Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

A group of young Austin hipsters have great plans to commit their own version of gentrification on the near ghost town of Harrow in Texas (as we are going to call Bulgaria this week). It’s all the plan of chefs Dante (Jacob Latimore) and Melody (Sarah Yarkin), so they, Dante’s girlfriend – let’s call her Dies-too-early-for-me-to-remember-her-name – and Melody’s sister Lila (Elsie Fisher) are something of the vanguard of the project. They are visiting the town they bought apparently without ever having gone there just hours before a busload of investors is supposed to arrive. As the traumatized survivor of a school shooting, Lila has all the makings of a final girl, of course, for trauma has replaced virginity in contemporary slashers as the Sign of the Final Girl™.

Which will turn out to be useful, for a series of unfortunate events reactivates good old Leatherface (Mark Burnham), who had been living here peacefully with his mother (Alice Krige). And the years clearly have turned the guy into more of a traditional slasher, so Austin hipsters beware.

The filmmakers responsible for TCM ‘22 could have spared themselves a whole load of vitriolic criticism if only they had changed some names, filed off some elements of the script, and called this an homage to “films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. Given that the film at hand has very little to do with text, subtext, context, style or mood of the original movie, and is rather shit seen as the direct sequel it purports to be, it really wouldn’t have lost out on anything but a marketable name. Without the TCM millstone round its back this could have happily survived as a fun, dumb, gory and pretty silly throwback slasher that superficially tacks on some modern social concerns.

It still is that, mind you, it’s just that much more difficult for many a horror fan to overlook what it purports to be, but is much too dumb to actually manage to be. Fortunately, while I believe the original TCM to be one of the greatest horror movies ever made, I have zero interest in TCM as a franchise, so it is surprisingly easy for me to treat this as the movie it actually is and just ignore the stuff that should never have been in there in the first place.

Seen as a series of dumb, bloody, and fun set pieces following established slasher formula - with some awkward borrowing from the first neo-Halloween thrown in because being derivative seems to be a bit of a way of life for this one – David Blue Garcia’s film is actually a success. There is many a fun and highly unlikely chainsaw kill, including what is certainly the best bus chainsaw massacre ever put to film (seriously, the scene is pretty incredible), excellent suspense sequences, and character writing so bad (screenplay credit goes to Chris Thomas Devlin) it does tend to be rather funny, particularly with a – perfectly decent - cast who treat this nonsense as earnestly as possible. It is all shot and edited with improbable gloss and care, suggesting Garcia could direct the hell out of a proper script, but is perfectly willing and able to put effort into whatever this thing he’s been hired for is supposed to be.

As something of a bonus, there are also quite a few moody scenes of characters wandering through the very atmospheric empty town lot, which is the sort of thing that’ll always delight me to no end in a horror movie; particularly since it means we don’t have to suffer through another warehouse and corridor walker.

In short: Ghost Story (1981)

Every couple of years, I’ve forgotten enough about John Irvin’s all too free adaptation of Peter Straub’s fantastic eponymous novel to try and change my mind about the film.

Alas, once I start watching, I remember again why I’ll never be able to call this one worth rediscovering, a hidden gem, or anything else positive. The problem really isn’t me here, it is that the film’s just a mess. In part, that’s the fault of a lot of heavy-handed studio intervention that tried to pull the film away from subtlety to more obvious shock effects, as if all that a film needs to be visceral are some often very awkwardly added in shots of a bad looking corpse make-up job. Director John Irvin has quite a bit to answer for, too. The glacial pace in which the film develops through pointless scene and pointless scene of little specific happening is all on him and scriptwriter Lawrence D. Cohen, as are the bizarre tonal shifts between the film’s main timeline and the long, long, way too long flashbacks.

That the film needs to cut back considerable parts of Straub’s novel to fit into anything but a modern mini series runtime (this one could really make a great contemporary streaming series) is obvious. It just seems to wilfully cut out the most important parts of the book, while keeping elements in that do not make sense anymore without what’s been lost. The completely rewritten elements of the film – particular the nature of its big bad - go out of their way to weaken one of the book’s main themes - the destructive force of male fear of women. That the originals many-coloured play with the traditions of the written (or really, told) supernatural tale have gone the way of the dodo is no surprise, but it makes it hard to see the point of the old men telling each other ghost stories at all.

But then, this is a film that makes a big thing out of featuring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and John Houseman in the leads and does sod all with them, focussing on their flashback selves (played by nobody you need to remember), and on Craig Wasson, who, I’m sad to point out, could not act his way out of a wet paper bag, and is actively, wilfully bad here. Alice Krige as our villainess is great, mixing cold anger and strange sensuality perfectly, but again, the film never seems to understand the performance Krige gives (or even what the point of her character is) and simply wastes it on nothing of consequence.

All of this is little improved by Irvin’s failings as a horror director: slow burn horror, shock horror, American Gothic mood, mild (and therefore heavily toned down from the novel) surrealist horror – there’s no mode of the genre you’ll see any ability for here.

In short: Page Eight (2011)

MI5 analyst Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) is among the last of a dying breed. Despite certainly being the public school bred upperclass type you'd expect in his position and age group, he's also not really part of any old boy's network. Johnny has too large of a moral streak for that, and still lives by the conviction that the ultimate goal of intelligence work is finding the truth, something that doesn't make him too popular among his more modern colleagues.

One would expect a man like that to have grown quite cynical over the years, but what the life of a spy has made Johnny, is lonely. Four ex-wives - one of whom (Alice Krige) is now married to his best friend and boss Benedict Baron (Michael Baron) - and an alienated daughter (Felicity Jones) are a pretty good demonstration of the spy's difficulties in opening up emotionally.

Johnny's life gets more exciting again when his decidedly younger neighbour Nancy Pierpan (Rachel Weisz) begins to show an interest in him. Not surprisingly, Johnny's a bit sceptical about Nancy; he does know a lot about ulterior motives, after all.

That feeling of something not being  quite alright around Johnny is not exactly decreasing when Benedict dies of a heart attack shortly after he revealed a file containing proof of the Prime Minister's (Ralph Fiennes) undisclosed knowledge about US torture camps to the Home Secretary (Saskia Reeves).

As if Ben's death weren't bad enough, someone in MI5 seems to want to use the opportunity to get rid of a fossil like Johnny. The spy is convinced that his dead friend wanted him to do the right thing with the information about the PM, but finding out what "the right thing" actually entails and surviving the politics surrounding it is quite a different thing. Ironically, Johnny might even need to begin to trust people again to survive.

If you've seen Red, you know that a (kinda-sorta) spy movie about an aging intelligence officer can be generic action crap like any other blockbuster. If you watch David Hare's BBC production Page Eight, you'll realize that a semi-realist spy movie about an aging intelligence officer can also still be thoughtful, quietly funny, and working inside the borders of its genre without wallowing in the obvious.

Hare - who also directed - is responsible for a tight script that prefers to be sly and seemingly unassuming, even though it is thematically quite rich. It's probably as good a film about an aging spy as I've seen, using the spy genre tropes of a man alienated from his surroundings and emotionally distant (though Johnny is neither in a spectacular way - this is not the sort of film that tries to lay anything on thick), to explore how growing old and lonely might feel to someone who is too intelligent not to know that he's wasted many of his chances and new ones might not come along anymore.

At the same time, neither its main character nor Page Eight are as dark or bitter as they could be: although it shows a lot of scorn for people playing politics and the hypocrisy of that particular game, there's also an honest strain of hope running through it that avoids kitsch and too easy ways out as much as it avoids cheap cynicism.

As a director, Hare is never flashy, but is pretty good at just stepping back and letting his script and his actors carry the weight of the story and the characters; that's what the film's brilliant cast, lead by an especially brilliant Nighy, is there for after all.

 

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