servicedevice-1

The knock on this movie is that it takes too long to get to the horror, but unless you are some easily pleased HorrorCon geek, you'll be glad they put it off. The majority of the film is build-up, and while there are some amateurish weaknesses in the execution (nevermind the many many questions raised by various plot points), it's more or less pretty good. But then the last 20 min is not only full on retarded, it's shot on HD as opposed to the rest of the film, thus completing the feeling that you just switched to some bad WB horror TV show that played at 2:00pm on Saturdays (complete with painfully familiar--and in this case completely random--horror makeup. I would say more, but I don't want to spoil your disappointment). The fact that it was shot in HD leads me to wonder if they went back and re-shot after deciding that the original ending was underwhelming. I for one would have rather seen something underwhelming than the rapid slide into frenzied mediocrity that ensues. By the way, apart from hairdos etc and the winking opening titles, there is nothing particularly 80s about the film itself. Set in 80s, yes, reminiscent of 80s films, not so much. (Except for the poster campaign. Awesome job on those.) Are people just drinking the publicity kool-aid? I don't know. For a film that truly channels pleasantly cruddy 80s horror movies, without even wearing pretensions to that on its sleeve (as this film does), check out 2004's Creep, with Franka Potente.

This is the best out of 15 films I saw at the Portland International Film Festival, despite a somewhat shoddy visual presentation (some insert shots are striking, but much of it looks like some kind of cross between video and 8mm). The documentary concerns the lottery system in the poorer section of Naples. Many residents, if not most, rely on an old, strange system of numerology to play it. They tell the clerks at the lottery office about a dream they had, for instance, and the main components of the dream are translated into numbers using a seemingly ancient book called "The Grimace" (why it is called this, along with a few other things, is never explained), or its more modern equivalents. It answers the eternal question: why do poor people throw their money away on the lottery, when they least of all can afford to? The answer in Naples is it is not just a token of hope, but a social activity, a way of parsing the events of their lives for sense and meaning, and simply a way of making life a game. Its at times strikingly strange (a drag queen running bingo games out of her apartment for buttoned-down little old Italian women would be an unforgivably contrived conceit in a fiction film, but one of the highlights of this one), surprisingly moving, often just surprising, and all around delightful. The fact that there are no other comments makes me worry for this film's fate--it has broad appeal. A genuinely heart-warming film, and I normally avoid those like the plague.