Three Films Make A Post: If the storm doesn't get you... they will

Crawl (2019): By now, I’ve decided the films of Alexandre Aja are a bit like those of Rob Zombie in that I’ll never like a single one of them. This one should actually be a bit of a winner: a father daughter duo trapped by a hurricane having to fight off an alligator sounds like actual claustrophobic fun. Alas, it’s an annoying father-daughter duo with exactly the father-daughter problems you’d find in a SyFy movie. Aja and/or the script also quickly get bored by having to come up with suspense scenes based on the minimalist set-up, so the one alligator soon turns into a swarm of alligators, and because Aja clearly can’t imagine not having any character to kill, we get ten minutes of alligators killing random people around our protagonists’ house. It’s really all very SyFy Original, just with a higher budget and for some reason having found its way into a cinema near me; it’s also a middling at best SyFy Original without much to recommend it or even just remember it next week.

The Black String (2018): I actually enjoyed Brian Hanson’s much more low-market film about a guy (Frankie Muniz) with a history of psychological problems either starting to suffer from a witch’s curse or losing it after a one-night stand a lot more. Hanson is really good at dragging Muniz’s experiences to the border of the ridiculous and illogical, making the viewer increasingly uncomfortable with the protagonist but also evoking sympathy and empathy for his plight, be it imagined or not, while still having him act increasingly erratic and threatening to himself and others.

Also highly commendable is how well the film fits typical tropes of Fortean High Strangeness into its plot, and how dubious and slightly cracked anyone who believes our protagonist is. It’s all highly ambiguous, until the film ends on a note that washes all ambiguity away without needing to go for a twist ending.

The Endless (2017): I liked the previous films by director/writer and sometimes actor duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead a lot, and The Endless, which tells the story of two brothers returning to the cult they grew up in – a tale that also happens to intersect with the duo’s first movie Resolution in surprising and pretty damn cool ways – is another winner. I’m particularly happy with the directors’ ability to fuse the cosmically weird, the humanly weird and the naturalistically mundane without ever letting any one perspective overwhelm the rest of the film.


The pace is leisurely, but it’s the kind of slowness that follows the need of the story the film tells and the world it takes place in – this is one of those films where every shot takes on multiple functions in world building, character building or mood building without ever making things feel too constructed or overloaded. It’s a thing of beauty, really.

In short: Piranha 3D (2010)

Seismic activity opens up the passage between an ancient underground lake and a popular vacation spot somewhere in the USA, allowing the elder lake's population of pre-historic piranha a nice little holiday in sunnier parts. But the poor darlings are oh so very hungry! Fortunately, Mother Nature takes care of her own and has seen it fit to provide the fishies with a delightful welcoming feast in the form of hordes and hordes of young and tasty spring breakers.

These young people turn out to be the ideal food, at once highly nourishing and dumb as rocks. There's also some stuff about the local sheriff (Elisabeth Shue) and her children, but there's absolutely no need for anyone to spend even a second thinking about it. The script bots who shat out this film's script certainly didn't.

Still, while I'd rather not talk about the script (why put more effort in than the people actually making the movie?) of Piranha 3D - no, I'm absolutely not calling this film by its official title, Piranha, for poor Joe Dante surely has enough troubles - I have to admit I rather enjoyed watching the film. In fact, for my tastes it is director Alexandre Aja's most watchable film up until now (please don't ask me about Haute Tension). At least, this time around, Aja seems completely clear about what sort of movie he is trying to make, namely an ultra-orthodox exploitation film that exclusively worships on the altar of breasts and blood. And truly, brothers and sisters, blood and breasts is what Aja brings us. Just don't get too excited here, it's spring break style nudity, so there's nothing going on that's actually erotic, unless you're a monkey.

Now, obviously, I would have preferred a film that attempted to include at least a bit of cleverness from time to time, but this is not the sort of film that ever promises any stimulation of one's brain cells, so it would seem rather unfair of me to complain too much about the complete lack of that stimulation. And hey, a film made by people with any ambition or working brains would probably not include as many scenes of people trying to fight against a swarm of angry fishes by shooting them.

All this does still sound rather more negative than it's supposed to, given that I had a (sort of) fine time watching Piranha 3D. It's decently paced and does "carnage" quite well. There's really nothing wrong with the movie that couldn't be solved by burning its script and letting someone with even the faintest whiff of talent - or just half a clue - write a new one. Obviously, it's not a film that can hold up to even the minor scrutiny of thinking about it for ten seconds (and yes, I'm pretty sure that's still nine seconds more than Aja and the writers spent thinking about their film).

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,alexandre aja,in short,horror