Brooklyn 45 (2023)

World War II hasn’t been over for long. A group of old friends and war veterans are invited to the Brooklyn home of Lt. Colonel Clive Hockstatter (house favourite and horror hero Larry Fessenden). It’s not the happiest of reunions: one of the men, Archibald Stanton (Jeremy Holm), is on trial for a rather nasty war crime, and there are other tensions in the group as well. Former interrogation specialist/torturer Marla (Anne Ramsay) has brought her husband Bob (Ron E. Rains) with her, and the men really aren’t keen on a guy who married everyone’s sweetheart, particularly when he’s decidedly lacking in the demonstrative manliness they just love to indulge in.

These and other conflicts will come to the fore soon enough, but the reason Hockstatter has asked them to come is rather different. He wants his friends to take part in a séance meant to conjure up the spirit of his dead wife Susan, who killed herself after nobody believed in her wild tales of some German-born greengrocers in the neighbourhood being Nazi spies.

The séance goes rather well– depending on one’s opinion about being trapped in a room by ghosts. Hockstatter puking up a puddle of ectoplasm from which the arm of his dead wife arises is only the first surprise of the evening, and soon the whole affair turns into a long discussion about the morality of war and duty, and horror cinema’s favourite theme, guilt.

Ted Geoghegan is certainly one of the more interesting directors of low budget horror movies working right now. He doesn’t appear to want to make the same movie again, so he follows the Fulci (etc) homage of We Are Still Here and the Western as horror of Mohawk with what amounts to a filmed stage play.

Not surprisingly, the resulting film is very dialogue heavy, much more focussed on its characters talking through some ethical problems they encounter and slowly revealing some dark secrets/their true selves, while also taking a look at the nasty side of the Dream of America, than it is on its supernatural horror. The supernatural side of the film really is only ever an enabler for what Geoghegan is truly interested in here, and – apart from one pretty outrageous gore gag concerning Larry Fessenden’s head – really takes up very little of the film’s interest.

If you’re hoping the supernatural to be thematically relevant instead of plot convenient, this is certainly not going to make you happy. Given my tastes, I found myself somewhat disappointed by that element of the film – I think the film could have done more to use the supernatural as a way to explore its thematic interests and been all the more interesting for it.

Particularly since the dialogue isn’t always strong enough to carry everything the film is attempting to say about America or its characters. While there are certainly moments with the proper weight and cadence here, there are just as many lines that are simply too stagey and stilted to work as coming out of the mouths of these particular characters. The dialogue also tends to be a bit too clear and obvious. There’s a bluntness to it that sometimes suggests a film a bit afraid of its audience not getting what it is trying to say about its characters, their guilt and their country. Which is a particular problem when what it is trying to say has been said dozens of times before, often with more subtlety and complexity, and when it works with a stable of actors who play their asses off, and would certainly do so as well if the material were just a little more nuanced.

All of which sounds rather more damning than what I actually think of Brooklyn 45. I certainly do respect its willingness to be as stagey as it is, as well as its decision to express what it’s going for in a manner that feels rather old-fashioned today. That its approach doesn’t resonate terribly well with me is more a matter of taste than anything else.

We Are Still Here (2015)

Emotionally reeling from the accidental death of their grown-up son, Anne (Barbara Crampton) and Paul Sacchetti (Andrew Sensenig) decide moving out of the house he grew up in might assist them on their way to closure. Turns out, moving to Aylesbury, Mass., situated right in Lovecraft Country might not have been the best idea to that end, for there’s something very wrong with the house they move to.

There’s a reason the place had been left uninhabited for thirty years. Particularly Anne finds herself confronted with various low key haunting effects that suggest the presence of the spirit of their son, but surely, actual ghosts don’t move to new homes with people. There’s also something deeply wrong with the house’s cellar that manifests itself in unseasonable heat, the smell of burning flesh, and – if you’re an unlucky electrician – the crispy-hot living dead.

After some time of weirdness, Anne convinces the more sceptical Paul, who still can’t quite wave away what’s going on, it might be a good idea to call a couple of friends of hers for help. May (Lisa Marie) and her hippie husband Jacob (the inevitable yet lovely Larry Fessenden) do have a talent for contacting the spirit world, it turns out, but there’s something worse in the house than just a few – already pretty damn bad, it’ll turn out – ghosts.

If you’re like me, you’ll probably already have read various bits and pieces about Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here emphasising how much of the film is a loving homage to Lucio Fulci. That’s absolutely true, too, but if you expect a film that feels or is meant to feel like a Fulci flick from his great period, you’ll probably end up confused or disappointed, for Geoghegan uses certain markers of Fulci’s aesthetic in a way often antithetical to the old maestro’s approach. I rather think that’s a good thing, too, for what would be the point in making a film that’s only aping a gone great?

But let’s start on the obviously Fulci-esque elements: the film’s colour-scheme, the characters’ wardrobes and the production design are very much taken from Fulci’s playbook, as are the nods towards Lovecraft (bonus points to Geoghegan for using Aylesbury instead of a more obvious place). And there’s really no doubt in which direction the scene with the electrician in the cellar nods; even though what happens to him is rather different to the doom of a certain Fulci workman in a Southern cellar.

However, no Fulci film – from whichever career phase – would ever have featured as naturalistically drawn characters as the Sacchetti’s (speaking of nods…), actual people with actually believable interiority who mostly do things that make sense, even when these acts are ill-advised. Crampton and Sensenig are rather wonderful as the Sacchettis too, selling much of the sadness and loss, as well as their long intimacy with gestures, posture and looks, without them or the script feeling the need to oversell it and drift into a more melodramatic direction.

Geoghegan’s script does in general – except for one bar scene involving Monte Markham telling the local bar owner stuff she already knows quite well for no good reason apart from clueing the audience in – tend to find the sweet spot between showing and telling and seems to trust in the audience not to need every little thing spelled out for them. Of course, this generally logical and humanly believable approach is pretty much the exact opposite to Fulci’s (and Sacchetti’s) love for slow, dream-like series of strange occurrences vaguely drawn characters just stumble through. I do think it works very well for We Are Still Here, mind you.

Keeping with the Fulci, even the way the film uses gore, once it arrives for the final act, is very different from the maestro’s, replacing the slow lingering on the bizarre and gloopy with relatively quick edits. Though it still is rather bizarre and gloopy.

All in all, Geoghegan uses elements of Fulci’s filmmaking to turn out a more conventionally accomplished movie, losing the dream-like, weird and just plain crazy mood in favour of being an effective, clever, and well-acted low budget horror film. I certainly won’t blame a film for being that.