In short: Road Games (2015)

Somewhere in rural France - the huge empty part films have taught me is nearly unpopulated except by cannibals, serial killers and immortal Nazis. After helping fellow hitch-hiker Véronique (Joséphine de la Baume) out of a spot of bother with a driver, brit Jack (Andrew Simpson) teams up with her. Despite a certain language barrier, there’s romance in the air: Jack running away from some sort of affair gone wrong and Véronique being rather French.

Things take a turn for the sinister when they are picked up by one Grizard (Frédéric Pierrot). At first, Grizard is perfectly pleasant – if a bit too happy picking up road kill and depositing it in his trunk for Jack’s (and my) taste – but Véronique doesn’t have a terribly good feeling about him. Nonetheless, they agree when Grizard invites them to spend the night in his and his wife Mary’s (Barbara Crampton) home. There’s a serial killer roaming the roads of this part of the country, so staying outside just isn’t safe, or so Grizard says. So perhaps, agreeing to the invitation was a better idea than horror movie lore suggests…Of course, the younger couple may harbour a secret or two themselves.

I was very pleasantly surprised by Abner Pastoll’s fine thriller. It’s the kind of film that does very little I’d strictly call new but it uses the old quite a bit better than many films tending the same plot(s). Why, this is a plot-twist heavy thriller where I even found myself enjoying the plot twists! It helps that these twists generally make sense, and don’t go out of their way to make the things that went on before them absurd even if they do stretch plausibility once or twice; it’s the sort of approach that even makes those twists you do see coming effective as parts of the narrative (well, most of them, at least).

Pastoll also makes very good use of the – sometimes as sun-drenched as is traditional – rural horror film landscapes of France, aiming for the feeling of isolation that comes with large empty spaces. As presented, the house of Gizard and Mary is pleasantly creepy too, without the film feeling the need to go so overboard with the New French Gothic (that’s a thing, right?) you have to ask yourself why anyone entering it wouldn’t just run the other way at once.

The acting is good too, the core quartet giving performances suggesting just the right amount of depths and secrets to their characters. I’m happy with Barbara Crampton’s career revival as a wonderful character actress anyhow, and her performance here just cements how good she is as the kind of weird role contemporary horror movies can provide.

Finally, the film even has a bit of a moral: when visiting a country, it might behoove one to understand something of its language beyond “hello”, “goodbye” and “I don’t understand”.

In short: Kiss of the Damned (2012)

Warning: this little piece is rather cranky

As much as I respect director Xan Cassavetes's obvious admiration for European horror cinema of the 70s (particular that of Jean Rollin), and approve of her decision to use elements of the style without going all out imitative retro with it, I can't help but notice, and be annoyed by how fucking bourgeois her film's conception of well, everything, is.

Her vampires are boring upper-class twats, even rebellious evil vampire Roxane Mesquida's type of rebellion is deeply bourgeois in its utter pointlessness, and really nothing you haven't seen from any rich daughter, just in this case with more dead bodies after the fucking, and blood instead of cocaine. Let me put it this way: why should I care about these people, their oh so poor broken vampire hearts, their unimaginative conception of evil or of happiness, their improbably conservative idea of hedonism and their sad staring out of their rich homes towards peaceful fucking lakes while classical piano plays?

The film surely has no answers to that question. In fact, I don't think it can even imagine anyone asking that question of it, seeing as it is the sort of film where the only lower class people are a faithful maid who gets rid of the evil vampire sister after a deus ex machina has already done most of the work, and various nameless victims. And no, the film unfortunately isn't doing some rude satire where he equates being rich with being monsters; it's just too concerned with posing its pretty people in pretty shots with a bit of decorative blood and a few tears to bother with any of that stuff.

I'd still be able to get something out of the film if Cassavetes style would result in a film as hypnotic or moody as it is pretty, but Kiss of the Damned never finds the point, that dream-like or nightmarish mood of many European horror films of the 70s that could help one ignore its politics, or its lack of dramatic heft, or its lack of plot, all things that I have seen become unimportant in other films.

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