Grizzly Man (2005)

directed by Werner Herzog
Germany/USA
104 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Even if you didn't know Timothy Treadwell while he was alive and teaching, it's easy to piece together the way he felt about the world around him from the footage shown in this documentary. He was somebody who very clearly created his own kind of idealism, to an almost frightening extent: He saw himself as the sole protector of a bear habitat that, as is revealed in the documentary, was under much less of a threat than Treadwell seemed to think it was. This is a person who has complete control over his life and what we can call his "destiny", who went out into his own personal paradise and just claimed it for himself against the odds, against common sense, probably against nature itself. For a lot of outsiders, the first question that comes to mind is "Didn't he know what he was getting into?" Didn't he know the likelihood of getting mauled or killed? It may seem unbelievable, but I think the easy answer to that is that in every moment he chose to continue living his life as the "grizzly man", he absolutely knew. He knew and he accepted that his fate lied in the paws of one of, if not the most dangerous mammals on the planet.

Since Treadwell is not around for Werner Herzog to interview, he instead looks through his footage and finds not only a man with personal demons but a fellow filmmaker, and that's the way Herzog chooses to relate to Treadwell. The man's actions on footage that, should things have gone better, would probably never have seen the light of day belie a canny awareness of the way his actions appeared on film- Which may not have been in line with the way he was actually being perceived by the general public, but in his mind he exercised perfect control over his own image. Even if you can't understand going to the extremes that he did, you've got to envy somebody who is living 100% of their life 100% as they want to live it.

What was surprising to me was the opposition to Treadwell. Not too much of it is shown in interviews, but it looks like there was tons of hate mail he and his peers received from people who thought he personified everything they hated about environmentalism, people who saw enough insanity in him that they couldn't resist reaching out to tell him so, and other nay-sayers that come with being an activist in any capacity. The majority of them are admittedly bringing up valid points, but the ones who have real vitriol, real malice towards him astounded me- Haven't they ever loved anything? Haven't they ever wished they could live in sync with the thing they love, every minute of every hour of every day? Is it perhaps jealousy that motivated so many people to reach out and condemn Treadwell for determining his own fate?

I think in a sense this is the apex of Herzog's oeuvre, the one that brings together all the ideas he has as a documentarian. This is the one that says that in the most bizarre of places, in the most unlikely people, we can find lessons about the deeper parts of our nature. The viewer can judge the subject of the film however they wish, but at the end of the day and at the end of Timothy Treadwell's life, he was a person who lived out his fantasy to its furthest possible extreme.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010)

directed by Werner Herzog, Dmitry Vasyukov
Germany, Siberia
94 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

As I've said before, Werner Herzog is one of my favorite documentary filmmakers as well as one of my favorite filmmakers in general, for a multitude of reasons relating to the worldview him & his films possess. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga is co-directed by somebody named Dmitry Vasyukov as well; I'm not sure who that is, but I wanted to make sure that name gets mentioned since most of what anybody is focused on with regards to this film is Herzog's role in making it.

Happy People is a documentary about an extremely remote village near the Yenisei river in Siberia where the small population lives in almost total isolation and self-sufficiency, as the place is not accessible for the majority of the year. There is another, shorter film Herzog made about people living in rural arctic Russia called Bells From the Deep that takes almost the opposite approach to this, as large parts of it were apparently staged and it presents a more ritualistic view of its subjects. The rituals in Happy People take on a different form, tending- save for the protector-spirit dolls belonging to the indigenous Ket peoples- to show traditions and pasttimes specific to the villagers' survival, like trapping and hunting.

It is one of the most compelling arguments against a fame-based method of documentary filmmaking that I've ever seen. Werner Herzog has made films about famous individuals before, but in many of his documentaries, all he does is go into the middle of nowhere, seek out a random person, and have them talk to his camera. These people don't necessarily have to be world-renowned, but they are all incredibly dedicated, and Herzog is as well- dedicated to bringing viewers a look at everything that exists in the further-flung reaches of the world that we may know nothing about. The fact that somebody can travel to these places and find a number of people with unique, priceless stories and ways of life is a testament to the necessity of documentary as a way to connect people rather than to enforce already famous peoples' fame.

The documentary also takes a more subtle yet telling view of politics in isolated regions, specifically Russia since it is so impossibly large and varied. A politician on a campaign boat complete with cheerleaders and a stereo system shows up on the banks of the Yenisei and the youth of the village are the only ones vaguely interested, and only that because he's playing pop music. When I watch films about the USSR from when there were attempts to unify an absurd number of countries into one homogenous entity, I get the same feeling I get watching the politician in Bakhtia village: That it is not remotely possible to preside over every single heart and mind in any large enough region, and also that the closer you get to the heat of politics, so to speak, the more dire everything seems. Far enough away from the big cities, in a place like Bakhtia, it doesn't matter one bit who's in charge or what demonym people try to refer to you with.

If you ever forget that your way of living- provided you're living in a developed region with little access to the wilderness- is not the only way, Happy People can be a perfect reminder. As always with Herzog's documentaries, there is minimal interference, and certainly no judgement. It is not new-agey and does not deign to talk down to its subjects. If you feel that documentary cinema has lost its sincerity, watch this to reaffirm your faith.

For an appropriate soundtrack: "Yenisei-Punk" by Yat-Kha in its entirety.

The Lobster (2015)

directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Greece-Ireland co-production
118 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I've been a big fan of Yorgos Lanthimos for long enough that it was really, really weird to me when he came out with The Lobster and broke- at least somewhat- into the mainstream. I'm not saying this to sound cool, it was genuinely shocking to me to drive past my local theater, a big, non-indie theater, and see The Lobster playing at it. It is also his first wholly English-speaking film with several notable non-Greek actors.

Maybe it's due to its provenance that the plot so resembles mythology, because obviously Greece is known, among a plethora of other things, for its myth. In the universe The Lobster takes place in, people are constantly monitored and, if they are single, brought to a hotel where they have 45 days to find a partner or they will be turned into an animal (usually of their choosing) and sent into the woods. If you were married, but your partner has died, or left you, you have to go to the hotel. This is a society where you are simply not allowed to be on your own.

It is firmly a dystopia, and I say "firmly" because I looked up the etymology of the word "dystopia" and not only is the suffix dys- originally Greek, the word itself is intended to mean "imaginary bad place". A lot of people use the word in a general sense to refer to any fictional society that is oppressive in a nightmarish, exaggerated way, but that all came later; the original meaning of the word does not specify when the world exists or how the society functions, just that it's bad, and it's imaginary. The Lobster is definitely those two things, with its slightly far-fetched plot, but it's also a place- it's somewhere that we can recognize parts of, somewhere that we might be able to identify with depending on how we live or how we're going about trying to enter a relationship. It looks and feels like a place that exists in real life, although the scale of it and the loose ends w/r/t how far into the outside world the philosophy of the hotel and the city stretches are left unanswered.

A recurring theme in The Lobster is that there are no halfways, only absolutes. You can only be gay or straight at the hotel, there is no longer an option to be registered as bisexual. You cannot have a "half" shoe size. And when the film expands outward to explore the fringe society of Loners living singularly in hiding outside of the hotel, the no-halves concept extends there too: It may seem ideal to live on your own if you can't or don't want to find a partner, but the Loner camp is ruled with an iron fist as well, and has several strict rules making it clear that you have absolutely no other options besides being utterly alone, being turned into an animal, or being coupled with another person forever.

The narrative style is typical of Lanthimos' other films, but is unusual as a whole. Rachel Weisz narrates large chunks of the action, giving us an overview of what the main character is thinking and feeling as he is thinking and feeling it. A large percentage of cinema seeks to create a product as close to real life as possible, with all the tear-jerking and frustration that that may entail, but Lanthimos' approach in The Lobster is almost the opposite of that, yet it has similar effects. Through the unemotional, monotone narration, we're not given any cues as to when we should feel bad or feel overjoyed, but those times are still there. It's just that no one reacts to them as they're happening.

The Lobster is a beautiful, horrific, brutal, tender, unique film. It is humorous at times but it's vaguely frightening even in its humor. It's great to see that though Yorgos Lanthimos may have stepped out of the shadows for this one, he has not compromised his vision and style.

The Good Neighbor (2016)

directed by Kasra Farahani
USA
97 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I had it in my head that The Good Neighbor was going to turn out to be supernaturally-tinged due to what I knew of the plot, which was that two teenagers set up a fake haunting for their neighbor as a "social experiment" and things turn out more real than they anticipated. I thought there was going to be an actual ghost in there somewhere and there definitely wasn't, but this was not disappointing at all. This is a good movie for my nitpicky self because I'm annoying about how I like my horror, and most of the time if there's nothing paranormal I can't get into it like I'd be able to get into other things. But in this case, the lack of a ghost was really not even a concern.

I'm guessing there's gonna be some comparisons to Don't Breathe because the two share a couple of similarities: There's an old guy, there's some teenagers breaking into his house, they find out things about the old guy that they hadn't expected. They're not carbon-copies, but it's enough to notice that The Good Neighbor was probably piggybacking off of Don't Breathe. However, I wanted to make it a point to compare/contrast the two, because I think Don't Breathe is a good starting point to discuss a lot of the reasons why I liked The Good Neighbor.

People were saying about Don't Breathe when it came out that it's a movie that's not afraid to ramp up the adrenaline and give the viewers, first and foremost, scares- even if those scares may come off a little bit cheap or obvious. But where Don't Breathe baits its viewers, The Good Neighbor relies on a subtle, slow(ish) release of information. Or maybe it does bait a little bit, but that's the best thing about it: Curiosity about what any given person does in their alone time is something I think we all share, and an experiment where one would get to see just that sounds interesting, but this movie gives an argument as to why we should never ever do that. It knows that its viewers will be intrigued by the possibility of spying on a stranger, ethically ambiguous as it may be, and it embraces that and uses it to the plot's advantage.

So, is there some deeper moral here? Is some of this intentional irony, a metaphor for the invasiveness of surveillance or possibly the ways people will gawk at public displays of closeness yet seek to invade personal privacy to an increasingly distressing level? Is it a commentary on the withdrawn nature of some of modern society? I hope not, because I'm tired of the "everybody's on their phone these days" camp, and I'd rather not have them in my horror movies. But taken as a whole with no underlying messages, The Good Neighbor is a clever and intelligent film that has more than a few setbacks it manages to evade and overcome.

Sacrificed Youth (1986)

directed by Zhang Nuanxin
China
91 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Sacrificed Youth is a movie set during the Cultural Revolution in China that follows a young girl gone off to live in a rural Dai village to "chasten herself through work". She finds herself very out of place in the village, being from a large city herself and also accustomed to a drastically different system of government. In places, the story moves at an idyllic, languid pace and represents an ideal of living that probably everyone could stand to benefit from, but it also stands firmly in the realm of coming-of-age movies, and there is no shortage of the awkwardness and feelings of being a misfit that come with that.

One of the reasons this movie is important is because it doesn't look down on the people living in this small village without electricity or books or access to a lot of the modern amenities the main character is used to. It doesn't posit that anybody is better than anybody else, just that standards of living are different. The main character sort of looks down on herself for not being like the Dai villagers. Nobody should be down on themselves for anything unjustified, but we don't really get any of that in America. We usually look down on our native peoples and rural areas, illogically, even though the people there are far, far better than city-dwellers at recognizing the language of nature and having the knowhow to survive outside a city. Every movie should portray its indigenous population's rural life as just as enriching and fulfilling as urban living.

Sacrificed Youth also shows that there are ways to come into yourself and realize your own beauty as well as your love for beautiful things that doesn't necessarily have to stem from a capitalistic desire to be seen, to hoard your jewels and spend all your time beautifying yourself. The standard of beauty in the Dai village is something a lot more traditional than the vanity the main character is trying so hard to escape from, it's as much a tradition as anything else the villagers do. Their beauty rituals are about much more than resembling celebrities or adhering to an unattainable ideal.

Shot on location with a cast made up of who I'm assuming were not "professionally-trained" actors, it's a great window into parts of China that might not see the light of day- or the light of film- that often. A lot of people don't know that "China" as a label is actually not something a lot of people who outsiders would call Chinese apply to themselves and their country, and this is far more complex than I can explain in a reasonable amount of time, but the identity and cultural heritage of the region commonly known as China is more varied and storied than can be kept in a neat and tidy single-word definition. This is a movie for recognizing the diversity of what-we'll-call-China and making time for stories that take place outside of Beijing.

Fair warning for two things, though: The first is that they do butcher an ox onscreen, and the second I'm not so sure how to explain without spoiling things. I'll just say that this movie does not round out as neatly and optimistically as one may come to expect from other films. It seems more concerned with portraying a realistic, emotional situation than catering to a viewer who would like a happy ending. There is also one weird usage of the N-word that I'm hoping was the product of a rather poor translation, because having that in the middle of a movie whose intent seems to be to not look down on anybody was bizarre.

Morgan (2016)

directed by Luke Scott
92 minutes
USA
3.5 stars out of 5
----

A lot of people have been looking forward to Morgan, and thankfully I am not alone in the opinion that Anya Taylor-Joy should do more things and that I should watch all of those things. I don't know if I'd have watched this without her, because it seems to ride too heavily on the coattails of a lot of other movies, yet doesn't quite have the courage to take those others and combine them into something original. The premise is just slightly this, just slightly that, and not enough innovation to surprise anybody.

The current attitude towards artificial intelligence in our society is one of distrust, for the most part. I'm not going to give you any "We live in a world where..." narrative because we've always lived in a world where the distrust of technology is deep-rooted in a large fraction of the population. We've been reaching towards scenarios of technological disaster since the early days of cinema, using the latest and greatest inventions to fuel our worst nightmares of what could go wrong when the ghost gets tired of living in the machine. The difference is that today, the uncanny speculations of what could come next go hand-in-hand with what is already here, and the further we advance into the territory of artificial intelligence, the closer to home such series as Mr. Robot or Person of Interest or films like Morgan can hit.

The driving force behind this film is the fear that something that is like us but tweaked just a bit, or separated by a slim margin from human beings, would be an abomination. Morgan the character is the consciousness of an outsider inside the body of one of our own, an intruder in our society, an outlier whose nature can't be predicted. The way Morgan the film deals with the problem of a potentially hostile artificial intelligence is, however, not very original, and none of the characters surrounding the AI are that likable either. There is a scene in which a psychologist is brought in to analyze Morgan, and before going into her room, he is a total cynic, jaded about his job and not friendly towards his patients. But when he sits down with her, he puts on a mask of congeniality and concern. And that really threw some light on the hypocrisy of Morgan's developers- If this man can act caring while he's in actuality a rigid, sarcastic person, why are we so surprised when the innocent-looking robot is also capable of atrocities?

I think for the most part the bottom line with this film is that it's not quite as deep as it wants to be. It's current, it's stylish, and it's relatable in that it reflects perennial fears of usurping and overthrowing of human intelligence, but it doesn't seem to go much further than the outer reaches of things that have already been said. I saw the ending coming from a mile away and it was interesting, and it probably would have been fairly impressive if I hadn't guessed it so early. All in all this movie is strangely engaging but doesn't stay in your mind for that long after it's ended.

Karakum (1994)

directed by Arend Agthe and Uzmaan Saparov
Germany/Turkmenistan
98 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Karakum is an obscure German-Turkmen joint effort concerning the adventures of a young German boy trying to get to his father who ends up stranded with a new friend in the sands of Turkmenistan after the two boys' guide falls down a well. It is exactly as uncomplicated as I've just made it sound and it 100% tries to make "falling down a well" a valid cinematic obstacle. The most crucial plot point before the whole well thing is the intrusions of a wily goat into the party's water supply.

The thing about this movie is that it is extremely slow, and although since it is ostensibly a family movie it lacks any feeling of anybody being in serious, life-threatening danger, there could definitely have been more action. That's not to say I wanted there to be any more action; I was fine with the way the plot didn't seem to be in any hurry to get anywhere, content to revolve around two boys in the desert with a big language barrier between them, but it's one of those movies where when it was almost over I looked back on the preceding minutes and I couldn't figure out what all had actually gone on during that time. 98 minutes is stretching it for a movie this simplistic.

I watched it because I was curious to see what Turkmenistan had to offer the film canon at large, seeing as there's not exactly a bottomless well of movies coming out of that part of the world, and I felt like it was probably a decent representation of some of the area in Turkmenistan (having never visited there myself) but it still felt too much like it was all seen from an outside perspective. The context under which a movie was produced and released makes a lot of difference when it's set or shot in any lesser-known region: You have to consider whether the filmmakers were concerned with making the stories of the locale known or if they filmed it solely to entertain more well-off people in their home country. There's a line between ogling at something like this because it suits you aesthetically and watching something while actually caring about the people in it.

I can't say for certain if that line was crossed or meddled with with Karakum because I can't find out much about its production or its reception upon release. I would have liked to see a movie about Turkmenistan coming straight from the source rather than having such a heavy involvement with foreigners, but it doesn't seem like this one wants the viewer to look down upon its characters or portray them as less than capable.

It's also enormously a product of its time. In the opening scene, the German boy is told he can't bring his switchblade comb on the plane, but then he flicks it out, brushes his obnoxious fringe (shoved through the hole in a backwards baseball cap, because this is 1994) and garners big laughs from the security personnel. Family movies are mostly family movies the world over, and this comes with all the trappings one would expect from that- the adults are all rudimentary good/evil archetypes with little development, the optimistic ending is pretty much guaranteed right from the start, and any danger that was there was understated. It's a fun watch, and probably doesn't deserve to be as forgotten as it is, but it's nothing special.

Dog Star Man (1964)

directed by Stan Brakhage
USA
78 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

Dog Star Man consists of four parts and a prelude, usually shown together as one long piece. In the prelude, there's a lot of focus on contrasting cityscapes with the human body and images of the sun and the moon. The combination of sparse shots of city lights and nighttime urban landscapes put against flesh and blood is an already entrancing start, but the city lights do not remain in the film in any strong capacity past the prelude, despite being interesting to look at.

In part one we get the first shots that are recognizable as being what could be called an "action sequence", i.e., a human doing something for more than one second, not spliced or cut up or degraded in any way. It's a person walking in the snow with their dog and an axe, and- though this is conjecture and most likely not Brakhage's intent- this put me in mind of Neolithic man journeying through the wilderness, axe in hand; as the person is wearing modern clothing I'm not sure if this was a narrative intentionally put in or my brain making connections that didn't exist.

From part two onward to the end, we get a lot more solidity than in the prelude, more stable shots with things that are recognizable as being people (and babies), but also a sort of painterly look at the interior of the human body. The things Brakhage does with blood and gore are amazing, he uses imagery of guts and such like Tarkovsky uses long takes: It's both a trademark and an original statement, something no one else does and probably no one else can do. It's almost celebratory, the way he puts our insides right alongside the decay and wide color palette created by the abstract form degraded film stock takes on. It's grotesque, but it feels pure at the same time.

This looks like an effort to put everything in the world on film in as short a timespan as possible. Brakhage, his wife, his baby, their dog, the stars, the sun, the moon, and the frantic mishmash of dead film representing every other possible thing in existence. The presence of Stan Brakhage's family in this film felt, at least to me, like a tremendously intimate act: Here is a filmmaker taking the things dearest to him and depicting them in the way he's most familiar with, using their images as art alongside the abstract and the experimental.

The thing that I kept thinking about during this and I think the thing that interests me the most about tape decay is how it throws a wrench into the concept of the camera as an eye. When the optical element is removed and instead of being pointed at a landscape the projector is fed reels distorted and destroyed into a myriad of colors and textures, it takes the camera and turns it from an eye into a brain. An interface is removed, the "middleman" that the camera is when it conveys people and places is replaced by material coming directly from the artist's hands. This is difficult to describe and I'm sure I'm making no sense at all, but the concept of tape decay as art is a really fascinating thing to me and Dog Star Man is absolutely ahead of its time.

Collective Invention (2015)

directed by Oh-Kwang Kwon
South Korea
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I'm fairly certain that the English title of Collective Invention is a nod to the Jungian concept of archetypes, which isn't a huge leap to make considering how it deals with the effect of celebrities on society at large and the way people tend to project their own agenda onto a singular person who really isn't anything like what they make them out to be. Gu the fishman is a symbol for whatever the people want him to be a symbol for, he exists as a different thing in everybody's subconscious. This was a society that needed somebody like him, so they made him up. They turned him into the second-coming when he could have just been a one-off mutation.

I talk like these events really happened. Honestly, it's all ridiculous, but I'm glad Collective Invention exists; I'm glad I get to analyze a movie where a guy turns into a fish and causes mass hysteria.

The question that this movie poses is whether or not a movie with a premise so far-fetched and fantastical as clinical trials turning a dude into a half-fish, half-human hybrid who then becomes a massive celebrity can actually be a serious film, and the answer to that question is a fairly surprising "yes". If Gu had undergone some other, more realistic transformation following the experiments that were performed on him, this movie would be a solemn, tragic affair. As it is, it's still very tragic- you definitely do feel for the fishman- but something about having Gu's situation be so absurd added some amount of satire to the whole thing. It can be easier in a lot of situations to criticize society if you veil your criticisms with unlikely scenarios and exaggerated characters to stand in for real-life topics.

Collective Invention sits at a kind of crossroads, because if it were slightly more serious, it would never work, but if it were slightly more humorous, it would become slapstick and feel forced. I think it's more clever than it seems on the surface, and I think the choice to make that character into a fish specifically, with his staring eyes and unreadable expression, was a way to throw the viewer off and entice them to- maybe while unaware of it- project whatever they were feeling onto Gu just like the fanatics and devotees in the film.

So keeping Gu's real feelings towards his situation ambiguous was probably the best route to take, but that meant that there were also details left out that I would have loved to see explored further. In a vision test, Gu is shown several small icons of random objects, and when he gets to the picture of a fish, he seems unable to name it. That made me think- How does his transformation affect his view of what separates a person from an amphibian? It may seem pointless to ask these existential questions, but the movie itself invites them to some extent. There's a latent horror there somewhere that, though hidden behind excellent practical effects, lovely cinematography, and sharp wit, is still vaguely disturbing, even if you laugh while being unsettled.

Dark Star (1974)

directed by John Carpenter
USA
83 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Nobody really likes or wants to talk about Dark Star due to it being one of John Carpenter's early, more amateurish films. Carpenter and his effects team may be masters of the ooey and gooey in a more fleshly form, and every movie coming after Dark Star may showcase that, but evidently when it comes to knobs, buttons, and interfaces instead of blood, guts, and gore, there's something left to be desired.

Dark Star is an obvious satire, but it feels like it reaches through time and borrows from the present in order to make its criticisms of the past (or what was the "present" but is now the past). The crew of the titular ship is a bunch of bored surfers given tremendous power that they handle like rowdy ten-year-old boys. They are tasked with blowing up any errant planets defined as "unstable", which essentially means that a computer predicts they'll begin to decay out of their orbit in any number of years- much like, oh, I don't know, Earth. Weapons technology has become normalized to a point where you can now talk and reason with your bombs. You can also talk to the dead, provided they're preserved correctly, but it's anyone's guess whether or not they'll actually have anything interesting to say.

In technical terms, it's a complete mess. The film's sole alien is quite literally a large inflatable beach ball with a pair of Halloween-costume monster hands. I think the majority of the sound effects were produced by somebody just making noises with their mouth. The actors are all horrible, nobody does a very good job at all. But because of all those failures, specifically because the actors are acting more like your friends you go get a beer with sometimes than professionals, this movie also manages to reach through time to embrace the present-day viewer. Maybe if you expect immaculate performances, you'd get disappointed in this, but the casual atmosphere and the way the actors don't even seem to be trying very hard makes this feel strangely intimate, like watching something all your buddies agreed to star in for a few dollars and the promise of a returned favor.

I'm surprised that more people don't like this movie, because to me personally it was near-perfect. It doesn't resort to cheap, brainless humor, it never gets offensive, most if not all of the jokes are clean, and despite how low-budget it looks, there's a definite feeling of intelligence behind it that I'm attributing to Carpenter being a good filmmaker even when he's making "bad" films. The sets may be poor, but they're also elaborate. It looks like the interior of the spaceship could have taken up a whole house's worth of space. It reminded me a lot of when I was a kid and I used to pretend to be in a spaceship in the room under the stairs at my old house. You can pretend anything is a spaceship if you try hard enough.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

directed by Werner Herzog
Germany/France
90 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

Chauvet Cave is very beautiful even if you don't see what's on the walls- it's a space where time operates differently, and the unbelievably slow growth of calcite and other minerals making up the materials of the cave itself would seem to suggest that this is not the dominion of humanity; it belongs to the earth, who can reclaim it as she sees fit. But the cave isn't just a stunningly beautiful yet empty cave, it contains some of the most important and ancient works of art found thus far. 

Time is possibly the most important theme in Cave of Forgotten Dreams outside of its deep, intimate exploration of what it means to be a human. At one point it's mentioned that some drawings were found to have been separated by 5,000 years- as in, someone drew the first animal and then, five thousand years later, someone else came into the cave and drew right next to it. That's a scale of time more akin to what I said about the growth of rock formations. Wikipedia is 15 years old. Television is somewhere around 91 years old. The first McDonald's opened its doors 61 years ago. Time has, as of late, begun to move at such a breakneck speed that barely anything stays around for five thousand years, and certainly not anything that would carry on a continuous chain of human interaction.

I get the sense that Herzog wants to involve himself in his finished product as little as possible, as usually he stays behind the camera in films where he isn't crammed into a cave with no space to extract himself out of the shot. Occasionally he'll include his questions to his interviewees, possibly just for context, possibly for some artistic reason that I don't know. But the hand with which he creates his documentaries is one utterly sympathetic to humanity, and this style of filmmaking pays off particularly well in his exploration of what we may have been doing 35,000 years ago in a cave in France.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is full of moments where the viewer is unable to do anything but become drawn into the human element of the cave. It's an incredibly emotional film, but the part that really got me the most was when they took a specific handprint from the wall of prints at the mouth of the cave and were able to track that individual further into the cave because he had a crooked pinky finger. That level of detail and intimacy struck me hard, because at that moment, the past wasn't dead.

I love this movie and its subject matter so much because cynicism can't touch it. You can study art in academia as much as you like, but this movie forces us to confront the fact that no matter what kind of tests we subject the paintings to and how much we trace their biological and scientific properties, art is an expression of individuality, and Chavet Cave is one of the best arguments for seeing our ancestors as individuals. Everybody should watch this who is in school, if you've been given some short explanation of the cave that only summed up the bare bones of it. Something like this being shown in a classroom could make a huge impact on a student's opinion of paleoanthropology and start them off on a journey to become more intimate with the distant past.

Under the Shadow (2016)

directed by Babak Anvari
Iran
84 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Set in Tehran in the middle of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, Under the Shadow provides a backdrop of real-life horror to its supernatural threats, and the two compliment each other perfectly well. The "shadow" in the title is an allusion to the rules and regulations set in place by Iran's ruling parties at that time, but it also serves as a double entendre to refer to the being(s?) haunting the main character's home. This is a recurring theme: Metaphors applicable to both real-life unrest and less tangible horrors.

It's not afraid of looking like a product of its time, which is almost the most interesting thing about it. I've spoken before about the 80s revival going on in American cinema for the past couple of years, and how it's very easy for anybody to make any movie look good by adding in the right amount of neon lights and synthpop because that's what's popular at the moment. But Under the Shadow takes American viewers somewhere else during the 80s, and not only is it a place of paranoia and danger, it's also a place where there was definitely a culture trying to break through all the strife. The main character wears layered tank tops and bright leggings and dances to Jane Fonda videos. The trappings of the 80s in a setting that is decidedly far removed from mainstream Western 80s-themed media is a refreshing and important perspective to see.

I don't know if I would recommend this to somebody looking first and foremost to be frightened, or to watch a typical supernatural movie, but if you're feeling a little more patient, this is a bit of a new spin on things, both because it involves the actual political climate in Iran and because its villain comes from non-Western sources. I think we (the US) have tried to do a couple films about djinn but they've all inevitably paled in comparison to when that story is told by someone who actually grew up around it.

I did have my share of complaints about this movie but they've mostly been expressed by other people already. Apparently to someone who speaks Persian, the characters' dialogue doesn't sound genuine, and is spoken with an English accent. A lot of things like that I don't really have the platform to criticize given that I neither speak Persian or live in Iran, but as a layman I can say that the script is a bit lacking and it does get to feeling overlong at points, although that could very well just have been my lack of attention span. Still, it uses visuals that are really striking and that I've never seen before, and I'm glad I watched it.

Morgiana (1972)

directed by Juraj Herz
Czechia
97 minutes
4 out of 5 stars
----

First and foremost, Morgiana is a film devoted to its own aesthetic in a way few films are. It's luridly colored with a degree of care that only makes it look better the older and more outdated it gets. Every wallpaper and every inch of satin or chenille or taffeta or other scraps of gorgeous, expensive-looking clothing that its characters casually wear holds up as well on film today as it did in 1972, if for slightly different reasons. Who knows if there was ever a time when people dressed like this in their day-to-day lives? I'm not even sure what time period this was supposed to be. I just know that it looks prettier than the majority of modern fashion catalogues.

It plays on our natural (sometimes ashamed) interest in backstabbing and disloyalty. It's full of jealousy and "she did what?" moments that anybody who watches reality TV will get. The plot is a vaguely Victorian idealized/romanticized crime affair: One sister decides to slowly poison the other for her crime of being too young and naive, too beautiful and carefree. If this was giallo we'd see some blood and gore, but it's not, so instead the eyeshadow and lipliner is caked on like prosthetics and guts.

The majority of this movie is just wall-to-wall girls with no men playing any roles that were terribly important. That's not to say it's a feminist movie- I could give you a whole bunch of reasons why not, as well as why I question if any media can actually "be" feminist- but it doesn't bend to that concept I've noticed lately where directors and writers seem to think girls only come in two forms, catty and innocent. Since there's so many women here, it's natural that their roles run the gamut, though not quite as thorough a gamut as I would have liked. Still, this would not have been even a shade of what it was if not for the hard work of talented women.

It did get on my nerves that a lot of women are essentially used as set pieces to display their beautiful dresses, but if you want to split hairs, the fact that all those outfits were thanks to a costume designer named Irena Greifová made that a bit more comforting. I liked knowing that it was a woman dressing all the actresses up rather than a man putting them in outfits he deemed attractive enough.

And if you're wondering where the title comes from, considering that the names of the sisters and the title of the original book it's based on aren't even close to "Morgiana"- it's the cat. Morgiana is the name of the more extroverted sister's cat. Who does not play a large role at all, I think she was probably more symbolic than anything. But nonetheless she deserves a spot in the canon of outstanding film cats.

Finisterrae (2010)

directed by Sergio Caballero
Spain
80 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Not much to go on with Finisterrae solely by its synopsis- "Two ghosts walk along the Camino of Santiago"- but maybe that brief sentence (it's not even really a sentence, is it?) is all that can be said for such an abstract film.

It lacks a concrete narrative or much in the way of correlation between the voice-over narration and what was actually going on onscreen, and it seems as determined as possible to keep the viewer from projecting any kind of identity onto the ghosts. You can't tell what they look like under the sheets, you don't know where they came from, you don't know which voice is whose, and you don't even know for certain whether the voices in the narration even belong to them.

Because of this apparent refusal to give up any secrets at first blush, possibly the only way to watch this movie (without knowing the director's intent) is to make stuff up. In the beginning it looked like the ghosts were a sort of representation of the "everyman", because a lot of their dialogue hints at a struggle to feel real, to feel that you count for something. But as it went on, I chose to conflate certain things with a narrative about colonialism and the triumph of industrialization over nature.

As the two ghosts move along rural Catalonia, they interact with their environment in various ways. Obviously they are Russian speakers in the middle of Catalonia, which puts them solidly outside the norm in that setting. Their push towards becoming tangible beings could signify a need for civilization to move outward and prove itself. They encounter someone credited only as "hippie", whom they tell to run, and eventually shoot; no matter your opinion on hippies, using one as a symbol of nature fighting against encroaching development wouldn't be a stretch. Sometimes the ghosts seem at peace with nature, using parts of it as tools- a rock as a cell phone, a branch as a flute- but they seem to have a lot of destruction in mind as well. I'm thinking mostly about a scene where one of them peers through a knot in a tree and sees a television playing performance art involving the violent death of a mouse.

The imagery used to convey whatever the meaning behind this movie/art piece/???? is are, thankfully, the best thing about it- it would be quite a task to trudge through this otherwise. There's a certain kind of entitlement that men who make surrealist art always have, though, and it tends to result in them using images of women's bodies out of context as a cheap attention-grabber- a tactic which is unfortunately present here in Finisterrae. I don't like at all how men look towards nude women in their surrealism so very often, because looking towards the body at all in absurdist art is a complex thing and usually when men do it there seems to be very little meaning behind it other than that it was the first thing that came to their mind. Women depicting their own bodies in art usually have something to say about them, whereas men just do it because they like the way women look naked. I don't know that I've ever seen art made by a man involving a nude woman that actually struck me as thoughtful or interesting.

So with the occasional bluntness of a random scantily-clad woman aside, I'd say Finisterrae was a winner overall. It's got a nice mysterious tone to it that I'm not used to seeing in film, although that could be due to the blurriness of the lines between "film" and "performance art".

Train to Busan (2016)

directed by Sang-ho Yeon
South Korea
118 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

Train to Busan has been getting a satisfying amount of praise recently, and I'm happy that that praise is going to something other than an American film for a change. South Korea is no stranger to the horror genre, but I think not many zombie films have been made there yet. There's some that are at the fringes, but they deal mostly with biological outbreaks rather than actual zombies.

But anyway. The zombie, especially when it travels in hordes, has long been the domain of any director/screenwriter/combination of both who wishes to explore the ills of modern society and bring them to scrutiny, which I think is interesting because there's not really any other monster in horror that has been used so often as a tool to interpret the actions of an increasingly bizarre real-world populace. Emphasis on "world", because Train to Busan marks the emergence of zombies-as-society into the larger international picture- other countries have done it before, I mean, but Train to Busan seems poised to break into the mainstream.

Compare/contrast George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which, in a philosophical sense, I think Train has the upper hand on. It has long bothered me very muchly that Romero had such a true message but chose to go after the consumers rather than targeting the people who peddle the unnecessary, occasionally harmful products that they convince the consumers to buy. Train to Busan goes at the authority figures, and it is very satisfying to watch. It carries the message that the government in charge is largely useless and ultimately is actually harmful. Helicopters are shown offloading zombies onto uninfected parts of the city. A squad of military men in fatigues get turned at one point, proving that they were as much a part of the shuffling masses as any civilian. This criticism of the government is subtle, but it's what the zombie genre has always been for, in my opinion.

Aside from its statements, this is just a good movie overall. A train is a wonderful setting for a horror movie because of the diversity of characters it can bring and the confined atmosphere it can push onto the viewer. This movie has everything it needs: Visual prowess (sometimes a bit... much), scenes of anti-zombie violence that get the adrenaline up, obstacles that come in in obvious but logical places, and above all, characters that you can care about. The main character is a jerk and you will cry about him later on. Redemption is a fairly large elephant in this room full of zombies; the concept that if you only think for yourself, you're harming your fellow human beings. All in all it has a moral at its core about looking out for people, and knowing that when it comes down to the wire, you can trust individuals more than you can trust any governing faction.

I'm excited to see if this director does anything else with live-action horror in the future. Glancing at their back catalogue it looks like they've only done animated films before, which is interesting since Train to Busan is so obnoxiously in-your-face with its visuals. If their second entry into horror doesn't come any time soon, though, I feel like this one will do well to hold us over for a while.

Lights Out (2016)

directed by David F. Sanberg
USA
81 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

So as everybody already knows, Lights Out the movie is based on Lights Out the (very popular) short film. The short's popularity is most likely due to the fact that it was extremely stripped-down, relying on one actress in one very small space, but that it was also backed by the most primal of fears: The thought of something lurking in the dark. This has been humanity's nightmare since the beginning of time- the creature goes away when the lights are on, but comes back in the dark; even though you can't see it, it can see you. Fires die, lightbulbs are extinguished, and in a seamless transition of the ancient nightmare to modern anxiety, the iPhone screen goes dim. The longer movie doesn't abandon this baseline fear even for a moment.

I think it's pretty lucky that the big Lights Out had the same director as the little Lights Out, but I don't know if anybody was too excited when it was announced that the short would become a full movie, because the prospect of elongating something that was good precisely because it was so short sounds like an easy way to bore the life out of audiences everywhere. But the short actually translates incredibly well to a longer format- or I guess a more accurate way to put it would be that the director had enough good ideas to support 81 minutes of expansion on a 30-second source. I don't know when the last time I actually cared about an onscreen romance the way I did with this was. It felt genuine, it wasn't just going through the motions, the extraneous material only enhanced the initial concept.

Its treatment of all of its characters- and I mean all of them- is far and away the best thing about it. It's unfortunate that it ultimately relies on that "if you've ever been in a mental hospital you're scary" rhetoric, more so as the story progresses, but there's still a little something more to the creature's backstory than that. Humanizing a character isn't just giving them something that'll make a viewer sad if they die, it's also putting in the things that make them tick, like what was done with the Diana entity. We understand why she is the way she is, and it's not any kind of excuse, but you do get the feeling that this was done to her, and the story doesn't go the easy route of blind revenge and good-versus-evil mundanity.

The distinction between "ghost" and whatever Diana was also caught my interest a great deal. The way the phrase "dead woman" sounded from the characters' mouths as opposed to calling her a ghost was unique and creative.

Sometimes people discuss what movies released today could become classics 10 or 20 years in the future, and that's always been a question I have a lot of difficulty considering because classic horror movies, to me, always contain some element that can't be replicated with current means. But I can definitely see Lights Out becoming a beloved classic, because it has all the parts of a movie that could be remembered for its originality: Sympathetic characters, strong and non-sappy family bonds, and enough backstory behind everything to make its 81-minute runtime burst at the seams.

Ventos de Agosto (2014)

directed by Gabriel Mascaro
Brazil
77 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

I wasn't particularly interested in Ventos de Agosto to be honest; I think I had the idea that it was going to be something a lot more lewd than it actually was. Which is why I was surprised when it turned out to be more along the lines of slow/contemplative cinema, although the parameters of that particular sub-genre are hard to grasp much of the time. 

Even more surprising to me was that it turns out this is one of my favorite entries into the slow cinema canon so far, because it doesn't ask too much of the viewer. There are slow cinema films that are incredibly complex, that evoke heartbreak and emotion with nothing more than several still frames, and then there is this. If it evokes anything it's a strong desire to lay back and listen to the wind for a while. Very, very little happens in terms of plot, and it's almost humorous how Netflix describes it: "Shirley has a fling with Jeison when she moves to his windswept seaside town, where time, tides and a dead body erode their youthful dispositions". It is painfully obvious how hard they had to reach to make it sound appealing, even though it's an excellent film as is. They play up the dead body more than is necessary because it's the sole notable thing that happens during the movie.

Probably my favorite thing about this is how very Brazilian it is: When people think of Brazil, I feel like most of them think of Rio, partying, and nightlife, but this movie chooses to focus on "small-town" Brazil, forgoing neon lights and vice for characters who never leave the small village they inhabit. Life moves at a snail's pace: Shucking coconuts, throwing coconuts into a truck, street dogs drifting in and out of the frame, boating various rivers, laying naked on a boat next to a dead octopus, laying around various places listening to punk music, ad infinitum. The appearance of a dead body is an unusual plot point because it brings a reminder of mortality to an otherwise vibrant (yet molasses-like) setting. That goes to show that there was depth to this beyond "attractive people milling about".

Speaking of that depth, there's a short sequence with the director himself going around recording ambient noise (wind, other peoples' radios, the tides) and I feel like that was intended to be self-referential. Field recordings are often seen as meaningless and weird when people miss the point of them, much like Ventos de Agosto and the whole of slow cinema.

At only 75 minutes, there's more complexity to this than meets the eye. It's as nuanced as life is, invading an area of cinema previously ruled only by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Despite some nasty weather and the presence of a rotting, unidentified corpse, this movie makes me really, really want to go and visit a small village in Brazil. Maybe that wasn't the intention but that's my main takeaway.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

directed by Jack Clayton
USA
95 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

I was, and still am, of the opinion that the original Something Wicked This Way Comes book, in its full form as it was originally published, is wholly un-adaptable to film. The screenplay of the movie version having been written by Ray Bradbury himself does a lot for its authenticity, but it still doesn't even touch how uniquely atmospheric and lyrical the original book was. Given that and my distaste for Disney, I knew that the film version would probably be an interesting watch, but I was expecting to nitpick it as I always do because I am an annoying and petty person.

The two are pretty different in tone, but the film version doesn't have any huge differences or anything I could say about it that I couldn't say for the original book, so that takes a lot of my criticisms away right there. Perhaps it's a bit lighter in tone than the book, only touching upon deepest evil where the book establishes it as an influential and tangible force, but again, Disney meddled in it, so that's to be expected.

The thing that's so entrancing about this movie is that it isn't realistic. Even when it was made, the era of its setting had already passed and remained only in the nostalgia of minds such as those that produced this film. This is a little ceramic Halloween village, a miniature-scale town set up around a sinister model train in a shop window that we're allowed to press our faces against. It's idealism of an America that may never have existed, and it gets right to the heart of what nearly every human being finds inherently comforting in small-town living. It is to Halloween and autumn what A Christmas Carol is to the Christmas season, for those that celebrate it.

Although the scope of Mr. Dark's sinisterness is slightly dampened, at its heart this story is essentially about grappling with death. So much of its central themes revolve around losing touch with the people you love due to the effects of time passing, and losing some vital part of yourself as your body ages faster than your mind. Charles Halloway's continual despair at being so much older than the son he wishes to connect with feels genuine because it's probably taken from Bradbury's own experiences and fears, and the final message of the film may seem Disney-saccharine at first- and it is; again, this is something only touched upon in the book- but in the end, the thing the little makeshift family finds isn't everlasting life, or a cure for all the world's ills. It's that love can make even two years with somebody feel like a million, and that there's no sense living out the rest of your life in worry when you can spend it with people who make you happy.

...I still recommend reading the book first.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

directed by Mike Flanagan
USA
99 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I trudged through the first Ouija movie recently, knowing full well its bland reputation, because I had learned that Mike Flanagan was directing the sequel. I kind of wish I hadn't done that now, because the sequel has little to do with the first. But the thing that makes me admire Flanagan all the more is that he apparently was not too much of a fan of the first one either, but he went ahead and worked with the concept to create something that is far and away the better of the two movies.

We are introduced, in the first few minutes of Ouija: Origin of Evil, to a warm, rich palette of 1960s colors at their most authentic. Period pieces set in the recent past run the risk of becoming trite, especially since it seems to have become a bandwagon many people have jumped on lately, but this one hits it right on the head and looks genuine, comfy and personal. Until it's not, of course.

I want to expand on how personal and intimate it is for a moment, though: Thinking about this in comparison to its predecessor, the first thing that jumps out at me is how firmly the family dynamic is established. Almost the entire first half is spent getting the viewers acquainted with the main characters, a widowed mother and her two daughters, and the time we spend with them is not time that could have been sacrificed in lieu of anything gory or titillating. This is something Mike Flanagan has proven to be a master of, even in Before I Wake which was, to be blunt, a trash fire: Actual loving relationships between characters that get you to care for these people and fear their endangerment. Lulu Wilson is a wonderful disruption of the awfulness of the creepy-little-kid trope, playing her haunted child's story out with talent beyond her years.

The tenderness with which it approaches its characters' daily lives does not mean it isn't scary. In the second half it moves onto more traditional (sometimes a little too traditional) scares, using the occasional jump scare but not really forcing anything on us that makes us feel used, and also not fumbling with the CGI too badly. The shift from a family trying to keep themselves together and keep the memory of their father and husband close at hand to a family desperately trying to escape a force that brings to light some terrifying revelations about the sanctity of their home is palpable. The one thing that gives me pause is that Flanagan just seems unable to stop using that "scary mental patient" trope. It's so frustrating because he builds these faceted, emotional worlds, and then he rams headfirst into the most stereotypical and useless of horror tropes. It's still not quite as bad as the upcoming Split, though- there was a preview before the movie, and good lord, I will not be going within 100 feet of that one.

So is this a masterpiece? Not quite. It still has its flaws, and somewhat disappointing ones at that. But it is a vast improvement upon the first, and I wish more directors had the audacity to step in and change the course of franchises they saw as having initially wasted their potential.

Viy 3D: Forbidden Kingdom (2014)

directed by Oleg Stepchenko
Russia
127 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

This is the updated, 3D remake of the original 1967 movie Viy, which I am tremendously fond of, and which is a movie that really can't be separated from its era, though the 3D version does try.

As I mentioned when I reviewed the first Viy, most of the movie's charm comes from the fact that it doesn't look like anything made today and that it's pretty clunky and rough around the edges. With 46 years and millions of dollars between the two, they hardly resemble each other at all. Viy 3D is massive, so huge that, if viewed in its original 3D, you could probably get physically lost in it. And yet I still find that the original is better at worldbuilding, because the practical (and very sparingly used special) effects it contains are more believable due to their simplicity. In the era it takes place in, I would expect magic to look more along the lines of men being hoisted by fishing wire and set pieces constructed out of plywood and tape than immense, fantastical, hallucinatory visions of seven-horned demons and evil wraiths. It is extremely obvious that the remake was intended to be viewed in 3D; so obvious that it almost impedes enjoyment of it without that enhancement.

I have to give credit where it's due, though, because somehow, even with the obvious difference in scale, Viy 3D hasn't entirely lost that unique folkloric charm. It's an unrealistic vision of a long-gone era with too many bells and whistles on, but it still transports you right into the heart of middle-of-nowhere Russia where the villages are so remote and the people so accustomed to living in the wilderness that you can't be surprised if half the population really are witches. It's probably the most ridiculously Slavic movie I've ever seen, and the feeling of proudness and history is still there, if in a boiled-down, digitally-enhanced form.

The remake also has almost a full hour on the original, which gives it much, much more time to become bogged down with filler and extraneous material. Most notably there is a fairly annoying Englishman as the hero (sort of?) who isn't even remotely present in the first film, and whose presence is so weirdly shoehorned in that it almost gets to be offensive after a while of watching him cavort around. With an entirely Russian team of writers and director, I wondered why they felt the need to insert a foreign hero into the mix? All his presence does is force a kind of nature vs. culture dichotomy where the "civilized man" must bring his knowledge to the impoverished rural population. Although, I do quite like the idea proposed by having a couple of the villagers also declare themselves to be scientists alongside this classically trained idealist model of a "scientist". I feel that calling oneself a scientist does not require any special classification.

I would also be remiss not to mention how unkind this film is to women. Of the five remotely prominent women characters, two are evil- three if you count the fact that one is just a sexier alter ego of a nasty old witch- one spends a lot of time mute and defenseless, and the other is the homebody wife of the scientist, only there to have a baby and fight with her father.

These things aside, Viy 3D certainly isn't without its fun moments, and at two hours, if you end up enjoying it, you've got a lot to enjoy. But I can't get past the overly-embellished look of it. It's very much like Harry Potter- if memory serves, all the HP films are very visually appealing, but it can't be described as authentic by any stretch of the imagination; it's a faceted world you can pretend to live in, but it's not like anything you could ever see in real life.

I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House (2016)

directed by Osgood Perkins
USA
89 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I haven't known about I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House for long, considering it wasn't announced until fairly recently, but based on early reviews and plot details it immediately grabbed me and I've been waiting impatiently for its release on Netflix.

The outstanding feature of this movie is that from beginning to end, first words to last frame, it is a powerfully scary experience. How it manages to be so foreboding in the beginning, before any of the real darkness has had time to settle in our minds, is thanks to deep, inherent fears: The fact that none of the things we're afraid of- ghosts; death; growing old and dying, in this instance- ever really go away, even in the sunlight. Even when the day streams through the windows in the background of a shot and the titular house is illuminated in its whiteness, it is still haunted. And so the main character sees something innocent, a bubble in the wallpaper or a kink in the carpet, and it's not what it is, it's actually a projection of all of her- and by extension all of the viewers'- innermost fears.

Despite the quietness with which this movie approaches the deep-seated fear propelling it, one of the most charming things about it is that it also seems keenly aware of its place as a horror movie. It reinvents the genre in many ways, but it also pays tribute- the references to the cliffhanger-ending trope, the relish it takes in cornering its main character a la classic, gothic horror, and most of all, the fact that the old woman who owns the house has the surname Blum- making her house a Blum House, like Blumhouse studios, one of the leading names in indie horror today.

I may have been making connections where there weren't any, but I kept catching bits and pieces in this that seem to allude to a lot of the horror being somehow inherently feminine, which is something interesting that I don't often see. There are only two men in this film and they could have been replaced with hints and implications. The very, very slight yellow wallpaper motif, the recurring emphasis on physical beauty, the horror that being held and holding yourself up to an impossible societal standard produces, as well as the horror of having even the slightest shadow of a threatening man in your home, as a woman... I felt that there was a language this movie uses that spoke to some deeper psychological element of stress produced by being a woman. I'd like to see these themes explored further in a horror film that didn't have such a predominantly man-filled crew as this.

There's been a movement lately- though I'm not sure if "movement" is the right term- of horror movies that refuse to play themselves out according to the standards of classic horror while not discarding the lessons of those older films entirely, and it seems like Netflix is helping to facilitate that movement a lot. Ultimately it's up to the filmmakers where and how they choose to distribute their work, and it remains that the further away from any type of studio something gets, the freer its parameters will be, but Netflix ushering in a new, extremely unique wave of genre films is something that excites me.

In so many words, I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House is an engaging and original experience that also happens to be a complete nightmare from start to finish. It will get under your skin, even your breathing will seem too loud and intrusive during its most suspenseful scenes. There's something bubbling under the surface of this film- something macabre enough to sustain it through every minute of its runtime.

Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (2002)

directed by Guy Maddin
Canada
74 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

The distinguishing factor about this is that it's a ballet performance filmed as an antique silent movie, in the fashion of all of Guy Maddin's other silent works. It works well as a movie and it works well as a ballet, but I think this is one of the only times where Maddin's signature style of filmmaking actually gets in the way of the experience of it as a whole, because it uses a lot of narrow lenses with blurred edges and quick, edgy cuts in order to look older, and most of the time that works fine, but this time there's such a wealth of visual information that I wanted to have a moment or two to appreciate the sets but that moment never came. I suppose focusing on the dancers/actors was basically the point of this whole thing, but I could tell that there were nice backdrops that we never really got to explore.

Although I guess that particular narrow lens is Maddin's trademark thing. Like you've found a time machine but all it is is an old telescope through which you can see the past, and you're restricted to what you can see through the tiny, dirty peephole.

Zhang Wei-Qiang gives one of the most unique and charismatic performances as Dracula that I've seen thus far (largely due to the fact that he's a ballet dancer) and him and Tara Birtwhistle make up a power couple who absolutely dominate the screen. Birtwhistle only has the first half to herself before her character exits as per the original Bram Stoker story, but she's such a commanding presence and plays her role- one traditionally played out as a helpless, preyed-upon waif- with such power that I wished she could have stayed the whole film. There's good things abound in the second half as well, but the first is definitely more entertaining, even if it does dawdle a bit.

Speaking of dawdling and potentially unnecessary things, I'm hoping the xenophobia in this was meant as tongue-in-cheek, because if it was, it does a good job of throwing the spotlight on how the majority of horror tropes since the beginning of time have stemmed from our fear of the "other", but if it wasn't... well, you don't have to be a professional film critic to see the issues there. Given the drama with which it's presented ("IMMIGRANTS / OTHERS"), though, I find it difficult to imagine it being serious.

This is unusual for a Guy Maddin film, not just because of the ballet but because Maddin directing something based off of an already-established set of rules doesn't seem like his style. Which is why there seemed to be a good deal of fudging around the edges- I'm not sure if 100% of the original material was followed here, but if it wasn't, it's all the more fun for it. I definitely wouldn't recommend this to anybody only just starting to get into this director, but for a completionist or just an enthusiast of offbeat vampire films, it's pretty essential viewing in my opinion.

The Windmill Massacre (2016)

directed by Nick Jongerius
Netherlands
85 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

I wasn't expecting too much from The Windmill Massacre, and what I expected was more or less what I got. It takes its sweet time introducing us to the busload of tourists we are to spend the rest of the movie with (excepting those who get killed, of course) and it pushes a message that everybody's got flaws, but it doesn't have to mean we're bad people. Which... yeah, I'm thinking it too, "why is a random slasher trying to give us this lesson in philosophy". I didn't mind the backstories that much, but it's just that they're all written in the easiest way possible, the way that required the least effort when thinking up some facet or flaw to give these characters so that they feel more human. Knowing that these people have garbage in their past just like all of us do has the effect of making it even more upsetting whenever one of them gets killed, but I think I'd have preferred one or two characters with original backstories as opposed to our bus full of archetypes.

Several of the characters also have mental health issues, and I don't think this movie handles that quite as badly as it could have, and I appreciate the way it shows how any given busload of people can and probably do have mental problems and it's nothing to be ashamed of, but I was left wondering why they chose to introduce that aspect of it in the first place. Plus, it's not pushy in saying this, but there's a creeping feeling in my mind that this movie was trying to make acting out of trauma and fear out to be as bad as willfully killing the mother of your child, and there's some obvious issues with that.

Even though this wasn't all that it could have been, the fact remains that nobody has really touched the Netherlands (specifically Holland) as a backdrop for a horror film. If this is the film to usher in a wave of Dutchsploitation, I'm ready and willing to watch it. I'm sure that the first thing on anybody's mind when they saw this is how it basically isn't possible to make windmills scary, and thankfully that's not what this movie was going for. I think there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek intended by putting evil into the least likely place ever, and this is actually a good example of how to make a place-specific horror movie without really making fun of the place itself; just utilizing elements of local lore to create something that feels like it has genuine fondness for that particular area.

It's got problems with ableism as well as casual racism, and there's no excusing that, and overall, this wasn't even that great of a movie. But it's got good practical effects and a novelty to it that sets the table for further exploration. If you do end up watching this, though, do yourself a favor and shut it off before those last seven minutes hit, because the end is atrocious and I'd rather pretend it didn't happen that way.

The Booth (2005)

directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura
Japan
74 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Starting with this, Pontypool, and its illegitimate child Dead Air, how many movies can we think of about radio DJs being menaced by the supernatural? It's still a fairly niche subject, but I personally am a big fan of ghosts over the airwaves or really ghosts inhabiting any form of technology- but specifically radios, because I find something extremely frightening in being able to hear a ghost speak loud and clear.

The Booth isn't any huge departure from the norm, but for a film industry that, in the public eye, still struggles to get past the typical onryō of The Ring and Ju-on, it's a breath of fresh air. It takes place during one night, when a radio host and his production crew are forced to broadcast from an old, creepy set while their current one is renovated, and of course this set turns out to be haunted. It's not your average ghost, though, it's got it out for the DJ personally and it's extremely unwilling to give up its (their?) grudge(s). There's a lot of different angles to the story, but all of them tie back somehow to the DJ himself, and it's really Ryutâ Satô's performance as this DJ that pulls the whole movie together, because he makes the main character interesting to watch despite the fact that this character is really kind of a terrible guy.

This took imagination and foresight, it's not just a cut-and-dry "somebody died here, now it's haunted" story. It almost seems to have to do more with the people who enter the building than the building itself, but that doesn't explain the full extent of it. It's a really interesting exploration of the divide between haunted place/haunted person and whether or not there actually is a divide between the two; whether one can cause the other or whether one influences the other, et cetera. It may not seem that deep at first blush but it's got weight behind it, a genuine story concerning the place of the paranormal in a fiercely modern age. Maybe a little too modern, because the rapid-fire pace made my head hurt after a while.

Overall it's just a good way to structure a movie. Introduce the main character slowly, but eventually have his backstory gel with an outside influence to become the driving force behind the plot. Make us interested in him not because he's any saint, but because things are happening to him that we inherently fear: Old mistakes come back to haunt us, retribution for crimes we committed with a clean conscience. I also like this because in the end it essentially comes down to women getting revenge on the men who brushed them aside like furniture, saying that no, you can't just insult your girlfriend or wife offhand and expect her to shut up and take it, these things build up. I guess that's a good way to put it. Supernatural buildup. Not one ghost but many co-conspirators.

Event Horizon (1997)

directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
USA
96 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Event Horizon is the perfect movie to argue the case for a distinction between "scary" and "creepy", if you subscribe to the notion that the difference between the two isn't just a matter of semantics. "Creepy" films are ones that are too real, too suspenseful; they make you feel like something is behind you. But "scary" is much more visceral. The kind of visceral that Event Horizon specializes in, a level of brutality so far out there that it would seem totally ridiculous if we weren't too busy contemplating the implications of such a ferocious evil existing. Scary isn't blood and guts, or I guess a better way to put it would be that scary isn't just blood and guts: It's this movie, it's blood and guts to the tune of eternal cosmic doom.

I don't want to say that I'm surprised that it works so well, because it's not like it has anything to work for- it's got a budget of $60,000,000, it's one of the most famous sci-fi horror movies out there- but it's got such a disparity in the people who like it that it's kind of amazing. People like me who enjoy more subtle horror love it, people who aren't into horror movies at all love it, and of course it's gained a lot of popularity among Warhammer 50k fans. But for all the fame it's garnered today, it just barely fell short of making back its budget during its original theatrical run. 

In comparison to "better" movies, Event Horizon is clunky, rough-hewn; the dated CGI gets in the way whenever it's leaned on more heavily than practical effects. But it also has a strange beauty, like a lesser version of the intricacies of Alien, more metal than flesh. W. S. Anderson continually places his characters in the middle of unfeeling twisted steel and industrial parts, dwarfed by machinery. He creates an isolation in the shots of the gigantic, empty hallways of the Event Horizon as well as in the brutal expanse of space. The constant refrain is that the crew is not alone, and will never be alone again; but they still drift beyond salvation in the blind cosmos, their rescuers oblivious and incapable of fathoming their fates.

I think everybody can agree that the first two quarters of the film are the best, and once it hits the eyeball bits the quality begins to degrade, but it remains that for such a mainstream film this goes further into the depths of discomfort than most other films would dare to. It's always a good watch for when you feel open to giving yourself the willies in a way that won't actually make you afraid of anything in real life.

Medusa (1998)

directed by George Lazopolous
Greece
87 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Despite coming first in... practically everything else, Greece does not have very many entries into the horror canon, unless you count some of Yorgos Lanthimos' stuff. They've got so much in the way of new weird cinema, but none of it ever bridges the gap into being what we'd typically call a horror film. So I had to look to the past to find Medusa, and even this feels like it's technically not horror, more just belonging to that wide wide umbrella of "genre film" as in "something that has fantastical elements and isn't a drama".

As the title implies, this is a modern retelling of the ancient Medusa myth. Without any knowledge of the myth, or if you separate it from the source material, it's actually a lot more interesting: A street tough and his weird friends investigate a rash of mysterious occurrences across Greece where statues of men are found wearing clothes, frozen into strange positions. Meanwhile another group of weirdos- vaguely bureaucratic weirdos, this time- seem to know something about the statues as well. Bad science is utilized to form the hypothesis that these statues are somehow living beings, and both groups of characters are On The Case™.

Unfortunately, like all modern-day retellings are doomed to eventually become, the movie is also ridiculously goofy. Greek dudes in leather jackets and tight blue jeans getting into bar brawls. Drinking and driving, like, literally drinking while driving the world's ugliest orange van. Perseus in this instance is an angsty young man with a bunch of earrings and some hangups about his childhood that don't have a purpose in the overall plot. There's a conspiracy of women, because there's always a conspiracy of women. I mean, at least the misogyny isn't at its most stomach-churning, but it's still fairly blatant how restricted the standard for women is- there's men of widely varying body types, they get into fights and act like standoffish louts and have backstories, but the women come in two flavors (evil and good) and one body type (skinny and conventionally attractive).

It wouldn't be so bad if anything happened that was remotely interesting, but this movie doesn't really do anything. I'm unfamiliar with the mythology, but is the original Perseus this much of an annoying brat? Because he's essentially useless in the film. Maaaaaybe he solves a mystery or two, but he comes upon them practically by accident, completely ambivalent about what path he takes. All he does is smoke cigarettes and brood. I get that the exaggeration inherent in mythology would translate weirdly to the screen- nobody can be a flawless, rock-solid hero the way men are in myth- but the main character sucks so much of the life out of this.

Still, though, against all odds, it's the tiniest bit endearing. Not through warm and fuzzy characters or fascinating plotlines or representation of anybody/anything that you don't typically see, but just through the fact that somebody took the time to turn an ages-old myth into a modern fantasy filled with the kind of flawed people you meet in everyday life. It's effortlessly good-looking, Greece's cracked plaster walls and dusty works of art providing a backdrop that would still be pretty even if it wasn't trying. All in all I can't say this was a good movie, but there's something in it that had potential.

A Page of Madness (1926)

directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa
Japan
anywhere from 58 to 78 minutes depending on who you ask
5 stars out of 5
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The film industry of Japan, like everything else, obviously took some hits during WWII, and many films that could very well have been great were lost. Thankfully, even though it could use some cleaning up, a print of A Page of Madness survives, and shows that there was an excellent film wave present in in Japan during the 20s and 30s.

Other countries slathered actresses in white makeup with black around the eyes and called that emotional acting. They directed people in as dramatic a fashion as was humanly possible, removing some key element of relatability in the process and giving antique films that quality that makes them look "antique". But meanwhile, A Page of Madness has acting that's at a level even some films today can't reach. It is genuine, emotive, subtle, and so evocative that I found myself relating to characters despite them never having spoken a word, not even through title cards (that I wouldn't have been able to read anyway). Other countries focused on archetypes and what was relatable, while Teinosuke Kinugasa gave this movie depth through supremely unsettling imagery and a murky plotline.

I'm not even sure if it could technically be called horror- at least not at the time of its release- but it's easy to see how influential this has been on cinema across the world. It predates most of the aesthetic concepts that take after it and it stands with its feet firmly planted in the avant-garde; somehow expressive through the use of brutalism, concrete, metal, rain, flesh. The plot is notoriously nebulous and hard to pin down, probably because it seems to dwell at least partially in the unreality of the main character (or characters?)'s mind and takes a more symbolic approach to things. What's for certain is that even though the meaning may be lost on some viewers- myself included- this movie has a soul to express and it does an amazing job.

In a conceptual way, it feels appropriate to call this movie haunted, but not because of the years that have gone by since its production. This was haunted when it was made, somehow a thousand different specters have hitched a ride on it and come out whenever it's watched for the first or even the second, third, fourth, etc. time. The shadowy, shifty, nightmarish vision behind whatever message this movie was trying to express, and the sheer originality in it during a time when other countries were still unsteadily taking to their ability to produce movies, makes this one of my very favorite movies of the 1920s.

Coming Soon (2008)

directed by Sophon Sakdaphisit
Thailand
80 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Coming Soon has a synopsis that seems to offer an entirely "different" horror film, claiming to eschew typical genre tropes and instead bring us a feeling of "arriving home alone and being struck by deja vu". I'm not too sure how much of this it actually delivers on, but it is somewhat better than your average horror; although that requires you to have a really, really low opinion of average horror.

The film opens within another film called "Revengeful Ghost" that's almost as good as the real movie itself. Perhaps better. It lays the groundwork for the main movie, explaining that it's a vaguely The Ring-type deal with a cursed film and a ghost who can come and get you when you watch it. I think the synopsis is purposefully vague in order to trick the viewer into not knowing what to expect, and it works- going in blind made me feel like the movie was less cliched than it actually was upon closer examination. Still, I'm surprised to see a lot of other reviewers say that the plot is overused, because even though it does seem to pull heavily from The Ring, there wasn't any point during the film where I thought "Oh, this is this type of movie". It remained basically unclassifiable for the majority of its runtime.

The mechanics of the haunting are really what made it interesting enough for me to confidently call it original. It isn't that great at following any set parameters in regards to how ghosts work or how curses work or how anything works, and that's a good thing. Sometimes somebody watches the film and then ends up inside it. Sometimes the ghost comes to menace people miles and miles away from her "point of origin". Sometimes things happen that are entirely within the main character's head. Maybe the overall shape of it got a little predictable, but the finer details evade expectations.

Just because it's unusual doesn't make it that great of a movie, though. It felt like either the director had a lot of really good ideas but no way to make them work together, and just threw them all in without regards to linearity, or they had no good ideas and scrambled so much to come up with things that it came out like this: Weird, disjointed, but unlike anything I've seen, occasionally not in a good way. The practical effects are good (though the CGI is not), but it lacks any ambiance due to a cheap and cheesy soundtrack and shoves jump scares in your face whenever the quality hits a lull. It has its merits and I don't feel confident completely trashing the thing, but I don't know if the good quite made it to outweighing the bad.

Byzantium (2012)

directed by Neil Jordan
Ireland
118 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I've been watching a lot of atypical vampire movies this month, which is unintentional, but I always enjoy seeing old mythology turned on its head and poked at with a stick.

Byzantium certainly does poke the myth with a stick (no fangs!), and it takes the viewers on a tour of a place they can't navigate in the way the characters do. It exists in the underbelly of an underbelly, the underground hiding in plain sight mingled with the burnouts and the unfortunates and the grime and rust, where only the two main characters know their way around. It also takes these two characters to a place that not too many women are afforded access to- generally with women characters there's a lot of giving and no taking, even if it's unintentional; the role of women in society has been as a care-giver and never an independent for so long, and most media reinforces that point by default. But in this movie, Eleanor and Clara become something different, having total control over their lives, being able to traverse the city at night without fear for their safety because they harbor a secret that makes them stronger than most men.

The most impressive thing about this is that it's really two or even three movies all playing out at the same time depending on whose perspective you look at it from. Eleanor is living a life in hiding, head stuck firmly and deeply in the past, seeking out the things every 16-year-old girl wants but unable to grasp hold of them. Clara is the protector, on the run, living in modernity often too much for comfort. And then there's their backstory, the elaborately-designed period piece complete with vague allusions to romanticized consumption and other such illnesses that affected poor, pretty girls in the 19th century. That all of these come together with mostly the same aesthetic is surprising- its antique sensibilities somehow transfer over into the gilt wallpapers and floral carpets of the (dingy) 21st century Ireland (?) that the film calls its present day.

It's got leaps and bounds to go before it could become the feminist masterpiece that everybody seems to applaud it for being, but its depiction of women taking control of their own lives within an atmosphere that's strictly dominated by men is nuanced and powerful enough to be rare. I had a lot of problems with a lot of it, mostly with how the method of conversion to vampirism is something that had to be revealed to Clara by men, so that even though it liberates her, she wouldn't have been able to do it without men... it's nit-picking, but I wasn't fond of that. Although the way she takes what was unintentionally given to her by her captors and just absolutely runs with it, makes it her whole life, that's a pretty interesting portrayal of bucking the norms of a patriarchal society (of vampires).

I don't know. It's a movie. A good movie. It's not a feminist manifesto by any means, but parts of it are refreshing. Both Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan play their roles with subtle charisma and charm, and it's two hours that I was happy to spend within this little fantasy world.

Black Sheep (2006)

directed by Jonathan King
New Zealand
86 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Sheep are not naturally frightening creatures. They are cute and the right size that even though they're wild animals, they don't quite read as predatory the way cows (also cute, though) or large deer (cute as well) can. Black Sheep understands this: It doesn't aim to make sheep scary, it aims to poke fun at the idea that sheep could ever be scary.

I think its poking fun might have actually gone a bit far, though, seeing as ridiculing somebody for their phobia the way this movie does with the main character and his phobia of sheep is never funny, and ridiculing animal rights activists also tends to rub me the wrong way. I never like to see a horror movie become even vaguely malicious towards anybody who's not doing anything wrong.

But anyway. The first thing I noticed about Black Sheep is that it's got unusually beautiful visuals for what I expected to be a schlocky cheesefest. I was wrong about the cheese and mostly about the schlock as well; it's still got a lot of comedic gore but it all somehow fits. If there is ever an appropriate time during a movie for multiple people to be dismembered and disemboweled by mutated sheep, this movie finds and takes advantage of that time. But the color palette all throughout was this kind of nostalgic yellowy-gold, which, coupled with the strangely playful soundtrack, created an atmosphere of... almost whimsy? I hesitate to say that because it's so subtle that it could very well have been a passing mental association on my part, but there's something about it that evokes memories of playing in fields in warm weather and enjoying the natural splendor of farmlands and countrysides the world over. Just try to tell all that to the demon sheep, though.

It's got pros and it's got cons, like anything. There's backstory to all of the characters, and they're portrayed using multiple angles that establish them as real people! But some of them are still caricatures. There's a girl in the main cast who never gets leered at or has her clothes removed! But she's the product of the screenwriters not taking feminism and environmental activism seriously. It flip-flops a lot, back and forth between the good and the "eh", but overall, it's actually far better than I'd expected, and the pros do outweigh the cons in the end. I suppose the best way I can sum up why this movie works where some others do not is this:

The horror-comedy is the favorite genre of low-budget productions and filmmakers with ideas but no resources because it's very easy to pretend that a film's shoddy appearance is intentional. It's easy to cover up cheapness with buckets of fake blood and slapstick humor. And a lot of those movies work, a lot of the really classic horror-comedies are these off-the-wall indie productions made for less than it costs to buy a DVD off Amazon, but where Black Sheep figures into the canon of low-budget horror comedy is something else: It actually tries to be a good movie, it incorporates everything it possibly can to create an end product that doesn't feel like it stoops to the gross-out due to a lack of other ideas. The special effects are amazing and there was clearly effort put into the thing as a whole. I'll always love trash cinema, but if you want to pretend for a moment that you have highbrow sensibilities and care about how your goofball mutant-animal flicks look, this is a good choice.