Monday, December 31, 2018

New Year's Evil (1980)

directed by Emmett Alston
USA
86 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

Slashers in the 1980s and before seemed to be much more creative with their plots, possibly because the horror industry hadn't yet figured out that they could churn out dozens of "people go to a cabin in the woods and get killed with an axe" films on the cheap. I feel like slashers are generally judged on either the visual intensity of their death scenes or the strength of their villains, and because New Year's Evil is full of overacting and awkward fake choking noises, the second option is more viable.

Another thing that the slasher genre seems to have lost over time is the distinctiveness of its bad guys: Somehow we went from the lurking, almost-faceless presence of people like Jason Voorhees and the over-the-phone killer from Black Christmas to just anybody who can wield a large object with extreme prejudice. In some ways this is an interesting development, because the shift from killers having some distinctive element about them to killers being random people we might meet on the street is very realistic, and because of that I can't really say that I prefer character villains to average-Joe villains. This is why I thought New Year's Evil's antagonist was unique: he shape-shifts enough between evil deeds to be somewhat unnerving, and has enough of the unfamiliar in him to freak us out, but the casual reveal of his tie to the lead woman and his unfortunately realistic misogynist motives make him feel truer than monolithic, instantly recognizable Freddy Krueger types.

This definitely has an established place among cult-ish classics of the subgenre, but honestly, aside from a vaguely original villain, there's not a whole lot to remember it by. Like I said, a lot of the acting is too over-the-top right where it's important for acting not to be over-the-top, and a lot of it has that inherent fakeness that comes about whenever any mainstream film attempts to depict punks. It has an original theme song that's moderately rad, but this early on into the evolution of punkdom, it seems like there was a kind of crossover between punks and new wavers that leads to the music feeling a lot more subdued than I'd expect from anything with the label "punk" today.

I get the feeling this is a movie that not a lot of people watch sober. I've always loved the camaraderie of New Year's Eve, because at virtually no other time can one find people literally all over the world celebrating the same (somewhat arbitrary) thing (unless you use a different calendar). So happy New Year from me to you, if this is indeed your New Year's; if it is not, I hope this Monday treats you well.

Friday, December 28, 2018

After Midnight (1989)

directed by Jim & Ken Wheat
USA
90 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

So this is a horror anthology directed by some guys whose only other claim to fame is a movie about Ewoks. The wrap-around story is a professor teaching a class on "the psychology of fear" and doing things that should get him super duper arrested, like brandishing a gun in class, putting said gun to the forehead of a student, and faking his own suicide. I mean, I get that it's supposed to hype up the movie and it's not meant to be believable, but it just made me roll my eyes at how try-hard it was.

The first segment follows a couple stranded out on a dark country road who decide to go up to the dark country manor to see if they can find a dark country telephone. This is a recurring theme: people blundering into scary places thinking they might find a phone. It's also a staple of pre-cell-phone slashers, all the characters constantly stumble into nooks and crannies going "phuh-phuh-phoooonne????" as if every dark corner of the world is supplied with a working phone booth that they'll surely find if they just grope around in the shadows a little bit more. Anyway, this short is pretty good, and it involves an accidental death that- although cheesy (flying head!)- is genuinely upsetting to think about.

The second one is about four girls who run afoul of a creepy guy living with a bunch of dogs in an abandoned gas station after- you guessed it- one of them decides an abandoned gas station is a perfect place to look for a phone. The guy I could do without, I've seen a million films where girls get chased by guys with knives, but the best part about this one was the dogs. I felt like it was really good at making the dogs into characters themselves, not just a blind snapping mass of fangs getting in their Schutzhund training. They had good dog actors for this part, I give props for that. Also that the girls are resourceful instead of flailing around helplessly the entire time.

The third has Marg Helgenberger in it. That's about all that can be said. It isn't original (is any of this original?) and it felt like it was over too soon. Again, After Midnight seems too concerned with being edgy and pleasing a crowd to feel like a genuine examination of fear. Maybe these scenarios had the potential to scare people in the 80s, but I think modern viewers would appreciate more of a look into why things are scary, not just a rehashing of "these are some plots where people are scared". I did like the telling-ghost-stories aspect of it though, those are my favorite kind of anthology horror films. I'm mad that I fell asleep before I got to see the stop-motion skeleton with an axe at the end.

Monday, December 24, 2018

Two Front Teeth (2006)

directed by Jamie Nash and David Thomas Sckrabulis
85 minutes
USA
4 stars out of 5
----

I've really been pining (get it? Christmas trees? pine trees?) for a half-decent Christmas horror movie this year, because I've run almost out of options for ones I haven't seen, and now I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel and watching things that are truly atrocious. In Two Front Teeth, I've finally found a Christmas-themed horror comedy that's good and funny. The director later went on to make WNUF Halloween Special, a segment from V/H/S 2, and to write several films for Eduardo Sanchez, including the terrifying Lovely Molly.

Fair warning: This movie's sense of humor is pretty stupid. It's generally inoffensive, but it's probably only amusing to people who enjoy awful puns and think those newspapers that have headlines about women getting pregnant by Bigfoot and/or women delivering half-bat, half-human babies are funny. The most important thing to this movie is being funny- there's little to no concern about aesthetic and style, and certainly no attempts to be "so bad it's good" or really to go for any specific type of humor at all. The only goal is whatever will be humorous and the film absolutely hits that goal.

Two Front Teeth also has basically no plot and feels remarkably like everybody was just making it up as they went along, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending, again, on how you like your jokes. There's no pacing, so don't expect the best to be saved for last or anything, because except for the final battle between the real, wholesome St. Nick and an evil impostor called Clausferatu, the action happens basically whenever the film feels like making it happen and is not confined to climaxes or pivotal narrative moments.

Good acting is also not a huge concern, which frees up opportunities to just be funny rather than focusing on the specifics of exactly how to deliver lines. I don't doubt that this was all scripted and planned out, and I don't want it to seem like I'm implying that it's only good because it feels like there was little directorial interference- it's just that the end product of the script, direction, acting, and cinematography is something that feels fun and off-the-rails. The passion put into making it is the most important thing. I wish more horror comedies would embrace being goofy, because Two Front Teeth was excellent and just what I needed to recover from some direly horrible movies.

Friday, December 21, 2018

All the Creatures Were Stirring (2018)

directed by David Ian McKendry and Rebekah McKendry
USA
80 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Reviews lead me to believe that this movie was going to be totally abysmal, but I watched it anyway because I need to watch more Christmas horror movies to make me feel The Spirit due to a lack of snow outside. Turns out this movie is great and some people don't know how to have fun. I'm not going to bother reviewing the individual segments because they were all pretty good, the only one I wasn't fond of was the weird one with a vengeful deer (?) that I may or may not have fallen asleep during.

One of the issues a few people seem to have with this is the wrap-around story. The whole deal is that each segment is introduced by three actors performing an artsy, almost-mime routine, which is being watched by a couple on a date. Each segment starts out performed onstage, and then segues into a properly filmed short with real actors and sets, et cetera. People seemed to take issue with the fact that, in-universe, the couple is shown commenting on how bad the segments are and how little sense they make, but the couple isn't seeing what we see, they see the people doing their art-house routine. They're not commenting on the same shorts the real-life audience is watching.

This could totally be one of those cases where I can't tell that a film is bad because I myself have bad taste, but I found All the Creatures Were Stirring to be not only super fun but well-made. Everybody in it is apparently involved in the horror community somehow, from having positions within magazines to hosting podcasts, and you can definitely tell that these are people who are familiar with the genre and know how to turn a restrictive budget into something authentic and entertaining. Constance Wu is also in it, and if you're like me, you may be a little resentful that you have to wait until the very last segment for her to show up.

I really appreciated the novelty of this whole film, it's not like a lot of holiday-themed anthologies where nobody who contributes to the film seems to have any ideas beyond "somebody dresses up like Santa and kills people". The things that happen in All the Creatures, both within the segments and in the wrap-around, are strange, inexplicable occurrences, not simple slashings and boring hauntings. They range from clingy demons to festive aliens to secret vampires (??) to Groundhog Day with ghouls. Everybody is entitled to their opinion and all, but I really can't overstate just how awful these reviews were. I feel like I watched a completely different film, one that I'm happy I took a chance on.

Monday, December 17, 2018

Index Zero (2014)

directed by Lorenzo Sportiello
Italy (filmed in Bulgaria)
82 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I was interested in this because the two-sentence synopsis was really vague and I didn't know quite what it meant: "2035, United States of Europe. Some humans are not sustainable anymore." I thought it would be interesting if the concept of "sustainability" in this film was treated as an extension of the personal-responsibility rhetoric preached by large corporations pretending to be eco-friendly. Like how brands squawk about how you're a bad person if you use plastic straws, but meanwhile they use more water in a single day than the population of a small country. I thought maybe Index Zero took place in a world where people were punished for not practicing "sustainability"- I.E., "forget your reusable shopping bags and we will take away your food ration". 

It turns out that the real explanation is a lot simpler; in a time of overpopulation, some quasi-governmental organization decides which people use "too much" resources, and the ones whose needs can be balanced out become "sustainable". Those who would be too much of a hassle to care for (sick/elderly/pregnant/just "unwanted") are unsustainable, and are abandoned by society. Index Zero did a really great job at worldbuilding, in my opinion, and I'm not sure if the idea of a United States of Europe was an intentional jab at the United States of America and all our failings, but I'm pretending it was. 

The best thing about this film are the scenes of the scrim- the din of crowds of unwashed, angry people congregating in shady "markets" and masses that are hit and abused by rich people in riot gear. When the protagonists lose themselves in these faceless groups of people who the privileged of society wish would go rot somewhere out-of-sight, I felt like this film was doing a better job depicting the anonymity that would come with being lumped into a category of "unwanteds" than most.

This next paragraph is gonna talk about the death of a major character so... watch out. The way the woman half of the lead couple was treated irked me in multiple ways, but her death at the end of the film felt more like a dispensing-with than any kind of resolution to her story. Ironically, natural pregnancies are frowned upon by the people who decide who's sustainable or not in the film, and if she had just used the artificial womb promoted by the elites, she would have stayed alive. So I'm not sure what the point to her dying in childbirth was other than to make her a martyr or just to get rid of the pesky wimminz.

All in all, this isn't the very best film I've ever seen, but it's grim enough that I enjoyed it as a film about our ruling class finally just coming out and saying they don't want certain people to be alive. I can definitely see things like this happening in the future and in fact happening all around us- just in ways we don't necessarily pay attention to.

Friday, December 14, 2018

Alien Raiders (2008)

directed by Ben Rock
USA
85 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

Before this, I watched The Blackout, a very similarly-themed film (set during Christmastime, alien invasion, people trapped in one place) that was disappointing due to its total lack of personality and charm, so I figured that as long as Alien Raiders had some shred of uniqueness to it, it would be better than The Blackout. I think the two are similar enough that a compare/contrast isn't that far of a reach.

Alien Raiders actually achieved my hope for it to have something distinctive about it within minute one, because the bad, edgy alt-rock song played over the credits is miles better than The Blackout's total lack of anything distinguishing it from a reel of stock footage. From then on we're introduced to the situation using tension, intrigue, mystery, and fear- genuine examples of these things, done well, even if the movie as a whole isn't winning any major awards. The characters each have a personality of their own and feel like actual human beings, not just words on a page being spat out by actors who aren't thinking of their characters as anything but just that, words on a page. A whole lot of the dialogue is cliched, but at least it's being said with conviction!

Every other horror movie attempts to advertise as prominently as possible that somebody in the cast or crew had something to do with Blair Witch Project, so I'll tout the director's work as production designer on Blair Witch as well. Maybe that has something to do with why this feels watchable and smooth, even though it's fairly generic.

The only thing that really bothers me is the title, because if I'm watching a movie with "alien" in the name, I want to see some aliens at some point. I'm not too cheesed off about the lack of aliens, because what the film has instead of aliens is almost cooler (it's like The Thing basically) and the practical effects are really nice. But still, I was expecting that maybe the people who invaded the supermarket the film is set in (you know, the raiders?) were going to turn out to be the aliens in one climactic sequence where one of them gets shot and bleeds neon green, or something like that. But again, what they did instead was good too. I'm honestly pretty satisfied with this movie. It's somewhere between good and great. I think I have low standards. Courtney Ford is really cute though.

Monday, December 10, 2018

Doc. 33 (2012)

directed by Giacomo Gabrielli
Italy
63 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

This movie is totally unashamed about being a Blair Witch Project fan film. It actually has the alternate title "Blair Witch Project Spin-Off", because I guess if you call it a tribute, nobody else can call it a rip-off. I appreciate the honesty about being blatantly based on Blair Witch because the vast majority of found-footage movies after the release of BW have been, in some way, influenced by it, and have for the most part refused to acknowledge that. In attempting to emulate Blair Witch, Doc 33 sets its sights on something that's achievable for virtually anybody with a camera and some friends who are really good at screaming, and that's refreshing too: a reminder that horror can come from anywhere, that anybody can make a horror film, you don't need millions of dollars in your special effects budget to do something creative and worth watching.

At 63 minutes, we don't get a lot of time for backstory; certainly not on the characters and only sparsely on the haunting. Instead of focusing on a witch legend, the location the mockumentary takes place in is more along the lines of just being somewhere that saw so much suffering and pain that it became inherently "bad". There is a figure that looks very witchy, but there's almost something comical about her. As usual, things are much scarier as thumps on the ceiling and disembodied cries than an actual physical creature in your face, and for some reason it was impossible for me to see the "witch" as anything other than another amateur actor, only in a costume this time instead of behind the camera.

I enjoyed this movie's approach to using a ouija board, because it takes an old trope and turns it into something more ritualistic. Instead of simply placing hands on a planchette and asking any ghost who's listening their questions, the characters have to say a specific chant before each question, and then ask something formulaic- "who?" "where?" "when?", short things like that. It feels like a hybrid between a game of Bloody Mary and a classic ouija board session, and I've never seen ouija sessions depicted like this before.

I just thought this was a really nice and well-made movie, and again, it being up-front about deliberately attempting to emulate Blair Witch Project absolves it from criticism for plagiarism as far as I'm concerned. The short running time is also to its benefit as it doesn't include anything it doesn't absolutely have to. There are Christmas decorations visible in the background and as such I consider this a Christmas film.

Friday, December 7, 2018

New Blood (2002)

directed by Soi Cheang
Hong Kong
89 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

This is a horror film, but much more frightening than the blood and ghosts is the city it's set in, which almost seems like it's halfway to becoming a ghost itself, if it isn't already one. This is the kind of place where the essential spark of belonging is just absent- nobody lives there, they only reside there. 

Someone at my book club once talked about the concept of a "moral apocalypse", not in the sense that everything turns to vice and grime and "immorality", but in the sense that everybody has a mass shift in personal morals to where they just don't care anymore. New Blood depicts a place where that has happened. Almost everybody reviewing it agrees that it feels apocalyptic, but it isn't an apocalypse like Mad Max where the world is obviously broken, or one where the cause of the downfall is quantifiable as one thing- nuclear weapons, climate change, disease, &c. The city appears to be in the mid-stages of emptying out because without people, without livelihood, a city is nothing. The shadows and isolation of the city destroy the ability of individual people to connect with each other, and that lack of connection in turn destroys the city. Just ghosts, now.

The atmosphere is overwhelmingly the most affecting thing in New Blood, but outside of that, there's a story about the vengeful ghost of a suicide returning to haunt the three people who donated blood to try and save her life. This concept actually feels like it doesn't fit with the depressing atmosphere of the film, which is an indicator of just how much of a downer the atmosphere is, that even a story about a suicide feels like it should be in a more upbeat film. I guess the desire to escape is in keeping with the desolation of the city, as is the anger the ghost feels when she finds that she died, while her boyfriend, who was planning to go with her to wherever they'd go when they died, got stuck in that horrible living limbo of a city.

I think New Blood might have attempted a really tired old "blame it on mental illness" twist towards the end, but honestly, I started falling asleep and I missed some parts. As far as that twist goes, I obviously still don't like it, but this is one of the very, very few instances where I believe it was inserted deliberately, as part of the story, as opposed to being put in because the filmmakers couldn't figure out a way to end their film. It's not a sympathetic portrayal of mental illness, but it's one that at least vaguely understands the way that your environment affects your mental health. This is the kind of movie that gets made when people have no faith in the upward progression of their city anymore, believing things can only get worse and worse.

Monday, December 3, 2018

Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka (1961)

directed by Aleksandr Rou
former Soviet Union production; Ukraine
69 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Now that it is December, it's time for seasonally-appropriate films. Evenings on a Farm near Dykanka isn't terribly Christmasy, but those are my favorite kinds of Christmas movies, and I'd imagine a lot of people who are sick of the commercialism and ubiquitousness of modern Christmas celebrations would enjoy things like this as well.

All of Aleksandr Rou's movies have some magic in them, but sometimes they can get stale, running along the same typical folksy track with little variation. This, however, is one of his better ones, even though it still uses character tropes that practically every other Russian Fantastika movie uses: the vain but beautiful girl; the hearty, honest blacksmith; a couple of drunk old Cossacks; a witch; you know the drill. I like the guy who uses his magic powers to be able to eat dumplings without moving off of his chair. The majority of humor in this comes from people like that- big fat drunken old men, cavorting around the snow, occasionally getting themselves mixed up with a monkey-like little devil. All I could think about whenever the devil was onscreen was how uncomfortable his costume had to be.

There's a really funny sequence where one man comes to visit the witch, and is interrupted by another man he's trying to avoid, so the witch bundles him up in a sack, and then the man who the first man was avoiding is interrupted by a man he wanted to avoid, so the witch bundles him up in a sack, and this goes on and on several times until multiple people are hiding from other people in sacks. I love this innocent humor, this stuff that's a little corny but really pure-hearted and not seeking to make fun of anybody.

The production design on this one is also great. There are a lot of scenes where people fly through the sky doing stuff like plucking down stars and/or the moon, or ferrying other people to St. Petersburg (as you do). I love the way the sky is constructed in this, how it's a solid backdrop that you can reach by levitating for a couple of seconds, as if the whole village is just surrounded by sky to fly in, like islands are surrounded by water to swim in. I love the way people fly in this, too- it literally looks exactly like how it feels when I have dreams about flying, right down to the swimming motions that you need to do to stay in the air. This is such a simplistic but really wonderful film and I like it so much more than films about Santa Claus and elves and etc.

Friday, November 30, 2018

Arena (1989)

directed by Peter Manoogian
Italy, USA
94 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

This is a somewhat niche plot that I genuinely love: A lone human goes up against a host of aliens in a sports competition somewhere very, very far away from Earth. It's not that I go in for the whole rhetoric that a lot of those films seem to have about humans being the proudest, most able species in the galaxy/universe, I just really enjoy seeing humans thrown in among a bunch of aliens. I like seeing us not be special.

It didn't really occur to me until after I watched Arena that there was supposed to be a plot. I mean, there is one- it's about a lowly snack bar worker who's kind of half-coerced into fighting in a ring with various aliens who are much bigger and stronger than him, and his attempts to win despite the corrupt system. But this is all just going through the motions, it's extremely predictable. The actual plot is the boring salad and the creature design is the tasty dressing that makes it worthwhile.

This is a Charles Band picture, but somehow it managed to snag some of the better names in practical effects, so it looks really great. I specifically wanted to mention the big alien that the human fighter takes on first (the kind of sluggy/mantis-y looking one) because I was just enamored with its design. I would love to see the inner workings of it, because it seemed way too fluid to have simply been a puppet, and I think there was at least one person in there piloting the arms, but I couldn't quite figure out where they would have fit. "Horn" is a good-looking alien too just because they managed to make his mouth move really realistically for a prosthetic. Everything else is unremarkable, Star Trek-y humans in various shades of bodypaint.

Also, I kind of hate how none of the aliens were women. The women were reserved for eye candy because nobody wanted to see an alien woman (or woman equivalent) who's big and nasty and muscly and gross. Give me scaly girls! Girls with horns who are so buff they can crush watermelons with one hand! Give me slimy girls who leave trails wherever they go! Amorphous girls! Incorporeal girls! In fact, give me more genders! This film should have had as many genders as stars in the sky and yet, and yet.

But now I'm off on a tangent about a bad movie that I should, by now, know better than to expect anything from. This is a fun, goofy thing with a fluffy and unimportant plot that will definitely keep you entertained and maybe make you laugh depending on how susceptible you are to bad sci-fi humor. Not much more.

Monday, November 26, 2018

Cam (2018)

directed by Daniel Goldhaber
USA
94 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

Because of its subject matter, I was afraid Cam was going to be another preachy piece about how selfie-obsessed and vapid millennial women are. I had some hopes for it, but I honestly didn't expect it to be as good as it was. Instead of lamenting how girls are always glued to their phones, Cam emphasizes that camwork is work, and focuses on the fact that girls in the industry can never be "off"; that it's incredibly taxing having to be able to instantly put on a smile and look perky the second you're in front of a screen. I appreciated that this didn't fall into the hole of portraying camgirls as bimbos with no "real" job.

It helps a lot that Madeline Brewer is REALLY good. I think that when an actor manages to not only play their character, but also play a character who's playing a character, it's a mark of significant talent. And Brewer does this three times. She plays her character, and then she plays the online persona of her character, and then she plays the weird, unsettling entity that takes over her online persona. She's not only great at acting, she's great at acting like somebody who is acting.

This is a double whopper of a film; it's good as a mystery and a portrayal of an occupation that usually gets stereotyped and looked down upon, but it's also great as a horror film. This isn't like all the other movies where a demon invades the internet who is researchable, who has "rules" for how it possesses victims, who can be understood even though it's diabolical and wrong. Had Cam paused midway to explain itself, had the main character been able to get help from somebody who knew the ins and outs of what was happening, the film would still probably have been good, but it would have been less frightening. 

The main character is alone, and the entity further isolates her by making her seem crazy, using her face and identity- her two central aspects as a camgirl- against her. And she can't seek out others who have had the same experience because they are all dead. It's truly isolating, and Madeline Brewer doesn't understate the terror of it in her performance.

The other thing that makes this film great is its very impressive attention to details. Not Chekhov's Guns; not things that are plot-relevant, just small, minor scraps that make it look like a real world. Brand names in the background, shabby clothes, typical things like that, but also more intricate, fleeting elements: We see the main character buy an expensive couch early on in the film, and later she sits on a sofa that still has plastic wrapping on it. The profile picture of one of her regulars is referenced in a later meeting with him. It has a vague Alice in Wonderland theme that, for once, doesn't feel hackneyed. All of this leads me to believe that this was an attentively-made film with lots of effort from everyone involved. Somehow this got into my #2-of-the-year spot.

Friday, November 23, 2018

The Endless (2017)

directed by Aaron Moorehead, Justin Benson
USA
112 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

This has been my most anticipated movie for a long time, so when it finally dropped on Netflix, I jumped on it. Moorehead and Benson's previous film Resolution bothered me in a way few horror movies do, and I'd heard that The Endless had some vague ties to that film, which made me even more excited. 

The Endless is about two brothers, played by the directors, who return to the cult/commune they grew up in out of some weird sense of nostalgia. Of course, this does not end well. This is a movie that's hard to talk about without spoiling, because you basically have to watch the thing from start to finish to begin understanding what it's doing and where it's coming from. It's interesting to compare the horror in The Endless with the horror in Resolution, because in comparison to Resolution, the horror in this movie has a more concrete form- yet it's still this nebulous, overarching power; less "monster in the woods" and more "monster IS the woods". It's one part monster, one part implications. And it has a brutal way of making humans look small and powerless.

For how unsettling it can occasionally get, this movie also feels personal, and the lives of the two main characters are inextricably tied to the plot of the film as a whole. Before slipping entirely into cosmic-horror mode, I kind of felt like a lot of what was happening was subjective rather than objective- like watching two people get scared by things that scared only them. Moorehead and Benson never let the viewer forget that they're watching a narrative, and, more interestingly, they never seem to let their characters forget that they're inside a narrative, which to me is the most fascinating thing about both this and Resolution. At every turn the main characters are positioned as small pawns within the grasp of something larger, and that's a unique place for the filmmakers to put themselves in as actors: not playing themselves, but playing versions of themselves, people who, to some extent, become aware of their existence within a specific context that they can't be separated from at the risk of death.

This film is also explicitly Lovecraftian, and I enjoyed that part of it because it skips the tentacles entirely and goes straight to the heart of what makes Lovecraftian horror so horrifying. You really get a sense of something huge. It's almost as if the act of writing fiction itself is the monster. Spring notwithstanding (I'm sorry but I felt like that movie had entirely too much mansplaining in it), these two have the potential to continue turning the horror genre on its head by creating films that examine the nature of fiction while pulling existential horrors to the forefront.

Monday, November 19, 2018

Fiend (1980)

directed by Don Dohler
USA
90 minutes
4 out of 5 stars
----

Don Dohler is known for being a director with some cult success who made low-budget films with a singular enthusiasm. Fiend is a departure from his other works about yokels running from aliens, but it still maintains a regional, down-to-earth vibe that makes it great. 

I also enjoyed that it's emphasized that the antagonist is a fiend and nothing else. I love the word "fiend". He's not a zombie, he's not a revenant, he's not a vampire or a wraith or any other creature, he is specifically a fiend. And he looks like a fiend, too- he's got a bushy mustache and penchant for dark clothing, he says stuff like "I'm not superstitious, that sort of thing is for children and women", he plays the violin, and his name is "Longfellow". I apologize to the non-fiendish Longfellows out there, but it is just such a dastardly name.

Every actor in this acts like they're in a commercial for a local car dealership or mattress store. I'm trying to find out if the two people playing Marsha and Gary Kender were/are married in real life because the dynamic between them is so sweet and adorable that it felt more genuine than just generic married-couple acting. As a horror movie, this feels unusually relaxed; it's not overly concerned with constant action, and it feels like while evil is definitely present, there's never a point where that evil seems unable to be stopped by regular people who dedicate themselves to eradicating it. The whole apex of the film rests on the testimony of a child, which goes to show how thoroughly this movie avoids making its good guys super-powered.

The special effects in this are also really charming & really make me remember the "animation" part of the term "computer animation". Our friend the fiend glows with red light that looks hand-drawn onto the film reel whenever he's in the middle of his fiendish doings. It reminds me of the electric zaps and energy pulses in Hellraiser that were done with such slapdash DIY-ness that they ended up looking amazing. I don't know if the red glow around Longfellow was done by hand or not but it looks really good. This is one of those films that I think is unironically great even though a lot of people might only be able to enjoy it through a lens of irony. It isn't perfect, but for what it is, including all its raw edges, I liked it a lot.

Friday, November 16, 2018

Housewife (2017)

directed by Can Evrenol
Turkey
82 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I've been thinking lately about horror movies that have freaked me out so bad I start to think "I don't want to see this anymore, please make it stop", and I can only come up with a few of them, but Can Evrenol's previous film Baskın is one. This made Housewife one of my most anticipated films of the past year or so, and although I had high expectations, I wasn't disappointed. 

It takes a very long time for this film to become fully what it is; it makes itself look like a psychological drama about a young woman lured into a cult because of her violent childhood until all of a sudden in the last half-hour it's... not. It's very clever at this because it genuinely does take a smart look at what makes people join cults: it introduces the main character to the cult while she's in a precarious mental state, and she immediately latches onto the cult leader because of something he says that, to her, indicates that he understands her personally, that he's the one she's been looking for and vice versa. This is of course not entirely true but it's one aspect of how people get lured into cults: parts of themselves that are vulnerable are preyed upon. So this is a story of a girl tricking herself and being tricked into thinking a cult leader can tap into something unearthly that turns into "Oh, this cult leader actually is tapped into something unearthly".

Can Evrenol seems to be really good at creating these kind of pocket-realities where horrible things can and do happen, yet the normal reality we're used to is still playing out in the background. It's like the world is ending only for the people trapped up in these nightmare scenarios. It's more difficult to explain the way this is executed in words than I thought it would be, but it's kind of like the narrative equivalent of leaving several apps running in the background at the same time and switching between them- they can all exist at the same time, all functioning simultaneously.

I was going to only give this three and a half stars because I felt like it honestly didn't match the gravity of Baskın, but those last few minutes really, really got me. Housewife starts out with one woman's trauma and eventually builds into a deep and all-reaching finality, not just for her but for everyone. I still feel like it stays subdued for a little too long, but once the reality of the plotline fully breaks through in the third act, it's cosmic.

Monday, November 12, 2018

Await Further Instructions (2018)

directed by Johnny Kevorkian
UK
90 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

Halloween is over (supposedly) so it's time for Christmas movies. Don't come to Await Further Instructions looking for cheery huggy family love, though. Half of the horror in this comes from the sheer torture of bringing an Indian girlfriend home to a family who ranges from awkwardly, casually racist to slur-spewingly bigoted, and then getting physically trapped in the house with those people as they all unravel. I'd have liked there to have been more from the perspective of being the Indian girlfriend who has to come home to these awful people, but okay. 

One of the most interesting characters in all of this is the father, who is the utter stereotype of unfeeling British stiff-upper-lip patriarchy, and he's meant to be a little exaggerated, but he really isn't that exaggerated. He's the type who looks at impossible things and just goes "Well, this is nonsense." and concludes that it's best to sit tight, slowly dying, while the rescue crews (because they are all also British and intent on nobly saving their fellow countrymen) are surely on the way courtesy of an efficient and sympathetic government.

The basic summary of the situation the characters find themselves in is that a strange black material clamps down on all windows and doors to the outside of their house while messages on the television begin giving them instructions on what to do- usually things that put them in obvious danger, but they don't notice because they assume the messages are coming from "the proper authorities". Things like injecting each other with used syringes that drop down their chimney, scrubbing themselves with bleach, and ganging up on one another for funsies. It's pretty obvious to a viewer that these instructions are the work of an outside actor wanting to see how far people will go when they're scared and cornered- but who's doing it? This remains the question until the end. In addition to the social issues raised, there's a really excellent body horror component. I'm discussing thematic spoilers from here on, so be cautious and don't read further if you're planning on watching this.

This movie has one of the best depictions of an alien lifeform that I've seen in recent memory and I am so enthused about it. Why have arms and legs when you can have an uncountable number of thrashing, flailing, cable-like tentacles? Cilia city, baby! This lifeform is in total opposition to everything human, a polar opposite to all things soft and warm and fleshy, and it is there for one reason only: to be worshipped. It's going to take over the planet, no questions asked. I don't usually go in for endings this bleak, and I still kind of disliked how staunchly hopeless this ultimately was, but I very much enjoyed this depiction of an alien invasion and I loved the film as a whole.

Friday, November 9, 2018

The Demon (2016)

directed by B. Tsogt-Erdene, O. Munguntulga
Mongolia
71 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

I was looking forward to this because I feel like it can be difficult to find movies that are just from Mongolia. A lot of the time you see movies made somewhere else (usually Russia, sometimes China) that are set in Mongolia. Or, if you're watching the SyFy Channel, maybe you'll end up with a movie filmed in Texas that's supposed to be set in Mongolia. Looking at you, Mongolian Death Worm (2010).

The interesting thing about The Demon is that the backbone of its plot is so old and archetypical, even though the rest of the movie tries very obviously to be as modern as possible. For instance, there are some shoehorned-in references to Western media, like when two characters argue over whether "Last Christmas" is by George Michael or Wham!. The setting of the film (young adults partying in a haunted house) is a cliched trope mostly invented by the horror genre, but the reason for their being pursued by an evil spirit is probably older than recorded history: the house they're in is where somebody died a bad death. She wasn't a bad person who did bad things, but because her death was unresolved and traumatic, she lingers on as a hostile spirit. I just find it really interesting that we're telling the same stories over and over even though the setting has changed.

It's interesting too that most of the characters are genuinely innocent. The only person with any real culpability is the kid who decided to just go on ahead and snatch his uncle's keys even though his uncle warned him to stay away from the house. None of the people this guy invited to the house had any idea of its history, but they were still targeted because the idea behind the lingering spirit isn't that it punishes people for what they did wrong, it just lashes out because it's angry, no matter if you're a good person or not.

I did give this a low rating, because objectively it's not a good movie for a lot of reasons. As a horror film it's lazy, with no personality or body for its villain other than that she's a scary witchy-looking thing that shows up sometimes and grabs people with her long craggly nails, and no personality for most of the good guys, either. But as happens often with films made outside of the mainstream- or even indie- U.S. entertainment industry, the low rating doesn't reflect my overall opinion of this film, because I appreciate that it exists, I appreciate everyone involved in making it, and I want to see more horror movies from Mongolia and from every other country that's been neglected in favor of American summer blockbusters about teens who get killed with axes. Also this is a Christmas movie so get in the spirit y'all.

Monday, November 5, 2018

Possum (2018)

directed by Matthew Holness
UK
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Some horror movies have a dark ambiance about them that only climaxes into something concretely frightening during one or two select scenes, the rest of the runtime simply being filled with shadows and melancholy. Possum somehow manages to be creepy like that from pretty much beginning to end. It took me a minute or two to get into it, because it's not huge on being clear about what's happening and that's confusing sometimes, but once it "clicked" for me, it instantly drew me in. There's no light or happiness anywhere in this, except when it occurs in the lives of other people, such as the boys the main character sees joking around on the train. Every minute of this film has both the viewer and the main character trapped in a hole with no escape. And there's something in the hole with us.

The title comes from a puppet belonging to the main character. I should probably put "puppet" in quotes because I really got the feeling that this was something awful pretending at being a puppet. Since, like I said, we have very little backstory on exactly what happened prior to the beginning of the film, the origins of the puppet-thing are murky and it feels more like something that's just always been there, not something that was built. I have to give the movie props for making me go from disappointed that the monster was so funny-looking to absolutely terrified of it, dreading its appearance around every corner and having to avert my eyes sometimes. When it was onscreen I wanted it to be offscreen.

Another thing I give this movie props for is taking something as gruesome, dim, and grimy as the main character's life and still managing to make it into a source of sympathy by the end. When we find out the full extent of his stepfather's abuse in the final few minutes of the film, so much about the rest of it seems to make a little more sense: The rhyme that warns Possum will "eat and smother any child without a mother", as well as other rhymes about the fearsomeness of this puppet-beast, reflect on the main character's own feelings of vulnerability surrounding being an orphan. Even the puppet's exaggerated, spiderlike limbs suggest fingers; this will also make sense in the (highly upsetting) last couple of minutes.

I don't think the presence of real-life horrors took away from the possibly metaphysical aspect of this at all. It's so heavy on the dread and terror that ultimately whether or not the whole thing was a product of the protagonist's trauma felt incidental. The trauma in itself was horror enough. The ever-present soundtrack by The Radiophonic Workshop completes the whole thing. I hope we get a real release of that soundtrack sometime soon but I'm doubtful.

Friday, November 2, 2018

The Legend of Bigfoot (1976)

directed by Harry Winer
USA
76 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

Apparently there are two movies with basically this same title that came out in 1976. This review is for the one about a guy named Ivan Marx who is either a hokey American farmer or somebody who wants very much to convince us he's a hokey American farmer, who happens to also be a Bigfoot expert. Or possibly he wants very much to convince us that he's a Bigfoot expert.

That's the thing about this mockumentary: you can't tell how much Marx himself believes. Does he allege that everything depicted in this film is one hundred percent the truth, and that no Bigfoot suits were used? Does he allege that everything depicted in this film is one hundred percent the truth, but staged with recreations and practical effects? Does he believe none of it and is trying to make a buck or gain notoriety? His narration is so self-righteous that it's difficult to see him as genuine, and his attempts to force folksiness and a vision of quintessential Americana make him sound like he's campaigning for something. Maybe you can be elected Bigfoot-catcher the way you can be elected dogcatcher.

The emphasis in this film is on Bigfoot as an undiscovered species, and in talking this out to his viewers Ivan Marx manages to alienate actual indigenous people. His idea of indigeneity is obviously that it's something of the past: he regales "his" America as land that is farmed and controlled (by white men) while speaking of "wild men walking out of the mountains of California" as if people uncontacted or unbothered by colonization are some kind of rare phenomenon as opposed to the original inhabitants of the land. As if California belongs to someone else, as if it's somewhere that you "walk out of" when you're indigenous. Someone else's land that you're just an inhabitant of.

I have half a mind to write an entire rebuttal paper to some guy's wacky Bigfoot fantasy from the 70s. I know it's not that deep, but Bigfoot movies run rampant with anti-Native racism. I was almost glad the narrator's dignity spared us having to watch him beat a drum and do a chant. I could truly go on and on about how pompous he is underneath his facade of being just a regular ol' guy (who never shuts up about what an outstanding, excellent tracker he apparently is) but I don't think this film or whatever it is is worth it.

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

directed by George A. Romero
USA
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

A special bonus Halloween review.


I can't believe it's taken me so long to finally watch this all the way through, but in my defense, have you ever tried to watch it when you're falling asleep? It's actually an extremely boring movie. I apologize for starting off what's going to become a positive review by saying that the film in question is boring, but it's true, and it doesn't detract from its quality (in my opinion) so I don't mind saying it.

So Night of the Living Dead is obviously the movie that, for most people save for pedants who know a lot about horror prior to the 1960s, introduced the world to zombies (though it doesn't use the term itself). It is 50 years old now, but it really does hold up. It gets called groundbreaking so much that you might expect some of its reputation to be hyperbole, but it's not. Watching this in 1968 must have felt the way it felt to see The Witch in theaters for the first time: like seeing something entirely new that hadn't been done ever before. The genre film world in 1968 seems to have mostly still been dominated by the shadow of Hammer horror and by cheesy crowdpleasers that laid the drama on too heavily for their own good, but Night of the Living Dead eclipsed them all.

The second factor that made it groundbreaking is that it explicitly addresses themes of civil rights that a lot of mainstream media was content to ignore. Black characters were still somewhat hard to come by in otherwise "white" films, especially ones written as competent and capable, the way Duane Jones' character was in this film. The fact that he took in a white woman and worked with her to get her out of the shock of witnessing shambling corpses and eventually to defend the house they holed up in together must have been entirely unexpected to conservative audiences. But George A. Romero gave no quarter to racism in this film, all without even directly addressing it, creating something where the plague of dull-eyed, unfeeling living dead reflected upon the overflowing hatred coming up through the cracks of society at the time.

The best thing about all this is that it is actually scary. It's set entirely in one farmhouse over the course of a night, and even in internal shots with no windows visible you can feel the oppressiveness of the night outside. The black-and-white is haunting. It's just such a genuinely eerie atmosphere, genuinely traumatic and real where most zombie movies overdose on blood and guts too much to feel real. The radio and television broadcasts of the wider world addressing what has quickly become the universal problem of the reanimated dead speak truly of panic and uncertainty. Night of the Living Dead cut right to the chase about topics both social and genre-related, and it set an example that so very many zombie films continue to fail to meet even today.

Monday, October 29, 2018

As Above, So Below (2014)

directed by John Erick Dowdle
USA, France
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

A lot of people doing October horror challenges right now seem to have a "no rewatches" rule, but not me. This month has been all about revisiting movies I may have had the wrong opinion of, or that I fell asleep during, and it's leading me to see some very good films in a new light. I know As Above, So Below isn't well-liked, but hear me out: it's fun.

It has all the problems every other adventure movie involving archeology has, I.E.: professors who are implausibly young and gorgeous, people casually mishandling artifacts, people instantly translating dead languages into modern English so accurately that they rhyme, lots of Orientalism, et cetera. You can't really think of As Above, So Below as a movie that's trying to be realistic about academia, archeology, history, or basically much of anything; you have to have the mindset that it's an adventure film, first and foremost. And I think we're lucky that it actually has an interesting concept and plot to fuel its madcap underground Parisian adventures.

I'm aware that nobody likes shaky-cam, but the thing this movie does that I like so much is use the shaky-cam to disguise just enough of certain things that your brain doesn't have enough of an image to latch onto. A lot of the creepier scenes in this film go by so quickly and are so out-of-focus that we only catch an uncanny glimpse that suggests much more. What was wrong with that monk's face? Were those human mouths sticking out of the ground? Are those faces in the wall moving? At times this movie goes too full-frontal, such as with the corny stone demon things, but the things that are kept to the periphery are almost more scary than the things we see head-on.

I am also a fan of the sound design in this because they don't use the typical scare chords and yet there's some noises that are seriously disturbing at times. There's an inscription about the trumpet call that raises the dead acting as a Chekhov's gun at the start of the film, but I think when we see the word "trumpet" we're put in mind of something much different than the sounds that come later. I loved how immersed I got in this, putting myself in the characters' shoes, imagining being impossibly deep underground with this bassy, deafening drone suddenly coming from all sides so loud it rattles your bones. It feels so dramatic, I loved it.

A couple of years ago I probably would have just sided with everybody else in saying this film is overrated and cheesy and not a good horror movie, but now I'm better at disregarding the popular opinion and making my own decision as to if I like a movie or not. I think it's nicer to not hold grudges against movies if you have no personal reason to.

Friday, October 26, 2018

Nothing but the Night (1973)

directed by Peter Sasdy
UK
90 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I was going to watch this anyway because of the presence(s) of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, as well as its having been directed by the same guy who did The Stone Tape, but I was planning on spending some time talking about how this wasn't a horror movie, until the film itself abruptly proved me wrong. I know this is an old movie, but do try to avoid spoilers beforehand.

So this starts out as a pretty stuffy mystery involving the mysterious deaths of some very wealthy people, and the involvement in said deaths of a little girl who appears traumatized, as well as her mother who everybody hates because of her history as a prostitute and her stint in jail. I felt like the mother was actually the weakest aspect of this, because all she really does is have an absurd hairdo and go around saying things to people with overacted vitriol. It's one of those times when I think the character could have been much improved if they'd gotten an actor who could pull off the role. This actress wasn't convincing as a willful ex-prostitute and her storyline was ultimately meaningless. Fortunately, to make up for it, the girl who plays the traumatized daughter is an excellent child actor, something I rarely come by in 70s movies.

As others have noted, Nothing But the Night is extremely drab for most of its runtime before a sudden and bizarre climax at the end, but it doesn't feel at any point like it's intentionally dallying to throw off viewers. I mean, it does dally, but that's just because that's its style. Even when they begin to introduce the possibility of psychic phenomena it felt like it was going to stick to its dreary old whodunit tone until the very end. I'm going to talk about some spoilers from here on out so please avoid this final paragraph.

Lord Summerisle gets his comeuppance. I'd seen comparisons to The Wicker Man, but I interpreted them to mean that the film was reminiscent of what Wicker Man would have been had it been chopped off at the end before the actual wicker man came in. This was wrong. It does eventually build up into all cultic hell breaking loose on a remote island as psychically mutilated children burn their parents and chant in glee. Seriously, we go from Peter Cushing diligently fiddling around with test tubes and Christopher Lee investigating goings-on with the most upsetting mustache of his career to a child catching on fire and plunging herself off a cliff while screaming "I CURSE YOUR GOD". The Stone Tape got scary, but it never gave the viewer as much whiplash as this. I even enjoyed the dull parts, probably because I was expecting them to be that way, but the way it immediately ramped up into terror was the cherry on top.

Monday, October 22, 2018

Carved: A Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi
Japan
90 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

As frequently happens, this is a movie that I tried to watch several years back but fell asleep during, so it's like I was watching it for the first time this time around. I was kind of surprised upon re-visiting it because I actually feel like this is one of Kôji Shiraishi's better movies, and I thought I had watched all his good ones already. The man still can't end a film to save his life, though.

So for the uninitiated, Kuchisake-onna is an urban legend in Japan wherein a woman with a deep gash in her face will come up to you and ask if you think she's pretty; if you agree, she'll use giant scissors to make you look like her. If you disagree, she'll still just kill you. If you say "eh you're average" she'll get all flummoxed and let you alone. A lot of urban legends in Japan are like this- creatures that accost you with a trick question, but if you know the answer, you can get them to leave you on your merry way. Watching this movie, I was struck by how deeply the standard of being polite and using the right greetings and honorifics runs, and I feel like that might have something to do with the prevalence of this kind of riddle-based urban legend: it's sourced from the fear of saying/doing the wrong thing.

This movie looks at the urban legend from different perspectives and involves the characters' personal lives in the way they see the legend, which I think is what any good movie centered around folklore/legends/etc. should do. One man is tormented by hearing the slit-mouthed woman's taunts in his head, a little girl seems to almost think being taken by her would be preferable to staying with her abusive mother, et cetera. However after a while the film kind of devolves into just child abuse, child abuse, child abuse- and it doesn't get any of the nuances right or seem to think much deeper than just "mom hits kid, kid cries" which makes its portrayal of abuse feel rushed and unsympathetic at worst, and poorly thought-out at best. The theme of reconciliation is less about "I did this horrible thing to you and I'm sorry" than it is about "even if families are abusive they still need to stick together because that is the way families should be", even if it doesn't explicitly say that on the surface.

Carved also adds an interesting element to the urban legend's story in which the slit-mouthed woman becomes a kind of "curse" that can jump from person to person, as opposed to a single figure who stays the same throughout all encounters with her. Multiple women become the slit-mouthed woman. This is also a really neat way of depicting an urban legend because it shows it as a kind of archetype, which legends frequently are- less a being and more an idea of a being, surviving that way throughout the years because the concept of it can never die without a physical body.

Friday, October 19, 2018

Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil (2017)

directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo
Spain/France
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I'd been anticipating this for a while now, and it was a big surprise when it got put up on Netflix. It's based on a Basque folktale, which is really neat because the world could use more movies in Basque. I hear the English dub is terrible so do watch it with subtitles if you are not a Basque speaker.

This movie had a totally different atmosphere than I expected. The most striking thing about it is that the titular devil is literally a devil, as in red skin, a tail, horns, and a pitchfork, and this is played utterly straight. If you're like me and you expected this film to be dead serious, the appearance of a literal archetypical cartoon devil can be almost comical, but in the end I loved it. And it makes sense too- at the point in time in which this movie is set, people would be expecting the devil to look like that, and so of course demons would appear in the form people fear the most. Today they might disguise themselves as any number of things, but in the mid-1800s the standard image of a horned devil was enough to frighten.

The fact that this doesn't take itself 100% seriously is really great, because I believe it feels more like folklore that way, since folktales are usually a bit nonsensical. It isn't a comedy by any means, and don't get me wrong, it's still got a lot of brutality and darkness in it, but it also portrays devils as not immune to humanity: this is a creature that goes nuts if you spill chickpeas around him, because he's compelled to count them all; a creature who can be annoyed by being poked and prodded by a small girl. This isn't a devil who's above it all, suave, dangerous; he's a flesh-and-blood dude who happens to have the job of being super evil, and gets really tired of dealing with humans after a while.

I don't know if Alex de la Iglesia had much to do with this outside of "presenting" it, but it actually does feel a lot like a film of his, and that was something I personally wasn't fond of. I like Alex de la Iglesia a lot, he's got great films (mostly), but I thought that sometimes the violence in Errementari felt out of place, although that thought could just be a holdover from me thinking this was going to be a moody slow-burn. Basically it's best to go into this with little to no expectations, and familiarity with the original folktale might help as well. Uma Bracaglia as Usue is absolutely great and doesn't feel like she's trapped within the "plucky orphan" trope at all.

Monday, October 15, 2018

Apostle (2018)

directed by Gareth Evans
UK, USA
130 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Netflix put this up at precisely the right time, because although it's been October for two weeks now, the weather where I live has only just begun to get really chilly, and for me personally, that's what signals the start of Halloween.

My first impression of the film was that Dan Stevens is really good. My second impression was that Dan Stevens is really good. He blends perfectly into this period piece from the very early 1900s. The cinematography and setup of the whole film is perfect- it looks unshowy, hand-cobbled; realistically dirty and full of smoke and soot. 1905 doesn't seem like that long ago until you realize that it actually was. The music is also a huge part of why I was so pulled in by the atmosphere. That tune that plays in the tavern towards the beginning was a straight up "put a fire in your blood" type thing and maybe it was a little more modern than the setting required but it sounded amazing.

So many small atrocities happen throughout the course of Apostle that I was expecting them all to eventually build to some singular, horrific finale that would outdo everything, but this isn't necessarily the case. The bad things keep coming with no significant increase in ferocity, except towards the end. Some scenes are more extensive and traumatic than others, but practically every moment is an enforcement of the wrongness of the environment. As a cult film it doesn't even make a particular effort to put on the whole "This is a utopian paradise where we definitely don't kill people" thing most cult leaders try to do, it starts right out with burning books, and really, no good has ever come of an organization asking people to burn their (regular, non-offensive) books. Of note is that the name "Eris" is also the name of an ancient Greek goddess of strife and discord. Erisden, Eris' Den.

The only thing I wasn't fond of was the insertion of a romantic subplot about forbidden love between two young people within the cult, and even this I'm reluctant to criticize because I did think it was done well. It's just the kind of thing I wasn't expecting to see in a movie this brutal. The relationship itself ends in brutality, which made me feel like the only reason it was there in the first place was so it could all go horribly wrong- I didn't see another ending to it right from when it was introduced. Also, I didn't like that this used typical ~*exotic*~ Orientalism in the protag's backstory- you can tell a lot about a film by who it chooses to subtitle, and in this case the few Chinese lines are not deemed significant enough for us to know what they mean beyond that they're supposed to be menacing.

I've been so used to watching hour-and-a-half films that something this long took me a bit to adjust to. It's like one long exhale, it gives itself time to develop, unfurl, and reveal more and more terrible things instead of rushing to get it all out in a structured beginning-middle-end (though it does have that too). Some of the CGI felt out-of-place and I think at times it could have benefited from a "less is more" philosophy, but on the whole, this is one of the top horror movies I've seen this year.

Friday, October 12, 2018

Robin Redbreast (1970)

directed by James MacTaggart
UK
76 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

The weather outside was dark and stormy thanks to some runoff from Tropical Storm Michael, and it was the perfect atmosphere for watching Robin Redbreast, which I've wanted to see for such a long time. Its black-and-white cinematography makes it look like it was shot around 1932, but surprisingly its politics and stance on women's rights is more modern than a whole lot of movies coming out even today.

I made a bit of a mistake in thinking this was going to be like The Wicker Man, because it has an entirely different vibe, although the two films have many similarities. Wicker Man is joyful in its pagan celebrations, dancing around maypoles and flaunting it in the face of staunch modernity; Robin Redbreast is almost the opposite. The villagers are depicted as conservative in terms of sticking to an old, unchanging way of life; the outsider in their midst is the non-religious, free-ranging, unmarried and (eventually) pregnant woman. They don't make a point of begrudging her for her ways, but neither do they openly accept her among their number. It's a kind of quiet ostracization that fits the gloomy atmosphere.

I absolutely love old lo-fi British horror like this because it feels like they had so little to work with in terms of effects, but did so much more with what they did have. I think context plays a part, too- this was Play For Today, which as I understand means it was broadcast on public television, and I don't know much about the standards for TV content in Britain at the time, but I would think that you couldn't exactly make Texas Chainsaw Massacre and show it at 2 in the afternoon. Hence these slow-burn, psychological folk horrors, with focus on hidden occult truths underneath the landscape of the countryside instead of on explicit bodily harm.

Like I said in the beginning, this is more progressive about women's autonomy than scores and scores of modern films. To start off with, the main character is a sort-of middle-aged woman who's depicted as actually having sexual desires simply because she wants to- the idea of a woman seeking out sex in a way that's personal and not intended for the consumption of men is something that a lot of media won't touch. Secondly, she openly uses birth control, and when she accidentally gets pregnant she doesn't flinch about the option to get an abortion, and even though she does eventually decide to keep the baby, she's militant about the fact that it's her right to terminate the pregnancy if she wanted to, and the man has no say in it.

So don't come into this looking for something dramatic and constantly changing, it's a slow tide of oppression building up to a mostly offscreen horror. I guess it probably did inspire The Wicker Man but the two are very different in tone and in moral standing. I do feel like this might have been gorgeous if it were in color but the black-and-white gives it a Vibe™.

Monday, October 8, 2018

Mr. Vampire (1985)

directed by Ricky Lau
Hong Kong
96 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

This is probably the most famous example of the Chinese hopping vampire (also known as jiangshi and in Cantonese goeng-si) on film, which is basically where a body comes back to life, due to poor burial practices or a curse or just whatever, as a hopping corpse with its arms out, zombie-like, dressed in traditional garb with a paper scroll stuck to its face. The scroll is supposed to immobilize it, and the hopping part is probably intended to emulate rigor mortis. The hopping vampire is instantly recognizable and there's media depicting it all across Asia; I think there's even some kids' movies and maybe like a Digimon or something based off of it.

So, it's popular, but is it good? Yes! I can't speak for the plethora of sequels this movie spawned, but this one, at least, is really fun the way Hong Kong horror comedies always are. As with the majority of them, most of its humor is slapstick and comes from characters doing silly things and throwing around some goofy over-the-top martial arts at each other, but there's also jokes with a kind of universal humor that work no matter the time and place. This could have done without the misogyny (incl. transmisogyny unfortunately) though.

Obviously the focus of the film is the jiangshi, but there's no shortage of non-jiangshi reanimated corpses in this. Depicted as equally fearsome and a little more immediately threatening due to their speed, some of the bodies come back to life as aggressive and extremely mobile creatures more like stereotypical Western zombies than anything else. I don't know what the difference was between these guys and jiangshi, or why some bodies turned into one and some turned into the other, but they both share the factor of not being able to get you if you hold your breath (and probably therefore hide your qi- the stuff they feed on) which results in some of the characters using a long bamboo pipe contraption to redirect their breath to another place in the room, which was pretty clever.

A lot of the time when I watch Hong Kong genre comedies from the 80s and early 90s like this one, I have trouble keeping up with the plot because there's so much happening all at once, but that wasn't an issue with Mr. Vampire. It still has the chaotic energy of its cinematic peers, but I could grasp what was going on- everything didn't have the cobbled-together feeling that I struggle with sometimes. You gotta have sticky rice to thwart the hopping vampire bite, both cooked and uncooked. But it has to be sticky rice, regular rice won't work. So be careful who you get your sticky rice from because some people have no idea of the urgency of your request for like 80 pounds of rice and will simply give you regular rice because it's cheaper for them. I think people who dislike this movie are people who just hate fun.

Friday, October 5, 2018

Suspiria (1977)

directed by Dario Argento
Italy
98 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I first tried to watch this several years ago, before I started regularly watching and reviewing horror movies, and my immediate impression was just "this is bad". I got through about fifteen minutes and then fell asleep. I don't know why it's taken me this long to get around to watching it through, but to no one's surprise, my opinion on it has done a complete 180 to the point where I think this is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's just bonkers for so many reasons.

Suspiria is nothing if not excessive. Saying that it goes all-out is doing it an injustice; it goes beyond all-out and into the territory of ridiculousness. Nobody ever told Dario Argento to chill out a single time in his life. There's essentially no plot-relevant reason why anything in this movie has to look the way it does: it's all colored, lit, shot, and constructed purely according to what looks good, and now that I can appreciate that fact, I admire it more than anything. There's no reason for one side of the curtains to be lit blue and the other side lit red, or for neon green lighting to fall onto the back of one girl's head without illuminating the girl she's talking to, or any number of other instances where neon overtakes the frame, other than "it looks cool and we can do it". Sheer aesthetic insanity start to finish.

I guess the reason why I thought this was bad at first is because it can be jarring if you're not prepared for how off-the-rails the dialogue and acting is, and for giallo's infamous problem with horrendous dubbing. Some of the script is The Room-level bad. "I once read that names, which begin with the letter S, are the names of.... ssssNAKES!" isn't even the worst of it. Bless Jessica Harper for delivering these awful lines with a modicum of seriousness, because nobody else did.

I don't really think Suspiria goes in for symbolism- it's such a purely aesthetic movie that nothing exists much further than the surface. But if you look at it the right way, it can be an interesting depiction of the misogyny behind why men make up stories of witches. I don't think the film is aware it's depicting this, and in fact it seems itself to be contributing to the evil witch trope, but nonetheless, the thing intended to be frightening is the suggestion of the witch- literally the shadows on the wall, the conception of a feminine evil operating clandestinely beneath the noses of men. I would argue that the majority of men are not physically intimidated by women, having been conditioned to confidence in their own power over them, and so the only way men can fear women is if they conceive of them as endowed with magical power and the ability to convert innocent girls to their coven of evil.

It will be interesting to see how the remake addresses these issues of misogyny given how ham-fisted the original is. So much of it is so clearly intended for nothing but eye candy. I laughed out loud at a scene where a nameless girl bounds downstairs in a tight shirt with her robe open and then immediately closes her robe at the bottom of the stairs, because it's incredibly obvious we were only meant to look at her chest. It's hard to express in words why this is such a compelling movie, because to describe it straight-on sounds too absurd to be good. But believe the hype: it is amazing. The soundtrack is something you feel in your blood. It is a full sensory experience for 98 minutes that feels like it lasts for several hours. There's giallo and then there's Suspiria.

Monday, October 1, 2018

Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater: Snake Girl (2005)

directed by Noboru Iguchi
Japan
53 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

Don't ask why I gave this such a high rating because even I am not 100% sure. The source material being Kazuo Umezu helps, because he's good to begin with, but I definitely loved this movie for what it was regardless of where the story came from. Snake girls seem to be a semi-popular motif in Japanese horror, and I'd place this one under the category of "folk horror" due to that and its setting in a remote mountain village. In my opinion this all makes it good October viewing.

It seems like most of these Kazuo Umezu's Horror Theater movies, and a lot of J-horror from the mid-2000s in general, made use of an extremely lo-fi, shot-on-video aesthetic that somehow enhanced them more than intricate cinematography and/or lighting, camera angles, etc. could ever have done. There's only minimal CGI, and even less set dressing, so you get the feeling that this is kind of just how Japan looks in its natural state- or I guess how it looked, seeing as most of these films were made ~15 years ago. But having horror set in such an intensely mundane atmosphere, with seemingly little done to prepare the environment for shooting a film, really makes for a unique look and feel that not many movies have.

Surprisingly, for such a relatively short movie, Snake Girl gets into the personal life of its protagonist enough that I genuinely felt for her. She has an affinity for posting nasty messages on an online message board, but the way it's presented is that even she doesn't really know why she's doing these things- she's a nice person in real life, but is having trouble figuring out her feelings as she gets older, and turns to this message board as an outlet. The film concludes with the main character recognizing her anger and realizing that it wasn't a good thing, and that it wasn't part of the person she wanted to be. I can think of tons and tons of movies and television shows that don't write their adult protagonists with this much maturity, and this is a 50-minute-long horror movie starring a preteen girl who encounters a village full of snake people.

So it's half fun folk horror with some... interesting-looking monster makeup, half a story about a girl growing up. The main actress does a great job with all of this. Also I don't support anti-snake propaganda, but I enjoyed this anyway.

Friday, September 28, 2018

E-Demon (2016)

directed by Jeremy Wechter
USA
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I honestly watched this because I was curious about just how awful it would be based on the title. I mean, no movie can be called "E-Demon" and be decent, right? Wrong.

It's a found-footage movie in the form of recorded video chats between four friends who slowly get picked off by an ancient and vicious demon after one of them opens up an old haunted trunk in his attic that his grandma warned him was cursed. It's established that the four friends have a history of pranks on each other, which provides some context as to why they don't immediately call the police and freak out when one of them appears to get killed on camera. Whether or not the "haha it's a prank right????" trope is overused and boring or not is up to you, but in this instance I actually didn't mind it, possibly because it was in the past, and the characters are all a little older than the mischievous college kids who usually populate films like this.

I also genuinely liked the idea of the demon. It's hard to explain why it appealed to me, maybe because it was taken so seriously and cast as this thing that has existed since forever and has simply adapted to the internet as its new method of getting victims. Good acting has a lot to do with why this was a good film, too. The group's only girl, Kendra, was a really strong character and probably my favorite, because she was so capable and was the only one who actually did anything that had an impact on the situation as a whole. Tied into that is another thing I appreciated about this- that it doesn't give any quarter to sexual assault, doesn't exploit it but states clearly that it's a line that isn't to be crossed. 

My opinion on this might change later but I've seen so many bad movies in the "screen sharing" format that a good one like this takes me by surprise. It doesn't wear out its welcome, it doesn't pull punches, it reveals what has to be revealed at the precise best moment for maximum effect. I'm surprised this is a first-time director, but I also think a first-time director is the only person who could have the courage to try their hand at a format so widely derided.

Monday, September 24, 2018

2012: Curse of the Xtabai (2012)

directed by Matthiew Klinck
Belize
80 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
----

I watched this because it's the first feature-length film made entirely in Belize, and it's kind of a horror movie, which obviously made it appeal to me even more. It's in creole, but you can probably understand it if you speak a bare minimum of English. "Xtabai" (also Xtabay) is a figure from Yucatec Maya folklore who is basically a woman with hair down to her feet who wears a long white dress, lives in a cave, and kills people. This film at least got the "lives in a cave" part down, but it takes some artistic liberty with all other aspects of Xtabay's appearance. No matter, though, as the rest of this was so good it got me hyped up.

I want to go to Belize now. This movie is just so radically different from typical action/horror movies in all the ways that matter. When the main character and her group go out into the jungle to search for the Xtabai and bring an end to the apocalyptic plague sweeping through their town, they do it in as smart and cautious a way as possible: A. They bring somebody along who is experienced in bushcraft, B. They go in a large enough group that they have safety in numbers, and C. For a while there's no unnecessary antagonism in their party. Just with those three simple things they've proved themselves smarter than 99.999% of slasher movie victims who bumble into forests and jungles alone, never having camped more than a single night by themselves.

It's also incredibly refreshing that the main character in this is a young woman who doesn't compact herself into an ideal of submissive femininity but instead charges forward with what she knows to be true, and is supported and respected by all those around her, men and women alike. I don't remember the last time a film has featured a woman having prophetic dreams where everybody around her acknowledges that she must be seeing these things for a reason, and that she isn't crazy. I love that women don't take a backseat in this. I mean, the main character's mother is shot while walking unarmed towards military officers demanding to be let outside the cordon to find a doctor for her son. Girls don't do anything halfway in this.

As for the actual quality of the film, I personally felt that it was pretty top-notch, but I know that to most people it would look cheap and unfinished. The acting is great, but if you're used to watching movies produced in big Hollywood studios this will definitely look amateurish. But you have to look past that- what matters is the idea; it doesn't matter that the CGI on the monster is worse than awful and she wears a goofy Halloween mask, it matters that this is a well-written, well-acted movie made by people who clearly knew what they were doing. I really loved this. Sorry.

Friday, September 21, 2018

Space Invasion of Lapland (1959)

directed by Virgil W. Vogel
Sweden/USA
73 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

First off, "Lapp" is now considered a derogatory term for Saami people- I'm not sure exactly where it falls on a scale from "horribly offensive slur" to "term that has fallen out of use", but either way, it's not used anymore, so I wanted to make sure to mention that because they sure do use it liberally in this film.

Anyway. This is kind of a strange one because it has all the trappings of a typical American sci-fi film from the 50s: A super corny monster, a damsel in distress, self-assured men doing Science™, etc. But it was also made in collaboration with Sweden and the majority of it takes place in Sweden. The country isn't really portrayed with the same exoticism that most American films of that era treated other countries with, and although it's implied that the domain of serious, modernized scientists is to investigate strange things and the domain of the Saami is to run in fright from them, Saami people aren't treated as a curiosity. 

This is a movie that I can't recommend in confidence unless you love skiing. It's not even particularly impressive or showy skiing, just... shots of characters skiing down hills for about 75% of the film's runtime. The low rating I've given this isn't necessarily for quality, it's for how incredibly boring it is. A glowing meteor lands in rural Sweden, some people go "perhaps we should investigate the meteor" for 50 minutes and then go skiing. End film. Well, not technically, because as I said there is a corny monster, whose lumbering, silent presence accounts for most of the "action" in the film, which, believe me, is not saying much. However, this monster is still just about the most interesting thing about the whole deal. It's essentially Bigfoot as an alien, but a really really really big Bigfoot. Its size is what makes it so fun- it dwarfs cabins, rips them apart like toys. The miniatures used to convey the alien's size are genuinely not that bad and make for neat practical effects. 

This movie is fun as a novelty, and fun if, like me, you have some Swedish ancestry in ya, but it's as boring and dated as all the other sci-fi films of the 50s are now. It leans more towards the U.S. and English speakers, and even has some people speaking a fake gibberish language instead of Swedish or Saami, which is always disheartening. It's not good but it's not unwatchable.

Monday, September 17, 2018

UFO (2018)

directed by Ryan Eslinger
USA
88 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

I watched this mainly for Gillian Anderson, who wears the worst wig I've ever seen in my life, and assumed that everything about it that wasn't her would be terrible. The other reason why it appealed to me is because it has an earnestness that I love, and because it deals with a subject that's close to my heart: the discovery of solid evidence that aliens are communicating with us. I don't immediately love every film about this concept, because some are badawful, but UFO does it in the way that appeals to me most: with open-minded curiosity and a good amount of scientific rigor (some of which might have been bunk, but it uses theories that are legit, at least). Movies like this touch a part of my childhood, the part that hung out in the closet under the stairs pretending I was in a spaceship talking to aliens.

One common complaint I'm seeing in reviews is that it's too "talky", but that was the best part about it for me. This isn't the kind of film where a bunch of inept teens see a UFO, chase after it with substandard camera equipment, and get themselves abducted. The main character of this film goes about pursuing what he's fairly certain is aliens with caution and occasional outside assistance, and even though he's, like, unrealistically in-the-know about every single subject on Earth, he's likable. Generally a lot of movies where the crux of the plot depends on one singular guy who just ~Knows~ are annoying, but something about this particular Guy Who ~Knows~ wasn't getting on my nerves. It's nice that most of the people around him are at least somewhat willing to play along, too. Friends in denial are another irritatingly common trope of sci-fi movies.

I think I was expecting this to be a horror movie, and that fact played into why I was so pleasantly surprised by it. There's as much motivation behind the aliens in this film as there was behind the WOW! Signal- precisely none, simply (if you want to believe the WOW! Signal was aliens) a reach-out in the form of a bunch of code that it takes a lot of people with Smarts™ to decode.

The final line of this- "We're not alone"- is everything I want out of an alien movie. I don't want guns and lasers, I don't want beautiful women getting bodysnatched, at the end of the day I just want a realistic exchange; the aliens sending us math to say "hey you guys smart enough to get this?" Leave motive to the other films, leave intent for later. The simple fact that we're not alone in the universe is the point of this film, and the details of what the aliens look like or what they want is left aside in favor of spotlighting the massive implications of that one fact.

Friday, September 14, 2018

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)

directed by John Newland
USA
74 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

This movie is so boring, I can't believe anybody wanted to remake it. And that's saying something considering how widely hated (and I mean hated) the remake is.

The worst thing about this movie is its downright alarming conservative gender roles. I first noticed it when the main character's husband asks her to make a meal that's "not too simple" because he's having company over and he has to make a good impression on one of his Man Friends. It sounds like straight up caveman behavior* to try and impress your fellow men by showing them that your woman cooks good, but that's not even the first or the biggest red flag in this. All throughout the film are instances where women are basically chained to their men and treated like children- at one point the protagonist's husband calls a guy up and yells at him for putting scary thoughts into his poor wife's head as if she's a literal child who must be kept sheltered.

Also the main character just looks... suspiciously young. I was curious so I looked up the actress and she was around 25 when this came out, but something about her face makes her look like a 15-year-old playing at being an adult. It's just creepy the way she's treated, even if she is an adult. Especially if she is an adult.

But anyway, the actual horror stuff is kind of fun. The film is essentially about a woman discovering weird little imp things in her new home that try to spirit her away, cut her with shaving razors, tug on her clothing, et cetera. They look like tiny versions of the gremlin on the plane wing from that Twilight Zone episode with walnuts on their heads. If you want to get into symbolism, you could definitely see these guys as representations of all the fears the main character represses to create a pleasant, socially acceptable facade. But I don't think this film is that deep. The little creatures are probably nothing more complex than little creatures.

I wish I had more positives to say about this because it's a nicely autumnal little film with original creature design and an occasionally eerie atmosphere, but honestly the politics of it took me by surprise and something about it is just unsettling, in a way that isn't fun and spooky-ooky. Worth a watch if you like goblins, but it isn't even the best movie out there about goblins.

*sidenote- i don't endorse the view that cavemen were all violent misogynists

Monday, September 10, 2018

The Borrower (1991)

directed by John McNaughton
USA
90 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I watched this because the plot couldn't be ignored. An alien criminal, forced to assume the shape of a human, is exiled to the savage planet Earth, and he goes around ripping people's heads off and attaching them to himself after his own head explodes.

While I was watching this, I realized that I watch so many "bad" movies that I can't tell when a movie is actually bad anymore. I have a vague idea that certain movies are worse than others, but I no longer know where to draw the line between things I enjoy and things that are actually good. Bearing this in mind, it's my personal opinion that this movie owns. It's wonderful. It didn't sneak up on me unexpectedly, either; I could tell from minute one how good it was going to be- that opening scene with the buggy alien speaking to the human-shaped alien set me up for greatness. I was going to rate this a full five stars, to be honest, but some random transmisogyny turned me off.

I don't even know why this rules so much. I could have just been in a certain mood last night. But while watching The Borrower I was totally disregarding the commonly-accepted terms of "good" filmmaking and I was enjoying the gross practical effects, laughing at the sometimes-cheesy humor, and not putting too much stock into anything, because the film itself takes itself blessedly un-seriously. Besides the head-snatching alien adventures, there actually isn't an abundance of plot to this. The alien doesn't really have a goal on Earth, seeing as he was sent here involuntarily, so he just wanders from place to place picking heads like pumpkins. We don't even know what he did to get sent here or anything else about his species, and that's fine: this film knows when to explain and when to hold back.

It's hard to believe this was directed by the same guy who made Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, of all things. But when you think about it, this movie is as irreverent and passionate about being a goofy alien flick as Henry is about being a transgressive and uncomfortable movie about a serial killer. Though they are two vastly different subjects, they have similarities in how committed they are to the subject matter. I would call this a guilty pleasure, but what does that even mean anymore? Why should I feel guilty about how much I liked this? I thought it was good and so that means it was good. Art is subjective. We should all chill out.