The Mimic (2017)

directed by Huh Jung
South Korea
100 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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The Jangsan Tiger (or Jangsanbeom) is one of my favorite legendary creatures and one of the only ones that actually scares me. I'm not sure why that is; it probably has something to do with its mimicking abilities, and also the way art depicting it runs the gamut from trying to make it look like a typical tiger to taking its characteristics more literally and creating a bizarre-looking monster that doesn't resemble anything else. Its shifting appearance makes it more than something like a Bigfoot or even the rumors of big cat sightings in the UK. It feels really menacing in a way other cryptids don't.

After a somewhat confusing start that I'm not sure had anything to do with the rest of the movie, The Mimic develops into an atmospheric, slow-burning horror film that I was impressed with. When I say "atmospheric", I mean that it might actually be too atmospheric for some people. So much about it is purely establishment of tone, there's a lot of shots where you can obviously tell there's about to be something really scary jumping out at you, but at no point did that feel like a problem to me. I was enjoying those moments where I almost got heart palpitations because I was so constantly aware something was lurking around. I know the phrase "jump scare" tends to turn people off from horror films these days because so many movies abuse them, but this is a rare one that doesn't. I admire its use of silence, too. Instead of a building Violin Chord of Doom leading up to its jumpy moments, there's absolute pin-drop quiet, and it's much more effective than any score could be.

The excellent lead actress and multitude of great child actors is one of the main things making this such a believable film. There's no overacting- although there's a good amount of emotional acting, it's just not the kind of frantic screaming and flailing that a lot of lesser horror movies seem to think will make their audience be afraid in sympathy with the characters. The backbone of the plot is family insecurity: the main character lost a child and never fully recovered from it, and that as well as the task of taking care of her aging mother means that she's especially vulnerable to the Jangsan Tiger's lures and tricks. The theme of loss is handled really well and it works as a perfect complement to the supernatural horror of the Tiger.

The backdrop is stunning, I'd love to know where it was filmed because it would be neat if it was actually Jangsan. Even if it wasn't, the universal feeling that sometimes beautiful, lush forests can harbor very old, very malevolent beings shines through in scenery that changes swiftly from idyllic to paranoia-inducing. The only parts of this I didn't like were when it got more dramatic towards the end and invoked the use of some mediocre CGI. And I suppose it does use some tropes that are more tired and overused than anything. But the finale after the major CGI scenes were finished was heavy and dark enough to fit a film that was itself dark and heavy.

The Rocking Horse Winner (1949)

directed by Anthony Pelissier
UK
91 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This sounded so much like a Twilight Zone episode that I'm still not fully convinced there isn't one with this same plot. It's based off of a D. H. Lawrence story, so I suppose it's possible both film and series made something from the same source material. It's about a young boy gifted a rocking horse by his family's handyman who discovers that he can predict winners of horse races with help from the rocking horse, and the consequences this brings as it gets more and more taxing on him.

The tagline is "As exciting as your wildest dreams!" which is amusing because it's totally untrue, unless your wildest dreams are of a sad British family running low on money. Social life in reality was probably a little more lax than films from the era tend to show, because mainstream movies are naturally going to depict an idealized version of class and gender roles, but as a result media from that era comes off very starchy and stiff to me and it's hard to relate to anything that feels so rehearsed.

There's also some predictable misogyny in The Rocking Horse Winner as it's repeatedly implied that the reason the lead family has financial trouble is because women shop too much. They make the mother out to be a socialite who just won't stop spending money on expensive dresses and furniture, while the father's gambling problem is only mentioned once or twice and brushed off. This is a great example of how financial troubles impact children, though, because the main character, the eldest son, essentially worries himself to death over trying to get more money for his family even though he's only 10. This film is largely dissimilar to the Twilight Zone in tone and pacing (only the plot is reminiscent of the series) but the grim outcome is a lot like some of the darker episodes.

The weird thing about this is that if you didn't know the rocking horse had anything to do with the boy's premonitions, you could go the majority of the film without realizing what was going on. There are no clear moments where the boy receives his knowledge, he's just shown going up to the handyman and his uncle and saying that he's sure such-and-such horse is going to win. His train of thought or the moment the revelations are bestowed upon him aren't really shown, so it's just like he rides his horse a lot and then gains knowledge of the winners as an aside.

In the end the two do get firmly linked, but it leaves a weirdly unsettling feeling, especially because that rocking horse is so visually disturbing- what exactly was the reason behind all this? No ancient curses, no meddling ghosts, no witch doctors, nothing explains the horse's abilities. As far as we know it's imbued with this bizarre clairvoyance as soon as it's built. This film is much too stuffy to veer towards the horror genre or anything that would make it more than just a kind of parable, and its reluctance to go for the supernatural is probably why it's so open-ended about certain things. But as a result, if you think too hard about it, it can leave you wondering.

45365 (2010)

directed by Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross
USA
92 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This is a documentary about the town of Sidney, Ohio, postal code 45365. While I was watching it I was thinking about documentaries that focus on the things a town is famous for, versus ones about specific towns that focus on the townspeoples' lived experiences of their town. Any documentary about my town would inevitably center around the things that other people would first think of when they think of it: football, our music scene, or our college. I like to see films about towns that have no strong identifiable aspects, films that explore the distinctiveness of the town through the people who live in it. This is also the Ross brothers' first film, which by itself is commendable.

I had a bit of a hard time "feeling" this movie out because it manages to encapsulate so many different aspects of living in lower- to middle-class America. This is one of the best things about it; it doesn't pick one emotion and structure the story or the tone of the doc based on that alone. But the problem I had with it- and this isn't the fault of the doc, it's just a reality that it exposes- is that everything in this film is basically a carbon-copy of every other middle-class American town. It has football, it has people getting arrested by friendly local cops, it has a barber shop, it has old people talking to each other, it has high schoolers, it has county fairs. This is the other side of what I mentioned about wanting to see movies about towns that aren't "remarkable": life can be the same across much of the map.

There's something about this movie that's subtly unsettling and I'm not sure if it was just me or not. The unchanging nature of life in Sidney and the feeling that this is one of those towns people get stuck in, one of those places people talk about wanting to escape after they finish high school but never managing to break free- it could be that I've lived in too many small towns like this one and I'm sick of them. But I think I was expecting more nostalgia and warmth and instead I got the stark truth. At one point the camera is in a squad car with a police officer who's talking about how he finds himself arresting people for the same crimes that he arrested their parents for. That unbroken cycle is just too disconcerting for comfort.

But there is beauty here and there- two people kissing under barroom lights, their hair making halos around their faces; the tribulations of teenage love; the energy in the young football players as they prepare for a game; etc. Which is why I think this is such a brilliant film. It captures the fact that you can live in a dead-end place, want to leave, and then feel nostalgia and longing for it after you do leave. It's all so unembellished, you barely feel the camera's presence at all. A lot of that is due to good editing, I think. All the parts where the framework is visible are chopped off and you're left with the honest reality of normal people, like an eavesdropper. 

Silent Running (1972)

directed by Douglas Trumbull
USA
89 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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A slightly early Earth Day special.

This movie catches a lot of flak for being utterly ridiculous and heavy-handed in its message about saving the planet, and its teach-the-children-well hippie optimism is very grating, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the message. We should preserve forests and all the little bunny rabbits and birdies in them, and we should strive for a balance with nature instead of robbing it of its resources quicker than it can replenish them. But none of that makes Silent Running's silly preachiness any less annoying.

One of the most entertaining things about this movie is that the main character seems genuinely unhinged. It's fun to watch something where the protagonist isn't the typical image of a savvy action hero, but somebody who's a little too dedicated to his cause, to the point where he seems almost dangerous to be around. I don't know how much these traits were intentional and how much they were just a result of Bruce Dern going off the rails for some reason, but nevertheless, the unlikely tree-hugging hero is great fun to watch. I do also empathize with him a great deal, because honestly, if I were tasked with maintaining a wildlife refuge in the cold reaches of space while my home planet was relentlessly deforested and burned by industry, I would probably go partly (or maybe wholly) insane too. 

Half the reason I enjoyed this so much is because it has some of the best robots I've ever seen in my entire life. And again, it's refreshing to see these particular robots, because they're not humanoid, they have nothing that resembles a human face, they can't speak English or any other human language, and they don't even really have arms, but they're still adorable. I love these robots dearly. It's also interesting that the main character became so trusting of them considering that he seemed to be the type that eschews anything that doesn't come from nature. I feel like this is a nice viewpoint to see; an acknowledgement that synthetic things and organic flora and fauna can live in harmony.

There's more bleakness to this than meets the eye, and that's probably why I liked it. Maybe before the Trump administration it was a little easier to pretend things would never get this bad. But now, the concept of the last remaining Earth-native trees and plants being blown up to clear the way for corporations to use the vessels that were carrying them sounds absolutely plausible. That speech we hear from the president in Silent Running where he makes a big show of begging for forgiveness and hope for "our ruined Earth" reeks of disingenuousness and I can 100% see it coming out of Trump's mouth. The times may have accidentally turned this from a hokey cult film into something unsettlingly relevant. The continuing emphasis on what a privilege it is to be a Great American™ is quite irritating, however. Out past the rings of Saturn, how much does it really matter?

Orbiter 9 (2017)

directed by Hatem Khraiche
Spain
95 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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For some reason Netflix seems to want to hype up the romance element of this film, even though it's not the most important thing about it (it's a pretty big part, but it's not the beginning and end of it). I suspect that this is because focusing on anything else constitutes a spoiler for the whole film. Considering that, I'm putting out a general spoiler warning for the rest of this review, because if you know anything about this before watching it, you'll get spoiled.

This was actually a much better movie than I had expected it to be, mostly because even though there was a twist that should have been disappointing for me since I was hoping for a space-themed sci-fi movie, it managed to remain really good after the twist was revealed. It's still sci-fi, it just changes tone to something a bit closer in time to us. It's more about the ethics of testing out a solution to save the entire human race on a small handful of individuals, and it explores how a person is shaped by their environment. Fooling a child is incredibly easy to do, and one of the questions asked in Orbiter 9 is whether it's ever right to do that, even if it's supposedly for the benefit of a huge amount of people.

The romance, like I said, doesn't play into this too much, and I guess it's inoffensive enough, but it's a bit irritating. The power dynamic is uneven in predictable ways: the man comes in to save the woman and therefore makes himself the defining force of change in her life; without him, she would be living something kind of dismal and unfulfilled. In this movie, like in most other romance movies, the man doesn't have as much of a fleshed-out personality as the girl does. It's implied that him being a man is enough to make him important, he doesn't have to have an interesting backstory.

The other thing I didn't like about this is that the villains are very nebulous, and I couldn't tell what their motivations were. It seemed to be a case of corporate greed combined with a genuine need to save the human race, which is interesting in that it mixes profits with pragmatism, but ultimately I felt like it would have been easier in the long run to just... not be evil. I didn't understand why the villains immediately started trying to assassinate the protagonist and her boyfriend to contain them when a cover-up in cooperation with them seemed entirely possible, if not exactly ideal.

I probably could have given this four stars if it had been shorter. There's one too many things in it that feel like they've been done before (chase scenes, the whole of the romance, etc), but it is still well above average. The product placement is kind of immersion-breaking, but if you watch until the very end of the credits they do admit that there's product placement, so at least it's not sneaky.

I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain (1998)

directed by Andrew Parkinson
UK
79 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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The problem keeping most zombie movies locked into a groove of sameness that lacks a human element is, well, the zombies: by definition, they're shuffling hordes with diminished mental function, their sole desire being to eat the brains (or sometimes just any flesh) of living humans. This is why I like when something like I, Zombie comes along that explores not just how it is to be a zombie but how it is to become a zombie, what it's like to know your mind and body are both slowly decaying. If done well, it can be nightmarish, and even if done only decently, as with this movie, it's still a nice departure from the zombie-flick norm.

I, Zombie follows an exceedingly average guy who, while doing research in the name of his Ph.D., gets bitten by an infected woman and slowly begins to become a zombie himself. He decides to hole up in a cheap flat where nobody will come looking for him (probably because he ate them all?) and keep a record of his descent into total zombification. It takes him quite a while, and for a bit he's able to sustain himself as a normal-looking human just by killing and eating somebody every couple of days, but after some time passes even that becomes insufficient, and passing as a regular living being becomes impossible.

Obviously this has some marked differences from the typical zombie film, the first being that it focuses on one zombie instead of a person or group trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. The second is that there's not really a zombie "problem" in this film; there isn't an epidemic or anything, and it seems like zombies are, in this situation, mostly like a rare and aggressive animal: you can find one if you go looking in the rural, not-often-visited parts of your locale, but otherwise you're unlikely to encounter one in your daily life. If you've seen Ghostwatch, this is a little like that, but for zombies. It combines the main character's narration of his descent into decrepitude with some interviews with his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend and the unmistakable look of a low-budget, shot-on-video horror movie to create something that's not at all elaborate or showy. 

The thing I didn't like about it was that, considering that it's a one-on-one, individual exploration of becoming a zombie, I was expecting more about the subjective emotional experience of zombie-hood. The protagonist goes at his transformation with a very clinical standpoint and makes of it a science project, similar to what he was doing when he got infected. We don't get to know how he feels about what he's going through, other than once or twice when he mentions his revulsion at having to kill people for food. So all in all this is a pretty boring movie, honestly, it's enjoyable for its uniqueness and I wish there were more like this, but it lacks the emotional element that I was hoping to see.

There Will Come Soft Rains (1984)

directed by Nozim To'laho'jayev
Uzbekistan
10 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Far and away one of the saddest and most disturbing films, short or otherwise, about a nuclear apocalypse I've ever seen, and that's saying something because every movie about a nuclear apocalypse disturbs me in some way. But there's an insight and an uncomfortable prescience to this that moves it well beyond the territory of films I'm familiar with. A lot of credit for that has to go to Ray Bradbury, but the majority of the praise should still, I feel, go to Uzbek director Nozim To'laho'jayev for giving this an entirely different weight than the original story had.

At nine minutes long it feels like it should be more difficult to find things to say about this, but it's so full of upsetting imagery and concepts that it sparks a discussion much wider than its scant runtime. And it even manages to leave a few things open to interpretation despite being so short: for instance, I am still not sure where it's supposed to be set. I was assuming it was set in the former Soviet Union, and that touches like an American flag on top of a turkey dinner and the U.S. national anthem playing over a loudspeaker were indicators of the States having forced their supposed "supremacy" on their defeated enemies after the nuclear war that led to the events of the film. But it's also possible that this actually takes place in a bombed-out America.

I think the ambiguity about where it takes place makes it more poignant- I don't want to negate the fact that this is singularly a film produced in a nation that was also under threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, but the message of devastation still stands when applied to basically any other place in the world. The soft rains fall on all nations.

Watchable here, although in pretty poor quality.

Pyewacket (2017)

directed by Adam MacDonald
Canada
88 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This is a movie about a teenage girl summoning a demon that turns out to be way more powerful than she or probably anybody else is equipped to handle. I think I've seen one or two movies that have a similar premise to this, and it seems like they mostly handle it in a somewhat disparaging way, which was my main concern about Pyewacket. I don't like when people make fun of teenage girls.

But thankfully- putting aside how ridiculous the name "Pyewacket" is for a demon- this not only takes its teen protagonist's life and troubles seriously but manages to imbue the atmosphere of the movie as a whole with a kind of ennui. We as viewers can feel something of the way the main character feels when things that won't be that bad later on in retrospect appear to be, at that moment in time, the worst thing that has ever happened to her. Everything feels genuinely important in this movie and I appreciated so much that the cares of a teen girl, generally always dismissed as hysterical and naïve, were given weight. I also enjoyed that the film doesn't leave us on a did-she-or-didn't-she note. There are demons. Absolutely demons. But poor human decision-making can be equally as bad.

Halfway through this I decided to look up the director, and it turned out to be the guy that made Backcountry, possibly the most unsettling movie about being stalked by a bear ever made. Which might explain why this movie is also so unsettling. It's honestly pretty sparse on actual demon sightings or really even any concrete signs that the demon is there- a lot of it happens either offscreen or is contained in implications. There's one scene where the demon manifests itself, and when I saw that with Backcountry in mind, I thought "ah yes, there's the Scene™". Backcountry has a mauling scene that single-handedly jolts the whole movie out of the comfortably distant territory of film and into something upsettingly real. But it turned out that I was wrong about the demon scene being Pyewacket's Scene™. The Scene™ comes close to the end of the film and involves bodily harm of a more physical nature. It is not nice to look at.

I hope that this sets a standard for future horror movies about teenage girls. The ending works because everything leading up to it establishes that it's not 100% the main character's fault, and having something happen that you know she'll never be able to get out from under just makes everything more tragic and horrific. I enjoyed the slow burn so much I didn't even really notice it was a slow burn. That's somewhat rare I think.

Ice Planet (2001)

directed by Winrich Kolbe
Germany, Canada
83 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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Forgive me while I am on a journey of watching mediocre, obscure sci-fi from decades past.

So this is an unaired Canadian TV pilot by a German director, filmed in Germany, that, for some reason, is in English and has few German actors. The majority of the things that I didn't like or was bothered by can be explained by the fact that it is a TV pilot, but that doesn't excuse all the cringe-inducing CGI.

It's not really worth complaining about the amount of characters, because this actually has a fairly diverse cast and I was thankful for that, but at the beginning there's such chaos that I couldn't initially figure out who was important enough to focus on. This is one of those things that makes sense since it's a pilot episode, but if it were a movie, would be weird and confusing. There's also a lot of unanswered questions that seem strange if you take this as a regular movie, but I guess they were going to be addressed later on if this ever made it into development as a series. For example, the main characters encounter an entire human populace living on the mysterious alien planet they're stranded on and this is never addressed again, beyond the one "first encounter" scene they're in.

This is widely ridiculed for its terrible CGI, which is valid. I think this film/pilot is something you either watch ten minutes of and turn off, or watch through to the end because you realize that it's better than it appears on the surface. Fortunately my viewing of it fell into the second category, but the opening scenes with people doing ~*futuristic*~ exercise that consists of jumping around and dodging lasers and striking cool poses while giving an oral report did test my patience. The CGI is bad, but we didn't really have anything better at the time. It's just unfortunate that Ice Planet leans so heavily on computer effects, because the costuming is genuinely great, and the sets are passable enough that if like 70% of the horrible flashy computer effects were removed, it would improve the whole movie drastically.

But the true colors of this thing show through despite the questionable effects, and it's a genuinely decent film, although I do have to tack an "if you like this kind of thing" qualifier onto that statement. Because this isn't cerebral sci-fi, it's not something you watch and instantly feel more intelligent for having seen. It's a somewhat generic action/sci-fi film that you will probably only enjoy if you can put up with the kind of campiness that's pervasively ingrained in Star Trek. Don't watch this if you can't have fun.