Kidnapped (2010)

directed by Miguel Ángel Vivas
Spain
85 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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(I honestly can't recommend that anybody watch this because it's very violent. Please don't watch it if you're sensitive to that sort of thing!)

I tend to avoid home invasion films as a general rule of thumb because I feel like home invasion is such a generic subgenre that more often than not it turns out to be extremely boring. Sometimes there's variation: Pretty color schemes, one of the victims ends up fighting back, the criminals' identities are a surprise, things of that nature that are slightly twisty but still fairly predictable. For this reason it took me a while to really warm up to Kidnapped, but once I saw the light, so to speak- oh boy, did it take me for a ride.

Probably the biggest reason why I can say I liked it so much is because there genuinely isn't anything in this film that feels like it's been done before. The break-in, the initial smash-and-grabbing, that was all pretty run-of-the-mill, but the actions of the criminals and the sheer brutality of the film is unique. It works by creating a lot of empathy for the innocents and then simultaneously dehumanizing and humanizing the invaders, so that they're not just a group of angry thugs but a group of angry thugs who are each individual people, who each have their own approach to their crime and their own attitudes towards it. At one point one of them takes the father character to an ATM to rob him, and it's easy to think that he's doing him some mercy because he unties him, reasons with him, and isn't as forceful as robbers typically are, but the truth is he just does not care. He's picking the easiest way to get what he wants, and if that way happens to involve not injuring anybody, he doesn't care. If the easier way was to slaughter as many people as possible, he would do that without caring too. Really brilliant and unnerving characterization of the villains at work here.

This is one of those movies that's very un-cinematic and honestly gets to a point in its brutality where you wonder why a thing like this was made- all the titillation is taken out of its violence, all the exploitation pushed aside until the only thing left is a family traumatized beyond any reasonable point. The way it depicts in-the-moment grief is stunningly realistic, and it wouldn't be this way if the acting from every single person in this film wasn't as absolutely perfect as it was, especially from the teenage daughter. It's just uncomfortable after a point, you wonder who could enjoy a thing like this and if the point is actually to enjoy it at all, which it doesn't seem to be, since you can't get your kicks out of this like you could a slasher where somebody fights back, like say for instance You're Next. It's not a movie that gives you anybody to root for, although it does play on sympathy quite effectively.

Overall, the biggest factor contributing to this movie's quality is that it's unpredictable. It's volatile and atypical and a total powerhouse of brutality that seems to not have any target audience. The violence is not eye-catching, it's not easily marketed to a crowd eager to see big guns and big muscles, it's an incredibly tragic, self-contained thing that gets to the point and drives that point right home.

Ouija (2014)

directed by Stiles White
USA
89 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I pretty much wrote this movie off back when it first came out as being the kind of horror movie I don't like, but with the news of who's directing the sequel and who's going to be in it, I thought it would be best to watch the first one before the second comes out. Besides, I'll watch any horror movie you put in front of me, I don't really have an idea of "the kind of horror movie I don't like". Also I feel like this movie doesn't exist to be analyzed and critiqued in any real capacity because it is, for the most part, a generic teen horror flick, but considering that there isn't too much to go by in terms of aesthetics or a deep, nuanced plot, the most interesting thing about the movie was the archetypes and underlying concepts it represented.

There's quite a few horror movies that take on the "no second chances" theme, although most of them don't make mention of it explicitly. They generally all follow the same path: A group of friends loses a member, the others mourn, and they're allowed to do so up to a point- you can cry, you can wish your dead friend would come back, you can cherish their belongings and remember what they meant to you, but you can never, ever try to contact them. It's interesting how even in America where mythology and ghost stories don't carry the significance they tend to have in other cultures, there's this common thread of flying too close to the sun in terms of the spirit world- even incidentally, in movies like this that don't make a big spectacle of the supernatural forces behind the haunting, there exists a warning message against trying to communicate with the dead.

As with a lot of other middle-of-the-road-quality horror movies, the most interesting parts of Ouija were in the moments where it wasn't trying to be scary and spoil the atmosphere with random jumpscares and cacophonous strings every time a character breathed. There was a surprising lack of the typical teen-horror cliches, not too much in the way of giggle fits, underage drinking, sex appeal, or any of that fluffy filler stuff that cheapens most other horror films full of teenagers. In fact it's kind of unusual how serious it is for a movie focused on a group of teens, but I'm not complaining; I was very thankful not to have to sit through the kind of cheesy banter I usually see in movies like this. Occasionally the seriousness can just come off as the actors not putting any effort into their roles but ultimately it was a good thing.

Aside from the refreshingly serious tone, there were a couple of other things that made me go "Huh, this isn't as bad as I thought it would be". The plot takes a bit of a nosedive in the last ~25 minutes when everything is starting to need to get wrapped up and it becomes a little too forced, but before all that, it's actually not your typical cut-and-dry haunting. Things develop more naturally, and the reason behind the sudden paranormal goings-on is kept from cliches (save for the awful "mentally ill people are scary!!" garbage) but not thrown in the viewer's face before they get a chance to wonder about it and get involved. I can only hope that the sequel manages to hold onto that shred of originality but there's no guarantees.

All in all: Not spectacular, maybe not even great, but decent. More so than I expected. It's actually got a future-cult-favorite feel to it, sort of like a cheap knockoff House of the Devil, or maybe that was just the presence of teens and flannel making me draw comparisons to that film.

The Dependent (1969)

directed by Leonardo Favio
Argentina
87 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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The most accurate thing I'm able to say about this film is that it's difficult to decipher. I've heard it mentioned as being a precursor to Eraserhead, specifically the dinner scene ("just cut 'em up like regular chickens!") and that's also one of the only accurate ways to describe it. The tone during that particular scene in Eraserhead is basically stretched out and applied to every moment of The Dependent- that sort of awkward, tense uncertainty with an undercurrent of social anxiety- and the end product is actually pretty excellent.

Discomfort is obviously a component of fear, and you rarely have one without the other, but I think something really distinctive about The Dependent is that it explores discomfort without any physical threat, or fear with the anticipation of bodily harm taken out. What if there was a situation where you knew you were safe, but your environment and the people around you were just wrong somehow, and you didn't really know what to do other than be horribly uncomfortable? That's basically how the protagonist in this movie appears to feel 100% of the time, although he's fairly strange himself so he not only experiences this atmosphere but perpetuates it to the viewer. The whole thing is like a nightmare that you'd have right before you're due to attend a big event: It's full of muddled social cues, fumbled interactions, unanticipated reactions to innocent gestures, basically a how-to guide on social anxiety. As a whole The Dependent is not a horror movie in any way, but social anxiety goes hand-in-hand with straight-out fear and it explores this particular type of fear in a distinct way that not a lot of other movies do.

The great part about it is that the content isn't all that lends it its atmosphere, it's also the way it was made and its outward appearance that contributes a lot to the overall tone. I don't think my opinion would be in the minority if I said that a lot of the reason why Eraserhead was so unnerving had to do with it being shot in black and white- something strange in the shadows and the light- and so it stands to reason that if Eraserhead's black and white was eerie, The Dependent and its grainy, low-quality monochrome with constant pops and hisses should be even more unnerving. As I've said before about a lot of movies, half of this aesthetic wasn't even deliberate; a lot of it just has to do with the way it aged and how it seems that the only surviving print of it is in pretty poor quality, since it (sadly) hasn't garnered enough attention to warrant a full restoration. Honestly, though, were some kind of fund set up for a nice full-scale cleaning of the film, I'd probably throw some money in its direction.

After the movie I looked it up to see if the director had done anything else I knew, and to my surprise this is the same person who did Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf. I have no idea how two movies so dissimilar in overall style could have come from the same director, but I guess even David Lynch had his Elephant Man. The question of whether The Dependent's unsettling atmosphere was there from the start or whether it's an unintended byproduct of weird filmmaking decisions still remains, but I lean towards it being weird to begin with, and the best evidence for this is the fact that it employs some strange, interesting and above all really effective camerawork. I mean, this is stuff modern movies that want to go for the same tone neglect to do, it uses unusual angles and framing techniques that give a very artful edge to the whole affair. 

I'd love to see this movie become more popular because it's got a whole lot of merit to it. I can see how more people would enjoy this if they knew about it.

The Princess of France (2015)

directed by Matías Piñeiro
Argentina
65 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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One of the reasons (or most of the reason, to be honest) that I wanted to watch this was because I thought it was going to be like the movie I watched yesterday, When Evening Falls on Bucharest. I was wrong to assume that, there's not much connecting the two at all whereas I thought they would both deal with the theme of meta-reality in cinema. The Princess of France is largely intended to come off similar to a play where When Evening Falls on Bucharest has its obsession with depicting reality as realistically as possible, and to be totally candid, though I did enjoy both movies, I loved The Princess of France much more.

There's just something so engaging about it when compared to Bucharest or to any other movie, really. It's not structured like a modern adaptation of Shakespeare à la Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet or even West Side Story-as-Romeo & Juliet, instead the parts concerning the play (in this case, Love's Labors Lost) are integrated with the characters so seamlessly that the line between original traits and things lifted from the play begins to blur. It's a little bit strange because it's not that the characters are acting out the play in exact detail, but it's like their lives revolve around it. They keep the characters in the play alive by becoming them, the play is a part of them and it's the only thing the audience gets in terms of character development.

From an outside perspective I realize that this all sounds fairly pretentious, but believe me, it's not. Which is something that surprised me- for a film so concerned with the finer arts, it doesn't at any time come off as being above the viewer's head or, like with Bucharest, as cynical about its subject. It's almost celebratory in how it engages with art and also with the audience, it's a living, breathing art gallery with the characters creating circuits between themselves and the art, and the art and each other. A cursory glance at this director's body of work shows that all of it seems to relate in some way or another to Shakespeare's plays, and the idea of devoting every film you make to that particular subject is, since no one else seems to have done it, the perfect niche-filler; the perfect way to make yourself stand out.

I almost forgot there was a plot at all because I got so wrapped up in technique. The plot is admittedly a bit murky and probably would have seemed to have more influence on the film as a whole had I been paying more attention, but it hardly seems the most important element here. The dialogue basically carries the whole affair to being as interesting as it was, but it's also a very physical film- another way it makes itself more like a play than the traditional model of a movie. Characters (and the camera) move about freely, constantly shifting and walking and gesturing like they would if given only the confines of a stage to express themselves in. The opening scene is particularly immersive with the way it takes an entire city into account: A bird's-eye view of a team playing soccer in the middle of an urban jungle, with attention paid not only to the bodies of the players but also to the shadows, the light, the surrounding buildings, everything. This is a movie that feels like it encompasses every element of the world into itself but somehow does so while focusing on a specific group of people. And I don't understand how in the world this was all packed into a runtime of scarcely over an hour.

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013)

directed by Corneliu Porumboiu
Romania
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This comes from the same director as The Treasure, which I watched not too long ago. Corneliu Porumboiu has directed a few other movies that have gotten a relatively large amount of praise, although sadly the US (where I am) doesn't seem too concerned with Romanian cinema, so his popularity may not be what it should.

Much like The Treasure, this film takes an unusual approach to filmmaking in that it doesn't leave out the things that would usually be cut from a movie, in fact it focuses on these things rather than on anything else. There is no solid beginning-middle-end structure, nor is there any conflict or real character development in terms of background and not just the characters' ongoing reactions to the world around them. It's also bland like The Treasure, but bland in a gorgeous way- solid, cold colors, sparse scenery, a highly limited amount of characters in any given scene- and to a point where, even though it's truthful, describing it as "bland" seems like an insult.

Conceptually it falls mostly in the camp of meta-cinema, making references to filmmaking while itself demonstrating those references in action. However, in trying not to feel like a movie, it draws a lot of attention towards being a movie, to the point where almost everything being done served to remind the audience that what they were watching was an imitation of reality. It's impossible to tell the intention behind any given movie unless you have the director/writer explain it to you in explicit detail, so I can't be certain, but it's almost like the message of this film is that even the most realistic form of cinema is still a lie. One of the things that makes me think this is the repeated construction of barriers between the characters and their world at large: Doors are shut on the camera, the majority of the main characters' interaction with other people is done via cell phone, and at one point the characters motion to a person off-camera who is supposed to be sitting at another table in the restaurant they're in, which made me very conscious of the fact that nobody was actually there off-screen. Whether or not this barrier was intentional or what purpose it served, I couldn't tell you.

For all the importance this film places on realism, from a purely technical standpoint in terms of the way it was made, it's far from realistic. The average person wouldn't have access to everything needed to make a feature-length movie as polished and streamlined as this. True realism in cinema is amateur, true realism is 13-year-old kids on YouTube recording their friends with a cell phone camera because that's what most people have access to, but nobody seems to want to acknowledge that. In making a film professionally and spending a large sum on its production, you automatically take a lot of the realism out of it just by virtue of bringing it into existence.

There's also the issue of accessibility that this movie ignores in its quest to be as realistic and neutral as possible. The majority of people I know would take a look at this movie and not "get" it at all; would think it's boring and impenetrable. And there's nothing wrong with that- to understand a movie like this requires context, context that the average person with average taste in film wouldn't be able to give it. At first I thought this movie was shying away from pretentiousness, but upon further examination even the barest details about it stop it from escaping the confines of "artsiness". This style of filmmaking is endlessly interesting, but it's not really saying much that's never been said before, and although I enjoyed everything about this film I just don't want it to con people into thinking it's smarter than it looks.

The Visitor (1979)

directed by Giulio Paradisi
Italy-USA co-production
108 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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The Visitor is one of those movies that are predominantly known for their reputation of being really bizarre, and this particular style of bizarreness is something that I always love seeing- it feels so genuinely, honestly out there that you can't help but love it. It's not trying to be anything it's not or put on any airs and it's certainly not weird-for-the-sake-of-weird. Somebody just had a very strange idea and decided to drum up the resources to make it into a full-length movie, and it's wonderful.

It starts off with what is honestly one of the most formidable opening scenes I've ever seen, and while that level of imagination and pure aesthetic isn't reached again at any other point during the film, it does a pretty good job of setting the tone for everything to follow. This is a gorgeous movie visually, and the reason it looks so attractive is because a lot of the important scenes are pared down to only the essentials, and then those essentials are used to convey a deceptive amount of information. Oftentimes there's only a few elements present in a scene- two people one-on-one, or even one person surrounded by a set- but it still gets to the point and retains a lush beauty while doing so, in turn eliminating any extra faff or filler.

Despite how much I enjoyed all the ridiculousness, I definitely did feel that more than a few minutes could have been shaved off the runtime, especially towards the end. It's a fun movie for a lot of different reasons, but something went haywire in the last 20 minutes or so and much of what I was enjoying in the first half either vanished or veered severely off-course. It seemed to me that three-quarters of the way through, somebody decided to blow the last of the budget on a flock of pigeons, and after realizing that that left them with no more money for the rest of the film, they thought to themselves "whatever man I'll just... I'll just wing it... it'll be fine". I almost don't want to mention that final bird-fight scene because even though it's not plot-relevant, saying anything about it feels like a spoiler since it really has to be seen to be believed. It's a little disappointing to see the movie go from imaginative and well-directed to total outlandish bird-fighting no-budget chaos, but that's fun too, I guess.

And I mean it's pretty rough around the edges even before the final act. It did not age well and it's an English-language Italian production from the 70s, which means that the dubbing is completely awful. It's difficult to tell whether or not it can be called a sort of "accidental classic" without knowing what the initial reaction to it was at the time of its release, but even with all its flaws and bumps, this film very much deserves its current cult status. Don't go into it expecting stunning quality, just open your mind and lower your expectations and you'll certainly have a good time. Maybe less so if you don't like sci-fi/fantasy, though, so I wouldn't recommend this to anybody not already familiar with old, cheesy genre films.

Fanfare (1958)

directed by Bert Haanstra
Netherlands
86 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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So this is a very gentle comedy about a small village in which there is an orchestra that represents the town and plays at events and whatnot. This band starts to become divided within itself due to a bit of infighting, mainly from the outspoken tuba player who can't stop laughing whenever one of the horn players misses a note, and before too long the band splits into two. A panel is coming to town to watch the band and determine whether or not they should get some grant money, so the two bands are in close competition and basically spend the whole movie trying to steal each other's members or abscond with their instruments.

As simple and unpretentious as it is, it still avoids one of the biggest problems movies that are this "innocent" (for lack of a better word) tend to face: Becoming outright saccharine in their attempts to be wholesome. Too often the tone that a movie depicting small-town life takes is sort of a "Nothing bad can ever happen and we don't even know what a cuss word is" thing; it comes off as though it was intended for children no matter its target age range. Like it was made with a blindfold on that shielded it from every bad thing ever, to the point of being unrealistic. Fanfare is full of adults doing adult things, but the things they do and the style they're presented in just happen to be a very inoffensive, organic type of comedy- the town is an idyll, a little microcosm of a community where the biggest problem faced is a rivalry between two bands. It could have turned fairly ugly, there could have been more aggressiveness and crueler acts of sabotage, but as the narrator says at the end, "Nothing bad was intended." A movie for a lazy summer day when you're trying to forget about your problems, but don't want to feel as if you're being talked down to.

It's actually fairly interesting that this movie has a narrator, because that's something that can really change the whole context of a film. It's not a documentary, but it opens with a man speaking directly to the camera as if it's a live audience, then becoming a player in the film he's presenting, until he closes the film with his happily-ever-after message. As with pretty much everything else, this doesn't feel forced or cutesy.

 The opening credit sequence is something else I wanted to point out, because it had to be fairly time-consuming to make: It's in the form of several banners pointed towards the camera with the cast and crew's names written on them, and while it may not be the most striking or stand-out thing, it's visually appealing and shows a lot of care was put into every aspect of this film. Rudimentary photoshop-like techniques still existed back in this period but this is the real deal, somebody had to either paint or sew (I couldn't quite tell which) every single one of those banners specifically for this movie, just for the ~30 seconds of the opening sequence. I wonder what happened to those banners, where they might be right now?

The only thing I can really count as a fault against this film is that it's not in color. Had it been in color, it would have surely been almost too beautiful to handle, and as it is you can easily imagine what a broad palette it would have had. It's gorgeous enough in black-and-white, but being able to see the vibrant grasses and colorful folk motifs in/on the buildings would have brought it to perfection.

Beshkempir: The Adopted Son (1998)

directed by Abdan Abdykalykov
Kyrgyzstan
81 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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When Boyhood came out in 2014 to mass acclaim, I couldn't understand why it was heralded as some visionary, unique masterpiece. The method of filming was certainly unconventional and honestly pretty admirable (devoting that much time to a project has got to be a real undertaking) but the narrative was that of a white, fairly well-off boy growing up in America, which... isn't exactly something that's difficult to come by. At all. The reason I'm mentioning this is because I feel a little hypocritical for liking Beshkempir as much as I did considering that it is also a movie about a boy coming of age, but the hypocrisy I feel is basically only applicable on the surface: Beshkempir is a totally different environment than Boyhood, and the set of challenges the main character faces are mostly separate from the trials and tribulations of children in middle- to upper-class USA.

In a broader sense, this movie is still relatable to boys across the world; it shows the basics of moving from childhood into adolescence with the typical rowdiness that accompanies being a young boy. But something that's distinctive about it is that while in American coming-of-age movies the interaction between a character and their environment is often incidental at best, there's no way to divorce character from setting in Beshkempir. Characters don't just take, take, take from the land around them like characters in urban settings do. Nature is a constant force in this movie, it's something that the people in the village it takes place in have to maintain every single day by doing jobs- some of which I couldn't even tell you the purpose of- like fishing, laying mud siding on a house, shelling grains, and spinning wool into yarn. The relationship between the main character and the world around him is a far more physical thing than you usually see in movies about teenagers.

As the main character moves throughout the film, he becomes aware that something about him sets him apart from his peers, which is the source of the title The Adopted Son. Although in most cases teenagers are eager to cast off parental influence and find their own independence, the lack of something tying this particular boy back to a set of biological parents gradually begins to weigh on him more and more, and he feels alienated from his friends because of it. The acting from the kid playing the main character is wonderfully subtle and he embodies a kind of meditativeness; in silent moments away from his circle of friends you can practically see his train of thought as he's trying to interpret his place in the larger world.

Unfortunately (as is very common), the only bad thing about this movie is a flippant attitude towards how the main character and his friends regard women and, in essence, towards women's role in the film itself. It almost got to where it was doing a good job at representing women as valuable members of the village, because a good chunk of the people we see doing various chores are women, but the constant ogling and fixation on women's bodies is presented as something typical- which it may be in reality, but that doesn't make it acceptable behavior.

Aside from that, gorgeous cinematography and a beautiful soundtrack make this calm, contemplative movie better than the majority of other coming-of-age stories I've seen, although I haven't seen many as I'm not that fond of the genre as a whole. Unless Abdykalykov is a common surname in Kyrgyzstan (which it may be, I have no idea), the star of this movie is also the director's son, which puts this in a slightly different and more gentle light.

Symptoms (1974)

directed by José Ramón Larraz
UK
91 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I don't know why I thought Symptoms was directed by David Cronenberg for a while.

The first thing I noticed upon starting to watch this movie and probably the most prominent feature it has throughout the whole runtime is the way it looks. Love it or hate it, the 1970s brought to the public eye not only a style of fashion but an entire aesthetic that's memorable and extremely distinctive, so much so that it surprises me how we've moved so far away from it in just 40 years. Symptoms was shot on location, meaning the old house in the movie is an actual old house in real life, and it's dripping with gorgeously complex fabrics, elaborate drapery, delicately-embroidered nightgowns, and everything else you'd expect from a house and its people dressed to the nines in 1974. The color scheme actually feels heavy, it feels physically saturated with color, and it backs up the overall oppressive atmosphere quite well.

This is a movie that's tense and anxious to the furthest possible limit, even to a point that could be comical if you've broken your immersion in it- stepping away from the bigger picture, it can be a little humorous to watch everybody taking long, dramatic pauses between sentences and creeping around like burglars. But I doubt your immersion will be broken, because it's almost hypnotic in how eerie and foreboding it is, and it draws you in instantly right from the start.

An odd side-effect of not being given any background on the two main characters is that they do feel like trespassers in their rambling old house. As far as we know they very much seem to be intruding upon some force that was already there before they moved in, and it actually took me a while to realize that Helen had already been living in the house for a while because her presence seems so... unwelcome there.

Most of the time the viewer can't tell if what they're seeing is ghostly activity or the product of Helen's anxious mind. This movie comes from the school of disturbing 70s horror films that choose to take a less visceral approach to their subject matter, tending to give the paranormal a physical component and using manifestations of nerves and paranoia as the real monsters. The trend, unfortunately- and this is something that's definitely still a big problem today- was to feature an "unstable" or "fragile" young woman in the lead, and make it debatable whether or not she's out of her mind. It's a shame that so many of these movies have such excellent filmmaking because it enforces stigma that harms real-life people with mental illnesses.

Product of the mind or not, you don't get any firm answers either way when all is said and done with this film. We know what happened and who did it but we don't know why or what the significance of it is. Some might say this is being deliberately obtuse, that keeping the true meaning just out of the viewers' grasp is manipulative and holier-than-thou, and those are all very valid points, but mystery and unaddressed tension in horror is something I'll eat right up every time. I'm a sucker for a good non-ending, and this movie with its apparent lack of plot or a traditional beginning-middle-end structure is perfectly satisfying to my personal desire for unexplained creepiness.

The Ones Below (2015)

directed by David Farr
UK
87 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I went into The Ones Below expecting it to be a pregnancy-horror movie, and while I wasn't wrong about pregnancy being a topic, I'd have a hard time calling it a horror movie with confidence. I wish there was a good word for the sub-genre of movies that are too dry to be horror but just a little bit more menacing than what's usually thought of as a "psychological thriller", although I guess I shouldn't discount the ability of the psychological thriller genre to be as frightening and intense as a horror film in certain cases.

This is a movie that's good at building up dread using something that everybody on the planet is afraid of: Leaving your baby with somebody and having them do weird stuff to it while you're not there. There's a multitude of other elements at play but most of the really solidly uncomfortable scenes take place when the baby is in peril, at the hands of the main characters' neighbors who are essentially the antagonists of the film. I think there was also a lot of discomfort coming from societal and social cues; the main character had a lot of easily noticeable anxiety about being a new mother the "right" way and things like that.

What I loved about the movie is that you can't tell where it's going before it gets there in the end. It's painfully clear that something unnerving is going on but there's so many different things happening at once that you can't tell what's a red herring, what's not, what you're meant to pick up on, what was intended for the viewers to catch vs. what was intended for the characters to catch, etc. It's actually a pretty boring movie overall but that's certainly not due to it having nothing going on. It's just got that dry Britishness to it that makes it drag on and on for what feels like much longer than the actual runtime even though there's technically a lot of "action".

Up until a point it's a very "this only happens to other people" thing, it deals with some uncomfortable subject matter but it also feels scaled-down and personal. You could pick anybody off the street and they might be going through something like the characters in this film are. The big moment, that terrible accident that I won't spoil is horrifically tragic, but it's still within the realm of possibility that it could have happened to anybody you meet day-to-day in real life. The realism is gone in the third act, though, because the circumstances at the climax are far-fetched and dire enough to only seem to have a place in true-crime documentaries.

All in all I really wasn't expecting this to be as good as it was. The acting is wonderful across the board from every actor, but Clémence Poésy shoulders the main role extremely well and looks immaculately-dressed while doing so. There's a lot of visual motifs going on, including some that I almost missed- I only realized fairly late on that there was something I was meant to notice going on with the repeated shots of characters handling bottles of milk. I think somehow that was meant to relate to breastfeeding but I'm still not totally sure. And it has an eye for coloring and cinematography too, every shot is gorgeously composed and it never stops being aesthetically pleasing. Especially good for being the director's first film, although they'd previously written Hanna to some acclaim in 2011.

Rituals (1977)

directed by Peter Carter
Canada
100 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This movie also goes by The Creeper, but it also also goes by Deliverance 2, although it's not really a direct sequel to Deliverance as it doesn't involve any of the same characters or anything else. I suppose the content is similar since they're both about being stalked by murderous hillbillies, but I've also never seen Deliverance so I can't personally vouch for how similar the two are. I think it's pretty safe to say that this is a sequel in name only, though.

It follows a group of five men (all doctors- this is relevant later) on a camping/fishing trip off in the woods somewhere. If you didn't know it was a horror movie, you could get pretty far into it without realizing that something was direly amiss, because it uses subtlety very effectively. It's strange how knowing that it's horror can lend a completely different angle to things that would normally be unassuming; the shots of the great wide open and become somehow menacing with the knowledge that the characters are all being watched- instead of a peaceful retreat, the forest becomes a place for sinister forces to conduct their business without being seen by their targets. The sense of being watched is played up really well, I think being able to harness the dissonance created by combining the nature shots with the underlying feeling of something lurking around without making anything too blatant is the mark of somebody who really knows what they're doing.

This movie felt so raw and unpolished, the banter between the five men seemed unrehearsed and incredibly natural even when the stress of being pursued started to get to them. They felt like real people, there was less backstory on all of them than I would have liked but their dialogue and actions never got whiny and melodramatic like so many camping parties in horror are notorious for being. The whole manly bravado thing got in the way a little, and when the going got tough the tough got tougher than probably anybody in real life would, but the jokes and simple interactions had a nice unscripted feel to them, at least.

The amount of restraint in here is something you don't typically see in more "backwoods" horror films, which I loved. Usually when the villains are a bunch of hillbillies, their attacks will be uncoordinated at best, usually blunt and brutal as opposed to the psychological warfare mounted against the characters in Rituals. It's frightening because their stalker is somebody who clearly knows what they're doing, they have it in their head that this is retribution for something that was done to them and just because they're a weirdo who lives out in the woods doesn't mean they don't know how to break people down in ways other than the physical. There's almost a supernatural edge to it, at times the lack of a concrete sighting of the stalker leads some of the men to drop phrases like "demonic ritual" and dance around the fact that there might be an even bigger horror at work than an angry hick. Some may call that a red herring but I enjoyed the air of mystery it lent to the plot.

Not too many movies escape the 70s still feeling potent and fresh, but there's a pocket of eerie horror films produced during that era that have a quality to them that you can't find anymore, and this is one of them. It's sad that to see those forgotten classics often requires sacrificing quality as sometimes decent-looking prints may not have survived, but the digging is worth it for something unique and solid as this.

Approaching the Unknown (2016)

directed by Mark Elijah Rosenberg
USA
90 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----
(I'm probably going to be mentioning some thematic spoilers here)

This movie begins a handful of seconds before the launch of a one-man (though there's another single-person module launched shortly after), one-way terraforming mission to Mars. I honestly find it difficult to regard movies involving a journey to Mars as science fiction these days, because the technology we need to get humans to Mars is so close at hand, if it isn't actually here already. Also the popularity of The Martian- which this movie does well at avoiding becoming a cheap knockoff of- has somewhat "desensitized" me to the scale of a Mars mission, so now it doesn't feel that impressive when I see it onscreen anymore.

I almost dismissed this movie based on its first half because the development of the main character, William Stanaforth, is just so unconventional and seemed to have me primed for something very boring. Because so little of the film takes place on Earth, we know absolutely nothing about the main character or details like why he was chosen to go to Mars, how intensive his training for this mission was, who the loved ones he's leaving behind are, and other miscellaneous things that usually flesh out a character. Instead, we're treated to the blatant fact that this guy both believes himself to be some kind of superhero and that the movie itself seems to have this viewpoint of him being a superhero as well, and it's strange to see this because usually a character will start out having some kind of challenge that they need to overcome, but in this case the movie starts off from a position where the main character has already conquered everything and is facing threats to his position of superiority over his domain. I felt strongly in a negative way about this style of filmmaking because the character felt very smug and it got irritating pretty fast.

That being said.

This is one of only a few examples where a movie has gone from not sitting well with me in the first half to winning me over completely in the second. We never do learn anything about the main character's personal life which I still regard as having been a pretty glaring flaw, but the point of the film is basically to strip away all the hubris that comes with being the dominant species on your planet until the main character discovers something intangible yet far, far bigger than his life or the life of any other singular person on Earth.

Stanaforth's transition from a self-assured professional to somebody at the mercy of the universe is satisfying to watch and holds deeper philosophical undertones than I initially thought this movie capable of. At one point while trying to fix his ship's water recycling system (which he so pompously brags about inventing All By Himself and testing by going into the Atacama desert with no water) he gets frustrated and yells "Work with me, for god's sake!" That's just it, the ship and by extension the universe won't work with him, he has to work with it, because the universe won't abide by human rules or even human hopes. By the end of the film Stanaforth has somewhat realized this, and found that without consciously knowing it, the thing he was seeking by accepting what was essentially a long, slow suicide mission to Mars was something that transcended even death, something like a big cosmic secret that he's the only person privy to. I guess the CGI budget was spent entirely on those shots of galaxies and gas clouds looming ominously in space because they're very, very striking and genuinely give off a feeling of being among forces bigger than you can comprehend.

In all ways but the setup, this movie reminds me of another long-haul space mission-themed movie called Love. I liked that one a lot better than this but I would recommend both if you're looking for a movie about humanity contemplating its nature in vast empty space.

Pumpkinhead (1988)

directed by Stan Winston
USA
86 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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During this movie, I ended up thinking a bit on how subjective the measure of a "good" movie is, and how when you know something isn't going to be Tarkovsky-level genius filmmaking, all you really have to judge it by is how much fun it is. Especially when you're watching movies that are multiple decades old, you have to account for the change in public interest and the rapid dismissal of trends and how those things can affect a person's opinion of a movie to possibly change it from being what it was originally intended to be. I was thinking about all these things, and then I was thinking "Why am I thinking about this stuff? It's Pumpkinhead, it isn't fine art" so I relaxed and just enjoyed the movie like a normal human being.

The whole thing is definitely fun, I'll give it that. It has an atmosphere that's perfect for watching around the Halloween season, with the sets decorated like Disneyland haunted houses and a color scheme that looks like somebody held the red lens of a pair of 3D glasses up to the camera the entire time. It's easy to figure out, every decision made by a character (well, almost all of them) progresses to the next logical step and there's no real forks in roads encountered by anybody, which I guess could speak to a lack of imagination on the filmmakers' part but it could also mean that they knew what people wanted to see and gave them that. I'm leaning towards the latter as an explanation, because this very much seems like a horror movie geared towards the general populace and meant to intentionally not have any offending qualities about it.

The big thing that's really difficult to get past is that it's just so awkward. It's dated, which contributes to that a little, but even if it had been made today I would think it was awkward. The younger actors' dialogue is forced and badly written, there's weird silences when there shouldn't be, there's lines that are unintentionally funny about stuff like hillbillies making "foot stew" out of people they kidnapped, bad fake crying, and random religious themes that don't seem to serve any purpose. It's a whole mishmash of tropes and random stuff that doesn't all work together that well.

The good part, and the whole reason why I wanted to watch the movie in the first place, is that the actual Pumpkinhead creature itself looks really, really good. Personally I think that even the shoddiest practical effects are better than CGI, so I might be a little bit biased, but Pumpkinhead looked great for its time and still looks good even today. Most of the time I couldn't tell if it was a person on stilts in there or just puppetry. I think the model changed a bit between scenes because there's some subtle differences in it from time to time, so it could have been both, but all of it consistently looked striking. The way the facial expressions moved, goodness, that was so good, there's movies today that can't achieve that look.

So basically it's your run-of-the-mill 80s monster movie. Good creature, questionable everything else. Not having any of the multitude of sequels it has would probably be beneficial for it because knowing that the creature was just used as a one-and-done thing would have made it feel more special. Still, if you're willing to put away all your pretenses and take it at face value, it's a pretty satisfying 90 minutes.

Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (1975)

directed by Leonardo Favio
Argentina
92 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Most of the time I don't do a whole lot of research on movies before I watch them. In the case of Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf, all I knew about it was that it was set in medieval times and it had something to do with werewolves, and that sounded fine to me, so I went ahead and watched it. I guess if I'd read some reviews or done a little more digging I probably would have found out that this movie is absolutely bonkers in the way that Something Weird or The Room or any other movie that's so roughly-made it borders on the avant-garde is.

I mean, you talk about movies that seem like the actors are making things up as they go- this is a prime example of that. There's nothing at all in the way of pacing or any kind of linear coherence to the plot, things just happen in a loosely chronological order and we as the viewers have to go along with it. The gist of it isn't too hard to make out: It's about a guy who turns into a werewolf on full moons because he's a seventh son, or maybe he turns into a werewolf because he falls in love, I couldn't tell. But he's a werewolf, in any case, and the devil (maybe?) comes to him on his 20th birthday and says if he abandons the girl he loves, he won't have to be a werewolf anymore. Even discerning that amount of plot is difficult, mostly because the copy I was watching had awful subtitles, but also because visually the movie just makes no sense. One minute we're watching the origin story of the main character and the next we're in what appears to be a soft-rock ballad music video with the main character's love interest making oh-so-sexy forlorn faces at the camera and acting windswept and despondent.

At one point Nazareno Cruz gets attacked by an angry chicken and falls down a well leading to some kind of underworld that looks right out of Fellini's Satyricon. In the middle of the movie I found myself watching a scene where Cruz and his girlfriend rubbed their faces all over each other, gasping, as waves crashed down around them and some random woman stroked the girlfriend's hair and repeated "I'll take care of him, I'll take care of him" over and over. I would be remiss not to mention the repetition because it's probably one of the strangest elements of the whole thing. Characters sometimes say the same exact line 5-6 times for no apparent purpose. It's really unusual.

If you take it seriously, there are some merits to this... unconventional style of filmmaking. It's sort of a stream-of-consciousness thing and that's pretty interesting, having a movie that's purely reliant on visuals as opposed to dialogue to tell its story, and the way so many non-relevant things are thrown into the picture makes it have a broader worldview than what movies typically have. But it's just so outright goofy that I personally found it difficult to take it 100% at face value, though I was trying very hard. It's obviously a beautiful and culturally important film- perhaps with some political allegories that I am unfortunately missing- but the whole affair is so over-the-top dramatic that I couldn't get into it like I could a less hammy film.

I appreciate that it exists and was made and everything and liked it well enough, but all the emotions were dialled up way beyond anything reasonable and it came out more ridiculous than anything. I envy the people who can take this seriously because they all got a solid movie about the trials and tribulations of a young werewolf whereas I just got confused.

The Sender (1982)

directed by Roger Christian
UK
91 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Right off the bat, this movie's got a really intriguing opening scene- the camera follows a young man waking up on the side of a road somewhere, filling his jacket with stones, and just walking into the ocean without any trace of emotion on his face. Unfortunately immediately following that is the first taste of a lot of misinformed ideas this movie has about mental illness, seeing as a large part of it takes place inside a mental hospital with stereotypically bad depictions of mentally ill people: the guy who thinks he's Jesus, the Vietnam vet, random people flailing about, you know the drill. Movies from this particular time period don't seem to care at all about how offensive their attitude towards mental health is so it's par for the course, but still disappointing.

Aside from the cruddy asylum scenes, what made this movie stand out among others of its era is that it leans away from exploitation and towards something a bit darker. Instead of being filled to the brim with as many flashy, loudly-soundtracked action scenes as possible, it works at creating an interesting and slightly foreboding atmosphere by keeping the cheese to a minimum, the romance subplots nonexistent, and the action on the down-low save for when it absolutely needs to happen, at which point it's jarring and potent. I was caught off-guard with how dark it actually is, I mean it's a far cry from being outright depraved but it's not the kind of airy, inconsequential horror that a lot of stuff from the 80s tends to be. Some of the scenes are genuinely pretty powerful, like that opening and a scene where an attempt at electroshock therapy sends several doctors flying through the air in slow-mo, and the sound design really helps the atmosphere along.

The exact nature of the main character John Doe (his real name is never mentioned), his telepathic abilities, and to what extent he can control them is kept vague until the very end, which is another thing keeping anything from getting too cliched. John Doe- played by Željko Ivanek looking all of maybe 15 years old- doesn't reveal much about himself at all except that he lives with his mother, and instead of probing into his past, that's basically all we have to go by, so we're never sure where to place our sympathies regarding him and his situation.

There's some weird religious symbolism that I didn't really understand the need for, it didn't seem to have much of an impact on anything and any mentions of it are isolated enough as to seem out-of-place. I got that John Doe supposedly has just a mom and no dad, like Jesus and all, but last I checked Mary Magdalene wasn't as disturbingly clingy and abusive as the mother in this film. I'm inclined to think the occasional reference to Christianity was a personal choice of the director that had nothing to do with the plot. Which brings me to another thing that I'm not even sure I should mention: The same guy who directed this movie later went on to do Battlefield Earth. How in the world can a person go from this to Battlefield Earth? This is still a good, solid movie (the ending's very predictable, but what can you do) but it's just baffling how you can make something good while all the while having it in you to make something as extraordinarily bad as Battlefield Earth.

The Treasure (2015)

directed by Corneliu Porumboiu
Romania
89 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

I don't remember why I wanted to see this so badly, only that whenever I saw it while looking through my watchlist I got the feeling that it was something I was especially interested in. It just recently popped up on Netflix so I figured I'd check it out.

It's kind of one of those things where the plot can't be summed up in a few sentences, because even though there's not much to it in terms of a complex storyline, once you actually watch it you'll see a lot of nuance and detail that you wouldn't be able to ascertain from a short summary. But, to oversimplify it: Basically a guy approaches a neighbor in his apartment complex and asks to borrow money so he can hire somebody with a metal detector to look around in a field on some property he owns, because he thinks there's some kind of buried treasure from the 1940s there. Pretty soon he ropes the other guy in and they both begin an inconvenient and expensive search for things they're not sure exist. The majority of the film takes place during the actual search and subsequent dig in the field.

Now, like I said, it's almost not even worth reading a synopsis before you watch it because you can't tell what it's like from that at all. There's a lot of conflicting statements from various film databases on what genre it is, and none of them really come too close to being accurate, but the most hilariously inaccurate one of all is imdb putting a "comedy" label on it. I guess in the vaguest, most nebulous sense of the word, it could be seen as "funny" in the way that watching a candid video of yourself is funny; you see all the subconscious behaviors you're not aware of and it's a little absurd to watch yourself looking so alien. That's the feeling you get watching this, that what you're watching is so realistic it might as well be about you.

This movie is bland as an aesthetic, and I have no idea how it works but it does. The pivotal moment where the plot really takes off takes place only a few minutes after the movie has started and comes about from a lengthy conversation between two neighbors about their mortgages. There's similarly "unnecessary" run-on conversations all throughout the rest of the film, just these weird scenes of people talking about things that usually get skimmed over in movies because they're things people do in real life, not in a movie. Something I've noticed from watching so many movies is that a lot of the time there's a marked "deviation", a spot where the film diverges from the possible and enters into the territory of being something that's entertaining yet implausible. I don't know where that deviation is in The Treasure, or if it even has one at all.

It might seem like hyperbole, but I truly found this to be a revolutionary style of filmmaking. This movie is about nothing on the surface, but looking a little deeper shows a consciousness of Romania's history as well as some interesting correlations to Robin Hood. All in all, what an unusual and wonderful thing this is. I can't compare it to much else except maybe some Berliner Schule films. I really loved it.

The Cursed Palace (1962)

directed by Hassan Reda
Egypt
83 minutes
2 stars out of 5
----

So I chose to watch The Cursed Palace because it's from Egypt and I don't think I've ever seen anything from Egypt, especially not any horror movies. I don't really know what I was expecting going into it but it definitely wasn't what I got.

It's... I'm not even sure "bad" would be the most accurate word for it, it's just that it's literally the cheesiest thing I've ever seen in my life. It doesn't reveal its cheese all at once, in the beginning it's sort of unusually peppy and upbeat and I'm like "...this is kind of a weird tone for a horror movie" but then the more you watch, the more ridiculous it gets. It's not just the sort of corniness that a movie acquires naturally over the years due to it becoming increasingly outdated, it's genuinely as goofy as it could possibly be and most likely it was still goofy in 1962.

I don't even know where to start with breaking down this mess. One of the most outstanding examples of its campiness is the soundtrack; it's got this incredibly dramatic, sweeping orchestral score that's completely inappropriate most of the time. At one point a woman runs down the stairs and is accompanied by something that sounds like Ride of the Valkyries. The acting is all uniquely terrible, every actor has their own particular way of under- or over-acting and nobody can play off of anybody else to save their life. The women are like weird Victorian caricatures of hysteria and the men are barely awake. There's a scene where a woman prances about her room and then wiggles into her bed with a broad smile on her face, looking almost directly into the camera, because that's how people get into bed in real life, right?

I guess technically it's got a plot, although it's pretty loose and felt like the actors were making things up as they went along. A lot happens that seems like it doesn't connect to anything, and overall the movie had the vibe of two stories that had been awkwardly mashed together: One about some kind of a romance amidst the processing of a recently deceased man's estate and inheritance, and one about a woman who screams and cries a lot in a very exaggerated manner because she keeps seeing the "ghost" of a man who's still living. At some point a man is menaced by what appear to be small, mobile bunches of hay. I kept hoping that part would eventually be explained but it is not. The whole thing is like a cross between one of those old Hammer horror ripoffs and a soap opera.

Pretty much the only thing that could save this movie is some context. If you're living in Egypt in 1962 and you don't have access to "classic", widely-praised movies from anywhere else in the world, this is decent entertainment. I'm aware that watching this film and making fun of it is a privilege and that this type of thing is all some people can get. And if the people who made this movie were proud enough of their muddled, unoriginal plot to go through with what it takes to produce and shoot a movie, then I'm glad. It's got some gorgeous music (the traditional stuff, not the orchestral bits) and a lovely but thematically unfitting dance scene, so I can't say it's all bad (just 99% bad), but in 2016 with all the advances in filmmaking from all over the world, this movie looks pretty silly.

Defying Everybody (1974)

directed by Yuri Ilyenko
Yugoslavia (Montenegro)
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

This movie comes from one of my very favorite directors, Yuri Ilyenko, who made The Eve of Ivan Kupalo which is one of my favorite movies of all time. As with Ivan Kupalo and many other Soviet and Yugoslavian movies of this time period, there's a special kind of dreamlike aspect to everything, but this time the movie itself is grounded in a harsh reality. It's still poetic despite the realism, though, and the gorgeous cinematography that always accompanies Yuri Ilyenko's films is there, but it covers a tumultuous time in Montenegrin history and doesn't spare any expense in doing so. Practically every shot is set up like a ritual, and sometimes you wonder while watching if it actually is a ritual, if you're seeing some kind of religious practice that you don't know about, but for the most part it's just the immaculately rehearsed and perfectly laid out visuals that make every small action by the characters look like something bigger and more significant.

The first thing to strike a viewer about Defying Everybody is that it is incredibly bleak. It takes place in an extremely poor Montenegrin village where the people are in desperate need of crops and money, and they're not even managing to scrape by- they're actively starving. They're eating the bark off of trees just to try and stay alive. It's upsetting how in need these people are. And it doesn't really get much better over the course of the film, circumstances change slightly and new developments arise but this isn't a movie that has some glorious moment of triumph, it's entirely filled with people who've begun to give up hope, and they pretty much stay hopeless for the entire film, save for the hero.

There's actually a tiny bright spot- probably the only humorous moment in the movie- where a villager and a visiting Russian man discover that the Russian and Serbo-Croatian languages share many similarities, and are surprised to learn that they can both understand each other. They find that they have different words for "vodka", but they both say "pour me one" just the same.

This is very much unlike any Western story of revolution and triumph over oppression. Its hero, Petar I Petrovic, eventually takes a stand against the invading Turkish army and sets Montenegro on a path towards economic freedom and independence, but he's not exactly viewed as a folk hero by the townspeople. No, they do not like him at all, they don't think he's making good decisions as the town's bishop and essentially their leader, and at one point they even throw stones at him. But when it comes time for revolution, when it's time for the army to assemble, they follow him anyway.

The bloody price of victory is not forgotten or taken lightly at all in this film, and at the end it's almost difficult to figure out whether or not the village was victorious over the Turks because the depiction of the toll of battle is just so grim. The bodies pile up; men, women, children, a huge percentage of the village is killed in this strife. It's made clear that Petrovic was a very important figure in Montenegro's history, but it's also made clear that their liberation did not come easily and it certainly didn't come fast enough to be covered in one 85-minute movie. All of this is is a retelling of actual events, so if you're looking for a lesson in Montenegrin history, this would be great to watch as not only does it tell the story but it tells it gorgeously, with beautiful music and beautiful costuming.

The She-Butterfly (1973)

directed by Đorđe Kadijević
Yugoslavia
61 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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This movie is available in full on archive.org for free and, like everything else on the site, legally! Tomb on the Moon officially endorses archive.org, it's an excellent place to find weird old movies and weird obscure music. It's best known for its massive cache of legal concert bootlegs (specifically more Grateful Dead than I've ever seen in my life), but there's a decent amount of movies on there too if you go digging.

Anyway. The She-Butterfly is one of not many horror movies to come out of Yugoslavia during the late 60s-mid 70s, although I almost feel like "horror" is too modern a label to put on something like this. I feel like if I knew the intent behind it, if I knew for sure that it was made with horror in mind, I would be much more comfortable calling it that. But as it is, there's a lot of folktales and region-specific myths and legends that, while having elements that would be called horror today (vampires, werewolves, curses, what-have-you), predate anybody's notion of horror as a genre by so much that it feels inappropriate to call them that.

Horror or no horror, though, there's no denying that this movie has a great vampire. This feels like it gets back to... not "the roots" of vampires as a concept but a more true-to-form portrayal of them as creatures that are undoubtably inhuman. The movie goes a far less sophisticated route than any iteration of the Dracula story; its vampire seems to be half-feral and is covered with hair, like a vampire/werewolf hybrid without the necessity of the full moon in its transformation. It gets a little bit more unsettling since the whole thing mostly takes place in the daylight, and there was something very eerie about hearing that bizarre hooting noise the vampire made (another thing setting it apart from pop culture vampires) that was actually more foreboding than it would have been had the vampire only come out at night.

Despite the vampire, I think this is definitely not a movie for somebody who's specifically looking to watch a horror movie. It's better suited to someone with an interest in the culture of this particular area of the world during this particular time period, because it's shot in the gorgeous Serbian countryside and it's full of beautiful traditional clothing and representations of the culture of what is now Serbia, and it's got more to do with those things than it does with vampires as we usually think of them.

It is also, however, a tremendously entertaining watch. It's sort of an aside, but apart from the plot about the guy who wants to marry a girl whose father won't let him be with her because he's poor, or the plot about the vampire killing everybody who goes to work in the village's flour mill, it's got a pretty weird sense of humor. I liked that there wasn't really one main character but instead there's a gang of something like 6-7 men forming a "council" who just kind of go everywhere together. There's a scene in which they all dig up the supposed vampire's grave and then collectively attempt to capture a small white butterfly that comes out of the grave. At one point they decide to go to a very old woman living in the village who sort of knows everything, and she's so old and deaf that they have to shout right in her ear. It's not coming out as funny on paper as it was on film, but the rowdy, boozy vibe of this group provided a classic humor to compliment the vampire story and I definitely don't think that sense of humor- or much else in the movie, for that matter- came about accidentally.

The Reconstruction of William Zero (2015)

directed by Dan Bush
USA
97 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I was a bit too hasty in judging this movie based off of its corny title, and if Amy Seimetz hadn't been in it, I probably wouldn't have watched it at all. It's just a silly name- it's like "Darkly Noon"; it doesn't sound realistic at all, but at least Darkly Noon actually sounds cool. My point is that I didn't expect it to be anything special and it turned out that it was. I also found out that the director previously worked on The Signal (the 2007 one, not the 2014 one) which was similar to this in that it was a strong, unusual sci-fi movie with personal undertones.

It starts off unassuming and then the science fiction element of it slips in, quietly and quickly. Prior to watching, I didn't know anything about the movie aside from what Netflix says about it, so I wasn't expecting it to be about what it turned out to be about, and I appreciated that because it wasn't a huge plot twist or anything, but it was still something unexpected and fresh that I didn't anticipate going into it. There are some other twists later on but you get the general framework of it pretty fast, and it's going to be borderline impossible to actually discuss the movie without revealing what it's about so maybe don't read past this point if you want to go into it totally blind.

I was really impressed with how fresh it stays after revealing that first chunk of plot. It would have been easy to just abandon the story to the cliches of other films dealing with this situation- and it does that a tiny bit, there's a lot of the same moral quandaries and such that you'd usually find in a movie like this- but it keeps throwing new things at you, never feeling content to just leave the story be and stop adding to it. It's great though because it's not like it whacks the viewer over the head with any of this, even though it tends towards the convoluted side of things at the end it still doesn't feel like it's trying to outsmart viewers or anything. I'd tentatively say that this is like Shane Carruth directing a more linear film. Tentatively, because suggesting that something is similar to Shane Carruth's work is a weighty comparison that I don't often make.

I feel like this movie deals a lot with the idea that giving human life (and with it human suffering) to an artificial, manmade being is one of the worst forms of punishment possible, and that's an idea that I find interesting. A lot of the time when you watch movies or read stories about robots that are given sentience, the robot is written as this innocent thing in an overly cruel world, either unprepared or unequipped to deal with immorality. Sometimes it goes out and witnesses so much crime and human brutality that it returns to its creator with eyes full of either real or metaphorical tears, asking why the world is so cold because it doesn't understand, it doesn't have that coldness conditioned into it. That's a subject in this film to an extent, the concept that it's cruel to shape something into existence and force it to live in a world this harsh.

Something else it deals with is the myth of the "do-over", which comes up a lot in sci-fi and speculative fiction. It's when a character or multiple characters have lost something incredibly dear to them and attempt to break physics and science in order to get it back. Most of the time this is treated as a parable warning people away from hubris, born out of some collective feeling that some things are too good to be true, that sometimes a tragedy just needs to be left as a tragedy; fixing it would just make it worse. That's where it seemed like this movie was going, but the end actually seemed to totally go against this, because the main character gets what he wants in the end with no real lesson or moral about it being better to leave things be. I can't say I hated the ending but I definitely didn't think it was in line with the overall concept of the film.

Xtro (1982)

directed by Harry Bromley Davenport
UK
84 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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By far the most lasting impression Xtro has left on media as a whole has been one gif (here) that has been taken and reposted so many times that hardly anybody actually knows where it's originally from. It's really interesting to me because the method behind getting the creature in the gif to look like that is actually very simple: It's a person on all fours with their belly facing upward (think Linda Blair crawling down the stairs in The Exorcist, but slower) who has their entire face covered by a mask that looks like it's facing outwards, so instead of a person in makeup, the effect is that of a bizarre creature with backwards, twisted limbs. It's really clever and the first time I saw the gif it unsettled me a little because of how unnatural the movement looks. Besides just that scene, the movie's got some excellent practical effects, in fact I'd say that the its strength is disproportionately lent towards practical effects and creature makeup while a lot of other areas are much weaker.

From a sort of abstract, conceptual standpoint, it's got a lot of the same elements that make certain episodes of The X-Files remain creepy through the years even though they may not have aged well. The horror of it comes from a collective fear of corruption, invasion, violation, etc- but it works off of archetypes more than original concepts, so it's something that would basically still give off the same vibe no matter what type of story it's used in. A memorable and creative genre film would take those archetypes and put a unique spin on them, adding its own new ideas while keeping enough of the old tropes and standards to make recognizable in the canon of genre films. A less creative movie would just shoot the scenes and feel like it's going through the motions and presented a series of cliches with nothing new added.

That's not to say that Xtro isn't original, however. It may not be the most well-made movie but it most certainly goes to some weird places. It felt less concerned about justifying the aliens' presence and more preoccupied with coming up with the strangest imagery possible. There's a scene or two in the tail end of the movie where there's just a black panther in the main characters' house for no reason? It's never fully explained how it got there. The movie leans towards the bizarre more often than not but unfortunately has a bad case of style-over-substance.

There's a lot of primal fears put kind of on the backburner that I wish they would have gone a little further with. Probably the biggest one was that sense of foreignness where a character sees their loved one return from being assumedly lost forever, but it isn't them, they can look the person straight in the eye and it'll look like them outwardly but there's something else inside them now. Movies that can properly execute that uncanny valley-like effect usually win me over, and there were shades of it in Xtro, but it didn't have enough atmosphere to help push it along. It almost goes full The Thing in terms of how badly the alien lifeform seems to want to take over human bodies and meddle around with people, and I wanted to see more of that.

Also, what is "Xtro"? Are we supposed to assume that that's the alien's name? Or maybe the planet it comes from? I know there's a few sequels to this movie so maybe it gets explained in one of those, but there's no background on the name Xtro in this one at all.