This moody ghost story resounds as a rich and textured gothic haunted house film containing some of the best ghostly special effects of its time. If made in Germany, Japan or France this film could have been turned into a chilling horror masterpiece, unfortunately it’s bungled by a Hollywood aesthetic of artificial romance and comedy which dulls the effects of its progressive horror concept and as such never really rises to its better contemporaries, Rebecca or the Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
Showing posts with label Horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Horror. Show all posts
Friday, 8 November 2013
Tuesday, 29 October 2013
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Though only an effort as producer, the much-maligned, persona-non-grata entry in the Halloween series has all the fingerprints of horrormaster John Carpenter. Featuring one of the most disturbing kill-concepts in the genre Season of the Witch fits in well with the trend of 70’s paranoia filmmaking as well as Carpenter’s career-long obsession with omniscent mental control and thus resounds as one of the most chilling underappreciated horror films of the decade.
Wednesday, 16 October 2013
Eyes Without a Face
Before the era of the slasher film, horror films didn’t get any sicker or more twisted than this early 60’s French gem which tracks the devilish attempts of a plastic surgeon to kidnap, drug and steal the faces of innocent women to graft onto his facially-deformed daughter.
Monday, 25 March 2013
Stoker
In the long history of Asian genre directors crossing over into English-language films, Chan-wook Parks’ Stoker, a deliriously directed noirsih thriller, is the cream of the crop. Unlike this year’s other Korean-directed thriller Jee-woon Kim’s The Last Stand, Park’s devilish film about nebbish teenager disturbed by the arrival of her long lost Uncle bristles with cinematic ingenuity and with a kind of inspired unconventionality not seen since the bombastic heyday of Brian De Palma.
Tuesday, 6 November 2012
Terror Train
At a glance this rarely discussed slasher film from the 1980s featuring libidinous teenagers getting hacked up by a masked villain, revenge for a fraternity prank gone wrong years ago, in the context of the sociopolitical significance of horror cinema, which is now a fully analyzable genre, is fascinating and admirable for reasons beyond pure entertainment.
Terror Train (1980) dir. Roger Spottiswoode
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Johnson, Hart Bochner, David Copperfield
By Alan Bacchus
This film has the distinction of being the first horror film I ever saw. And as a 6- year-old, the experience of watching a sadistic murderer kill innocent teenagers dressed up as Groucho Marx had a palpable imprinting effect on my life. I’ve never forgotten the fear and sheer terror this film caused me. Years later I was distraught to find out that most of the critical world didn’t feel the same way.
But the idea of a pristine Blu-ray version (via Shout Factory) of this highly personal film was akin to unearthing a time capsule from one's youth. I certainly wasn’t expecting a diamond in the rough. In fact, I had the opposite expectations, which had me even question whether re-watching this movie would tarnish my selective and biased childhood memories. Alas, no, I had to watch it.
Indeed, the film is not great. But it is fascinating.
The story can be summed up in a sentence or two. In the preamble we see Jamie Lee Curtis roped into participating in a cruel joke from her fraternity friend/jerk extraordinaire Doc Manley (Die Hard's Hart Bochner). Of course the prank goes wrong, the poor naïve kid is humiliated and for years he's treated for mental trauma. Cut to three years later, Curtis and the same group of pre-med students are partying it up on a New Year's Eve train ride full of booze, pot and heated sexual libidos. When one of the students is killed before boarding the train, and whose costumed identity is assumed by the killer, we assume it’s the same poor kid and that there’s going to be a bloodbath.
Curiously, the film is spare with its blood. Most of the kills are hidden from us, like a consciously PG version of the traditional slasher film. This point specifically is interesting to examine from the point of view of horror film history. Terror Train was made in 1980, thus it was one of the first of the modern teen slasher films. And if you look at Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) explicit gore had yet to become a prerequisite for the genre.
As forgettable as the plotting and characterizations of the story may be, for genre enthusiasts the narrative deconstructs perfectly into the genre formula - the Inciting Incident: a community of people responsible for an immoral act against the villain in the past; Location: An isolated environment disconnected from the outside world; Villain: a masked avenger burdened by the trauma of the past; and a Twist: a whodunit mystery with misdirected cues and red herrings about the killer’s identity.
From a political point of view, this film was made in the heyday of the Canadian tax shelter, produced entirely in Canada with American money but independent of the studio system - though 20th Century Fox would later acquire the film for US distribution. Production values are surprisingly strong, especially the cinematography lensed by the great John Alcott (famous for shooting Kubrick films such as Barry Lyndon and The Shining). It also happens to be Roger Spottiswoode’s first feature, and his ability to choreograph suspenseful action within the tight space of a real train shows remarkable talent. And even the performances manage to surmount the rickety material. John Ford and Sam Peckinpah stalwart Ben Johnson as the heroic conductor is the heart of the film and lends immeasurable credibility to the action. And Jamie Lee Curtis, as usual, oozes screen charisma from her pores. David Copperfield also does a surprisingly good turn as a magician aboard the train who becomes the audience’s main suspect for the murders.
The Shout Factory Blu-ray/DVD disc holds deep reverence for the picture, as evidenced by the four well produced and informative featurettes centring on the production reminiscences of the then-young production executive Don Carmody, US producer Daniel Grodnik and the fine work of production designer Glenn Bydwell and composer John Mills-Cockell. Each of these men, while not claiming to have made fine art, take their work seriously. Their candid enthusiasm is refreshing and infectious, aiding in the appreciation of this picture in the context of the genre.
***
Wednesday, 31 October 2012
Sparrows
'Sparrows', the silent Mary Pickford-produced masterpiece, features certainly one of cinema’s most despicable villains with a concept even more frightening than the most grotesque from the horror films of today. It's the story of a baby farm run by a diabolical landowner, Mr. Grimes, who steals babies and interns them on his ranch for ransom, sale or anything else he desires. As one of the most celebrated Pickford films, it was a controversial talking piece in the day, a Gothic nightmare of monumental proportions, but also a riveting and inspirational adventure film featuring one of cinema's greatest escape sequences at the end.
Sparrows (1926) dir. William Beaudine
Starring: Mary Pickford, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Charlotte Mineau, Roy Stewart, 'Spec' O'Donnell
By Alan Bacchus
In the middle of a remote and treacherous bayou swamp lives Mr. Grimes (von Seyffertitz), a hunchbacked devil of a man. And judging by his sickly visage and ominous presence, he’s like Fagan meets Nosferatu. Huddled in the barn are a group of seven children who have been kidnapped by Grimes and his wife. The eldest is Molly (Pickford), who tends to the children like Mother Teresa, both sheltering them from the evil Grimes as well as educating them in the eventuality that they may escape or be rescued.
Early on, Grimes receives a doll intended to be given to one of the children, but in the most diabolical fashion he throws the gift into a mud sink hole and gloriously watches it slowly get sucked into the earth – a chilling visual metaphor for the danger these children face. When Grimes breaks into the mansion of one of the local plantation owners and steals their two-year-old daughter it sets in motion his demise and the escape of Molly and the children.
Perhaps what is most chilling is the fact that the film never really tells us why the children are there. Most of them are certainly too young to work on the land. Thus the nebulous purpose of this prison renders the mood and threat even more bone-chilling.
The film is not shy to characterize Molly like the Virgin Mary, a near-deified protector of the children. Her education of them includes quoting scripture and referencing God who watches over them. The most emotionally stunning sequence is the celebrated Jesus scene in which Molly, while nursing a starving baby, imagines Jesus himself entering through the barn to take the child away from her, only to wake up and find the baby dead in her arms. I can think of fewer moments in cinema as powerful and moving as this scene.
The finale is equally stunning, a riveting escape/chase sequence out of the compound and through the treacherous swamp. As Molly and the children climb across branches above the snapping jaws of snarling alligators and avoiding the trappings of the mud sinkholes, it’s one moment of tense jeopardy after another rendered all the more dangerous because of the children’s lives at stake.
If anything, the film pushes the chase one scene too long. After escaping the swamp and after Grimes is sucked into it, it turns into a boat chase between Grimes’ accomplices and the police. But it’s all in aid of the feeling of spectacle, as led by Pickford herself, who championed the film and served as its producer.
So look past the usual Halloween fare and seek out Mary Pickford’s Sparrows for a jolt of spine-tingling Gothic horror from the silent era.
****
Sparrows will soon be available on sparkling Blu-ray in the Milestone Films’ Rags to Riches: Mary Pickford Collection. It includes three Pickford films - Sparrows (1926), The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) and Hoodlum (1919) - as well as invaluable audio commentaries, Pickford home movies and short film accompaniments, which add value to the reverent package.
Tuesday, 24 April 2012
The Innkeepers
Starring: Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis
**
By Alan Bacchus
There’s much to admire in Ti West’s creepy and understated haunted house film in which a pair of lowly minimum wage underachievers attempt to capture the essence of an alleged ghost in a rundown mountain view hotel. It’s a playful film with a consciously restrained quality, a mix of comedy and suspense without ever succumbing to exploitative gore and horror. That said, there’s just not enough guts to this story to truly satisfy its audience beyond the atmosphere and tone.
Taking place largely in a single location, a quaint Victorian inn which comes off like a low budget version of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, West introduces us to Claire and Luke (Paxton and Healy), who are employed as the last two staff members of the inn on its last day before closing down. Luke, who runs a paranormal ghost hunting website, is there to take audio samples of a ghost named Madeline O'Malley, rumoured to have haunted its confines for decades, with the unambitious Claire tagging along mainly for the fun.
There are a few guests for the evening, each with their own idiosyncrasies that contribute to the uneasy feeling of dread. Kelly McGillis turns in a creepy performance as a has-been actress staying for the night. And the presence of an old man who arrives to spend one night in his old room to rekindle the feelings of his honeymoon is chilling.
West succeeds in creating the gothic tone of a Hammer Horror mystery, from the moody atmospheric music to the classical widescreen photography reminiscent of John Carpenter’s great films of the ‘80s, right down to the chapter breaks written in old gothic script and designed like 1920s title cards.
While The Innkeepers plays directly off of The Shining, West's aesthetic sensibilities resemble 1980's John Carpenter (i.e., The Fog, Prince of Darkness), floating his widescreen anamorphic camera through empty hallways with Carpenter-like panache. But unfortunately West is missing the bravura escalation of action and horror marked by both Carpenter and Kubrick. Indeed there is a ghost with a grisly backstory who looks downright scary in her brief flashes, but we simply don’t see enough of the spectre. With murky or non-existent motivations, we don’t ever see O'Malley as a character, thus we don’t really fear her either.
Ti West’s camerawork is teasing, building up a number of moments but rarely paying them off. For example, he crafts a terrific sequence in which Claire investigates an open cellar door. West gives us a traditional false scare when the terrifying silence is interrupted by a bird flying out of the dark space, but he leaves the scene without paying it off with a real punch. The cellar does come back into play in the final scene, but it’s still a wasted set piece, indicative of the underwhelming quality of the film as a whole.
The Innkeepers is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Entertainment One in Canada.
Sunday, 22 January 2012
SUNDANCE 2012: The Pact
The Pact (2012) dir. Nicholas McCarthy
Starring: Caity Lotz, Casper Van Dien, Haley Hudson, Kathleen Rose Perkins, Sam Ball, Agnes Bruckner
***
By Alan Bacchus
The Pact is a smart, well written and genuinely scary haunted house movie with equal parts B-movie pastiche and visceral horror movie thrills.
After her sister disappears inside her own house, Annie is forced to return to her childhood home to play surrogate parent to her 8-year-old daughter. It doesn't take long before she starts hearing things in the house. A creak in the floor, closet doors opening inexplicably, broken picture frames on the ground and maddening nightmares are the stuff of horror films 101. Yet director Nicholas McCarthy is so damned resourceful and creative within his tiny spaces, it's a marvel.
There's also a heavy hand at work directing his actors with blockhead subtlety, egregiously over-killed music stings and overly lit texture-less cinematography, which is so bright it reminds us of a soft core porno film. But hell, Casper Van Dien is in the picture, which means we can't watch it with too much seriousness. It takes a while to set up the story, but there's a strong backstory established that is weighted equally with a dangerous presence in the present.
However silly and obnoxious the performances get, McCarthy absolutely floors us with his stunning horror images and nail-biting set pieces. As bad as the film is good, there is some major genre talent in this guy's bones.
Sunday, 4 December 2011
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) dir. Jalmari Helander
Starring: Onni Tommila, Jorma Tommila
***½
By Greg Klymkiw
While it is an indisputable truth that Jesus is the reason for the season. the eventual commercialization of Christmas inevitably yielded the fantasy figure of Santa Claus, the jolly, porcine dispenser of toys to children. Living with his equally corpulent wife, Mrs. Claus, a passel of dwarves and a herd of reindeer at the North Pole, Santa purportedly toils away in his workshop for the one day of the year when he can distribute the fruits of his labour into the greedy palms of children the world over. Is it any wonder how we all forget that Christmastime is to celebrate the birth of Our Lord Baby Jesus H. Christ?
In the movies, however, we have had numerous dramatic renderings of the true spirit of Christmas - tales of redemption and forgiveness like the Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, Frank Capra's immortal It's a Wonderful Life and Phillip Borsos's One Magic Christmas, but fewer and far between are the Christmas movies that address the malevolence of the season celebrating Christ's Birth. There's the brilliant Joan Collins segment in the Amicus production of Tales From the Crypt, the Silent Night Deadly Night franchise and, perhaps greatest of all, that magnificent Canadian movie Black Christmas from Bob (Porky's) Clark.
And now, add Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale to your perennial Baby-Jesus-Worship viewings! This creepy, terrifying, darkly hilarious and dazzlingly directed bauble of Yuletide perversity takes us on a myth-infused journey to the northern border between Finland and Lapland where a crazed archeologist and an evil corporation have discovered and unearthed the resting place of the REAL Santa Claus. When Santa is finally freed from the purgatorial tomb, he runs amuck and indulges himself in a crazed killing spree - devouring all the local livestock before feeding upon both adults and children who do not subscribe to the basic tenet of Santa's philosophy of: "You better be Good!" A motley crew of local hunters and farmers, having lost their livelihood, embark upon an obsessive hunt for Santa. They capture him alive and hold him ransom to score a huge settlement from the Rare Exports corporation who, in turn, have nefarious plans of their own for world wide consumer domination. How can you go wrong if you control the REAL Santa?
There's always, however, a spanner in the works, and it soon appears that thousands of Claus-ian clones emerge from the icy pit in Lapland and embark upon a desperate hunt for their leader. These vicious creatures are powerful, ravenous and naked. Yes, naked! Thousands of old men with white beards traverse across the tundras of Finland with their saggy buttocks and floppy genitalia exposed to the bitter northern winds. For some, this might even be the ultimate wet dream, but I'll try not to think too hard about who they might be.
All cultures, of course, have their own indigenous versions of everyone's favourite gift-giver and this eventually led to the contemporary rendering of the Santa Claus we're all familiar with. Finland, however, absorbed in considerable wintery darkness for much of the year, insanely overflowing with rampant alcoholism and being the birthplace of the brilliant Kaurismäki filmmaking brothers, is one delightfully twisted country. It's no surprise, then, that the Finns' version of jolly old Saint Nick is utterly malevolent. As presented in this bizarre and supremely entertaining movie, Santa is one demonic mo-fo!!!
Directed with panache by the young Finnish director Jalmari Helander (and based on his truly insane short films), Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is one unique treat. It's a Christmas movie with scares, carnage and loads of laughs. Helander renders spectacular images in scene after scene and his filmmaking vocabulary is sophisticated as all get-out. In fact, some of his shots out-Spielberg Spielberg, and unlike the woeful, tin-eyed JJ Abrams (he of the loathsome Super-8), I'd put money on Helander eventually becoming the true heir apparent to the Steven Spielberg torch. Helander's imaginative mise-en-scène is especially brilliant as he stretches a modest budget (using stunning Norwegian locations) and renders a movie with all the glorious production value of a bonafide studio blockbuster. The difference here, is that it's not stupid, but blessed with intelligence and imagination.
While the movie is not suitable for very young children, it actually makes for superb family viewing if the kiddies are at least 10-years-old (and/or not whining sissy-pants). Anyone expecting a traditional splatter-fest will be disappointed, but I suspect even they will find merit in the movie. Most of all, Moms, Dads and their brave progeny can all delight in this dazzling, thrilling Christmas thriller filled with plenty of jolts, laughs, adventure and yes, even a sentimental streak that rivals that of the master of all things darkly wholesome, Steven Spielberg.
You have hereby been warned:
You better watch out,Or in the words of Tiny Tim: "God Bless us, everyone."
you better not cry,
you better not pout,
I'm telling you why,
Santa Claus is coming to town,
with razor-sharp big teeth,
a taste for human flesh,
he knows if you've been bad or good,
and he likes to eat kids fresh. Hey!
"Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale" is currently available in a superb Bluray and DVD from the Oscilloscope Pictures (and distributed in Canada via the visionary company VSC). I normally have little use for extra features, but this release is one of the few exceptions. It includes Helander's brilliant shorts and some truly informative and entertaining making-of docs.This is truly worth owning and cherishing - again and again!
Monday, 21 November 2011
Father's Day - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011
Father's Day (2011) dir. Astron-6
(Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney)
Starring: Conor Sweeney, Adam Brooks, Matt Kennedy, Brent Neale, Amy Groening, Meredith Sweeney, Kevin Anderson, Garret Hnatiuk, Mackenzie Murdoch, Lloyd Kaufman
****
By Greg Klymkiw
"Death ends a life. But it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind. toward some resolution which it may never find." - Robert Anderson from his play, I Never Sang For My Father
A father's love for his son is a special kind of love. As such, Dads the world over face that singular inevitability - that peculiar epoch in their collective lives, when they must chauffeur the apple of their eye from a police station, for the third time in a month, after said progeny has undergone questioning upon being found in a motel room with a dead man covered in blood, après le bonheur de la sodomie, only to return home after dropping said twink son on a street corner, so the aforementioned offspring of the light-in-the-loafer persuasion, can perform fellatio on old men for cash, whilst Dad sits forlornly in the domicile that once represented decent family values and stare at a framed photo of better times, until he succumbs to unexpected anal rape and as he weeps, face down and buttocks up, he is doused with gasoline and set on fire, then frenziedly tears into the street screaming, until collapsing in a charred heap in front of his returning son, who reacts with open-mouthed horror as the scent of old penis, wafts, ever so gently, from his delicate twink tonsils.
For most fathers, all of the above is, no doubt, a case of been-there-done-that - not unlike that inevitable fatherly attempt at understanding when Dad gently seeks some common ground with the fruits of his husbandly labours and offers: "Look son, I experimented when I was young, too."
So begins Father's Day - with the aforementioned, AND some delectable pre-credit butchery, an eye-popping opening credit sequence with images worthy of Jim Steranko and a series of flashbacks during an interrogation with a hard-boiled cop. This is the astounding feature film (the second completed feature this year) from the brilliant Winnipeg filmmaking collective Astron-6 (Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney) who have joined forces with the legendary Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz of Troma Entertainment to generate a film that is the ultimate evil bastard child sprung from the loins of a daisy chain twixt Guy Maddin, John Paizs, early David Cronenberg, Herschel Gordon Lewis and Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer.
Father's Day is a triumph! It happily combines the effects of asbestos-tinged drinking water in Winnipeg with the Bukkake splatter of the coolest artistic influences imaginable and yields one of the Ten Best Films of 2011.
It is the seed of depraved genius that's spawned Astron-6 and, of course, with the best work in Canadian film, it has been embraced by an entity outside of Canada - the glorious aforementioned sleaze-bucket uber-mensch nutters who gave the world The Toxic Avenger. This collective of five (not six) brilliant filmmakers (including the above named quartet and Steven Kosanski, the F/X wizard, writer and director of Astron-6's MANBORG) are part of a new breed of young Canadian filmmakers who have snubbed their noses at the government-funded bureaucracies that oft-eschew the sort of transgression that normally puts smaller indigenous cultural industries on the worldwide map (including its own - Canada only truly supports such work grudgingly once it's found acceptance elsewhere). In this sense, Astron-6 has been making films under the usual radar of mediocrity and steadfastly adhering to the fine Groucho Marx adage: "I refuse to join any club that would have someone like me for a member."
Imagine, if you will, any government-funded agency (especially a Canadian one), doling out taxpayer dollars to the following plot: Chris Fuchman (Mackenzie Murdoch), is a serial killer that specializes in targeting fathers for anal rape followed by further degradations, including torture, butchery and/or murder. Our madman, Fuchman (substitute :k" for "h" to pronounce name properly), turns out to be a demon from the deepest pits of hell and a ragtag team is recruited by a blind infirm Archbishop of the Catholic Church (Kevin Anderson) to fight this disgusting agent of Satan. An eyepatch-wearing tough guy (Adam Brooks), a young priest (Matthew Kennedy), the aforementioned twink male prostitute (Conor Sweeney) and hard-boiled dick (Brent Neale) and a jaw-droppingly gorgeous stripper (Amy Groening) follow the trail of this formidable foe whilst confronting all their own personal demons.
This frothy brew of vile delights includes some of the most graphic blood splattering, vicious ass-slamming violence, gratuitous nudity, skimpy attire for the ladies, 'natch (and our delectable twink), morality, evisceration, hunky lads, delicious babes, compassion, rape, fellatio, chainsaw action, wholesome content, cannibalism, hand-to-hand combat, gunplay, family values, sodomy, immolation and monsters. It's all delivered up with a cutting edge mise-en-scène that out-grindhouses Tarantino's Grindhouse and delivers thrills, scares and laughs all in equal measure.
The film's sense of humour, in spite, or perhaps because of the proper doses of scatology and juvenilia is not the typical low-brow gross-out humour one finds in so many contemporary comedies, but frankly, works on the level of satire, and as such, is of the highest order. It stylistically straddles the delicate borders great satire demands. Too many people who should know better, confuse spoof or parody with satire and certainly anyone going to see Father's Day expecting SCTV, Airplane or Blazing Saddles might be in for a rude awakening. Yes, it's just as funny as any of those classic mirth-makers, but the laughs cut deep and they're wrought, not from the typical shtick attached to spoofs, but like all great satire, derive from the entire creative team playing EVERYTHING straight. No matter how funny, absurd or outlandish the situations and dialogue are, one never senses that an annoying tongue is being drilled firmly in cheek. Astron-6 loves their material and, importantly loves their creative influences. Their target is not necessarily the STYLE of film they're rendering homage to, but rather, the hypocrisies and horrors that face humanity everyday - religion, repression, dysfunction - all wedged cleverly into the proceedings.
Clearly a great deal of the movie's power in terms of its straight-laced approach to outlandish goings-on is found in the performances - all of them are spot-on. Adam Brooks IS a stalwart hero and never does he veer from infusing his role from the virtues inherent in such roles. Hell, he could frankly be Canada's Jason Statham in conventional action movies if anyone bothered to make such movies in Canada on any regular basis. Conor Sweeney as Twink is a marvel. Not only does he play the conflicted gay street hustler "straight", he straddles that terrific balance between genuinely rendering a layered character, but also infusing his performance with melodramatic aplomb. Not only is this ideal for the character itself, but it's perfectly in keeping with the style of movie that is being lovingly celebrated. Anyone who reads my stuff regularly will know my mantra: Melodrama is not a dirty word - as an approach to drama, it's a legitimate genre. There is good melodrama and bad melodrama, like any other genre. End of story. No arguments. Luckily, the Astron-6 team has the joy of glorious melodrama hard-wired into their collective DNA and Sweeney's performance is especially indelible in this respect. Brent Neale as the hard-boiled cop is, quite simply, phenomenal. Will someone out there give this actor job after job after job? The camera loves him and he knows how to play to the camera. He is clearly at home with the straight-up and melodramatic aspects of his role and most importantly, he is imbued with the sort of smoulder that makes stars - he's handsome and intense.
Astoundingly, not a single actor in this film feels out of place. Whether they're emoting straight, slightly stilted, wildly melodramatic or, on occasion (given the genre), magnificently reeking of ham, this is ensemble acting at its absolute best.
The entire movie was made on a budget of $10,000 and once again, for all the initiatives out there to generate low-budget feature films, Father's Day did it cheaper (WAY CHEAPER) and better. The movie uses its budgetary constraints not as limitations, but as a method to exploit what can be so special about movies. The visual and makeup effects as well as the art direction ooze imagination and aesthetic brilliance and it's all captured through a lens that puts its peer level and even some big budget extravaganzas to shame. Imagination is truly the key to success with no-budget movies. The Father's Day cinematography is often garish and lurid, but delightfully and deliciously so - with first-rate lighting and excellent composition. The filmmakers and their entire team successfully render pure gold out of elements that in most low-budget films just looks cheap - or worse, blandly competent (like most low budget Canadian movies). It's total trash chic - trash art, if you must.
I attended this spectacular event in France many years ago called the FreakZone International Festival of Trash Cinema which celebrated some of the most amazing transgressive works I'd ever seen. When I expressed to the festival director that I was surprised at the level of cinematic artistry, he just smiled and said, "You North Americans have such a limited view of trash culture - for us, trash is not garbage, we use the word to describe work that is subversive." This was so refreshing. It felt like a veil had been lifted from over me and I realized what EXACTLY it was that I loved about no-budget cinema - as a filmmaker, a teacher, a critic and fan.
Making a movie for no money that is NOT subversive on every level is, frankly, just plain stupid. What's the point? And Father's Day is nothing if it's not subversive. Besides, I've seen too many young filmmakers with talent galore ruined by initiatives that purported to celebrate the virtues of no-or-low-budget filmmaking but then forced the artists to apply the idiotic expectations of "industry standards" - whatever that means, anyway. This has been especially acute in Canada, but to be fair, in other non-North American countries also, where bureaucrats make decisions and/or define the rules/parameters of filmmaking.
Father's Day and the entire canon of the Astron-6 team should be the ultimate template for filmmakers with no money to seize the day and make cool shit. That's what it should always be about. And in this case, it took the fortitude of the filmmakers, their genuinely transgressive gifts as artists AND an independent AMERICAN producer to ensure that they made the coolest shit of all.
What finally renders Father's Day special is just how transgressively intelligent it all is and yet, never turns its proverbial nose up at the straight-to-video-nasties of the 80s, the grindhouse cinema of the 60s and 70s and the weird, late night cable offerings of the early 90s. It works very much on the level of the things it loves best. This is real filmmaking - it entertains, it dazzles, it makes use of every cheap trick in the book to create MOVIE magic and finally, it's made by people who clearly care about film. They get to have their cake and eat it too by having as much fun making the movies as we have watching them.
Father's Day was unveiled at Toronto's premiere genre film event, the Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011 where it won several awards: the grand prize of Best Film, Most Original Film, Best Hero, Best Kills, Best Trailer and Best Poster - all voted on by the thousands of attendees of the festival. It will be released theatrically in early 2012 by Troma Entertainment and will be followed with the usual forays into home entertainment formats.
Monday, 14 November 2011
I Saw the Devil
Starring Byung-hun Lee, Min-sik Choi, Gook-hwan Jeon
****
By Alan Bacchus
Call me a masochist, but I want the movies I watch to beat me senseless. Enjoyment of film comes from the ability of the filmmaker to manipulative one's emotions, be it through laughter, sadness or fear. I haven’t been pummelled this hard in a while. And damn does it feel good. Jee-woon Kim’s audacious I Saw the Devil is a thriller/action/horror film for the ages.
This is a two-and-a-half hour relentless car wreck of a film, so grisly and disturbing, but something you can’t help but rubberneck your head around to watch.
Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun) is a cop whose wife was murdered in a particularly brutal fashion. Her body was pummelled to unconsciousness in her car, then brought back to the killer’s layer, then brutally chopped up with a meat clever, then deposited in the river. There’s no question in Soo-hyun’s mind that he will make it his life’s goal to exact proper revenge for this crime.
This is also Korean cinema – which arguably redefined the revenge film genre with the Chan Wook-Park films in the 2000s – and director Kim plays into our expectations by ramping up the energy early on for some ass-kicking vengeance.
Soo-hyum systematically goes through the four likely suspects, beating confessions out of each of them. And surprisingly he meets the real killer, Kyung-chul (Old Boy’s Choi Min-sik), with relative ease and less than half an hour into the film. After beating him to near death, he stops and lets him go. Why? This is just the first act of Soo-hyun’s and director Kim’s grandiose plan of vengeance. An eye for an eye is just the tip of this iceberg.
The film then becomes an intense battle between serial killer and cop with Soo-hyum following Kyung-chul, who is still compelled to continue his exercise, including his need for rape, murder and torture. Each time the killer finds a new victim, Soo-hyum is there to save the day and administer more beat downs. Kyung-chul proves to be a wily opponent and one not to be messed with, and the tables are turned magnificently.
The lesson in this film is not subtle, as violence begets violence, a contagion that spreads from the guilty to the innocent, blurring all lines of good, evil and human decency. By the end, both opponents become sadists to the extreme, a quid pro quo of blood curdling torture taken to the extreme.
Kim leaves nothing off screen to infer. He boldly shows Achilles tendons being ripped apart, as well as fleshy stabbings through the hands, cheek and neck. We quickly become desensitized to maimed body parts as each scene becomes more gruesome than the next. The scene to end all scenes occurs midway through a suspenseful and near-insane knife fight in a taxi cab. This is a scene to be seen before it can be believed.
Kim’s filmmaking skills are of the highest order, elevating the picture above mere torture porn. His pacing and ability to create a visceral impact to not just the gore, but also the intense urgency at play for both characters is remarkable, resulting in a picture that is more impactful than anything I’ve seen on screen this year.
Monday, 31 October 2011
Kuroneko
Starring: Kichiemon Nakamura, Nobuko Otowa, Kei Satô, Kiwako Taichi
***
By Alan Bacchus
Delicious Gothic atmosphere from the fog-filled and misty bamboo forests is the star of this loopy and often haunting Japanese ghost story of female revenge against malicious Samurai soldiers.
It’s the Senguko period in Japan, that is the 17th century when most other Japanese Samurai films are set, and like most places in times of war, men go off to fight and women stay home for sometimes years waiting for their husbands to return. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. For Gintoki it’s been three years since her husband was literally snatched from their house leaving her and her mother-in-law, Yone, home alone. We’re exposed to a particularly brutal opening, which has a rogue band of soldiers wandering through Gintoki’s farm stopping for some water. It’s an innocent visit at first, but quickly turns into a heinous rape and murder of the two women and the burning of their home.
But with the help of a wandering black cat the women are reincarnated as ghosts to exact revenge on their assailants. Now the women ply the lands of the neighbouring forests as sirens of sorts seducing wandering Samurai into their home for room, board, sex and then vicious, blood curdling, vengeful murder. But when Gintoki’s husband returns, she finds herself at odds with her Faustian bargain. She must either kill her husband, who as a Samurai is now her sworn enemy, or lose her ghostly abilities and cross back over into the land of the dead.
Billed as a ‘horror film’ this picture is less a shocker than a brooding and existential psychological study. Shindo creates a haunting atmospheric feeling during the sirens' frequent seduction sequences. The crisp and contrasting black and white cinematography is gorgeous – jet black frames delicately populated with splashes of light, creating a feeling of eerie Gothic strangeness.
This film was made in 1968, and there’s a strong psychedelic tone to the staging of the film’s key sequences. Gintoki’s love scenes are tastefully choreographed, covered up skin appropriately with flowing drapes and such, but Shindo sure teases us with artistic silhouettes of Gintoki’s supple nude body.
The attacks on the men are vicious and perhaps speak to a feminist movement in the world zeitgeist at the time. But the emotional core of the film arrives in the third act when Gintoki’s husband learns the truth of his wife’s apparitions. A forlorn and tragic love story emerges from the Gothic horror.
Unfortunately the film is also bogged down by a stiffness in performance that is common with these types of period Japanese films. The extreme reactions and emotions of the characters are far from the naturalism we usually expect from Western films. But this is a purposeful convention of Japanese cinema – take it or leave it.
Kuroneko is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
Friday, 28 October 2011
The Woman - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011
The Woman (2011) dir. Lucky McKee
Starring: Pollyanna McIntosh, Sean Bridgers, Angela Bettis, Lauren Ashley Carter, Zach Rand, Shyla Molhusen
****
By Greg Klymkiw
The Cleek family are living the American Dream! Chris (Sean Bridgers) is a successful back country real estate lawyer with loads of cash, oodles of prime land, a beautiful, devoted wife Belle (Angela Bettis) who puts June Cleaver to shame, three lovely kids including his chip-off-the-old-block son Brian (Zach Rand), a cute-as-a-button little girl with a name to match, Darlin' (Shyla Molhusen) and Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter), an intelligent, attractive teenage Emo girl privately suffering morning sickness due to possibly being impregnated by her Dad. In the barn are some crazed German Shepherds and a blind, naked feral woman raised with the dogs and tended to by Brian who physically abuses them.
Like all corn-and-steak-fed American men, Chris wakes early in the morning, eats breakfast lovingly prepared by Belle and then, packing a scope rifle and adorned in hunting garb, he smiles and declares how much he loves the quiet of the country before revving up his ATV and tear-assing into the woods for some hunting. To complete this portrait of All-American bliss, one of his hunting trips yields a live trophy - a buxom, beautiful, feral woman from the backwoods that he manacles in the fallout shelter where she is forced to eat food from the floor and/or a Tupperware container and gets scrubbed raw by wifey after being good and hosed down by Dad. When she's first introduced to the family, one of the kids asks if they can really keep her. The answer from Dad is a resounding: YES! After all, she needs to be civilized - a charitable act on Dad's part; even more charitable considering she's already bitten off his ring finger when all he wanted to do was inspect her teeth.
Trussed up and manacled in the dank fallout shelter, the civilization process includes being raped late into the night by Chris while son Brian watches jealously through a peephole. The lovely daughters sleep soundly in their warm, comfortable beds and wifey Belle weeps in the properly accoutered conjugal boudoir at the thought of hubby getting his manly satisfaction elsewhere and, of course, as any eager All American Boy would do, the feral woman, is eventually tortured with wire cutters and sexually abused by the randy little chip-off-the-old-block.
America.
Love it or leave it.
As rendered by director Lucky McKee and his co-screenwriter Jack Ketchum, The Woman is, without a doubt, one of the most foul, wanton and viciously humorous movies of the new millennium. It also seems to be a part of a new wave of films (including those of the brilliant Bobcat Goldthwait) which take family dysfunction several steps further - where dysfunctional depravity has become the norm.
McKee has his actors play everything in a straight deadpan. There isn't a single, out-of-place performance in the entire movie. McKee's mise-en-scene is distinctively sun-dappled-with-dollops-of-blood-and-nastiness and the movie works as both vicious satire and thriller. To say the movie is brutal, would be an understatement of the highest order, but the horrors on display never feel cheap and exploitative the way most torture porn horror films are. This is a savage, raw-nerve-ending-exposed portrait of life in the mean, new America.
As such, it's an unflinching, unyielding ride on the locomotive of excess that has turned one of the world's strongest nations into a veritable third-world country. The movie requires a strong stomach and open mind - anything less and you'll feel like you stepped into your worst nightmare.
So grit your teeth, gird your loins and, enjoy!
The Woman was a closing night film at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011. It's currently in very limited theatrical release and will soon be available on DVD.
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Absentia - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011
Absentia (2011) dir. Mike Flanagan
Starring: Katie Parker, Courtney Bell, Dave Levine, Morgan Peter Bell
***1/2
By Greg Klymkiw
There are horrors - everyday horrors - that we all hear about. If we have never experienced them ourselves, all we can do is try to imagine what they must feel like. But that's all we can do. Imagine. When movies delve into the horrors we hear about everyday, the best of those pictures probably come as close as any of us would want to get to experiencing the real thing.
Perhaps the one thing that's worse than knowing a loved one has died - especially in a fashion of the most heinous variety - is the horror of a loved one disappearing without a trace. It's knowing the truth that offers the most meagre shred of solace, or at least, acceptance. Not knowing, though, is the real horror. It's what we imagine that could, can and would haunt us forever.
Absentia is a micro-budgeted independent horror movie that plays on these fears. Tricia (Courtney Bell) has lived for seven long years never knowing how or why her beloved husband Daniel (Morgan Peter Bell) has simply vanished. Time has healed many of her wounds, but even now, on the verge of awaiting a death verdict for her husband - in absentia, Tricia harbours feelings of heart aching sadness and frustration. Though her financial and legal affairs will have a clean slate once a death certificate arrives, she will always be haunted with never knowing the truth.
Though frankly, once the truth rears its ugly head, she is wholly unprepared for the horror to follow. This is especially draining as she has been attempting to rebuild her life - she's having a baby and is in love with a kind, gentle man.
Her younger sister Callie (Katie Parker) arrives to assist her in coping with this loss and the impending arrival of the baby sired by her lover Mallory (Dave Levine), a detective who has been investigating her husband's missing person file for many long years. Callie is haunted by her own demons. She's a drug-addict in 12-step recovery mode. Tricia copes with her horror and sadness with both Buddhism and psychotherapy. Callie has found Jesus and jogging.
Together, on the cusp of a death certificate being issued, the sisters begin confronting a series of strange, creepy and decidedly horrific occurrences. I'm going to avoid being too specific. Seeing the movie with a fresh perspective (as I was lucky enough to do) is what will yield maximum impact.
In the 1940s, when RKO Studios was on the verge of bankruptcy, they hired the brilliant Val Lewton (producer David O. Selznick's former right hand man) to head up a new horror division to make them flush. Lewton employed a brilliant strategy. Up to this point in movies history, most horror was rooted in the past and had a fairy tale quality to it. Lewton decided that the real horror was in the modern world. Using supernatural backdrops with lurid titles such as The Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Seventh Victim and Curse of the Cat People as a lure for audiences, Lewton told a series of mostly contemporary tales that dealt with everything from crumbling marriages, childhood loneliness, madness and, among other real-life themes, religious cults. He also felt that what scared people was what they couldn't see - that horror was found in shadows and darkness.
With Absentia, writer-director-editor Mike Flanagan employs a similar strategy in telling an often scary horror picture which, when it works at the peak of its powers, jolts us with what we cannot always see. What we DO see, WHEN he allows us to see it is numbingly terrifying.
Tricia is haunted by dreams - or are they? - of her husband appearing around virtually ever corner - emaciated and stricken with both grief and anger that she is finally "letting go". Callie, on the other hand, experiences strange appearances of weird people and strange noises in the mountain tunnel crossway just down the street from their Glendale home.
There is, finally an indisputable connection between the two sisterly experiences and as the picture edges along, we're suitably creeped out. The movie is so intelligently written, skillfully directed and magnificently acted that for much of its running time we're on the edge of our seats. Unfortunately, the narrative begins to spin its wheels in the final third and what could have been a great horror movie falls just short of that.
In spite of this, it's an effective and original approach to the genre and the film's subtle slow-burn is finally so horrifying that the flaws in the latter portion of the narrative are almost voided by the overall effect - one, I might add, that lasts long after the film is over..
In this day and age of torture porn masquerading as horror and John Hughes-styled teen romance pretending to be vampire/werewolf thrillers or worse, endless awful Hollywood remakes of great Asian scare-fests, it's nice to experience something so eerily, creepily quiet. It's not only what we don't see, but what we can't quite hear. The silence and deliberate pace renders more than enough scares and for some, it will be just what the doctor ordered to soil more than a few undergarments.
Absentia played at the 2011 edition of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. It will soon be available on VOD and other home entertainment venues, but if you get a chance to see it on a big screen with an audience, you'll be in for an extra special horror treat.
Monday, 24 October 2011
Midnight Son - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011
Midnight Son (2011) dir. Scott Leberecht
Starring: Zak Kilberg, Maya Parish, Jo D. Jonz, Arlen Escarpeta, Larry Cedar, Tracey Walter
****
By Greg Klymkiw
Jacob (Zak Kilberg) is sick. Very, very sick. He leads a solitary existence in a basement apartment with all the windows sealed shut. By day, he is a brilliant young artist - painting variations on a similar theme: exquisite renderings of the sun. He pays his rent working as a night-shift security guard. He is so sensitive to the rays of the sun that his arm bears the horrendous scars of burned flesh.
Of late, he's been extremely hungry and in spite of wolfing down as much food as possible, he's becoming thinner and more pale. One night he collapses at work - blacking out completely. A doctor examines him and expresses concern that he is becoming anemic from malnutrition. This, of course, can't be so. He's eating more than a 500 lb. circus freak.
Passing by a butcher shop, Jacob decides he needs meat.
Meat.
Pure and simple.
He buys a juicy steak, fries it up, scarfs it down, but alas, he's still hungry. Eyeing the styrofoam platter his steak rested upon, he is drawn to the droplets of blood dappling it. He is compelled to lap up the glistening, treacly red liquid. After doing just that, he visits his friendly butcher shop again and buys an entire container of blood. He greedily guzzles the hemoglobin treat and feels energized like he hasn't in some time.
Jacob knows now what he needs to survive.
Jacob needs blood.
Such are the opening minutes of Scott Leberecht's Midnight Son, one of the most exciting feature length directorial debuts in years. Given what passes for vampires in these dark days of the ludicrous Twilight franchise, it seems almost insulting to toss this original and affecting horror movie (also scripted by Leberecht) into the same putrid bucket containing Stephenie Meyer's rank turds. Still, we must call a spade a spade and a vampire movie it most certainly is. However, Midnight Son is one of the creepiest, sexiest and truly romantic vampire pictures to grace the screens in many a new moon.
Its unique blend of gorgeously gritty camerawork and equal dollops of both neorealism and existentialism, place the picture closer to the tradition forged by George A. Romero's Martin, Larry Fessenden's Habit and Abel Ferrara's double scoop of the horror brilliance that is Driller Killer and The Addiction.
What Leberecht brings to the table that's all his is a tremendous degree of heart. He manages to shock us, creep us out AND move us. This is an astounding achievement.
When Jacob meets the coke-addicted cigarette girl Mary (Maya Parish) they're instantly attracted to each other - two lost souls in the big city who deserve much more out of life and most certainly deserve each other. As played by the beautiful, sexy, but wholly real Parish, the character of Maya has what Twilight's Kristen Stewart is unable to bring to her vampire-loving heroine - a sense of humour and play. She's a character that the audience falls in love with because she has a perfect blend of bigger-than-life and girl-next-door properties (albeit slightly tarnished by the cards life has thus dealt her).
Jacob too feels like somebody we could know, or even be. He's trapped by circumstance and lonely out of necessity. That he should discover his potential soulmate at the worst possible time isn't just the stuff of great drama, it's rooted in realism - an experience so many have had when they find something or someone special, but the timing is so damned inopportune.
Leberecht's mise-en-scene is superb. He captures strange corners and pockets of Los Angeles with the same eye for detail Larry Fessenden brought to Habit and the city of New York. The choice of locations, shots and interiors never feel stock. It's a side of L.A. we seldom see on film. It's gritty, all right, but instead of the almost stereotypical strolls, Leberecht takes us to some mighty strange places - my favourite being a toxic materials dump in a rear lane of a hospital. Here we're also introduced to one of the weirdest pushers we'll encounter in any recent movie - the sleazy blood peddling orderly (brilliantly played by Joe D. Jonz) who discovers a rare, but needy market for what he can provide.
Happily, Leberecht and his production team had the exquisite taste to cast one of the greatest character actors working in American cinema today. Appearing as Jacob's only living cohort in the office tower, Tracey Walter plays the kindly night janitor who dispenses humour, wisdom and assistance. Walter has been in a million or so cool movies, but it's especially cool to see him in a movie that presents such a unique portrait of L.A. since it happily reminds us of the UFO-obsessed trash man he played in Alex Cox's Repo Man (another great picture with a unique sense of place).
Visually and narratively, Midnight Son leads us confidently into territory we almost never see, but even when things start to feel familiar, Lebrecht throws us a curve ball - not just for the sake of tossing one our way, but because it's rooted in the emotion of the story.
One of my favourite moments falls into a category I like to call "Scenes We'd Like To See But Never Will And When We Do We Are Totally Fucking Delighted". Imagine a lovemaking scene where a sexy gal has just snorted several lines of coke, jumps onto her awaiting lover and mounting him in the throes of passion gets a horrendous coke-influenced nasal cavity burst of blood which geysers onto her boyfriend's face. This would be a shocker in any context, but it's especially delightful since the face smothered in blood belongs to an individual who just happens to be a blood-starved vampire.
To that, I say: "Top that Stephenie Meyer!"
Midnight Son is currently on the film festival circuit and was presented at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2011.
Saturday, 17 September 2011
TIFF 2011 - You're Next!
You're Next! (2011) dir. Adam Wingard
Starring: Sharni Vinson, AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, Margaret Laney, Barbara Crampton, Nicholas Tucci, Wendy Glenn, Amy Seimetz, Ti West and Larry Fessenden
**1/2
By Greg Klymkiw
This energetic, crisply directed home invasion horror thriller delivers up the scares and gore with considerable panache. I absolutely loved the delightfully grotesque look of the killers in You're Next! Wearing ultra-creepy animal masks (like those really cute lifelike ones you can buy for your kids at Zoo gift shops), the deadly home-invading carnage-purveyors might only have been creepier if they all wore matching Larry Harmon Bozo the Clown masks. (Or even creepier than that, if they WERE actually ALL Larry Harmon - but that, I'm afraid is another movie.)
In addition to the aforementioned, the picture is chock-full of babes including a mega-kick-ass Aussie chick played spiritedly by Sharni Vinson whose character, it is revealed, was raised in a survivalist compound Down Under. (I kid you not! An Aussie Survivalist Babe!!!)
So, what's not to like?
Well, not that I expect much in the way of originality from this sort of movie, especially if the killings are conceived and dispatched with both humour and aplomb - as they most certainly are in the picture, but the big disappointment is one of those: " Oh fuck, I can see an obvious 'twist' coming from miles away and I hope to Christ it's just a red herring and the filmmakers surprise me with something as sick and twisted - if not more so - than what's already on display in terms of the gore." But no! There it is in all its dullsville glory - the dreaded twist I won't reveal for the great unwashed who don't see it coming!
Come on, guys! Give me a break. Frankly, I'd have been happier if there was NO reason given for the killings save for a whack of psychos just doing what psychos do best. That really would have been better than the, uh... twist.
In any event, the first half of the movie proceeds like a delightful bat out of hell. An affluent couple (the female half played by the still-delectable Re-Animator babe Barbara Crampton) are celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary in their ultra-chic country mansion and have invited all their kids and assorted significant others to join them. The characters sharing bloodlines are straight out of some lower-drawer Albee or O'Neill play and the conversation round the dinner table plays out with plenty of funny, nasty sniping.
Great stuff!
Then the killing starts!
Even Greater!
And then, the aforementioned plot twist!
Uh, not great! Not good! Not even passable.
Thankfully, the carnage continues, but for this genre geek, the movie never quite recovers from a twist that was probably meant to be clever or something. I hate that! This is exactly the sort of thing that can drag potentially great genre pictures right down the crapper. It's too bad, really, because I really think screenwriter Simon Barrett has a lot more going for him that resorting to crap like that. He delivers a decent backdrop, first-rate sniping and a passel of great killings.
And, of course, let's not forget the babe raised on a survival compound in Australia.
Now that is truly inspired!!!
You're Next was unveiled at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2011) and while as of this writing it has not secured a distribution deal, it will. And it will no doubt be gangbusters at the boxoffice - in spite of the stupid... God I want to spoil it for those of you who are too boneheaded to not see it coming, but I won't.
Friday, 16 September 2011
TIFF 2011 - The Day
The Day (2011) dir. Doug Aarniokoski
Starring: Shawn Ashmore, Ashley Bell, Cory Hardrict, Dominic Monaghan, Shannyn Sossamon
*1/2
By Greg Klymkiw
Okay, so we all know when we’re watching a genre picture that’s low-to-no-budget - we’re out in a wilderness setting with one primary location and a relatively small cast. This normally isn’t a problem when the filmmakers go out of their way to make up for a lack of dough by:
(a.) Taking the genre into territory we’ve never quite experienced before and/or;
(b.) Maintaining a sense of dark (and hopefully not tongue-in-cheek) humour and/or;
(c.) Showcasing really good writing in terms of character, theme and dialogue.
This, I think, is especially important for post-apocalyptic thrillers, because the last thing you want to offer fan-boys is a dour, humourless, low-to-no-budget post-apocalyptic thriller.
This is often, shall we say, apocalyptic in more ways than one.
The Day hits zero out of three on the aforementioned checklist of low-to-no-budget genre thriller requirements. It’s a dour, humourless been-there-done-that post-apocalyptic thriller with by-rote writing that no doubt thinks it’s smart. The screenplay by Luke Passmore loads up all the clichés of the genre with a heap of dull blah-blah-blah in confined spaces and stock characters (the cool collected leader, the kick-ass babe with smarts (as it were), the loner kick-ass babe who is seemingly off her rocker, the supposedly funny team member who is sick and holding everyone back and, for the life of me, I can’t even remember who the fifth team member is, but I can assure you he’d probably be more memorable if I bothered to watch the movie again.
The picture focuses on one day in the life of five apocalypse survivors trying to stay a step ahead of crazed cannibals (identified by an “I’m a cannibal” tattoo) looking for fresh meat. Food is in short supply so humans are the best bet for good eating. The one-day-in-the-life conceit could have been interesting, but it’s not fully exploited in any meaningful and/or useful fashion. The device appears to be there because the filmmakers think they're being clever and/or have used it as a let’s-keep-exigencies-of-production-in-mind convention.
None of this is surprising since the movie is all about setting up expectations and then not delivering (and when it does, it's much ado about nothing). For example, early on in the film, the survivors come upon a seemingly abandoned farmhouse. We sit back in anticipation as director Doug Aarniokoski draws out the “suspense” whilst our team slowly susses out the situation. This drags on for what feels like an eternity until… nothing.
All seems well.
Phew!!!
We then have to suffer through a whole lot of dialogue where the actors get to emote and be characters we could care (less) about and it then seems to take another eternity before something vaguely exciting happens. When it does, it’s exactly what I predicted when they first discovered all was well. I have no doubt you'll figure it out too. My apologies, then, for having seen too many movies and knowing exactly where things are going, If you’re going to make a picture like this for no money you better damn well think of shit that geeks like me aren’t waiting for. Or, if you do utilize obvious genre tropes, you better damn well do something interesting and/or funny with them. Instead, the movie plods along with no surprises, no thrills and nothing new under the sun. At times, it’s hard to believe the movie is only ninety minutes. It's so dull it feels like ninety hours
About the best one can say is that The Day is at least professional and borderline competent. The performances are as fine as they can be under the circumstances and director Aarniokoski (director of the incomprehensible hack job Highlander: Endgame and the ludicrous Animals) handles the suspense and action with rudimentary competence.
This, however, is hardly a compliment.
If the movie had at least been utterly incompetent, it might have been blessed with something resembling entertainment value.
The Day had its unveiling at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2011). If it's theatrically released, civilization as we know it will be dead. Most likely you'll find it direct to home entertainment.
Saturday, 3 September 2011
John Carpenter's The Ward
Starring: Amber Heard, Jared Harris, Mammie Gummer, Daniella Panabaker
**
By Alan Bacchus
Well, it's fun to have John Carpenter back after so many years dormant and more than a decade of forgettable films, even if this latest effort is not the reverie we all hoped for. At least it’s a pure horror film. There are no vampires or ghosts on Mars. But there is a contained location, specifically a psych ward in the '60s, and the ghost of a missing or dead girl tormenting a group of female patients.
We're treated to a classic Carpenter opening including a number of establishing shots of the ward strung together. Before that we see Carpenter’s heroine, a gorgeous and athletic Kristen (Heard), lighting her house on fire, an act that sends her to the looney bin. It’s 1966 and the ward is something we’ve seen in numerous films before - cold, dehumanizing decor, ornery doctors and nurses who seem to care little about the patient’s well being, and of course, experimental treatments like electro-shock therapy and labotomization. Kristen hangs out with other gorgeous young gals, inmates we presume are crazy too.
It doesn’t take long for Kristen to figure out there’s something not right about the ward, specifically an ominous dark-clad figure making creepy appearances around the building. Based on the glum reaction of Dr. Stringer (Harris), this seems to be a part of why Kristen is here. A few of the gals try to escape but are caught and killed by the demon ghost before Kristen has her one-on-one confrontation, and, as we can expect with these period mental patient films, all is not as it seems.
Carpenter manages to engineer a few scary sequences with creative ways to make us jump. His demon woman is a wholly Carpenter creation, a grotesque humanoid in a dress resembling one of the devil worshippers in Prince of Darkness.
But what’s sorely missing is the rich texture Carpenter used to have between his scary moments. Think of the build up in They Live before Roddy Piper first put those sunglasses on, or the monotonous music tones of Ennio Morricone in The Thing, or the religious back story in Prince of Darkness, or John Houseman’s opening campfire story in The Fog. There are no feelings like these in The Ward.
Carpenter’s later pictures have all been plagued with bad casting. Here Amber Heard is simply not believable as a tortured girl from the '60s, too generically beautiful to be psychotic. The stilted dialogue of all the girls feels more like a high school clique than four crazies in a psych ward. Thus, when Carpenter’s not trying to scare us, it’s all flat and devoid of atmosphere.
Sadly, Carpenter has lost his touch, but not without a superb body of work behind him. The Ward is like those last few films from Alfred Hitchcock, admirable but forgettable.
The Ward is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Alliance Films in Canada.
Friday, 27 May 2011
The Rite
The Rite (2011) dir. Mikael Hafstrom
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Colin O’Donoghue, Alice Braga and Rutger Hauer
*1/2
By Greg Klymkiw
I think my 10-year-old daughter summed up The Rite quite perfectly as the end titles popped up. “That wasn’t scary at all, dad,” she declared. When I queried her further on this response she offered the following: “I kind of liked it at the beginning because it was cool to learn a bunch of new stuff and that was pretty creepy, but when the movie tried to be scary, it wasn’t.”
Ah, the wisdom of 10-year-old girls.
At her age I was a movie geek, but nowhere near the level of her critical acumen.
This, of course, is the primary reason The Rite doesn’t work, and as a proud parent, I’m happy my daughter’s assessment mirrored my own when I first saw the movie on a big screen.
Slowly telling the story of Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), a small town lad who works in the family business as a mortician with his father (Rutger Hauer), he dreams of a life beyond the confines of a fluorescent-lit abattoir where he pretties up corpses for their final viewings. So he does what any dissatisfied junior mortician would do. He enters the seminary. After all, he’ll get a free education, and, as a bonus, explore within himself his late mother’s belief that the hand of God touched him at birth.
Upon graduating, Michael resolves to resign from the priesthood until discovering his entire tuition will convert to a humungous student loan. This is ample impetus to receive training as a soldier of the Lord. It’s what any doubting Thomas seminarian would do.
The Vatican has issued a decree that every diocese be staffed with a fully trained exorcist. Turbulent times have yielded more aggressive measures. With Satan stepping up his game, the Catholic Church must raise an army to battle the ultimate evil. It's what any organized religion needing a public relations fix would do.
We follow our hero on an all-expense-paid trip to Rome. A good deal, if you can get it. Living la dolce vita on the tab of Catholic parishioners, Michael attends classes with Father Xavier (Ciaran Hinds), who delivers considerable background on the exorcism game. When Michael displays utter disinterest in the proceedings, the picture gets narratively annoying since we the audience would rather stay in class with Father Xavier than watch Michael mope around.
Even the introduction of religion journalist Angeline (Alice Braga) bears little fruit, as Michael has no interest in plucking the juicy apple from her bountiful garden.
Eventually, Michael is placed under the one-on-one tutelage of the unorthodox exorcist Father Lucas (Anthony Hopkins). Here the movie shifts from measured and creepy to dull, predictable and decidedly lacking in the horror and suspense the film’s makers would want to instill.
This is not due to any lack of enjoyable ham-slicing on behalf of Mr. Hopkins – he attacks his role like a sow nursing a full load of suckling piglets. The problem is the movie itself at this point. We follow, pretty much by rote, the teacher-student duo as they do battle with a particularly nasty demon possessing a young pregnant woman. Everything we expect to happen happens (and boy, do I mean EVERYTHING!). Michael is skeptical. Lucas is unorthodox (and why wouldn’t he be with Anthony Hopkins playing the role?). The possessed woman hurls expletives. She vomits (though not green pea soup, but – admittedly a nice touch – bloody nails).
Eventually, the demon is cast out, though glory is bittersweet. It results in the death of the woman and her unborn child. But oh, surprise-surprise, it is one clever demon. It leaves the woman to possess one of our exorcists who must then be exorcised by his partner. I will not tell you whom the possessed turns out to be, but if you would not be able to guess at this point, you deserve a spoiler right about now.
Do not worry, though. I will keep it to myself. When it happens, trust me, you will not be surprised in the least.
Ho-hum.
Seeing it all done before is not, however, why The Rite fails as a movie. The few surprises in tone during the early going turn out to be bone-headed filmmaking. The seemingly measured pace of the first third, in retrospect and upon a second helping on Blu-ray, is less about a director engaging in a slow burn and more the result of a camera jockey who has no real feel for what a genre picture needs. Worse yet, Hafstrom simply has no sense of humour, and as he lacks a discernible voice, we get a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it to, but does so in the dullest fashion imaginable.
I should say this is not all Hafstrom’s fault since the script also fails to deliver on either side of the to-scare-or-not-to-scare fencepost.
Watching it a second time, I was reminded of my first helping on the big screen and thinking at the time that the film was going to go into some very exciting and dangerous territory. When it did not, I drifted in and out of catnaps. I am also pleased to admit these catnaps were extremely edifying, resulting in mini-dreams of the most horrendous variety.
Watching the movie on this go ‘round, I was wide awake. I was, in actuality, primed to see what I had missed whilst in the Land of Nod during my first screening of the film. I thought that perhaps the movie would live up to my initial response to the first third. Alas, watching it a second time on Blu-ray, I experienced nothing as pleasant as occasional forays into sleepy time. Instead, I started to feel not unlike Alex in A Clockwork Orange – his eyelids fastened open as he is forced to endure images that drive him to a state of utter revulsion.
I, for one, might have preferred utter revulsion to utter disinterest.
There are so many potentially interesting story elements introduced in the picture that are either dropped, go nowhere, or worse, forge into utterly dull directions. Let us, for example, take the whole subplot involving Rutger Hauer as Michael's father Mr. Kovacs.
Let us do the math on this:
Number one - RUTGER HAUER AS A MORTICIAN!!! 'Nuff said on that.
Number two - in flashback we see Rutger working his magic on dead mommy.
Number three - Michael, as a child, watches from a distance and is invited into the morgue for a closer look.
What's all this add up to?
Total Creepville! Mind you, only on paper.
Well, not even that, because the script never goes deeper than the above named surface details.
From a directorial standpoint, there is a bit of sizzle to these scenes, but absolutely no steak. These moments in The Rite kept reminding me of just how creepy, sick, scary, darkly funny and even strangely/genuinely moving the scenes are in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, where a father psychologically abuses his little boy in all manner of deliciously foul ways, which leads the boy in adulthood to seek the "career" and "hobby" that he does. This is hinted at in The Rite but never followed through in a satisfying way.
Then again, Hafstrom is no Michael Powell. He is, in fact, barely a cut above a television director. I would have loved to see what someone with style and humour might have done with this material – someone like Brian DePalma, for instance. He would, at least, have demanded a script punch-up, taken the fine cast, all the great craftspeople (the movie is exceptionally well shot) and then delivered something truly memorable. Even if it had been dreadful, DePalma is a director whose dreadful movies are spectacularly abysmal – so much so that you never forget them.
However, when a studio tries to have its cake and eat it too, the result is more often than not, truly forgettable – kind of like The Rite.
Hiring a barely competent hack to direct also never helps. Zack Snyder, for example, is a bit of a hack, but man-oh-man, he does have a voice and can direct action and suspense with the sort of ferocity so lacking in this ultimately dreadful movie.
The Rite is available on Blu-ray from Warner Home Entertainment. The picture and sound transfer are predictably excellent, but if it is extras of any substance that you are looking for, you will not find them here. The cover promises an alternative ending that will knock you on your proverbial posterior. While it is probably a preferable ending to the lame ending the movie has, it is of the trick pony surprise variety and would probably be better suited to an episode from a television anthology series. The additional deleted scenes are okay, but only worth seeing for some great Rutger Hauer stuff that was cut. The added film purports to be a documentary on the real-life exorcist the feature drama was inspired by. This might have been great, but is, instead, far too short and features more footage than we need of the cast and key creative types and clips from the film. It is, in essence, not much more than a glorified electronic press kit.
Thursday, 19 May 2011
Vanishing on 7th Street
Starring: Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, John Leguizamo, Jacob Latimore
**
By Alan Bacchus
The title of this picture has a very Twilight Zone feel to it. Perhaps it's by design. After all, the high concept at core here is clearly influenced by the seminal work of TZ writer Richard Matheson. It’s the I Am Legend/Last Man on Earth scenario recycled again. Some kind of unexplainable apocalyptic disaster results in a massive power outage, but not just electronics – the sun itself. There are no zombies or vampires in this case. Instead, it’s simply darkness itself representing the evil lurking and stalking the survivors.
The director, Brad Anderson, is the main attraction here. Genre-philes know him from his brilliant low-budget horror film Session 9. Unfortunately, his subsequent efforts, the moody, atmospheric mind-bender The Machinist and the Hitchcockian train-actioner Transsiberian were too faulty to match the promise of Session 9. Despite some minor tingling of the spine in the opening act, Vanishing on 7th Street is not a return to form.
It’s a terrific opening. Bone-chilling, actually. Hayden Christensen is a television news producer who is caught in a massive power outage. But when he searches out others in the building, he discovers everyone is gone – literally vanished, with their clothes on the floor the only remnants of their places on earth. We see the same thing happening through the eyes of Paul (John Leguizamo), an AMC Cinema projectionist. The imagery of the clothing left on the floor outlining the vanished bodies is stunning.
Where did they go? What happened to them? We don’t know exactly, but some kind of evil force in the shadows creeps up and steals their bodies and souls. Much like The Fog encroaching on the villages of John Carpenter’s seaside town, the shadows on 7th street are eerie and scary supernatural entities.
Brad Anderson shoots these scenes with great precision, using a slow and purposeful pace to amplify every moment of suspense. But after this set-up with the four main characters congregating together, the second act stalls. Unlike Night of the Living Dead or 28 Days Later or even Shaun of the Dead, the foursome, which also includes a young boy and a hysterical mother who has just lost her child, is hopelessly dull and uninteresting. As customary, the group tries to piece together what’s happening in the rest of the world, hypothesizing about what kind of apocalypse they’re in, and specifically, how to get to some kind of safe haven located in Chicago. Unfortunately, the group is too passive, and without this forward momentum the film runs out of gas quickly.
Thandie Newton, who plays the crying and inconsolable grieving mother, is like fingernails on a chalkboard and plainly looks lost in this kind of genre film. Hayden Christensen does a decent job portraying Luke as a twitchy, reluctant leader. John Leguizamo’s back in this kind of role – remember his turn as the obsessed parent in the similarly-themed Shyamalan film The Happening? He’s crippled with an injury for most of the film, which is an unfortunate and unintentional metaphor for the staleness of the film’s second and third acts.
Brad Anderson does the best job he can, creating a unique and unsettling atmosphere. But like The Machinist, with very little script or characters to work with, his tonal aspirations amount to just another forgettable horror film.
Vanishing on 7th Street is available on Blu-ray and DVD from EOne Entertainment in Canada.
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