the quality of a haunted castle right in suburbia, with his parents as the local Bluebeards. The visual palette is dominated by the colours of a rather sickly autumn, and there’s much here that feels genuinely creepy. The first two acts really work like a particularly dark fairy tale, even though it is desperately obvious where all this is going to go.

In fact, the third act makes it very clear the filmmakers didn’t really intend this to be the mood piece the first hour makes one hope the film is going to continue to be, but rather a mix of at least three of the more popular horror movies of the past couple of years, Barbarian, The Black Phone and Malignant. Alas, two of these three films have brains, a theme, and the willingness to actually think about the stuff they are showing, where Cobweb’s script (by Chris Thomas Devlin, of the last Texas Chainsaw Massacre screenplay credit) just reproduces clichés without sense.

That’s a failing I could still cope with in a film as moodily shot as this one, if not for the horrors of a third act when the film leaves behind all semblance of logic, art, or even just good structure. Instead, it’s one badly thought out plot point hit artlessly after the next, with characters only brought in because the filmmakers seemed to have panicked about the low body count, and plot holes so big, even I care. That the film implicitly says that locking up your disfigured child in some secret room in your house is okay because ugly means evil isn’t exactly helping there either, in a movie made in this decade. Nor is Bodin’s sudden love for not using light sources at all, so that much of the “action” of the final act is more guessed at than seen. On the other hand, the design and execution of the film’s monster will turn out to be so amateurish, I would have wanted to hide it as well.

Despite how bad the final act is, I’d be rather interested to see what Bodin could do with a proper script instead of whatever the third act of Cobweb is supposed to be. But given the weaknesses of his Netflix series Marianne, this may be a James Wan-like case of fear of decent scripting.

In short: Plane (2023)

Two-fisted airline pilot Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler) doesn’t have a great time. Ordered to pilot his half-empty smallish passenger plane through a storm, the plane gets struck by lightning, forcing him to apply some minor heroics to land it. Alas, he does land on a Filipino island in the hand of separatists who have made a habit out of kidnapping foreigners for ransom and would be quite happy to acquire a plane full of those foreigners without having to go through much effort. So Torrance, together the obligatory murderer with a soldier background (Mike Colter) who was supposed to be transported to the US on the plane as a prisoner have to do some killing, some running, and some bad planning to save the day.

Our old frenemy Boring Competence strikes again. There’s nothing really wrong with Jean-François Richet’s action movie – well, apart from nobody involved applying any thought to anything in the script because laziness rules. There’s definitely not much really right with it either. Pacing, acting, dialogue, camera, editing, and so on, and so forth are all there and handled in a professional manner, but there’s nothing here that has any shine, nothing that dares to be good or bad in any interesting way. The action scenes aren’t terribly well edited, but not so badly as to ever become interesting in that way, either.

There’s a joylessness to the whole affair’s professionalism that really kills it for me as anything of any actual entertainment value. Nothing to see here but people doing their jobs, but mostly waiting for the time when they’ll be getting off work to drink away their pay checks.

Music Monday: Bananas Edition

Devil’s Diary (2007)

Warning: I’ll have to spoil some of the film’s middle act twists.

High schoolers Dominique (Alexz Johnson) and Ursula (Magda Apanowicz) are low on the totem pole in the brutal hierarchy of their school, but at least, they have each other – and actually at least a handful of friends, more than most kids in their situation in the movies usually get – to keep the usual combination of jocks and cheerleaders off. Dominique is the one with the better game face, protecting Ursula and herself with gallows humour and an excellent pose of not giving a shit. At the same time she’s hiding most of her own hurts, like a rapey stepfather.

While they are farting around at a graveyard, lightning strikes a grave and uncovers an old book. Ursula feels particularly drawn to the improbable things, and discovers that writing in it as if it were a diary makes her wishes come true. Alas, not all of her wishes, but only those based in hatred and other negative feelings, so very quickly, the nastiest of the jocks and cheerleaders are having increasingly brutal accidents. The more Ursula uses her newfound power, the angrier and nastier she becomes. Once Dominique realizes that Ursula isn’t “just” having a breakdown but is becoming possessed by an evil supernatural power, she does her best to save her friend. Parts of the cheerleading squad also get wind of what is actually going on, and decide to steal the diary.

As it turns out, an evil cheerleader is not a pleasant alternative.

Apparently, this is how Lifetime movies looked in 2007. Given its Lifetime movie status, Farhad Mann’s film has some surprisingly nasty moments – the special effects aren’t any great shakes, but this is not a film afraid showing a teenager dying puking out all of her teeth or another get his face melted off by acid. It’s certainly not tasteful, but I can’t help but respect the film for it.

The staging of the death scenes is generally on the crude and tacky side, but that appears to be the tone the whole film is very consciously going for, be it there or in its emotional moments. Even the way it escalates its plot and the degree of the supernatural threat has a certain tacky superficiality. Typically, you’d find this material handled as the tale of a female friendship under pressure destroyed by a supernatural threat that weaponizes the trauma of one of the friends. Devil’s Diary seems to get bored by this approach early on, and so begins to let the diary wander into cheerleader hands and eventually even draws a secretly Satanist catholic priest out of its hat. Of course, given how one-dimensional the characterization of every single character not named Dominique – she’s got at least two dimensions – here is, staying on the more psychological lane would simply not have played to the film’s strengths.

Having realized that subtlety really isn’t the ballpark it wants to play in, the film kills off Ursula in the middle in a particularly unpleasant way and then goes off to the races of increasingly absurd plot twists, bizarre scenes of a cheerleader who has turned herself dominant towards all men (and doesn’t have the imagination to do the same to women as well), an attempted rape by stepfather, and said secretly Satanist priest. It’s a wonder of tacky, pulpy, absurdity, and really rather a lot of fun, if one is in the right mood.

Mann isn’t exactly a great director, but his blunt, bad music video on a budget, style fits the content of the film rather wonderfully. He also leaves enough space for the young actresses – the male characters don’t have terribly much to do here – to chew the scenery quite enthusiastically. There is so much evil glowering, evil staring and evil catfighting (don’t ask) going on here, you could use it to make two other movies.

And if that doesn’t recommend Devil’s Diary to you, I don’t know what could.

Three Films Make A Post: It's never too late to start.

Living (2022): There’s so much that could have gone wrong with shifting Oliver Hermanus’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to 1950s London, but the resulting movie carves out its own, individual identity instead of being the original movie, but worse and set in the West. Kazuo Ishiguro’s script for the tale of a man confronted with the diagnosis of his looming death and what this does to him is delicate, intelligent and easily portrays the difficult bits of the human heart, so that a story that in the wrong hands could be just a piece of kitsch becomes deeply felt, thought and moving. Hermanus directs with quiet intelligence, a presence that’s never showy, and the ability to support his actors.

The cast, led by a typically wonderful Bill Nighy doesn’t exactly need the support, great as the ensemble does, but the film isn’t exactly getting worse by them and their director being on the same page.

Sri Asih (2022): Only the second film of the Indonesian Bumilangit Cinematic (superhero) Universe, and we’re already getting not only a female led (Pevita Pearce as the titular heroine) entry, but one directed by a woman – Upi Avianto – to boot. For my tastes, this is a better paced movie than Gundala is, a little slicker in presentation and choreography, and a lot of fun like this sort of big budget superhero thing is supposed to be, particularly – as with its predecessor - in the way it allows itself to be local as well as universal.

Hergé: In the Shadow of Tintin aka Hergé à l’ombre de Tintin (2016): Apparently, there are different cuts of Hugues Nancy’s documentary about the great pioneer of the Bande dessinée, Hergé. I have only been able to see the shorter, fifty-two minute cut. I suspect most of my problems with the film would be resolved by the thirty minutes longer version, for this version’s main problem seems to be its neck-breaking pace, racing through its subject’s life and work with so little breathing room, it can only touch on anything – his unpleasant early politics, the war years, his emotional struggle with being the Tintin drawing machine, the development of his style and so on – without ever finding the time to actually say anything deep about it, despite featuring an impressive number of experts as well as rare and valuable archive material from Hergé’s estate.

I’m not quite so sure the film’s tendency to hyperbole – there’s a lot of talk about “genius”, whatever that means, little talk about any comics work influencing Hergé and things like that – is going to be better in the longer version, but it running around like the White Rabbit really is its main problem in the short cut.

Short Film Friday: A Darker Place

In short: Arion (1986)

Original title: アリオン

A version of mythological Greece where the three sons of Cronos, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, are involved in a bitter war. Young Arion (voiced by Shigeru Nakahara) is the son of Demeter and Poseidon. His mother, blind through circumstances she isn’t willing to disclose to her little kid yet, has left the wars and intrigues of the Titans behind her. These intrigues haven’t left her behind, however, thus Hades kidnaps Arion and tricks him into believing Zeus to be responsible for his mother’s blindness. Arion killing Zeus would not just be an act of vengeance but also the only cure for Demeter’s blindness. Trained into a pretty impressive yet also really stupid teenage killing machine by Hades, Arion sets out to kill his way through various of the Titans. He will eventually meet his father and side with him for a while; fall in love with his own sister Resphoina, as is tradition among his family, and eventually become instrumental in the fall of the Titans.

I’m usually all for Asian artists doing weird stuff to western mythology and religion; cultural appropriation is fun to watch/read/listen to for me. Alas, nothing Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (who adapted his own manga with this) does to Greek myth here is terribly interesting, even if you can cope with its titular character not being a horse. Most of the many, many changes to Greek myth here seem in service of making it less interesting and more generic in a very particular boring mid-80s anime way, and none of Yoshikazu’s ideas on display are an improvement on the actual myth cycle. The characterisation of most of the gods and half gods in the film is so different from their sources, it’s not even a story deconstructing the myths, but just one using their names.

Worse still, the film’s storytelling has all the hallmarks of the kind of adaptation that doesn’t know what to cut from its source material – which is no wonder given that the creator of said source material co-writes and directs – so Arion also never manages to focus on any theme or idea but instead throws out an astonishing number of them it then has no time to actually use well or think through. Characters are never actually developed, instead, we are told their character traits; relationships never quite make sense because there’s no space to develop them either.

In a quite impressive turn of events, the film still manages to feel like a slog.

The animation side is generic and very of its time but certainly very competent – I particularly like the use of cheap psychedelic effects whenever magic of any kind comes into play – but the script is so weak, there simply never seems to be much point to any of it.

In short: Kuchisake-onna (1996)

Kodan-shi – a ghost story narrator in a traditional Japanese style – Ichiryusai Teisui does the framing narrative for a horror tales directed by Teruyoshi Ishii. The first one concerns the (well, one of many, really) origin story of the titular Kuchisake-onna, the internationally popular Slit-Mouthed Woman. Here, she’s the victim of a cruel lover and a plastic surgeon, taking her revenge and then not really stopping, as is the wont of her type of Japanese supernatural being.

The second tale concerns the haunting of a male killer of women by slugs, which certainly isn’t something you see every day.

Thirdly, we encounter a budding serial killer in junior age, who eventually kills his baby sister in a fit of jealousy, driving his mother mad. Obviously, getting strangled by a baby ghost is in his future.

The three tales are all very simple, as befits stories told to us by a very traditional storyteller, in tone falling between urban legend, what we’d now call creepypasta and traditional Japanese kaidan. Thanks to surprisingly moody direction by Ishii and Teisui’s dramatically spooky – even if one doesn’t speak Japanese – narration, the tales feel archetypal rather than simplistic. As is often the case with Japanese horror of the cheap and cheerful yet not extreme direct-to-video type of the 90s and early 00, these feel as much like modern variations of folkloric storytelling as the cheaply done bits of horror they are, suggesting a certain dignity and cultural connection that can surprise when one keeps in mind this was most probably just made as cheap video store or cable channel fillers.

In short: Space Is the Place (1974)

A messianic alien (Afro-futurist jazz pioneer/inventor Sun Ra) with an interesting fashion sense descends to Earth (or into our dimension) to free the souls and bodies of – American – Black people, perhaps to take them back to wherever he comes from. To achieve this, he plays a metaphorical card game with a pimp/devil figure the credits quite logically call the Overseer (Ray Johnson).

Parts of the plot also concern the attempts of a group of government agents/NASA scientists (!?) to stop a climactic Sun Ra Arkestra concert, or something.

What exactly is going on in it is sometimes difficult to say, for Space Is the Place’s plot is generally disjointed and makes a lot more sense on its metaphorical and philosophical level than as a straightforward narrative.

If one approaches it as the kind of blaxploitation flick it at least seems to be partially aligned with, one is probably going to be disappointed, for treated as such a linear movie, it is an often awkward series of clichés, staged and acted just as awkwardly.

Fortunately, the film never really appears to actually want to aim for the drive-in and 42nd Street market, so this failing isn’t much of one in practice. Watching Space is the Place with an open mind is quite an experience: between the straightforward bits, there are scenes of Ra proclaiming his Afro-Futurist philosophy, other scenes where I couldn’t help but feel I had stumbled onto a very peculiar cult indoctrination movie, bits and pieces of SF turned towards people of colour (so the sort of SF still very rare in 1974 in any form), messianic lore, metaphor turned concrete. Ra and/or director James Coney turn the Black Experience just metaphorical enough for Ra to come up with a way to change it in a world where neither politics nor rebellion seem to be viable ways to bring about change; glorious moments of Sun Ra and his Arkestra playing their still idiosyncratic, joyful and beautifully strange version of free jazz seem to fulfil this promise of freedom as much as the souls and bodies of Black people leaving Earth with Ra.

Music Monday: Origin Edition

Crystal Eyes (2017)

Original title: Mirada de cristal

Unpleasant and unstable supermodel Alexis Carpenter (Camila Pizzo) causes an accident that gets her burned alive during a fashion show in 80s Buenos Aires. A year later, the fashion magazine queen who produced the whole debacle (Silvia Montanari) decides to run a deeply cynical tribute thread in her magazine, featuring two models Alexis hated, and made with parts of the crew who were also part of the deadly fashion show.

Before the shoot for the project can even start, someone wearing a mannequin version of Alexis’s face as a mask begins murdering their way through the cast, leaving no trace of their victims, who are apparently not missed by anyone either. The unsuspecting survivors eventually gather in a creepy, absurdly labyrinthine mansion for the shoot, or rather to be murdered as well.

There have been quite a few attempts at committing pastiches of the Italian giallo over the decades, but few of these films are quite so specific as Ezequiel Endelman’s and Leandro Montejano’s Mirada de Cristal. The film at hand isn’t just a giallo pastiche, but one of that very particular group of 80s giallos that were influenced by the slasher genre (which itself was of course heavily influenced by earlier giallos) and typically concerned the murders of models.

The film hits the tone and style of these films perfectly. Even its particular flaws are those of the model slasher giallos (or however one wants to dub the sub-genre, if one feels the need to do so at all): to wit, the acting is generally atrocious in a spectacularly stilted and unnatural way that still manages to be overly melodramatic with an extra 80s plastic sheen on top, which adds to the whole affair’s air of unreality rather than distract from any supposed believability. The script is awkwardly structured, full of characters whose only reason to be in the movie at all are their death scenes, and who are all utter bastards. The budget can’t keep up with the film’s ambitions at all, so expect huge fashion events that take place in what looks like a damp cellar in front of an audience of at least ten people.

All of this is utterly in keeping with Crystal Eyes’ filmmaking models, obviously, as is the delight the directors find in using all the aesthetic tricks and traits of the 80s giallo. So here are the peculiar high fashion costumes, the lighting that spits on your naturalism when it can use any strange combination of neon colours instead, the lingering, creeping/creepy quality of most of the shots, the complete disinterest in things looking real when they can look like the wet dream of a cocaine-fuelled 80s set designer instead. It’s really absolutely glorious, or at least, it is if you do enjoy the aesthetic copied here so carefully and wonderfully as much as I and apparently the filmmakers do.

Now, one could complain about Crystal Eyes’ complete unwillingness to make any kind of postmodern comment about the 80s fashion giallo, deconstructing its gender representation, and so on, and so forth, but to me, it seems perfectly in keeping with the soul of a genre where style always was the main substance to not do any of these things, and instead just wallow in the joys of a very specific set of aesthetics.

Three Films Make A Post: The girl you've been waiting for

The Unheard (2023): Other people’s mileage apparently varies considerably, but I had a lot of fun with Jeffrey A. Brown’s thriller about the auditory haunting of a deaf girl (Lachlan Watson) during and after an experimental procedure to regain her hearing. The whole “person encountering ghosts while regaining a formerly lost sense” thing is of course less than original, but the script by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen is tight, Brown’s direction solid, and Watson’s performance effective and likeable, so I didn’t mind this lack of originality in the least.

Whipsaw (1935): This melodramatic crime romance by Sam Wood about an undercover cop (Spencer Tracy) and a thief (Myrna Loy) he is attempting to pump for information about her colleagues in crime going on the road together is a surprisingly fun little thing, living off the considerable chemistry between Tracy and Loy – not something I would have expected going in, though Loy apparently had the ability to spark off everyone if she wanted to – and a sense of melodrama that never becomes too sappy or kitschy. There’s what feels like genuine heart to the story, so much so that, even under the conservative hammer of the Hays code, the cop seems to learn as much from the thief as she from him. That the film manages to contrive a way to not punish Loy’s character for past misdeeds and points at a happy end is an additional pleasant surprise.

Battle in Outer Space aka Uchu daisenso (1957): Leave it to the great Ishiro Honda (and of course writer Shinichi Sekizawa) to make a film about a space war between Earth and a superior alien force that have made their base on the moon to not go for the jingoist vein but emphasise the importance of international togetherness. It’s till rather refreshing; and a bit uncomfortable in that it makes a space war movie feel somewhat utopian.

If that alone doesn’t float your boat, you also get some wonderful miniature work from Eiji Tsuburaya and company, an ever wonderful Ifukube score, goofy yet awesome science, and even a bit of the old “mind-controlled by the alien menace!” paranoia. Though most of the latter could have been avoided if the powers that be had put any effort at all into guarding their heroic astronauts from alien abduction. But what can you do?

Short Film Friday: Sound from the Deep

In short: Gundala (2019)

An orphan learns that he has divinely inspired superpowers. Combined with the martial arts skills taught him by an older orphan during his worst times, this makes him prime superhero material. Eventually, reluctantly, the grown-up version of our orphan turns into the masked hero Gundala (Abimana Aryasata) to fight off a demonically (well, the Indonesian equivalent of demons, really) inspired rich man (Bront Palarae) with a very complicated mad rich villain plan, and his small army of orphan assassins. There’s also a subplot about ancient evil that only makes partial sense to the uninitiated like me, but is most probably in here to prepare the future of this superhero universe, as is the short appearance of Sri Asih (Pevita Pearce), who has her own prequel film following this.

Directed by the great Joko Anwar, this is the first entry into a proposed big Indonesian comic book based superhero universe, the Bumilangit Cinematic Universe. Because very little of this stuff has made it into languages I can understand, I really can’t say how this connects/compares to the comics. I always find it fascinating how standard super hero tropes are treated through a slightly different cultural lens (see also the riches of Filipino superhero movies of decades past, or Japanese tokusatsu cinema), and it certainly makes a very nice change from the Marvel and DC styles, even if you don’t understand every cultural nuance. And you’ll hardly get this movie’s class war aspect from Hollywood.

Of course, there’s so much here that’s universal to the subgenre – heroes being heroic and all - the film is still easily understood and related to even for an audience outside of Indonesia.

Anwar is of course a fine director, and I appreciate the film’s complicated sort of leftist touches, but I do think Gundala does spend a little too much time on our hero’s horrible misadventures as an orphan. Some of it has a pay-off later on, but I do prefer my origin stories generally a bit shorter unless the length is absolutely necessary. The pace is in general a bit more leisurely than it needs to be.

That our main villain’s plan only makes very little logical sense is no problem whatsoever in the context of this kind of project, of course, and Anwar (who also scripted with Harya Suraminata) uses the dubious logic to set up some fine and fun set pieces for Gundala to fight his way through. The fight and action choreography is generally fine, not quite as inspired as in some modern Indonesian action movies, but individual enough to be fun and have heft when the plot actually needs it.

Which certainly makes for a promising start for this particular universe.

A Record of Sweet Murder (2014)

Original title: Aru yasashiki satsujinsha no kiroku

Journalist Soyeon (Kim Kkobbi) is suddenly contacted by her old childhood friend Sangjoon (Yeon Je-wook). They haven’t seen each other for twenty years, ever since Sangjoon had been hospitalized in a mental institution, following some accident the film will get into eventually when they both were seven years old.

Sangjoon is out now, escaped, and has supposedly committed eighteen murders; still Soyeon agrees to meet him at a place of his choosing only accompanied by a Japanese cameraman (Koji Shiraishi playing a cameraman named Tashiro, as is his wont). Sangjoon is very insistent on the Japanese cameraman, for reasons he will explain later. When they meet up in an old, run-down apartment, Sangjoon quickly starts ranting and raving and tells an odd story: he hasn’t “only” committed eighteen murders but actually twenty-five, with two additional murders to come. He’s not killing for no reason, or so he explains. Ever since the childhood accident that killed one of his and Soyeon’s friends, God has spoken to Sangjoon, eventually convincing him that he has to murder twenty-seven people after his twenty-seventh birthday to bring their friend back from the dead. Sangjoon’s victims will apparently come back to life as well, or so God says. In his mind, Sangjoon connects all of this to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which actually will make some kind of sense later on, in a wonderfully perverse way.

Soyeon doesn’t believe Sangjoon’s story at first, of course, but further developments suggest at the very least that either something very weird is going, or the laws of causality are so broken, unpredictable things will as a matter of course happen exactly like Sangjoon predicted.

When other directors sleep, Japanese master of the highly individual and weird POV horror movie Koji Shiraishi shoots another movie, TV show, or direct to whatever thing. This is a fine example of the man’s style, not as brilliant or complicated as Noroi or Occult but still following many of the director’s thematic obsessions. These films, together with the Senritsu Kaiki series, do seem to take place in the same universe, not just because Shiraishi tends to pop up as the actual DP as well as the guy playing the camera operator in many of them, but because their cosmological and thematic elements seem so closely related. Even the design of the godhood(s) having their fun with Sangjoon belongs into the same conceptual world as those in much of Shiraishi’s other works, and A Record’s climax (which I don’t want to spoil) is very much in keeping with the later episodes of Senritsu Kaiki. Just that here, developments feel rather more serious and focussed, where the series tends to the consciously silly and eccentric.

In fact, A Record of Sweet Murder is a rather tight movie, setting up a situation, dropping a handful of characters into one room, and then letting madness, tension, and camera waving escalate. I’m pretty sure if he wanted, Shiraishi could be a successful director of mainstream thrillers and horror movies, he just chooses to be eccentric and individual; at least he’s as tight and controlled here as anyone could wish from this kind of movie. For Shiraishi, this is one of the bloodier and more exploitative movies of his career, which only irregularly dips into the nasty stuff. But even here, the ending’s not going to satisfy the more gore-minded viewer because the film takes one of those wild swings its director/writer/etc likes so much and ends on a completely different note than you’d probably expect.

A note I might have found rather annoying myself if the film hadn’t actually subtly prepared it very well throughout, and if it weren’t executed as well as it is.

In short: Driver 23 (1999) & The Atlas Moth (2001)

Rolf Belgum’s verité style twin documentaries concern one Dan Cleveland, a metal guitarist and delivery driver who deeply believes he’s meant for greater things in life. Cleveland has troubles with mental illness and an obsessive personality, bad medication and general unhappiness, all of which he tries to get through with a mix of delusions of grandeur, intense determination, and a habit of inventing strange contraptions where others would take a walk to the next hardware store.

Both films follow their subject without much commentary, yet the first one, when seen alone, can leave one rather uncomfortable. At times, we get too good a look at parts of Dan’s personality strangers shouldn’t be or needn’t be prone to and there are a few moments when the documentary seems out to present him as an object of mockery more than one of sympathy. It’s not that I didn’t laugh, it’s that I really felt bad for laughing at a guy who clearly is subject to forces out of his control even more than most of us are, and whose main sin is that he’s difficult, weird and a dreamer.

The second documentary avoids this pitfall completely, following Dan through harder times but really very clearly wanting him to achieve some of his dreams. On the way there (spoiler, I guess, so sorry), we get more insight into Dan and his peers, and an honest look at that part of middle age where you look at your life and realize that none of your dreams and hopes have come to pass, and you have left other, more realistic chances, pass you by for these unfulfilled dreams.

Music Monday: On Being Edition

Marathon Man (1976)

Babe Levy (Dustin Hoffmann) is a New York student working on a thesis connected to the death of his father, who killed himself after being subjected to one of the McCarthy “hearings”, something Babe clearly can’t get away from, and so doesn’t try. Apart from his training up to run marathons, if you go for that kind of psychology; the film certainly does. Babe believes his brother Doc (Roy Scheider) is some high-level businessman working from Washington, but in truth, he is involved in the shadiest parts of espionage work, where it’s okay to keep mass murderers safe as long as they are convenient sources of information.

Said mass murderer is Nazi Szell (Laurence Olivier), and he’s grown rather paranoid in his old age. Believing Doc to be part of a conspiracy to steal his retirement nest egg of diamonds, the old man eventually kills him. Because Doc, despite all his faults certainly a loving brother in his way, stumbles into Babe’s apartment to bleed to death there, Szell assumes the younger Levy knows something about his most probably imagined conspiracy, so he begins to threaten and torture Babe.

Babe eventually escapes and turns rather more lucky at vengeance than Szell could have feared.

It is one of the fine ironies in John Schlesinger’s often brutal and really rather wonderful paranoid thriller Marathon Man that Szell is very much the architect of his final doom, driven by madness and an immense guilt this monstrous little man could only ever channel into anger and violence to create enemies and his own final catastrophe by his own blind brutality and cruelty. Laurence Olivier plays up the basic horribleness and horridness of the man wonderfully, grasps enough of the pathos of the character to make him interesting and complex, yet also keeps well away from making this murdering Nazi bastard “sympathetic”; as Olivier plays him, he’s small, cruel and painfully human in his quotidian monstrosity – there’s a controlled restraint in the actor’s approach that’s absolutely right for what is happening here.

Hoffman’s Babe is just as driven by the shadows of the past and guilt as Szell is, but where Szell is actually as guilty as a person can be, Babe’s guilt is based on a past history he had no hand in shaping and bears no responsibility for. In truth, Babe starts out as the innocent his name suggests (the script by William Goldman based on his own novel and apparently doctored by Robert Towne isn’t subtle about these things), and is dragged into growing out of assumed guilt into accruing some of his own through machinations he has little control over. I have seen Babe’s development read as the process of him growing up, but I’m not quite cynical enough to understand “learning that your loved ones are lying to you about the most crucial elements of their lives, and being involved in several violent killings” as growing up. I can’t imagine Babe after this as nothing but broken, dysfunctional and utterly alone, having shed the guilt for what his country did to his father only to have to replace it with one all of his own, however much the film tries to sell its ending as a happy one. To be fair, there’s also a second thematic strand about endurance (another reason for the marathon running) under horrible circumstances running through the film, but its darker thematic vein isn’t just richer, it is also much better embedded into the deeper strata of the film itself, at least to my eyes.

There’s a deep sense of urban paranoia running through much of the film; there isn’t only the heavy burden of hidden or at least unresolved history to carry, the characters also have to cope with a world where betrayal is a given as if it were a natural law. In the Paris and New York of this film, it’s a given that your partner and your lovers will betray you, that your brother’s friend is a rat, and so on. Though, in a curious sense of fairness, the worst of us, like Szell, can’t rest easy either.

On a cinematic level, this is a rather fantastic film. Schlesinger, whose body of work I generally find inconsistent but genuinely interesting, creates dark, grubby versions of New York and Paris that fit the grim and desperate tone of the film perfectly. Even by day, this particular version of the world is dominated by shadows and only the coldest of artificial light; everything is grubby, grimy, and used-up. Even the Paris Opera looks as if it had seen better days.

The suspense scenes follow classicist Hitchcockian forms, but Schlesinger often adds little notes of historical verisimilitude here Hitchcock would have avoided, probably very consciously keeping to the film’s main theme of the psychologically (possibly psychically) disfiguring burden of history and guilt. These scenes are often incredibly tight and tense, be it Szell torturing Babe dentally, Babe’s ensuing escape attempts and eventual escape, or the long, final sequence in which a panicked Nazi war criminal makes its way through a Jewish part of New York (at a time when you’d still meet quite a few survivors of the concentration camps there). The film’s actual finale isn’t much of one, in comparison, with a strong whiff of studio executives getting cold feet when confronted with the consequent grimness of Goldman’s initial ending. The rest of Marathon Man is so strong, the mildly botched ending isn’t much of a problem however.

Three Films Make A Post: He's a Modern Day Devil Hunter He's a Master of the Martial Arts He's… MR VAMPIRE!

Magic Cop aka 驅魔警察 (1990): In what is sometimes sold as a direct continuation of the Mr Vampire series, Lam Ching-Ying plays a policeman who does rather more Taoist movie monk work than policework. Here, he’s on the trail of a Japanese sorceress who uses the walking dead as drug mules, for reasons the film never gets into. The film isn’t quite as slapstick heavy as some of the Mr Vampire movies, but has a lot of fun milking the differences between Lam’s character and Wilson Lam Jun-Yin’s big city cop.

The black magic in this one is also seriously creative, with things I haven’t seen quite like it in other Hong Kong films featuring black magic; the climax does of course become, as is tradition, properly mind-blowing. Director Stephen Tung Wai – who did much more work as an actor – may not be one of the great horror comedy directors from Hong Kong, but he certainly knows how to make the most out of what martial artists and effects people offer him.

Time aka 殺出個黃昏 (2021): Staying in Hong Kong, though a couple of decades later, Ricky Ko’s film concerns the travails of three former triad badasses played by Patrick Tse Yin, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo and the great Lam Suet, who are now elderly, lonely and depressed, with nobody, a family that doesn’t love them and a prostitute being their only connections to life, respectively. Their ties as friends, and a very small-scale plot concerning a troubled girl who adopts Tse’s character as her grandfather do return hope and a bit of light into their life. In between, there’s seriously played semi-naturalistic drama, a bit of funny martial arts, and some ironic but always empathetic variations on classic gangster movie tropes.

It’s a lovely little film, clearly harbouring a lot of love for the actors, the archetypes they represent here and people who haven’t really had any luck in life.

The Ghost Station (2021): But let’s not end on a positive note today: on paper, this tale of a young, bottom feeding online reporter (Kim Bo-ra) stumbling upon a cursed subway station and accidentally unleashing a curse on rather a lot of people who’d never had encountered it without her, sounds like a nice enough bit of South Korean horror. Alas, director Jeong Yong-ki never manages to turn the film into anything but a series of disconnected scenes I’ve seen realized much more effectively in other movies, never building up the creepy and spooky mood that’s needed for his movie to work. He doesn’t even manage to turn the subway station into a proper liminal place, which is quite an achievement given that they are liminal by nature.

Actually making good use of the social commentary about a certain style of online media and responsibility inherent in the plot is of course just as beyond the film.