Three Films Make A Post: The Price Is Blood

Climax (2018): Leave it to very French director Gaspar Noé to make a film about a group of dancers getting dosed with LSD and going on a shared trip of dance, sex, violence and death that can feel excessive and abstract at the same time, breaking taboos without getting smug about it. Stylistically, it goes through the sort of intensities of colour, movement and behaviour a viewer will by now expect of the director – an audience not okay with strobe lights and a lot of shrieking need not apply – yet the film never feels to be the wrong kind of self-indulgent, Noé always getting to a point eventually even if his films seem to be meandering. Style in this director’s case is still an important part of the substance of his movies.

Under the Silver Lake (2018): This, the film writer/director David Robert Mitchell made after the brilliant It Follows, on the other hand is very self-indulgent indeed. It’s yet another one of those LA movies apparently made explicitly so that filmmakers existing in their LA bubble can wink and smile smugly at the other inhabitants of said bubble watching, full of in-jokes only the LA-obsessed will tolerate and apparently vacant of any wish to communicate with the rest of the world. Add to this general air of group masturbation a pie made out of badly digested Pynchon and Lynch, and you have a film I want to punch in the face rather badly, even though I’ve only got a tiny non-punching guy’s fist available, and am not into punching on general principle anyway.

There’s certainly a lot of technically excellent filmmaking on display here, but I’ll wait for that to be applied to something other than a bloated, 140 minute in-joke, thank you very much. Though, given how different this one is from Mitchell’s other two features, and those from one another, I might not have too long to wait; at least, one can’t blame the man for simply repeating himself.

Breaking Away (1979): Rather better at using an actual place – in this case the somewhat unglamorous and therefor infinite more interesting Bloomington, Indiana – to actually speak about something of interest to people not living there is this coming-of-age comedy by Peter Yates (also a man of very different films). It treats the feelings of young working class men of not belonging into the world of their parents but also being blocked from participating in the world the people born rich or richer seem to enjoy so much with delicacy, dignity, and a sense of whimsy, not going the poverty porn route of painting everyone and everything in the bleakest possible way yet also not looking away from shit.


Yates’s treatment of the material is so clear-eyed and even-handed, he even sells a climactic cycling event as meaningful and exciting to a guy like me who could care less about people riding bikes in circles (even though it’s a nice metaphor for the human condition). There’s also brilliant, idiosyncratic use of classical music in a context where most movies would go for Springsteen or would-be Springsteen, and great performances by Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, a tiny Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie and Paul Dooley.

The Lost Room (2006)

Police detective Joe Miller (Peter Krause) becomes involved with a very strange case of murder that sees the victims fused with their environment. The investigation leads him to a motel room key that is able to open every door, with said door then leading into a strange, very 60s motel room, and from there, through every door in existence. Miller soon learns this key is only one of a number of seemingly quotidian Objects (they really earn that capital letter), each of which carries its own, reality-bending power.

There’s a whole sub-culture surrounding these Objects, with a faction out to destroy them because they leave a trace of destruction and madness in their wake (mostly represented by a character played by Julianna Margulies), a cult that believes bringing all of the objects together will bring them into contact with the mind of God (that one wouldn’t be one I’d want to meet, personally), a millionaire (Kevin Pollak) trying to get certain objects together for a personal reason, as well as various criminals and sad and broken people fixating on the magical/cursed things. Miller has to get rather involved into these people’s business, and the mysteries of the Objects, for his little daughter Anna (Elle Fanning in her secret origin) disappears in the room; he’s also framed for murder.

This three part TV movie (that is actually structure like six regular episodes paired up) made for SyFy, written by Laura Harkcom, Christopher Leone and Paul Workman (a trio whose major achievement this has been until now) and directed by TV vets Craig R. Baxley and Michael Watkins, is a surprisingly wonderful little thing. Sure, its plotting, as well as the way our protagonist is written and motivated, is very much competent standard TV writing of the early Oughts, as is the direction, so in this regard, it doesn’t seem to be terribly special.

However, this relative blandness of some elements fits the series nicely, providing an effective contrast to the surprising number of Weird concepts it uses, and grounding the strangeness of the Objects and the Motel Room in the consensus reality of network-style television. And make no mistake: the show’s writer’s clearly understand they are telling the story of a rift (or rather, several little ones) in the world through which the numinous/terrible gets in, touching various people in ways only something truly outside of human comprehension and understanding can, and apply themselves accordingly. Which is a fine trick to pull off particularly since most of the Objects’ powers aren’t spectacular. The way their owners react to them sells the strangeness here more than anything, with most of them clearly at least slightly unstable, perhaps teetering on the edge of becoming unhinged completely, obsessing over the Objects – theirs and others. It’s particularly telling and effective how often the films have the Object owners saying these things are the only thing they have left, portraying them as unfit for the normal world once they have been touched by a different one. In a particularly clever move, the films never outright state or explain if the Objects seek out or draw people with bad lives and a tendency to obsess or if owning them and using them breaks people in ye olde cosmic horror style of corruption via insight into the true nature of the universe. Basically, it is never quite clear if it is the Objects or us that’s wrong.

In general, the films have a good idea of how much they can explain about the nature of the Room and the Objects without destroying the sense of true Weirdness, so we never learn what bit of the world broke and how it did, but we do learn where it is centred. The rest is a mystery, and it works better staying one.

The films have a lot of other cleverness in them too, as for example demonstrated in the imagination they show when it comes to the way Objects with minor powers might be used, or in a couple of really strange suspense scenes, like the one that is based on our hero’s ability to build a lock into a door faster than someone else can break through security glass and get to him.


The whole thing – Weird reality grounded in the quotidian, cabals that develop around the Weird, the pressures of unreality on human minds, the whole concept and execution suggesting the RPG “Unknown Armies” or mid-period Tim Powers – is pretty much catnip to me, turning a solidly made TV miniseries into something rather special.

In short: The Silencers (1996)

Or, PM Entertainment has watched the X-Files and liked it so much Richard Pepin is directing this one himself. So this time around, it’s an alien would-be invasion responsible for car chases, random and not so random explosions, shoot-outs and general carnage. Jack Scalia is a luckless secret service agent who teams up with the lusciously haired Pleiadian (so PM entertainment has also read some David Icke or stuff in that vein?) space agent played by a lusciously haired Dennis Christopher he was supposed to cart to vivisection to fight the clone army of Lekin (Carlos Lauchu), a part-time Man in Black with an unbecoming ponytail (one supposes his hair isn’t as great as that of Christopher) and a love for hats bigger than his head. Will our heroes and a couple of submachine gun toting UFO journalists stop Lekin before his army of about ten people can walk through a dimensional portal it took the US government fifty years to build for them?

I don’t know about you, but I always wanted a best of series of alien conspiracy theory bits in my cheap yet loud action movies, so this is a bit like a dream come true, at least as long as the buddy cop movie elements don’t interfere too much, which they really don’t for most of the film’s running time.

Plus, how often does one have the opportunity to watch Jack Scalia shout “Noooooooo!!!” while shooting a humungous handgun that makes one wonder about his character’s penis nearly as much as the one Charles Bronson lugs around in Death Wish 3, while later on the female UFO journalist included for the mandatory romance (Lucinda Weist) actually shows a photo of him making his “Nooooooo!!!” face to her editor - to introduce the concept of action movie Scalia, I suppose.

And you really can’t complain about the action either. It comes fast, it comes furious, and it’s obvious that Pepin takes his responsibility of showing his audience as many stunts, explosions, and crashes as possible on his budget very seriously indeed, a dedication to the truly important things in filmmaking I wish more of today’s direct-to-video action directors would show.