Stephen King’s the shining – review

Director: Mick Garris

Release date: 1997

Contains spoilers

Stephen King’s sequel to the Shining, Doctor Sleep, was a novel based around a group of energy vampires but, whilst Danny Torrence returned as an adult, the Overlook hotel was missing from the novel as it was destroyed in the climax of the original novel. Rather, the climax took place on the site that the hotel had stood upon. When the film Doctor Sleep was created this was changed as it followed the aesthetic and content of Stanley Kubrick’s film version of the Shining. Within Dr Sleep, as in the novel it is based on, the ghosts from the Overlook were shown as vampiric – trying to consume Danny’s Shining - but the hotel itself was also vampiric, the building was identified as consuming the shining also.

the Torrence family

Stephen King was famous for not liking Kubrick’s interpretation of the Shining, however. When a mini-series of the novel was proposed King, himself, wrote the teleplay. That makes the teleplay true to King’s concept, indeed the series was shot in the actual hotel that served as inspiration for the novel, but it still had to compete with the Kubrick film, which is (despite King’s feelings on the subject) a masterpiece.

the Overlook

I’m not going to blow by blow through the scenes. Suffice it to say that Jack Torrence (Steven Weber, Dracula: Dead and Loving It) is a recovering alcoholic who has lost his teaching job after beating a student and has previously injured his son, Danny (Courtland Mead), breaking his arm in a drunken rage. He gets the post of winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, which is snowed off over winter, and moves himself, wife Wendy (Rebecca De Mornay) and Danny to the hotel. He intends to write a play whilst there.

the hose

Danny is psychic, often seeing an (otherwise) invisible friend called Tony (Wil Horneff), a manifestation of his abilities. One difference between this and Kubrick’s is that Tony “appears” in Kubrick’s film as a voice spoken by Danny and represented by a crooked finger – in this Tony appears as a person. Danny is warned about the Overlook by Tony but, being seven, there isn’t much he can do about it. What we do get is an interesting view, in his visions, of something stalking the corridors but only the shadow is seen. This will turn out to be his father but the use of a shadow is, of course, a vampire genre trope. He also sees an animated fire hose with teeth, an unfortunate effect that we’ll get back to.

Melvin Van Peebles as Dick

Once at the hotel Danny meets chef Dick Hallorann (Melvin Van Peebles), a fellow psychic – though nowhere near as powerful – who recognises Danny for what he is. He calls the ability the shining and suggests that Danny shines brighter than anyone he has ever met. He warns Danny from the rooms, one in particular, and tells him that he has seen things occasionally in the hotel but they can’t hurt Danny. They are only pictures and if he looks away and counts to ten, they will go away. The hotel itself seems to have a shine of its own – hence it being a vampiric entity as we’ll explore.

reflected ghosts

Danny is seeing things from the beginning, and phenomena also occurs - poltergeist like falling of chairs, for instance. It is most certainly Danny that the hotel wants but, when it can’t get to him, it turns its attention to Jack. There is an implication that Jack shines also (in a minor way, and hence his susceptibility) but it is Danny’s ability that is fuelling the hotel and ghosts. This sees them ramping up their assaults and soon even Wendy can see/hear them. At one-point Danny realises that pretty soon they won’t be ghosts at all, meaning they are gaining a corporeal presence through their vampirism of Danny’s psychic gift.

the topiary

I mentioned effects and probably the worst is tied into an aspect missed in the Kubrick film altogether. In the movie Kubrick adds a hedge maze (rather effectively and it is reproduced within psychic sequences, at least, in the film Doctor Sleep) and uses it to replace topiary animals. They are here and, as in the book, there are moments when they come to life (an aspect of the vampiric hotel, rather than its associated ghosts). However, they look rubbish, bad cgi blobs with no weight to them as we see them move across the snows.

the ghost of 217

That’s not to say all the effects were bad. The drowned ghost of 217 (237 in Kubrick) looks fantastic in the bath, rotten and lying in a chemical soup. But the hose pipe, the topiaries and floating Tony all looked rubbish – and, given the key role of Tony plus the fact that the topiaries are essentially a set piece, that isn’t good. The dialogue can be a tad hokey also at times (have I committed a faux pas given King wrote it? Perhaps). The direction was, in fact, not as bad as it perhaps appeared as one cannot do anything but compare it to Kubrick’s auteur opus. That said, it didn’t capture the doom-laden atmosphere of the film. The mini-series format probably didn’t help with this dragging in its middle section.

Steven Weber as Jack

As for the key performances. Well, Courtland Mead works well as Danny – a tough role for any child actor, he manages to vacillate between childish reaction to knowing psychic. Rebecca De Mornay gives a strong performance as Wendy and a very different one to that offered by Shelley Duvall. Of course, Steven Weber was always going to be compared to Nicholson and his iconic performance – something that is probably really unfair. His Jack is more sympathetic, certainly, and he offers a strong performance but next to Nicholson it will always come out at second place. The adult actors were also hampered in places by that hokey dialogue I mentioned.

floating Tony

Retrospectively vampiric, like the Kubrick film, the consumption of the psychic energy isn’t mentioned (just that Danny enables it), and whilst it was always going to struggle next to the film, this wasn’t as good as it might have been anyway (in a universe where the Kubrick film didn’t exist). The film is dragged down by some of the effects, lack of atmosphere and some hokey Hallmark channel dialogue that surfaces through the film. Its TV mini-series origin means that some of the things we should have seen we didn’t. 6 feels a tad strong but 5.5 feels churlish and so 6 out of 10 it is.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Domnisoara Christina – review

Director: Viorel Sergovici

Release date: 1992

Contains spoilers

A little background, if I may, of how I came to know this film existed. On occasion I am known to attend the excellent online lectures arranged by Romancing the Gothic - favouring, of course, the vampire related. I spotted one by Maria Cohut entitled Revenants as Abject Feminine in Romanian Gothic Horror: Mircea Eliade’s ‘Miss Christina’ (1936). The word revenant got me… then as I looked into the book I noted it used the term strigoï. More excited now I looked to track the book and discovered that there were two Romanian films based on it. This being the first and so I managed to track it down and watch this the day before the lecture. Note this is not easily come by, it is a VHS quality rip from Romanian TV and, I suspect, fan-subbed. There was also a 2013 version that I will also look at.

Christina murdered

So Eliade’s story surrounded strigoï and, from within the lecture I ascertained that in his non-fiction work he recognised both the strigoï vii as living witch-like persons and strigoï mort as more vampiric and fluctuating from spectral to corporeal. This film, I understand, follows the book pretty darn closely. It starts with Miss Christina (which is the English title) the sound of a crack of gunfire and she falls dead. This places the event in the historical peasant’s revolt of 1907. Later, however, we get to hear that Christina was deemed as wicked anyway (beyond being a landowner). The film shows us a portrait of her.

Adrian Pintea as Egor

Moving to the 1930s and the painter Egor Paschievici (Adrian Pintea) has visited Sanda (Raluca Penu), with whom he has a romantic entanglement. As they walk through the hall of her family house he tries to pull her to him but she pulls away and says they have a new guest. They enter the dinning room and her mother, Mrs Moscu (Irina Petrescu), introduces Professor Nazarie (Dragos Pîslaru). They sit to eat but Sanda’s younger sister, Simina (Medeea Marinescu), insists she have the chair near her mother to which the Professor acquiesces. A note about Simina, the dialogue referring to her describes her as young – indeed in the novel she is nine – but Medeea Marinescu was eighteen and the character looks teen. I suspect this is because of sexual connotations later.

the portrait

One thing of note is Mrs Moscu eating obsessively, shovelling fork after fork of food into her mouth. Egor has also noted that she seems to lose strength as the sun sets, sometimes falling into lethargy. The next day Simina reports having dreamt about Aunt Christina – Mrs Moscu’s older sister – and the men are taken to a locked room that contains the portrait of Christina. Egor suggests he would like to paint it in his own style and Sanda tells him that it is rare that her mother lets anyone in the room. The Professor has heard stories about Christina being the bailiff’s mistress and forcing him to thrash peasants for her pleasure. During the uprising, it is said that she invited peasant men two at a time into her room and allowed them to rape her (a note from Maria Cohut’s lecture is that this paints her as the abject feminine, that rape and consent are mutually exclusive, and that the tale is told from a male perspective) and the bailiff shot her out of jealousy. Children in the village, he suggests, still fear her.

Simina and Nazarie

As the story progresses Egor, having had warning dreams at first, starts seeing Miss Christina in his dreams as she attempts to seduce him. Sanda becomes deathly ill – and is said to have anaemia by the doctor (George Constantin) who is called for. Though we don’t see it, Sanda seems to be being fed upon by Christina, whose powers grow and who seems to become more corporeal. Equally Simina starts acting in a way inappropriate for a child (notwithstanding the age she presents in the film), knowing things about Christina, cleaning her Aunt’s prized carriage, acting sexually dominant to Egor at a point and a cut on his lip may have occurred when she kisses him. This can be read two ways, that she is being possessed at times by her aunt or, as posited by Maria Cohut, that she is actually strigoï vii. The mother seems to have a sympathetic connection to Christina, with her prized portrait and obsessive eating habits and perhaps lending her strength to the strigoï mort at night. It is interesting that in the climax, when villagers reach the house, her first reaction is to say, “You’ve come for land” referencing the 1907 revolt again.

Sanda weakens

The way to deal with a strigoï in this is to push a rod of iron through the heart (in the grave) but the film also connects the portrait in to the ending – with portraits being a firm favourite within the Gothic. I enjoyed this but it is rather languid in its pace, the slow march rather than a rush of thrills and it also aims more for the uncanny than it does horror. The world feels off kilter. It is an interesting take on the feminine; it is a household of females, the negative stories about Christina are delivered by men and the three women of the household could be fit into the maiden (Simina), mother (Sanda – though she is not a mother she is the object of Egor’s sexual desire) and crone (Mrs Moscu), with Miss Christina a unifying force. One thing that did strike me was a feel of la Morte Amoureuse - though Clarimonde only demanded a drop of blood from her lover, and Christina seemed to be sucking the life out of Sanda as she pursued Egor. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Rose Red – review

Director: Craig R. Baxley

Release date: 2002

Contains spoilers

Rose Red was a Stephen King penned miniseries that I was aware of when it was released but passed me by and then I just forgot about it. Recently I saw a post on Facebook that suggested the vehicle featured vampiric ghosts and it does but, more, it features a vampiric building – the titular Rose Red.

For those wondering, I have a fondness for vampiric buildings and so to, it seems, does Stephen King. I wrote about the niche sub-genre in a chapter of the Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire and it is fair to say that King has listed a vampiric building film, Burnt Offerings, as an all-time favourite. To me it is clear that this influenced The Shining, in which the Overlook itself is a vampiric building that holds its hungry vampiric ghosts within. The Overlook obviously inspired Rose Red – like the hotel it feeds on psychic energy – and other inspirations would seem to be the film The Haunting (which came from the same source novel as the series The Haunting of Hill House, again interpreted as a vampiric building) and the real-life Winchester Mystery House.

Rose Red circa 2001

The miniseries begins, proper, in 1991 and suburbia. Annie (played young by Kristen Fischer) draws in her room, she starts music by telekinesis. There is an argument about her from outside her locked door. The neighbours across the road had a dog, which is being put down for biting her. The wife insists that he was a good dog and sensed something wrong in her. Annie’s drawing is of their house and, as the arguments rage, she starts scoring lines down the page and, in reality, rocks and boulders start to mysteriously fall from the sky smashing the neighbours' house. It is clear that Annie is causing the phenomena.

Nancy Travis as Joyce

In 2001 Prof. Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis) is finishing the last lecture of the semester – her subject parapsychology. A young man, Kevin Bollinger (Jimmi Simpson, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter), asks her a question, trying to trip her up about the use of funds for a term-break project – he is a reporter for the student newspaper and has been set up to make her look bad. She fends him off, but she is, indeed, having a weekend paranormal investigation of Rose Red. She describes the house as a dead cell – there has been no reported phenomena for several years. Later she will suggest that she wants to make a psychic muscle twitch.

Melanie Lynskey as Rachel

She is in a relationship with Steve Rimbauer (Matt Keeslar, The Middleman & The Thirst) who owns Rose Red (being the great-Grandson of original owner Ellen Rimbauer (Julia Campbell)). He has not entered the house since he was eight and intends to have it demolished in 6-months. She is gathering a research group of psychics (who she is paying out of her own pocket) including automatic writer Kathy Kramer (Judith Ivey), a post-cognate called Emery Waterman (Matt Ross), telepath and remote viewer Nick Hardaway (Julian Sands), Victor Kandinsky (Kevin Tighe) who is a pre-cognate and Pam Asbury (Emily Deschanel) a psychometric. She really wants Annie (played older by Kimberly J. Brown, Halloween Town, Halloween Town II & III & Vampire Princess Miyu), something her parents are against but, with a high value offered for her attendance, her older sister Rachel AKA Sister (Melanie Lynskey, Castle Rock) secures her presence.

Tsidii Leloka as Sukeena

However it isn’t just for the money – Rachel wants it to get Annie enrolled in an autistic school, as well as psychic Annie is mostly non-verbal autistic – as Annie has shown she wants to attend (making her wishes known through telekinetic activity) and we have seen something calling her, shown in the form of eyes appearing in a reflective surface. This is clearly the house calling to her and so it is not as dead a cell as Joyce claims (and it is likely she knows this). Emery is also getting warning visions, though it is unlikely that is the house as it would want him there. We also get a sense of it not being as dead as claimed when Bollinger tries to get in ahead of the group (and so the psychics have not been there to feed it) and is greeted by a ghost, Sukeena (Tsidii Leloka). Not knowing her spectral nature he follows her and is taken by the house (though survives for some time, it seems, though quite mad).

Annie making contact

As for the house, constructed by John Rimbauer (John Procaccino) for his young bride, Joyce describes it as bad before it was built, with at least three deaths during construction. There was a séance at the house were Ellen was told that if the house kept being built then she would never die (using the mythology around the Winchester Mystery House, where rumour suggested the owner, Sarah Winchester, believed they would die if construction stopped). Ellen continues to have things built onto the house until, at a good age, she vanishes mysteriously but from then on the house seems to grow under its own volition. The count of rooms can change and early on the investigators tie a guide rope and, when leaving the area, find that a wall has appeared with the rope passing through it. Annie removes the obstacle (though whether it was dispelling a shared illusion or an actual wall is unclear).

fangs on show

Rose Red is a gothic pile that looks anachronistic against the modern city it nestles in. The house is described as a vampire and also homes the ghosts of those who died/vanished there (at an estimated count of 23). It likely supports them through the psychic energy it steals – in this case, whilst feeding on all the psychics, it is mainly interested in Annie and Steve – whilst Steve is described as not being psychic at all, his familial link and the visit when he was eight plays into this. We do see Ellen both as a walking cadaver and a ghost (the spirits are shown in a glowing blue often) – whether she is animating her own cadaverous body or it is a spectral form she takes was unclear, but when she is angered she does also manifest large fangs.

ghost in the mirror

The mini-series was interesting and, if nothing else, it seems to underscore the vampiric building/ghost aspect of the Shining and clarify King’s direction of travel. It is very miniseries with characters that are perhaps too larger than life – Emery’s incel like snark is almost caricature, Joyce’s obsessiveness overtakes any other character aspect she may have had and some of the powers/abilities are too overtly strong to allow for subtlety (Annie is pretty much overpowered – telekinesis is one thing but the stones and boulders from the sky are another order of magnitude). There is no slow build up here either. Once at the house the hauntings come in hard and heavy (in fact it is astounding that they make it past a night… and… well not all do). Yet it was a fun enough watch and a vampiric building is always welcome. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Honourable Mention: Sundelbolong

Directed by Sisworo Gautama Putra and released in 1981, Sundelbolong is an Indonesian film starring Suzzanna and is part of the Severin films All the Haunts be Ours volume 2 set. The set quotes Sophie Siddique as she writes about how the film confronts the New Order Indonesian Government’s gender ideologies and the “gender fantasies of the world of the vampire ghost”. This, of course, made my ears prick up.

Bane also describes the folkloric sundel bolong thusly “In Java, there is a vampiric REVENANT known as a sundal bolong (“hollowed bitch”). It is created when a woman commits suicide or when a child who was conceived by rape dies. It appears to its prey, mostly travelers and foreigners, as a beautiful woman with unkempt HAIR wearing its burial shroud. Using its beauty, this vengeful and angry vampire will lure a man to a quiet place with the promise of an indiscretion but instead will turn and attack him, draining him of his blood.” The translation of the name is suggested in the Severin notes as prostitute with a hole and refers to a maggot covered hole in the ghost’s back.

the wedding

Unfortunately, whilst the film does follow the folklore this particular (physically manifesting) ghost does not indulge in draining blood, rather she murders her victims as we’ll see. As such the film is of genre interest. It starts with the grave of Alisa (Suzzanna), who has died very young, and a voice over suggesting that she did have some happiness in her life – this then cuts to her wedding as she and her groom Hendarto (Barry Prima) enter the reception. However, a man approaches him with a letter. It is from “the company” and Hendarto, a ship’s captain, must go to sea for nine months. They have a final drink together and mention is made of her twin sister Sinta dying at age 10.

Suzzanna as Alisa

Alisa embroiders and is called by Rudi (Rudy Salam), who owns a boutique, to propose going into business with him. She brings her samples, but a customer there knows her. She is known as Mami (Ruth Pelupessi, Satan’s Slave) and she is a Madame over s stable of prostitutes and Alisa used to work for her. Mami has an idea and Rudi changes the offer to Alisa of modelling for his range – she turns him down as such modelling does not fall into her new gender role of a dutiful wife. Driving home a car is blocking the road. Alisa goes to the driver to check he is ok and a group of men come out of hiding and kidnap her.

haunted by phantom kids

They take her to a warehouse, where she fights back but is eventually overpowered. Rudi and Mami turn up and she is offered a deal – they’ll let her go if she works for Mami again and submits to Rudi. She refuses and is dragged off, tied down and Rudi rapes her. He then has the four thugs gang rape her too. The film cuts to a trial where Mami and Rudi are accused of rape but the four are not on trial (Alisa mentions them in an outburst) and the defence solicitor calls her story into question – based on her former profession and basically victim blaming. The trial is adjourned. Worse news comes when she discovers she is pregnant and the doctor she goes to refuses to abort the pregnancy (in truth why she told him it was simply not her husbands, but not that it was as a result of rape seemed odd). It turns out that she has previously had five abortions.

Alisa's death

Realising that her husband is due home she becomes desperate, after a rather freakish hallucination of her previous aborted children as obviously disabled babies (based on the doctor suggesting abortion causes disability), she eventually (in a scene that is almost a flash but pretty darn gruesome) cuts the baby out of herself, killing herself in the process. The film then has her returning to her husband as her twin sister (he quickly accepts that her dying at ten is untrue) and, as the sundel bolong, attacking those who wronged her.

hungering for food

Both non-corporeal and corporeal, she wears a white shroud and has a wan, heavily shadowed face and a hole in her back that is rotten. Occasionally she appears as a (rather rubbish looking) skull with rotten flesh clinging to it. However she can also take the form of another woman and uses this to lure some of the men. Once lured she murders them. At one point she appears as a pocong. We get the lore that a nail in the head, something often associated with the kuntilanak, will turn her into a controllable, beautiful lady (it never happens). At one point she goes to a food stall and demands 200 satay skewers, eaten half cooked, and then drinks a pan of soup, which all drops/pours out of the back hole; showing a relentless hunger but not one for blood.

skeleton form

The fact that the vampire element is removed may have been due to the time it was made (though there is plenty of horror themes in the film) but is a shame. The film is a supernatural rape revenge film and is interesting read against Western films of that genre from the time but the social context of Indonesia at the time also has to be read into it. The classical music on the soundtrack is bombastic and, honestly, ill placed and there is a thick layer of melodrama, especially to the first 30 minutes plus, which despite the gang rape has a layer of schmaltz to it. It is notable that part way through they give Barry Prima a shirtless, action hero martial arts sequence – this film is known as a breakout horror film for Suzzanna who became one of the largest horror stars in Indonesian films but Prima was also one of the hottest Indonesian actors in the 80s.

The imdb page is here.

Short Film: Lisa

Lisa was a short film directed by Jacob Pinger and was on week 2 of the 2021 Killer Valley Horror Film Festival. Whilst the entity within the film might be identified as one of a couple of things, there certainly is blood drinking and I think it deserves a place here at TMtV.

So, it starts with Mandy (Ava Acres, Hotel Transylvania 2, Adventure Time: Stakes & American Horror Story: Hotel) who is recording a video for social media from her new home. She hears raised voices between mom (Stephanie Burden) and dad (Keith Edie), and mom comes in and tells her off for recording on moving in day.

with the book

As the story develops it transpires that mom had an affair and it was discovered when Mandy walked in on her mid-coitus with her lover. This has precipitated a move of States as a way of trying to fix things but it is clear there is no love lost between parents. Mandy has found an old book, which she intends to “arts and crafts” into a jewellery box, admitting to camera that she is unaware of what the book is about, or even what language it is in. She reads a line out… we all know where that is likely to go.

haunted

She thinks something bites her, but when dad looks there is no blood or marks, Her dreams are disturbed and she, through research, discovers that the previous occupants of the house included a teen girl, Lisa (Isabella Acres), who was into the occult and who killed herself. It seems that Lisa is back but there are a few interpretations… The reading from the book brings Evil Dead to mind but the similarity stops there and Lisa does not act like a deadite.

feeding

It might be that Lisa is a demon, however, in the previous girl’s form and summoned by the passage from the book. Equally, as we have the bite, of course, and we have her sucking the blood from a cut Mandy is encouraged to make on her arm, Lisa may be a vampiric ghost and we do have the oft used connection between suicide and vampirism. However, as the bite couldn’t be seen after the fact (and as mom suggests she is a teen ‘attention seeking’) one could read this as not supernatural at all, with Lisa being a projected aspect of Mandy’s psyche as she moves from happy vlogger to withdrawn and self-harming, as a way of coping with her parents’ marital problems and the ‘punishment’ of being moved from her friends due to her catching her mother’s indiscretions.

The imdb page is here.

Lured – review

Director: Dawei Lee

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers

I’m not sure that we can call Lured a ‘found footage’ film, as there isn’t an indication that the footage shot was found and there are moments where it appears that the footage we’ve seen earlier has been mysteriously deleted. More accurate to suggest that it is in the style of found footage, though it is not pov – the primary camera man often places the cameras in stationary places to capture interaction.

Jeff Gonek as Jason

So, it starts with an image of a woman hanging and then moments flash up that take images from the climax. It is the 13th April 2018 (which incidentally was a Friday, that isn’t mentioned). We then cut to Jason (Jeff Gonek, Van Helsing). He is an aspiring filmmaker who has travelled to many places around the world. He has arrived in what I assume to be China, though he only references Asia, where he is meeting with a local girl, Kate (Lei Wong, note this is the in-film credit, IMDb suggests her name is Lei Wang). They have been chatting online for six months, have hit it off and she is an aspiring film writer. She wishes to show him her village, a remote location 200 miles outside the city, in a mountainous area.

Lei Wong as Kate

He gets a call from film school pal GT (Corey Woods), who is in the country, and then we see him have interrupted sleep due to noisy hotel neighbours. The film credits then run and they contain effectively atmospheric dark imagery. Then we get Jason, talking to camera, worried that Kate has not arrived to pick him up (though he sounds more petulant than anxious). As he complains, a car comes down the road and Kate gets out. It is apparent that Kate is uncomfortable being filmed constantly. It isn’t clear but there is a driver, so Jason is in the back of the car and eventually falls asleep, woken when they arrive.

sheet covered figures

Kate explains that they have to walk along a path through the woods. He notices the car has vanished but she simply says that the driver has left. As they walk they talk about his love of horror films and eventually get to the house – which is 1000 years old she says. She had previously told him that her parents would be there but once inside she admits they disappeared and also mentions that she wanted company, hence inviting him. There is a moment where she is trying a key into a room but it won’t turn (and she won’t accept his help) and he has a look around. At one point we see something move – a white sheet (I’ll come back to that). He steps back to Kate, still at the door, the key hasn’t turned and her hand is bleeding. She shrugs off his concern.

rescue

Kate takes him to the dinning area. The area smells, and she suggests that it is like the decay of human flesh, and then suggests that she is joking because of his love of horror. She gets him some water, which he drinks and then spits out as it has bugs in it. She seems to see something and runs off, he searches for her and eventually sees her in the centre courtyard being attacked. He rescues her by dragging the attacker off camera… and then the film jumps to him with her – presumably the disjointed jump is purposeful. He asks who it was and she says her cousin and it was a family issue.

strange actions

She cooks a meal for him and during it he gets a call from GT. Now this underlines why the viewer has little sympathy for Jason. He takes the call and tells her where he is and then suggests he won’t be sleeping alone that night, the arrogance of the statement is beaten only by the fact that Kate is in earshot and her English is excellent. Meanwhile her reactions are often strange, at times psychotic. He tries to get her to stay in his room to “chat” but she extracts herself. Talking to the camera, once she’s gone, he says the food tasted bad.

locals

So the film kind of slow burns – with things getting weirder and weirder. He is attacked by locals who have powder white faces, he hears knocking and sees things (or sees them in footage) including a man with a badly cut face (Yin He), who he recognises in a photo but Kate says the photo is her dead husband. When he gets really freaked she does sexually come onto him – though by then his ardour is cooled and he turns her down. So why is this a vampire film?

beneath the winding sheet

Well, when she relays her script, it is clear this is what actually happened to create the situation she is in. A woman married a man from a remote village but suffered domestic abuse to the point that she hung herself. The film then says she rose, not dead and not alive (so undead). It then says that she was driven by an evil spirit (so the corpse is possessed) to kill her husband and in-laws. As she killed evil spirits took over the village and those spirits feed on the living. Eventually the village was emptied of the living and they needed to lure the living to the village to feed (we do see some flesh eating but it is the life they ultimately eat, or that was the feel I got). They call them a sacrifice and each sacrifice creates another hungry spirit – though not every victim is suitable for sacrifice.

Kate's backstory

The trouble is that the film struggles both to draw up an atmosphere and to have a sympathetic focus for the viewer. Jason has a misogynist streak and does not feel like a well-travelled individual, his acquiescence to being tied up (whilst he was absolutely freaked out and had just been cut in the dark) was laughable. Lei Wong does give us a good line in deranged. Decent lighting and photography may have built a slow-burn atmosphere but the found footage style doesn’t do that. The powder-white faces looked cheap and the sheets were awful spirit simulacra – pitching into the most cliché view of ghosts. To be fair, when we see two in Kate’s backstory section, they look quite good, but in the film proper, they broke tension rather than built it. Though when we see beneath on one, as they are supposed to be winding sheets, it is rather effective.

tied and deranged

This then is the issue with the film. There is quite a good job done of disorientating Jason and through him the viewer, but without the atmosphere to back it up we’re on a loser and without sympathy for him we struggle to care. That said, it made an effort and it was watchable (at least for a single viewing). So 4 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

Dark Forces – review

Director: Bernardo Arellano

Release date: 2020

Contains spoilers

Ah Netflix, you can bring us some films from all over the world, introducing us to new and strange vistas… But some of them come with a serious WTF.

Take Mexican horror flick, Dark Forces. It looks magnificent but it really decided that cohesion was for other movies. Great Dollops of the occult, vampires, criminals and cracking lighting but whilst the basic story seemed to be there, characterisation wasn’t and lore was occult in the worst possible way – so obscured as to be frustrating.

Tenoch Huerta as Franco

So we see a city and Franco (Tenoch Huerta) riding a motorbike through the night. He stops at a hotel, a decrepit place where he rents a room. He is there, it seems, to consult an albino girl who is a medium but there is a financial cost and the consultation cannot take place for two weeks, until the full moon. Meanwhile he meets some of the occupants of the hotel most notably femme fatale (and barmaid) Rubí (Eréndira Ibarra) and occultist Jack (Dale Carley).

vampire attack

Whilst there he starts to suffer either dreams of a vampire or an actual predation. He also needs the money for the consultation, so he and Ruby go on a heist, which leads to her getting a nasty head gash that he has to sew but is strangely missing (as is the blood) in the subsequent sex scene. The consultation is to find out where his sister is being held – which given it turns out to be at the compound of crime lord, and Franco’s erstwhile employer, Max (Mauricio Aspe), shouldn’t have been a stretch to discover by conventional means.

leech parasite thing

Then there are the leeches. Somewhat phallic creatures that live inside some of the characters and seem to be the actual vampires. Or maybe not. You see the film doesn’t tell us. It throws concepts into the ring by the bucketload but doesn’t actually then explain what it is doing with them. In some films this could be a clever thing, in this it isn’t handled with enough aplomb to convince that it is anything other than a conceptual mess. If we take the leeches as an example, we never know what they are, their bearers become veiny in the face when they appear but Franco shows the same veins in a reflection before being infested. Once he is, he sees the previous host who speaks to him but perhaps that is no more than a hallucination.

Rubí vamps

The same might be said of the vampires. He seems to be preyed on whilst asleep and then, when he sleeps with Rubí for the first time she develops fangs but that is never revisited and the inference is he hallucinated it. Later he stakes a vampire but then it is another person who he has stabbed. The film fails, however, to direct the viewer to just how it wants us to view these things – real, hallucination, allegory – perhaps we should just take them as seriously trippy and leave it at that.

a vampiric ghost

Yet if the story seems to want to be 'Argento meets Lynch' with a slice of 'action hero meets anti-hero in a horror arena', and does not manage to get to where it aspires to be, the film does manage to look absolutely gorgeous (except for the flashback scenes to his sister, which feel mundane and this was, clearly, purposeful). It has so much style it drips, in location and lighting especially (though some of the cgi, especially around the leeches, could be better). Tenoch Huerta is wonderfully stoic in performance but his character needed more building by the scriptwriters. Style does not necessarily make the film. I was taken by this, even though I shouldn’t have been, but can’t suggest that more than 4 out of 10 would be fair (and I’m probably being generous).

The imdb page is here.