Pilot Pirx's Inquest (1979)

directed by Marek Piestrak
Poland
95 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I've wanted to see this for a while. I actually just started reading Tales of Pirx the Pilot, plus I found out Arvo Pärt did the soundtrack, AND I recognized the guy from Stalker in it. So I was really jonesing to find somewhere I could watch this. I knew of the director already from a horror film he did called "The Wolf", and I didn't like that film overly much, but it was aesthetically pleasing.

I've only read two stories with Pirx in them, but that character seemed very unlike the character in this film. It's entirely possible that he develops over the course of all of his endeavors, but book Pirx seems like a kind of bumbling, ultimately good-natured average guy who somehow also has a bit of an inflated ego, and film Pirx... we don't really get to know what kind of person he is because he doesn't get much backstory at all. He comes onto the scene in a very stereotypical "I know just the man for the job..." introduction, so we know at least that he's (in)famous as a pilot, but the neophyte space cadet I'm reading about seems far from this depiction of Pirx.

(That doesn't mean I didn't like film Pirx- I do, I think he's well-acted and the actor portraying him has charisma. He's just not familiar to me from the stories I'm reading.)

This particular story concerns Pirx as the only for-sure human in a crew of robots and humans aboard a ship to Saturn. The robots are brand-new, extremely realistic, and being tested to see how they fare among humans and in their duties as crewmen. If they succeed, they'll be put into mass production to do jobs around the globe, as they're indistinguishable from people unless you cut 'em open and they can perform in environments much too dangerous for humans. I thought it was interesting that the name for these guys is "non-linears", because it made me think about something I don't think of often when it comes to robots: how they experience time. If you don't program a circadian rhythm into a robot, does it have any conception of time whatsoever? Could you say that a robot "experiences" time the way a human does, or does it have no more awareness of time than a clock? The idea of time doesn't actually figure into the robots' characterization- they're non-linear in name alone- but it was a fascinating thing to think about during the boring parts.

Since this is adapted from material by Stanislaw Lem, there are of course philosophical questions about the nature of humanity at its core, and those are what I would consider the most interesting parts of the film- how the robots interact and conspire, things like that. It gets goofy once or twice, like when everybody is supposedly under massive G-force which just looks like walking around really slow, but for the most part it's covered in that DIY, cardboard-and-miniature-spaceship magic that makes Eastern-European sci-fi from the 70s and 80s so great. There's also a great deal of what I would call early Polish house music in the soundtrack which I found quite amusing.

Ladromas de almas (2015)

directed by Juan Antonio de la Riva
Mexico
88 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I was drawn to this because there's not too many untranslated titles when you're browsing Netflix in English (this one means Soul Thieves) and therefore the lone Spanish title amongst everything else caught my eye. Add to that the promise of zombies and I was intrigued, even if Netflix has a reputation for trashy horror movies. To my surprise, though, it wasn't half bad.

First off, I was a big fan of the costuming. All of the characters wear fairly detailed outfits that look pretty accurate to me (although I know nothing at all about the Mexican war of independence, so I could be wholly wrong), but more than that, are worn with consistency throughout the film. Maybe it was unrealistic that the characters all managed to keep most of their clothing intact throughout fighting and getting down and dirty with the undead, but it still provided a striking visual image. The women in the film were less elaborately dressed, mostly wearing thin floor-length nightgowns that looked visibly cheaper than the men's outfits- which is somewhat unusual considering how it's generally women who are obligated to preen and dress up onscreen.

Although this looks good, I think Netflix has a big problem with going all in for HD when it's not necessary. With things like nature documentaries, higher definition is better, and in some TV shows and movies specifically designed to look eye-catching, better quality enhances the overall experience. But in regular films like this one, I don't need to see every pore on everyone's face in 1080p. In fact, I think it renders the whole thing a less believable, because when the image is so sharp, things like makeup, wigs, and synthetic fabric become too obvious.

This is kind of a weird setting to put zombies in, but I guess if you have enough imagination you can insert zombies into any situation. Do they actually fit well within the surrounding storyline? Eh. But this film deals with something that I think about often: the idea that the only people to have witnessed anything truly paranormal could have died before they could tell anyone. I think it's really interesting to think that maybe a random soldier whose name was never recorded, lying half-dead in a trench somewhere, could have seen an actual ghost, but died so shortly afterwards that they never had time to convey their experience. Even if the witness isn't anonymous, the swiftness of death in wars and their associated skirmishes would guarantee that almost nobody would have the time to tell anyone what they'd seen, if they'd seen it. Considering how many people die on battlefields, it's not hard to imagine that they could be hotbeds of paranormal activity, only known to those who eventually contribute to the ranks of ghosts haunting them.

Other than being visually attractive and having some nice-looking (though conventional) zombies, this doesn't have too much going for it. I'm always down for horror films from Mexico and it's unfortunate that there are so few, because the country as a whole has huge potential for creepy goings-on (lots of history and lots of deserts and ghost towns). I like that this takes itself seriously despite the presence of zombies and I like the historical element. It's a classic good-but-not-great movie.

The Crescent (2017)

directed by Seth A. Smith
Canada
99 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Someone on Letterboxd brought up the point that this kind of dreamy indie "mumblegore" is cheap to make, but still has the potential to be as powerfully unnerving (or even more so) than anything put out by a big studio. I think that's a really great thing for the horror genre in general, that we're leaving behind the use of the most expensive, cutting-edge cameras and CGI as a prerequisite for a good film and acknowledging that anybody with an idea can make something that will translate to good, unsettling horror.

The Crescent utilizes not much more than the landscape it's set in to establish a dark, broody atmosphere full of creeping dread and menace. It takes place at a secluded beach house where a young mother stays with her toddler son after the death of her husband, and for most of the film it's difficult to tell if there's real horror there or if the dark atmosphere is just a result of the numbness- the anesthetizing trauma, Beth's lack of participation in the world around her, her just floating through the frame without interacting with it. The openness of the wide ocean is used to incredibly evocative effect in this, it really reminds you how powerful the sea is. I kept thinking the word maw during this; the sea as a maw.

I'm not sure if the kid playing Lowen was the main actress' actual child or not, but if not, he's either one of the best child actors I've ever seen, or the editing in this is so phenomenal that it could frame him and an unfamiliar woman to look like they had a deep relationship. At Lowen's age, it's hard to film a child and have them act a certain way, so they don't try- Lowen is almost the most frightening character in this because he's so real. There's a genuine feeling of precariousness in him because you're watching a child really interact with their environment, even though you know that environment is staged for film. Adult actors know where the props are and why they're there, but toddlers don't. What's around them is just there, as real to them as anything.

I'm also fascinated with the way this film managed to make room for fantastic creature design in the middle of what was otherwise a grounded and serious scenario that seems at first glance like weird creatures would have no place in it. A particular scene- I won't say which- is effective because it's a breaking-away of things, a glimpse at the maw that I mentioned. The parasites underneath and outside the frame.

I'm going to get into spoilers in this last paragraph because I want to talk about the ending. I might seem like a hypocrite because I rail against horror films that conclude with one or all of the characters having been in a hospital the whole time, but this is a rare instance where that scenario works because it's fully integrated with the events preceding it. I only take issue with the hospital ending when it throws away everything the film had been up to that point in favor of a poor attempt at a plot twist. What happened in The Crescent actually happened, and it's scarier because it happened somewhere that you and I can't see- it was happening beyond "life" as we know it, some other place, definitely real, but inaccessible to the living. It raises questions about the afterlife and where we pass through when we die. Genuinely one of the most original and unnerving films I've seen recently.

The Cape Canaveral Monsters (1960)

directed by Phil Tucker
USA
69 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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Really not a very good movie but available for free, legally, on archive.org.

This is a typically hokey TV movie about two aliens who take over the bodies of a human man and woman after they both die in a car crash and use them to muck about on Earth and advance their alien agenda. I watched it because I think there's something inherently interesting about films in which humans are aliens- not in the Star Trek sense where every single alien is a human with some stuff on their forehead, but in a sense like Under the Skin where the alien is indistinguishable from a human. There's something about looking at a person and knowing that that isn't a person, even though it looks just like one.

The thing about this movie that made it boring, though, is that it doesn't really do anything with its aliens. They kidnap humans and teleport them back to their homeworld, do stuff to them in their sinister lab full of bubbling fluids and electronic devices, et cetera; but that takes up a small amount of time. This could literally be re-dubbed as a crime flick about a couple with strange scars who kidnap a bunch of people and do medical experiments on them. If I'm watching a movie about aliens and it's so hard to tell that it's about aliens that I wouldn't know with the sound off, I don't consider that good enough storytelling, to be honest.

I was also excited because there's a woman scientist in this, in an era where the womenfolk were generally regarded as not being able to Do Science for whatever reasons, but she's framed as a sort of doe-eyed damsel who seems to have mostly gotten the lab position through her famous German uncle. They shoehorn in a love interest for her who proposes as they're both imprisoned in an alien lab (seriously?) and she does no small amount of fainting or generally being incapacitated. Even the alien in the form of a woman acts within social norms. Make her get messy and gross! Aliens don't care about manners, or at least not in the same sense that humans in the 60s would have.

I very rarely say this, but a remake of this could be really interesting if it was kept loose enough and not constrained to the style of the original's time period. Just the basic concept transposed into a format in which it could have the pathos it should have had would be interesting to see.

The Tower (1985)

directed by Jim Makichuk
Canada
81 minutes/102 minutes/110 minutes (there's a lot of cuts of this)
3 stars out of 5
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I mostly watched this for the poster on Letterboxd that looked like peak vaporwave aesthetic, but I also found out that it was directed by Jim Makichuk, who did Ghostkeeper, which I was unexpectedly fond of. That last fact is interesting because The Tower is the opposite of Ghostkeeper: One is about the horrors of modern living, the other is about getting stranded in the snowy wilderness.

The premise of The Tower isn't original, but it's something that isn't really done anymore due to the comfortable place technology now occupies in our hearts and lives. It's one of those movies about a high-tech "smart building" that goes rogue and attempts to kill its human inhabitants- even succeeding in doing so, in a couple of cases. There was an episode of The X-Files that covered this and I'm sure countless other horror and sci-fi films/series tried to glom on to this popular topic in the 80s/early 90s as well, and their quality is very inconsistent, but they all serve up a piping hot slice of aesthetic, much as The Tower does. The actual film never gets as perfect as the pastel lilac tones and tiny glittery lights of that poster, but the cheaply manufactured interiors and occasional cheesy synth music add time and place- and a certain dated, retro pathos- to this somewhat generic idea.

The protagonist embodies the unspoken idea that there's such thing as a "Natural Man", a force in opposition to the growing automation of everyday life. His type is a recurring theme in movies like this one: a guy who, by his nature, is simple and kind of dirty, rough-and-tumble and un-sophisticated yet exactly what the plot needs as its monkey wrench to throw in the gears of the bad, naughty smart building or whatever other killer technology he goes toe-to-toe with. This Natural Man is brash and somewhat rude, but it's presented as "unfiltered" human nature instead of a lack of manners. Where the computer tracks movements down to the atom and tells you the weather in sixteen different cities across the world at precisely 9:30:00 each morning, the Natural Man crushes a beer can, belches, and wears wrinkles on his dress shirt with pride.

Repeatedly, the artificial intelligence controlling the titular Tower plays a recording of Saharan "tribesmen" (this irritated me- what tribe? where?) calling out in worship of their rain god, and ostensibly this is just a random snippet from the AI's memory banks that surfaces due to glitches in its programming, but it can also be read as a kind of "where is your god now?" power move. This whole film casts the computer as the new god and the lowly common man as innocent, but unfortunately it also seems to be implying that chanting African tribesmen are some kind of bastion of "uncivilized" humanity, as if there are degrees of naturalness, and the archetypical image of hunter-gatherer African tribes are the closest to a "baseline" of human nature. This is a problematic idea for many reasons.

This really isn't a deep or interesting movie, its characters are flat and constantly cracking unfunny, generic banter, but the implications behind the goofy old "killer smart building" plot are somewhat fun to delve into. This is a relic from a time before everybody got used to the idea of something listening in on your every conversation and recording your emails. Evidently there's a 110-minute cut of it (the one I watched was, thankfully, just over 80) and that sounds exhausting.

Vampire Clay (2017)

directed by Sôichi Umezawa
Japan
81 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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In keeping with the cinematic tradition of turning things into monsters that nobody else would think of turning into monsters, Japan's film industry now brings us a movie in which clay is somehow given life and begins devouring the people around it.

The reviews are pretty abysmal, but this is an interesting movie nonetheless because it takes something typically thought of as a creative force (clay) and makes it into something typically thought of as a parasitic life-drainer (a vampire). The clay doesn't literally form itself into the shape of a humanoid vampire and suck peoples' blood, though, it does things like form weird appendages to manipulate objects so that people will cut themselves on them and/or mold itself into bizarre gaping mouth-shapes to envelop and digest entire human bodies. It pulsates and is moist and makes wet sticky noises, basically doing all the things clay is given to do, except now it's animated with some kind of hideous life-force beyond our comprehension that allows it to have a hostile autonomy. There's almost a Lovecraftian streak to this if you frame it in the right way.

I personally thought the idea of vampiric clay was utterly fascinating. It's an almost Promethean cycle: we take the clay from the Earth, hoping to steal its power, and the clay ends up stealing the life from us in return. However, the clay's origin story has more similarity to Frankenstein, with its creator going too far in his ambition to make something truly stunning and ending up being killed by his creation. (The origin story also has parallels to the story of the Golem, but I hesitate to delve any further into that due to the Golem being a specifically Jewish creation.)

If you want to disregard all of this completely, and just watch the film for its practical effects and gore, you can definitely do that as well and still be highly satisfied. I don't know whose idea it was to make a monster out of clay but it was a brilliant one, really, because it meant they were able to create fantastical shapes and metamorphoses with claymation and not have to hide it under the banner of "no really this is a real monster and not something made out of clay". The monster IS clay, therefore it's supposed to look like clay, therefore the special effects artists had much more freedom to work with. And the effects are a visual treat in this. Fun and gooey but also well-crafted. I'm surprised this isn't more of a cult favorite (though it may be too new for that) because I thought it was great.

The Atomic Cafe (1982)

directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, & Pierce Rafferty
USA
86 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Within the first ten minutes of this I felt intensely like I wanted to throw up. The first chunk of the movie is dedicated to addressing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and has interviews with people directly involved in dropping the bomb, as well as shots of the media response in America at that time, and it's sickening. Newspaper headlines gleefully declare things along the lines of "WE BOMB J*PS!" as crowds of young women in bobby socks dance and kiss young men in sailor suits, all while calm-voiced government men and the scientists they've recruited inform us of the progress we've made, how noble it is, how freedom has won as it has vaporized women and children and reduced entire cities to contaminated rubble. And that's just the beginning of the documentary.

Obviously since we've never atom-bombed anybody else, the rest of the film's footage is mostly of "peacetime" usage of atomic and hydrogen weaponry. A particularly appalling propaganda film shows U.S. soldiers conversing with Marshall Islanders and their immediate response of being overjoyed to vacate their island so we may reduce it to smithereens. They're shown as a "primitive and docile" people, subservient to the U.S. armed forces, thankful to get some "variety" in their lives (by having us pack them up and ship them away from their ancestral homes?), and they sing You Are My Sunshine while they're being transported off the island.

Even though this doesn't have much of a "narrative" other than the clear irony the propaganda pieces are presented with, it does an excellent job of showing the mindset that allowed us to go to war and will continue to allow us to go to war as long as we keep it. In every conflict, those who will suffer the least and benefit the most from bombing other countries convince us that there is someone Coming For Us, that there is a force looking to personally corrupt Our Values and infringe upon Our Freedom. The identity of this foreign actor changes- it can be the Japanese, it can be the Soviets, it can be whoever a governing body decides is our enemy. This demonization allows us to stop seeing the other side as people and start seeing them as exactly that: demons. Drones dedicated to dismantling our private freedoms and the joys of the American dream. Foreigners whose point of view we will never understand except that it somehow clashes inherently with ours and therefore cannot be allowed to exist. The government deploys messages of intense fear because it's easier to keep a frightened population complacent.

There's really no one moment in this that's less horrifying than the next. I don't know if the message intended to be impressed upon viewers was this radical, but in the end I came away from this with one thought: that the United States is absolutely in the wrong if this is the foundation it builds its "freedom" upon and uses to "protect" its people. By virtue of its lack of narrative, The Atomic Cafe is one of the most effective documentaries I've seen thus far.

Armenian Haunting (2018)

directed by Art Arutyunyan
USA
77 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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My opinion on this might be a little biased (I had few complaints despite the middling rating I've given it) since I wasn't necessarily watching it because I thought it'd be a great movie, I was watching it because there's really no horror movies out there that involve Armenian culture and people. I'm not Armenian, I don't have relatives from the country, I'm just somebody who cares a lot about making sure the genocide and its million-and-a-half victims aren't forgotten, which is the cause this film has at its center as well.

This doesn't look like it had a huge budget, but that's not necessarily a problem. The filming style is kind of unpolished, but the acting is actually not bad- the main actress is convincing as a determined girl who cares about her family, her ancestors, and her relatives all over, and the scene towards the end with her mother is genuinely very affecting. I see also that the director worked on some kind of LGBTQ anthology film- there is an attempt to include a gay character in Armenian Haunting, and it... leaves something to be desired, but I do really appreciate that the director acknowledged the community when this film basically has nothing whatsoever to do with us. The character somehow didn't feel like that cliche "gay best friend" trope even though he pretty much was; he has an actual important function in helping the protagonist along.

A lot of people would probably see this as too on-the-nose, as there's literally a part where a guy just talks straight at the camera about the Armenian genocide, but with this particular subject it's important to be direct about it and spread the word as much as possible. I don't think this movie was going for something big and artsy and deliberately obtuse, this is a movie for and by Armenian people that is trying to get the word out about this horrible event one hundred years ago that has barely any survivors left and therefore relies on modern people to relay it. And this isn't just a movie that interviews elderly people and focuses on the last generation- this is all about a modern interpretation of Armenian history; how the younger people are carrying on their culture and the memory of what happened to their ancestors.

So where does the horror movie stuff come in? By way of a curse upon the main character's family. I was thinking of this as a kind of Armenian "The Grudge", with an event in the distant past echoing down through generations of family members inexorably, driven by an anger that transcends bodily form and dwells in the supernatural realm. The curse, like the main character's family history, is something that she lives with and can't change. The visual of the ghost was actually my favorite part about this movie. Even though they used no effects or prosthetics, just the image of a person crawling on all fours with their face to you, who has no business being in your private home whatsoever, making weird growling/groaning noises, is scary enough without computer enhancement. This is a different kind of ghost, one more embedded in history. Like I said, there's parallels with The Grudge. This is both commendable as a horror movie and as an important message.

The Night Eats the World (2018)

directed by Dominique Rocher
France
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I mostly watched this because I was drawn to its artsy title, but also because Denis Lavant is in it and I had to see if he played a zombie (he does). I was more than surprised when this film I reckoned would be a pretentious fluff piece turned out to be a genuinely affecting, thought-provoking, and interesting take on horror, and the first time in a long while that I've really, actually loved a zombie movie.

This is pretty unconventional for a zombie film and I think it's a matter of personal opinion whether or not it even technically is one. In this instance I don't believe we see any of the infected consume human flesh or come back from the dead, they just gain increased imperviousness to injury, become driven to extreme violence, and lose most of their free will. The synopsis itself refers to them as "living dead" but it was unclear if all of the infected had actually died before becoming infected. One person dies from gunshot wounds and does not come back so it's obviously only communicable by bite. This is one of those zombie films that doesn't give you any answers whatsoever regarding the outbreak or the virus itself.

But the most interesting variation from "baseline zombie", as it were, is that the infected appear to lose the ability to use their vocal cords in any capacity. The world is largely silent by necessity, any loud noise will attract the clamoring hordes. I loved that this was not treated as a gimmick. This is a movie that focuses on the lived, human experience of the apocalypse- what a singular person would go through, not necessarily as a representation of every person, but one man as he ekes out an existence in a newly hostile world. That we see him and everyone around him as a normal human at a party in the beginning is crucial to how jarring the sudden outbreak is; particularly when we see his ex-girlfriend alive and then afterwards as one of the first zombies the protagonist encounters. I got a sense of realness from this that I never get from zombie films. I could imagine how terrifying it would be to suddenly find the people you used to know reduced to senseless, limb-flailing violence.

As I watched this, it dawned on me that it that could be interpreted as a metaphor for depression. A living person among zombies can be a pretty obvious statement about not being able to connect with people around you. Throughout the film the main character continues to make music, and it's the one thing getting him through everything, like how a single hobby can sometimes keep the worst parts of depression at bay, but he eventually makes a bad choice and burns all his tapes, which leads to the infected knocking his door down when they're attracted to the smoke alarm. Often, depression leads you to make reckless decisions that ultimately end up endangering yourself.

There's a small twist towards the end that I felt was too on-the-nose for something that, otherwise, was exploring deeper areas of loneliness, rather than predictable isolation tropes. It's not plot-relevant other than as a reinforcement of how bad the main character is starting to go stir-crazy, and it's all the more annoying because of its irrelevance. But it isn't a big deal overall. Zombie Denis Lavant in his silent grasping for warm flesh out of some incomprehensible instinct creates enough pathos that I felt like this movie outshined most typical zombie genre fare, and it brushes over common tropes loosely enough to make me feel like I was watching something really unique.