Nightworld (2017)

Former LA cop Brett (Jason London) has great difficulty working through the death of his Bulgarian wife Ana (Diana Lyubenova), spending his time at their Bulgarian country home in a deep depression. A concerned buddy has a plan to get him out and back into the world, to which end the proactive man has procured a security job in Sofia for Brett.

It’s a live-in position in an old villa whose upper levels have been converted into apartments, or so the owners of the place say. Not that Brett’s ever seeing anyone living there. It’s a cushy, if somewhat strange job: Brett’s only duties are locking and unlocking the main door and to descend into the very deep cellar twice a day to check some security monitors that are facing the darkness inside a large locked chamber (the film calls it a hangar, for some reason) that’s situated behind a large door with neat skulls and tentacles on it. Clearly, there’s nothing to worry about here, and at first, Brett actually seems to get better doing very little. He’s got a new environment to explore, he’s got at least something to occupy himself with, and the – very young and very very pretty – barista Zara (Lorina Kamburova) of the corner coffee shop clearly has an eye on him. Therea are certainly worse ways to live.

However, there’s something really strange going on in the villa. There are not just the expected peculiar noises, and that hell gate style door in the cellar, but Brett also begins to have nightmares that begin to turn into daytime visions. And once Brett has seen what looks a lot like footprints through one of his cameras and calls in the owners’ expert for this situation, an older blind man named Jacob (Robert Englund) events spiral downwards rather quickly.

For my tastes, Patricio Valladares’s Nightworld is a pleasant surprise, a horror film that feels very much beholden to the classic Weird Tales style of horror with a smidgen of Lucio Fulci I’m not going to spoil. It is, in other worlds, exactly the sort of film where I’m perfectly willing to overlook certain weaknesses as long as it understands and uses its strengths.

The obvious weakness here is the pacing; while this sort of mood based horror does need and deserve a thoughtful pace, Nightworld does meander a bit in the middle, with perhaps one dream sequence and ten minutes of running time that could productively have been excised. It’s not a deadly flaw, at least in my eyes, mind you, though it is something which will make the film not terribly interesting to watch for some viewers. The film’s not always all that believable, either: would a guy like Brett really take a job like this without at least explicitly asking if he’s guarding anything illegal and without any explanation for its strangeness? The May-October romance between Brett and Zara isn’t terribly easy to buy either.


However, while acknowledging these flaws, I can’t say they really did anything to my enjoyment of the film. Valladares – ably assisted by some cracking spooky locations and Pau Mirabet’s moody and shadowy camera work – creates a wonderful sense of creeping wrongness. And once the film has explained the rather wonderful backstory of the villa through some patented and effective Englund exposition, it also develops a neat and effective resonance with classical myths about the realms of the dead, all the while making good use of its budget (the way the film uses a large, dark empty room to full effect borders on brilliance) and evoking its lead’s pining for a lost love to thematically appropriate effect. In general, Valladares uses iconic horror images very well, with moments like the shots of the faces of the dead trapped in the villa pressed against its windows from the inside just resonating very well with me in their archetypal feel.

In short: Blood Trap (2015)

aka Bite

Freshly pensioned prison guard Roman (Costas Mandylor) assembles a bunch of pea-brained violent idiots (among them Gianni Capaldi and featuring a pleasantly short appearance of Vinnie Jones) for a brilliant plan: kidnap Nika (Elena Mirela), the daughter of one of the richest gangsters alive, from the stately mansion she resides in and press her Dad into paying a ransom of forty million dollars. Whatever could go wrong?

Well, for starters, while casing out said stately mansion, our protagonists somehow managed to overlook that with every sunrise, the mansion is automatically sealed off from the outside by practically indestructible blackout shutters. As it happens, that’s exactly the time of day when the kidnapping is going down, so the idiots find themselves locked in with their supposed victim. Of course, who exactly is going to be whose victim here might just become a pressing question when trapped in a mansion among whose other features include a freezer room full of human body parts, another room with 28 babies, and crazy naked people crawling through sewer tunnels.

I don’t write this sort of thing lightly or often anymore, but I have no idea what I just watched. What starts out as one of these generally insufferable would-be Tarantino movies, just with really abysmal dialogue, quickly turns into the weirdest horror comedy I’ve seen in quite some time. Director and writer Alberto Sciamma’s sense of humour is deeply peculiar, and if you’re like me, it might not make you laugh, but it sure as hell will get your eyebrows up into the stratosphere. I most certainly won’t forget that moment when Mandylor starts walking around in a golden full plate armour any time soon. Then there’s the Viagra torture scene, and…well, most everything that’s going on in the film’s second half is pure weirdness gold.

Much of the film, and not just its sense of humour, is utterly inexplicable, not because the elements it consists of are terribly original but because the way Sciamma uses them is so off. The film is clearly following a very individual vision, fuelled by old exploitation movies, and an unironic weirdness that may not be funny (though it might very well be) but that sure as hell did interesting things to my brain while I watched it. Apart from that, Blood Trap is also really nice to look at and stylishly directed, which of course makes the grotesqueness of its contents all the more potent.

So, I certainly do not have any idea what it is all about, but I highly approve of Blood Trap.

In short: A Wicked Within (2015)

One Dr. Woods (Eric Roberts cashing in his usual pay check for one day or so of work) is interviewing the survivors of a family meeting that ended with quite a few dead bodies. During the course of these interviews, Woods uncovers a story he quite understandably doesn’t believe. Looks like family member Bethany (Sienna Guillory) came down with a bout of demonic possession during the proceedings, adding all manner of fun stuff to the usual mix of secrets and lies dominating this charming little family.

It looks like I’m not the only one who always asked himself when watching another movie about a bourgeois family unit breaking down during some sort of family meet-up, “how much more fun would this be with demonic possession?”, for verily, director Jay Alaimo and writer Stephen Wallis made exactly that film, and it turns out to be rather great, or at the very least damnably entertaining.

This is not one of those psychological horror films that take ages to get going, nor one of these exorcism films that get to the fun stuff only an hour in: after thirty minutes, we’re already at the point where the family calls in a very matter-of-fact psychic (Sarah Lassez), and about fifteen minutes later, a not terribly competent priest (Heath Freeman) arrives. A Wicked Within sure isn’t fucking around except (perhaps) in a framing device that really rather reminded me of The Unusual Suspects, just not as cleverly used and with a lot more Eric Roberts than can be good for your health. That framing device, though, is quite useful for the film’s theological high concept, so there’s something more to it than mere Roberts-ploitation.

Anyway, the film starts really fast, drops the family’s dirty laundry quickly on the audience’s doorstep, and doesn’t stop for breathe at all, achieving a flow of pleasant hysteria, flying urns, and so on and so forth with such great enthusiasm even a confessed exorcism horror party pooper like me can’t help but have a lot of fun. Parts of the film are – true to the title - wickedly funny, some of it are fun, and some of it even demonstrates the filmmakers did think about what possession in the world of their film is actually good for.

This approach doesn’t lend itself to a film that’s very uncanny or creepy, but sometimes hysteria is just as good an emotional anchor for a horror film, particularly one featuring not just an entertaining ensemble cast (apart from the actors already mentioned Giannia Capaldi, Enzo Cilenti, Michele Hicks, Sonja Kinski and Karen Austin) but a particularly spirited possessed performance by Sienna Guillory who does all the spitting and gnashing of teeth, the writhing (sexualized and not), the cajoling, the sudden breakdowns into human fragility, and so on, and so forth with wonderful commitment and the kind of pizazz this sort of thing really needs, turning out one of my favourite possessed bits in any movie.