On WTF: Merantau (2009)

While most of the world is celebrating Gareth Evans's Indonesian action movie The Raid, I'm catching up with the past and watch the director's first team-up with his star Iko Uwais.

Lucky me, because Merantau just happens to be a pretty fantastic martial arts movie well worth anybody's time. My column on WTF-Film goes into a bit more detail, so why not click on through? (Please don't answer that in the negative).

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In short: Proteus (1995)

The yacht of some drug smugglers on the run with assorted girlfriends sinks in a joint-related accident. Their life boat carries the idiot gangsters and their girlfriends to safety in form of an oil rig.

But something doesn't seem to be right with the place at all. There's no crew to be seen anywhere, the lights in most of the rig's innumerable corridors are out - this just might be a ghost rig.

Our intrepid non-heroes soon stumble into the resident genetic mad science lab, manage not to see the pulsating goo patiently waiting to infect them in a corner, and come to the conclusion that something's not right with the place. Could it be that experiments with artificial genes (don't ask me) and a shark have created a horrible monstrosity out to assimilate and eat people, and that our non-heroes look really tasty to it?

Oh yes, it's an Alien/The Thing variant with a bit of Invasion of the Body Snatchers on an oil rig! Where do these filmmakers get their ideas from? Despite lacking any ideas of its own, and being pretty dumb, Proteus is a serviceable example of its particular breed of horror film. From time to time director Bob Keen (better known as a special effects guy) manages to create a somewhat suspenseful scene, and while there's nothing happening here that will surprise anyone, the film is at least decently paced.

Of course, to be as mildly entertained by Proteus as I was, one will need the ability to appreciate scenes and scenes of (pretty vile yet uninteresting) people running through dark corridors. That's the late 80s and 90s version of all those running through the woods scenes we all know and love from 70s horror films, and was probably created when producers realized that an important part of their audience just fucking hate trees (stupid trees); plus, corridors can be even darker, so you never need to shoot more than one take in them, because your audience can't see what's happening in them in any case.

But where was I? Oh, right, Proteus. Seeing as Keen's a special effects guy, I was a little surprised by the badness of the climactic monster encounter, when the monster of the appropriately evil name of Charlie - Sheen, one supposes - appears in its full shark/t-rex glory, as a barely mobile animatronic thing that looks about as threatening as Neil Gaiman. The rest of the effects are pretty okay, though, if, again, lacking any creative spark as well as the willingness to actually go for the body horror elements that just scream for some tasteful tastelessness.

Or, to use the immortal word the Internet likes so much: meh.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: A freak of nature whose crimes go beyond your wildest terrors!

Chronicle (2012): Turns out there is still life in the POV movie style. Josh Trank's semi-realistic "what if actual teenagers got superpowers" (in this case a pretty hefty dose of telekinesis) movie does some rather clever stuff with the whole POV angle and even uses said superpowers to find a reason to have more camera angles as normal in the style. There is, in fact, a lot that's clever about the film: the treatment of an abused character and his abuser is deeply pessimistic yet also believable, and the development of the relationship between the film's three main characters seems authentic.

Having said that, I also have to say the film didn't really move me emotionally as much as I wanted it too. While I appreciate most everything Trank does on an intellectual level, I never connected to it much on an emotional one, without being able to actually pin down why.

Intruders (2012): Ah, third act plot explanation (the more long-winded brother to the third act plot twist), old enemy, we meet again. Thanks to you, what begins as a moody, well-acted (especially by the child actors) examination of childhood fears turns into a tedious game of "explain everything" that doesn't actually add anything to what the film did up to that point, sucking the whole film dry of ambiguity and anything that might actually disturb or confuse an audience. In this particular case, the twist is certainly well constructed, but - as is often the case with these things - does seem to belong into a different movie than the one I watched up to that point, turning everything else in the movie into nothing but a long-winded set-up for an equally long-winded punch-line.

Paranormal Xperience 3D (2011): Honestly, that's the title. The film carrying that title is even worse. It's about a ridiculously vile group of medicine students visiting a ghost town for parapsychological research, and (hooray!) getting slaughtered. As is traditional. There is, of course, also some kind of plot twist, but I don't think anyone didn't see that particular one coming. For once, the twist can't ruin much anyway, for this is the sort of trite and boring horror that has no tension, atmosphere or sense of fun to be ruined by a twist; the only memorable element is an amount of product placement you generally only see in James Bond movies. Why Sony is so desperate to be connected with this particular piece of crap is anybody's guess.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,spanish movies,superheroes,sf,horror,josh trank,in short

Absentia (2011)

Callie (Katie Parker) arrives at her pregnant sister Tricia's (Courtney Bell) small house in the suburbs to help Tricia finally end a very difficult time in her life. Tricia's husband Daniel (Morgan Peter Brown) one day seven years ago just disappeared, leaving Tricia's life something of a shambles. Not that Callie's life is a bed of roses. She has a history of drug abuse and bad life decisions, as well as the tendency to just pack up and disappear when things get too rough for her.

Still, troubled as their relationship may have been at times, both sisters are trying to be there for each other. So Callie is doing her best to help Tricia make the final steps in having Daniel declared dead in absentia, and attempts to finally move Tricia out of the house she shared with Daniel, convincing her to start living again.

What Tricia doesn't tell Callie is that ever since she's started the process of declaring her husband dead, she's been having nightmares and hallucinations (or are they?) of a very angry Daniel. This sort of thing can of course be explained by trauma and stress, but soon enough weird things begin to happen to Callie too.

Everything that happens to the sisters seems to be connected to a nearby pedestrian tunnel and the unreasonably high number of disappearances of people and animals in the area, but is really something supernatural at play, or are people just leaving behind their troubles one way or the other?

Now, if every piece of indie horror were like this instead of being a part of a seemingly never-ending series of bad gore movies (I'm making unfair generalizations, I know, and apologize to all indie horror filmmakers who make more inspired films), I'd probably dedicate my whole blog to indie horror, never to look at anything else; at least for a week.

But honestly and in all appropriate enthusiasm, Mike Flanagan's Absentia is a film that hits all the right notes for me, a film that plays as if it were written by someone with a direct line to my brain. As it is in cases like this your mileage with the film at hand may very well vary even more than normal (after all, no two persons ever see the same film anyway). So it's probably best if I just indulge myself and count all the ways in which Absentia is awesome, without any pretence of critical distance.

First and foremost, there is Flanagan's direction and editing, inventively and with great intelligence keeping a film that in large parts plays out in three rooms and a tunnel into something visually dynamic and interesting without ever falling into the trap of getting showy with it. Flanagan has a fantastic sense for building up mood, treating the moments of dread and horror with the same sure hand he uses for the moments of intimacy. The latter does of course make the horror moments even stronger.

I was also pretty much floored by the film's sense of place. Sure, we're talking about a film taking place in the most quotidian suburb imaginable. However making such a place believable not only as a place where people could believably live quiet, quotidian lives but also one where the layers between the day-to-day and the outside - and possible the layers between people's inner lives and what is surrounding them - have literally and figuratively grown thin is an achievement all of its own.

Absentia also shows some very convincing acting, with especially the lead actresses being as flawed and sympathetic as one could wish for in a film like this. Again, there's a complete lack of showiness in their performances. I'd use the dread word "authenticity" if I weren't conditioned not to. Suffice it to say that Parker and Bell (as well as the actors in the smaller roles) do a fantastic job selling Absentia's more difficult moments, leaving the audience not much room to doubt the strange things happening to them.

The script is just as good as the rest of the movie too. The film's idea of a supernatural menace is clearly influenced by the Weird Tale tradition of horror (with nods in the direction of Lovecraft, Machen and Blackwood, and I don't use these names lightly), yet Flanagan's film does not stop at the point of imitation, and instead places (like many of the best writers of the contemporary Weird Tale do) the concepts of the classic Weird Tale in the context of contemporary urban life and the experiences of contemporary people. That's a fine position to explore concepts like loss, the wish to leave everything behind, and the horrors of what leaving everything behind might actually mean from, and Absentia knows well how to use it.

 

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Music Monday: Contorted Edition

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Bulldog Drummond (1929)

The former soldier Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond (Ronald Colman) is quite bored with his new life as useless upper-class lazypants. So, as you do in such cases, he puts an advertisement into the Times, looking for adventure.

Said adventure does indeed come in form of a girl named Phyllis (Joan Bennett) who invites our hero to a conspiratorial meeting in an inn in the country. Understandably, Drummond can not resist that sort of invitation. When they meet, Phyllis, who turns out to be young, pretty and quite a friend of dramatic hand-gestures, describes her troubles to Drummond. Her father is being held captive by the evil psychiatrist Dr. Lakington (Lawrence Grant) and his cronies, the brother and sister pair (or are they?) of "Pete" Peterson (Montagu Love) and the vamp Irma (Lilyan Tashman), who torture (Lakington will turn out to be quite the fan of electricity) the old gentleman into giving them access to his money.

Clearly, this sort of thing isn't done on Drummond's watch, especially not when there's a pretty girl to impress, so he - alas with the help of his mentally handicapped friend Algy (Claud Allister) and his butler as a horrifying un-comic relief double-whammy - goes about given the blackguards whatfor.

If you ask me, early talkies like Bulldog Drummond are more of an acquired taste than silent movies ever were - after all, the silents often have a dream-like quality to make up for their theatricality the very early talkies couldn't aspire to for technical reasons. Fortunately, this free adaptation of the first adventure of Sapper's crypto-fascist, racist hero makes liking it pretty easy.

Especially since it removes the fascist elements and most of the racism and replaces them with the universal language of the more friendly elements of pulpy fun and a large amount of silly witticisms. If you ever asked yourself where the Thin Man style of mysteries in the movies came from, this might be an auspicious place to start, for the dialogue - at least whenever Algy's not concerned - is generally charming and often really funny.

It sure helps that Ronald Colman seems perfect for Drummond as the film interprets him: highly competent, difficult to perturb, and never without a witty repartee. Colman's acting is quite different from that of most of his peers on screen. Allister and Grant - if in very different ways - are both of an annoying, stagy theatricality (exactly the type of acting you expect of actors working at a point in time when the rules for sound acting on screen were still being written) which only is enhanced by the more easy-going charm Colman oozes. Bennett and Tashman, for their parts, are all over the place. There are moments when Colman seems to pull the actresses away from the old ways of stiffness; at other times, you'd find pieces of wood who are more expressive.

Of course, this sort of thing is to be expected of a film from this period, and it's rather more sensible to concentrate on Colman's approach - that pretty much carries every scene he is in anyway - than on all that stiffness.

F. Richard Jones's direction is pacy, and more than once, framing, use of shadows, as well as the production design by William Cameron Menzies hint at the influence of German expressionism and make the film more interesting to look at than I had expected. Some scenes seem to pre-figure Universal horror and noir, even though these films would end up to bee completely different in tone. Plus, there's a minor mad scientist lab with a torture chamber and an electric door of which our scientist is inordinately proud.

Which is symptomatic of exactly the sort of pulpy thrills Bulldog Drummond offers when it's not letting its hero run his mouth. Plot contrivances, chases and minor fights are the name of the game, and are - as such things go - completely timeless. Well, for me at least.

Seeing as the film was made in the wonderful pre-code times of 1929 (although it doesn't belong to the classic pre-code era; this stuff is more complicated than algebra), it also has the opportunity to add other timeless things that delight me, like hints of (fake) incest, double entendres, dominant women, sexually "deviant" (read "not boring") villains, torture and everything else that's fun in the movies and (disregarding the torture) in real life.

I don't want to end another write-up with the question "what's not to like?", but really, what's not to like?

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,adventure,pulp,comedy,f. richard jones,ronald colman,claud allister,joan bennett,lilyan tashman

On WTF: Assignment Naschy: El Jorobado De La Morgue (1973)

aka Hunchback of the Morgue

Continuing my frightening adventures with the works of Spain's auteur of the insane Paul Naschy, I explore a film that finally reveals the truth about what goes on in those Bavarian mountain towns.

Necrophilia! Bestiality! Foot Fetishes! All that and a mad scientist await you in my column on WTF-Film. Paul Naschy loved us.

 

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Hairy Beasts: Der Hund von Blackwood Castle (1968)

aka The Monster of Blackwood Castle

aka The Horror of Blackwood Castle

Warning: there will be spoilers.

This May the agents of M.O.S.S. throw their collective gaze (warning: may resurrect the dead as mid-tempo zombies) toward everything hairy and beastly: King Kong, cuddly little dogs and more. To stay up to date on our exploits regarding the matter, you can just follow this handy link.

Der Hund von Blackwood Castle, despite a title that translates to "the hound of Blackwood Castle", only barely qualifies for the "Hairy Beasts" theme, because it may contain an evil dog, but it's really treating the poor thing strictly as a murder weapon that could be replaced by just about anything.

When Jane Wilson's (Karin Baal) estranged father, Captain Wilson (Otto Stern), dies, he leaves her run-down old Blackwood Castle and a bunch of problems she surely didn't expect.

For one, there's Wilson's shady lawyer's (Hans Söhnker) heavy insistence on Jane selling the castle as soon as possible (but only to the people he chooses, which would be him), there's a cellar full of snakes, and there's the Captain's former factotum Grimsby (Arthur Binder), all dress-sense a few centuries out of fashion and threatening demeanour, and these are just the problems Jane learns about early on in her stay.

Among the mysterious occurrences surrounding her Jane doesn't yet know about is the start of a series of murders; various shady people taking residence in the nearby inn of Lady Agathy Beverton (Agnes Windeck) and her brother Henry (Tilo von Berlepsch) meet a horrible end when walking the moors by the fake (and pretty ridiculous looking) poison fangs of the titular hound. The hound's victims also have a tendency to disappear afterwards.

That is, until one of them finally re-appears right in Blackwood Castle's living room. Jane, being the heroine of the piece, calls Scotland Yard, but to the audience's disappointment, there's no inspector available, so Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) and his secretary Miss Finley (Ilse Pagé) take on the case personally. Poor Jane.

Sir John will for once actually have to use his own brain to cut through the mystery. And I haven't even mentioned the added complexity of the case provided by the not murdered shady residents of Lady Agathy's inn (Wallace inspector actors Heinz Drache and Horst Tappert, among others), or by the suspicious manner in which village doctor Doc Adams (Alexander Engel) and Sir Henry act. Only one thing is clear: there must be something quite valuable hidden in or around Blackwood Castle, and whoever knows of these valuables is willing to murder people with a hound.

I am tempted to call Alfred Vohrer's Hund von Blackwood Castle an archetypal example of the German Edgar Wallace Cycle that began in the 50s, but that would only be half true.

Sure, half the film's cast can also be found in about half of the other Wallace movies, and the film's plot is a variation on all the usual Wallace themes - there's the innocent woman inheriting money and a whole lot of trouble from a shady relation, the mysterious killer who murders other nasty people by bizarre means, the typical assortment of secret doors, threatening animals, and other signs of pulp cinema, and a plot that is so convoluted it becomes difficult to keep track of the cast and their motives (which isn't helped by the fact that people's actions only barely make sense even when you take their hidden agendas into account).

On the other hand, Herbert Reinecker's script puts some work into using some of these elements a bit differently than usual. Firstly, while using Siegfried Schürenberg as the main police detective gives the man a bit too much room for a comedy shtick that is generally more amusing when used sparingly, it also gives the movie the opportunity to eschew the whole "male hero romances the heroine" business that nearly always is a weak point in films of the series completely; it's just too bad that the script doesn't use this opportunity to make Karin Baal's character more active, but since this is a German movie and not one made in Hong Kong, that would be too much to hope for.

Secondly, Der Hund confuses the role of its hero even more by casting actors like Tappert (seriously playing a man called Donald Fairbanks) and especially Drache (his character name is Connery, Humphrey Connery) who would usually play the male hero as some of the film's bad guys. To make matters even more self-conscious, Drache does seem to play his usual inspector/private eye/etc working incognito part for large parts of the movie, only to finally be exposed to be just as evil as everyone else is.

Thanks to this twist, Der Hund has the rather curious distinction of being a movie in which every character apart from the heroine is either an idiot (hullo Sir John, hullo Lady Agathy), evil, a snake, or a dog with ridiculous fake teeth. Which would put Der Hund's world view right next to that of the more pessimistic noirs, if its inherent silliness and the self-conscious winking at the audience Vohrer so loved in his movies wouldn't suggest that to be an indulgence in over-interpretation.

On the directorial side, Vohrer seems most alive here when he can indulge in his love for silly gadgets (I still don't have a clue how that sarcophagus/chess set contraption is supposed to work - it's awesome anyhow) or slightly bizarre sight gags (Vohrer truly loves making jokes about monocles and eye patches). The director's treatment of the suspense scenes seems less enthusiastic this time around: while the scenes of dog attacks and people sneaking through the moors aren't done badly - Vohrer probably being too much of the professional for that - I couldn't help but think his heart wasn't really in them while I watched the movie.

Which, in combination with the high self-referentiality of its most interesting elements, makes Der Hund von Blackwood Castle quite typical of the decadent (colour) phase of the Rialto Wallace krimis. It's not exactly a film I'd recommend to people starting out with the series, but one that reserves its charms for an audience (pretty much like its contemporary German audience that had been eating these films up for a decade by then, and would continue to do so in TV broadcasts for decades to come) well versed in the ways of the Wallace cycle.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,hairy beasts,krimi,alfred vohrer,heinz drache,karin baal,horst tappert,siegfried schürenberg,agnes windeck

In short: 23:59 (2011)

1983. A group of young soldiers are on the last leg of their national service, spending the last few weeks in a training camp on a jungle island.

There, strange things begin to happen. At first, it's only Tan (Tedd Chan), the group's supposed coward, who is affected by visions of two ghosts - a child, and woman with a hole where her face should be - which doesn't exactly strengthen his position among his peers. Tan's only actual friend among the group is his childhood friend Jeremy (Henley Hii), but even Jeremy seems to be at the end of his tether with Tan's often rather hysterical behaviour, especially since Jeremy is your typical horror movie sceptic denying his own past connections to the supernatural. Jeremy, you see, has the Third Eye and can let ghosts speak through him, but he is convinced that power is something his father invented to milk fools for their money.

But even Jeremy will change his tune when Tan dies on a cross-jungle march under mysterious circumstances, and the rest of their platoon begins to be plagued by ghostly appearances, dreams and even possession.

I might be wrong about it from my far-off perch in Europe, but it seems as if there's by now coming a minor but steady trickle of decent horror movies from Singapore. Enough of them at least, to awaken the hope in me there'll come one exceptional horror film from there that will start a whole wave of movies trying to copy it, bringing with it a load of crap but also quite a few pearls, as it always happens under circumstances like this.

Gilbert Chan's 23:59 is not that film, but it is a cheap, short and competent of little horror movie that knows what kind of story it wants to tell and goes about that business in a straightforward, mostly effective manner without using too many cheap tricks, losing itself in comic relief, or swooping in with a third act plot twist.

If that sounds like a bit of a conservative approach to horror to you, I won't disagree there, but it also seem to be an effective way to make a movie that works pretty well in its own, unassuming way. It's not a horror film out to change the world or scare your pants off, it is however one quite decent at building up the proper mood of a place and time where the barriers between the living and the dead have grown thin. Plus, it's so unassuming, not even the "teach the unbeliever the truth about the spirit world" parts of the plot manage to annoy me. While the film is probably out trying to convince its audience of its philosophical outlook, it's fitting its plot and characters to that outlook instead of imposing it on them.

As somebody not from Singapore, I found myself also quite fascinated by the cultural and temporal background the film shows in - again - a very unassuming yet quietly effective manner, the mixing between more traditional Asian concepts and mores and Western influences, as well as the slightly different outlook Chan has on these things than what I'm used to from other South-East Asian films.

Technorati-Markierungen: singaporean movies,horror,in short,gilbert chan,tedd chan,henley hii

Black Angel (1946)

When bar singer Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) is murdered, quite a bit of circumstantial evidence points to her lover Kirk Bennett (John Phillips) as the murderer, enough so that the glorious American justice systems sees fit to sentence him to death.

Ironically, the only one who believes Kirk's insistence on his innocence is the one he's been lying to all along, his wife Catherine (June Vincent). After the sentencing, June decides to put all her energy into finding the only piece of evidence that could exonerate Kirk, a heart-shaped broach Mavis's killer took with him. Her investigation leads Catherine to Mavis's estranged husband, the pianist and composer Marty (Dan Duryea). Something about June pulls Marty out of the alcoholic stupor that is his usual state of mind, and convinces the alcoholic to help the desperate yet gutsy woman.

The trail leads the new partners to bar owner Marko (Peter Lorre, obviously having a lot of fun with his pasted-on cigarette). Marko may or may not have had good reasons of his own to kill Mavis. Catherine at least is convinced Marko is hiding the broach in his safe, so she and Marty develop a plan to get closer to the man and his safe 70s Bollywood would approve of: they turn into a singer/pianist duo (quite like that of Mavis and Marty once were) and hire on in Marko's establishment. Things don't go as planned, of course.

Ray William Neill's Black Angel (based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich, like so many other noirs) is a very fine, b-list Universal noir that contains so many elements typical of what we now think of as part of the noir genre, listing them may make the film sound like a parody, or at least as a pretty dumb series of clichés. Thanks to Neill's atmospheric direction and a script that contains quite a few moments of cleverness and hidden depth, nothing could be further from the truth, for if you do it right, you can make clichés sing like the truth, while certain improbabilities of plotting always seem to be rather the point of film noir anyway.

Of course, when it comes to helping me ignore improbabilities and clichés in a movie, a nice ensemble of actors like the one working here is useful too. Duryea, Vincent and Lorre in a good mood - like they are here - would be more than able to convince me of much less believable things, like politicians not in the pocket of big media corporations.

While the film contains more than enough inventive visual moments - Neill sure loves transitions that are more than just cuts to the next scene, and does put an equal amount of effort in meaningful framing of scenes, which gives the whole affair a pleasant visual flow that only breaks when it is supposed to break - this isn't one of those noirs where the emphasis truly lies on the visual side of things.

Neill seems more interested in the subtextual load his script offers, and the way it plays with and sometimes against certain noir stereotypes. Just to take an obvious example, this isn't a film where a male main character is seduced or beset by a femme fatale (though one could argue that the typical male lead in these films really seduces himself), but rather one where the absence of the femme fatale creates a void at least one of the male characters needs to fill.

From a certain perspective, Black Angel is a film exploring its lack of a living femme fatale. It is certainly no accident that Marty seems to attempt to turn Catherine into a woman very much like his dead wife, nor will it come as a surprise that Catherine loses more of her scruples the longer she stays in the role men seem to want her to play. The film's not so crass as to have her turn "bad", but it's still a clear part of the set-up. I'm of the opinion that the femme fatale in most noirs isn't so much the deadly and infinitely ruthless monster the films pretend she is, but a useful foil on which the genre's male main characters can project their own weakness, and Marty's creation of his own private femme fatale here looks like a point in favour of that idea to me.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,roy william neill,dan duryea,june vincent,peter lorre,noir,reviews

Music Monday: Looking At Flowers Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,waco brothers

Dragonslayer (1981)

In your basic medieval fantasy world (it's never quite clear if it's supposed to be a secondary one very close to out own, or our own world with a bit of added magic), magic is one the wane, leaving Ulrich (Ralph Richardson), an elderly wizard as one of the last - if not the last - of his kind. The rest of Ulrich, his even older servant Hodge (Sydney Bromley), and his magically not very competent apprentice Galen (Peter MacNicol) is disturbed by a group of peasants from the far away country of Urland.

The group, lead by a rather ambiguously gendered young man named Valerian (Caitlin Clarke), has come to ask Ulrich to slay the dragon who has been plaguing their country for years. Urland's king, Casiodorus Rex (Peter Eyre) has struck a deal with the dragon, sacrificing a virgin determined via a lottery to the creature two times a year so the dragon won't burn down half his kingdom.

It's not a satisfactory state of affairs, really, even if you're not completely against virgin sacrifices, for it just so happens that the virginal girl children of the upper classes of society never get chosen by the lottery. Why, one might think the system is rigged against the poor!

After some old-mannish hemming and hawing, Ulrich agrees to help his visitors. Alas, before he has even begun the journey to Urland, the wizard manages a pretty impressive suicide by proxy, said proxy being in the form of the king's henchman Tyrian (John Hallam), said suicide being by way of the wizard letting himself being stabbed with a dagger to prove his magic and dying of it. Oops, as they say outside of fantasy worlds.

While poking around in his former master's possessions, Galen realizes that he can use a magic stone to make his minor magics much more powerful than they usually are, and decides, for reasons the film never really makes its audience privy to, to take on Ulrich's dragon slaying mission.

The whole process starts out well enough, what with Galen burying the dragon's lair under a landslide, but the situation deteriorates once the young man meets the rather displeased Casiodorus and realizes that the dragon isn't as dead as everyone (except Casiodorus - one imagines a dragon to be quite a useful distraction from internal political problems, especially before the term "terrorist" was invented) hoped. Surprisingly enough, Galen will turn out to be more tenacious and courageous than anyone could have expected.

Matthew Robbins's Dragonslayer (co-written by Robbins and future adventure game developing legend Hal Barwood) may be a Disney production, but if you expect the sort of slick, sugary-sweet and ethically as well as politically conservative confection much of the studio's output is, you will be sorely disappointed. Dragonslayer falls right into the middle of a phase when Disney's film arm - like a mouse and copyright terror based version of Hammer - seemed rather confused about its position in the market place, and gave immense amounts of money to projects made by people who actually cared about more than box office numbers and teaching children not to be uppity. For once, Disney was a studio that took artistic risks, perfectly willing to finance a film like this, an often dark fantasy movie with more than one clever idea, and politics of a sort you would never expect to find in a Disney production.

Robbins and Barlow, with the help of the best, coherent and believable production design money can buy, obviously put a lot of thought into their film's world building, realizing how important it is to sell a fantasy world - even one close to our own past - through convincing details that make it looked lived in. Dragonslayer's world feels and looks believably medieval except for Galen and Valerian, who are blandly American (and not too well acted to boot). Of course, when were the heroes in Hollywood movies hoping for a young audience not?

Thankfully, the film's story - the sort of Hero's Journey that takes the whole "killing of the father" quite literally in a very ironic way - takes place in front of an interesting background that's fit to distract from its boring protagonists. The world of Dragonslayer isn't just at a point where magic begins to disappear from it, but also at one where pagan religion is beginning to be replaced by Christianity.

The film is clearly on the side of the pagans here, for all Christian priests we get to see are of the nasty, probably pope-pleasing, type whose main traits seem to be arrogance and hypocrisy; the only victory Christianity achieves during the course of the movie is based on falsely taking credit for the effect of some good old pagan magic.

This savaging (or in one case, roasting) of the Church is part of a political subtext that's so anti-authoritarian you'd have a hard time convincing me of being in a Disney movie or a traditional cinematic fantasy tale if I hadn't watched the film myself. All figures of authority - apart from those very few willing to sacrifice themselves instead of others - are figures of derision here, kings and priests aren't born to rule, but people who are loathsome, casually brutal, and sometimes funny in their ineptness. The film doesn't make this point subtly, but it's not a point that needs subtlety.

Dragonslayer's script has some other features I find rather pleasant. There's a willingness to go to places you would not expect in a Disney movie or most other Hollywood productions of this type, a readiness to be grim and brutal when it is appropriate without falling into the trap of becoming grim and brutal only for the sake of being edgy.

In addition to its very interesting script (that is even interesting enough to distract me from the whole Hero's Journey thing), its fine production design and good acting by anyone but the youthful protagonists (who are more often neutral than actively bad), Dragonslayer also presents a very fine dragon, created through a mixture of animatronics and technologically enhanced stop motion that manages the difficult mission of creating a dragon that looks exactly as impressive and fearsome as it is supposed to be.

What else could one ask of a film?

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,fantasy,matthew robbins,peter macnicol,caitlin clarke,ralph richardson

In short: Naked Killer (1992)

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not an admirer of the horrible Wong Jing. The man's general attitude towards movie making, which can be summarized with "I don't care enough to make an effort", just rubs me the wrong way. Additionally, unlike the man, I don't think rape jokes are very funny.

But I've always made an exception for the Wong Jing written and produced Naked Killer, for it is a movie that shows what can happen when the frightful man does bother to apply himself. It's not as if the script for this one made that much more sense than anything else Wong Jing has written, but it does at least tell a story with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end, instead of playing out as what feels like random scenes from different movies haphazardly stitched together, which is the usual Wong Jing feel. Furthermore, while Naked Killer takes place on a planet where traumatized hero cops begin to puke whenever they touch a gun (and suffer from erectile dysfunction only looking at Chingmy Yau can cure, but let's not go there), other cops are named "Dickhead", where part of the killer training consists of getting locked up in a pop art cellar with a chained rapist, and where people dress in the awesome primary-coloured (remember when movies had colours?) things the actors wear here, the crazy for once does make just enough sense to be entertaining. It's like the adaptation of a men's adventure novel about a killer where all the testosterone-y men have been replaced by women. The audience of this sort of thing (hullo Mum!) does like after all two things the most: ridiculous violence and staring at sexily clad women; as Carrie Ng's character here would agree, there's no need at all to feature men at all. Though Naked Killer is at least trying to cover all its bases by also featuring a Simon Yam masturbation scene.

A lot of what's fun about Naked Killer - and it's really a very, very fun movie - I blame on director Clarence Ford. Ford has the early 90s HK aesthetic down to an art, featuring the expected mix of blue light, fast edits and Evil Dead-inspired camera work most directors working for Wong Jing always seem to bored or tired (now, what happens in Jing's production house, inquiring minds want to know) to use consistently or as exhilarating as Ford does here. If people aren't fighting, there is - of course - more footage of Ng, Yau, Yiu Wai and Yam in ridiculous poses that often look like an alien's idea of sexiness to me than any sane person could ask for, giving the film an overheated mood as if nobody involved could think about anything but sex, even when thinking of sex seems totally inappropriate in a given context. In part, we can thank a "no breasts" clause in Yau's, Ng's, and Yiu Wai's contracts for the film's ridiculous imagination when it comes to the sexiness; it is, it turns out, possible to turn anything into softcore.

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,in short,wong jing,clarence ford,chingmy yau,simon yam,carrie ng,yiu wai,action,exploitation

On WTF: Hairy Beasts! Santo Vs. Las Lobas (1976)

The month of hairy beasts continues when I encounter what may be the best film ever made: Santo vs. Los Lobas. It's not just a duel of the ages, but also a seriously strange, and very serious horror movie as they were only made during the 70s. The inclusion of Santo is icing on an already incredibly tasty cake.

My column on WTF-Film continues with the appropriate gushing, so you know what to do.

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,lucha,horror,reviews,el santo,ruben galindo,rodolfo de anda,gloria mayo,carlos suarez,other places,hairy beasts

In short: Outpost: Black Sun (2012)

Now, having read my less than amused ranting about Nazis at the Center of the Earth you may believe me completely opposed to the use of Nazis as pulp movie bad guy fodder. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just think you should do so without pretending concentration camps are funny (while Hitler, obviously, is a very good object to make fun of).

Steve Barker's sequel to his own pulp-y Nazi zombie movie Outpost (alas lacking Ray Stevenson for obvious reasons) does most everything right when it comes to the treatment of his pulp Nazi zombies. We are in classic B-movie territory here, so expect the Nazi zombies to be just like Nazis zombies always are, doing Nazi zombie things for decrepit old Nazi war criminals, while a couple of civilians - one the mandatory plucky young woman (Catherine Steadman) who proves her pluckiness by being responsible for the death of an octogenarian war criminal in his rest home, the other the just as mandatory guy of dubious moral standing (Richard Coyle) and an incompetent (they never met a perimeter they wanted to secure) British special forces unit try to destroy the mysterious Nazi zombie making machine before the military nukes the place from orbit (it's the only way to be sure, or so I've heard). The whole thing doesn't go too well, of course.

Disappointingly, Outpost BS is filmed in the usual colour-drained way every horror movie in this decade is bound by law to use, so expect your colourful comic book action horror nonsense to happen in sickly green, grey, and brown, and me to be a bit bored by that particular aesthetic dead end.

However, it at least is colourful action horror nonsense, with a plot that begins halfway believable - I'm talking believable for the realm of the Nazi zombie movie here - but gets crazier and ever more pulpy fast. I wish somebody would give Barker a bit more money for one of his next projects, so that he could really let his highly entertaining imagination loose. As it stands, Outpost BS is still a film full of Nazi zombies, an evil Nazi plan that seems to consist of "make Nazi zombies, hope they'll take over the world before elderly Nazi boss dies of old age", a tortured scientist who talks like Gollum and shoots electricity while hanging over the Nazi zombie making machine (which really could use a snazzy name like "The Nazi-Zombificator™), a Nazi zombie knife fight, and the Nazi zombie sister of Left For Dead's witch. Even with all the green and grey, that's more than enough to keep any sane viewer entertained.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,horror,action,pulp,zombies,steve barker,catherine steadman,richard coyle

Black Magic 2 (1976)

An unnamed city in South-East Asia. A series of peculiar, medically inexplicable and really rather horrible illnesses (of course featuring worms and ugly sores) and deaths has confused the world view of physician Shi Zhen Sheng (Lam Wai-Tiu) so much, he's now convinced they are caused by black magic. Shi invites his doctor friend Qi Zhong Ping (Ti Lung) and his wife and partner in science Cui Ling (Tanny Tien Ni) to town, in the hope that the couple can help find a way to break the spells.

Not surprisingly, Qi Zhong and Cui Ling are sceptical concerning their friend's talk of magic and spells; instead of going witch hunting, they prefer to investigate the cases scientifically. These investigations don't lead to any results, though, for Shi Zhen is absolutely right - there is a black magician, a man named Kang Cong (Lo Lieh) in town, using his powers to acquire the two most important things in his life, money and breast milk (which he needs to drink fresh from the breast to keep his youthful appearance despite an age of 80). And now, Kang Cong has decided that Shi Zhen's wife Margarete (Lily Li) looks like an excellent breast milk donor to him. Even after the magician has put a spell on Margarete, causing her to get highly pregnant with an ugly lump of flesh ("It's a freak", Ti Lung diagnoses) in just a few hours, Shi Zhen's friends aren't convinced of the existence of magic.

For that, they propose a test: hire Kang Cong to cast a spell on Cui Ling. Would you believe it's not a very good idea put oneself into the hands of a black magician and that consequently, things go very badly for the people of medicine?

Despite its pioneering status when it comes to Hong Kong horror films, I never cared too much for the first of Meng Hua-Ho's Black Magic movies, perhaps because the gross out one looks for in one's HK horror took place well enough, but it and the weirdness that is the other half of this very special horror sub-genre never found a way to work together all that well there.

That's not something I can say about the sequel (also by Meng Hua-Ho, with the same actor base playing different characters). Black Magic 2 brings the gross-out and the weirdness together in the most pleasantly entertaining ways, at least if you're like me and can find entertainment in things like maggots, and worms and pus and Lo Lieh stealing pubic hair to get at that valuable breast milk; "I needed breast milk" is now my favourite new excuse for doing evil.

If these things don't row your boat, how about Lo Lieh's cellar full of zombies he awakens by hammering big nails into their heads? Ti Lung eating the eyes of a self-declared wise man and consequently getting more manly? Lo Lieh throwing his cat at someone to get some much-coveted blood for evil spell-work from its claws?

Clearly, every sane person reading about these elements of joy will want to run awayout and acquire Black Magic 2 as quickly as possible, but wait, there's more!

Like the fact that the acting ensemble is in a pretty awesome mood, with Lo Lieh having a lot of fun with sneering, making bug eyes, and spitting blood at corpses, Ti Lung being his knightly self, Lily Li undressing and Tanny Tien Ni knowing how to use a hatchet.

And the fact that Meng Hua-Ho directs the whole mess of pus, insects, nudity, bad back projection, and a pulp horror finale (complete with a small army of the undead and a burning house) of the highest degree with a great eye for the pretty; seldom has a close-up of a festering wound full of worms looked this photogenic. Some of the more creatively realized scenes of horror hint at an influence of mid-period Hammer and Italian horror through their careful lighting and the moody photography, giving the quite outrageous (yet not as insane as these films would become in good time) pulp horror story the audience witnesses a veneer of class that stands in delightful contrast to Black Magic 2's highly exploitative nature. Do I love the movie and its director for it? I sure do.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,horror,exploitation,meng hua ho,ti lung,tanny tien ni,lily li,lo lieh,shaw brothers

The Nesting (1981)

During the production of her newest novel, writer Lauren Cochrane (Robin Groves), never exactly a picture of mental health it seems, has developed a serious case of agoraphobia. She decides that the best way to cope with her condition is for her to move from her native New York to the country for a time.

Out in the boons with her friend Mark (Christopher Loomis), Lauren feels strangely drawn to a place where she finds an old, dilapidated, yet beautiful mansion that looks exactly like the house she had in mind when she was writing her latest book, "The Nesting". Fascinated, Lauren decides that the house is to be her new country home. The owner, a senile old coot named Colonel LeBrun (John Carradine in a horrible state) would be quite willing to rent it, yet for some reason, taking one look at Lauren is enough for him to suffer a stroke that leaves him speechless and unconscious for most of the rest of the movie; fortunately, his grandson Daniel (Michael David Lally), rogue physicist, is there to take care of the renting business.

In a turn of events that'll come as no surprise to anyone but Lauren, her new dream home leaves something to be desired. Once the writer has moved in, her nights are disturbed by nightmares and peculiar dreams full of sexual undercurrents, grasping hands and a see-through Gloria Grahame. Initially, these dreams make the writer quite happy, for she has never been able to remember her dreams at all, yet now does so quite clearly. That happiness soon gives place to hysteria, when it becomes less and less clear to Lauren that her dreams actually only are dreams, and not ghostly apparitions. Soon enough, these ghosts find their first victims.

If you know him at all, you'll probably know The Nesting's director Armand Weston for a series of exceedingly dark and intense porn movies made in a time and place when hardcore porn directors had ambitions to make actual movies that just happened to include lots of sex, and weren't at all afraid to make sex look anything but enticing. As every ambitious porn director must, Weston also tried his hand at the horror genre, resulting in this, a pretty strange mix of haunted house movie, evil country yokel film, Southern Gothic not actually taking place in the South, and psychological horror that just might be the most Italian horror movie of 1981 not made by Italians or in Italy.

During its first thirty minutes or so, I thought I had The Nesting pegged as a cleverly directed (say what you will about Weston, but the man knows how to frame scenes so that they show the mental state of his characters) haunted house movie of the type where the haunting and the inner life of the main character are so inextricably entwined there'll be no telling what's supernatural and what mental illness. Sure enough, that's a card the film will continue to play later on, too, as well as trying its hand at pretending to be the story of a woman cleansing herself from post-natal trauma, but at that point, it will have already exploded into a series of increasingly bizarre scenes of screaming and mild mayhem that start with the physically dubious death of Lauren's psychiatrist (it's all very Freudian, really), make a little stop over at the house of a mad country person, guest star a flying cradle, and so on and so forth until its quite impossible to make out what the film really is supposed to be about, or for what kind of mood Weston is going. There's an explanation for most of the film's spooks late in the film, but the reason for Lauren's haunting and the way it actually plays out don't make a lick of sense when brought together, really putting The Nesting on the same level of merry what-the-hell-ness as, say, the films of Lucio Fulci.

Apart from the American movie's much lower level of gore and blood, Fulci's body of work truly is the best comparison I can come up with: there's the same love of sideways melodrama, people acting so weird they are more embodied mental states than characters, actors that can go from terrible to very convincing from one scene to the next, batty dialogue, plot lines disappearing and reappearing out of and into nowhere, explanations that fall ever so slightly short of making sense, flourishes (like Daniel's physicist job) that don't seem to have a reason to exist, and supernatural attacks often disturbing through their wrong-ness. And just like with Fulci, it's all presented in stops and starts, yet imbued with a deep, lingering sense for creating mood, an atmosphere of decay that is only increased by the film's logical missteps and weird pacing.

Now, Weston's film isn't quite as good as those of the maestro at his best. The mood is not quite lingering enough, and the weirdness not quite outré enough to keep a viewer as deeply engaged as Fulci's films can. However, for a film that was probably shot on a shoe-string budget to make use of a fantastic looking haunted house somebody in the production team stumbled upon (I'm speculating wildly here, so if I'm wrong, don't sue me), The Nesting is quite the thing. It's also proof - if anybody needed more of it - that US directors can succeed at the whole "horror as illogical, over-excited mood piece" approach to filmmaking nearly as well as we Europeans do, if they only apply themselves.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,armand weston,robin groves,john carradine,horror

Music Monday: Dark End Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,dan penn,spooner oldham

Assignment Naschy (Slight Return): La Cruz Del Diablo (1975)

aka Cross of the Devil

Some time in the 19th century. English writer Alfred Dawson (Ramiro Oliveros) suffers from a bit of writer's block. One may make his love of his hashish pipe responsible for that, as his girlfriend Maria (Carmen Sevilla) clearly does. Be it as it may, Dawson's publisher is getting rather cross with him.

So it's quite useful - if certainly disturbing - when a letter from Alfred's sister Justine (Mónica Randall), who lives with her husband Enrique (Eduardo Fajardo) in his native Spain, arrives, in which she tells him about having had a miscarriage and now being quite at odds with her husband who'll "never forgive her". As a devoted brother, Alfred decides to travel to Spain at once; as a devoted girlfriend and being of Spanish heritage herself, Maria decides to come with him.

Once the couple arrives in Spain, they find Justine dead, supposedly murdered by a vagrant who will all too soon hang himself while in jail. Alfred is not convinced of the man's guilt, suspecting Enrique and his incredibly shady secretary Cesar del Rio (Adolfo Marsillach) of having murdered his sister. In fact, if Alfred were aware of a short scene between Justine and Cesar that reveals she had an inexplicable affair with Cesar and suggests "unnatural experiments" committed by the secretary, he'd be even less convinced of the official story.

Justine wasn't killed close to home, but at something called the "Mountain of Souls", supposedly a place cursed by having been the location of the final stand of the ever evil Templars. Alfred feels so drawn to the place he convinces Enrique and Cesar to travel there with him, possibly in the hope of provoking the true killer to reveal himself. But what Alfred learns there when he and his traveling companions arrive is much stranger than he could ever have expected.

Hammer veteran (among other things - he's also responsible for Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, but it's better not to think about that) director John Gilling's final film after some years working exclusively on British TV shows was produced in Spain, shot in Spanish, and was cast with Spanish actors.

I had expected it to be a piece of Gothic horror in the Hammer tradition, just shot on a lower budget and with less lavish looking sets, but La Cruz Del Diablo is standing with both feet in the tradition of the continental cinema of the fantastic, eschewing the comparatively logical dramaturgy of British horror in the Hammer style for a languidly paced narrative that's so ambiguous it never becomes clear how much of what happens in it only takes place in its protagonist's rather drug-addled mind (I know hashish doesn't work that way, exactly, but the film pretends it does) and how much is truly supernatural horror.

I'm pretty sure Paul Naschy, co-writing under his Jacinto Molina name, is in part responsible for the film's not always logical progression and its dream-like mood, for that's the sort of thing Naschy included in most everything he did with more personal involvement too. I also suspect that it was, at least in part, Naschy's idea to make a film based on themes and motives of Spanish post-romanticist/romanticist (whichever website you want to believe - I'm not knowledgeable enough about Spanish literature to have an opinion here; I only know that the little I read of the writer reminded me of the sensibilities of German romanticist E.T.A. Hoffmann, if clearly coming from a different cultural background) Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, putting the film into a place far from any interest in realism.

Surprisingly enough, Gilling, whom I usually see as a competent professional with moments of greatness (he did direct two of my favourite Hammer films with the Cornish duo, after all) acquits himself very well in the unfamiliar surroundings and makes a film as fog-shrouded, confusing and strange as any native Spaniard. Even though Gilling's direction isn't flashy, he manages to imbue the slow proceedings with exactly the kind of macabre and decrepit mood they need to suck a viewer in. There may be little happening for most of the film, but it does that with such a weight I found myself quite excited by La Cruz.

But then I do have a weakness for films more interested in building a strange and dreamlike mood than in telling a clear and linear story, so if anyone not quite as in love of mood for mood's sake will be as excited as I was while watching La Cruz Del Diablo is probably doubtful.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,horror,gothic,reviews,john gilling,carmen sevilla,ramiro oliveros,eduardo fajardo

In short: Pánico (1966)

This omnibus film contains three unconnected stories.

"Pánico" finds a young woman fleeing through the woods. She is chased by a screeching older woman with a knife, and has strange, metaphorical encounters with three men and a baby doll. Holy Eisenstein, Batman!

"Soledad" concerns two men in a jungle somewhere in South or Central America, burying a woman who died from Yellow Fever and then attempting to make their way to the next larger settlement. Clearly, there's enough tension between the men to induce melodramatic declarations towards the sky, murder, and perhaps vengeance from beyond the grave.

The final story, "Angustia", tells of the problems a scientist gets into when he ignores some obvious safety rules in his lab while developing a new anaesthetic. Turns out letting your pet cat run free in your lab and having an open cup of coffee on your laboratory table can lead to trouble like…a premature burial.

The Mexican movie Pánico was directed by experienced worker in every genre Julián Soler, and finds the veteran in a somewhat experimental mood. All three of the film's episode are trying to enhance their rather simple plots through heavy use of meaningful montage, the bluntest visual metaphors imaginable, and every camera or direction trick that was en vogue and cheap in 1966.

For the first two episodes, Soler's attempts to intensify his stories through style succeeds for the most part. "Pánico" (the episode) probably makes the best use of the semi-pop art elements making up Soler's visual language here; while the metaphors are much too blunt for my tastes, the segment works well as an attempt to put a high-strung state of mind into pictures.

The film's second segment may be even more melodramatic, featuring an astonishing amount of unnecessary, yet stylish, flashbacks that in the end segue into a very poe-esque (possible) vengeance from the grave. If you can get used to the - again - high-strung impression the story's characters and the surrounding filmic techniques make, you might find the segment quite effective.

The third and final segment is clearly the weakest one. It gives more than a little nod towards Poe, too, but does nothing much of interest with the whole premature burial aspect. This is supposed to be the mandatory funny segment of the film, but really isn't a great moment in humour at all. Neither the acting nor the writing are strong enough to elevate this part of Pánico above the level of a time filler and end the omnibus film on something of a sour note.

Still, the first two episodes are stylistically interesting enough - unless one can't stomach the melodramatics - to make Pánico worth watching. It may not be a masterpiece of Mexican horror, but it does try its hardest not to be bland.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: mexican movies,horror,thriller,comedy,in short,julián soler

On WTF: Darna! Ang Pagbabalik (1994)

It had to happen! I finally make my first frightened step into the wild and joyous world of Filipino superheroine Darna.

Because I'm a wimp and like understanding what's going on in a movie, I chose to start with the one Darna movie I have subtitles for. It was a wise decision, as my column on WTF-Film will hopefully show.

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,reviews,peque gallaga,lore reyes,superheroes,fantasy,horror,anjanette abayari,cherie gil,other places

Hairy Beasts: Bigfoot (1969? 1970?)

This May the agents of M.O.S.S. throw their collective gaze (warning: may turn living matter to stone) toward everything hairy and beastly: King Kong, Feroz Khan's chest and more. To stay up to date on our exploits regarding the matter, you can just follow this handy link.

But there's time for that later. Now, follow me into the wooded mountains of Nowhere, USA, where a trio of bigfoots - bigfeet as we call them in Europe - is kidnapping women, stripping them down to their underwear (or indescribable-wear), and tying them to trees.

First, the hairy gang kidnaps pilot and exposition fairy Joi Landis (Joi Lansing), then they steal Chris (Judy Jordan), "the girl" of kinda-sorta hippie biker Rick (Christopher Mitchum, still young enough to try and move his face). After getting short thrift by the local sheriff, Rick decides to mount his own rescue expedition, getting unexpected help by "comedic" Southern traveling salesmen Jasper B. Hawks (John Carradine in his embarrassing phase) and Elmer Briggs (look, it's Robert Mitchum's little brother John, sporting the sort of facial hair that would nominate this filmlet for the Hairy Beasts project even without the bigfeet!). Now, Jasper may plan on catching himself a bigfoot and get rich through it, but a guy with a gun is a guy with a gun, right?

Turns out hunting bigfeet is more difficult than Rick thought, and it'll need all of his kinda-sorta hippie biker friends, some dy-no-mite, and a lot of walking through the woods to rescue the girls.

Not all that unexpectedly, the month of hairy beasts began a bit painful down here when I thought to myself: "would-be interspecies rapist bigfoot, two Mitchums, bikers, and the living corpse of John Carradine, whatever could go wrong?", and then proceeded to watch Bigfoot, or, as I'd rather call it, Various Groups Of People Walk, Ride, Drive, Or Run Through The Woods Forever.

Now, as even irregular readers of my musings will realize, frequent exposure to films like (the glorious) Don't Go In The Woods…Alone has helped me build up quite a high tolerance for the - oftentimes frightening - sub-genre of the walking-through-the-woods low low budget horror movie, so I feel pretty secure in surviving anything such a film can throw at me without falling asleep. However, Bigfoot is a movie clearly out to show people like me where our limits lie, featuring fifteen (warning: numbers may not be quite exact) boring scene of people moving through the woods for every two boring, static scenes of old coots in front of cheap sets (hello, former western star Ken Maynard in a role that could have been cut like just about everybody else's) mumbling irrelevant nonsense at each other. It's all a bit much, or rather, a bit much of nothing even for my hardened tastes.

It does not help the film's watchability that parts of it seem to be meant as comedic - though I dare not venture a guess which parts specifically beyond the painfully unfunny scenes between Carradine and the elder Mitchum - but as a matter of fact only work as a laxative. Nor are things improved by an acid rock soundtrack that generally has less to do with what happens on screen than the soundtrack of a Los Campeones Justicieros film. Bigfoot is even missing the obligatory soft rock theme song all bigfoot movies are supposed to include (see every other bigfoot movie made in the 60s and 70s).

And even when "director" and "writer" Robert F. Slatzer decides to throw a cult movie fan a bone by including a scene of one of his ratty bigfeet wrestling a bear (I think that's what's happening there, at least - the VHS sourced print I watched wasn't exactly a beacon of clarity), or of Joi Lansing calmly expositing SCIENCE! about the bigfoot as the missing link while tied to a tree and poked by a human/bigfoot hybrid, or the appearance of the big boss bigfoot ("the eighth wonder of the world", Carradine enthuses), he's filming these scenes with such an utter sense of apathy, it's exceedingly difficult to keep oneself awake.

Fortunately, Joi Lansing screeches so much and so loudly during the film's grand finale I woke up again in time. Hooray.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,robert f. slatzer,john carradine,joi lansing,christopher mitchum,horror,the pain,reviews,hairy beasts

Three Films Make A Post: Featuring the Longest Kiss in Cinema History!

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): Guy Ritchie's second movie about the adventures of a very pulp hero Sherlock Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. and his especially long-suffering Watson Jude Law shares all the virtues of the first movie, and is therefore pretty much as good as mainstream adventure cinema gets. It's fun, it's silly, it's playful, and so totally divorced from Victorian reality or the self-image of Victorians as evidenced in Doyle's work, it develops something of a subversive edge simply by treating both with as little respect as they deserve yet also with as much - probably more - love as they do.

Bonus points for a Moriarty who doesn't act like a hyperactive twelve-year-old, Noomi Rapace (who would make a pretty great pulp Holmes too, I think) and the most off-handed Reichenbach Falls ever.

The Life of the World to Come (2010): For some reason, this film doesn't appear on Rian Johnson's IMDB page, but this was made by the director of Brick and The Brothers Bloom anyway. It's a one take/long take concert film without an audience of The Mountain Goats (in this case in the form of John and Rachel) performing the whole of "The Life of the World to Come", the (not exactly religious) album on which all songs are titled with bible verses - which honestly is much better in practice than it may sound in theory; a description that fits The Mountain Goats in general.

For the most part, the film consists of the camera shifting position around Darnielle while he plays on the piano or the guitar, providing the film with an aesthetic that is minimalist and - thanks to the long take business - just a bit awkward at times, which again fits The Mountain Goats nicely, for this is the music of a guy who has always been willing to accept and own moments of awkwardness instead of excising them.

I'm too much of a fan of Darnielle (whose music, together with that of the Go-Betweens, Lucinda Williams, Epic Soundtracks, and the Fellow Travellers may very well have kept me sane at one point in my life) to say much about the quality of the music or the performance, except that the film made me cry just a little.

Finalmente… le mille e una notte aka 1001 Nights of Pleasure (1972): As a genre, the Italian sex comedy, even in its (in theory) more classy aspect, never did much for me, despite sharing at least the female half of its casts with those Italian genres of the same eras I do love. Their ideas about what's funny and mine just disagree a bit too much with each other.

So I found myself rather surprised when (house favourite) Antonio Margheriti's provoked quite a few smiles and even two or three guffaws from me here. The film's combination of low-brow comedy, nudity graciously provided by actresses like Barbara Bouchet and Femi Benussi (and, if that floats your boat, to a lesser degree actors like Gino Milli and, well, whoever plays the other semi-nude guys), and pretty nice to look at production design doesn't exactly add up to something everyone should see, but the film is a fine enough piece of exploitation for those evenings when something deeper, cleverer or less friendly would be too much. This is also another film that supports my theory of Margheriti being - generally (let's pretend we don't know his war movies) - one of the most good-natured of all Italian genre directors, for there's really nothing nasty about the film, even when the joke's by all rights should feel nasty. I imagine Margheriti as a happy man.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,adventure,action,music,comedy,exploitation,robert downey jr,jude law,guy ritchie,rian johnson,the mountain goats,antonio margheriti,barbara bouchet,femi benussi

The Innkeepers (2011)

A hotel with the quaint name of "Yankee Pedlar Inn" is in the final week of its existence. Businesswise, there's nothing at all happening, so Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy), the place's two remaining employees (its boss is using his ill-gotten gains for a holiday) look forward to a quiet and boring time, which is the thing you want when you have to sleep at your place of work for its closing down, and you'd really rather play around hunting the hotel's ghosts you don't actually believe in.

The hotel's only guests are a cranky mother (Alison Bartlett) and her little son (Jake Ryan), an old man (George Riddle) wanting to sleep in the honeymoon suite for reasons of nostalgia, and the former TV actress Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), so there's enough time and space for Claire and Luke to try and make contact with the hotel's resident ghost. Luke, who is more into the whole ghost hunting thing, or at least more experienced at it, has already encountered the ghost before, but during the course of the following nights, it will be Claire who is most determined to meet the dead.

Alas, as M.R. James taught, encountering a ghost can have dire consequences.

Last time I wrote about a film by Ti West I was more than just a bit exasperated by the director's seeming unwillingness to use his clearly great talents as a filmmaker for anything more than a piece of retro horror so retro it even copied all of the flaws of the films it imitated, instead of making the great Ti West movie he obviously had in him.

I'm happy to report this criticism doesn't apply at all to The Innkeepers. While the film is informed by a knowledge and love for older horror movies and ghost stories, it's not a slave to that knowledge and love, and instead uses them as a foundation on which to build something all its own, really turning it into the Ti West movie - that is, a film giving expression to a personal philosophy and style - I had hoped for.

This doesn't mean that West leaves behind everything he did before stylistically. As the director's earlier films, The Innkeepers is putting its narrative emphasis firmly on mood and characterisation, telling its story in a slow and deliberate way that is the complete opposite of the way ninety percent of modern horror movies tell their stories. I'm sure quite a few people will be bored by the film; I'm just as sure these people are missing out on one of the best ghost stories not filmed in Japan.

For West really is so, so good at creating mood. At first, the film stays tonally so light it could easily turn into an outright comedy (of the mid-brow indie type), but slowly, in ways expected and unexpected, the hotel and the things we see, those we nearly see, and those we only expect to see (not to speak of the things we hear - the film's sound design is decidedly clever), come together to create a mood first of tension, then of outright dread, until the film culminates in a climax that is as consequent (as in destiny) as it is ambiguous. Even though all the clues to understanding what's going on are in the film (which of course does not hinder certain types of viewer from not understanding because the exposition fairy didn't come and puke into their faces), there's still a lingering feeling of the inexplicable left after all is said and done, something, I'd argue, more horror films should try to produce.

I'm still not completely done swooning, for The Innkeepers does not just showcase West's technical perfection (apart from the sound design, his editing and Eliot Rockett's cinematography are something to behold in a subtle, not at all showy, way) applied to a very fine ghost story, it's also a film that shows of a small and very talented case without, you know, showing off with them. The three main members of the cast - Paxton, Healy and McGillis - are all highly sympathetic and manage to not just let their characters come to life - so as to keep the audience more wary of their final fates - but also present their hidden complexities in ways subtle enough to fit in with the rest of a film that is playing with perfectly open cards yet also wants its audience to be patient and attentive, or perhaps rather a film that knows that its audience is patient and attentive.

The Innkeepers is just an all around fantastic film, the sort of movie I'd call a future classic of horror cinema, if I were the kind of guy who made that kind of pronouncement.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,ti west,sara paxton,pat healy,kelly mcgillis

Music Monday: Haven't Posted Any Metal For A While Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,cattle decapitation

In short: Air Terjun Pengantin (2009)

Dedicated final girl Tiara (Tamara Bleszynski), plagued by flashback trauma concerning her car collision with a black cat and subsequently being trapped inside, invites her sister (I think) Mandy and a veritable horde of Mandy's young, pretty and totally non-descript friends out to a trip to a seemingly empty island not very well known as "the Bride Island". There's a tragic story about a black magician trying to steal a bride there, only killing her in the process, but these are modern times, so that's surely no reason to get nervous.
So, little does anyone expect the island not to be quite empty, but instead inhabited by a charming guy with an excellent mask who soon proceeds to slaughter the pretty hordes, drinking their blood to become invulnerable, per the recommendations of a hallucination (well, or a ghost, but since the guy's invulnerability will turn out to be quite limited, I'd bet on a hallucination). You know the rest.
I really could go two ways with this write-up. One possibility would be to bemoan the fate of Air Terjun Pengantin's director Rizal Mantovani, who started his career with the Kuntinalak trilogy, possibly the best films coming out of the great Indonesian horror boom of the second half of the Oughts, but has now come down so much in the movie life he has to helm Maxima productions with a (un)healthy emphasis on the non-softcore the Indonesian censorship allows, with much cavorting of pretty if surgically enhanced girls and boys in their underwear and swimwear while horrible music plays in the background.
However, and here's where the second and friendlier way to look at the film comes in, while it is undoubtedly true Air Terjun Pengantin can't compare with Mantovani's classier films, it actually does work quite well as what it is: a very low budgeted little slasher movie out to show nearly nude young people, some friendly yet effective gore, and to let its (clearly rather young and not oriented towards a traditional Indonesian life-style, whatever that may be) audience have a fun time with getting (sort of) scared. It may sound strange to some of you, but this sort of highly exploitative, commercially oriented horror cinema always feels very innocent to me, for instead of claiming any higher artistic goals, its proponents are never less than honest about the kind of transaction they are after: we give them our money, and they give us as much sexiness (in this case taking place in front of a landscape that's pretty pleasing to the eye, too) and blood as the censors allow (typically, Indonesian censors allow much more blood than sex, which makes the film's attempts at sleaze look even more innocent to eyes used to pink cinema and Italian sleaze like mine). It's nothing if not honest.
From time to time, Mantovani even has the opportunity to let some of his talent shine through. The latter parts of the movie - thankfully, this is a film that knows you gotta stop with the sleaze once the killing starts or lose any possibility of tension - still look cheap as hell, but also demonstrate a nice sense of pacing, and from time to time even give the director a moment or two to set up an elegantly framed shot (I'm especially thinking of Bleszynski tied to a tree in front of a waterfall, which is pretty brilliant in its horror paperback novel cover way).
The rest is routine, cheap, yet competent slashing with some small, yet appreciated, influences of Indonesian culture like the killer's mask and the motive for his violence. In this case, that turned out to be enough for me.

Technorati-Markierungen: indonesian movies,in short,slasher,horror,rizal mantovani,tamara bleszynski