Brooklyn 45 (2023)

World War II hasn’t been over for long. A group of old friends and war veterans are invited to the Brooklyn home of Lt. Colonel Clive Hockstatter (house favourite and horror hero Larry Fessenden). It’s not the happiest of reunions: one of the men, Archibald Stanton (Jeremy Holm), is on trial for a rather nasty war crime, and there are other tensions in the group as well. Former interrogation specialist/torturer Marla (Anne Ramsay) has brought her husband Bob (Ron E. Rains) with her, and the men really aren’t keen on a guy who married everyone’s sweetheart, particularly when he’s decidedly lacking in the demonstrative manliness they just love to indulge in.

These and other conflicts will come to the fore soon enough, but the reason Hockstatter has asked them to come is rather different. He wants his friends to take part in a séance meant to conjure up the spirit of his dead wife Susan, who killed herself after nobody believed in her wild tales of some German-born greengrocers in the neighbourhood being Nazi spies.

The séance goes rather well– depending on one’s opinion about being trapped in a room by ghosts. Hockstatter puking up a puddle of ectoplasm from which the arm of his dead wife arises is only the first surprise of the evening, and soon the whole affair turns into a long discussion about the morality of war and duty, and horror cinema’s favourite theme, guilt.

Ted Geoghegan is certainly one of the more interesting directors of low budget horror movies working right now. He doesn’t appear to want to make the same movie again, so he follows the Fulci (etc) homage of We Are Still Here and the Western as horror of Mohawk with what amounts to a filmed stage play.

Not surprisingly, the resulting film is very dialogue heavy, much more focussed on its characters talking through some ethical problems they encounter and slowly revealing some dark secrets/their true selves, while also taking a look at the nasty side of the Dream of America, than it is on its supernatural horror. The supernatural side of the film really is only ever an enabler for what Geoghegan is truly interested in here, and – apart from one pretty outrageous gore gag concerning Larry Fessenden’s head – really takes up very little of the film’s interest.

If you’re hoping the supernatural to be thematically relevant instead of plot convenient, this is certainly not going to make you happy. Given my tastes, I found myself somewhat disappointed by that element of the film – I think the film could have done more to use the supernatural as a way to explore its thematic interests and been all the more interesting for it.

Particularly since the dialogue isn’t always strong enough to carry everything the film is attempting to say about America or its characters. While there are certainly moments with the proper weight and cadence here, there are just as many lines that are simply too stagey and stilted to work as coming out of the mouths of these particular characters. The dialogue also tends to be a bit too clear and obvious. There’s a bluntness to it that sometimes suggests a film a bit afraid of its audience not getting what it is trying to say about its characters, their guilt and their country. Which is a particular problem when what it is trying to say has been said dozens of times before, often with more subtlety and complexity, and when it works with a stable of actors who play their asses off, and would certainly do so as well if the material were just a little more nuanced.

All of which sounds rather more damning than what I actually think of Brooklyn 45. I certainly do respect its willingness to be as stagey as it is, as well as its decision to express what it’s going for in a manner that feels rather old-fashioned today. That its approach doesn’t resonate terribly well with me is more a matter of taste than anything else.

The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

aka The Taking

Mia (Michelle Ang) and her duo of a film crew (Jeremy DeCarlos and Brett Gentile) are shooting a documentary on Alzheimer’s patient Deborah Logan (Jill Larson), and the way caring for her influences her daughter Sarah (Anne Ramsay). And yes, the film we are about to see consists of the footage they are shooting, so welcome to POV horror land again.

At first, Deb seems to be in the early stages of her illness but her condition deteriorates horribly quickly during the first few days the camera crew is with her. She quickly turns from an older woman who is infrequently phasing out a little to someone more often than not bound up in screaming fits of anger and self-mutilation. There’s something even more insidious going on with her than just the total collapse of her mental faculties, though, for last time anyone checked, levitation, raving in a language one doesn’t know and telekinesis aren’t exactly part of Alzheimer’s symptoms. The more horrific occurrences the Sarah and the film crew witness, the more sure they become something supernatural is happening. Research leads them to a series of murders several decades ago that seem to be connected to a very old, and very nasty ritual.

At first, Adam Robitel’s The Taking looks quite a bit like your run of the mill 2010s POV possession horror movie. Things, however, leave the realm of the generic pretty quickly for something rather more specific and individual, and therefore more effective and horrifying, until the film it culminates in a finale that may use certain very well worn POV horror mainstays but also puts some things on screen I actually have never seen done in another film quite this way.

Most certainly, I haven’t seen them done this effectively, for not only does Robitel’s film use what looks like a coherent mythology to construct the film’s supernatural menace, it also demonstrates a fine sense for the timing of its escalation as well as for the various revelations of what’s going on, early on fruitfully using audience expectations about possession horror and the horrors of Alzheimer’s, but going its own way once playing around with generics would weaken the film. There’s also a much firmer sense of characterisation on display than you’ll find in most POV horror pieces (despite its appearance of intimacy, the form really doesn’t lend itself to depth in this regard), with at least Sarah coming off as an actual complex person. On the character front, it’s also worth mentioning how well The Taking does inclusivity, using characters who are lesbian, or Asian, or black, or white without the need for big gestures or explanations, just quite matter-of-factly showing people of all shapes and forms as normal parts of the world. Which, to me, seems like the best way to go about these things. This also fits in well with another of the film’s strengths, its eye for details that make its situations just the decisive bit more believable, even if a detail is just the shaking hands of an anthropologists who has just watched a video of Deb not being herself anymore at all. (As an aside, it’s also typical of the film’s approach to genre tropes that the anthropologist is quite a bit more helpful than a priest Sarah tries to ask for help).

And in the end, The Taking of Deborah Logan is also just a highly effective and often imaginative horror film that grounds itself in the very quotidian – and all the more disturbing for it - horror of Alzheimer’s to go from there to some inspired moments of less quotidian horror and even that most curious of things, a kicker ending that actually does work with what came before because it is the logical conclusion to what we’ve seen.

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