In short: Fire in the Sky (1993)

This is a dramatization of one of UFOdom’s favourite incidents, when Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney), a member of a group of loggers in Arizona disappears in the wilderness. His returning colleagues – as led by Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick) and numbering characters played by mainstays like Peter Berg, Craig Sheffer and Henry Thomas – get back into town only to tell the somewhat unbelievable tale of how Travis was sucked into the sky by a UFO. Police person in charge Frank Watters (James Garner) believes he smells a rat, but he’s not thinking hoax, but rather more ambitiously, murder.

What follows for Mike and his buddies is a bit of a nightmare of press hysteria, public outrage, Watters’s weird ratiocinations, lie detector tests and marriage crises. Until a naked and traumatized Travis appears, apparently without any memory of what happened to him.

Robert Lieberman’s film, long missing from home video until a short time ago, has a bit of a reputation among the cognoscenti. That reputation is mostly built on two scenes – Travis’s abduction and his late movie flashback to his experience with some truly frightening and traumatizing versions of the good old greys. Those scenes are indeed as great as their reputation suggests. Lieberman’s tight direction, a perfect use of some of horror’s favourite colours and note perfect production design come together to form two truly nighmarish moments. The slight variation on the typical Grey design alone would be enough to make the experiment scene great, but as Lieberman shoots it, there’s a special quality of suggested horrors about it that’s indelible.

The rest of the film, on the other hand, is a somewhat sober portrait of a handful of working class men under outside pressures they have no control over, mostly shown via, still very well directed and acted, dialogue scenes. It’s not a bad approach to the material in any way, shape or form, but it certainly isn’t the one you’d expect to encounter in a movie with two scenes like those. If this makes Fire in the Sky a better movie or a worse one will depend on any given viewer’s expectations more than on anything else, I believe. Me, I would have loved to see more of Lieberman’s SF horror stylings, but found myself rather hit by the drama.

Three Films Make A Post: The struggle is real.

Witches in the Woods (2019): I can appreciate that this film directed by Jordan Barker does try to use the metaphorical power of witch lore to explore very contemporary ideas about feminism (really, the #metoo movement in this case), class, and race. Unfortunately, the idea is much better than the execution, for Christopher Borelli’s script is about as good at actually writing the characters involved and their relations as the scripts of 80s slasher movies were. Believing that these specific people are supposed to end up in the same SUV looking for hot snowboarding action and have ever been friends is honestly a bridge too much to cross for my ability to believe any damn nonsense a movie tries to sell me. Making matters worse is of course that an 80s slasher could easily get away with this sort of thing because the characters were not really what those films were about.

This one, on the other hand, is supposed to be about the social and the psychological, so not delivering on these things marks complete failure. Even ignoring this, the film’s horror stylings are bland and conventional, and there’s nothing to see here but some pretty young things who probably deserved to be in a better movie.

Tone-Deaf (2019): Keeping with films I didn’t enjoy at all, here’s Richard Bates Jr.’s movie about an intolerably annoying young woman (Amanda Crew) renting a house in the country for a weekend to get over her life being crap and to have a different place to stare at her phone from encountering an equally insufferable old guy (Robert Patrick) with a tendency to break the fourth wall right into the camera who has found the new hobby of murdering people. I have no idea why I should care, or what the film’s permanent shifts between blood, the flattest jokes outside of a pancake, META!, and whatever the director/writer wanted to shove in next are supposed to achieve, but I’m sure everybody involved thinks this one’s really, really clever, given all the smug mugging into the camera the film and the actors do.


Blackhat (2015): On the other hand, I thought Michael Mann’s generally maligned crime and action movie that presses an actual performance out of Chris Hemsworth instead of a star turn is rather good. After the horrors of Miami Vice, Mann has returned to his old tricks – actors doing ACTING in diners, hoisting enough detail into a film to make the silly perfectly believable – and come up with a film that’s about as realistic a portrayal of international hacking shenanigans as Hackers was, but that creates its world with such drive and force, I even found myself buying into the even more improbable finale in which Hemsworth – genius hacker and action movie badass at the same time – does manly shit wearing phone book armour.

In short: Hellions (2015)

Teenager Dora (Chloe Rose) has a decidedly bad Halloween when she learns she is unwantedly pregnant. While she’s still pondering what to do (at least she’s not in the US but in Canada, so she actually has options), and is home alone preparing to tell her boyfriend, some rather frightening trick or treaters in creepy costumes begin harassing her in manners rather supernatural.

I am very glad director Bruce McDonald has made another genre film, for, much like his brilliant Pontypool, Hellions takes a common and generic sounding plot and turns it into something special and strangely (given that I don’t think McDonald has much experience being a pregnant teenager) personal. I don’t think this one will be as popular among the horror crowd as Pontypool was, though, because Hellions is a much weirder, more metaphorical film, less clear in the story it is telling, and so invested in being dream-like and truly strange it’ll rub anyone interested in more traditional storytelling the wrong way.

Me, I found myself fondly remembering the best of Italian horror cinema while watching it, Fulci and al seeming not far away once the film’s sure-handedly realist (that is to say, involved with quickly and deftly establishing its main character as a person instead of a cliché) introduction was over. Sure, Hellions is far less gory than comparable Italian films, but it is very much in the same business of building a dream-like creepy mood through non-realist storytelling, clearly taking place in a moment where the rules of logic and normal narrative don’t apply anymore, so also using All Hallow’s Eve properly. For my tastes, McDonald is rather good at this sort of thing, too, quickly going from one set-piece to the next, every single one of which seem taken out of nightmares and the shared horrors of humanity. He’s doing so for cheap, too, on a limited spacial scope, with only a handful of actors, the camera, some creepy costumes and deeply un-real(ist) light carrying the film’s weight. Unlike most of the Italian films I felt reminded of, McDonald’s film does offer a rather clear interpretative reading, but because he’s not really pushing that onto his audience, I let that slide.

What really drew me in – apart from the seamless way Dora’s reality drifts into the unreal – was the wonderful weirdness of it all, the pumpkin fields under the film’s strange fake blood moon light, the voices out of nowhere, the score’s chanting children, “blood for baby”, the way pregnancy turns into a form of body horror. McDonald – again unlike my beloved Italians - also clearly understands the difference between “weird” and “random”. While the supernatural occurrences never make sense in a traditional way, they do belong to each other, suggesting a world that doesn’t work by logic but by rules simply not made for humans.

Which is quite a thing for a film about teen pregnancy.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,in short,bruce mcdonald,chloe rose,robert patrick,horror