Behemoth (2015)

directed by Liang Zhao
China
95 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

Behemoth is an artsy documentary on coal-mining operations in inner Mongolia that takes a look at the tangible effects of pollution as well as bringing a slightly more intangible perspective, with a narration that centers on the horrors of mining as a kind of dream, just one big horrific hallucination that guides its viewers into destruction like Virgil guiding Dante in Hell.

Getting down to the business of what the title is referring to, it would seem obvious that the Behemoth in question is humanity, but the narration mentions that we are both Behemoth and Behemoth's minions- insinuating that the true Behemoth is on the less tangible side of things, borne into the world as the idea of a society that needs endless amounts of energy. The Behemoth in question is a concept, a way of life set in place when modern transport was first invented, the never-ending desire for more and more fuel is the master that commands us and works its minions to the bone and, more often than not, to death.

Most documentaries on the environment that I'm used to seeing have this sardonic, holier-than-thou tone in which they expose the people in charge of foolishness like climate change denial and the constant pushing forward of laws that are harmful to the planet. Behemoth challenges most of that. It forgoes interviews with the workers for a sparse narration and startling imagery, and the point of view, instead of coming from a position of superiority, is despondent. It doesn't ask you to hate, it doesn't invite you to create prejudices and cast blame. It just asks you to grieve. We're all complacent in this in some way or another- there's not going to be a massive shutdown and overhaul of modern transportation tomorrow; this kind of destruction didn't happen overnight and it won't be fixed overnight either. All minions of the Behemoth of capitalism and the supply-and-demand chain.

It's refreshing to see something so focused on the sorry state of the coal industry and the people being worked to death by it that isn't exploitative, doesn't take the power away from the "little person", just tells their story. Tear-jerking interviews are not needed to impart a sense of urgency. All that's needed is the sound of labored breathing and a man carrying a mirror to reflect the devastation around him. There are shots of untouched beauty alongside the man-made grit and grime, but these shots aren't inserted deliberately to provide contrast- they genuinely exist right alongside the mines. Sheep run down a hillside that, a short amount of time later, has tons of dirt and debris dumped onto it by trucks.

Whether intentionally or not- and I get the feeling that it may have been intentional- Behemoth is reminiscent of 2012's breakout documentary Leviathan, but much bleaker. Unless the average viewer is an expert on the ins and outs of coal mining, as it was with Leviathan and commercial fishing, the movie will come off sort of surreal- you constantly wonder what makes that noise, or what that piece of machinery is doing. A large point in Behemoth is that the end product of these mines goes so far from where it originated that nobody who mined it actually has access to it, and it makes the class divide stand out in absurd relief: What's the purpose of these immense, immaculate, uninhabited cities if the people who gave their lives for the raw materials never get to see them?

The Fits (2016)

directed by Anna Rose Holmer
USA
72 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

So I kept seeing The Fits on lists of horror films and I had my doubts about it belonging to that genre, but if any genre needs more movies with young black girls in it (trick question. they all do) it's horror, so I was keeping an open mind. I still doubt that this could be considered a horror movie, but it does have a specific vibe that's mostly occupied by some very, very white films: That hard-to-describe niche where a movie is kind of unsettling but you can't tell why. Maybe there's discordant music or too much silence or details that don't make sense. It's like the darker side of magical realism, and although it's my favorite thing, I don't know if I can name any movies like that with any significant number of black people in them.

The Fits' greatest strength is probably that it uses ways of looking at motion and gesture that felt totally new. You can have a dance film, you can have a film where the main character is a very physical person, but there's something different about The Fits and its particular point of view. I'm still not sure how it managed to have the camera look at the main character and feel like it was looking out from her perspective at the same time. Royalty Hightower (who I'm very excited to see in the future) gives off a performance that's amazingly nuanced- she goes out there and, though she's an accomplished boxer, gives these dance performances that are really, really mediocre, but she brings a kineticism to her movements and even though the girls around her may be doing better in a technical sense you still feel 100% of her intent. She brings all of this with a perfectly straight face and commands every scene she's in.

Even actresses who are not at the forefront, like the main character's companion Beezy, have attention paid to their personal motion. The childhood need to constantly be wiggling, dancing, doing something with your body, that's the thing conveyed through every actor, bit part or big part.

When I think of the term "the fits", it sounds to me like something psychiatrists in the 1800s thought women would get if they, like, stared at the color red for too long. A swoon or a fainting spell. But in practice, on film, the spells the girls fall under look more like the grips of a religious terror, moving in waves through the students of a dance class until it's inevitable that they're all going to get it at some point or another. I felt like from the main character's viewpoint the fits may have been kind of a monumental achievement of dance- to be able to shake and shiver with such force and yet do it completely involuntarily, that sounds like the ultimate show of skill. Maybe that sense of envy was intentional, maybe it wasn't, but the way the episodes play into the plot seems like it takes a turn that I wasn't expecting but probably should have been.

The simplicity of the ultimate metaphor (?) does not change the fact that this is an amazing movie with a stellar payoff in one singular moment of impossibility followed by triumph. There's tons of talent in this and I'm eager to see where the crew goes from here. I mean I can't tell you what to do but watch this instead of The Neon Demon, okay?

Housec(r)eeping post.

To celebrate the Halloween season, I'm going to be temporarily going back to my one-review-a-day schedule in October and reviewing a horror movie every day for the whole month. It's sort of a tradition for me to watch a horror movie every day in October, I make a big deal of it every year and I just want to celebrate on my blog too. Even though no one cares.

Also, if anybody is reading this who's actually in Athens, I'm going to be entering some of my short fiction into the Flagpole newspaper's Halloween short story contest. I've never won before, but I have a good feeling this year. So if you see a Rhys in the paper, that'll probably be me. I don't know too many other people named Rhys in the southern US.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

directed by Jean Epstein
France
63 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

The 1920s are possibly the best decade for cinematic adaptations of Poe's works, because already we've got the gloomy caste that the black-and-white and the actors' dramatic makeup-slathered faces give to everything, and coupling that with sets that are shadowy and grim creates the ideal atmosphere with which to convey Poe's vision. A large part of the aesthetic appeal of this particular version of the House of Usher tale is due to age and the degradation of the print- graininess and slow destruction of nitrate causing all the actors to have an unearthly glow, the roughness of the camerawork making everything waver and shake, et cetera. But that is not to say that none of its beauty is deliberate.

I don't doubt that the groundwork behind most of why it looks so foreboding today was laid down during its production. The sets look somewhat bizarre, like expansive carpeted-and-curtained warehouses dressed only with a piece of furniture here or there, so large that they threaten to swallow up characters. Lady Madeline enters the set and her figure is dwarfed by the room she's in. The quality of the film obscures her facial features and the details of her body so much that we may as well be looking at a ghost. All of this (melo)drama, all of the interaction between actor and environment- I'm sure that was intentional. Goofy as some of it is in retrospect, this is primo acting circa 1928.

It's been a long, long time since I read the source material, so I can't recall how true-to-form this movie was, but it seemed to me like it took some liberties in creating a somewhat different version of the Usher household than is popularly depicted. In it, the slow decline of Usher's wife seems to be something he himself is unwittingly doing to her; feverishly painting her image over and over and so drawing some essence from her physical body until her eventual death. This paints a portrait (heh) of Usher as constantly grieving husband, putting the horror of the experience front and center but also allowing for a great deal of genuine sadness and melancholy. Roderick Usher, last of his family line, alone and destitute in his cavernous manor, has nothing to fill his house with, so he fills it with suffering.

Like it or not- and really, who doesn't like it- I think these stories have become our folklore. Poe is now what we light our campfires by, his works are what we call upon as archetypes and parables and examples of things so oft-repeated that they become the definition of themselves, their most distinctive elements isolated and taken out of context so many times that they're instantly recognizable in the wild. Jean Epstein's flickery, depressing image of the Ushers as being haunted by each other's desires takes the essentials and frames them with 1920s grace. It also sports Luis Buñuel as its co-writer, quite early on in his career.

Antibirth (2016)

directed by Danny Perez
Canada
94 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

This has been getting a decent amount of buzz lately, but none of that buzz mentions that it comes from the director of Oddsac. Oddsac is one of those things you watch and you think "Man, if that person directed a horror movie..." and thankfully that actually happened this time.

I think this director's approach to horror is a really interesting one because its entire tone and the majority of its visuals gives it this hyper-modernity while not really being a "criticism" of modern life per se, but still something along those lines. A portrayal of the dismal reality that a lot of people find themselves in, sprinkled with hysteria and eye-popping color to reinforce it. You'll see this kind of aggressive tackiness a lot in stuff that Adult Swim does as well as a lot of internet-based horror these days, because it's a form of art that's very accessible to millenials and people who grew up within a certain timeframe- it draws heavily off of pop culture, of forgotten kid's shows on VHS, of TV preachers of the alien abductee variety, of pizza parlors, of local commercials, of weird Chuck-e-Cheese ripoffs, all the delirious products of the mid-90s to early 2000s probably intended to be for children but coming off as an adult's experiences after drinking a bottle of cough syrup instead.

I'm not afraid to call this movie "druggy", because even though saying "haha this movie is like drugs!" can be narrowminded at best and disparaging at worst, I feel like this aesthetic is fairly obviously intended to come off like a bad trip, and it works. It's so much weirder than I thought and probably weirder than you would think as well if you knew little about it. It's not just that it's a frenzied neon wasteland, it's a frenzied neon wasteland that gets so strange it appears to exist in a reality foreign to ours at times. But it doesn't; this is our world, this is how awful it gets and this is the lifestyle trying to cope with it forces many of us into.

The aesthetic is tied with Natasha Lyonne's acting for the best thing about the film, and boy is it a close tie indeed. I love how genuinely nasty she is in this, how she's beyond just the "tough girl" stereotype and into where people writing women characters fear to tread. Underneath her binges and her benders is a desperation, and I think that's where the body horror really works: This is somebody trying to get away from themselves, not somebody looking for fun, but someone who turns to drugs and alcohol to forget about everything else, and being forcefully drawn back to her body by some kind of mysterious pregnancy makes it all feel like a waking nightmare.

Unfortunately the ending is a bit of a let down. It's too abrupt and, without spoiling anything, it's almost an insult to the main character. Overall it's good and a welcome departure from the norm, but that ending could use some fixing up.

The Last Winter (2006)

directed by Larry Fessenden
USA
101 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

This was my second watch of this movie because I felt like I had missed something important the first time around. Upon revisiting it, I was able to tell for certain what that thing that impeded my appreciation of it was: For some reason I used to have this idea that Larry Fessenden only made goofy, non-serious horror, and I don't know where I got that impression but it's definitely wrong. Fessenden makes horror films as serious as anything else, especially in the case of The Last Winter, which is a capable effort that carries with it a sense of urgency. Upsetting that this was made ten years ago but the situation it deals with is still as perilous today as it was then.

Ecological horror isn't exactly a new idea, but a huge part of why this movie doesn't just fade into the background with all the rest of the half-hearted "global warning" flicks is that it doesn't start us off disliking the main characters. Perspective is important: The people we get familiar with in the first minutes of the film are by all accounts normal, cheery people; they all get along smoothly for the most part and they live their lives untroubled by their jobs. In fact, they enjoy what they're doing, though what they're doing is ripping a hole in the earth and siphoning off its resources. But these are not, in the classical sense of the term, the bad guys- they don't steal candy from kids, they don't screw each other over, they're normal people. Which illustrates that oftentimes those orchestrating a detrimental process can be as well-intentioned as you or I.

The tundra is really a wonderfully scary place to base a horror movie because that environment is, I believe, harsher than anything else on the planet. The cold can get physically painful, it's a formidable opponent to humans because it basically chops our instincts down to the barest level of survival, stripping us of anything but the need to get warm now. It makes you want to curl up inside yourself and not move, it makes the slightest effort to do anything outside of keeping yourself rolled up into a ball excruciating. Now imagine that setting, and imagine not being alone in it- imagine being out there with a force borne of that cold, a force that you've disturbed, a force that is pissed off and does not care about how earlier that morning you were throwing a football around with your friends.

Larry Fessenden deals with this particular entity a lot in his films (there's probably more of his movies that do feature it than don't) and I don't make a habit of mentioning the name because I'm too weird and superstitious about it, but you can find out easily enough what it is. I think he takes a very apropos approach to depicting this thing, although I don't belong to any of the Native American tribes whose mythology it originates from so I can't say for certain. But the way he explores this force seems, to me, to be more like a deep fascination and respect than a desire to exploit only its most accessible elements that would easily fit into a mainstream horror movie.

There's some questionable CGI, but this is a different approach to the natural horror genre that feels genuinely foreboding. The phrase "rude awakening" comes to mind, although the rudeness is not unjustified on the part of the thing being awoken.

The Sentinel (1977)

directed by Michael Winner
USA
92 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

The Sentinel is a movie in which religious horror comes to the hustle and bustle of 1970s New York. Or I guess it would be more accurate to say that it's an amalgamation of religious, natural, and very, very personal horror, infiltrating the high-class New York life of a fashion model who should by all accounts have her entire life ahead of her. To keep things vague, I'll say that she still does, but she doesn't end up spending it the way she may have envisioned... By the way, avoid synopses of this one, all of them give away the end of the movie pretty blatantly for some reason.

The first thing I have to say about The Sentinel is that it's good. It's really, really good. Here I was, hesitant to watch it, expecting something from the cesspool of cheesy 70s horror that doesn't hold up, and instead of that mess I got genuinely one of the best horror films I've ever seen. Every single element of it is on-point: Cristina Raines plays the main character with charm that draws from decades of girls in horror prior. She's perfect as the scared girl, the tough girl, the hopeful girl; stumbling through the dark with one strap of her nightgown down, trembling, flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other. All the others in the cast lend a whole lot to the film as well, and so does the writing- this is a movie with a fairly extensive cast of characters and none of them feel for a second like a cliche, or even like they only exist in movieland; they don't just show up, do one plot-related thing, and disappear, they do things that you wouldn't think were necessary and in the process they become these fully fleshed-out, realistic characters.

Other high points include the way the city is photographed lovingly as if it were a forest or a jungle somewhere, the way the plot evades your expectations, the pacing, the sets, and pretty much everything else. The two things I didn't like about it were that it uses lesbians as a kind of shock factor, as these sexual deviants meant to instill a sense that something was wrong in the main character's world, and also that at the very end it uses people with deformities for the same effect. 

Back onto the things I did like: I just don't see this kind of horror coming from the 70s. Maybe it's a narrow-minded view of genre film in that era, but when I watch a horror movie that's this old, I don't expect it to be anywhere near this good. It's so convincingly ominous, so dark, so utterly serious that it defies aging and remains a shining example of the genre despite it now being nearly forty years old. I think it manages that feeling of darkness because it's incomparable, you can watch other horror movies and be able to tell "oh, this is about witches", or "oh, this is about devil worship", or "oh, this is about a haunted house" or whatever other categories apply neatly to said film. But you can't do anything like that with The Sentinel. The horror is so personal and is such a good depiction of paranoia and uncertainty stemming from the main character's past life experiences. You can't see anything coming in this film. You might be able to guess at a thing or two before they happen but as a whole it's made up of parts that are unusual and free of cliches.

To any filmmakers looking to remake this in the modern era- don't touch it. This isn't something that can be improved upon. The magic happened once and it's not going to happen again no matter how good of a remake anyone could conjure up.

X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

directed by Roger Corman
USA
79 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

There was a post going around tumblr (maybe there still is) about this, saying how for the most part it's a fairly unassuming movie up until the very end, at which point it crosses over into cosmic horror. That it's directed by Roger Corman probably has a lot to do with that, but at its heart this is such an unsettling movie that it seems like it was made years and years after its actual release date.

It doesn't start off too promising. The opening shot is a ~20-second static shot of a bloody eyeball with operatic wailing in the background (the wailing is incredibly cheesy and is present throughout the whole film), and then we get treated to that persistent 60s sexism when a woman calmly talks about trying to do her job and the main character writes it off as her "temper". So it's not at all above the trappings of its era, and honestly it looks like a slightly better Herschell Gordon Lewis film most of the time, but like I said, something nasty lurks once you manage to get past the ridiculousness.

If the title doesn't explain it clearly enough, it's about a scientist who discovers a formula that can make anybody or anything (that poor test monkey...) have x-ray vision. There's a lot of inconsistencies on how exactly this works and what the extent of its power with a single dose is, and some of them are actually quite glaring- we have to shlep through the obligatory "I can see naked people!!" jokes, but while the scientist is checking out all these naked people, why can he still see walls, doors, tables, and the like? Why would he see everyone with their clothes off but not be able to look past household items? There's just a couple of things like that that made me feel like there was too much filler here- which was unsurprising considering that on its own this story could probably fuel a Twilight Zone episode, but nothing more.

I think eyesight is one of the subjects that makes us the most aware of how ultimately narrow human perception can be. There's really no way to know exactly what we can't know, since the only perspective we have is restricted to our own eyes and brains, while other organisms may be more capable than us. The mantis shrimp's complicated eye structure renders them able to perceive a number of colors that we can't. When a factory makes a vinyl record colored white, the color isn't actually "white" in the way that we'd think of it; the things added to the mix to create it just appear white to the human eye. So really, the concept in X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes is quite terrifying when you think about it, and is a step above your average "see through women's clothes!"-type exploitation, though it's not shy about using that as a plot point.

The story also deals with something that underpins a lot of horror media: The idea that there's something else out there in the universe, not in terms of a life-form on a scale we can comprehend but some sinister presence, whether physical or material, hidden deep beneath the layers of human perception. It's like the Stephen King short story The Jaunt, there's just some place or some thing out there that's deadly to humans on a fundamental level. Just like the boy in The Jaunt has his mind ripped apart by comprehending what hides underneath the void, the main character in X eventually sees so deeply through to the disturbing workings of the universe that it ruins him, and it makes for pretty good cinema.

Dagon (2001)

directed by Stuart Gordon
Spain
98 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

H. P. Lovecraft is one of a handful of horror writers whose work is very popular for adapting into film but also notoriously difficult to actually do justice to on film. The thing about Lovecraft in print is that despite all the flowery prose, his particular style of horror all boils down to the unfathomable, the things you cannot perceive because they exist on a level so alien that human minds can't grasp it. Many directors tend to take his prose a little bit too literally and attempt to recreate in detail the creatures he describes, when the best option would actually be to either keep the monsters spoken of but not seen, or to just go so out there with their appearance that they're unrecognizable. Look beyond tentacles and make something so grotesque it's not even immediately recognizable as any kind of life form at all.

Stuart Gordon, director of Dagon as well as a very large back-catalogue of other Lovecraft and Lovecraft-inspired films, generally tends to go for the in-your-face body horror and rubbery monsters approach. Which can be tremendously entertaining- just look at From Beyond- and has earned him a large cult following, but in my personal opinion, although his movies are fun, they usually miss the point of Lovecraftian horror.

All of this is why I was very surprised when Dagon actually went more towards the "unspeakable horror" route. It starts off pretty rough (the first glimpse of the unknown we get to see is... a mermaid???) but slowly gets more and more maddening until it ends up firmly in that zone of things so horrible you can't even understand them. All the while, though, there's still this disparity- on the one hand you have the Dagon-worshipping townspeople, depicted very well as unsettling and awful with only the bare minimum of makeup, prosthetics, and spot-on sound effects, and then on the other hand you have tentacles, tentacles, tentacles. All lovingly rendered in some of the worst CGI I've ever seen in my life. Do I want to see graphic designers hamfistedly attempt to render what it might look like if a woman's naked bum terminated into two long, thick tentacles instead of legs? No. Do I want to see the same thing done in practical effects, even if they're only semi-competent? Still not really, but the snatches of practical effects here and there in Dagon are just about a thousand times better than all of that awful CGI, and there was so much I wished they'd used makeup for instead.

I guess maybe all that cheesiness at the beginning wasn't without a purpose, because it does serve to make the latter portion of the movie more horrific in contrast. It's a little like a reverse Event Horizon: Where Event Horizon starts out disturbing and Lovecrafty and slowly gets cheesier and cheesier until you have Sam Neill shooting fireballs out of his hands, Dagon starts out with ridiculous early-2000s partying on a boat and then when all is said and done people are begging to be killed because their minds have been so broken by an Eldritch abomination that they can't handle it any longer.

Like I said, it's weird tonally and there's some stuff that didn't at all fit, but bottom line, it's good. It's way better than I thought and more nuanced than I thought Stuart Gordon was capable of. What it lacks in the Jeffrey Combs department, it makes up for in the slithery unspeakable horror department.

Bells from the Deep (1993)

directed by Werner Herzog
Germany/Russia
60 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I have to admit (with great shame) that Werner Herzog's extensive filmography is a blind spot to me. I've seen a couple of his films and I loved Aguirre: The Wrath of God, but as far as his older stuff or the majority of his documentaries go, I'm not familiar with them at all. I do know, however, that his attitude towards filmmaking and the way he approaches cinema as a whole is something I can get behind, and he seems like just a really great person in general. So I will explore the depths of his back catalogue further in the future.

I feel like Herzog sees a lot of the inherent humor in any situation or locale, but not in an offensive way. I was concerned initially that Bells From the Deep was going to be nothing but making fun of people whose way of life is something most audiences aren't familiar with, because it seems like from the reception it got that was the majority opinion; that the people featured in the film were somewhat of a spectacle. But even if the movie itself was intended to be humorous (which I honestly don't think it was), as a viewer you can watch it and acknowledge that it came from a place of ridicule but still see for yourself that the content isn't really anything to be made fun of.

Basically in so many words I'm saying that I think Herzog explores a lot of the silliness in everyday life while still respecting the fact that what may appear silly to outsiders holds enormous significance to those practicing it.

Some of the villagers in the film don't seem to know what to do around the camera and it gets... a little bit uncomfortable. The viewer is so conscious of the camera being held by another person that it feels almost intrusive at points. Here you're in the point of view of someone barging into a house while its occupants sit extremely still and try not to acknowledge the camera, or in a church as a man baptizes a squalling baby, or watching somebody who believes himself to be the secondcoming of Christ talk of love and light and peace while blessing the camera (or at least blessing in the general direction of the camera).

There's a definite degree of awkwardness that comes into play, but as much as there's awkwardness there's also immense beauty. Hardcore religion, in this context, ceases to be something you jab your thumb at and go "get a load of this guy" to, because it's so genuine and so purely good-natured. It gets weird- as weird as a guy doing a mass exorcism while some girl in the audience screams and moans like she's being tortured- but all of the folktales, all of the blessings, everything depicted therein comes from a place of joy. If Russian Jesus wants to wave his arms about and declare that he is the Word of God, as long as he doesn't hurt anyone, I don't see any reason to object and I don't think Herzog's lens does either.

If nothing else, this is worth a watch for the snatches of folk music you get to hear. Throat singing is my very favorite style of folk music, and we also get to meet possibly the most skilled bell-ringer in the whole of Russia. As a whole the thing is just a great big joyful noise depicting with empathy a people living in the wake of a huge restructuring of their country but remaining as true to their beliefs as ever.