Spontaneous Combustion (1990)

directed by Tobe Hooper
USA
97 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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In the wake of Tobe Hooper's unexpected death, most people are gravitating towards his earlier works and of course his masterpiece Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There are some amazing and intimate reviews coming out examining his contributions both to the horror genre and to peoples' personal lives, and I thought I would contribute by defending one of his films that seems to have fallen by the wayside. Spontaneous Combustion is not a flawless film, but I hope that I can convince at least somebody that it has a lot of merit.

I was surprised that this movie so directly addresses the sinister underpinnings of the United States' atomic bomb program in the 50s. It's made very explicit that everything that goes wrong within this movie, and everything that plagues its main character, stems from rampant nuclear testing and a misunderstanding- if not blatant, intentional misuse- of nuclear power. There's something I want to point to as an example of the subtlety of this understanding: I'm not sure how true it is, but it's said that the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion was often called the "Fire of Heaven" throughout history, until an incident in which a priest burned alive, after which it was regarded as a more malicious force due to it affecting the clergy as well. This is, I think, a spectacular metaphor for the hypocrisy of the U.S.'s role in nuclear warfare- the awe with which the scientists and government men treat it when it's focused on somebody else, the proudness (in the moment, perhaps not so much today) of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the sudden awareness brought on this country's citizens that their fire of heaven can hurt them just as well.

There's a clarity to this movie that I also thought was interesting, and maybe it's just an unusual choice of dialogue or actors but it adds to what I felt was an undertone of direness. Instead of wordless screaming or generic pleas to a higher power the characters often address their situation directly, yelling "There's fire coming out of his arm!" or "The water just acts like fuel!" or anything else highlighting the impossibility of their suddenly having found themselves in flames. This made me think a lot about how direct Texas Chain Saw Massacre also was about its violence. Tobe Hooper seems to be best, even in movies that are less celebrated, at bringing your attention into the moment and forcing you to reckon with the nature of danger and fear.

I'm honestly just rambling a little bit at this point- most reviews dismiss this offhand due to a variety of things: the cheesiness of it; Brad Dourif's overacting; the comically sinister villains. But like I said, I want to defend this movie as something that is worth a second glance because it looks from my angle like the majority of its flaws are not entirely its fault. The lack of access to perfect special effects in 1990 isn't its fault, the way it aged looking like something from closer to 1960 than 1990 isn't its fault. It's got a lot of issues but there's something good and worthwhile underneath it all.

Naprata (2013)

directed by Mladen Milosavljević
Serbia
65 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Naprata is a quiet little horror movie about a group of filmmakers ostensibly looking to shoot a documentary about violence against women in rural parts of Serbia. It doesn't go too well initially, and the slow first thirty minutes are a bit trying for both viewer and characters, especially considering that it's half of a movie that's only barely over an hour long. There's not a single allusion to this eventually turning into a horror movie until eventually the filmmakers stumble upon a drunk ex-professor who's like "I'm not gonna talk about violence against women. How 'bout some vampires instead" and unloads upon them the story of a folkloric vampire known to inhabit a local swamp. With the help of some other folks, the documentary veers off into this territory instead, abandoning its original premise to do some good old-fashioned vampire hunting.

This sounds a little cheesy now that I'm writing it down, and there's generally a lot of ways to mess up a movie about vampire hunting, but I think how cheesy the subject matter sounds on paper versus how serious it feels within the film itself is a testament to the fact that Naprata really is a good movie. This isn't the sterilized Western conception of a vampire, which is also a reason why this doesn't feel as contrived as a pop vampire flick. This is more along the lines of a revenant or a traditional Eastern-European vampire, where the bloodsucking and aversion to garlic isn't as heavily featured if it's even there at all.

Considering the bare-bones look of the rest of the movie, I was expecting either nothing much to happen when the filmmakers finally found their vampire or for it to have looked goofy, but in reality the outcome was neither of those things. I don't want to spoil anything, but considering that the monster is literally right there on the poster, I would feel bad if I didn't mention that this is genuinely an awesome-looking ghoul. I liked the fact that there's almost no noise whatsoever when it dispatches with the main characters; we just see them each go off into the night ill-advisedly to investigate and then the next thing is the cameraman coming upon their body. We have to make up in our own heads what the Naprata did to them and how it did it. 

Guimba the Tyrant (1995)

directed by Cheick Oumar Sissoko
Mali, Burkina Faso
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I feel comfortable calling this a fantasy film because I feel like it was deliberately advertised as such from the start and because, although the touches of fantasy are subtle, it has all the trappings of something out of a classic good-over-evil fairytale. Things like the king's sensitivity to the sun, a trait that makes him seem inherently more villainous, and his one fatal weakness that can be exploited to bring him down are taken directly from fantasy narratives in popular fiction.

Whether they take place in the middle of crowded New York, in the Sahel like this one does, or on the moon, for that matter, I'm really fond of fantasy films that make use of the environment and don't use any special effects. There's something that feels more genuine about a movie that has scenes like this where a person does a spell and immediately the effects of it are seen, no CGI magical auras or overly dramatic superpowered fight scenes. Just the use of magic as a tool.

Aesthetically this thing is a treat as well- everything felt so big, all the women wore these large, chunky necklaces and earrings and there's murals on the walls that are huge and outlined with thick black lines so that they look like 2D drawings in a 3D world. It works with the colors of the Sahel so well, and this is something I've noticed a lot about films made in the dry, dusty portions of African countries. People think there's not much color to be seen there other than beige and maybe red but films like Guimba the Tyrant bring out an entire gorgeous spectrum.

I would be remiss to not mention that in context this is an important film as well, because its director, Cheik Oumar Sissoko, is not only a filmmaker but an active politician in his home country of Mali. He started a leftist political party called African Solidarity for Democracy and Independence that grew out of resistance to a military regime in the early 90s, and one of its founding members was directly involved in the overthrow of that government. So, unlike the vast majority of fantasy films in which a tyrannical government is depicted in its most basic form and not explored in-depth, Guimba the Tyrant is not only what it is on the surface but also the product of somebody who is directly involved with changing the system of governance in their country. The African Solidarity political party still holds influence in Mali today.

Crumbs (2015)

directed by Miguel Llansó
Spain, Ethiopia, Finland (not sure where Finland comes in though)
68 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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So due to a very poor choice of words, I thought this was going to be an entirely different movie than it actually is. When the synopsis refers to the main character as "figurine-sized", my interpretation of that was something along the lines of A Town Called Panic, I.E. that the main character was literally going to be a stop-motion figurine. But as it happens our protagonist is just a regular guy who happens to be short due to some skeletal deformities and I am very bad at interpreting metaphor. Also that's a bit insulting.

Anyway. I'm actually somewhat thankful for that mixup because it meant I was expecting a silly movie and instead got jarred by the unexpected pessimism of it all. The opening paragraphs establish a narrative about the end of civilization that feels horrifyingly possible; an apocalypse which comes about not due to any action taken to bring it but due to no action having been taken to prevent it. Humanity kind of bores itself to death. Everyone finds themselves disinterested in prolonging human civilization and so eventually we all just fade away. It's simple and you might scoff at it at first but it's easy to see the next generation or two becoming more and more disdainful or at least doubtful of the future of humanity.

These points about the end of society are well-established and understandable, but that's about the only thing that's understandable in Crumbs. It doesn't take a simple approach to its story and instead gives us a weird ball of random occurrences and surrealism mixed with notes about the evolution of culture after its context has been stripped away. Parts like the selling of plastic trinkets with epic stories attached to them about what they were supposedly used for before "the war" make sense, parts like the main character going on a journey away from the house he shares with his lover only to end up inside a fixture from that same house make much less sense.

But it all does come together pretty solidly in the end. I seldom see surreal movies like this where the emotional element of the plot is heavily emphasized despite the lack of events that a viewer could immediately connect with. But I guess if you look at it in a certain way, a lot of the important features of this movie do have analogues in today's environment: there's a derelict spaceship floating up in the sky that everybody has rumors about the eventual return of, which is like people looking to higher authorities than themselves that rarely actually give them an answer, and the trotting-out of cultural motifs attached to toy swords and action figures is basically what toy collectors do today. I probably could have watched more than 68 minutes of this but for something only a little over an hour long it gets the job done really well.

Without Name (2016)

directed by Lorcan Finnegan
Ireland
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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So this is something I had been excited about because the director also made a short film that came out in 2011 to a decent amount of praise called Foxes. For something that was only a scant handful of minutes long, it had an excellent sense of the uncanny and from that short I could tell that this director had a great full-length horror film in him.

For a while at the beginning of Without Name, we get to know the main character only through observing that he leads a bog-standard life: wife, child, car, house, job, et cetera. The compulsion placed on people by modern society to assimilate a certain way and lead your life according to a set of social expectations is half of the horror in this thing, honestly. I almost began to feel like it was taking a route to introducing our protagonist that was too generic, but I think that feeling of complete mundanity was what was intended to come through.

The main theme of this whole affair is that we've been away from nature for so long that it's started to feel uncomfortably foreign to the majority of us. The contrast between urban and rural living is such that the paltry amount of flora and fauna the average person might see in a day (trees and shrubs in traffic circles/roundabouts, the occasional deer or rabbit if you live in a greener part of the suburbs) is no comparison to what's truly out there, I.E. the forest that the main character in Without Name works in as a land surveyor. The film itself all but states outright that this feeling of cognitive dissonance in city-bred humans is what it was going for.

Despite its success in being atmospheric and immersive, Without Name is not quite without flaws. There were times when I felt that the narrative was taking a route that was obvious and easy, and there's no shame in doing something easy as long as you do it well, but for a film that had a lot of complex layering, it felt out of place. The shroom-tripping sequences in particular, while relevant to the plot, were used as a quick way to get the main character into an altered state of consciousness wherein there would be context for his seeing and feeling bizarre, supernatural things. And the romance between the main character and a younger woman he worked with was painfully obvious, and I had to commend both of them for wonderful acting all around, but it still felt like that affair was an artifact from a lesser movie that didn't have any place there.

Probably shouldn't have to be said.

...but with recent events.

If you support anything remotely related to white supremacy or white nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, Donald Trump, the "alt-right", or any ideology that seeks to exterminate any race or other group of people, this blog isn't a safe space for you, and I personally do not want you here. I don't make posts specifically about politics because this is a film review blog, but this sort of thing transcends politics, I think, and I felt the need to make a post about it.

Regularly scheduled Monday review coming at you tomorrow morning. Stay safe out there.

Ernest & Celestine (2012)

directed by Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner
France
80 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I probably don't need to explain too much about Ernest & Celestine because it's already a fairly popular movie. I probably also don't need to mention that the animation is flawless, fluid, inventive and generally a treat to look at. But mention it I will, because watching something like this where the characters are rendered in a fantastical yet structured style makes you realize that animated films that use computer-generated imagery (like most of Disney's modern films) are, though probably still as time-intensive as this, somehow lacking in the same level of warmth.

I actually love the inconsistency of proportions in this. For example, one of the larger plot points is that there's a thriving mouse dentistry industry that profits off of pilfering teeth from bears and putting them in mice's mouths. Ernest the bear also makes an excursion into mouse territory, which is ostensibly small enough as to have been established in little hidden places like storm drains; and compared to Ernest, Celestine the mouse is more like the size of a large rat or perhaps even a weasel, owing to the difficulty that would arise from needing to draw an actual mouse-sized mouse and a bear in the same frame.

Besides being an absolute treat visually, this has some unexpected things to say about capitalism as well. There's a surprising amount of focus on having and not-having, profiteering and class lines, things of that nature. A daddy bear selling candy to other bear children with glee and disregard for the fact that their teeth will rot while steadfastly keeping his own son from having one gram of sugar. Making money off the misfortune of others to the point of relying on it for the prosperity of your business. Also it covers taking back that which is unfairly held from you by capitalism- stealing food that exists in abundance when your own lack of money precludes you from getting even one decent meal.

Besides all of these important teachings about the nature of capitalism and profit, the message at the heart of Ernest & Celestine is not to listen to those who seek to categorize certain people as all being the same: Celestine and the rest of the mice are taught from infancy that bears are all murderous and scary, and the bears detest the possibility of something so pestilent as a mouse coming into their home. And in addition to this, the thing at the heart of it all is loving. The importance of finding someone who'll care for you and who you can provide happiness to in return. No matter what imaginary divides that relationship might happen to go across.

The Tripper (2006)

directed by David Arquette
USA
96 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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"That's Reagan's skeleton, marching our way/Sentimental violence/Leading his zombies in the fog eternally..."

-from "Reagan's Skeleton", Yeasayer

I'm surprised that a Ronald Reagan-themed slasher directed by David Arquette of "Scream" fame is not more popular, even in cult circles. In my opinion it's far from what I would call "bad"... corny, yes, but not terrible. I appreciate the concept a great deal: instead of being inspired by those who are universally reviled, like serial killers or people he saw in gory movies, the villain in The Tripper is inspired by an American president. Despite being primarily a comedic film, the role of the United States government in doing evil is something that's excluded from the pool of things to joke about here, which I was thankful for. 

The presence of the serial killer in disguise as Reagan actually comes from a little ways out of left field, because there's a moment or two when you're lead to believe the culprit is somebody other than who it really was- and then when the moment comes in where you finally do see him, there's a sense of revulsion and a strong uncanny valley effect created by that disturbingly realistic, yet severely off mask the killer wears. 

I felt like this movie sometimes couldn't figure out what direction to take in terms of seriousness versus non-seriousness, because there's moments where the acting is as serious as acting would be in any other movie with less Reagan in it, but... Paz de la Huerta is there. I guess it comes down to the wide variation in how seriously the actors seemed to take their individual roles. Some of them phone it in, some do deliberate scenery-chewing, and some of them just seem to treat it like any other gig.

For the most part I thought this had good things to say about US imperialism and whatnot, but there were a couple places where I was disappointed that it couldn't have been better. For a movie that should have been aware of injustices it doesn't even stop for a moment before blatantly making the only black person in the group of main characters also the first of that group to die. And there are also some weird vague anti-Semitic stereotypes that are probably present in an overwhelming amount of other media as well, but this doesn't make it okay for them to be there in the first place.

Ghostkeeper (1981)

directed by Jim Makichuk
Canada
87 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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While it's true that it falls victim to a lot of the usual cliches of 80s slashers, there's also something in the mix with Ghostkeeper that makes it some small measure stranger. I'm not talking strange as in surreal or unexpected, but strange as in there's a feeling to it that I'm unused to seeing in films from its era; a vibe that comes across as a solid, palpable sense of foreboding. I think this is due to the fact that it doesn't put such an excess of panty shots and frivolous sexy dialogue in, although there are one or two bits of flirtatiousness that felt out of place. Those bits don't come in until a while into the film, so for a while we just watch some people get further and further away from civilization in a snowstorm and know there's something coming for them. There's a quietness to it that pervades everything and that quiet is incredibly important in establishing a haunting atmosphere.

Unfortunately what that quiet and lack of sensationalism also means is that it's very, very boring. The characters speak softly and the landscape seems to drown them out, and that makes for a good and creepy overall vibe, but it doesn't do much to keep your attention. I had some trouble motivating myself to continue watching it, but in the end I did, because I could tell how it would have felt to watch this in the 80s- probably like how watching something tense and unsettling like The Witch is going to be in 36 years. I'm not saying Ghostkeeper holds a candle to The Witch, but I could feel its authenticity, and that factor sets it apart from the rest of its ilk.

I also greatly appreciated the performance of the woman playing the creepy old innkeeper as well as the writing that saved her from being the "sinister old lady" cliche I've seen a thousand times already. That performance alone had a lot to do with why I found this to be a respectable film as well: she's not the witchy, "eeeeeh heh heh heh come in dearie" type or the sugary-sweet, feeding-people-cookies type; she's an old mountain woman, and while she is murderous, she's played with a sense of intelligence and formidability that was much better than what most writers and directors go for when creating an old lady in a horror film. It was great seeing a character made for a specific role who had facets to them that didn't concern that role, like real-life people do.

I don't know, y'all... I think I really liked this one. I'm not used to watching 80s movies where I can see how they would have looked to audiences back then through their patina of outdated fashion and hairstyles. If somebody did it right, a remake of this could be fantastic.