We Are Still Here (2015)

Emotionally reeling from the accidental death of their grown-up son, Anne (Barbara Crampton) and Paul Sacchetti (Andrew Sensenig) decide moving out of the house he grew up in might assist them on their way to closure. Turns out, moving to Aylesbury, Mass., situated right in Lovecraft Country might not have been the best idea to that end, for there’s something very wrong with the house they move to.

There’s a reason the place had been left uninhabited for thirty years. Particularly Anne finds herself confronted with various low key haunting effects that suggest the presence of the spirit of their son, but surely, actual ghosts don’t move to new homes with people. There’s also something deeply wrong with the house’s cellar that manifests itself in unseasonable heat, the smell of burning flesh, and – if you’re an unlucky electrician – the crispy-hot living dead.

After some time of weirdness, Anne convinces the more sceptical Paul, who still can’t quite wave away what’s going on, it might be a good idea to call a couple of friends of hers for help. May (Lisa Marie) and her hippie husband Jacob (the inevitable yet lovely Larry Fessenden) do have a talent for contacting the spirit world, it turns out, but there’s something worse in the house than just a few – already pretty damn bad, it’ll turn out – ghosts.

If you’re like me, you’ll probably already have read various bits and pieces about Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here emphasising how much of the film is a loving homage to Lucio Fulci. That’s absolutely true, too, but if you expect a film that feels or is meant to feel like a Fulci flick from his great period, you’ll probably end up confused or disappointed, for Geoghegan uses certain markers of Fulci’s aesthetic in a way often antithetical to the old maestro’s approach. I rather think that’s a good thing, too, for what would be the point in making a film that’s only aping a gone great?

But let’s start on the obviously Fulci-esque elements: the film’s colour-scheme, the characters’ wardrobes and the production design are very much taken from Fulci’s playbook, as are the nods towards Lovecraft (bonus points to Geoghegan for using Aylesbury instead of a more obvious place). And there’s really no doubt in which direction the scene with the electrician in the cellar nods; even though what happens to him is rather different to the doom of a certain Fulci workman in a Southern cellar.

However, no Fulci film – from whichever career phase – would ever have featured as naturalistically drawn characters as the Sacchetti’s (speaking of nods…), actual people with actually believable interiority who mostly do things that make sense, even when these acts are ill-advised. Crampton and Sensenig are rather wonderful as the Sacchettis too, selling much of the sadness and loss, as well as their long intimacy with gestures, posture and looks, without them or the script feeling the need to oversell it and drift into a more melodramatic direction.

Geoghegan’s script does in general – except for one bar scene involving Monte Markham telling the local bar owner stuff she already knows quite well for no good reason apart from clueing the audience in – tend to find the sweet spot between showing and telling and seems to trust in the audience not to need every little thing spelled out for them. Of course, this generally logical and humanly believable approach is pretty much the exact opposite to Fulci’s (and Sacchetti’s) love for slow, dream-like series of strange occurrences vaguely drawn characters just stumble through. I do think it works very well for We Are Still Here, mind you.

Keeping with the Fulci, even the way the film uses gore, once it arrives for the final act, is very different from the maestro’s, replacing the slow lingering on the bizarre and gloopy with relatively quick edits. Though it still is rather bizarre and gloopy.

All in all, Geoghegan uses elements of Fulci’s filmmaking to turn out a more conventionally accomplished movie, losing the dream-like, weird and just plain crazy mood in favour of being an effective, clever, and well-acted low budget horror film. I certainly won’t blame a film for being that.

Neon City (1991)

As is so often the case on this blog, it's the end of the world. This time though, it's a combination of various ecological catastrophes and holes in the ozone layer caused by a scientific experiment gone wrong that has turned North America (and that's the only place that's important, surely) to crap.

At least, there's still some sort of government trying to uphold a certain amount of order among the few survivors huddling together in the handful of population centres, but its idea of order, containing the murder of "mutants" and enforced sterilizations, isn't necessarily one distinguishable from barbarism. The country between settlements isn't better off though. It's controlled by half-mad bands of roaming bandits and full of the strange new environmental dangers of this grungy new world.

The ex-ranger (in this case "ranger" means a mix of cop, soldier, and fascist bootlicker) - now bounty hunter - Stark (Michael Ironside) finds himself convinced to do a bit of work for his former bosses, namely transporting the murderer Reno (Vanity), whom he has just caught, on a passenger transport through the dangerous outlands to a place called Neon City (the Paris of the wastelands?). On board are a merry company of characters. There's Stark's ex-wife Sandy (Valerie Wildman) who shares a rather traumatic past including a dead baby with him, the driver Bulk (Lyle Alzado) who was a friend of Stark's before Stark arrested him for murder, a doctor of medicine with a dark secret (Nick Klar), a debutante who spent most of her life in Switzerland (Juliet Landau), an elderly scientist with another dark secret (Arsenio "Sonny" Trinidad) and Dickie Devine (Richard Sanders), bad professional comedian and trader in suicide drugs.

With these people on board and the bandit raiders on the transport's track, there will be never a dull moment on the journey.

The word that comes to mind first when thinking about Neon City (which I'd rather have called The Road to Neon City, but of course nobody ever asks me stuff like that) is "solid". In fact, the film might be the textbook definition of the description, or of that other frightening word, "competent". Usually, I prefer my movies "clever" or "terrible" or "mind-wrecking", but complaining that a film like this is neither very good nor so terrible that it becomes interesting again seems a little unfair.

Neon City seems to have been made with all the best intentions of creating a solid (there's the word again), cheap little post-apocalyptic variation on Westerns like Stagecoach or El Dorado/Rio Bravo in a vehicle, with a truck standing in for a stage coach (or a sheriff's bureau) and post-apocalyptic bandits standing in for the "Indians" (or for pre-apocalyptic bandits). It's the sort of idea John Carpenter would have loved to use, I'm sure, and I'm equally sure that Carpenter's version of this film would either have been pretty great or pretty terrible, definitely not solid. But I digress, which is understandable given that the film is as all-around solid as it is, and therefore not inducive to much analysis, ranting or bad jokes.

Director Monte Markham (probably better known as an actor) points and shoots nicely and makes what he has to work with (barren, slightly snowy landscapes, grubbiness) look as interesting as possible; the script isn't brilliant, but puts the character types it includes to enough use not to annoy, lets the expected plot move forward without pretensions of greatness and is not completely without moments of cleverness in its worldbuilding; the actors as well as the ex-NFL pros embody these characters with professional vigour; Michael Ironside is for once allowed to be the (grumpy, bad-tempered, yet golden-hearted) good guy. And that's more or less the film - a solidly made cheapo in the tradition of classic character-type based B-movies that isn't ever going to be a "classic" of any kind itself, yet manages to achieve its goal to entertain for ninety minutes if a viewer is willing to let herself be entertained.

That's perfectly fine by me. Of course, I tend to like the sort of movie Neon City is based on quite a bit,too.

 

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