In short: I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016)

On first look, John Wayne Cleaver (Max Records) is your typical teenage outsider in your typical US small town – socially awkward, with only one actual friend, and rather more interested in weird stuff than his peers. “Weird stuff” in John’s case being serial killers and death.

Unlike most teenage outsiders, though, John is a diagnosed sociopath who has set himself a whole load of rules he follows to be “normal”, and not go around murdering people. Although as the film – and Records – plays him, I’m not sure his therapist isn’t misdiagnosing heavy social anxieties and depression.

Be that as it may, John’s home town is struck by a series of murders, with the victims brutally ripped apart and missing one body part or organ a piece. Looks as if the place has its own serial killer now. John soon finds out the killer is his elderly, friendly neighbour Mister Crowley (Christopher Lloyd). Turns out the man’s not exactly human. Knowing this and doing something about it will turn out to be rather different things for John.

Unfortunately, the film never really explains why a guy who supposedly has no empathy at all for other human beings would feels the need to do something about Crowley at all, giving us a sociopathic central character whose difference Billy O’Brien’s film never really makes enough use of. In fact, the film seems to shy away from ever facing what it says doesn’t go on in its main character full on, and without the therapist character telling us repeatedly, John wouldn’t actually read as a sociopath. This does of course weaken all of the film’s attempts at contrasting Mister Crowley, who does his deeds to a degree out of love, with John who doesn’t do bad things because it says so in the script, and leaves us with a rather more well-worn story of a small town kid discovering his neighbour is a monster.

I really think the film – I don’t know about the novel by Dan Wells this is based on – misses interesting possibilities there. In general, the film’s approach to everything seems a bit too low key to me, be it Crowley’s true nature, John’s interior life, or dramatic tension.

I Am Not a Serial Killer isn’t exactly boring, mind you, it feels more like an attempt at making a horror movie which follows the outside markers of indie dramas about teenagers and forgets about the bit where it needs to actually build tension. Instead it would rather introduce a bunch of characters who won’t have any import on the plot or its characters (for example, why is the girl who has a crush on John even in the movie?).

The film’s approach just seems a bit too harmless for the sort of thing it is supposed to be about, never actually willing to face the abyss and the things this abyss suggests about people head-on. Instead the film dithers on a perfectly competent level without ever committing to anything terribly interesting.

The Hybrid (2014)

aka Scintilla

A mysterious corporation buys mercenary boss Powell (John Lynch) out of a rather nasty African prison. They have a mission for him and his former team (among its members are Ned Dennehy and Antonia Thomas): escort scientist Healy (Morjana Alaoui) to a secret research facility in a civil war-torn former Soviet state to retrieve research material and specimens. To make things a bit more interesting, a warlord and his army are sitting right above the underground complex, so the merry band will really have to come up with a plan, unless they wish to take on a force quite superior in numbers.

But even when and if our heroes will make it to the lab, the things awaiting them there just might be even worse than the bunch of crazy, heavily armed guys with a mean disposition they just avoided, for the science that has been going on down there is clearly of the mad persuasion, and the “specimens” they are to collect are that old mainstay of unsafe scientific practices, alien/human hybrids. So whatever could go wrong, right?

Despite having seen most of the bits and pieces the film is assembled from in other movies, I rather liked Billy O’Brien’s (of the fine Isolation and the decidedly less fine Ferocious Planet) horror/sf/merc movie Hybrid (see what I did there?).

This is one of those low budget movies that make a lot out of a handful of locations and a tight special effects budget, so much so that I hardly noticed this is basically another “running through corridors and some industrial ruins” movie – just with a bit of sunlight in the first act and the last few minutes – for O’Brien really puts the extra effort into decorating the place simply and effectively, making particularly good use of bright colours and bits of decaying Soviet chic that turn a cheap location and sets into places with a mood. More often than not, it’s even a consistently creepy mood.

The production is quite evocative as a whole, with many a clever little bit of production design or an acting decision turning the trite creepy or at least interesting: just look at the unnerving helmet shapes of the mad scientists’ protectors, and how they prefigure the really rather creepy eyes of our alien hybrids, the not-quite-there body language of the hybrids that again gives an effective impression of strangeness through simple means. These, by the way, are generally exactly the things the films I scorn as “boringly competent” never get right, whereas a film like Hybrid adds these small yet important bits and pieces to its generally competent air and acquires a personality and a mood through them, becoming a film very much worth watching in the process.

The actors are game, too – and are a well cast bunch of character actors to boot – which just might have something to do with the fact that most of their characters’ behaviours and motivations – though not too complex - actually make sense, and there’s no truly embarrassing dialogue to utter either; while not too complex, characters and plot never become too simple either.

All this might once again sound like I’m damning another film with faint praise. However, The Hybrid is a really fine example of the kind of low budget genre film that knows exactly what it and its audience want, what it can afford, and how to make something from there that’s engaging and very actively not stupid (except for the science, but you gotta give a film that, or you’ll end up as one of those people complaining for half an hour about “what film X got wrong about science” never realizing it’s not actually a film about science, or a documentary, or what it gets right about anything else). To my eyes, that’s quite an achievement.

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In short: Isolation (2005)

Dan (John Lynch), the owner of a run-down little farm somewhere at the ass-end of Ireland, has leased parts of his livestock to a scientist (Marcel Iures) for quite illegal genetic growth experiments.

Something like this is never a good idea, and when one of the experimental cows gives birth to a very, very hungry calf, things start to go very, very wrong. Dan, the scientist and two young people (Sean Harris & Ruth Negga) who had the misfortune of passing through, have to cope with a few problems, like flesheating cow embryos and a rather nasty kind of infection that does make it imprudent to leave the farm too soon.

Isolation is a much better film than its plot would let you think. What sounds like a very bad Troma comedy (and really, are there even watchable Troma comedies?), plays out as a dense and claustrophobic thriller with some nice and effective nods in the direction of body horror and the first Alien movie, all achieved without looking too derivative.

The trick here lies in the excellent execution. Director Billy O'Brien shot the film in the naturalistic, matter-of-fact style one knows from worthy UK social dramas like the films of Ken Loach, leaving everything as low-key as possible and mostly replacing the expected fountains of gore with the insinuation of gore and other oh-so-disgusting things of the sort that are always much harder to cope with when one is just imagining them. That tactic works out nicely. I for one couldn't escape a very unpleasant feeling of claustrophobia - and that's no small feat, seeing how seldom films get to me this way.

I'd be interested to hear what someone who is more of a country person has to say about the film, because I can't shake the feeling that a part of the movie's effect on me had to do with its grimy country setting (leading to thoughts like "Ew, why is she sticking her arm into that cow ass? Is that normal?" or "Look at all that mud!") which would have been unpleasant enough without any monsters.

This is highly recommended to people who have the stomach for it.

 

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