Three Films Make A Post: All they had was a skill for violence and nothing to lose but their lives!

The Stranger (2014): This Chilean film concerns s a very interesting variation on the right now second-most overused horror monster, and, if nothing else, proves you can do something worthwhile with it still; at least if you’re the film’s director Guillermo Amoedo. Amoedo not only manages to do something interesting and at least half-way original with his monster but also finds a place where the naturalistic portrayal of pretty shitty lives and a dream-like mood aren’t mutually exclusive approaches.

The fact that the film, mostly cast with Chilean actors speaking their English with more or less obvious accents, takes place in what seems to be supposed to be a US small town (I think), actually furthers the weird mood of proceedings for my tastes, locating the film not in a place as in the idea of a place. However, it is, like The Stranger’s somewhat peculiar pacing, certainly a point that’ll annoy some viewers to no end.

The House of Hanging aka Byoinzaka no kubikukuri no ie (1979): Kon Ichikawa is one of the big Japanese directors outside the pure arthouse realm I often find myself having the most trouble with. It’s not that I don’t think some of his film’s are masterpieces, but he seems – at least for my tastes – to have rather more films like this adaptation of one of the adventures of private detective Kosuke Kindaichi (in this case embodied by Koji Ishizaka) than I’d like. Films that fluctuate in tone so heavily and so (in)consistently – in this case between stuffy comedy and handwringing melodrama – it becomes difficult to ascertain what tone the director is actually going for; films where for every brilliantly and complex staged scene there’s another one bland, boring and lifeless, and a further one where Ichikawa just seems to be showing off; films where contrasts neither rub productively against one another nor seem to have another reason to be there.

In House of Hanging’s case, these problems are exacerbated by one typical flaw of late 70s biggish prestige productions from Japan, needless length that makes a film feel rather bloated and slow, particularly one which really could have been improved mightily by having various scenes of “comically” inept cops removed, and various plot strands tightened.

Mystery on Monster Island aka Misterio en la isla de los monstruos (1981): I don’t loathe Juan Piquer Simón’s family adventure movie quite as much as parts of the Net do, but then, that’s because I’m trying very hard to ignore the odious comic relief taking up half of the film, the idiotic twist ending (which actually is Jules Verne’s fault as author of the novel the film adapts), the plodding pacing, the expected (because nobody in his right mind will expect a production like this to actually afford many shooting days from these gentlemen) underuse of Peter Cushing and Terence Stamp, the film’s dubious racial politics, on account of this being a rather naive children’s film I did indeed enjoy when I was a kid.

For us grown-ups, even for those of us used to “bad” movies, the whole thing just might be pretty unpalatable, but then, it isn’t actually meant for us.

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In short: The Rift (1990)

aka Endless Descent

A new-fangled, experimental military sub, the "Siren", has disappeared in the depths of the ocean, all contact to it has been lost. The contractor company responsible for the sub brings its designer Wick Hayes (Jack Scalia), who had left them once it became clear his bosses were working for the military, back into the fold to take part in the rescue mission for the "Siren". They're quite convincing, too, for if Wick doesn't help the company they'll put all the blame for the submarine's accident on him, even though they changed the initial design so heavily the ship's not even using the same type of drive anymore. I suspect not even the patent office would buy that one, but then my name's not Wick.

Anyhow, to make the rescue mission as successful as possible, it is decided that the rescue submarine will be the "Siren II", of the exact same build and model as the disappeared ship (because why not take a gamble), commanded by tough Captain Phillips (R. Lee Ermey at his least shouty), and crewed by a random assortment of people of various nationalities (as you do when hunting top secret submarines), among them the obvious traitor (Ray Wise), the black "comic" relief character (John Toles-Bey), the Italian comic relief cook, and Hayes's ex-wife (Deborah Adair). Need I even mention that everybody on board has already been informed it's supposed to be Wick's fault that the "Siren I" disappeared?

Whatever can go wrong when the mission turns into a fight against a big underwater rubber monster, and later leads our heroes into a sub-oceanic cave full of a whole zoo of various other rubber monsters?

The Rift, a Spanish-US co-production, is veteran Spanish director of schlock Juan Piquer Simon's entry into the small late 80s/early 90s wave of kinda-sorta underwater Aliens-by-way-of-Abyss rip-offs. I suspect this specific sub-sub-genre came to pass when an exploitation film producer finally realized that there just wasn't room in space anymore for further Aliens-a-likes, and used all his power of creativity to think up the high concept of "Aliens under water".

Simon's film is actually one of the more entertaining entries into this not particularly awesome circle of films, mostly because it, while putting a check mark beside a lot of Aliens' plot points, has the feel of a type of slightly SF-nal horror movie that could have been made anytime between the 50s and the time of its own production. Sure, the 50s version would have been a bit less gory, and a few details would have been different (no evil government experiments in the 50s, but radiation problems), the basics however are still the same, and the audience still watches mostly to see some monsters.

Simon seems to realize this quite clearly, and does a nice, clean direction job of the pretty silly and flat script, without wasting much time on filler, characterization or any other stuff that doesn't have anything to do with showing us monsters doing monster stuff or charming submarine models.

The whole affair is a bit dumb, obviously, and scientifically dubious (there's even some reversing of polarity going on), but it's also unpretentious and fun, which is all I would ever ask of a film like it.

 

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