Mirror Mirror (1990)

Very LA goth teenager Megan (Rainbow Harvest, a name that brings up so many questions) and her mom move to a small town in nowhere, Iowa. Megan, being from the big city, shy, and a bit weird, does not hit it off with most of her new classmates. Only prospective class president Nikki (Kristin Dattilo), a friend of strays and weirdos, or so her vacuous boyfriend suggests, befriends her. Because Megan is not one to make her own life easier, she develops quite the crush on the nice-jock boyfriend of the school’s resident bitch queen (Charlie Spradling, only credited as “Charlie” for some reason), which does not make her social life any easier.

Because teen hormones and soap operatics are best taken with a bit of violence, an antique mirror left over from the earlier owner of the house Megan and her mom (Karen Black, alas not doing much) moved into turns out to be possessed by demonic forces. At first, it seems to react to Megan’s subconscious – and quite understandable – rage by magically murdering whosoever tortures or annoys the kid. Soon, however, Megan seems to control the destructive forces herself, while taking a nasty twist to her personality. Eventually, she’s outright possessed by the mirror and its powers. Only Nikki realizes something strange is going on, and tries her best to find out what exactly is up with Megan and her mirror, and get her friend back. There is, of course, a somewhat tragic story of sister love and murder connected to the mirror, and Megan and Nikki seem bound to repeat a variation on it.

Marina Sargenti’s only feature film – she did a bit of TV work later on, but only a couple of TV movies and a handful of episodes of various TV shows – is a perfectly decent entry into that horror subgenre concerning teenage misfits gaining some sort of supernatural power to take vengeance on the world that has treated them so badly. Its main problem is a certain lack of originality, so much of the character work feels a bit routine. So, Mirror Mirror goes through its well-worn motions, tropes and plot beats in an effective but not exactly riveting manner.

Of course, these tropes are well-worn because they are so relatable to many of the misfits at heart who have always made up large parts of the hardcore of horror movie fans (typically the people who stay with the genre no matter if it is in one of its cyclical upswings or downswings), and there’s nothing wrong with their presentation here. It’s good enough for what the film is doing, as faint as that praise may sound.

Also good enough for a decent time are the murders committed by the – mostly - invisible demon force; again, there’s nothing here that’s terribly original, but Sargenti’s direction is capable enough. As everything else about the movie, the horror set pieces are perfectly decent.

Really, Mirror Mirror’s main flaw is just that it’s so decent, competently made and keeping to the safest parts of horror country there’s very little about it you’ll remember as being actually exciting or weird. There is one scene of Megan dry-humping the mirror (who can hug back) that’s misguided and weird enough to please and so will in one way or the other reappear in the film’s three(!) sequels, but otherwise, this is very much the most average horror movie imaginable.

Cut and Run (1984)

Original title: Inferno in diretta

After stumbling upon the aftermath of a very violent massacre committed on members of a drug smuggling gang, TV reporter Fran Hudson (Lisa Blount) and her buddy and cameraman Mark Ludman (Leonard Mann) are put on the track of a curious drug war that seems to go on all around the United States as well as (somewhere in) South America.

Clues soon lead to one Colonel Horne (Richard Lynch) who supposedly died at Jonestown, and the missing son of an executive in Fran’s TV network,  and to an unnamed part of South America, so off to (some part of) South America our heroes fly. There, they’ll have to evade the soft attentions of crazy people and the cult of native warriors who are somehow (the film never explains) under Horne’s sway. Awkward attempts at Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now quotes happen. Michael Berryman does his wild Berryman thing, so there’s quite a bit of gore, too.

Fortunately for the softer stomachs and hearts in the audience, Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run – at least in the rather gory cut I’ve watched – does not follow the trail blazed by the director’s masterpiece of making any viewer feel like shit Cannibal Apocalypse and contains very little footage of animals getting tortured to squick the viewer out. Since the film fuses Italian jungle action and elements of the cannibal movie, Deodato obviously and cleverly having deduced that cannibals alone don’t cut it anymore at this point, there is some sexual violence and quite a load of implied racism to get through, though not double the amount than in each genre alone, at least.

It also has to to be said that Deodato’s use of sexual violence here very clearly isn’t meant to turn a viewer on, but rather part of the director’s typical project (at least in this part of his career) of putting us off of humanity altogether while still doing what is expected by an exploitation movie. To my eyes, one of the things that makes Deodato’s movies from this period – which pretty much ends around this point in his filmography - rather more interesting than a lot of its genre siblings is how clearly the guy means his general hatred of Western complacity and how earnestly he tries to shock his audience out of it. Which can lead to a film like Cannibal Holocaust only few people will want to watch a second time even when they are – as I am – sympathetic to the director and his project, or one like the film at hand that’s not fun enough to really work as an exploitation movie, but not unpleasant enough to make you (well, me, at least) feel really bad.

On the exploitation and horror front, there are – if you find a version of the film not cut to hell – some rather creative gore bits to watch, as well as small parts for Karen Black, John Steiner (who really goes to pieces for his part) and other genre favourites. There’s generally enough of a good bad time that it’s a reasonably enjoyable film to watch if you’re into this sort of thing like I am (and anyone who isn’t will already have closed this tab a couple of paragraphs earlier), particularly since Deodato isn’t bad at all at pacing the film’s more extreme moments with the inevitable slow parts. I also approve of Richard Lynch doing a Marlon Brando impression for a bit, as well as the completely pointless attempts at exploiting Jonestown for additional shock value.

Past Misdeeds: The Outfit (1973)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

At just about the same time when professional robber Earle Macklin (Robert Duvall) is released from jail, his brother Eddie is murdered by killers working for the Outfit (the artists formerly known as The Syndicate). Turns out a bank Earle, Eddie and their partner Cody (Joe Don Baker) robbed belonged to the Outfit, and when there's one thing you don't do, it's stealing from them, at least if you ask Outfit boss Mailer (Robert Ryan).

Eddie's not the only one Mailer wants to see dead, but hits on Earle and Cody fail. Once he understands what's going on, Earle decides the best way to stay alive is to go on the offense. From now on he, sort of joined by his girlfriend Bett (Karen Black), and a bit later on by Cody, robs every Outfit establishment he can find. They're pretty easy marks, too, for the unspoken "don't touch the Outfit" rule among professional criminals has resulted in rather lax security measures in the organizations' establishments.

Mailer could make his new problem go away peacefully if his organization would only be willing to pay Macklin $250,000, and leave him in peace afterwards. Not surprisingly, that's not a deal he's willing to make; instead he intensifies his attempts killing Earle and Cody, until they see no choice but to come after him. Not that this wasn't their preferred outcome all along, given their actions.

The Outfit is an adaptation of one of Donald E. Westlake's/Richard Stark's Parker novels (one of my favourites in the series to boot), and as always one that does star Parker neither in name nor character. As far as I know, that's because Westlake didn't want the Parker name used unless an actor agreed to an actual series of films, which sounds rather like avoiding finding more readers for one's books to me, but then I'm not the pulp-y paperback writing master here.

Duvall's Macklin is nearly as ruthless as the character he's based on, but clearly still has more regular human feelings than the empathy-less sociopath Parker. Consequently - and wouldn't Parker just love this as proof for his usual thesis that emotions are bad for his business anyhow - Macklin may be nearly as brutal as Parker but does tend to sometimes let his emotions get in the way of his planning abilities. He even has actual feelings for Bett beyond her use as an object to relieve his sex drive with.

Of course, it is much easier for a viewer to relate to Macklin than to a more closely adapted Parker. Emotional shorthand does, after all, work better with characters that do have emotions their audience can relate to; and once we can relate to something on that level, we do tend to excuse little things like mass robberies and a lot of dead bodies much easier. Duvall as an actor is at the height of his powers here, providing just enough glimpses of the emotional intensity and rage working under Macklin's cold and professional surface to breathe life into his character.

I also appreciate how Flynn attempts to provide a somewhat more sympathetic view of women in his film than you'd ever find in a Stark novel, obviously having caught up with the scientific news that women are actual human beings, just like men; early on in the film I even dared hope he'd give Karen Black's Bett just as much room for development as his male characters. That hope, alas, isn't really fulfilled, despite Black's - an actress I love but not for anything that has anything to do with subtlety - surprisingly subtle performance. In the end, The Outfit trades Stark's borderline misogyny for that common cliché of the female character having to die to motivate the male lead to his climactic violent act. However, Flynn does go through these motions at least with a bit more interest in Bett than typical, and really, compared to Stark's treatment of women in the books, he's golden.

It's also difficult for me to mind this flaw much in a film that does nearly everything else right. I love how Flynn's script adapts the novel, leaving most of its set pieces intact while imagining a different, more human character like Macklin (without two novels before as the set-up for certain scenes) going through them. A lot stays as it is in the novel, yet there are little shifts in meaning and emphasis that aren't just caused by the necessity of filmic language; they are also products of a director with a slightly different philosophy than Stark's, replacing cynicism that at least borders on nihilism with the laconic, strangely sympathetic fatalism so typical of US crime movies of the era. In The Outfit and other movies like it, everybody is a sinner and everybody is most probably doomed, but there's still room for small, defiant gestures of humanity, even if these gestures are violent and morally dubious.

This - to my European eyes - very particularly American way of looking at the world of the early 70s takes place before a background of unspectacular ugliness: a brown world of mud, dark bars, motel rooms and houses that look as if they could crash down on the characters any minute now. The Outfit's USA are a place far from small town romance or the supposed sexiness of the big city - not that we ever get to see anything that looks like you'd imagine the Big City (Flynn retools a short dialogue between Parker/Macklin and Handy/Cody about the shittiness of cities quite wonderfully in that regard). Obviously, the American Dream is not impervious to mud.


Flynn is also simply a great director of semi-realistic action sequences. Everybody, their amount of professionalism in the cause of violence notwithstanding, is somewhat awkward in these scenes, and even when clearly used to the violence they are committing, still caught up in the little failures and stumbles that come with the chaos surrounding them. Despite the conscious decision to use awkwardness and the sudden chaos of real-world violence, Flynn also manages to keep the action exciting and tight. This way, whatever else one may look for and find in The Outfit, it's also a great, exciting 70s crime film.

Out of the Dark (1988)

Life at the LA phone sex, I am sorry “phone fantasy”, hotline of Ruth Wilson (Karen Black) is good: Ruth is genuinely nice to her girls, business is buzzing, and the girls seem to be having quite a time making fun of their customers. That is, until a madman in a clown costume calling himself Bobo starts to kill them off in bizarre and increasingly improbable ways. Unfortunately, the cop concerned with the serial killings isn’t the glorious Detective Langella (Divine in a pretty funny cameo in full film detective regalia including a moustache) but the rather less exalted Lt. Meyers (Tracey Walter) who is bad at his job even by horror movie cop standards. Just wait until he manages to come up with a stake-out that gets a woman and one of his cops killed!

Meyers starts suspecting photographer Kevin Silvers (Cameron Dye) – tasked to make glamour shots of the phone sex ladies for a magazine article for some reason - early on, but he’s of course more into threatening his suspects and ranting at them instead of committing to anything like an actual investigation, so this guy’s not gonna find out either way. The photographer at least insists on his innocence, roping his phone sex worker girlfriend Kristi (Lynn Danielson-Rosenthal) into various attempts to prove other peoples’ guilt. And it’s not as if there aren’t a variety of sleazebags and weirdoes around who might dress up as a murderous clown. Geoffrey Lewis, Bud Cort – there are character actors aplenty for this sort of thing around.

Even if it weren’t as entertaining as it is, Michael Schroeder’s Out of the Dark would still be a very interesting film, seeing as it seems to stand at a point just before the Cinemax-style “erotic thriller” truly happened, clearly demonstrating quite a few of that genre’s sleazy sensibilities. However, where a lot of the later erotic thrillers mostly put the off-screen sex of the noir on the screen and ramp it up until it buries everything else under silicone breasts, to my feeling, Out of the Dark comes to its sleaze and nudity by way of the giallo while integrating a nice slab of slasher elements as well as a sense of genuine fun.

That kinship to the giallo brings with it quite a bit of visual style; this is never blandly shot but full of clever little flourishes in the use of light (often artificial and blue, of course), clever little moments of suspense, and so on. The plot and most of the kills are absolutely preposterous, mind you, but then, they are not supposed to be anything but. In fact, the film often shows quite a bit of glee over its own weirdness, with Bobo not just wearing the clown mask but actually putting all kinds of efforts into being a decidedly evil clown. Particularly joyful is the scene in which Bobo is finally unmasked, granting us great put-down lines like “No extra business in Bobo’s act!” (which happens not to work as useful armour against a shotgun blast), as well as useful musings about what they do to killer clowns.

In general, the film seems to have a blast with its cast of weirdoes, sex workers, and thriller movie cliché characters. Better still, and not terribly typical for a genre that’s very much about showing tits and dead female bodies, Out of the Dark seems to genuinely like its female characters, and enjoy the humour they use to distance themselves from what must be a pretty dispiriting job. There’s no moralizing bone in the film’s body. Of course, the killings are still filmed to be enjoyable – it is supposed to be a fun, sleazy horror flick after all - but this one very clearly isn’t working off anybody’s problems with women.

The cast of character actors, soap opera actresses and playmates is a joy to watch, providing good natured humour, choice overacting (I’m particularly partial to Divine’s cameo, as well as the scene where the killer finally shows their true colours) and generally likeable presences even when blouses and shirts stay on. Even when the plot isn’t particularly riveting, it’s always fun to spend time with the characters and whatever the film comes up with for them to do or say next.


So, if you’re not afraid of a bit of sleaze, you just might find yourself enjoying Out of the Dark as much as I did.

Night Angel (1990)

Turns out the biblical Lilith (future German soap opera actress Isa Jank) is still working regularly. During a lunar eclipse, she incarnates on Earth, planning, apparently, to claim the soul of a man in love. After seducing, killing, and driving mad quite a few other men and women (this film is nothing if not inclusive), that is.

Lilith’s other big goal seems to be to get on the cover of fashion magazine “Siren”; to spread her evil influence, we are told. Obviously, the magazine is quickly hit by a series of mysterious deaths and hilarious, I mean horrible, sexual hysteria. Only art director Craig (the void known as Linden Ashby), his very fresh new jewellery designer girlfriend Kirstie (Debra Feuer), and taxi-driving elderly black woman Sadie (Helen Martin) – who has a past with Lilith - stand between the world and a lot of people getting their hearts ripped out during sex.

Erotic horror, as I might have said before, is difficult to realize without making it a bit ridiculous or outright hilarious. I’d wager there’s perhaps half a dozen directors working at any given time who could pull something off in the sub-genre, and hundreds of others who are at least clever enough not to try. Night Angel’s director Dominique Othenin-Girard clearly didn’t belong to either of these groups, so we get this courageous and pretty bad effort.

The film’s problems are manifold. Start with a lead actress who is certainly not unattractive but utterly lacks the very particular kind of presence as well as the acting chops needed to pull off the role of an undying demon all men and women want to screw – even if she only wants them to die for them. There’s a “sexy”, “heated” dance sequence early on that had me in stitches, a scene that completely destroys any hope of anyone watching being able to take our villainess seriously during the rest of the movie. The death scene coming right after is not much of an improvement, for that matter. It doesn’t exactly help here that the film’s idea of sexual obsession – as well as that of sex, eroticism and love as a whole -  seems exclusively schooled on the way people present arousal in softcore porn movies. Othenin-Girard’s main instruction for his actors seems to have been something along the lines of “go big!”. These are not words you say to Karen Black and Doug Jones (who are both in this thing, too), unless you’re making a comedy. On the positive side, the film is pretty funny for most of its running time, though the kind of laughter it causes is strictly on the laughing at not the laughing with side of the equation.


It’s a bit of a shame, really, for Othenin-Girard does show some promise in his treatment of the most important colours of late 80s/early 90s horror – blue and red – and certainly knows how to keep his film moving, if usually in the wrong directions. The special effects involve Howard Berger’s and Steven Johnson’s respective workshops, and are – apart from the crappy looking final version of Lilith that could have found a place in Troll 2 – up to the typical high standards of the two gentlemen. It’s just that a film doesn’t live on a couple of good effects and a bizarre nightclub in hell sequence alone.

A Handful of Toughts On Family Plot (1976)

Alfred Hitchcock’s final film is generally, though certainly not universally, rather unloved. It’s not much of a surprise either, for this peculiar comedy thriller (thriller comedy?) most of the time doesn’t feel at all like the sort of films you think about when it comes to defining an Alfred Hitchcock movie, even though it is certainly working in a genre space Hitchcock very much helped define.

Which is why I rather like the film, I think. At the very least, I find it very difficult not to respect a filmmaker who has been making movies since silent film times, and in the late 70s still goes out to make a film that’s not typical of him. Family Plot is not a stone cold Great Film mind you - it lacks that slightly abstract crystallized and unmoving quality films marked with this word not seldom suffer under; it doesn’t feel like a part of a canon but like part of a life’s work that could have gone on from there.

The film’s great strength and its great weakness lies in its playfulness, the director’s willingness to let his very wonderful, very 70s cast – particularly Karen Black, William Devane, Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris – interact in often funny ways that suggest personal histories between characters instead of explaining them, and to let them show off-beat flaws, how the film suggests all sorts of interesting stuff you couldn’t get into a film that’s interested in tight plotting. For Family Plot really is a rather meandering kind of movie, with quite a few scenes you’d just cut if its aim were are tight unified experience but which are left in here to create more of a space for the characters to inhabit. The plot for its part is weird, rather intricate, but also not at all the point of the film.


There are two nice Hitchcock suspense set pieces to enjoy too, but what really lets this film stay in my mind is how little this is “An Alfred Hitchcock movie”, and how much the work of a veteran director of huge talents trying on elements of what the new kids have been up to in the last years.

Killer Fish (1979)

If you’re gonna steal a bunch of diamonds from your former employers, go big, thinks Paul Diller (James Franciscus), so while he’s having a nice game of backgammon as an alibi, a power plant and other stuff explodes as a distraction while his nurse-turned-lover Kate (Karen Black putting way more effort in than anyone else on screen) and a group of professional criminals lead by professional criminal and semi-professional ladies man Lasky (Lee Majors playing that character he’s always playing lest horrible things will happen on screen, one supposes) do the actual stealing.

Things go well enough, and the successful criminals sink their loot in a lake to let it wait there for sixty days until the heat dies down. Alas, not everyone – namely some of Lasky’s buddies - is too happy with the idea of waiting two whole months in a tourist town in Brazil (there’s obviously no accounting for taste). They learn all too soon that Diller has taken some precautions for this case, for he has infested the nicely dammed off lake with piranhas who proceed to eat the untrustworthy criminals. Despite this not hanging well with Lasky, he still finds time and space to romance visiting model Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway, not able to act as usual) and say stuff like: “Historically, bisexuality is a lot older than any of my blocks” (seriously). Obviously, everyone involved is still trying to pull one over (though it’s clear Lasky and Kate would both have preferred to play fair) on each other, an activity that gets decidedly more dangerous once a storm destroys the dam and the surviving cast find themselves on a sinking boat on a piranha-infested lake.

As long-time readers among my imaginary audience might remember, I’m predisposed to like any old crap Italian director in every genre known to Man and some known only to Italian cinema Antonio Margheriti did, so it’ll come as little surprise to these chosen few that I did indeed like, as well as deeply enjoy, this somewhat misbegotten mixture of heist film, post-Jaws something-in-the-water horror, men’s adventure, and disaster movie that mixes so many genres it’s no wonder it can’t do any single one of them terribly well. Instead, the movie is a series of barely connected events, cool ideas, horrible ideas and the mandatory in about half of its sub-genres boring modelling scenes. Somehow, this film-like entity still manages to have something like a discernible plot – mostly because it is entirely made out of clichés, one might suspect.

On the other hand, the film’s cool ideas lead to some fine library footage explosions, later on some of that patented Margheriti model work for the dam destruction sequences, and many a scene of actors getting eaten by fish. That’s rather enough to keep me entertained at least, and while I’d never pretend Killer Fish is anything like a brilliant movie (or even among the best third of Margheriti’s films), its mix of absolutely archetypal genre clichés, but from a bunch of different genres just thrown together, is rather irresistible to someone like me fascinated by the way the content of 70s men’s adventure books made it into the movies (without said movies ever actually adapting them). There’s a somewhat grimy charm to the resulting film that’s certainly enhanced – the charm part, this is - by it being actually shot in Brazil, the generally lovely cast, and the curiously likeable quality most of Margheriti’s movies (even those in the sleazier genres) have for me.

Three Films Make A Post: Aliens Invade! Mankind fights back!

The Wolverine (2013): After the apocalypse of crap that was the first Wolverine movie, I didn't expect anything at all from James Mangold's sequel, so it was a rather pleasant surprise to find it to be a highly entertaining mix of action movie tropes, good-natured Japan clichés, appropriate comic book silliness, and even half-way poignant moments. Add to these points the production's decision to cast the Japanese characters with actual Japanese actors instead of any Asian looking guy or girl they could grab from the street, and the (for contemporary blockbuster cinema) surprising amount of time The Wolverine has for its female characters. The film has reached the point where Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima are actual female leads again, and not just the girls on screen to look pretty and motivate the lone hero.

And isn't it a fine thing too that the film's usually very lone hero actually needs a lot of help to get by, which the film treats as a strength and not as a weakness?

The World's End (2013): I think I've repeatedly gone on record as a big admirer of Edgar Wright, so it won't come as much of a surprise to anyone that I really, really like the last film in the thematic trilogy that started with Shaun of the Dead. Having said that, I also think it’s fortunate the film at hand is the final film in the thematic trilogy because it's hard not to see that things begin repeating themselves now, and it's probably good Wright is doing something probably quite different next with Ant-Man (as he did, to be fair, with Scott Pilgrim, a film many sad people seem to hate for reasons inexplicable to me). At this point, The World's End repeats Wright's favourite themes and character types on a still highly entertaining and clever level. It's also at its core probably Wright's saddest movie, though this is the kind of film that really isn't out to make its audience sad; the sadness is just there if you're of the temperament to see it.

Children of the Night (1991): Tony Randel's vampire horror comedy is a bit of a strange egg. Tonally, it rather undecidedly jumps from broad small town satire to gore to really stupid comedy to slightly less stupid comedy to grotesque semi body horror to dark fairy-tale and back again, putting quite a few moments of actual magic in between triteness, annoying stupidity and stupid fun. The permanent tonal shifts make it impossible to a) get a very good grip on the movie as a whole and b) to ever be as much drawn into the film's very weird world as one would wish. Still, there's as much to like as to hate in here, and this is the sort of small town horror movie whose true hero isn't one of its theoretical leads (Peter DeLuise and Ami Dolenz), nor Karen Black chewing scenery, but Garrett Morris as said small town's black town drunk. Which is to say, a film worth fighting through the unfunny moments for the actual surprises it contains.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,superheroes,sf,horror,comedy,in short,edgar wright,simon pegg,nick frost,peter deluise,karen black,ami dolenz,garrett morris,hugh jackman,james mangold,tao okamoto,rila fukushima

In short: Children of the Corn: The Gathering (1996)

Student of medicine Grace Rhodes (a very young looking Naomi Watts) returns to her rural home for an off-semester to take care of her mother June (Karen Black) and her younger siblings Margaret (Jamie Reneé Smith) and James (Mark Salling). June has suffered some kind of mental breakdown that leaves her unable to leave the house for more than a few steps in what looks a lot like agoraphobia but perhaps isn’t, and doesn't do much for her abilities to take care of her household and kids either. June's problems are somehow connected to a rather strange dream she has every night, in which a dead boy kills her.

As Grace and the people of the town will soon learn, June's dreams are rather prophetic, for soon a dead boy in preacher's garb (Brandon Kleyla) crawls out of a sealed well and does something magickal using a man he kills. The boy’s ritual induces an inexplicable fever spiced up with a bit of levitation in all of the town's children that eventually results in creepy staring and possession. Which is of course the point at which more murders start.

To save her siblings and herself, Grace will team up with the town's former mayor Donald Atkins (Brent Jennings) and learn the truth about her former home’s oldest, darkest secret.

As should be obvious after this synopsis, it's difficult to avoid the suspicion watching the fourth Children of the Corn movie that Greg Spence's film wasn't actually written as part of the franchise but only got the "Children of the Corn" moniker because the script takes place in a rural area and the producers had the rights to the name; why, the corn fields aren’t even important to the movie at all.

That's of course only a bad thing if you're missing He Who Walks Behind The Rows desperately, because the rural horror film we get may not seem to be part of the franchise but it is about as good as mid-90s direct-to-video horror gets. That's not saying too much, of course, but in case of The Gathering it does describe a competent and entertaining little flick most viewers probably won't have minded to rent from their video store (remember them?).

In fact, The Gathering's He Who Walks-less backstory, and the way it is revealed, is its greatest strength, connecting it to the great tradition of cursed rural towns in horror, and giving the series of supernatural shenanigans enough of a connection to the larger thematic streams of its sub-genre to make them a little more interesting and meaningful.

Yet I also wish Spence had explored these thematic connections a little deeper, for while the reason for the killings makes sense in the realm of the movie, the ways the various murders happen seem less part of one coherent supernatural phenomenon but rather too much like what they actually are - an unconnected series of special effects sequences not based on what fits the backstory best but on what (supposedly) looks coolest, which is a particular shame in a film whose backstory emphasises connections between present and past. It's not a fatal weakness but it is this point that keeps The Gathering from being a memorable film instead of a diverting one.

Of course, in the context of how most mid-90s direct-to-video films turned out, diverting isn't bad at all.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,greg spence,naomi watts,jamie reneé smith,brent jennings,karen black

On Exploder Button: The Outfit (1973)

Can there be a nicer way to return from a short hiatus than with a fine, generally underrated crime movie like John Flynn's The Outfit, with Robert Duvall playing Donald E. Westlake's/Richard Stark's Parker in the olden times when movie Parker wasn't allowed to be called by his name?

I don't think so, so click on over to my column and be convinced to agree with me there.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,john flynn,robert duvall,joe don baker,karen black,crime,other places

Some Guy Who Kills People (2011)

Warning: here be rather large, yet unavoidable spoilers.

After having spent time in a mental institution (or loony bin, as he and everyone else how ever was in one calls it) to help him get over his suicidal depression, Ken Boyd (Kevin Corrigan) walks through his life with the shell-shocked expression of somebody neither able nor willing to take the risk of actually beginning to live again. Ken has moved back in with his - deadpanning and sarcastic - mother (Karen Black, truly delightfully deadpan) and works in the local ice cream parlour, where he frequently has to take on the undignified job of dressing up as an ice cream cone. His life is pretty horrible, but at least nothing is happening in it.

That is, until Ken's eleven years old daughter Amy (Ariel Gade, who actually manages to be as charming as the script wants her to be, no mean feat in the nightmare world of child actors) steps into his life. Amy's the product of a one-week-relationship, and until now, her mother was able to pretend her father just disappeared. However, once happenstance leads Amy to the truth, the girl decides to get to know her father, if he thinks he's too much of a fuck-up to be one or not. Amy decides to move in with Ken for a week, and she sure isn't going to take no for an answer.

Spending time with Amy slowly opens up something in Ken, and with the girl's encouragement, he even begins dating British ex-pat Stephanie (Lucy Davis, still orange).

However, while all this has been going on, the small town Ken lives in has been hit by a series of murders. The victims are all major pricks, and, though the Sheriff (Barry Bostwick, just as deadpan as Black) - who just happens to be the boyfriend of Ken's Mum - doesn't realize it for quite some time, were once involved in a flashback-inducing traumatic event for Ken. In fact, there's a lot the Sheriff doesn't know that implicates Ken to the audience as a serial killer, and soon enough, Amy will have to share our point of view.

Colour me confused, for Some Guy Who Kills People was made by Jack Perez, the director and writer of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus and other crap, yet it is actually pretty darn good. It's a clear demonstration of the fact that putting one's heart into a movie leads to much better results than putting in self-serving irony.

Not that Some Guy is free of irony or humour, it being a comedy and all, but this is not the sort of film that points at itself and shouts "Look how crap I am! Now laugh at me!". Most of the film's humour is of a rather more deadpan type that is in my mind part of the US indie movie tradition. It's the sort of humour that points out the absurdity of the situation the characters are in, and finds the funny in the quiet horribleness of Ken's life, but never stoops to making fun of people's pain. And there's a lot of pain to go around, for Some Guy's greatest strength is the quiet and honest way it shows its characters' unhappiness. There are no big dramatic break-downs, instead, Corrigan's stooped shoulders, and Gade's often a bit too ready smile are all the Perez needs to demonstrate how his characters are feeling for most of the running time.

However, Some Guy isn't only a film out to explain how much life sucks, but also one willing to suggest that yes, it might get better. I'm nearly tempted to use the word "heart-warming" like some of my more courageous movie-loving peers do when talking about the film, if that particular word didn't suggest a kitschiness neither Perez' quiet and unassuming film nor the nuanced performances of the cast have anything to do with.

Ironically, given my general tastes and unflinching pretend-cynicism (surely, I've never cried while watching Doctor Who), it's the film's horror part I find the least convincing. For one, I'm not sure if Ken's and Amy's story actually needs the serial killer plot at all, and while it certainly isn't anathema to the rest of the film, that aspect of the movie also feels a bit superfluous. It sure doesn't help that the film's indictment of Ken for the murders does not really play fair with the audience, showing things to make us think Ken really is the killer that don't seem believable anymore once we know he isn't.

On the other hand, the serial killer plot is so minor in its impact compared with the interplay between the main characters that its lack of success doesn't pull down the film too far. It may be keeping Some Guy Who Kills People from being a perfect film, yet it still is highly recommended one.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,comedy,horror,drama,jack perez,kevin corrigan,barry bostwick,karen black,ariel gade,lucy davis

The Squeeze (1978)

There will be spoilers later on.

After a few years in the slammer former expert safe cracker Chris Gretchko (Lee Van Cleef) has retired from the crime world, and lives in Mexico as a cattle rancher. Still, when Jeff OIafsen (Edward Albert), the son of an old friend, seeks Chris out to ask him for help, the old gangster doesn't make the young man beg all that much. Jeff is in big trouble with a gang of Germans under the leadership of a certain Van Stratten (Peter Carsten), but if Chris would be willing to come to New York and open a safe full of diamonds for the Germans, all would be forgiven for the young man, and Chris would make a nice amount of money. At least that's what Jeff says.

In truth, once Chris has arrived in the US and contacted his old friend, the fence Sam Steinfeld (Lionel Stander), it becomes quite clear why the Germans have to import a retiree like him for the job instead of digging into New York's native talent pool: people doing business for or with the group tend to disappear or turn up dead, which makes these Germans somewhat unpopular partners. Chris enjoys challenges, it seems, for he decides to stay in the city, do the job, and take the diamonds for himself and Jeff - whom he plans to keep safe by talking him into letting himself getting arrested before the heist starts - instead.

Things go nearly as the old gangster has planned, except for the fact that his escape from his murderous partners entails dead people and explosions and leaves himself hurt badly enough to need to lay low in an empty apartment quite close to the place where he got rid of his escape car. That sort of trace is eminently followable for the police, the former owners of the diamonds, and the rest of Chris's former partners. Jeff's true loyalties seem dubious at best, too. On the positive side, Chris's empty apartment has a very friendly - and impossibly ditzy - neighbour (Karen Black), only too willing to help him out for no obvious reason.

As much as I adore Italian director Antonio Margheriti, Lee Van Cleef's natural coolness, Edward Albert's easy sociopathy and Karen Black's full-blown looniness, I can't call The Squeeze a fully successful film. The first half of the movie is strong enough, with Margheriti seemingly just turning on his camera, being happy to film in New York, and giving his actors possibilities to shine in an authentic and laid-back way that doesn't produce much of the tension you'd usually expect from a crime movie, but establishes the characters and the city they are living in quite wonderfully.

Unfortunately, once the in a Margheriti movie mandatory mediocre but beautiful model effects sequence has passed and Van Cleef's character is laying low and not doing much anymore, the film's looseness turns into a liability. The focus shifts from Van Cleef to Albert to Stander to the former owners to Black overacting hilariously and back again nervously, with half of the scenes of no use to further develop the film's characters or plot, and the other half being pretty fine looked at as single scenes, but not as parts of a whole that's supposed to be a movie. The actors are doing some fine work with what they are given, but the script becomes just too disjointed for them to truly salvage anything.

It sure doesn't help The Squeeze's case that it has two absolutely horrible plot twists that don't make sense even if you're trying very hard not to think about them - and believe me, I was trying. Twist number one (please be advised I'm getting spoiler-y now) might explain why Black's Clarisse is so damn helpful, but could only have worked if Jeff had known beforehand where Chris would be hiding out, which he doesn't, while twist number two needs the audience to believe that Chris is either always carrying dummy ammunition around with him or can somehow pull some out of his ass.

And still, having said all that, I don't regret having watched The Squeeze. There's enough good, relaxed acting in it, and it evokes enough of a sense of place and time for me to put it down on the "basically enjoyable" side of the equation. Everyone concerned has certainly made or been in better movies, but they've also wasted their (and my) time on worse.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,crime,lee van cleef,karen black,edward albert,lionel stander,antonio margheriti