Cephalopod (2010)

directed by Rubén Imaz
Mexico
90 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I have to admit that Cephalopod is really not the type of movie I usually watch. I'm not much for dramas that don't have at least some small element of genre in them. And while this was a great movie that I liked very much, I think it's the kind of thing where you have to be otherwise invested in it in order to care, because if you're not feeling receptive to it or if you go into it thinking "this is gonna be boring", then you're gonna be bored. It's very, very slow, at times it seems to not even have a point; basically it's Basque-Mexican mumblecore, or it would be if mumblecore wasn't partially defined as being American.

It feels unembellished and deeply personal. It lacks theatrics or moments accented with music designed to tug at your heartstrings (thankfully). It's a portrait of some of the weirder stages of mourning that we might not be conscious of, a portrait of a man an unknown amount of time after losing his girlfriend who now drifts in and out of his surroundings, rudderless. It doesn't seem like it should work for the most part, it seems like it should just be boring and self-indulgent. But the thing that adds a little extra weight to it is what it takes its title from; the presence of squids, jellyfish, octopus, etc as something that connects the main character to his dead girlfriend even though she's gone forever. The cephalopods are that something, that thing that the man and his girlfriend shared that nobody else had, and it's not played up in that sort of gimmicky, John Green-ish, sickly-sweet way that tries too hard to be quirky. It works because it feels realistic that this person would travel to such lengths just to be close to not even a physical part of his girlfriend but something that represented her memory. As cliche as it sounds, there's definitely an element of the main character trying to find something about himself in all this as well.

The cinematography is subtle but plays a role in making the overall atmosphere what it was. For the first three-quarters it's not overly concerned with scenery or environment, and if it is at all, it's concerned with the way people fill up an environment, the way the presence of bodies shapes the atmosphere of a space and the way the main character fits (or doesn't fit) into the world around him. In the final act, in the Sonoran desert scenes, it becomes something else, something that's essentially about an environment influencing the person within it. I'm actually not too sure what to make of the latter portions of the film because it all seemed pretty indecipherable from the moment the main character arrived in the desert, so I'm just going to leave that alone since I'm not sure I understood it.

People have called it boring (just glancing over some reviews shows me that) and said it's got too much extra footage but I felt like the extra footage wasn't "extra" at all. The things that had nothing to do with the whole searching-for-something-in-the-desert aspect filled out the movie and gave it a melancholic, almost bittersweet feel. All in all it adds up to an interesting way of exploring grief, loss, and memory as well as the things that keep people connected to people they shared something with that aren't around anymore. As usual Netflix's summary for it is extremely inaccurate but it's still great that it's on there for easier access to a wider variety of viewers.

After the Dark (2013)

directed by John Huddles
USA/Indonesia co-production
107 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

This didn't win me over very quickly, to say the least. My first impression wasn't a good one because right from the beginning the most outspoken character and arguably the biggest influence on the plot takes that irritating, holier-than-thou stance that "most people" are fat, useless idiots. The argument that the average person nowadays is an obese basement-dweller with a low IQ is insulting and I don't know if people who say that sort of thing realize that it basically comes off as them saying "Look how much better than everyone else I am" or not, but it most definitely does.

As a whole the movie is structured around the kind of meaningless rhetorical questions that pseudo-intellectuals like to ask because they think it proves something about humanity's true nature. It's difficult to describe what I'm talking about here, but it's when people take a moral/ethical quandary that could never be relevant in real life, challenge non-pseudo-intellectuals with it, and then pretend it's some big "gotcha" moment, that this impossible question that there's no purpose in asking is going to all of a sudden make people realize they're all Bad People. Stuff like the railroad problem, where you have to decide whether or not to let one person die to save five others. The effect is the same as the stance I just mentioned, it implies that the person asking the question thinks they're somehow above Common Folk for thinking about these things. To be fair, though, if we didn't ask ourselves weird, impractical questions, we probably wouldn't have very many movies at all.

Trying to work past the annoying ethics and even more annoying characters, I found that in terms of concept alone, I really can't criticize the movie. The final lesson in a philosophy class where we get to see a large group of students try to figure out which of them should be saved in a ten-person-capacity bunker during various end-of-world scenarios? That's a great idea for a movie. The problems come in with the overall philosophy of the thing, and though there's a lot of takedowns of the teacher (the guy with the "people are all fat/lazy" opinion) that were very satisfying, essentially any time a character opened their mouth to say anything, I wanted to throttle them.

Around the halfway point there's a moment where it's implied that one guy should automatically get excluded from the bunker because he's autistic. At that moment I stopped caring about the movie at all. The second half may have been better and marginally more ethically sound than the first, but after that point, it just didn't matter to me anymore. Not to mention the large amount of homophobia disguised as "it's just common sense u guys!!!" that this movie tries to sneak past the radar in both the first and second halves that also made me stop caring about it.

What I'd really love to see is this same concept directed and written by a gay and/or autistic person. Then we'd get the same unique idea without all the skeevy "othering" arising from 99% of the cast being straight and not autistic. I guess the problem was that the movie wasn't "pure" enough for me; I was only interested in the concept and didn't see any reason for it to be sullied with unrelated character development and background.

Also, I disliked the ending so much that I wish I could spoil it in order to talk about it on here. But I won't. I'll just leave it at saying that it's got a bafflingly terrible final scene.

Prescient (2015)

directed by Hann-Shi Lem
Singapore/USA co-production
81 minutes
1.5 stars out of 5
----

I was hoping I'd like this movie, and I really tried to like it, but there's just too much about it that's a mess.

Usually (especially in science fiction films) I can still make it through a movie with a decent opinion of it if the main character is annoying. It's not that huge of a bother to me in most cases. But with this movie its main character is one of its biggest problems and it's a problem that I couldn't get past no matter how hard I tried. The main character is dimensionless, and he suffers from that flaw in writing that so many fictional men end up with where there's just an assumption from square one that their story is interesting no matter what; that everything in the movie revolves around them- which, in most movies, it does, but in cases like this where the writing is shoddy, the viewer is not made to care at all before the assumption that the main character is the center of the universe is brought in. Basically what I'm trying to say is that he comes off self-centered because there's nothing to "ground" him and we as viewers don't get any emotional attachment to him.

Also in a more superficial sense, the actor was doing a very obvious and terrible job of faking an American accent and that somehow added even more depth to the character's awfulness. Just a greasy, growly-voiced, sunglasses-indoors-wearing, very annoying man.

The main character probably would have been vaguely bearable- considering the overabundance of egotistical white guys in sci-fi movies that are otherwise good- if the plot hadn't verged on the absolutely disgusting side of things more often than not. The whole thing centers on some scientists doing work with the human genome, which entails predicting genetic defects both in adults and before babies are born, and apparently divining a person's entiiiiiire personality just through some DNA samples (/sarcasm), which, as it usually does if a filmmaker is not careful enough, gets into eugenics territory fairly quickly. The message, both underlying and explicitly stated, is that "we're all prisoners to our genes", and the first time that line was stated aloud rather than just strongly implied was when I decided that not only was this movie irritating, I outright hated it for the things it was implying about people with "genetic predispositions" to mental illness.

And again, to be superficial about the villain as well as the main character: What was even going on with him? He looked like a fake human being! He looked like a Saturday Night Live skit about an alien pretending to be a person! He looked like his name was "I.M.A Mann" or something! Not to mention he's the only visibly disabled character in the film, which of course means he just has to be the bad guy (/sarcasm again). Good lord, there's plenty of ways to characterize your villains that aren't related to their physical appearance.

In terms of plot and of things unrelated to the sub-par script and questionable ethics of the film, surprisingly, it wasn't all bad. The storyline is somewhat juvenile and presents a few too many conveniences for it to flow naturally, but if you took out the weird eugenics, it might be a decent thriller with a couple of twists and turns. Aesthetically it's beautiful, if in a bit of an amateur way- a little too much "putting the thing in the middle"- and if this director can manage to come up with a better script and a concept that doesn't lean on eugenics as a plot point, I'd genuinely be interested in seeing what he does next. A little dose of ethics could have gone a long way for this, but instead it falls flat.

The Little Mermaid (1976)

directed by Karel Kachyňa
Czechia
84 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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That other Eastern-European adaptation of The Little Mermaid from 1976. 

Admittedly I'm not up on my Little Mermaid folklore, but even to someone with no more than a cursory knowledge of the original fable, it's fairly obvious that this retelling of it is a little bit more melancholic and probably closer to the Hans Christian Andersen original than the Disney version. I'm not too sure if I should worry about spoilers or not seeing as practically everybody knows the story in some way or another, but I will say that the refrain of the movie's theme ("such a sad love with a sorrowful end") is more than accurate in describing the film as a whole.

This is very much a movie about the mermaid herself and the way her life underwater works, and-- possibly due in part to budget restrictions-- the aesthetic of this underwater life is more unconventional yet a thousand times more eye-catching than most versions of the story. For starters, the merfolk don't have fishy tails, and think it's rather silly that humans think they do. They've got two legs, and they wear long, shapeless robes in whatever color signifies which of the seven seas they're from. And since live-action greatly restricts extensive underwater scenes, the merfolk don't "swim" so much as they just walk around in slow-motion to simulate the feel of being underwater, which is surprisingly effective.

Though much that we're used to seeing thanks to the Disney classic is missing, I'd go so far as to say this movie is much more beautiful than the animated version. The coloring is lush and imaginative and almost seems to glow around the edges, casting the whole film in this ethereal, dreamlike light that speaks better to the "child in me" than most actual children's movies do. The sets are wonderful as well, and as unlikely as it seems, you do eventually almost forget that you're not watching people underwater. But possibly even better than the sets is the costuming, which is really just impressively gorgeous for every character regardless of how much screentime they got or what their role in the story was. It's got that look to it that only sci-fi and fantasy movies from the late 60s to late 70s have, before there was such a need to make everything more complex using computers and whatnot.

The troubles of the original story are all still there, and it'll still divide audiences between those who think it's a tender love story and those (like me) who think it's daft for a girl with a promising future to sign away her voice for a life on land with a lover whose love isn't even guaranteed, but the whole thing radiates emotion and draws you in with it no matter your opinion on the story itself.

Ice from the Sun (1999)

directed by Eric Stanze
USA
120 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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This is a really difficult movie to review because its narrative is presented in such a non-traditional way. It's actually got a very similar structure to Visions of Suffering except a little bit more comprehensible, so if you've seen Visions of Suffering you'll basically know what to expect, but I don't think a lot of people have seen that movie at all so I'll try to explain:

To water it down to the absolute bare minimum, the plot essentially begins when a woman tries to kill herself and an angel (?) intercepts her before her soul/spirit/whatever can reach the afterlife. The angel tasks her with assassinating an extremely powerful wizard who lives in some kind of pocket dimension encased in ice and is so evil that both angels and demons shun him. Along with the girl sent to kill the wizard, six other people get pulled into the pocket dimension, evidently sacrifices that the wizard takes every so often. The angel deems these people's deaths "not relevant" and so tells the girl to ignore them and go straight for the wizard. So there definitely is some kind of plot if you dig deep enough to find it, and it's actually a really interesting plot at that, but breaking through the walls of nonsense in order to figure out what's going on is a real challenge.

Is it a good movie? Is it a bad movie? I have no idea. From an aesthetic standpoint it's ugly as sin but I get the feeling that it was meant to be that way. From a technical standpoint, the acting is atrocious, the special effects are dingy, there's absolutely nothing in the way of character development, it's poorly filmed and very, very poorly paced. It's like an alien came down to Earth, hung out with a bunch of street punks for a week or two, then tried to make a sci-fi movie based off of what he saw. The premise alone does go a really long way, because the parts that were focused on the girl navigating the ice dimension and trying to kill the wizard were really interesting, but there's so much extraneous garbage and divergences into weird places (at one point it turns into some kind of a car chase involving the police?) that it comes off like it was trying to be a movie but it kept getting distracted.

On one hand, I really like this film because it's such a slap in the face to everyone who insists that fantasy movies have to be nothing but three-and-a-half-hour, billion-dollar-budgeted blockbusters. The grunginess and dinginess of it makes it feel truly punk and I love to see sci-fi and fantasy movies coming from unlikely subcultures rather than big Hollywood studios. But on the other hand, the lack of coherence and only vaguely linear plotline gets to be extremely irritating after a while. Had it been solely about this cool girl hopping between dimensions to put an end to the ancient wizard's reign of terror while also battling her own demons to get redemption in the end, it would have been awesome. But it isn't about that. It's mostly about the slow and increasingly painful deaths of the six other people the wizard abducts. It's like 25% interesting plot and 75% watching people get tortured and it's just not fun or engaging to watch after a while.

This definitely had potential, and it's got a great soundtrack, but all in all, watching it is more trouble than it's worth. Or at least in my opinion it is.

Parents (1989)

directed by Bob Balaban
Canada
89 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----
(there are no plot spoilers in this review, but I'd advise you to go into this movie without knowing anything about it beforehand)

Parents isn't really the kind of movie I would normally watch, but I started to see a few reviews here and there that suggested it was something weird and uncanny as opposed to what it looks like outwardly. I would think that generally everybody's first instinct when seeing a movie from the 80s set in the 50s about a little boy who somehow thinks his parents are cannibals would be to assume such a movie was a goofy horror-comedy, because that premise is so ridiculous and silly that it should only work as a comedy. Surely there would be laughs to be had here, if not from the jokes then from the faux-retro setting and corny 80s acting, right? 

Not right. No one is laughing.

Purely from a technical standpoint, it's obvious right off the bat that this is actually a really well-produced film with great cinematography. I kept forgetting that it wasn't made sometime in the 2000s (although youngish Randy Quaid does obviously date it) because it manages to hide its actual era unnervingly well. It's a really smart movie and there's interesting, thoughtful camera angles all throughout; stuff like the camera following a plate of food at hip-level as it's brought to the table, the camera being carried to bed like it's a child, basically just all these unusual, creative angles and plays on lighting and composition that make it feel very deliberate. It's this deliberateness that's the reason why it's genuinely so disturbing. Scenes go on too long, it exceeds the boundaries of even the blackest comedy, it's a miniature trauma that puts you in the mindset of a scared child.

I'm not sure if I'd say "uncanny" is quite the right word for it, but this is a movie that has something extremely dark lurking in it and it knows exactly when to let that darkness show and when to hide it. More than anything, it's just plain uncomfortable. It's like talking to somebody who seems good-natured and cheerful, but suddenly they say something depraved with a big smile, and you have no idea whether they were joking or not and suddenly you feel a little afraid. If I was even expecting this movie to be scary at all, I was expecting it to be something like Messiah of Evil or Laughing Dead where the scariness of it is due to it trying to be a comedy and missing the mark, but you can definitely tell that Parents was intended to have exactly the tone it comes off as having.

This isn't a movie about looking back on old childhood fears and realizing how silly you were back then. This is a movie set right in the middle of the height of those fears, where you were 100% sure that whatever you were afraid of was completely real. It's rare to see a movie like this that both taps into the surrealness of being a frightened child effectively and still manages not to go over-the-top with gore or depravity just to seem "mature".

As soon as the opening credits rolled I knew why people were calling this movie so terrifying: The orchestral soundtrack was composed by none other than longtime David Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. His soundtrack is far from the only thing that gives the movie its atmosphere, but good lord, it's horrifying. This whole movie conspires to make you feel unsafe and it's excellent at achieving that goal.

The Pact II (2014)

directed by Dallas Richard Hallam, Patrick Horvath
USA
95 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

So as I was mentioning in my review, the first The Pact movie had something about it that endeared it to me in a personal way and for that reason it almost felt "homey". It focused on one character, that's all, a few people came into her life at various points and either assisted or harmed her, but ultimately the movie was about her, first and foremost. In The Pact II, we enter the wider world, there's a different main character this time, and there's police activity, a boyfriend, a mother, basically just a wider field of vision than in the first one. That's fine as a whole, but it does take away that feeling of intimacy that I thought was really what made the first one unique. It's also got different directors than the first, but I wasn't too nervous about that seeing as they previously collaborated on 2012's ultra-ultra-slow-burn Entrance, which was a movie I very much enjoyed. This is a totally different beast, though, so I'm going to stop any comparisons to Entrance right here.

If you were more into the paranormal aspects of the first movie, the second one will be for you. As before, the paranormal is mixed quite seamlessly with the physical, the two being blended so you can't see where one ends and the other begins. On paper that sounds good, but in action it's not nearly as ominous as I'm making it sound- the scares (as in the jump scares and tense moments, not the things involving murder and such) are actually pretty cheap and predictable and the pacing is clunky. The third act is where it really seems to find its bearings and actually manages to pull out some unexpected twists for a change, but before that it feels entirely like going through the motions of a typical haunting on film.

I want to be clear in saying that this is definitely not a bad movie. As a stand-alone, it's more than passable; it's cliched and not very original but you don't really need to have seen the first one for the second to make sense. It helps, yes, but you wouldn't be too confused. So the problem I had with this isn't in terms of overall quality, it's just that it feels unnecessary. The first one was self-contained, save for the ending, and I was satisfied with it. This one drags out the storyline of the killer from the first film, who didn't have a huge role in it to begin with, and even though it didn't ruin anything that the first one had set up, it really doesn't need to exist. What's worse is that the ending undoubtedly sets the stage for a third sequel, and I don't see any way a third movie could possibly hang onto the last gasp of quality that the second one managed to ride out. I think the fact that for the second movie to work they had to bring characters back from the dead (I won't spoil which) really shows how hard they're trying to squeeze more movies out of this storyline when doing that will muddy the original vision up more than anything.

One last thing I was thinking about this series is that they have the vibe of movies that will eventually be classics. I wonder if this is how people felt watching the first A Nightmare on Elm Street when it was originally released. Not to compare the two series in terms of quality, but The Pact has that little something that makes it stick out, a more complex storyline hidden in a generic haunted-house/slasher combo set in an atmosphere that still adheres closely to classic genre tropes but still injects some "oomf" into it. I can see this being a cult favorite in a decade or two, for sure.

The Pact (2012)

directed by Nicholas McCarthy
USA
89 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I've actually seen this movie before but it was so long ago that I didn't remember much, plus it was back before I cared about writing reviews, so I gave it another chance because I was curious about the sequel and wanted to jog my memory of the first one before I watched the second. I can't see how the sequel could expand on it any further because start-to-finish it's a strong stand-alone film, but I'm gonna watch it anyway for review purposes.

I must have missed something on the first watch or didn't have my heart in it enough because upon second viewing I found that not only is it a well-made movie, it also felt almost comforting and weirdly familiar, and not just because I'd seen it already. Although I didn't relate to it on a personal level I still sympathized with the main character and felt like I knew her. There's something very natural in the way the paranormal activity comes about early on in the film and with such a sudden yet distinct arrival that there's never any doubt as to whether or not it's there at all. It's like it's a normal part of losing a parent: your mom or your dad dies and then there's the ghostly activity that follows that, it's par for the course, everybody goes through it. It successfully blends flesh-and-blood threats with a connection to the "other side" so to speak, existing in that slightly altered horror movie version of our world where everything is bluntly realistic and plausible but there's also a strong metaphysical presence that's accepted without doubt.

Setting the movie at Christmastime was also something that added a bit more dimension to it but it was because of the lack of focus on that aspect that I appreciated the setting. The holiday decorations are kept in the peripheral, and it's just like how the holidays can creep up on us unawares in real life, how occasionally we'll get as close as Christmas Eve and still be devoid of some essence of holiday cheer. The warm color palette that's free from red and green and snow and shiny presents with bows is unobtrusive but still striking and beautiful.

The main character Annie is one of those rare woman characters who doesn't fall victim to the wide-eyed, helpless terror that seems so encoded in women in horror. She's more on the steel-nerved fighter side of the spectrum rather than the damsel in distress; she's realistic and still portrayed as being scared out of her wits but it doesn't overtake every single aspect of her personality. Caity Lotz is excellent in her role, and again, brings a degree of warmth and familiarity; she's a flawed everywoman who we feel for without pity but also see a little of ourselves in.

Overall, the worst thing I can say about it (other than that the ending was a bit of a mess) is that it leaned towards being non-committal at times. Doesn't really go in any particular direction, doesn't take chances despite being slightly different from the typical "There's ghosts in my house, now what do I do?!" storyline. All of the middle-of-the-road-ness, for lack of a better term, was as much a high point as it was a flaw, though, because the lowkey atmosphere separates it from mainstream haunted-house movies with wall-to-wall screaming and furniture being thrown around. I can only see a sequel messing things up because basically the only way to add to it would be to put in more unrealistic tropes and generic horror fodder. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Messiah of Evil (1973)

directed by Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz
USA
90 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

There's no doubt that Messiah of Evil is a total cheeseball, but it's such a weird and eerie one. It's one of those horror movies where half of the horror lies in the movie itself and the other half is found within the mind of the viewer and how they choose to interpret it, and for that reason it's understandable that this movie would completely bomb with some people but not with others. I was unimpressed at first, because it's got an awful opening sequence featuring an incredibly corny theme song that goes "hold OOONNNNNN to LOOOOOOOVEEEE" and doesn't fit with the rest of the movie, but as more and more of it passed, it became something else, something more sinister.

It's difficult to take this one seriously because basically the whole thing is badly acted, shoddily made, and interspersed with risque 70s girls prancing around in practically no clothing and delivering all their lines in an unnecessarily seductive manner, but there's also a second layer to it that's far more disturbing. This is probably one of the only times I'll recommend that you watch the poorest-quality version of a movie you can find, but honestly, I watched a terrible VHS rip on YouTube and it added to the feel of the whole thing so much that I'd go so far as to say the movie would be a fraction worse without it. The degradation of the video quality erases faces at a certain distance and adds ambiguity to figures, making them washed-out spectres to a degree further than they were intended to be, and it also adds a weirdly realistic aspect to the whole thing so that it feels like watching untrained, "real" people rather than professionals. If you want to watch the movie and appreciate it from an aesthetic or technical standpoint (although it has little to appreciate), try to track it down in better quality, but if you want an immersive, almost three-dimensional experience, break out the VCR.

On the other side of things, the side owing to the movie itself as opposed to the way it's interpreted in the mind of its viewer, it's got a concept that outshines the poor production value. It's genuinely foreboding and it's also bizarre, like a David Lynch film with all the intent taken out of it. Drawing from the old standards of discomfort in fiction like Robert Aickman and the better episodes of The Twilight Zone, it paints a portrait of not only a fictional situation but also some of the hysteria underlying 1970s America in real life. A woman gets mobbed and tackled in the middle of a flourescent-lit Ralph's supermarket and no one comes to her aid because there's no one left in the town who wants to. The journal entries of the main character's father that detail some kind of horrible transformation, along with the wind, the sea, and the moon, all hint at a more organic, inescapable horror that doesn't really get dated even though everything else is. I was afraid it would fumble when it got to the part where the origin of the townspeople's madness was revealed but it doesn't at all, it's one of those rare occasions where the explanation is satisfying yet still leaves much to the imagination.

Although vision and voice were half of what made this movie the stand-out experience it was, I cannot overstate what time does to it. The locals carve out their own grooves and outsiders either stay away or are ensnared. The body transforms to trap the soul inside it. The film degrades and is eventually lost, faces becoming indistinct and acting credits slowly disappearing from the internet as people forget people. Knowing that nothing like this will be made in the modern era, it's worth it to just submit yourself to it for a time and forget that the clothing, hairstyles, and mannerisms have devolved to self-parody.

Viy (1967)

directed by Konstantin Ershov ad Georgiy Kropachyov
Soviet Union
77 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

Viy is fairly well-known as far as Russian Fantastika* goes, considering that it's an area of the cinematic map that doesn't really claim any break-out hits or entries into the vagueness of the "mainstream film canon". I guess there's Rusalochka too, which has become somewhat of a cult favorite for its visuals, but even that is mostly obscure and its fans are well-hidden.

Based on a book that was probably based on a folktale that's been around for who knows how long, this is, in my opinion, one of the best representations of the broadness of the horror genre. The plot concerns a young priest ordered to watch over the body of a witch he accidentally killed for three nights inside a church, alone. It's very far from mainstream horror and yet it still comes across clearly as belonging to the genre because even though it may go about showing its subject matter in a non-typical way, the core elements are there, the tropes that have been around since before anybody really began naming them as horror tropes specifically. I've had an idea for an essay rattling around in my head about how the backbone of the horror genre is the question of what might happen- the possibility of a monster versus the monster itself- so I won't go too in-depth about that just yet, but the reason I mention it in relation to this movie is because the potential for supernatural phenomena to occur within those three nights is what cements it as a horror movie despite its age and unusual appearance.

I'm not saying that the plot doesn't matter, but this is an example of a movie that's definitely style over substance. Although there's clear intent to use the visuals to compliment the story, the aesthetic of the whole thing is so beautiful and over-the-top that it wildly overshadows the concept. It looks like a moving storybook and it's absurdly, impossibly Russian. It's full of goats, cows, and other livestock; cracked plaster houses and houses built out of stone and wood; grandmotherly figures in headscarves and aprons- though at the time its origins were labeled as just being the Soviet Union in general, it's one of the most uniquely Russian films I've ever seen and it's a great representation of the myths of that corner of the world.

I always have trouble reviewing visually arresting reviewing movies like this because I feel like I can't do anything but say "it's beautiful, it's really great and beautiful and wonderful" over and over, but really, this movie is gorgeous and I want people to watch it. It's the clunkiness of the whole thing that makes it perfect. Its handmade, hand-painted, un-complicated nature defines it. Part of the reason I wanted to (re)watch it was because I just recently found out that they remade it in 3D a couple of years back and frankly the entire concept of remaking a movie like this in the modern era, and in 3D nonetheless, is totally ridiculous to me and wholly misses the appeal of the source material.

If you want to watch this, watch this, get the original because it doesn't get any better than it. I'd love to track down the 3D version just for entertainment purposes but there's no improving on this version as far as I'm concerned.

*(more accurately Soviet Fantastika, since films with this aesthetic have come from multiple countries in eastern Europe)

Here Comes the Devil (2012)

directed by Adrián Garcia Bogliano
Mexico
97 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I think I tried to watch this a while ago but I didn't get very far into it because I thought it was bad and I lost interest. I'm also not one for creepy-kid horror (in my opinion it's a ridiculously overused and boring trope), but I definitely am one for horror movies where people disappear for no reason with no logical explanation. It goes a bit deeper than just the typical creepy kid stuff, and I definitely think it was worth a second viewing, but I can see why I turned it off in the first place because it certainly doesn't start out on the best note.

You know how I've mentioned a couple times before that there's other, better ways to push an edgy or menacing atmosphere besides sex and violence? This is a movie that doesn't even remotely consider that to be a possibility. It's extremely exploitative of women, it's not subtle about a single thing, it goes to some really weird and taboo places and it doesn't feel at all like it's doing so with any kind of respect for its subject matter. It's still not quite as graphic as it could have been but it's not very often that I see a movie handle concepts as indelicately as this. Eventually once the horror/mystery aspect is introduced, the somewhat graphic imagery takes on a bit of a different tone, complimenting the unease and terror of the whole thing where in the beginning it just seemed clunky. It all still felt cheap and unnecessary, though, if the goal was to make a movie about kidnapped children, that goal could have been accomplished and probably been accomplished better without the use of all that weird, intensely uncomfortable eroticism.

All that being said, I did find myself liking the movie more and more the further it went on. It's got this way about it where it looks like everything is really obvious from the beginning but somehow that still works, somehow even though the ending is no surprise you still feel like you went through a lot of twists and turns to get there. It has a subtle background fixation on the human body in a way that almost turns it into body horror at times, but not the type of body horror where things are being done to the body, the type of body horror that focuses on the grossness that's inherent with the human body, the grotesquery that's with us all the time. The hair and the flesh and the blood and the biological processes that are always there but that we don't really pay a lot of mind to because it isn't "proper". I'm not saying the movie has a scatological bent or anything but there's an acute awareness of the body, possibly due to the two children acting like they don't belong in human skin. 

I guess the children also give it that "primal fear" aspect, the relief of missing children coming home versus the revulsion of realizing there's something wrong with them versus the urge to shove those thoughts to the back of your mind and just be glad you have your babies back. It's an "I hope that never happens to me" movie, it's instinct mixed with supernatural horror, and those elements are what makes it all work despite a tendency to show much more than is necessary for no apparent reason.

Bite (2016)

directed by Chad Archibald
Canada
90 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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Who's ready for me to give yet another shallow, mediocre modern horror movie a much longer and more in-depth review than it deserves? I'm not going to stop anytime soon because I honestly love doing these reviews, but sometimes... sometimes movies are just not very good.

If I could get paid for the amount of times I've watched a found-footage movie that begins with a character saying "Haha are you really gonna film everything?" directly into the camera, I would have enough money to make my own movie. It's just irritating when people write that line into their movies; it seems like most do it because they think it'll make things a little more realistic but the audience already knows they're watching a found-footage movie, we know it's all fake and we've already suspended our disbelief enough to play along and pretend that this footage was recovered from some tourist's camcorder after they died/went missing. Inserting the nod to the camera is really not necessary at all.

Midway through this movie I got curious about the director's other works (if they had any) and I found out that they also directed Ejecta. When I saw that, I thought "oh, so that's why this is like this", because it's basically got all the same problems that Ejecta had: When you stand back and look at it as a whole, it's not that bad, it's got a lot of good elements to it and everything looks to be in working order, but there's a whole bunch of smaller flaws in the dialogue and acting, as well as other less immediately noticeable areas, and all that small stuff adds up to something that looks amateurish even though this director has apparently been making movies since 2005.

I want to focus on the dialogue for a second because it's just so weird and awkward. The acting is not good overall but the script felt really poor. At one point the main character is on the phone with emergency services trying to get help, she's explaining the symptoms of her potentially infected bug bite to the guy on the other line and the guy is giving her advice, and he says "As for the vomiting..." but she never told him she was vomiting. It might not seem like a huge deal in the middle of a full-length movie but it's still glaring enough that with all the scrutiny involved in making a movie, I'm surprised nobody noticed that error before everything was wrapped up and released.

Another fairly egregious example of poor writing is that no character in this movie seems to be able to react properly to anything. The main character, Casey, has her issues and she's dealing with that the way anybody would- terrified and repulsed, etc- but the people around her do not seem to be fully conscious of the things they're confronted with as the main character gets progressively worse. There's multiple instances where somebody comes into Casey's apartment to find it looking absolutely horrific and they barely even question it, instead going straight for Casey and yelling at her for some other problem separate from the fact that her apartment is basically turning into SCP-610.

The concept is decent and admittedly the visuals are pretty great, it does get very satisfyingly gross towards the end and all, but like I said, it only looks good from far away when you consider the big picture. It's not the worst thing I've seen this year but poor acting is a huge setback for it, and ultimately, I'm going to remember the acting more than I'll remember anything else about it.

México Bárbaro (2014)

directed by Lex Ortega, Jorge Michael Grau, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Ulises Guzmán Reyes, Aaron Soto, Isaac Ezban, Laurette Flores, Edgar Nito
Mexico
120 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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México Bárbaro is an anthology horror film comprised of shorts that explore, as the title would imply, some of the nastier myths and legends native to Mexico. Every country has their folklore and a lot of the more popular stories stem from the same general archetypes that represent elements of the human condition, but the tales in this anthology belong firmly to Mexico; they represent Mexican struggles and Mexican history and this movie makes that much very clear. Although Netflix obviously chose what would be the most universally eye-catching poster (a pretty woman with her face painted up in the style of a sugar skull), it's nice to have a movie entirely about Mexican folklore coming straight from the source, free of American direction.

What's unfortunate about it is that such an overwhelming majority (I'd say like ~75%) of the segments rely heavily on rape to convey a horror that there were actually many, many other ways to convey. Leaning on rape as a plot device is just lazy writing, and when you watch a movie like this where there's multiple nearly identical scenes like that being repeated over and over from segment to segment, it feels really careless, like nobody has actually stopped to consider what they're filming and is just going through the motions of what they think will come off "edgy". Where the segments don't actively involve rape, they involve a woman in peril with her body being the main focus of the shot. There's so much exploitation in here and it was disappointing because this was such a great opportunity and so many of the directors just went straight for sex appeal. The original folklore isn't the thing that has the problem, it's the execution of it by directors and writers who apparently could not find a better way to flesh out the mythology than to involve a naked woman in it that was upsetting.

Due to all of this, I couldn't tell you my "favorite" short, so I'm not going to review them all separately this time. Siete Veces Siete was probably the best one objectively because it went deeper into ritual and symbology and felt like it was closer to the spirit of what this whole affair was intended to be, although even it isn't free from the occasional unnecessary nude woman. The entire latter half of the film actually does move towards something a lot darker than the beginning, which was much appreciated; the departure from what felt like immature child's play to the actual legends shining through perked up my interest in the movie at least a little bit. But as a whole it's far too inconsistent and fraught with misogyny to live up to what should have been a great concept for an anthology, seeing as Mexico doesn't have too many outstanding horror directors.

Probably my favorite thing about it is that as a viewer unfamiliar with most of the myths being presented, it had a lot of really original monsters and villains that I'd never seen before. More than once the monsters' appearance was so jarring and unfamiliar to me that it elicited a response of just flat-out amazement, especially in the short "Drena", which was one of the better (and more bizarre) ones. That also happened in a bad way a few times, though, particularly with the bafflingly poorly-made tale involving some kind of bawdy imp at a motel. Again, this isn't me criticizing the traditions or folklore or anything like that, that aspect of it was really neat to see- it's just that I wished more people hadn't leaned so heavily on sexist genre tropes.

Ils (2006)

directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud
France
75 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Otherwise known as Them. Them! Who's Them? It's most likely meant to refer to the film's villains, whose identities I will not spoil since there's somewhat of a minor twist about it at the end, but a quote before the closing credits also makes reference to "Them" as in the two protagonists. Maybe this was there to subvert the "us v. them" mentality that the majority of home invasion flicks have, maybe it was there to infantilize the person saying it (you'll get it when you watch it), or maybe it was just meant to put some more distance between the good guys and the bad guys. Whoever Them is intended to be, putting distance between good and bad is probably this film's biggest strength and it makes for a fun, unnerving watch.

As far as New French Extremity goes, this one is very light on the movement's stereotypical gore. It's also one of the bleaker and more effective films of the movement, clocking in at roughly 70 minutes minus credits with no time left over for filler or fluff. I've been jaded by watching far too many formulaic, unoriginal home invasion movies, so I can't really get frightened by any horror film where the villain is a human (I go for supernatural stuff, personally) but this one comes close to being an exception to that rule because it's as restrained with the villains' identities and appearances as it is with the gore. Looking at The Strangers, widely considered to be a gem in the home invasion subgenre, even that movie has a few jarring moments where you get a glimpse of the invaders and their creepy masks, but Ils doesn't even have that until the reveal at the very end. The most you get is a shrouded figure in a hallway or a pair of hands grasping at the protagonists. There's no room for humanization up until the end, and the mood whiplash this lack of empathy overridden by a sudden outpouring of it to the point where it becomes a moral dilemma at the final scenes creates is why this is such a unique movie.

A lot of the reason why certain movies such as this one stick out in the home invasion subgenre (or, if you want to be broader, the slasher subgenre as a whole) is their sound design. The most recent movie to be touted as a home invasion "modern classic" was Hush, which revolves around a deaf-mute woman and as such contains a lot of subtleties in its sound design. Having a specific sound or sounds that announce the arrival of the tormentors, especially when that sound is something you can't readily identify as being manmade, is a very effective tool in creating a pit-of-the-stomach menace. If you're alone and you hear a human voice calling out where there shouldn't be one, you get scared easily because you can tell what it is. But if you're alone and you hear a sound like in Ils, a weird rattling/cranking noise that probably wouldn't be sinister at all in the right context, you're more inclined to go investigate because you don't immediately make the connection that there could be a human behind it. And if you go and investigate... well, that's where They come in.

Most New French Extremity movies are unique in some way or another but this one is a bit of an odd duck with how effectively it goes about things. More movies could benefit from having this amount of restraint as well as this much attention paid to sound design. It's a shame there's not more like this but then I guess I wouldn't be able to praise this one for being so unique.

High-Rise (2016)

directed by Ben Wheatley
Ireland
119 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I'm a huge fan of Ben Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump, I've seen all of their movies save for Down Terrace and pretty much liked every one of them. What I find most interesting about their films is that there's not necessarily anything outright supernatural going on- unless you want to interpret it that way- but there's still room for the suggestion of something slightly "off". With the exception of Down Terrace, they all straddle the line between horror and not-horror because they all depict their characters' lifestyles being interrupted in a dramatic way, which is essentially the backbone of all horror, but again, they're not up-front about things. Kill List centers around family life, Sightseers centers around a couple and their relationship, and I don't really know what A Field in England was all about but I don't think it started out with its characters thinking they were going to end up where they did. Here, in High-Rise, Wheatley adapts a book by J. G. Ballard, author of many "un-adaptable" stories, and it's essentially the culmination of all the interrupted idylls, taking place in an expensive tower apartment as it slowly degrades into the hideous and uncivilized.

Something that attracted me to this movie from the early days when there wasn't too much information on it online was that I was hearing things about it involving a building being alive somehow. That's one of those Wheatley ambiguities: it never explicitly states whether the building did have some influence on the de-evolution of its occupants or if they did it to themselves entirely, but there are a few lines here and there that could be interpreted as such. I'm not sure if the outside shots of the building were CGI or if that's an actual apartment complex somewhere, but it certainly looks as sinister as it ends up being- there's something about it that's just wrong, it looms in shadow like the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and its architecture makes your skin crawl for no nameable reason.

Whether or not you consider this to be a horror movie, its entire backbone is as deeply unsettling as the image of the building itself. It works by being frightening on a primal level because it depicts such a primal level, it depicts humans gone back to not just hunting/gathering and simple instincts but something more perverse and deliberate than that. It's interesting because it doesn't go for the low-hanging fruit that a criticism of 21st-century living would have been, it keeps the source material's 1970s setting while still being a commentary on capitalism and the lives of the disgustingly rich. The 70s are a great backdrop for it, too; it's got gorgeously dramatic and over-the-top cinematography with a perfect soundtrack featuring bands like CAN, Amon Duul, and some guest vocals from Beth Gibbons of Portishead.

It's nearly a perfect movie, but I wasn't sure how I felt about the development of Laing as a main character. He's so sparsely written that I was inclined to think he wasn't even meant to be a character so much as he was meant to just be a vehicle for the story to advance, a way to anchor everything so that there was some degree of realism while not actually having a personality of his own. He's somewhat enigmatic, he's definitely a part of the building's ecosystem and doesn't reject the atmosphere of high living but he also doesn't participate in it as much as some of the other characters, and he eventually ends up in the same boat as everybody else. I wished he would have been developed a bit more, though I guess having him raise so many questions is yet another good reason for me to finally get around to reading the original book. I don't have enough complaints to knock this from five stars to four or four and a half, though, and at the moment it sits at #4 of the year in my loose mental ranking of new movies.

Pictures of the Old World (1972)

directed by Dusan Hanák
Slovakia
70 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Some backstory so you're not watching a degraded film full of old folks that you know nothing about: This is a documentary on some people living in a secluded village in the Tatra Mountains, an area that forms a natural border between Slovakia and Poland. Notably, the cult favorite horror/black comedy Ravenous was filmed in the Tatras, along with one or two other movies, but I can guarantee that none of them have the same emotional and philosophical depth as Pictures of the Old World.

Watching it, the first thing that struck me is that it looks so old. It looks like it's been left in a box in somebody's half-flooded basement since it was shot, and it very nearly may have been relegated to that basement forever considering that it was censored for seventeen years after its completion. There's no easily recognizable reason why it would have been censored, and the fact that it was reflects the governmental restrictions of the time and place and goes to show why movies like this are important in the first place. Though they may outwardly be nothing more than a man with a camera following around some old people in a rural village, it's obvious once you know the backstory that these people have a standard of living that doesn't match up with what the watchful eye of the government wants to think of its citizens as. It's a preservation of culture, and it's really difficult to think about how everybody in this movie save for the infants is almost certainly dead, but it helps to know that we have their images captured on film even though they lived in a place where it was unlikely for anybody to take up a camera and document things.

There's still a lot of symbology and ritual embedded in our current culture, occasionally too deep to be easily noticeable, and in a few scores of years maybe the films containing those elements of tradition will be looked upon in the same way Pictures of the Old World is now. It could be that the current fashion trends- the ombre hair and super-cute space buns, the overalls and Doc Martens revival- are going to become as matronly an image as the babushka in her headscarf and frumpy floral dress. But these things have technology to preserve them, everybody's got a camera in their pocket that they can take to the ends of the Earth if they want to and then post the video to their blog when they get home, and it's wonderful that we now have so many eyes to see the world with, but in 1972, in the Tatra Mountains, nobody had that. There was no technology assisting peoples' way of life and there are unknowable amounts of stories and songs that simply died along with the last person to tell or sing them.

Censorship of media seems to be lessening in the modern age, some countries still employ heavy restrictions but guerilla filmmaking always manages to sneak past the borders somehow. The current climate of sharing memories is exactly why we can't forget documentaries like this one, because even though it's easy now, we have to remember what came before us in a time when something as simple as making a film about elderly farmers and housewives was a controversial act.

Something Weird (1967)

directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
USA
80 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Something Weird was the debut film of Herschell Gordon Lewis, who would later go on to become known as one of the first pioneers of the splatter flick, directing several other fabulously bad films such as The Gore Gore Girls and The Wizard of Gore. It's also where Something Weird Video got their name from, so even though in and of itself it's an astoundingly terrible movie, it did have some influence on the wider world of cinema.

I don't even really need to say this because it's so well-known for it, but I'll say it anyway: It's trash. I mean, it's the trashiest of trash. Think of everything people like to make fun of about the 60s and about cheesy old horror movies in general; this movie is a combination of every one of those things. It's strangely devoid of any of the gore that would eventually make Gordon Lewis famous, the closest it gets is a couple gunshot wounds that could be mistaken for the drippage from a light bloody nose and what looks like Silly Putty plastered onto the face of a "burn victim". There is absolutely nothing about the movie that's good, but everything about it is entertaining anyway.

What I'm most confused by is that not a single person does a good job at acting. The direction actors are given as well as the quality of the script and the ability of the filmmaking team to edit and process the film into something coherent does contribute a lot, but it can only explain so much. I don't know how you can get as many people together as this and have nobody among them seem professional or invested in their role in the slightest. Thanks to this horrible mixture of over- and under-acting, though, we get what is potentially cinema's worst fight scene (at around 54:40 if you're watching the version of it that's on youtube) which is the most entertaining singular moment in the whole film, probably.

Despite being really, really bad, though, I think it's kind of important that movies like this exist because with the gatekeeping that's rampant among horror fans, it seems like a large majority of people want to make it so that if you can't produce a movie that's up there with the best horror films ever made, you shouldn't even try. Like everybody else, I've been disappointed by numerous ho-hum efforts from people who didn't have either the talent or budget (or both) to make a decent film. But if the only people we allow to make movies are the creative geniuses who make nothing but masterpieces all the time, that's going to do two things to horror as a whole: A. it's going to be a lot less fun, and B. it'll restrict the genre so much that it's impossible for anybody to enjoy themselves, especially newcomers.

Obviously I'm exaggerating and speaking a bit metaphorically with the concept of not letting anybody who's not in tip-top shape direct a movie, but what I'm getting at is that having people direct things like Something Weird that are complete and utter un-self-aware garbage is important. The way I see it, a movie is a piece of art that you're proud enough of to show it off to everybody else. If Herschell Gordon Lewis and writer-slash-psychic James F. Hurley were proud enough of Something Weird and they wanted to get it out there and be seen, I think that's great, and although it's a candidate for one of the most poorly-made movies I've ever seen, it's still better than something funded by a billion-dollar corporate studio that ends up feeling soulless and mass-produced.

If nothing else, watch it for the soundtrack. People are trying and failing to replicate that reverb-soaked, retro, Halloweeny feel even today.

The Time Shifters (1999)

directed by Mario Azzopardi
USA
88 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I can honestly say that this movie (which is apparently more well-known as Thrill Seekers) wasn't as bad as I expected it to be. Most of the problems I had with it just stemmed from it being really, really dated, which I pretty much anticipated it would be anyway, since it's from 1999 and is a science fiction movie. Sci-fi ages faster than any other genre due to how quickly real-life science evolves as well as the lighting speed at which trends appear and disappear and eventually become faux pas; that being said I was still expecting to cringe a lot more than I did.

There's not a ton of cruddy CGI or practical effects, and that's good because it keeps the movie from getting even more dated than it already was but it's a bit of a double-edged sword because personally I wanted to laugh at the cheesy 90s CGI and I didn't get to. There's still a lot of other stuff to laugh at, though, particularly the incredibly cheesy delivery of the line "now, he'll be out of our misery" and the way the time travelers all dressed like rejects from The Matrix (if they were trying not to stand out why did they all look like something from an early William Gibson novel?).

As a whole there's just... really not all that much wrong with it? The dialogue is uniformly bad and there's a lot of "forced" backstory: the protagonist is a run-of-the-mill Manly Action Dude with your typical stressful job, stressful family life, obligatory rocky relationship with his estranged wife and son, an incident in his past that haunts him and makes him feel like a bad person, you know the drill. All that stuff they stick in to make movies seem less two-dimensional that isn't actually original or unique at all. But overall, it's surprisingly inoffensive and tame. Obviously the absurdity of what was thought to be futuristic sci-fi technology at the time can throw you for a loop but if you kind of try to get in the right headspace for it and disregard how old it is, it's pretty enjoyable. Drags a bit, but it's fun.

The plot was more interesting than any other element of the whole deal- basically in the future there's a method of tourism involving time-traveling back to the scene of a bunch of infamous disasters and getting your kicks off watching stuff blow up, and the movie is done from an outsider's perspective on this as some people in the present encounter people from the future mucking things up and failing to "look but not touch". It's essentially a lot like the Ray Bradbury story A Sound of Thunder, which was also turned into a movie that was far, far worse than this.

There's plot holes and inconsistencies and it looks very low-budget but all in all I had a good time and if you're looking for 90s sci-fi I'd recommend you not glaze over this one. Plus Martin Sheen is in it which I had no idea about. The cast list on letterboxd doesn't mention him at all but it's definitely him. It's Martin Sheen in the future.

Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea (1977)

directed by Jindřich Polák
Czechia
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea is an oldish Czech film about a man getting involved with a group of time-traveling Nazis who intend to present Hitler with an H-bomb in order for him to win WWII. The man gets caught up in this by way of deciding to impersonate his twin brother after his brother chokes on a bread roll and dies, which is a strange and illogical decision that seems to be one of those things that happen in movies that would not happen naturally in real life. But if I critiqued every movie on what could and couldn't happen in real life we would have a large Star Wars problem on our hands.

As with most movies involving time travel, especially ones involving twins getting mixed up with each other (in this case so badly that they may or may not be the same person at some points, it's hard to tell), it's pretty easy to lose the thread if you're not paying 100% attention and possibly even taking notes. The issues of mistaken identity are a much bigger issue than the whole Nazi time-traveling thing, in fact it's the main focus of the entire plot- the repercussions of giving Hitler a bomb are not discussed at length, partially because the plan is ruined by the good twin fairly early in the movie, but also because that's really just not what it's about in general.

This is a movie that very much does take jabs at Hitler and at his reign and that's obviously a difficult subject to get right. As per Poe's law, if the intent is not made clear enough, satire can occasionally be indistinguishable from the thing it's supposed to be a satire of. This movie definitely establishes as a baseline that it is not supportive of Nazism or anything like that; it's obviously meant to be insulting to Nazis, but comedy that strays into this territory makes me personally a bit uncomfortable no matter the tone or intent. But this is not an American film and I am not somebody who had family affected by WWII, so I don't have much leverage with which to judge it, and if people more closely involved with the war want to use humor as a way to diffuse the horrific impact it had on their countries and their people, that's their say. I think this movie handles its concept fairly well- and, again, it's really not about Hitler- but like I said, I don't have final say on that.

I feel like a lot of the time people can mistake a movie being old for it being good. Some may argue that this is a good movie by virtue of being from the 70s, being obscure, and being a decently intelligent film, and it definitely does have a good vision and strong concept but I don't think it's anything anybody needs to go head-over-heels for if they're not feeling it. Bottom line, it's fun (if vaguely misogynistic), it's a change of pace, and it's nice to see a viewpoint of WWII that is not an American one.

In a little while I'm also going to post a review of a movie called The Time Shifters (aka Thrill Seekers) because it deals largely with time travel as tourism like this movie does. It's not nearly as good but time travel tourism is a neat subject and maybe some people who've heard of this movie haven't heard of the other, or vice versa.

Midnight Special (2016)

directed by Jeff Nichols
USA
112 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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There's no requirement that a director's every film share some common thread or even be done in the same style, but director Jeff Nichols' works all feel loosely connected nonetheless. He makes thoughtful, somewhat angsty Southern Gothic dramas, usually with Michael Shannon in them, that contain more emotional depth than they would seem to on the surface, with their inwardly-focused characters and occasionally sparse dialogue. Specifically, Midnight Special seems to work extremely well as a spiritual successor to Nichols' previous film, Take Shelter. Midnight Special is the next logical step up, it expands on some of the more science-fiction-leaning ideas presented in Take Shelter but still has that signature feeling of melancholy and stark realism. Where Take Shelter left you wondering "Did that really happen? What was it?", Midnight Special is far more direct; saying "That most definitely did happen and it's not even all that happened".

The title doesn't seem to have any relation to the actual concept of the movie at all, but it's still a fitting name for it because basically the entire thing takes place in that area of your memory reserved for things you did at night as a kid. It captures the feeling of being awake when everybody else- even grownups- were all asleep, backseat car rides down long highways illuminated by city lights; gas stations at all hours of the morning; sleeping in other peoples' houses for just a night or two. Through this feeling of nostalgia it somehow manages to be at once achingly beautiful while still avoiding looking at things through rose-tinted glasses.

Although it's still got Nichols' signature realism, its concept is pretty far into the realm of the supernatural, which may take some getting used to if you've seen the director's other movies and have no experience with how he handles "impossible" concepts. This is a movie where not knowing specifics is crucial to getting the best possible experience out of it, so I won't spoil anything, but I was surprised at how well the more... outlandish scenes fit in with everything else. This is not a fantasy movie and it's not a children's movie either, but at the same time it feels like it's still conscious of the presence of a child. The adults don't try and stoop to the child's level and the child doesn't have to act like an adult, the beauty of it is that every character fits together even though they're all different people with different motivations.

Another way that it picks up where Take Shelter leaves off is its initial sense of looming dread; although it's not quite the atmosphere of apocalyptic-scale discomfort conjured in the older film, there is definitely a strong feeling of growing turmoil. At some point it gets diffused, though, somewhere along the line (I can't pinpoint exactly where) the film and its characters as a whole seem to have stopped fearing change, and then a lot more beauty begins to seep through the cracks to create something that, again, is strictly realistic, but also touches on the further reaches of the imagination.

In the end you don't get all too much more of an answer than you did in Take Shelter. You know right from the moment you read the movie's synopsis that it's about a little boy with "powers", and you do learn more about that as the film goes on, but it's one of those things where you feel like you kind of walked in on the middle of it and it retains that feeling all throughout. Keeping that ambiguity was essential to having the movie have a slightly dreamlike aura around it, the lack of an all-reaching explanation lets the viewer project and speculate while keeping the integrity of the director's original vision intact. I'd have to say it's definitely one of the best of the year so far, with excellent performances from all the cast and beautiful coloring. I'm sad I missed this one in theaters but if it's still showing on the big screen in some parts of the world, I advise you to go see it there.

Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991)

directed by David Blair
USA
87 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees holds the title of both the first independent film to be edited digitally and also the first movie to be converted to hypertext and posted to the internet. It's a great use of the format, because this was before the use of computer graphics was widespread, and the poor quality of the digitally-generated imagery fits well with the rest of the movie. On the poster it claims to be "cyberpunk" but that's clearly just meant to entice people to watch it, because there's nothing even remotely resembling cyberpunk in it and if you put some blurb about what it's actually like on the poster, it would probably repel more people than it would attract, and you know what they say: You get more bees with honey.

It's difficult to say anything about this movie because it's so strange. A lot of weird movies can still be commented on, you can parse them down to production value, overarching thematic content, acting, etc; but with this there's just no real way to correctly describe it. I'm not sure if people remember Time Cube, which I've linked to an archived version of because sadly the actual website is no more, but this is basically the closest anybody has ever gotten to making a cinematic version of it. The content is different but it's got the same pseudoscience feeling, the feeling that you should be able to understand what's being said but you absolutely can't. The narrator is stringing words together that make it sound like he's saying something normal, he's certainly fully aware of what he's saying and it makes sense to him, but there's no logic to it. He's using words and it seems like he's not using them to mean what they actually mean. It's hit and miss, sometimes he describes things that happen in real life and then the next minute apparently bees are 30 feet tall and he can travel to other planets full of dead people. It's not surprising that William S. Burroughs is involved in this.

What I can't figure out for the life of me- aside from, like, the entire thing- is why it's so ominous. Things can be weird without being menacing, it's not just the weirdness that does it, but for some reason Wax has this dizzying atmosphere that caught me off-guard. I guess maybe it's the revision of reality as we know it, the use of a documentary format to portray events that not only never happened but are physically impossible; the presentation of these events as mundane; and the feeling that the narrator knows something we're not privy to. Those bizarre biblical concrete statues didn't do anything to make me feel any more at ease, either.

I think this is probably one of the strangest films I've seen since it doesn't seem to be self-conscious of its strangeness. It's nearly impossible to sit through the entire thing because after a while having somebody basically just rant at you for over an hour straight about things you don't understand starts to wear on you. I liked this movie but I don't know if I technically "enjoyed" it and I also don't know how to recommend it to anybody or who to recommend it to, because unless you have a taste for non-traditional narratives this is just a bunch of dreck. But if it does sound appealing to you, the director has made it available for free online, and I highly encourage you to seek it out.

Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession (1973)

directed by Leonid Gayday
Russia
93 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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1970s sci-fi from the former Soviet Union is an absolute treasure trove of wonderful, unique films, and is personally one of my all-time favorite era/genre combinations. The decade churned out a multitude of great movies, some still considered the vanguards of Russian sci-fi today like Solaris and Stalker, but there's far more movies that were left in obscurity than ones that went on to become well-known. I think Russian cinema tends to have a reputation for being very serious, especially the further back in time you get; there's all kinds of dramas concerning hardships and wars and social/economical toil- it's generally not a country that we think of as producing a whole lot of comedies, though there are some released occasionally. But Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession... this movie is a whole other deal.

It's funny, I mean it's truly hilarious in some parts. It's got that goofy, slapstick, fourth-wall-breaking humor that reminds me of Monty Python. As with the movie I watched before this, I'm going through some reviews and noticing that a lot of people are criticizing it for things that (to me) were pretty blatantly intentional, the corniness of it all is definitely meant to be there- I mean, what serious movie has characters occasionally ribbing to the camera? And it's only gotten better and cornier with age, it holds up incredibly well for being as old as it is and the already parodic looks of the characters are only exaggerated further by how out-of-date they are now. The perms and mustaches and technicolor apartment furnishings coupled with humor that's funny in any time, context, or country makes it feel like a movie made in the past decade or so that's intended to look like something out of the 70s.

I really couldn't find anything I didn't like about it but I guess its biggest problem is that it gets to dragging on after a while. The first 45 minutes are golden and there were still some very funny parts in the latter half (that dance sequence at the banquet had me in stitches, good lord) but this type of zany humor is suited far better to being fast-paced and hyperactive, and it feels like it runs out of steam at a certain point. To give a quick rundown of the plot- and honestly, you should definitely watch this movie so I'm going to keep it brief- a nerdy scientist-type invents a machine that can transport people back in time and then back to the present again, and through a series of mishaps, his uptight landlord and a burglar who happened to be in the building at the time get transported back to 16th-century Moscow while none other than Ivan the Terrible gets brought to the present day. The science is terrible and even for a comedy it's got a lot of continuum errors and inconsistencies, but it's just such a fun watch that none of that mattered.

Evidently it's part of several films from the same director featuring Shurik, the scientist character, and I suppose it's the most popular of those films seeing as it's also apparently one of the most popular comedies of the time, with people numbering in the millions going to see it. It's based off of a play and that translates really well into its particular style, the flimsiness of the fourth wall and the often extreme overacting would go perfectly in a stage production. I've got to check out the other movies in this series even though I don't know that any of them would be as funny as this.