We're Cursed, Irina (1972)

directed by Nikola 'Kole' Angelovski
Yugoslavia
72 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Let's hear it for movies made in countries that no longer technically exist, right? I guess since this is in Macedonian that means it was probably produced and filmed in the region now known as Macedonia, but imdb just says "Yugoslavia", so that's what we're calling it.

As this is my first Macedonian movie I was pretty excited to see it, regardless of whether or not I would actually end up liking it, and it was definitely interesting to watch and fairly well-made (some bad acting aside) but I think the subject matter was just not for me. It's based off of a book and it's about a miller and his daughter-in-law biding their time while waiting for the miller's son to come home from the army, and the longer they're alone the less the miller finds himself able to resist... well, romancing his son's girlfriend. It's very unsubtle about this, there's a whole lot of lewd men after the girl while she just kind of tries to stay out of trouble and gives doe-eyed looks to spots just out of the frame, and I think the book was probably a bit more careful and deliberate about setting up and executing this plotline, while the movie only had 72 minutes to do it with and thus comes off with a lot of the delicateness stripped away.

It could at least have been a fairly good coming-of-age movie if it wasn't so... non-standard, for lack of a better term. It depicts in an honest way the troubles of a young girl barely beginning to reach womanhood as she has (and tries to avoid having) various encounters with men. It's not really the kind of narrative that foists the responsibility off onto the girl, but her character really doesn't have too much autonomy anyway; her life is basically a series of men doing either bad or not very gentle things with her. It's all stuff that a girl would realistically have to deal with but it's far too melodramatic to have any kind of resonance with real-life experiences. It feels like it's from an outsider's perspective and the actions of the girl don't make a whole lot of sense outside of the context of being scripted and acted out in a movie.

There's a part where the father says the title of the movie ("We're cursed, Irina") in exasperation, and I almost laughed out loud at that bit because it's not that they're cursed at all, it's that they live in a village full of lecherous men and the father-in-law is himself one of them. There's no curse, just a guy's inability to keep away from a pretty young woman even out of respect for his son. It's worthwhile because the imagery is very pretty in a bare-bones sort of way, but this was probably not the best pick to have watched for my first Macedonian movie. I expected it to be a bit more subtle about all the romance and turmoil and whatnot. I'll have to look for a better movie to make up for this one.

Runoff (2015)

directed by Kimberly Levin
USA
89 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I'm not sure why, but I was expecting something like Magic Valley or One & Two (without the supernatural elements) when I watched Runoff; something a little more... complicated I guess? Given that these movies are about small town/farm life it's difficult to really call any of them complicated, but they had a depth to them that Runoff only just barely touches upon. It's still a gorgeous movie that reflects the beauty in nature, and the rural Kentucky scenery is genuine, but there's something a tiny bit too shallow about it that made me feel like at least some of it was an act. I wanted to believe Joanne Kelly was good for her role because she is a good actress, but her phony accent was too much and I felt like the filmmakers were too conscious of her looks- putting in that one random butt shot felt horribly out-of-place in what was meant to be a movie about a hardworking mother.

The good definitely outweighs the bad, though. While it might not be as small-budget or as simple as more true-to-life movies about farming have been, and while it might belong more in the Urban Outfitters faux-distressed pre-ripped jeans school of filmmaking, the message about not stooping so low as to do something you know is dangerous even when you're absolutely desperate is still there. As is the message about smaller businesses constantly being pushed to the brink of extinction by larger corporations. Being personally more invested in preserving the environment and giving power back to the individual, you do tend to forget that not all people think the way you do; there's still companies that want individual farmers out of the way to clear more land for them to seize up. Choosing to keep yourself on a diet of media that exclusively sides with these farmers makes you forget the viewpoint of people who seek to destroy them.

I guess I just didn't feel like this was a realistic enough portrayal of its situation, is all. I really appreciated the character development, every character had their own individual problems and personalities, even ones not involved with the main character's family, which is fairly rare. But everything still feels too self-conscious, too exaggerated, too much like a distilled, diluted, made-for-mass-consumption version of the issues at hand. Like I said, the message is still there, and that's good, but I felt like everything was filmed with an outsider's perspective on things.

I mentioned in my last review about how a lot of movies try to trick you into thinking a character is in a moral panic when the decision has really already been made, and this is not one of them, which I also appreciated. The dilemma that the main character faces is genuinely something very conflicting, mostly from her side rather than the viewer's- you can see where she's coming from and see the desperation that leads her to doing what she did, but you also see it from the outside, and as the viewer you know that what she's doing is a terrible, last-ditch idea. The plot may have been a little too cut-and-dry for my tastes but there's both good and bad in laying every aspect of the story out plainly. It has its issues but it's a good movie and I don't want to complain about it too much.

Pandemic (2016)

directed by John Suits
USA
91 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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By now most people paying any amount of attention to what's being shown in theaters lately have probably heard of Hardcore Henry, and as such are familiar with its "gimmick", which is that it's shot entirely from the main character's POV, with other characters speaking into the camera like it's a person's face and arms/hands doing things in the frame like they're "your" arms/hands. The intention with this is to make the movie more exhilarating, to kind of put the viewer in the driver's seat of all the action so it feels like you're really there. As it's always been, with any mainstream movie that has some quirk or unusual style of filmmaking, there's inevitably going to be a slew of smaller movies trying to cash in on that gimmick; like Pandemic- while its POV isn't as "pure" as Hardcore Henry, all of the shots are either from the point of view of the main character's helmet-mounted camera or from another character's camera, so you never get to see two characters in the frame together. I guess I chose this particular movie because having a woman main character appealed to me far, far more than Hardcore Henry did, but it's still not that great.

Whether intentionally or not, another thing about POV shooting is that it mimics first-person shooter video games. I don't really see the point in making a movie that looks like a video game because I always thought the point of POV video games was that you can interact with your surroundings and retreat into any fantasy world you'd like, so it seems weird to me that there would be a movie trying to emulate these things, since you can't interact with a movie. I do think the format is kind of interesting, and I'm surprised there aren't more movies that use it; probably because it seems to be fairly difficult to get it right, especially in movies with a lot of fighting. POV hand-to-hand combat is honestly just too cheesy, you have to look directly at an extra miming anger and throwing punches at the camera where otherwise there'd be cuts and everything to distract from the parts that look weird up close.

I think ultimately the reason why I couldn't connect to Pandemic is because it gives this half-hearted effort to have a bit of moral dilemma in it but it fails pretty hard and is obviously only sticking it in there to fool you into thinking it's about something other than fighting. This happens in video games too, you're presented with a situation where you either have to harm (possibly kill) another person or have something worse happen, and even though the apprehension is forced upon you, it's always fairly clear which choice you're meant to take. For something to be a real moral dilemma I would think there would have to be two sides that have equal pros and cons, but are both detrimental to either your life or another person's. You can tell that this movie isn't really about plagues or anything, that's all just extraneous material to advance the story along so that it can get away with all the fighting.

I did like the ending, and I did think Rachel Nichols brought a lot to the movie, possibly even being its saving grace. I haven't seen Hardcore Henry, so I can't say what the ending to it is like, but I appreciated the human element in this one and the tenderness interrupting the chaos. It's still utterly generic, any emotion is really cheap and cliched, but at least it's more gentle than everybody going down in a hail of bullets as zombies gnaw on their necks.

Baskın (2016)

directed by Can Evrenol
Turkey
97 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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There's been a small amount of buzz about this movie recently, and though it's sparse it seems to be very positive, which was why this was one of my most anticipated horror films of the year. After watching it I can definitely agree that it lives up to its hype and more due to being such a remarkably unique movie. I can't say Turkey has ever been at the forefront when it comes to horror movies, and in fact this might be the first horror movie from Turkey that's ever garnered any kind of attention on US soils, but if this director continues to work in genre fare- and it looks like he will- the country will have a more than capable representative in the horror world.

It starts us off in the house of a child at night, instantly locking onto that vibe of deep-seated discomfort, and what stands out about it from early on is that it's so full of neon. In this climate where everyone is a critic, I'm surprised that I don't see more people deriding movies for clinging to the neon aesthetic that is so popular these days, but that's probably because everybody making movies with a neon color palette is doing it really well. This is no exception, and it's actually interesting because the color scheme works for every minute of the movie- even when it strays from the relative safety of the first ~20 minutes, those bright colors and deep shadows suit every scene. As with a lot of other movies sporting this style the soundtrack is also absolutely essential, every song is perfectly in its place and although it eventually builds up to be a deeply disturbing movie, that scene with everybody jamming out in the police van manages to be a genuine rollicking good time in the middle of everything else.

It's really difficult to put a name on this particular brand of horror, which I appreciated a lot. It's strange because it's not the kind of "something's behind you" creeping dread that usually is best at unsettling viewers; it presents its concepts in a far more direct way where it's not holding back on anything at all, it's all right in front of you, and yet there's some chord struck that registers in your brain as wrong, no matter how much is or isn't shown onscreen. Finding a happy medium is difficult when it comes to depictions of Hell, actual, literal capital-H Hell in cinema, because most of the time a director will either try to make it attractive and it won't feel dangerous enough, or they'll go too over-the-top and everything will be greasepainted demons and chants in a possibly made-up language. But not Bask
ın, it goes straight to the underworld with no affectations, no Hellraiser-esque elaborate costumes highlighting the boundaries between pain and pleasure, no goth kids drawing pentagrams in abandoned warehouses, just pure, untainted wrongness. It's graphic but it hits that rare spot where all the gore is perfectly justified and not a drop of blood is spilled for the purpose of showing off. The closest I've seen anything get to this is Event Horizon, and in fact it looks so closely related that imdb claims that Baskın references it, although no actual verbal mentions are made in the film at any point.

So basically what this is is a movie that can truly do everything. There really wasn't much at all I could see to criticize, save for a very transmisogynist joke towards the beginning. There's never any reason for that, even though I guess it was there to establish the kind of people the main characters were. That scene included, this is one of the most uncomfortable movies I've seen, and I'm really just using the word "uncomfortable" because I can't think of any other word for the intensely skin-crawly feeling this movie gives off from start to finish.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

directed by Herk Harvey
USA
78 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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To celebrate its upcoming Criterion Collection re-release (and not a moment too soon, because good lord does it need restoring), I decided to watch Carnival of Souls, one of those horror movies I really should have seen already. Grim, black-and-white, and endlessly gloomy, it's dated and rough around the edges- it was never intended to have the cult following it gathered, after all- but the horror still stands up some 54 years later.

I think a large part of why people seemed to take to it so strongly is because of how different it is from most of what was around in terms of horror movies during the time of its release. It was basically either Hammer or Hitchcock, all movies that presented their subject in a fairly straightforward, easy-to-understand way, and then there was Carnival of Souls, refusing to let its viewers get so familiar with its "monsters" as to put a name to them. Our hero is not very heroic, she isn't given to melodrama or flights of fancy like other 1960s starlets tended to be, and while she's not what could be called unpleasant (even with the measure of "unpleasant" in the public eye being skewed when it comes to women), she herself admits that she's not terribly sociable. She's not outgoing but she's not a brooding recluse. Therefore, the bizarre situation she finds herself in is made all the more frightening and hard to understand because of how much everything takes her by surprise and how she seemed to truly not expect any of it, not drawing the obvious survivor's-guilt conclusions that a viewer might draw and/or be wrong about- who knows. As I said, the beauty and uniqueness in this lies in its existing just out of reach of what the brain can call familiar, instead residing in that dark, shadowy corner that is the uncanny valley.

It shares a lot of similarities in tone with the best Twilight Zone episodes and that's another reason why it holds up so well. The Twilight Zone never went out of its way to embellish its characters or alienate them from the viewers by making them anything other than normal human beings, save for the odd space-based episode, and by doing that it created a twilight zone that was foreign and disturbing but still not outside the realm of "our" world. Carnival of Souls doesn't take place in some fantasy that could never happen, it dwells in an uncomfortable intersection of not-quite-imaginary but not-quite-real that people generally don't like to get into.

There's no easy way out for both protagonist or viewer, no solid feelings of closure at the end despite what should be a fairly definitive conclusion. Movies like this have the power to haunt a weird area in your brain for a while after you've finished them, the imagery continuing to take on new and terrifying contexts with each decade that it lives through, never surrendering to the degrading effects of time and memory. I guess the real villain in this movie is death, or the protagonist's unspoken fear of it, but then that can also be said for most horror movies and even some non-horror ones- we've been dealing with our collective fear of mortality by way of turning it into now-famous boogeymen and ghosts since the advent of cinema, and as long as there are new formats to tell stories with, we're probably going to continue to embed our real-life fears into fantasy and fiction for as long as is possible.

Lyrical Nitrate (1991)

directed by Peter Delpeut
Netherlands
49 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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From the director of The Forbidden Quest comes another movie composed only of smaller snippets from ancient, degrading film reels. This time there's no narrative, just the reels themselves pieced together in a long-form collage, and although it can't hold a candle to what a powerful experience The Forbidden Quest was (for me at least), there's still something incredibly haunting in it. All of the films shown were shot between 1905-1915 on nitrate, a material which is highly perishable, leaving nothing but blurs and smears after a time. These reels were apparently decomposing in an attic until they were given to Delpeut who managed to make something interesting out of them.

What makes it so haunting is that it contradicts the idea we have that filming something or somebody is a way to make it/them last forever. The nitrate decaying as the people shown in the films eventually grow old and die offscreen ruins any concept of permanence that we have. Although movies made with non-nitrate film (and ones made digitally) will also eventually have casts made up of people who've died, the concepts and the people will still be preserved. Nitrate takes with it all memory of anyone who never appeared outside of films shot on it, and all those extras and less famous actors are captured once and then left to be forgotten after the film containing them has disintegrated fully.

Given the context, every movement of the actors within the reels takes on a new significance, making drama and tragedy out of the exaggerated weeping maidens and men in suits miming frustration and grasping at the air. There's one scene in particular where a woman collapses all over a room in the throes of mourning over something unknown, and the small details of her are played in slow-motion over and over, giving us time to examine her unconscious motions, things she may not have even controlled when acting out the scene- things like the way her fingers splayed grasping a couch, the rings around her eyes,  the fall of her hair, how an extra in the background focuses his eyes on her waving hands- and through this, she looks almost holy. She looks like a saint in a fresco somewhere. Time makes itself a character in Lyrical Nitrate, and all the actors are silently pursued by it, having their every movement turned into a desperate struggle against being forgotten where in their original context they were simply trying to entertain. Silent films and even those three- to five- minute clips from the earliest days of cinema seem less haunted than this, because they at least have a place in the wide-reaching canon of film history while things like this are left carelessly in attics until they're destroyed by time.

The Forbidden Quest (1993)

directed by Peter Delpeut
Netherlands
70 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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There's something extremely powerful about this movie that I can't put into words.

For all intents and purposes it should be a pretty boring film. Technically there are two actors in it, and only one is ever seen in front of the camera. Aside from the archival footage, the runtime is all spent in an old man's house, with the old man telling the cameraman a long story for a supposed documentary on an expedition to the Arctic that never actually happened. But somehow, somewhere along the way due to directorial prowess or strong acting or some cinematic trick that I couldn't make out, it becomes one of the most solidly captivating movies I've ever seen. They say that all filmmaking (and to an extent all art) is just lying to your audience, and this is probably the best example of how that can be pulled off to create a masterpiece- not a shred of the story being told was real (save for what we saw in the archival footage, and we can't know the context of any of that) and yet the intensity with which the events are conveyed and the stark seriousness in the old sailor's face gives you no choice but to believe, for a scant hour and ten minutes, that something beyond comprehension exists in the South Pole and the sight and knowledge of it only exists in the mind of one lonely old man.

I don't think there's anything as shared in the minds of human beings the world over as half-remembered dreams and partially falsified memories. We all have something in the back of our minds where we think "did I really experience that?", we all have some flight of fancy that's stuck with us throughout the course of our lives in one way or another. This is a movie constructed from nothing but those old, wispy recollections and concepts that exist just beyond your reach. It's just ghosts. The entire thing is haunted. I don't know that I've ever felt this keenly aware of how old film reels and photographs are essentially motion-picture coffins for the people that inhabit them who have since had their identities lost to time.

There's a lyricism to this movie that I've never seen before and it makes me upset to know how few people have been able to see it and appreciate the poetic old sailor's monologue. But maybe that's fitting considering the content of the film, maybe it's in its destiny to fade further and further from the public eye until eventually the scenes shot in 1993 are indistinguishable from the slowly degrading antique footage. Maybe it's for the best that few people ever watch this, maybe to continue the film's legacy we have to let it rot away until it's nothing but a memory you're not even sure is yours.

I know this all seems like posturing and me getting worked up over something insignificant, but believe me when I say that there's something enchanted going on in this film. When I say "enchanted", I don't want you to think of princesses and fairytales, I want you to think of places on this earth that are well and truly unearthly, places so hostile and uninhabitable that the lines between this world and the next- whatever that may be- are so blurred as to be invisible. Places that make us realize that this planet was never meant for human habitation. As the old sailor says, worse than Heaven's rage is her silence. Some things become so unclear over time that you can't be sure what's myth and what's reality, and some things were never meant to be anything but myth.

Crazy & Thief (2012)

directed by Cory McAbee
USA
51 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I've seen both of Cory McAbee's other movies (The American Astronaut and Stingray Sam) and they're some of my all-time favorites. McAbee is one of those filmmakers who has original ideas, who are totally genuine, and who manage to make movies that are visually engaging and fun to watch on little to no budget. Crazy & Thief, the shortest of all his films and also the most recent, is strikingly different from the quick, ironic wit of the two movies preceding it. There's no cardboard-and-tinfoil space travel, no photoshopped-in effects, no nothing except for the ever-present soundtrack from The Billy Nayer Show, whose infectious oddball tunes would be a satisfactory substitute for They Might Be Giants if the real TMBG had never formed. Instead of all that sci-fi stuff, this is a far more intimate and gentle look at childhood unaccompanied by the restraints of parents or any other adults.

It stars seven-year-old Willa Vy McAbee and two-year-old John Huck McAbee as they wander through the city of Bethlehem, PA aided by a "star chart" that's really just black paint drippings on a manila envelope. It's not quite a documentary because there are some occasional scripted encounters with adults (as there would be in real life) but the interaction between the two children and their interaction with the world around them is beautifully unhindered by any direction from McAbee save for- I'm assuming- instructions to stay out of traffic. The two children's ages are a really important factor, because Willa Vy is the oldest and she can take care of herself and John Huck pretty decently on her own, but she's also still a child herself, and though she plays the big sister role her sense of wonder has not yet fallen away with adolescence. She leads John Huck along both as a carer and as his friend, talking to him like anybody would despite his speech still being too slurred and broken to understand, necessitating the use of subtitles for most of his proclamations and words of wisdom.

A lot of movies made by adults involving children end up feeling too forced, because the adult tries to imitate a child and fails, a lot of the time coming off more like a person talking to an animal rather than a person talking to a kid. Not this one though, this one leaves out the adult's perspective and tries, gently and non-intrusively, to peep into the world of children as it's seen through children's eyes, not as it's processed through the eyes of adults. It takes place in a world where the city is still safe and everything still has meaning and magic in it. Suddenly the big city seems like it's not suited for big, awkward adult bodies, and you become aware of how everybody is always rushing to go somewhere and do something while the kids can afford to stop and sprawl out on the ground with all the time in the world to do what they want. In this movie McAbee has captured innocence, not through trying to emulate it himself but through documenting it the way his children experience it. It's one of the most gentle movies I've ever seen.

Chanthaly (2013)

directed by Mattie Do
Laos
98 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I realized the other day that I had never seen any movies from Laos and I wanted to fix that. I looked some up and found Chanthaly, which claims not only to be Laos' first horror movie but also their first feature-length movie directed by a woman. Evidently due to governmental restrictions only nine films have ever been made and released in Laos, but I still feel skeptical that no other Laotian women had ever picked up a camera and directed anything (and not released it) in the country's entire history up until 2013. I don't know. What's for certain is that this is good, but definitely not the right movie to watch if you're looking for something that's horror first and everything else second.

It's got an interesting narrative style that feels much more suited to a slower film, it's bright and summery and the constant bird and insect noises in the background give the whole thing a very laid-back atmosphere. I was surprised that it actually worked as a ghost story considering the unorthodox look and feel of it. I've always thought tension was something that a horror movie absolutely has to have, but Chanthaly has literally no tension whatsoever, and while it isn't frightening in the least it also still works really well with a more leisurely pace. Really I'm just surprised any of it worked in general, because it's obvious that budget restraints limited the crew to filming inside this one house, and it's easily apparent how bare-bones the whole thing is (no prosthetics, no CGI, no nothing aside from fishing wire and fake blood) but it's refreshing to see a story told without any embellishment. Due to the stripped-down nature of it it felt really personal, almost like a diary film sometimes. I could believe that this was all happening in real life because it stays so firmly realistic and subtle at all times.

That's another point I thought was neat and probably resulted from a lack of money: The nature of the haunting felt a lot more likely to happen than most other movies about ghosts. Rather than stuff like violent demons inhabiting dolls and invading houses with intent to kill, this kind of thing seems like it would be more common in everyday people's lives- a visitation from a deceased family member, devoid of ill intent but still frightening to the live person because they don't expect it. The lack of a scare factor was much appreciated for a change.

Unfortunately it overstayed its welcome a bit too much. The slow pace combined with a not-slow storyline was fun up until the storyline actually did start to drag. It tries to bring in a twist in the final act and does something with its main character that not many movies have the courage to do, and I guess it still works, but there's a point where it's just too much. It could have cut off at the twist and been a much better movie. But instead it goes into weird, uncharted territory for the final ~30 minutes and that was when things fell apart. I still liked it very much, though; I liked how intimate it felt and I liked that it goes a little bit deeper than just being a ghost story, getting into the territory of parental and societal expectations of women, especially when they're sick mentally- that mentality that "You're not sick enough to get out of doing work" that unfortunately is prevalent in real life. It's not groundbreaking with its stance on anything, but it's an honest depiction of things, at least. I'm glad it exists and I'm glad I got to see it.

God's Pocket (2014)

directed by John Slattery
USA
88 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This movie would probably have had at least some success anyway due to generally being good, but it's most notable for being Philip Seymour Hoffman's last completed film. As with most of his other roles, he approaches his character with familiarity and honesty, and that vibe is a perfect fit for the rest of the movie. I think I got something mixed up because initially I thought this was going to be a heist film, and at first it came at me out of left field because it seemed to be so gentle and unassuming, but as I watched more and more, I realized that that harmless appearance was pretty much what the movie was baiting you into thinking it was like- while its subject matter and setting is dealt with using a great amount of sympathy, it's far deeper than the small-town crime flick it would appear to be. It seemed to me like its intentions were to portray life in a small town with total, 100% honesty; including all the racism, boredom, complacency and closed-mindedness that that tends to entail. Under that sheen of blue-collar grit and grime is a movie that's actually fairly depressing because it's about depressed people living in a depressed town that unfortunately is the type to have its faults overlooked and be praised as the all-American "Everytown, USA".

Basically the takeaway from this movie is a two-pronged message about the fondness with which we tend to recall memories that at the time were different than we'd prefer to remember. Its two basic components are this:

1. People who did not intimately know a person will continue to have an idea of that person's character that they insist is correct, no matter how that person actually is in reality. This is especially true after somebody has died.
2. Nostalgia will make events more noble and significant than they ever could have been when they first happened.

Anyone who's lived in a small town like the fictional God's Pocket knows that weird feeling you get when you finally leave for good where you know that living there had its problems, that its people weren't all the sunshine and hospitality they appeared to be if you weren't from around town, but you still manage to hang onto some scrap of memory that stubbornly argues the town's good intentions. The plot of God's Pocket concerns a crime and a half-hearted attempt to cover it up, but moreso it's about that misplaced nostalgia. The message of the closing scene isn't that the townspeople will continue living their quaint, homestead-y little lives, but that they'll continue living as closed-off people who brawl first and ask questions later.

It's extremely well-photographed and the dialogue has a very subtle humor to it but also a lot of genuine love. Another takeaway from this is that even places like this can be beautiful, there can be gorgeous scenery and gentleness and affection and all that stuff, but that doesn't cover up the fact that the characters are not good people. They have to do terrible things just to cover up the fact that they were doing terrible things, and even the coverup of the crime committed is less to protect the innocent party responsible but to get back at a guy who was, in life, the most outspoken ignorant bigot of all the film's other ignorant bigots. To view a movie like this as what it appears to be at its surface is dangerous; there's no crime in acknowledging one's illogical nostalgia for towns like this but when you begin to take it too far and deny the way the town actually was in real life is where oppression and backwards thinking sets in. This is a wonderfully nuanced film to be able to communicate that, with capable direction and great performances all across the board.

Fear X (2003)

directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Denmark
91 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Nicolas Winding Refn is one of those directors where you can watch any of their movies and basically know what you're getting into, but since Fear X is one of his earlier films and has been far less successful than his later ones, I expected something much, much different than what I actually got. I never hear about this movie, it seems to be totally absent from the discussion whenever anybody is talking about Refn's greatest works, but it deserves a place up there with his best, for sure. Refn really hasn't ever put his name on a movie that isn't aesthetically pleasing to the point of excess; even way before his more refined style with Drive and Only God Forgives began to show through, this does one of the best jobs I've seen at using a rich, warm color palette to create an atmosphere that's absolutely formidable. The reds make you nervous, the browns dampen sound and make you feel 1970s wood-paneled claustrophobia, and the deep, dark blacks threaten to swallow the characters up. It is pretty style-over-substance, because I honestly didn't care much about the plot at any time, I was more concerned with how this movie's atmosphere felt like it could eat me alive.

There's something about the film that's endemic to America but isn't Americana in the traditional sense. It's an honest portrayal of the vibe of American living and although it was released in 2003 (and filmed in Canada) it could have come out practically yesterday. It captures so well feelings of voyeurism and surveillance, disillusionment and injustice, responsibility and desperation, and most of all revenge... not a satisfying one but one that's nihilistic, that leaves both you and the characters wondering if it was worth it to get to the end, if anything at all is really worth going out and fighting for if the answers you need so seldom come easy or guilt-free.

I don't know if it's because I've seen Lost Highway too many times or what but when there's a movie like this that's basically a crime flick dipped in an oppressive, dread-filled atmosphere, I ascribe something paranormal to it. Looking at the facts, there's nothing inhuman about Fear X, but there's this creeping horror that seems to pursue the main character wherever he goes. It doesn't come in the form of the man he's looking for, it doesn't come from his emotions, it just comes from the fact that every movement that brings him closer to the man who killed his wife also seems to bring him closer to the edge of a gaping void. The atmosphere itself is a character and it is a sinister one. There's so much emptiness in this movie. It puts singular characters in an expanse, outside the context of modern American life yet assimilated into it, almost caricatured here (though subtly) but faceless in real life. Scenarios like this have played out both in reality and in cinema time and time again, but in this instance, aided by gorgeous cinematography, a foreboding score, and an absolute dead seriousness, it feels like the whole world is folding in around the main character.

The only real catch about this movie is that you can't even pretend it's realistic due to what I mentioned about it valuing style over substance. In the beginning, the main character has that thing you see in movies and TV where somebody is obsessed with someone else and they cover a wall in pictures of them, but it's so well-organized that it doesn't even feel "obsessive". Although his upkeep of it is meticulous; it just comes off as decorative. I can see where criticism about being too pretentious would come in but if you can really, really throw your judgement to the wind and try to get into the right frame of mind, this is an unusually immersive viewing experience that hangs around well after the movie has finished.

Darling (2016)

directed by Mickey Keating
USA
76 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I've been excited for this movie for a long time because I love Lauren Ashley Carter, I love Larry Fessenden and Glass Eye Pix, and Mickey Keating directed Pod which I also loved. I was curious to see how another horror movie from this director would look because the thing about Pod was that it was such a full-frontal, in-your-face terror; I agree with the school of thought that says subtle and quiet is better when it comes to horror movies but I thought Pod was really interesting in how it tossed ambiguity to the wind and went as loud and fast as possible. That frenzy is still palpable in Darling, but this time it's hidden just under the surface, occasionally coming through for a split-second burst of intensity. Those split seconds add up to a paranoid atmosphere that feels like it could break at any moment.

It's a classic setup: Girl moves into creepy old house, creepy old house turns out to be... bad for her. It seemed to be drawing pretty heavily from Polanski's The Tenant as well as a little from his Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, but it feels heaps more accessible than those films and because of that it carries a bigger sense of plausibility. Polanski's work is far more artful and deliberate, and Darling, with its low budget and sparse cast, feels closer to real life. It's like a budget version of one of those old black-and-white gothic horrors, and while its stripped-down nature does make it relatable, it's like any budget item- you get what you pay for. It's got definite flaws, it takes a very long time to actually start getting good and in the beginning it seems to fumble and force the subject matter more than anything, but in the end I think most things resolved themselves. I'm always vocal about my dislike for horror movies that rely on mental illness as a cheap scare tactic, but there's a difference between that and a movie about a house that's just so wrong it drives its inhabitants mad, no matter how mentally sound they were when they came into it. I'm a fan of the latter type of movie, I like things where characters can't see what's menacing them.

I guess another complaint I had about it was that we didn't get to see a lot of the main character's personality "before", so we didn't really have any perspective on who she was as a person and how distant from her normal self she became when she entered the house. It was implied that the house did change her, but we don't know how much; for all we know she might have been that way for a long time. 76 minutes is not a lot of runtime for much of anything, and while cutting to the chase was ultimately best for this movie considering its shoestring-budget looks, there were some bits left out that would probably have painted a clearer picture of the situation as a whole. Then again, a lot of the beauty of it was in the absence of any physical evidence of the house's haunting beyond what the main character feels in her mind; the restraint in not showing some elements that would have explained a lot benefited the movie and made it feel a little less predictable.

I think mostly it just proves that Lauren Ashley Carter needs to be in more horror films. She's really great when she gets into the more physical stuff and she plays her character with nuance that seems almost a little too good for the movie itself. It was nice to see a cameo from Helen Rogers at the end too, two up-and-coming women in horror all in one film. It's not the best of the best of the year but it didn't let me down.

The Midnight Swim (2014)

directed by Sarah Adina Smith

USA

84 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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(this is an older review that I wanted to post because Lindsay Burdge is in both this and The Invitation and is really great in both movies)

I was surprised by this one. I think this is one of those times where I see a side of a movie that conflicts with the popular opinion, because it's got an unremarkable rating all across the board, but it was absolutely perfect for me personally and I'm so glad I decided to watch it. I love cases like the one this film is centered on, deaths and disappearances that look like they have a clear-cut explanation to an outsider but the people closest to the deceased or missing all agree that there's something fishy going on. It's something that's shrouded in mystery, every single element of it is murky and seems to be constantly shifting so as to avoid the three main characters ever landing on a solid answer to what they set out to find out. Around every corner is a new fear, although the movie is very, very quiet and subdued it constantly gives off a feeling like something is about to jump out at you but it never does.

It's actually a little strange how ominous everything is considering that this movie is (really heavy-handedly) about reincarnation, which shouldn't be a scary subject at all. But good, bad, or indifferent, it's crystal-clear that there's something going on with the lake that the three main characters' mother disappeared in, and the uncertainty and confusion surrounding all the mysterious goings-on obviously disturbs the sisters and disrupts what was meant to be a quiet retreat to honor their mother's memory. All that weirdness comes across as sinister, mostly because you can never get a firm grip on what was reality and what was metaphysical. I guess the reason the lake was so unnerving was because it's not what it should be, you can feel when you look at it that something isn't right with it and it doesn't really matter if it's good or bad because it doesn't conform to your mind's idea of what should exist in the natural world. That line towards the beginning about how nobody has ever found the bottom of the lake basically casts a shadow over the whole rest of the film, every time there's a shot of the girls out on a boat or swimming in the lake I got so nervous, I wanted them to get out of the lake as quickly as possible because it was just so unsettling knowing that nobody knows what truly lies in the depths down there where no person can go without risking life and limb.

This movie comes from a first-time director which is very impressive because it's absolutely perfect tonally. Some of its main themes are rebirth, sisterhood, motherhood, and family, but there's such a strong sense of the unknown and of something lurking just beyond your field of vision that it's full to the brim with tension. We need more horror movies like this, we need more horror where the thing that frightens you isn't something you can see or feel. The sadness of losing a parent and then going back to a place that's so full of memories of them is horror enough, and then you take that story of a death in the family and put it alongside the mystery of the lake and its influence on the three sisters and you create something quiet yet powerful in its ability to unnerve. It's all just so cyclical; the story of the seven sisters is told over and over in different forms but the root is always the same. The horror here is deeply intertwined with nature, and those two things strengthen each other and the rest of the film as a whole.

The Invitation (2016)

directed by Karyn Kusama
USA
100 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Right from the beginning of this movie, there's a feeling that something isn't right with the world. Starting a horror movie off with a disturbing event unrelated to the rest of the plot is always a good choice, because it makes that feeling of anxiety more pervasive and when coupled with dangers encountered further on down the line, it can even make it seem like there's more going on than meets the eye, that there's something almost cosmic out to get the characters. When The Invitation begins with the mercy-killing of a coyote wounded by the main character's car, we feel just a little bit more on edge, although reasonably we know the coyote couldn't possibly have been more than a sad accident. But its presence is a suggestion of menace, just a hint at the hysteria that underlies the rest of the film. This is a movie that never lets you get comfortable; on the surface it's an atmosphere where you should feel safe, but the nitpicking and the social nightmare that begins when the main character and his girlfriend enter the house in which they'll remain for the rest of the film won't let a viewer cast off the nagging unease that that poor coyote brought in.

Although the movie builds off of a feeling of being unsafe, there's a ton of subtlety all throughout it and also a ton of restraint- we know that clearly something is happening, and we know that it's dangerous, but until a tipping point is reached, we feel like there's still more to come. The conversations and actions of the characters simmer with hidden malice and a lot of the reason for this vibe can be traced to social anxiety, to a feeling of not being able to trust these people who are supposedly your "friends"; thinking they might snap at you at any moment. The main character is clearly a very haunted man, and his personal instabilities and self-doubt make us sympathize with him as he's probably one of the most "human" characters, but it also makes us see things from an outsider's perspective and wonder how much of what's going on around him he might be willing to overlook and chalk up as his own anxieties. Again, even though we know this is a character with baggage, there's no doubt at all that what's going on around him is something genuinely sinister rather than his own imagination. The way that character interacted with the rest of the cast was really interesting and provided a kind of leverage so that the viewer wasn't immediately 100% pitted against the other partygoers, but was still wary of them.

A few movies have come out lately where the horror is very psychological and comes from being stuck in a house with somebody whose motives you can't trust. Society has taught us to try and be polite even when faced with these kinds of situations, to keep that dread at the back of your mind but still assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and that sense of forced normalcy creates tension in The Invitation. Why do we feel comforted when someone is smiling but uneasy when they start smiling too wide or for too long? Why do we admire those who have managed to learn to deal with loss in a way we deem "proper" while others whose grief still consumes them alienate us? What's the difference between friendly and overly friendly? The characters in this film are at each others' necks in a quiet, polite way, the bared teeth suggesting a warning rather than a smile and the warm, inviting atmosphere of a large, lavish house becoming a labyrinth to lose yourself in rather than an easygoing environment.

Everybody's been waiting to see what director Karyn Kusama does next after the release of Jennifer's Body to much acclaim in 2009, and the answer comes in the form of this, a masterfully directed and unpredictable modern horror film. It would take volumes to talk about all the nuances of this movie, but 100 minutes feels like the perfect runtime where time is devoted to establishing story and tone but never gives way to filler. I loved this movie, I loved the immersive soundtrack and I loved how it surprised me and how I felt like I was being pushed away yet intrigued at the same time. The note it ends on is as mysterious and ominous as the whole film preceding it, and I'm glad to have gotten the chance to watch it.

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980)

directed by Les Blank
USA
50 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Like a lot of other people who watched this film, I've never had a particularly strong opinion on garlic. I do like the smell of it, and I think it adds great flavor to a lot of dishes, but I always just kind of viewed it like I would a spice; it's good in things but you can't really do anything with it on its own, so it's not worth fawning all over it unless it's used in a really good dish. It's a testament to how good a documentary filmmaker Les Blank is that I and so many other people can go into Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers with little to no opinion on garlic and come out of it with not only a new appreciation of the vegetable but an appreciation of food and really just of life in general, it's such an enjoyable thing that you can't help but feel a great warmth coming from all the happiness and the smiles on everybody's faces as they all tell what garlic means to them personally.

The last movie I watched prior to this one was Nostalgia For the Light, which is also a documentary that concerns community and culture, but they're on totally opposite sides of the spectrum: One is about keeping culture and history alive through personal grief and intense emotional pain, and the other is a celebration of something simple that's taken on a cultural significance for a wide-reaching group of people. Although they're two movies that really can't be compared at all, both are about refusing to let yourself and the community you belong to die out, they're about fighting back against the repression of time and of outside forces that seek to beat back the vibrance of a people and the things that mean a lot to them. Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers is less focused on one nationality than Nostalgia For the Light is, but you can tell that garlic is clearly a more significant part of the history of certain cultures and ethnicities than it is for others, and it celebrates that sense of community, of sharing a love of food, of tradition, and of memories.

I don't think it's possible to go through this movie and not feel connected to it at least once. The strong smell of garlic triggers something in pretty much everyone; the aroma or taste of it can send you back to your childhood home or a favorite restaurant or a person you knew, and those reactions are what the movie is all about. Over time it becomes less about garlic as an object (although there's no doubt that the people in this movie are truly head-over-heels for garlic) and more about it as a thread connecting families and friends and basically just anybody the whole world over who has some memory in their life that garlic reminds them of. It's a joyful experience, a film full of fullness and brightness and love brought on from an unlikely source.

Nostalgia For the Light (2010)

directed by Patricio Guzmán
Chile
90 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Although Nostalgia For the Light is in large part a documentary about astronomy and our place in the cosmos, it's also about our place among ourselves and in our own history. As the film opens and one of the many gigantic telescopes featured in it is rolled into position, I found myself thinking all the machinery looked somewhat like heavy-duty medical equipment- breathing machines and MRIs and other equipment meant to preserve someone's health- and I got to feeling like that's what all the telescopes in the movie are, machines that will hook humanity up to outer space the way a person in a hospital might be hooked up to a life support system. This is a film that isn't afraid to be subjective, to come straight from the experiences of a singular narrator and the country he belongs to rather than looking at things from a clinical standpoint. For that reason, it's an incredibly affecting thing to watch. It lacks the sense of wonder and almost naive fascination that many other documentaries about the cosmos lack because they don't take into account the intensely personal nature of every person's concept of where they stand among the rest of the universe.

The film puts two groups of peoples' individual pursuits of history side-by-side and compares them against each other: Astronomers, working out of the Atacama desert to search far and wide for answers about not only the origins of life on earth but also the origins of anything, seeking to poke through space dismantling things and putting them back together to find out where they came from, and a small group of women who endlessly search that same desert for the remains of their loved ones who were murdered and their bodies dumped by the regime of Augusto Pinochet. The entire point of the film is to draw parallels between the two's searches. Watching these women turn over every scrap of desert, every rock, every inch just to find as many fragments of their families' bones as they possibly can is something that's difficult to stomach, it's nearly impossible to keep your eyes dry as you watch these women- all of them well into middle age- try so desperately to keep meaningful elements of history with them as the rest of the world encourages them to forget. The main message of the film as a whole is that we can never forget our dead; it's about searching and it's about the importance of memory and of justice and of being able to look back on the people who came before you and to recognize where you came from, why you're here, whether that means exploring the stars and discovering the building blocks of life or searching for fragments of people thrown away en masse whose relatives understand the significance of just having some small piece to remember them by.

It's a grim and powerful movie. There's clearly a lot of care put into telling the stories of these women and their families in the context of Chile as a whole and the ways various forces have tried to control its past, to wipe out its history. One of the people interviewed is a man who was in one of Chile's concentration camps, and he tells about how he spent every single day memorizing the topography of the place he was in and sketching it out, then ripping up the pages every night and disposing of them in the toilets, so he could remember them clearly enough to draw them by memory when he got out. He tells about how him and a group of other prisoners came together to look at the stars and draw maps of them with salvaged and hand-built equipment, how that afforded his mind and spirit a freedom that his body didn't have. I came away from this film thinking a lot about how everybody looks up at the stars but no two people do it for the same reasons.

Hush (2016)

directed by Mike Flanagan
USA
87 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Mike Flanagan is a "quality over quantity"-type director, having enjoyed relatively quiet success with his two previous features, Absentia and Oculus. Both are generally regarded as indie darlings, if that phrase even means anything anymore, though Oculus, with its backing by WWE Studios and cast of more well-known actors, is probably his most famous. Hush marks his return to smaller-scale horror, having landed a spot with the low-budget-on-principle crankin'-out-them-hits Blumhouse Productions. Something that's a little interesting about Flanagan as a director is that his movies really have no common thread- though it's not obligatory for a director to have a signature style or shared thematic element that's consistent with all their movies, the range that Flanagan produces while still staying within the horror genre is impressive. Here he departs from the supernatural with a tightly-wound (yet grounded firmly in real life) home invasion thriller.

Basically what sets it apart from other home invasion flicks is that the main character is deaf-mute. I'm not deaf, mute, or hard-of-hearing, so I can't claim to have picked up on anything and everything that may have been offensive, but from an outsider's standpoint I felt like the movie did do a pretty good job of not making its main character seem helpless because of her disability. Being pursued by a non-deaf killer meant that she had to fight extra hard against him, but I didn't feel like the message was that deaf people are overly vulnerable. If you've seen the movie, you know that she puts up a total beast of a fight and proves herself to be ultimately more resourceful and clever than her would-be killer. I'm still not particularly fond of deafness being used as a kind of "...but get this!" point, but as far as making the main character out to be a totally defenseless "easy target", this movie definitely stays as far away from that as it can.

I think a lot of this movie's strength and a lot of the reason why it was genuinely a tense and thrilling experience was because of how human and relatable the main character was versus how unrelatable the villain was. They're both really well-established characters for their own reasons, and the intruder actually stood out among all the other generic menacing guys with weapons who inhabit less interesting/original home invasion-themed movies. For a little while, he's got a mask on, and the way the movie dodged cliches with that was very adept: the mask is not flashy or showy at all, it doesn't have a stereotypical rictus grin or a totally blank expression, but instead an unnerving Mona Lisa smile that makes his first kill look striking. Even when the mask is off, his characterization is surprisingly good, because he doesn't do any evil laughs, fits of rage at his intended victim, or really much else for that matter; he just has this dull-eyed look for the majority of the movie that removes any chance of the viewer seeing him as an average person. In fact, when he does let himself show a little emotion later on as he thinks he's finally got Maddie for good, she's able to deal him her first real blow.

Probably the best thing about this is that even though it's very good, it's still simple. I feel like that's the kind of thing Mike Flanagan is becoming known for: horror movies with a little something more, not a totally out-there, bonkers plot, but movies with just enough originality put in to make them stand out from the crowd.

Laughing Dead (1998)

directed by Patrick Gleason
USA
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I didn't know anything at all about this movie prior to last night, I picked it from my watchlist at random and had no memory of ever putting it on there in the first place or where I'd heard of it from. Given the title, I assumed I was in for nothing too complex, just a campy zombie-comedy or something like that. As it turns out, every single guess I made was totally wrong.

The film opens with a man washing up on a shore somewhere, coughing up water and looking pretty out of it. He seems to be having flashes of what's assumed to be his life before he ended up here, but in these flashes he's not a young adult from modern times but a little boy, pursued by an angry mob with torches, dressed in what appears to be Quaker-style clothing. How or why he got to where he presently is from where he used to be is never explained or even implied, there's some kind of vague nonsense about "rivers of time" but how exactly this young Quaker boy turned into a 20-something street tough is left a mystery. He seems to have some recollection of who he is, he knows his name and appears to be at least somewhat familiar with his surroundings, but the extent of his memories is never revealed so the viewer can't know what his deal is. 

Almost everything else about this movie is a total mystery as well. This could have been a straightforward film about a guy waking up without his memories in some kind of irradiated wasteland, but it's not. Where the movie is taking place, who the characters are, why they do the things they do, why their environment is the way it is- never explained at all. Time has no meaning whatsoever, there's no telling how much time has passed between one scene and the next, and there's no guarantees the characters will even be in the same situation if you blink and miss something. This is one of those movies, I think, where the viewer's interpretation of it pretty much decides what it's about. I was in a weird mood while I was watching this, so for somebody who's feeling bored or unreceptive to strangeness, it could take on a totally different tone and be borderline unwatchable. But for me it was fascinatingly weird, most likely unintentionally so.

Despite the poor acting and all its other shortcomings, there's something really unsettling about this film. Although the scummy nightscape the characters are living in is very immersive and the sets are competently dressed, it still looks like it's on a soundstage, which makes it feel (weirdly) like it's hiding something. I may have just been recontextualizing a lack of talent on the filmmakers' part into a tone that the movie wasn't originally meant to have, but the details are downright disturbing sometimes, and I can't describe exactly why. There's a scene where the camera is focused on a television set showing a shot of a man walking down a hallway for a second or two before reaching a door and crossing into it as the door opens wider to reveal somebody jumping up and down on a bed, after which a scare chord plays and the door closes on the man. It's just the subtle non-sequiturs like that bit and other things that don't fit with the rest of the plot- don't fit with any plot, for that matter- that elevated this above badly-made trash for me. This feels like something out of an urban legend, like a "lost film" that was funded and produced but never distributed and so it's only supposed to exist in rumors until a copy of it finally gets uploaded to the internet. I can't just write this off, I can't say it's empty late-90s sleaze with a vaguely interesting concept. It's too bizarre for me to dismiss it like that.

Topos (2012)

directed by Emiliano Romero
Argentina
100 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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(this is an older review that I wanted to put up because this movie is tremendously underseen, and I actually only watched it because I had it confused with something else)

It's hard to describe Topos without giving an impression of it that isn't true, but in a nutshell: it's about a young man who lives in a clandestine underground society of people with some kind of spinal deformity that makes it impossible for them to stand upright, so instead they go everywhere crouched on their knees and sometimes on all fours, like moles. All the main character wants is to attend a ballet school. There are also a few non-stooped-over people in cleansuits who seem to be hanging around the community and have a general disdain for the molepeople, but exactly why they're there is never told outright.

I couldn't shake the feeling like this movie was already happening before I started watching it. You as the viewer basically get dumped into (what feels like) the middle with no explanations or anything else to go on. Certain things are established almost instantaneously in a way that doesn't require explanation, like the separation of the underground-dwelling people from the people living above-ground, but other things don't get addressed directly. Because of how immaculately the sets are composed and how well-developed the environment is, it almost feels like this movie practices the "show, don't tell" method of filmmaking, but the showing and the telling go hand-in-hand; information is conveyed through the visuals just as much as it might otherwise be conveyed through a narration or a more constant dialogue. Even though you get no backstory on how there came to be such a large community of people with the same deformity, why they stay underground, who the people in cleansuits who seemed so annoyed by them were, or even who the main character is in general, you're not missing out on anything due to this lack of context.

There's a lot of dark comedy in the film too, but unfortunately the majority of it- as well as a lot of the overall vibe and worldview- depends on the "othering" of the molepeople. It's a bit like hixploitation movies in that it takes a society of people who are mostly filthy and primitive and focuses its lens on Them vs. Us. It makes a spectacle of people who live in a different way, and that's something that happens far too often in movies concerning actual minorities who exist in real life (as opposed to molepeople). The way the molepeople are depicted could be looked at as a mixture of several stereotypes that are usually applied to a wide range of oppressed groups in real life, and while the main character's personal storyline is a kind of cliched "overcoming adversities to achieve his dream" story, there's no saving grace for the rest of the underground-dwellers. They never rise up and leave the underground, they just remain there in containment, being filthy and piggish in comparison to the people above ground. That "dude in a dress" sight gag that just refuses to die is also used for comedic effect, so there's no shortage of things I found to be fairly offensive, which is an unfortunate smear on an otherwise very good film.

Outside of those issues, it's visually gorgeous and has a quick, clever wit about it, and I would recommend it if you're the kind of person who feels like they've seen pretty much everything cinema has to offer. It's very unique and accomplishes its uniqueness by taking a lot of tropes that have been overused in the past and putting a new spin on them.

The Vatican Tapes (2015)

directed by Mark Neveldine
USA
91 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I've got a bone to pick with possession-themed movies in general because of their ability to create real-world stigma that has the potential to harm people with mental illnesses that present in a way similar to textbook cases of demonic possession. Even movies that posit no connection to mental illness and purport to be about "actual" demons contribute to this stigma, because it's something that's been around for a very long time; scores of texts dating back ages detail accounts of possessions that were most likely just a person hallucinating and having delusions. This stuff contributes to scared, ill-informed people keeping their loved ones from getting the medical help they need in favor of exorcisms and other attempts to cure the spirit rather than the mind and body. Even worse is the high amount of movies claiming either openly or in a thinly-veiled way to be inspired by the famous case of Anneliese Michel, a German girl who ostensibly died of starvation and fatigue (Wikipedia lists her as a "homicide victim") while out of medical care that could have probably saved her life.

Now that that's out of the way, The Vatican Tapes itself was actually not as terrible as I would have thought. It does suffer because of its PG-13 rating, which is always disappointing because horror movies don't have to be bad just because they got a PG-13 rating. Last year's Krampus, the American remake of The Ring, and both Cloverfield movies are all rated PG-13 and are solid and highly-praised films. I think the fact that The Vatican Tapes comes off as restrained and watered-down when it could have been much better shows a bit of a lack of creativity on the filmmakers' part, along with the movie's tendency to lean too heavily on genre cliches that just get in the way of the plot. A little more subtlety and a breaking-away from the conventions of movies that came before it could have benefited this a lot. It's still not the worst thing I've ever seen, but it doesn't bring anything new to the table at all.

Something a couple people have pointed out (easily, since it's a pretty glaring plot hole) is that there's no explanation for why the main character gets possessed. That had the potential to actually be a strong point in making the movie scarier, because when you think about it, it would be more frightening if a normal, god-fearing person got possessed rather than somebody who was "predisposed" to that kind of thing according to popular belief. But the movie fumbles that point and instead of being a "no one is safe!" kind of deal, it's a "this girl cut her finger and then got possessed by the Antichrist" kind of deal. Again, disappointing and could have been avoided if somebody had a little bit of originality in them. The ending is probably the best part of the whole affair, which isn't usually something you hear seeing as generally if something starts out bad it just gets worse, but the final ~20 minutes are the only part where it really begins to establish a feeling of being unsafe. The way the crisis builds and builds and then eventually overflows to be something of a global catastrophe was interesting and broke out of the mold, for once.

All in all the coolest thing about this movie is that it makes the Vatican out to be this clandestine society of priests who go around collecting evidence on the existence of demons and then hunting them down. I would watch a whole movie about that sooner than I'd watch just another stereotype-ridden possession film.

Possible Worlds (2000)

directed by Robert Lepage
Canada
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Well this was definitely much different than I expected. The synopsis makes it sound like you're in for a romance with time-travel elements when in reality the movie is something like an existential time-travel movie with occasional references to a romance. In fact, it's even better if you don't take it as a romance at all, because the relationship that the main character is in (or is trying to be in) isn't the main focus at all, it's just a constant that holds strong throughout all the titular possible worlds, and it's nothing close to the kind of transcendent, "I tore the multiverse apart for you!" love story that you'd typically find in a movie with both time travel and romance in it.

This movie involves ideas that delve much deeper than time travel alone, and it also takes an almost mystical approach to them, blending fantasy and fringe science to create something uncanny. Again, I feel the need to stress that it's a far cry from practically every other movie about time travel that I've seen, partially because the method of travel the main character- George- is capable of is less similar to time travel and more similar to a kind of quantum jumping; being able to skip from one iteration of his life to the next and still retaining his fundamental consciousness while everything else in the world around him shifts around. It's all about the philosophical horror with this one, it never lets up with the feeling that George is constantly pushing the boundaries of the very very limit of physics and reality and his life is becoming more and more unstable because of it.

There's a part halfway through (the scene at the beach house) where it just goes nuts, any resemblance that any of the science had to anything currently acknowledged as possible in the real world is disposed of and instead we enter a surreal, uncomfortable fantasy realm. At times I thought that some of the strangeness of the movie had to have been due to me missing something, that even though I was totally glued to the screen for the whole runtime there was something that had slipped by me, but I really don't think that's the case. It's just that George is living in such a fragile state that things inevitably begin to go haywire more than once, and the recognizable elements of a normal life slowly get replaced by allusions to the bizarre nature of George's subjective reality and, in effect, of the way we all experience consciousness.

I guess the only real complaint I had was that even though conceptually it's a wonderful and creative movie, something was off about the characters and their dialogue that sometimes added to the whole vibe of uncertainty, but more often than not it just felt clunky. It was like the dialogue had been poorly translated into English from another language, and actually, seeing as all the director's previous films had been in French, I'm inclined to think that may have been the case. If you get annoyed easily by characters in movies with "no one in real life talks like that" syndrome, this will definitely get on your nerves; characters in this are less human beings and more vehicles for concepts and ideas, just plot elements to make everything fall into place where it needed to. That's why I say the romance was so un-romantic- neither of the characters actually felt like they were in love with each other but rather they were there because they had to be, because the plot necessitated it.

Altogether this is one of the best movies to explore solipsism and the "brain in a vat" theory (the notion that it's impossible to prove you aren't a brain floating in a vat being made to experience reality) because it's largely unpretentious for once. It's confusing, and that can sometimes come off as pretentiousness, but in times where it was difficult to tell what was happening I don't think it was because the movie wanted you to feel dumb, it was just because nobody in the movie had any idea what was happening either. It almost reminded me of E. Elias Merhige's metaphysical crime thriller Suspect Zero, which is one of my favorite crime movies of all time.

Anguish (1987)

directed by Bigas Luna
Spain
89 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This was surprisingly excellent, I really only watched it because Zelda Rubinstein is in it and I love her (who doesn't?) but it very much exceeded my expectations in several ways. It's a shame it's not talked about more, because when you hear people talk about self-referential horror movies you always hear Cabin in the Woods or Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon or of course the Scream series, but I've never heard mention of this. Because I'd never heard it discussed in those conversations, I wasn't anticipating its self-awareness, and its nature as a film-within-a-film took me by surprise (which isn't a spoiler because you can find it out by looking up any synopsis).

It also surprised me in that it's genuinely one of the most aesthetically pleasing horror movies I've seen in recent memory, the attention to detail in the self-contained "fake" movie made it really immersive and it didn't at all feel like less was put into it because it wasn't the "real" storyline, which I'm guessing was intentional. The sets are dressed in warm browns and oranges and sometimes in stark whites when the scene calls for it, and several motifs are used throughout both the fake and the real film- eyes, spirals, snails, pigeons; things assembled together in an almost ritualistic fashion, the perfect blend of physical and metaphysical horror, repeating the same images over and over in different configurations to bring a disquieting elegance to the atmosphere that was perfect for the content of the movie. The sound design is similarly fantastic, it's got touches of the stereotypical shrieking violins but also other, more subtle elements that you barely even notice at times. My personal favorite minor touch was that all the text in the film-within-a-film (apparently named "The Mommy") was in gibberish: despite being filmed in Spain it's not in Spanish or in any other recognizable language, which adds a barely perceptible layer of mystery to something that already played with the limitations of the fourth wall in a masterful and unnerving way. If you pay attention you can see the actual director's name spelled backwards on a movie poster in the theatre lobby.

I think there was a lot to do with the power of suggestion in both "layers" of the movie, because the plot in the real-life half pretty much revolved around the spell that this movie The Mommy has put its viewers under and the plot in The Mommy itself also concerned hypnotism and mind control. There may have been a message somewhere about the notion that horror movies make people more violent, but if there was, it was too subtle and I was too concerned with other parts of the film to be paying much attention to it. I did feel like once the focus was shifted away from The Mommy for too long, it got clunkier and more tiring, probably just because "real life" wasn't as aesthetically pleasing, but even when it's dragging and getting boring it's a powerful experience that hooks you in and makes you uncomfortable if you let it. It kind of makes you feel ill at ease in your own skin, although there's no bare flesh shown or even hinted at there's something about it that feels overly conscious of the human body, there's too many eyes and chewing noises and spotlights thrown on the frailty of the main character in The Mommy's self-control. Definitely something that requires an above-average amount of focus and suspension of disbelief but if you can really get into it, it'll make you feel weird for a while.

Horse Money (2014)

directed by Pedro Costa
Portugal
109 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I'm a little embarrassed to admit that this is my first Pedro Costa. From what I hear, the rest of his work isn't as abstract as this one is, so I'm interested in finding out how the style of filmmaking used in Horse Money would translate to a movie with a more traditional narrative.

Anyhow. It's fairly rare that I watch a movie and I just have no idea what to make of it; no grasp on what the intended tone was meant to be or how I was supposed to be interpreting the storyline, but this is definitely a time when I have little to no solid grip on what I was supposed to feel. The atmosphere seems totally impenetrable, it's constantly cycling through a plethora of moods and I could never find purchase on just one overarching theme that persisted throughout the whole movie. I think I can vaguely make out what it's meant to be about in some weird, nebulous sense; there was definitely a lot of stuff about personal identity in there as well as a good deal of shrouded commentary on culture and race, but the whole thing is so mysterious and refuses to give up any real information about itself that it makes for a bizarre viewing experience- and I mean that in the best possible way. I wonder now if maybe the best thing to do isn't to try and crack it open, if maybe I should just acknowledge that this movie comes from somewhere personal to Pedro Costa that I can't really see because I'll never be able to know exactly what he intended while making the film. Maybe if I watch more of his movies I'll be able to understand where he's coming from a bit better, but given that I've heard this one is pretty distinct from the rest of his filmography, I have my doubts about that.

The way the movie plays with light and shadow is just incredible, it creates this menacing feeling that makes the hospital in which it's set look like a labyrinth of tunnels perhaps not corresponding to anything in the physical world but instead to a place in the main character's mind. I'm not trying to make it out like I think everything happening was all in the main character's head, because that premise is such a cop-out by now that I want to stay as far away from it as possible, but I think that maybe another point the film was trying to make was that memory and reality aren't as separate as we typically think, that personal experiences from the past can remain with someone in some physical sense for their entire life. Certainly the way the main character experiences memory is different from the norm, it's a more visceral, full-body thing where instead of just listing off the time something happened, who was there, why it happened, etc., he's recalling every sensation associated with these memories and reliving them through the people he knew. Although there's no clearly defined beginning, middle, or end, the movie has a definite climax (that elevator scene) which is incredibly powerful and seems to speak directly from the archetype of "your life flashing before your eyes" before you die.

Something that helped me parse things a little (emphasis on "little") bit better was comparing it to the movie 22nd of May. While I hesitate to put that and this side by side due to how much of Horse Money is tied to an experience of race and class that was entirely absent from 22nd of May, the gist of it is that after a small explosion at a mall, a man has visions of people who were involved in the explosion, and they haunt him as he feels he did not do enough to help. Keeping that in mind helped me translate what was going on in Horse Money easier, because I think it's essentially the same thing; the main character Ventura is seeing all these people from his past who relay their own experiences to him in a way that intertwines itself with his own experiences. This is an absolutely brilliant, unique, and well-realized movie that defies explanation except from sources that know for certain what the director's intent was.

WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

directed by Chris LaMartina, James Branscome, Shawn Jones, Scott Maccubbin, Lonnie Martin, Matthew Menter, Andy Schoeb
USA
82 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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It's kind of hard to talk about WNUF Halloween Special without mentioning Ghostwatch, the movie it seems to be trying to emulate. Where WNUF Halloween Special was released in 2013 and (very effectively) mimics the look of a degraded VHS rip, Ghostwatch dates back to 1992 and apparently frightened more than a few viewers into thinking it was real. One is authentic while the other is not, but they both resemble each other in that they're both in the form of a fake local news segment on a haunted house. I'm not one to be picky about the boundaries of the horror genre and what does and doesn't belong to it, but I honestly am questioning the intent behind WNUF Halloween Special and whether or not it was meant to be a horror movie first or a movie emulating the Halloween specials of the 1980s first. The reason I say that is because while it's thoroughly a Halloween movie and it's got the appropriate atmosphere and aesthetic and everything, it drags on and on so much that it eliminates any trace of creepiness and I wondered if the point was to draw focus on the corny fake commercials made by a menagerie of different directors that break up the "news" segment rather than having the special itself be the centerpiece.

No matter what the intention was, there's certainly no debate over how authentic it looks. It's different from new television shows and movies set in the 80s but filmed with modern technology, the video quality is genuinely very, very poor to the point of making my eyes hurt after a while, and there's no moments where the disguise falters and looks like present-day people dressed up in retro clothing. There's a lot of restraint, and I think that's the reason why the whole thing worked so well: Even though it is a parody of the time period it's set in, the peoples' clothing, hair, makeup, etc- isn't overly exaggerated to the point of being too outlandish to be real. It's obvious that it's making fun of things from that era like party lines, hair metal, the "Satanic panic" and overblown paranoia about cult activity, and incredibly cheesy late-night TV movies (just to name a few), but it doesn't do so in a way that takes out the plausibility of it actually being from that time period, even though it's not.

Without spoiling anything, the ending is also a big reason why I had my doubts about whether it was meant to be a horror movie or not. The build-up is hard to get through, with commercial breaks every two minutes and the kind of awkward hemming and hawing that's familiar on those local news shows, and when the big payoff finally does come, it's extremely disappointing. I felt let down, having been made to wait so long for something so anti-climactic and predictable, and I was hoping it was going to turn out to be unexpected and startling like Ghostwatch was. I guess you could argue that the monotony of watching 20% news segment and 80% commercials was just another thing thrown in for authenticity, and at times the film tends to value its authenticity over its entertainment value. Even with a disappointing ending, though, it's still a pretty fun watch, especially for getting into the spirit around Halloween season.

They're Watching (2016)

directed by Jay Lender, Micah Wright
USA
95 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Like Man Vs., They're Watching is a movie where the crew of a reality TV show goes somewhere without being fully prepared for it and ends up getting themselves in trouble. The comedic element comes mainly from the television crew, who are actually very rude to the locals and to each other, but even though they're all people I wouldn't necessarily want to hang out with, they're still really funny, and given that there's nothing particularly funny about their situation or their location, the humor coming from them is pretty much the backbone of the entire comedic side of the film. It works pretty well as a comedy, and fortunately in this case it's meant to be funny, but ultimately that couldn't save the whole affair.

There's only the barest minimum of foreshadowing before the horror bits come in full swing, but you can definitely still tell that it's eventually going to turn tail and be a serious movie later on down the line. Up until then, it's genuinely a fun ride, but the fun doesn't last because once it hits just about an hour in, things finally start heating up, and instead of being what I'd hoped for and turning on its head to be a worthwhile horror flick, the quality takes an instant nosedive and becomes laughable for the last ~20 minutes. There's not a whole lot I can say without spoiling the "twist" at the end, but there's a barrage of special effects that comes in all of a sudden and totally knocks you off-guard. I don't even understand how the movie got by with all the horrible CGI at the end, I mean I know it's probably a case of the filmmakers' desire to get the movie made overriding their budget and (possibly) talent, but they still could have dialed it back about a thousand notches and had it be a much, much better movie.

The issue of exploitation was also on my mind, because it's a movie focused on Americans bumbling around in a foreign country where they don't understand the customs or tradition, and with movies like that there can oftentimes be a lot of poking fun at the local populace. There's a good amount of that going on, and thankfully most of it comes from the perspective of the Americans so the viewers understand that it's not the intention of the movie itself to insult anybody, just the characters; but it still gets uncomfortably close to depicting the locals as brutes and savages once the action starts. It was apparently not actually filmed in Moldova but instead in its neighboring country of Romania, which really isn't here nor there seeing as plenty of American TV shows try to pass Toronto off as being [insert any big American city here], but the issue I was concerned about was lumping together eastern European countries as all being one and the same when they're not. There's also a moment when one of the main characters is telling a story about his time as a journalist in Afghanistan, and that story is definitely pure exploitation- this nameless, faceless little girl in the story is used as nothing but a way to garner sympathy for the guy telling it, her gruesome death is devalued because this white guy had to watch it and yes, that's traumatizing and extremely upsetting, but the way the girl was just this random body without autonomy really put me off.

Overall it's not much better than Man Vs.. The comedy is good but the horror is not on the same level as it. There's gonna be much better horror movies later this year that haven't even come out yet, so I'd say you're not missing anything if you choose to skip this one.