Dark Star (1974)

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

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

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

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

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

directed by Werner Herzog
Germany/France
90 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Chauvet Cave is very beautiful even if you don't see what's on the walls- it's a space where time operates differently, and the unbelievably slow growth of calcite and other minerals making up the materials of the cave itself would seem to suggest that this is not the dominion of humanity; it belongs to the earth, who can reclaim it as she sees fit. But the cave isn't just a stunningly beautiful yet empty cave, it contains some of the most important and ancient works of art found thus far. 

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

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

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

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

Under the Shadow (2016)

directed by Babak Anvari
Iran
84 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Set in Tehran in the middle of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, Under the Shadow provides a backdrop of real-life horror to its supernatural threats, and the two compliment each other perfectly well. The "shadow" in the title is an allusion to the rules and regulations set in place by Iran's ruling parties at that time, but it also serves as a double entendre to refer to the being(s?) haunting the main character's home. This is a recurring theme: Metaphors applicable to both real-life unrest and less tangible horrors.

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

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

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

Morgiana (1972)

directed by Juraj Herz
Czechia
97 minutes
4 out of 5 stars
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First and foremost, Morgiana is a film devoted to its own aesthetic in a way few films are. It's luridly colored with a degree of care that only makes it look better the older and more outdated it gets. Every wallpaper and every inch of satin or chenille or taffeta or other scraps of gorgeous, expensive-looking clothing that its characters casually wear holds up as well on film today as it did in 1972, if for slightly different reasons. Who knows if there was ever a time when people dressed like this in their day-to-day lives? I'm not even sure what time period this was supposed to be. I just know that it looks prettier than the majority of modern fashion catalogues.

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

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

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

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

Finisterrae (2010)

directed by Sergio Caballero
Spain
80 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Not much to go on with Finisterrae solely by its synopsis- "Two ghosts walk along the Camino of Santiago"- but maybe that brief sentence (it's not even really a sentence, is it?) is all that can be said for such an abstract film.

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

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

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

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

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

Train to Busan (2016)

directed by Sang-ho Yeon
South Korea
118 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Train to Busan has been getting a satisfying amount of praise recently, and I'm happy that that praise is going to something other than an American film for a change. South Korea is no stranger to the horror genre, but I think not many zombie films have been made there yet. There's some that are at the fringes, but they deal mostly with biological outbreaks rather than actual zombies.

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

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

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

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

Lights Out (2016)

directed by David F. Sanberg
USA
81 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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So as everybody already knows, Lights Out the movie is based on Lights Out the (very popular) short film. The short's popularity is most likely due to the fact that it was extremely stripped-down, relying on one actress in one very small space, but that it was also backed by the most primal of fears: The thought of something lurking in the dark. This has been humanity's nightmare since the beginning of time- the creature goes away when the lights are on, but comes back in the dark; even though you can't see it, it can see you. Fires die, lightbulbs are extinguished, and in a seamless transition of the ancient nightmare to modern anxiety, the iPhone screen goes dim. The longer movie doesn't abandon this baseline fear even for a moment.

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

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

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

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

Ventos de Agosto (2014)

directed by Gabriel Mascaro
Brazil
77 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I wasn't particularly interested in Ventos de Agosto to be honest; I think I had the idea that it was going to be something a lot more lewd than it actually was. Which is why I was surprised when it turned out to be more along the lines of slow/contemplative cinema, although the parameters of that particular sub-genre are hard to grasp much of the time. 

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

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

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

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