In short: Hellbenders (2012)

The Augustine Interfaith Order of Hellbound Saints is the final option in exorcism. When nothing else helps, these holy men and one woman (embodied by the wonderful acting ensemble of Clifton Collins Jr., Clancy Brown, Andre Royo, Robyn Rikoon, Macon Blair and Dan Fogler) are prepared to invite a demon into their souls, commit suicide and drag it with them to hell. Of course, to actually be able to drag anyone to hell, you need to be hell-bound, so when the Hellbound Saints aren’t exorcising, they are sinning left and right (and clearly also in even more sinful directions). Name a debauchery, and they’ve done it.

Right now, the Hellbound Saints are the only thing standing between old Norse god eater Surtr who is bound to burn the world to cinders and destroy humanity and their god(s) in the process. Not surprisingly, things get rather messy, particular when Opus Dei (boo!) decides to shut the embarrassing group of debauchers down.

Despite my admiration for J.T. Petty’s small but excellent body of work, I wasn’t too sure about Hellbenders going in. It was not just my usual doubt about horror comedy as a genre (and the humungous number of horror comedies that just plain suck), but a fear that the film would just blow up a single one-note joke at too much length.

I shouldn’t have doubted Petty (not sure about Jesus), though, for Hellbenders not just uses this one joke as a basis for a dozen other jokes, much funny cursing (talk dirty to us, Clancy Brown!), and other shenanigans but also treats it as the basis for some clever as well as funny worldbuilding. It’s the sort of film that takes a ridiculous idea and then begins to actually think it through, heaping excellent absurdity on excellent absurdity to make sense of the last absurdity until the combined absurdities become somewhat logical; also, very funny.

Hellbenders does not really lend itself to any kind of tight plotting, so its rhythm is more like the exhausted (professional sinning is tiring) stumbling gait its protagonists prefer, the plot meandering through outbreaks of violence, blasphemy, and swearing. I didn’t mind, though, because said outbreaks are generally very funny, and funny, people tell me, is what comedies are supposed to be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,comedy,j.t. petty,clifton collins jr.,clancy brown,andre royo,robyn rikoon

Three Films Make A Post: Puts terror into a new dimension!

Evidence (2011): This just might be the shakiest of all POV/found footage movies - at least, it's the first one I've encountered that actually caused me motion sickness. Horror movie fans love to praise movies as "visceral", but I don't think it's really this sort of physical reaction we're hoping for from our films.

Evidence seems to be out to try to break records in other respects too: the characters are especially annoying, the non-stop bickering starts especially early, the part of the the film that consists of running and shouting and shaking the camera even more wildly (plus added shaky editing) is especially long. The film's actual claim to fame will probably be that it seems to have some rather decent monster suits and make-up, and that it's making an unexpected sub-genre change about two thirds in. Alas, the former are buried under a whole lotta shakin' going on, the latter would only be effective in a movie tightly enough scripted not everything that happens feels just random (there is, it turns out, a point to Blair Witch Project actually telling us the legends about the witch before stuff begins to happen).

It's clearly not worth the motion sickness.

Murder By Decree (1979): I know, this is the one of the two Holmes versus Jack the Ripper movies one is supposed to prefer, but I've never had much time for it. There's a stuffy worthiness and self-importance surrounding the proceedings that rubs badly against the silly conspiracy theory at the core of its plot, with worthily acting high class actors very slowly walking through worthily reproduced Victorian London while - worthily - things happen in excruciatingly low speed, a bit like I imagine the morning jog of Mycroft Holmes would go.

For me, the whole worthy, ponderous affair has the whiff of a TV movie that has stumbled onto a budget and into over-length and now doesn't really know what to do with them, except making gestures that try to affirm its own importance. Frankly, it's just boring, and feels dead compared to the charms of a film like A Study in Terror.

Blood Red Earth (2009): This short companion piece to J.T. Petty's fantastic The Burrowers leaves me in a much less foul mood than the much worthier Sherlock Holmes film. It concerns the run-in of a small group of Native Americans with the creatures from the film, and doesn't really broaden or explain the main film's mythology much. It's just a short, fragmentary companion that suggests where a sequel to the film might have gone (not that I think The Burrowers needs one), and doesn't really try to add anything. Still, after the shaky cam overkill of Evidence and the bloated monstrosity that is Murder by Decree, this kind of story vignette is actually refreshing, if not particularly exciting.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,canadian movies,american movies,in short,horror,mystery,bob clark,christopher plummer,j.t. petty

Mimic: Sentinel (2003)

Marvin Monrose (Karl Geary) lives together with his mother (Amanda Plummer) and his teenage sister Rosy (Alexis Dziena) in an apartment in a very run-down part of a larger North American city. Marvin is one of the original Sticklers' disease kids, whose illness was indirectly responsible for the creation of the ill-mannered killer insects known as the Judas Breed from the first two Mimic movies.

Marvin - by now in his twenties - doesn't suffer from the illness anymore, but has acquired a hyper-sensitivity to diverse parts of his environment that mostly seems to be a a symptom of social phobias. He spends most of his time in his room, watching the apartment building across the street from his home through a photo camera (non-digital, man!) and spying on his neighbours in a harmless yet slightly creepy manner.

Strange things are beginning to happen in the neighbourhood: Marvin witnesses the disappearance of a child, but isn't too sure what exactly it is he's seeing, a new arrival in the neighbourhood with special interest in trashcans whom Marvin christens the Garbageman (Lance Henriksen) and who might or might not have anything to do with the kid's disappearance acts suspiciously, and Carmen (Rebecca Mader) a young woman Marvin shows special interest in doesn't act creeped out when Rosy introduces her to her brother and his wall of peeping tom photos.

One night, Marvin and Rosy witness how something or someone kills Rosy's dealer and friend Desmond (Keith Robinson), yet don't manage to make photos of what happened. They call the police, but nobody believes them. It's not that much of a surprise, given that Marvin is a bit obsessed with the Judas Breed and has a history of seeing the nasty bugs everywhere they aren't and calling the cops on them.

The investigating detective (John Kapelos) shows much more interest in getting into Mrs. Monrose's panties than in her children's stories, so Rosy and Carmen decide to take a look at the Garbageman's apartment while Marvin is supposed to watch out for them, not caring that Marvin has actually seen Rear Window and therefore does not have a good feeling about the whole affair.

So, another shot-in-Romania sequel to a horror movie series that never was all that impressive to begin with for the DVD market? Does not sound enticing, right? Fortunately Sentinel wasn't directed by one of the more typical talentless and careless hacks who usually make this sort of film, but by the impressively talented J.T. Petty, whose first non-independent film this is. Petty seems pretty much incapable of making a bad movie, and while this probably isn't the sort of movie that will make any lists of the "best horror movies of the noughties", it's a clever and solid little movie.

One early obvious difference between this and other US movies shot in Romania is that all main characters who are supposed to be Americans are actually played by American actors and not Eastern Europeans stumbling their way through the English dialogue with heavy accents and straining even my ability to keep up my belief in a film taking place in the US. While I'm all for giving us Europeans acting jobs in American films, I'm also all for giving roles to fitting actors and not some guy who was accidentally hit in the head by a film's script when the director was trying to hit the trash can.

Obviously, the presence or lack of a presence of actors with Romanian accents isn't something that makes or breaks a film, I do however think that it hints at a director willing to put a bit more care into aspects of his film many people working in the direct to DVD part of the film business just don't give a shit about - namely, actually making a movie an audience can watch without feeling offended by its lack of entertainment value.

While at least one half of the philosophy of making cheap genre movies has always been to get it done as cheap and fast as possible, and directors had to work correspondingly, some of those directors were also diligent craftsmen trying to make their films as good as possible under the constraints of budget and time given to them.

Petty's film stands very much in the tradition of the work of those directors making an effort to please their audiences.

Petty uses the art of reduction, of showing his audience as little as he can afford budget-wise, but he is also putting a lot of effort into connecting the reduction with the plot and themes of the film. The audience mostly shares the claustrophobic and restricted view of the world Marvin has. There's his room, his mother's apartment, the windows of the neighbouring house and the street, and that's all anyone ever sees of the movie's world. Now, there are a few scenes in which we see more of the outside world than Marvin does, but even these moments keep to the film's feeling of claustrophobia. All attacks of the Judas Breed take place in confined spaces - even the street between the two buildings has the feel of such a space - with characters (in classic horror film tradition) usually trying to escape from their attackers into even more confined spaces. Petty milks this feeling of claustrophobia for all its worth, connecting it to undertones of urban decay and the loneliness of his protagonist, not with large gestures that try to make a high-minded "point about the world we live in" that would easily drag the film in the direction of the ridiculous, but with a genre movie humility that wants to make a tight movie more than it wants to make a point.

It's this unpretentiousness I like most about the film, the knowledge of how, what (and how much) can be done with the "Rear Window meets killer bugs on a budget" set-up and the knowledge what can't be done with it.

As someone with experience with social phobias myself, I also liked that Marvin's character arc doesn't end in the expected way - with him "getting over" his mental problems as if they were a cold and saving the day - but with him surviving by following his instincts of crawling into a dark and tight space. Instead of showing that now everything's "alright" with Marvin, the film leaves the viewer with the hope that the young man will have a somewhat easier time connecting to other people in the future, eschewing the usual movie pretence that problems like his can be solved with finality through fifteen minutes of being a manly man.

This thoughtfulness about the less clear-cut aspects of life can also be found in other parts of the film's character work, be it in the non-judgmental way the film treats Rosy's drug problem or how John Kapelos' cop character - while not exactly a hero -  isn't the sort of stupid bastard one would expect him to be in a movie like this.

Tightness and cleverness in details and giant bugs - what more can one ask of a film?

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,j.t. petty,lance henriksen,horror,karl geary,alexis dziena,amanda plummer

Three Films Make A Post: Chained For 100 Years In A Sunken Tomb!

Highwaymen (2004): Director Robert Harmon attempts to re-capture the magic of his The Hitcher in this film about an obsessed man (Jim "Boring" Caviezel) combating the car-based serial killer (Colm Feore) who killed his wife, on the way rescuing Rhona Mitra who isn't allowed to do much of interest.

Alas, Harmon is not all that successful. He certainly knows how to make a conventionally exciting thriller, but it is exactly his keeping too close to formal and structural conventions of the serial killer thriller that gets in the way of the film's more interesting aspects, like the way the traumata and obsessions of the three main characters mirror each other and the nearly there commentary on cars/technology as extensions of the human body.

It's certainly a competent thriller, though.

 

S&Man (2006): J.T. Petty (who I think is one of the most interesting horror directors with a career starting this century) explores the nature of reality and film (or reality on film), and the reasons we watch horrible things happen to fictional characters by way of a half fake documentary that consists half of Carol J. Clover being clever and uncomfortable and various "extreme underground horror" (aka fake snuff) people doing their respective shticks and Petty's meetings with a director whose fake snuff very possibly isn't fake. It is an at times uncomfortable experience - which comes with the thematic territory - containing thoughts that might be autobiographical regarding Petty's own obsessions, but might also very well be not. There's something deeply confusing (in a good, interesting way) about a film interested in the nature of reality that is asking its questions by making things up.

 

Kereta Setan Manggarai (2009): A group of random Indonesian teens is trapped in a ghost train. Lots of screaming and running around ensues. This one definitely does not belong to the higher echelons of quality of the mad Indonesian horror boom. It's not the worst film of its kind I have seen, though, because it thankfully lacks the copious amounts of "comedy" that mar some of its peers. Instead of comedy, it's all running around screaming all the time, which could certainly be annoying enough for anyone with a proper sense of taste. Personally, I didn't mind the film one way or the other.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,indonesian movies,horror,thriller,in short,robert harmon,j.t. petty,rhona mitra

Soft For Digging (2001)

Virgil Manoven (Edmond Mercier), a lonely old man, lives in a hut in the woods, a cat his only company.

One morning when Virgil goes out to fetch his newspaper from the side of the road, the cat takes off into the woods. So Virgil goes after her, dressed only in his white underwear and red bathing robe. Instead of finding the cat, he stumbles upon the sight of a young man (Andrew Hewitt) strangling a child (Sarah Ingerson) to death. Panicked, Virgil flees from the place of the murder. The killer doesn't seem to follow him, but when Virgil calls the police, the ensuing search doesn't bring up any physical trace of anything having truly happened.

A few days later, when Virgil is again stumbling through the woods in his bathing robe in search of his still lost cat, he finds the little girl's grave. However, unlike most corpses, this one moves. That alone would probably be enough to cause a grown man to run, but then the girl's ghost appears, asks Virgil for help and tries to climb on his back. That really is too much for the old man, so he flees home and calls the police again.

Yet again, when the cops dig at the place Virgil leads them to, they find nothing. Obviously, they now have him pinned as a senile old crank. It wouldn't help his case if Virgil told them the truth about the ghost, or the fact that Claire, as the dead little girl is called, now talks to him through his dreams. If Virgil wants to help the ghost find peace, he'll have to do it himself, something not easy for someone who doesn't venture outside of his cave and the surrounding area anymore.

In the end, the dreams and chance lead Virgil to the truth and in terrible danger.

Soft for Digging is exactly the sort of movie that will stick in a lot of people's craw like a bone, but that is quite good if the viewer just accepts the way it goes about telling its story.

It is a very slow film (as is Virgil's life), in which nothing much happens (as in Virgil's life), and when something does happen, it is not always completely clear what it means (as is the case with Virgil's life). As should be clear by now, director J.T. Petty (who would go on to make the wonderful The Burrowers) uses everything in the powers of his meagre budget and his considerable talent to put the viewer into the shoes of his protagonist. Everything in the film seems to be designed to achieve this goal - Virgil never speaks to anyone, so we hear next to no human voice, only the sounds of the woods, Virgil never goes outside of his comfort zone, so we don't go outside of it either. Of course, there's still a difference between the audience and the protagonist in that the typical viewer will be more conscious of the barrenness of Virgil's life and of the absurdity of someone treating a patch of woods as his front-yard.

A crueller film would probably make Virgil a figure of ridicule. Soft for Digging isn't above showing the funny side of the sad state of Virgil's life (and Mercier's performance makes it clear that his character does see that side too from time to time), but it is not satisfied with treating a sad and lonely old man as someone to gawk at. While the film (or rather the world it takes place in) is cruel to him in different ways, it is designed to let the viewer feel the character's pain. There's a terrible irony in the way Virgil's final, quite heroic for a shut-in like him, acts in the film, his venture outside of the secure shell that is his lonely life, might not be ending his existence completely, but will only make the rest of his days more unhappy. It is not necessarily a nice thought, but something that more often than not happens to people as closed off from other people as Virgil here is. It could all just be an exercise in cynicism, but as it is in the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, whose style of chapter titles seems to have influenced the intertitles Petty uses, it's the cynicism of someone with too big a sense of empathy for his own comfort.

Apart from Bierce, Petty's debut reminds me of the individuality of the left-field filmmaking I always go on about excitedly, or the classic punk rock ethos. There's something uncompromising about Soft for Digging, a quality you need if you make a film people will feel uncomfortable with, be it because of its themes (old people, murdered little girls) or because you dare to be slow and possibly boring.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,j.t. petty,horror,reviews,edmond mercier

The Burrowers (2008)

The American frontier, 1861. Two families are attacked, some of them killed, the women kidnapped. Everyone is sure that the deed was done by a group of Sioux from the reservation close by, because killing farmers and kidnapping women as their future wives is what Indians do, right. There's just the small matter of details like the strange, round holes in the vicinity of the farm and the even stranger wounds that killed the farmers - single cuts in their necks - to ignore. A posse consisting of a cavalry troop under the command of a certain Henry Victor (Doug Hutchison) and a few interested private citizens, the experienced John Clay (Clancy Brown) and Will Parcher (William Mapother), as well as Coffey (Karl Geary) who was just about to propose to one of the missing women and Dobie (Galen Hutchinson), the teenage son of the woman Parcher is trying to woo.
The soldiers abduct the first Indian they see and start with the torturing at once. Of course, the poor guy doesn't know much, and without the torturing, he would probably have told them what he knew. The civilians are less than impressed by the way Victor handles the situation, or by the fact that he's obviously a sadistic maniac with a very short fuse. It's not that these aren't violent and hard people, they just don't get off on senseless cruelty like Victor and his men do.
The only thing their captive can tell them is that they are looking for "the burrowers", plainly no Indian tribe anyone has ever heard of. That's no reason for Victor not to want to ride further into the Indian reservation to finally get himself some killing done again. The civilians remain skeptical, even more so after four of Victor's men just disappear while they are on guard duty. For Victor, it's a clear case of desertion. Parcher, Clay and the others don't even bother to tell him of the holes that have appeared around the camp anymore.
Instead, they split from the soldiers and let them go about their business of genocide, while they go and try to find out where following the strange holes will lead them.
Soon after Victor's black cook Callaghan (Sean Patrick Thomas), glad to find a reason to get away from a racist madman like his former boss, has joined them (and no, he's not going to sacrifice his life bravely so that our white heroes can go on), they make a terrible discovery. A girl, paralyzed, conscious and buried alive, bearing the same wound as the dead back home. The man slowly begin to understand that they are not hunting anything human at all.
The Burrowers is a very fine movie, the kind of film that does nearly everything right, marrying the revisionist Western and the horror film so deftly as to make it look easy.
Usually, I try to avoid using words like "gritty", but for once it is the right way to describe a film. From the start, the film strives for the dusty and muddy naturalism, showing the West not necessarily as it was, but very much in a way it really could have been, with all the cruelty and racism this implies. Yet director and writer J.T. Petty mostly (Henry Victor is the exception, and very much the sort of exception you make when you want to make a political point) eschews demonizing his characters as much as glorifying them. Clay and Parcher, for example, are hard men, willing to do most anything to survive, but they aren't cruel, or more violent than is necessary for them. Petty also gets some excellent performances from his actors, some of whom obviously relish the chance to do some real acting this time.
I find it remarkable how well the film fits the basic horror of life on the frontier, where the slightest misunderstanding can lead to the death of someone who just doesn't deserve it, to the even greater horror of the burrowers. As a revisionist Western, it talks openly about the terrors people inflict upon themselves and so needs monsters that are even worse, and made even worse by the way people relate to them.
Besides this, the film is also one of the coolest monster flicks of recent years, utilizing a surprisingly effective mixture of CGI and physical effects. At first, we only get enticing glimpses of the burrowers, which escalate into moments of greater violence and greater visibility, slowly building up to a very grotesque finale.
Speaking of finale, it's been a long time since I have seen a film with an ending that has such a tone of cruel absurdity, which is perfectly fitting for this story.
The Burrowers is a beautiful example of the sort of film I wish more American horror directors would start to make again. A film with adults, about adults, interested in something besides gore without ignoring it completely, intelligent and thoughtful enough without trying to hit the viewer over the head with its own cleverness, very nicely photographed, edited with a sense of craft, but still very much a film inside the genre. Just not one willing to ignore the interesting things one can do within a genre; or, as is the case here, by letting two genres collide.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,horror,western,j.t. petty