Three Films Make A Post: In this town a speeding ticket is a death sentence

Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City aka El silencio de la ciudad blanca (2019): This Netflix movie adaptation of a crime novel that’s apparently much better (which shouldn’t be terribly difficult to achieve) directed by Daniel Calparsoro feels like a greatest hits version of the serial killer thriller genre, and as with most greatest hits collections, there’s a lot of glitz but little substance on screen. Sure, the film does look great, but the script is a complete mess full of sub-plots that are picked up, dropped and forgotten for no apparent reason, motivations and character psychology that make little sense (and is usually neither explained nor demonstrated but just stated awkwardly). The film has the kind of overloaded stop and start pacing you often get when a book is cut down to what a screenwriter deems to be its highlights.
Otherwise, there’s only the usual overblown serial killer movie nonsense, full of grand declarations of intellectual depth that doesn’t actually exist, ridiculous murder rituals this film isn’t even clever enough to make as creepy as they should be, and taking place in a world where characters are probably even accompanied by Very Dramatic Music™ when they are on the loo.

Housewife (2017): I absolutely adored director Can Evrenol’s Baskin, but this, his second feature, is quite a step back, despite hitting some of my favourite horror and weird fic elements, namely a creepy cult, a protagonist who can’t quite understand if she’s dreaming or not, and creepy flesh masks. Evrenol seems to be trying to formally emulate the dream logic of Italian 80s horror, but for much of the film’s running time, he doesn’t hit the proper mood of a bizarre and unpleasant dream but more the randomness of actual dreams, which simply isn’t terribly interesting to watch. There are a couple or three effective scenes here to show that Baskin wasn’t an accident, but most of what we get is aimless meandering.

The film also suffers badly from the decision to have a cast of non-native English speakers speak English dialogue, adding a stilted and unnatural quality that may have been meant to add to the film’s unreal mood but in practice makes the already pretty awkward dialogue difficult to make out and puts another layer of distance between audience and characters when they badly need to feel as close to the audience as possible.


The California Kid (1974): Which leaves this post’s role of “The Good Film” to this unassuming 70s TV movie by Richard T. Heffron in which drag riding Martin Sheen takes revenge on Sheriff Vic Morrow who purposely drove his brother and others off a mountain road. It’s not a tight, Duel-style thrill ride but more interested in a  very 70s exploration of characters on the side-lines of life, while having some thoughts about the reasons why good people look away from bad acts, usually avoiding the melodrama that can come with the TV territory. Heffron’s direction is not spectacular but makes nice use of its California locations and knows how to provide space for a cast that also features a young Nick Nolte, Michelle Phillips and Stuart Margolin.

The Field Guide to Evil (2018)

As we regular viewers of things like them know, horror anthologies are often a bit of a mixed bag, never more so than when they operate like The Field Guide to Evil does and bring together thematically linked short features from different directors. In The Field Guide’s case, these directors are also from different countries and apparently found themselves tasked with making movies based on the ghosts and ghoulies of local folklore, so the tonal connection is often loose to non-existent.

That’s not much of a problem for me, for a collection of eight interesting short films isn’t anything to sneer at, and giving money to filmmakers that wouldn’t necessarily make shorts anymore is a thing to praise. Stylistically, most of the segments come down on the more artsy side of genre filmmaking, which isn’t much of a surprise given the involvement of directors like Peter Strickland (of Berberian Sound Studio fame), Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure), or Can Evrenol (Baskin). These are not the kind of directors you go to when you want to make a bro horror anthology in the spirit of the VHS films. I’m quite happy with that, though I have to admit this does result in a film that’s very uneven in tone and style, which may be weakness to some viewers but a strength to others.

My personal favourites are the first tale, “Die Trud”, as directed by Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, that recommends itself as a fantastic example of how to do the supernatural as metaphor right, while also hitting my personal sweet spot by being in mood and style a lot like an Austrian version of The Witch, creating a very deft picture of a specific time and place, as well as containing a pretty great looking monster.

Then there’s Can Evrenol’s “Al Karisi” that shares the same nightmarish quality that made his feature Baskin so impressive, expressing a young woman’s anxiety about pregnancy, child rearing, loneliness and loss of identity via a goat-based demon that is as bizarre as it is disturbing.There are, by the way, quite a few goats in the film.

Equally nightmarish is Smoczynska’s “The Kindler and the Virgin”, that takes the more unappetizing elements of a traditional folk tale, puts them into a drily funny (but not comedic) short film, adds some acerbic social commentary and some appropriate imagery and is over so quickly I found myself a bit stunned by it all.

Also lovely in a completely different way is Strickland’s entry “The Cobbler’s Lot”, which takes the most fucked-up version of a traditional fairy-tale (and those can get pretty messed-up if you read beyond children’s books), adds more foot fetishism, shoes made out of human skin and sexuality expressed through dance, and then films it in a mock silent-movie style (with sound effects). It’s the sort of thing that will probably have some people mumbling something about pretentiousness, but to me, style and content fit together here rather more comfortably than I would have expected and are certainly doing right by the Weirdness of folklore and fairy tales.


I didn’t connect as well with the other short films in here – and frankly have no idea what was going on in Yannis Veslemes’s “Whatever Happened to Panagas the Pagan?” – but that’s probably more on account of personal taste than them being objectively weaker, so I found myself still rather satisfied with the film as a whole. It is, to emphasize it again, really meant for people who enjoy art house horror, so just don’t go in expecting something more mainstream in its sensibilities.

Baskin (2015)

Warning: spoilers are an inevitable fact of life!

A group of Turkish policemen (Görkem Kasal, Ergun Kuyucu, Muharrem Baryrak, Fatih Dokgöz and Sabahattin Yakut), most of whom are thugs or at least the sort of cop letting their colleagues work out their inner thugs without protest, receive a call that sends them out to a house in very curious rural area. They are confronted with a terrible ritual in a place and time where the borders between our world and one much worse have grown rather thin. But even before they have arrived at the house, the world seems to shift around them, time and place twisting and turning into nightmares that may not offer escape for any of them.

Turkish director Can Evrenol’s Baskin – based on an earlier short film – is quite the film, as close to the recreation of a nightmare (inside of a nightmare inside of a nightmare, and so on) as possible. Even right at the start, when the plot hasn’t arrived at the point where it will actually show anything supernatural or simply horrifying, the director puts quite a bit of effort into creating a feeling of wrongness and weirdness. Some characters show frays at their edges the situation – or simple digestion problems – don’t quite seem to justify. Colour schemes, camera angles, music, and the disquieting way the camera doesn’t show the faces of certain characters seems to suggest doom, dread and create distrust in the reality of anything we see, until the simple act of meat cutting to appropriately sinister music takes on a sinister undertone, a suggestion of one isn’t quite sure what, only that it can be nothing good, healthy, or sane.

The sense of disquiet Evrenol creates is only further increased by strange jumps in time and place that leave the viewer asking if it is the film as one first assumes or the characters jumping around; the way the talk between one of the cops and his foster son seems to concern dreams, omens and the supernatural quite a bit more than fits the tough guy postures of their colleagues. The film keeps this sense of the high Weird even once the policemen have descended into cellar of a lonely house and have become the unwilling participants of a ritual that contains rather more – inventive and excellently unpleasant - gore and torture than films this heavy on an atmosphere of dread (when they’re not made by Fulci and the other typical Italian suspects at least) usually show, keeping the feeling of the ritual as disquieting as it is brutal. Not a little feat once you’ve realized that most of this latter part in actuality only consists of a bunch of people out of a 90s metal video doing metal video stuff to one another in some ruined cellar. The thing is – Baskin never feels that way at all, but really comes very, very close to the feeling of the never-ending living nightmare its content is supposed to be.

Even the slowness of Baskin’s early phases – about the only element of the film I can see anyone reasonably criticizing – fits the idea of a nightmare perfectly, leaving the audience without the crutches of a more conventionally thrilling first half while still building (and building) a feeling of wrongness. And while I can’t say I was terribly surprised by the film’s ending, I don’t think feeling surprised by it is really the point here; rather, the film seems to delight in confirming the audience’s worst fears.


All in all, Baskin is a fantastic achievement that anyone who likes their horror on the atmospheric yet gory side needs to see.