Three Films Make A Post: Shocking beyond belief

La revanche des mortes vivantes aka The Revenge of the Living Dead Girls (1987): I do have a high tolerance for backyard-made horror nonsense, but this French attempt at a movie directed by Pierre B. Reinhard (who mostly had a career in porn, though you wouldn’t notice him actually having ten years of experience as a director of anything when this was shot if I didn’t tell you) does stretch my patience thin. Perhaps it’s the fault of its high concept of randomly mashing softcore porn and supposedly gory horror together, shifting genre codes badly and at the worst possible moment. Or it maybe the non-acting, or the usually static camera. Or how un-erotic the softcore sequences, and how bland and boring the horror bits are? Or maybe, it’s a combination of all these factors that turns the film into a joyless slog. In any case, this is so bad it’s bad.

El segundo nombre aka Second Name (2002): I have an equally high tolerance for slow movies, and do enjoy the investigative aspects of horror quite a bit, but Paco Plaza’s adaptation of one of the great Ramsey Campbell’s lesser novels does make a it desperately hard to connect to it. There’s slow movies, and then there’s needlessly static ones like this, seemingly hell-bent on slowing what is already a slow plot to a crawl for no good reason whatsoever. Certainly, there’s little mood-building going on in any of the many overlong scenes, and what’s of import for plot and characters could be much more economically told in about half the time. The characters have little dimension either, and – as if to make up for it – everyone insists on a particularly stiff and ponderous acting style, perhaps to slow things down even more. This does leave a viewer with copious time to find fault with the preposterous conspiracy theory at the film’s core; while there’s little here that carries any of the thematic dimensions of the novel.

Brightburn (2019): Director David Yarovesky’s Brightburn promises to tell an inversion of the origin story of Superman in which he doesn’t don a costume and becomes the best person on the planet, but where the onset of puberty awakens the evil psychopath in him. He does make himself a costume at least. The film keeps its promise admirably, featuring a good cast (Jackson A. Dunn does creepy very well indeed), good effects and a well-paced script, so it is an enjoyable film if you want a bit of evil kid supervillain action.


However, that’s really all there is to it, so if a viewer imagines the film to actually comment on superheroes or Superman in particular, or do anything at all but presenting its high concept with a high level of craftsmanship, they are a bit out of luck, for there’s really no ambition at all towards having any thoughts whatsoever in the film. In fact, most contemporary superhero movies have quite a bit more going on under their hoods than this riff on them.

Verónica (2017)

Warning: I am going to spoil parts of the ending!

Madrid 1991. When fifteen year old Verónica (Sandra Escacena doing a pretty perfect job with the role) isn’t going to Catholic school, she’s the replacement mom for her three younger siblings. It’s not that their mother is completely absent or neglecting her kids on purpose, but after the death of her husband, she has had to take on dire hours running a bar, leaving little mental and physical capacity for the other fulltime job of running her family. Which of course doesn’t change the fact that Verónica’s clearly missing out on space and time for not being a grown-up herself.

Verónica’s not the kind of girl who’ll let her little kid brother and sisters down, so her only tiny rebellion consists in an interest in the occult – or really, the bit of the occult you can learn about by buying one of these cheap weekly magazine “encyclopaedias” about them (personally, I remember buying similar stuff about the blues and classical music). When a solar eclipse is coming around, Verónica, her best friend and a girl who is clearly Verónica’s competition for the best friend role sneak down into the cellar of their school for a bit of a ouija séance to contact Verónica’s father. Something goes very wrong indeed during the séance, though Verónica doesn’t seem to be able to remember what exactly happened. In any case, her friends – such as they are – shun her afterwards.

Worse still, the séance seems to have opened a door to something very malevolent that is now following Verónica and threatening her and her siblings. The kid doesn’t have much of a support network to help her either. Her mother’s pretty much useless, so there’s only a strange, blind nun (Consuela Trujillo) and the cheap occult encyclopaedia to help her out. That just might not be enough.

As a guy who was fifteen in 1991, with a dead father and a single mum, I can relate to Paco Plaza’s Verónica rather well, even though I didn’t have to care for any siblings, and my part of Germany is more laid back protestant than Catholic. Also, there has been a decisive lack of non-metaphorical ghosts and hauntings in my life. There’s a great feeling of veracity to the film, its portrayal of the period shaped by what feels very much like lived experience; not a product of nostalgia so much as an attempt to show how environments shape experience. This is supposedly based on a true story, but as the narrative unfolds, the supernatural threat is really an embodiment of all of Verónica’s fears, the feeling of grief for her father, an outsider’s desperate clinging to the only real friend she has, as well as the usual teenage malaise even those teens suffer under who don’t have to carry the weight of a whole family.

If a viewer wants, she can even explain most of the supernatural occurrences as products of Verónica’s mind, but some of Plaza’s directorial decision late in the film consciously block this reading from being completely correct. The supernatural isn’t a metaphor, but all of Verónica’s fears and problems externalised and made real in the world of the film, all the nagging big and little things turning nasty. So when the interior rot she feels suddenly presents itself outside of her, under her family’s mattresses, it’s an example of one of the oldest and best moves in the horror playbook: fears turning into something tangible and deadly.

Speaking of deadly, Verónica is an excellent example of horror filmmaking that manages to be ruthless without having much of a body count, winning its tension by making the lone death that happens desperately important as well as terribly unfair. For while one could read the movie as Verónica being punished for transgressing through her use of the ouija board, Plaza plays it very much as Verónica being punished for nothing that’s at all the fault of a teenage girl, the things she has no control over whatsoever: her loneliness and having to carry the load of a grown-up.

All this is packaged as a highly effective horror film that uses a lot of the elements you find in most mainstream horror productions right now. However, Plaza uses the style in very careful ways, timing jump scares and figures lingering in the background exceedingly well. The director always keeps in sight what the louder moments of the film actually mean for the characters, finding a thoughtful middle between some very creepy moments – Plaza makes a lot out of the supernatural invading intimate spaces and actions - and those that are more disquieting through their implications about the inner life of our protagonist.


Plaza also keeps in mind the age of his characters, so Verónica’s final fight against what threatens her and her siblings is done via crap found in that magazine encyclopaedia, drawings made by a four year old, and no help by any theoretically responsible adults. That the film ends how it ends seems practically inevitable, but because of the way Verónica tells its tale, I also felt much sadder about it than most horror films make me.

Three Films Make A Post: The Lashing Slashing Drama of the Hellions and the Town They Violated!

[Rec]3 Génesis (2012): I loved the first two [Rec] movies, but this one does everything wrong it can do wrong for me. Giving up on the first two films' POV gimmick turns the movie into just another zombie movie, with added generic horror comedy humour I really didn't ask for, and not a single good idea I haven't seen before in better movies. Worse, the other big selling point of the two earlier films, their peculiar religious zombie variant, here turns into the sort of babbling nonsense only the maddest of right wing "Christians" gibber before they attempt to burn somebody alive. There's also some nonsense about a freshly married couple "feeling each other" telepathically that is played completely straight and other stupid crap of the same type I find much too tiresome to get into.

Of course, I have endured worse things in films if they also had things to like about them; unfortunately [Rec]3 only has the dubious virtue of being professionally made, and therefore deserves the strength of my annoyance. At least the film - directed by Paco Plaza alone - answers the question which of the two directors of the first two films in the series was responsible for all that was good about them.

Hyenas (2011): Talking about crap, how about this thing about Costas Mandylor's epic fight against CGI were-hyenas, directed by Eric Weston, who, a long time ago, made one entertaining movie. This one often feels as if somebody had artificially grafted random scenes from two completely different scripts only connected by were-hyenas and their utter stupidity together, hired Costas Mandylor and Christa Campbell as the utmost in available star power, and then proceeded to film the actors' first run-throughs through said script(s). I'd love to find anything positive to say about this one, but what can you say about a horror film that is so ashamed of itself it even digitizes nipples away in its brief seconds of female nudity?

Die Seltsame Gräfin aka The Strange Countess (1961): One early and pretty minor entry in Rialto's Edgar Wallace cycle, directed by veteran director Josef von Báky with an assist by Jürgen Roland. It's much less pulpy as well as less pop than most of the other Wallace films and instead spends its time being a somewhat bland, very convoluted mystery movie that could have been made in the 40s (well, not in Germany, of course). At least, there's some fine "I'M MAD! I'M MAD!" acting by saintly Klaus Kinski, an expectedly decent hero turn by Joachim Fuchsberger and the shock of Eddi Arent playing neither a butler nor a photographer. Compared to today's other two movies, though, it's just golden.

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In short: Rec 2 (2009)

It is still the same night as in Rec. The authorities send a four man SWAT team into the quarantined building with the zombie problem as protection for a Dr. Owen (Jonathan Mellor), a man supposedly from the Ministry of Health. The men are told Owen's mission is to find out what is going on in the apartment building and to rescue any survivors. The SWAT guys don't have the faintest idea what is really happening, so the first zombie contact turns out to be even more lethal than it would have been had they come prepared.

It doesn't take long until the cops learn that Owen isn't working for the Ministry of Health at all. He's a priest, and his mission is to somehow get a sample of the blood of patient zero of the whole zombie/possession mess; survivors are of no interest at all, there's only the blood, and the need to document as much proof on camera as possible (or we wouldn't have a film, and we don't want that). Why the Vatican needs proof for the supernatural is never explained. Probably on a need to know basis.

Separate from the cops and the priest, a trio of stupid teenagers (with a camera, too, don't worry), a fireman and a man looking for his family have managed to sneak into the quarantine zone, too. It's difficult to imagine that this can end good for anyone involved.

If you are one of those people who had problems with the religious zombie explanation of the first film, you should probably avoid Rec 2, because director/writers Jaume Balaguero (who seems to have a thing for the Devil, going by his other films) and Paco Plaza aren't taking anything of that stuff back. Quite the opposite, the religious elements of the plot are much stronger here, and the not necessarily supernatural zombies of the first film become full-grown supernatural menaces. On the plus side, this does explain the tactically sound behaviour the zombies already showed in the first film nicely.

This merry atheist of a reviewer didn't have any problems with any of that. If I can accept the walking dead, I can also accept the walking dead possessed by demons for the length of a movie.

Rec 2 isn't a plot heavy film anyway. Exposition and moments of silence do not amount too much of its running time. Like its predecessor this is a film that proudly wears the banner of the horror film as a chaotic rollercoaster ride. That is not exactly my favourite type of horror film, but - as it was with the first part - Rec 2 is so breathless, exciting and brutal that it just gets the adrenaline pumping. There's a wonderful sense of panic about the proceedings the viewer is allowed to witness, strong enough to help one ignore all implausibilities the script might or might not contain.

Apart from its successes at making me jumpy and nervous, the only other memorable things about Rec 2 are the meanest child zombies I have ever seen and the film's open disgust with authority, here represented by the dubious priest Owen who is as much a servant of a loving god as I am a nun.

That's all, and it's more than enough for a satisfying movie.

 

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