Semya Vurdalakov (1990)

directed by Igor Shavlak and Gennady Klimov
Russia/Soviet Union
82 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

This is a vampire movie from the Soviet Union, and I can't find out whether it's actually from Russia or one of the countries that are now separate from the SU. The dialogue is in Russian, anyway. When we talk about vampires in this case, we're talking the old-school, Eastern-European conception of a vampire, not the vampire that pop culture has produced in the West. A lot of the characteristics of the vampire(s?) in Semya Vurdalakov bear little to no resemblance to what's typically thought of as a vampire, and in fact probably the only recognizable thing is a scene where we see a few drops of blood on an unconscious boy's neck.

At one point I actually got to thinking about the emphasis horror movies place on showing evil or dangerous characters walking differently from everybody else, and I had something longer and more thought out to write about that, but now it doesn't sound like it makes any sense. I was just wondering why we read so much into a person walking very slowly, with heavy footsteps, maybe some shuffling, too. A person walking at normal speed can be a normal person but slow them down and give them some Doc Martens and suddenly they're a menacing ghoul stalking around in the moonlight. As with most things, this probably stems from fear of disability, but it's one of the stranger byproducts of that fear and one of the least easily recognizable as such.

Semya Vurdalakov starts off relatively bright and cheery, and our main character, insofar as we know anything about him at all, seems to be a pretty happy, work-oriented guy. On assignment, he goes to visit a family in a rural farmhouse where somebody has just died, and that's where the whole movie changes dramatically. It may have been intentional, but the contrast between the "before" picture of the protagonist as a sunny go-getter immersed in his work and the "after" of an unshaven, unkempt, haunted-looking guy living with a family who doesn't really want him there is very jarring. Also, there's a good deal about this movie that I just had no idea what to make of, so forgive me if I kind of glaze over certain details that I didn't quite catch.

I don't feel as bad about missing those details as I normally would, because this movie is about 99.9% atmosphere. And what an atmosphere it is- like I said, it only kicks in once the main character leaves the city, but before too long this film is in the domain of shifting darkness, creaking wooden floors, whispered prayers in the night, and a flimsy, often invisible line between "living" and "dead". I still don't know what was going on at any point during this but it's perfect viewing for a cold, damp, dark night. There's been eerie Russian films before but this one feels unlike most I've seen.

Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Present (2005)

directed by Yûdai Yamaguchi
Japan
49 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

Grab a bucket of KFC and get ready! There's probably other Christmas movies from Japan, but I'm not sure if there's any other Christmas-themed horror movies, or any other Christmas-themed horror movies based off of famous manga. I can't judge this on how faithful it is to Kazuo Umezu's original work, because I've never read it, but it's not too bad on its own provided that you stick with it for a while- the beginning isn't too enticing. It helps to know beforehand that this director deals in the type of splattery, gooey, nasty horror flicks the parents in Present warn their little girl not to watch.

The acting isn't that great and the plot is incomprehensible, but honestly, this was better than I expected. It starts off when the main character is a little girl, being told as many parents inexplicably tell their children that Santa isn't just there to reward her for being good, but also to punish her for being bad. Then we jump ahead to her as a young adult, being a little bit bad at a (love?) hotel with her more extroverted friends and the guy she likes. I don't want to give too much away, but the two different versions of the protagonist aren't as separate as the movie wants us to think. All that we see or seem is but a dream within a Japanese Christmas TV special.

The set design in this is vaguely surreal; I'm not sure if that was a byproduct of slapdash construction or something deliberate, but the interior of the hotel (which most of the movie takes place in) is expansive and dreamlike. Hallways and stairwells are too wide, with not enough furniture in them. It looks like it wasn't designed with actual people in mind. And there's a lot of mixed religious imagery, predictably, including Santa Claus getting very mad at people for "desecrating the Holy Christmas"- even though it doesn't make sense for Santa to be the one up in arms about not being celebrated, seeing as it's not exactly called Santamas.

There's some complexity in the concept behind the villain, and more layers to the plot than appear on the surface, but I think those things only struck me as interesting because they were unexpected. I'm not even that big a fan of splatter movies so the extensive scenes with icky body parts weren't quite enough to keep me intrigued. I can't recommend something this gross for Christmas viewing. It's better watched in the middle of July or some other time. I just wanted to bring something new to the table for everybody else who's tired of the usual Christmas traditions.

Better Watch Out (2016)

directed by Chris Peckover
USA/Australia
89 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

I got off to a bad start with my semi-annual Christmas horror marathon by somehow accidentally watching a pro-life movie, so I was hoping that Better Watch Out would set me back on track. Fortunately it did, and then some, and now I feel like all the other movies I watch after it will fail to stack up. I advise anybody reading this not to read any further, because this one really depends on you not knowing anything about it. It's a home invasion movie, that's all you need to know. Go no further if you haven't seen it already.

Anyway. One thing I particularly liked about this is that, in contrast to the trope where a much younger boy tries hard to woo his hot older babysitter, the inherent creepiness of older teenagers playing along when actual children have the hots for them is highlighted. I've quit movies halfway because this mentality or "joke" or whatever people think it is is taken too far- see The Babysitter. It's just gross, not cute or funny. There's a bit of "I-got-a-crush-on-you"-type banter in Better Watch Out, but it's just banter, it's not like the movie itself goes along with it like nothing is wrong.

I actually really liked all the banter in this, to the point where I was sad when the parents left the picture and things turned more serious. When the film switches over to home invasion mode, everything falls into a sequence of events that, while taking cues in large part from older movies within the home invasion subgenre, never felt predictable. What I felt when the characters were trying hard to evade a perceived intruder in the house wasn't the type of fear that gets me personally afraid at home, but I believed that the characters were afraid themselves. I got invested in seeing these people survive, rather than waiting for the bad guy to jump out at them. It's not like one of those overdone slashers where you know what's going to happen before it happens.

This film is so well done, in fact, that when it goes in a completely different direction and pulls an entirely new plot out of left field, I didn't feel betrayed, although I had become engaged in the home invasion story. The thing that came after that felt like a solid continuation of the same movie rather than a venture into entirely new territory. Most of this hinges on the actors being really believable in any situation, which they were- actually they're all so good that even though I could tell the majority of the cast were Australians faking generic American accents, it didn't stop them from being really good at their roles. This is a good movie if you like Christmas and it's a good movie if you hate Christmas, or even if you don't celebrate it.

The Worthy (2016)

directed by Ali F. Mostafa
United Arab Emirates
98 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

The Worthy is noteworthy (sorry, I had to) for being one of a few movies made and set in the United Arab Emirates. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, so as happens often, I was hoping for some emphasis on the apocalypse, but never got it. I wanted to see more of what happened as the world ended rather than hear about it in an opening narration by the main character. The scenario in which society crumbled is where The Worthy's anti-terrorism message comes in, telling us about a future where paramilitary factions' skirmishes between one another escalate to become all-out global wars until one of them successfully poisons a water supply.

I enjoyed this movie's post-societal worldbuilding because I felt like it hit on several critical points that help to establish the danger of a world in which basic resources are no longer obtainable without effort. Vast importance is given to having a steady and reliable water supply, which isn't even speculative, it's just the reality of living in a desert. There's a lot of guns, like a whole lot of guns, and a lot of knives too, and I think that's a fairly accurate part of what a world after this one will look like. I think there's going to be easy access to things that can kill people and not a lot of access to things that could help people live. Also, the compound where most of this movie takes place has an interesting design- instead of subterranean tunnels or a bunker or anything like that, it's an abandoned aircraft wing factory, and it's huge. The survivors aren't frightened people burrowing into the smallest, most undetectable corners of the Earth, they've got a gigantic, wide-open space to command, at least for a little while.

However, the fact that many synopses of this hail it as "visually spectacular" should be a little worrying. It's pretty fancy-looking, but it doesn't have nice cinematography at all, it just has that aesthetic movies get when they have a massive budget to work with and want to show it off. It's so overblown it's almost comical at times: so much unnecessary slow-mo, lots of shots of characters just barely ducking out of the way of some weapon or projectile, gratuitous usage of CGI blood and fire, et cetera. It's visually frontloaded and that might be impressive but it doesn't translate to something that's pleasant to look at.

I would say that this is a decent movie, but maybe not as good as everybody thinks it is, but it appears that people don't actually think this is that good. So maybe I should just say it's a decent movie. It might be because I watch and read a massive amount of post-apocalyptic fiction but this didn't come off as very original to me. I think I also would have liked it a lot more if any women had survived until the end.

The Brain (1988)

directed by Ed Hunt
Canada
94 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

I accepted that this movie would be bad from the outset and only watched it to fill some time, and for the most part it did turn out to be pretty trashy, but what I didn't expect was that it would also be so wild. Although it firmly confines itself to the parameters of a cliche late-80s horror/sci-fi hybrid and doesn't bring anything new to the table, it has moments where it's genuinely pretty fun to watch. 

I've spoken before about how I believe it's better to have patience when showing off a monster, and not rush into it and overdo it, spoiling the sense of mystery for the audience, but then there's The Brain, where pretty much the very first scene is of a giant tentacled brain. There it is, no doubt about it, here's the brain you all expected. Honestly, when the practical effects are this inventive and amazing-looking, and when the rest of the movie is so campy that any sense of genuine mysteriousness would basically fizzle and die, it's much less important to hide your monsters. I scream, you scream, we all scream for tentacle-brain.

It almost makes me sad that creature design like the brain in this movie would be so out-of-context if made today, and would probably be banished to being seen as a gimmick or an intentional throwback, because this brain thing is pretty awesome. It's never explained where it comes from, why the villain is trying to spread its ideas, or, perhaps most importantly, what the brain's end goal is for when it finishes taking over the world. It's just there, this gigantic brain with a face, a huge, snarling face that looks like a cross between a pug and a mountain lion, shuffling around on its brainstem (which is apparently NOT a tail, and the bad guy will admonish you if you say so). If not showing your monsters is my first rule of good creature design, not explaining your monsters could be my second.

Unfortunately, our friend the brain is the only thing this movie has going for it. The characters are all awful. The main character is a high school prankster who suddenly becomes the only guy who can single-handedly save the whole town. The most amusing thing about this is watching everybody run full-tilt everywhere because for some reason there's a foot chase scene about every two minutes. Like I said, it's fun if you have the right mindset, and I liked how simple it was and how "pure" it feels as a horror/sci-fi popcorn flick, but I don't think it deserves too big a spot in the history of the genre. Also, although it's never mentioned, it is Christmastime in this movie. So this counts as a seasonal review.

Everything Beautiful Is Far Away (2017)

directed by Pete Ohs & Andrea Sisson
USA
91 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

The premise of this one doesn't need much summarizing: a girl, a guy, and a robot head trek across the desert of another planet in search of a mythical lake. The worldbuilding is definitely one of the strongest, if not the strongest point in this film, because this desert has all the right stuff to look subtly futuristic and alien, yet still have the atmosphere of a place that humans call "home". There's strange technology discarded and buried in the sand, and the edible flora of the desert have names that aren't quite what we'd call things here on Earth, but as a colonized planet it's certainly believable.

I want to address the only real problem I had with this movie before I go any further. It wasn't necessarily a problem with the larger framework of the movie itself, just something it perpetuates that a lot of other movies also do. The girl, Rola, is written to be the heart to Lernert's head, she follows emotion where he follows reason, and it isn't inherently wrong to have two characters play off each other like this, but almost every time, the airy-fairy, risk-taking party is the woman. Lernert is there to oh-so-patiently mansplain to her, and rescue her when she eats poisonous roots, and remind her to do very basic things. She's there to be magical and beautiful and not know much of anything practical at all. I found this infantilization very irritating even when I was otherwise enjoying this movie.

I did, however, do a lot of enjoying. It's a latecomer, but I really think this is one of the most visually gorgeous films of the year. The aesthetic is really, really homogeneous, there's impressively little variation in color, and I know that two implausibly pale people venturing across an implausibly pale desert where everything is only beige, blue, or green may be, for some, tiring to look at for an hour and a half. But I feel like you have to admit that the cinematography in this is ridiculously well-done even if it's not personally your favorite color scheme.

I almost gave this five stars because there's basically nothing wrong with the way it's made. There are boundaries to plot and setting that it sets up for itself (desert environment, only three main characters, one fixed goal for the two of them) and it works within these boundaries perfectly. Maybe it's not as ambitious as your Alien: Covenants or your District 9s or your Cloverfields. It doesn't have as large a scope, despite being set in an absurdly large desert. But it's more than beautiful enough to be fascinating throughout every minute of its running time, and most of all it actually made me feel uplifted and optimistic about being a human being, living a human life, which is something I haven't felt in a long, long time. Just a pleasant and gentle movie.

The Survivalist (2015)

directed by Stephen Fingleton
Ireland
104 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

The Survivalist is both a very complex and a very simple movie, I don't really know how to explain it other than that. There are standards it adheres to in order to fit the post-apocalyptic model but as a whole it's not quite like anything else I've seen before.

The title doesn't refer to the kind of doomsday prepper type you may think of nowadays when you see the term "survivalist". Well, technically I can't be certain what it refers to, since I don't know the filmmakers' intent, but I would guess that surviving in this context refers not to a particular method or methods of living post- societal collapse, but to the overall notion of just surviving in such a world, doing whatever is necessary to ensure you go on living day-to-day. It's startling how much inhumanity is in this film, not brutality or intentional evil, but a total absence of anything that would betray any of the characters as having human feelings. This is truly a post-societal landscape.

It really drives home the point as well that if you can get yourself far enough from anybody else, you can do whatever you want. You can wear an elaborate hairstyle and have weird gardening practices and play the harmonica (possibly the film's only human touch) and there's nothing anyone can do to judge you, because the laws that governed behavior don't exist anymore. A lot of post-apocalyptic films don't get into that, they show survivors doing the same routine over and over of venturing out on some journey somewhere with a large backpack and some beef jerky, but they don't show what people would do if they could sustain themselves alone on a farm and not have to make a trek to find other survivors.

I know this is slow and I know it barely has any dialogue, and it might even border on invoking the P word (pretentious), but it's so well made and sticks so firmly to its premise of not showing any trace of manners or social niceties that I'm kind of amazed by it. There were points when the younger of the two women who came to stay on the protagonist's farm would say something too forward to him, and I almost expected the older woman to remind her not to upset the man, but this kind of calculated survival of two unarmed people against one armed person goes much further than just being polite to him. They survive around him on a more tactical level, one where it matters less if you insult him and more if you can manage to grab his shotgun shells while he thinks you're trying to get him off, or slip poison into his meal one day. What a well-constructed and unconventionally scary film. Not so much about how the world got to be this way as it is about how the new environment shapes human behavior.

Angst (1983)

directed by Gerald Kargl
Austria
87 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

Belonging to the category of "German-language films that make us uncomfortable", this movie is well-known for being extremely effective in depicting a serial killer from the inside out, with narration switching back and forth between a separate cold, clinical voice explaining the backstory and previous doings of the killer and his own inner monologue, similarly cold and clinical in locution.

The opening scene is a stark look at the killer doing his thing, and I noticed that the actor seemed to be wearing some kind of steadicam rig. I noted this but didn't think anything of it until he said to his first victim "I'm shooting now", and I thought "huh". Because to me, the actor supporting his own camera rig and then his character saying that he was shooting- that felt like a double metaphor, like an acknowledgement of the fourth wall. He's shooting a gun / he's shooting a movie. This, of course, could be a completely moot point depending on whether or not the German language uses the same word "shoot" to refer both to shooting a gun and shooting film, which for all I know it might not, I'm just going off of subtitles here. Whether or not that specific instance was meant to brush up against the fourth wall, this is certainly a film that draws the viewer into it and makes sure you can't ignore a single thing that's going on.

The one element of this that I couldn't figure out, by which I mean I personally enjoyed it greatly but didn't understand why it had been included in the film, was that there's a little dog who stays around for a very long time. I immediately got bad vibes when they showed the dog, because considering that it's mentioned many times that the main character has tortured animals, I was sure the dog was eventually going to get done in. But it never does! It's just there, and they kept showing it running back and forth between places and barking at the murderer, which was honestly really funny and it's a testament to how otherwise disturbing this movie is that having a little dachshund named Kubo running around didn't bring down its disturbing nature at all.

Overall this is just a really well-made film that does a lot with no embellishment. I was disappointed in its assertion that childhood trauma can cause a person to grow up into a monster, but I suppose in 1983 that notion may not have been challenged as much as it is today. The main actor is perfect and probably the reason so much of this works so well. He was in Das Boot, too! I'm not sure why I find that amusing.

Woodshock (2017)

directed by Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy
USA
100 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

I was planning on watching this on Thanksgiving but I didn't want to make myself sad after a nice day. As it turns out I would have been perfectly fine if I had watched it then, because unless a movie being very, very boring makes you sad, and unless you have very raw wounds from the death of a parent, Woodshock will most likely fail to sway you in any meaningful way.

Since this comes from A24, the studio who brought you basically every critically acclaimed horror movie in recent memory, the hype has been rather high for this in certain circles, but it doesn't seem to be quite up to par with the rest of A24's offerings. Reviewers have mostly come to the consensus that it's a nice film but it's extremely empty, and more boring than poignant. I don't feel like it's bad enough to be categorized with the plethora of "fake deep" dramas that have come out recently, but it's getting there.

To be fair, I was trying to make sure there were genuine differences between it and any other films that I personally enjoy, but that I know could subjectively be called "boring", and I'm fairly confident that those differences do exist. Woodshock doesn't seem to actually be saying anything with those lengthy scenes in which nothing happens but everything is very pretty. The sole message culminating from all of its efforts at aesthetic purity seems to be "I am sad", and if we wanna be fancy, "I am sad because _____ happened", but more frequently it doesn't even connect the sadness to anything. The imagery in this is very free-floating and airy, and undeniably beautiful, but disconnected from the narrative and only there because it looks nice. Which is not a crime! I'm an advocate for putting things in films because they look nice. But this tries to be poignant and thought-provoking when in reality it doesn't provoke any significant thoughts at all.

There's also the fact that the subject matter is not revolutionary or anything you couldn't find in a different movie that takes a less roundabout, more conventional approach to its themes. Kirsten Dunst with flowers, Kirsten Dunst with butterflies, Kirsten Dunst crying in some nice lingerie. I could even raise the point that this movie has a lot of nerve to romanticize a white lady doing something terrible on weed while untold numbers of non-white people are wrongfully imprisoned for doing nothing wrong while on weed, or under suspicion of having been on weed. If you want to watch this because it's pretty and Kirsten Dunst is talented, go right ahead, just don't expect to actually be moved by it.