Three Films Make A Post: Seclusion. Seduction. Survival.

The Detained aka Deadly Detention (2017): Ah, detention horror, the more high-school-y sub-genre of the corridor runner. Well, usually, it is. In the case of Blair Hayes’s The Detained, the corridors our detained high school kids run up and down and forwards and backwards and around in, above or under belong to a closed-down prison, for their high school has been closed because of an opossum infestation. Yup, this is one of those films that excuses all sorts of lame (and perhaps a wee bit lazy) aspects of its script by being all ironic and shit. So the main characters aren’t walking and talking clichés but ironic walking and talking clichés. We all know the drill by now. Does the “irony” add anything to the film? Does it help uncover any interesting insights? Of course not. To be fair, I have seen much worse in ironic horror, and much worse corridor runners. At least, the acting is decent, about every tenth cheesy joke is actually funny, and the basic aspects of filmmaking are perfectly competent. Hooray?

Jackals (2017): Plotwise, Kevin Greutert’s 80s set movie about the members of a family and a deprogrammer having to fight off a siege by a group of rather creepy cult members from whom they’ve stolen the family’s son back, is a very sparse film. The characters aren’t terribly deep either, but they are brought to life by a fine cast – Deborah Kara Unger, Johnathon Schaech, Stephen Dorff among them – and Greutert has an eye for using character archetypes in just the right way for the kind of film this is. Visually, Jackals is very atmospheric, and there are quite a few clever little touches: the cult’s use of animal masks and Greutert’s tendency to shoot them in silhouette is a prime example of how to make your antagonists feel ever so slightly worse than human. The pacing is excellent, and while I hoped in vain for an escalation in the direction of the supernatural, the whole film is just a tight, exciting little package in the best low budget movie tradition. Why, I even liked the kicker ending!


Wendy and Lucy (2008): This Kelly Reichardt film featuring Michelle Williams and a dog named Lucy might be among the saddest films I have seen in a long time. Plot-wise, it’s not about much more than an impoverished woman and her dog stranding on their way to Alaska in some horrible little town, with little outwardly happening, and that slowly. In truth, it’s a film about a personal apocalypse, a life that has turned to a dead end without the woman living it having quite noticed it (or perhaps rather admitted to herself), a society that replaces kindness with an insistence on proper procedures, bureaucracy, and money, and can’t even imagine not filtering everything through the lenses of these things. It’s also a film about what it means to be poor in the western world today (well, 2008, and things haven’t exactly improved, have they?), and how the worst cruelty is inflicted on people by other people who probably can’t even see it. There’s also an absolutely horrifying encounter with a half-crazed man played by Larry Fessenden that puts further emphasis on the way poor women have it even worse. It all adds up to something so sad, filmed and acted with such care, words – my words at least – can’t really do the film justice.

SyFy vs The Mynd: The Hollow (2015)

Sisters Sarah (Stephanie Hunt), Marley (Sarah Dugdale) and Emma (Alisha Newton) have been having a rather hard time of late. Their parents died in an accident that left the youngest Emma hurt and suffering from some form of PTSD, and now the money their parents have left them has run out from paying for Emma’s hospital bills. Their only choice to escape the loving arms of the foster care system is to move in with their aunt Cora (Deborah Kara Unger).

Cora lives on a somewhat isolated island in what I assume to be the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, this island turns out to be at the centre of the return of a rather nasty supernatural surprise in form of a fiery stick-monster bound to Halloween and storms. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a storm coming up, and it’s the day before Halloween, so when the sisters arrive on the island, Cora is already dead (one suspects Unger isn’t cheap), the island under attack, and the sisters will have to put quite some work into surviving.

It looks as if now that the SyFy Original is a species threatened with extinction, the few films still being made are allowed a greater degree of care – or we’re a really lucky audience and only the crappy SyFy Originals are dying out. Be that as it may, SyFy veteran Sheldon Wilson (in the past responsible for what might be my favourite SyFy movie, Carny) does provides us with a fine example of the SyFy monster movie. Pleasantly, it’s an earnest one too, so nobody’s patience will be tested by unfunny attempts at being funny, and the people who can only enjoy a monster movie ironically can go watch American Horror Story.

But I’m getting rude, and I digress. If you’re acquainted with the SyFy formula, you will have noticed this one surprisingly doesn’t feature any divorced characters getting together again via monster hunting, and indeed no romance plot whatsoever. Instead, Wilson concentrates on the tensions and bonds between the three sisters (the male characters aren’t of any import whatsoever), whose nature is of course revealed via the whole monster business. The characterization isn’t particularly deep but done with a degree of precision that avoids making any of the sisters the bad one who doesn’t deserve to live and realized by the young actresses with surety. The sisters and their relationship feels believable enough to not make me want them get eaten by a stick-monster. Indeed, I found myself actively rooting for them during the course of the film, which isn’t exactly something you can count on in more formulaic horror flicks.

As in most of his other movies, Wilson shows himself to be a capable director of low budget chills too, with many an atmospheric shot of rather picturesque woods (mostly by day, interestingly enough), well-timed monster attacks and an eye for the gruesome detail. It’s a very controlled movie, with little going on in front of the camera that doesn’t have an actual bearing on the movie except for the somewhat pointless sub-plot of Emma’s visions that changes nothing about the plot and tells us nothing about the characters (and was perhaps more important in an earlier draft of the script?). That subplot is fortunately tiny, though, so The Hollow stays the taut and fun SyFy horror movie I enjoyed greatly.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,syfy vs the mynd,horror,stephanie hunt,sarah dugdale,alisha newton,deborah kara unger

In short: Fear X (2003)

This is the movie that drove Nicolas Winding Refn's production company into bankruptcy in the director's first attempt to get a foothold in English language cinema without betraying his aesthetic interests.

And really, it's not much of a surprise Fear X flopped pretty hard, for where the film's basic plot description ("lost man played by John Turturro attempts to understand the murder of his wife by finding her murderer") suggests your run-of-the-mill vengeance thriller, the actual film is working hard to subvert the vengeance thriller with the power of the Weird and the metaphorical. Refn uses a rigorously composed visual style that hints at the surreal despite - or perhaps even because of - its rigidity. That style turns the quotidian into the unreal by the sheer power of hyperstylization, pretty clearly not caring one bit for mainstream interpretations of how "suspense" or "excitement" are built in a thriller. That doesn't mean that Fear X isn't suspenseful or exciting, for these seemingly lost elements reappear once a viewer has accepted the non-generic way the film is built, and just goes with it.

After a point (ironically shortly after the film pretends to become clearer and more "realistic"), it becomes utterly unclear what part of the film is a dream, or a hallucination, and what part "real" (as much as anything in a film ever can be real, of course); questions of truth and reality are, as they often seem to be in Refn's movies, completely dependent on one's interpretation.

To - depending on one's position on this sort of thing - either add insult to injury or cheese to your wine, Refn's film refuses the easy way out of an ending that explains anything at all. In fact, the ending Fear X delivers so steadfastly refuses to even show the audience an important part of what is or isn't happening (though there are enough hints to build one's own ending if one is so inclined) I can easily imagine a nice percentage of the film's audience actually hating the director for it. I for my part rather want to applaud him.

Technorati-Markierungen: danish movies,canadian movies,british movies,brazilian movies,nicolas winding refn,john turturro,deborah kara unger,thriller

Three Films Make A Post: LEAVE THE CHILDREN HOME! ...and if YOU are SQUEAMISH STAY HOME WITH THEM!!!!!!!

Neues vom Hexer aka Again the Ringer (1965): Alfred Vohrer's sequel to his own Der Hexer is a decidedly middling part of the Rialto Wallace adaptation cycle. It features a few of Vohrer's trademark sight gags and moments of fourth wall demolition, a fun bad guy henchman turn by Klaus Kinski, and Drache, Rütting, Schürenberg and Arent in their usual roles, as well as a slightly insane soundtrack by Peter Thomas, but the film never feels as fun as it should do. For my tastes there's just a bit too much normal mystery tedium and too little of the pulp thrills I've come to expect from the Wallace films, leading to a film that is too well done to be completely unsatisfying yet too often trades in the anything goes feel of my favourite Vohrer movies for standard German mystery fare. For once, the German movie going public must have agreed with me, for the sequel Again the Ringer (and wasn't he called the Wizard in the English language version of the first movie?) sets up in its final scene never was made for lack of success.

One Point O aka Paranoia: 1.0 (2004): This is a pretty fantastic little (as in: obviously low budget yet just as obviously knowing how to cope) SF film in the classical mindfuck style that heavily echoes Dick in its un-real circling around questions of reality, identity and ownership of said identity. Directors/writers Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson update the whole thing with a bit of nanotech-virus SF-science, but mostly, they let their design sense (seldom has a brown apartment building in a sideways future seemed more appropriate) and the peculiar rhythm of their film drag the viewer into an emotional place where the Weird and the surreal collide. There's also some fine acting (and fine acting's a difficult thing in a film going for the Weird this intensely) by Jeremy Sisto and Deborah Kara Unger - both no strangers to strangeness on screen - and smallish appearances by the great Udo Kier and the great Lance Henriksen to praise.

The Soul of a Monster (1944): Well, it sure is nice to see that Val Lewton's productions for RKO were regarded highly enough by executives in other studios to imitate them, like director Will Jason set out to do here for Columbia. Alas, as it goes with imitations, whoever was mainly responsible for The Soul did not actually understand how and why the Lewton productions worked so well, replacing ambiguity with cloying Christian moralizing and characters with flat clichés. While the photography is moody and beautiful, it's badly served by a script that doesn't really seem to know how to tell its story effectively, and direction that tries to take up all the outward appearances of the Lewton style without showing the necessary sense of timing and depth of meaning necessary to make that style work. I'd blame Jesus, but then the film makes it quite clear I'm not allowed to.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,american movies,in short,krimi,sf,horror,klaus kinski,heinz drache,barbara rütting,siegfried schürenberg,eddi arent,alfred vohrer,jeff renfroe,marteinn thorsson,jeremy sisto,deborah kara unger,lance henriksen,udo kier,will jason