Aurora (2018)

directed by Yam Laranas
Philippines
110 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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At the last minute before watching this, I saw some reviews that were less than stellar, but I still wanted to see it for myself because it sounded really good. Also there's such an abundance of Filipino movies on Netflix that I keep hoping something vaguely resembling horror will pop up among them so that I can get more acquainted with the country's film industry while staying in my comfortable rut of only watching horror movies.

I don't really think this is a bad movie, but it's a movie that feels directionless and very long. The acting is good, the cinematography is beautiful despite occasional sub-par CGI, and the score is so enthralling and monumental it almost feels like it's overachieving, so why is Aurora so bland? Its concept of the returning dead doesn't feel rooted in any specific emotion- typically revenants and walking dead have some message to communicate to the living, some goal in showing themselves that they can accomplish and then finally leave this world for good. Aurora's shipwrecked dead don't seem to guide the living characters to a conclusion about the way they died, which felt like it should have been the end result here, and instead they simply show up en masse and wander around ineffectually. They exert no strong pull and don't have any physical effects on the living other than creeping them out. I wanted to feel something about these ghost-slash-zombies' trauma, but instead they seemed weak and mute.

I just feel like with a little bit more push in practically any direction, this could have been amazing. It lays out its concept (the shipwreck and the investigation into recovering the bodies) but doesn't make us feel anything about it. We recognize the tragedy of the lives lost, but it kind of fades into the background because it's not emphasized enough. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be emphasized, the fact of it is tragedy alone, but it seems like after the beginning, the story of the wreck simply passes into the past like an underreported news article. But the visual of the ship run aground on the rock was stunning, I would have loved to see more of it: the thought of living on that island trying to run a happy little inn while just outside a gigantic cruise liner sits on its side as a kind of horrible headstone for a mass grave could have been the pathos needed to make this a more resonant film.

It's really not terrible, like it's really really not terrible, but it's not good either. Everybody has very nice hair that I highly suspect was artificially enhanced. Maybe if they put more of their hair budget into their CGI budget it would have felt more immersive.

The Siren (2019)

directed by Perry Blackshear
USA
80 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I didn't know the director of They Look Like People had a new movie out, nor did I know that it sounded like something right up my alley, until very recently. Where They Look Like People is straight-no-chaser paranoid horror, The Siren (aka Rusalka, after the folklore creature it's based on) is more of a horrific fantasy, and it's fascinating to see the differences and similarities between two movies that are both equally as good.

The Siren is kind of difficult for me to review because its method of storytelling is just so visual. This can be a good thing and a bad thing: good because it wraps you up in the atmosphere like nothing else I've seen, bad because a lot of the time you have to use your imagination and have no idea what's going on. But the feeling of fantasy that pervades the film is ultimately something I loved, because the subtle suspensions of disbelief created a world that seemed just that tiny bit more full of possibility than ours, even if that possibility is sinister. The fact that two men don't seem to think it's strange that this girl they meet literally never gets out of the water, or don't question why they encounter a lone girl swimming in her full clothing anyway, gives a vibe of unreality. The meshing of the supernatural concept of the Rusalka with the material fact that she's just a swampy girl in a wet t-shirt is such a cool way to portray folklore in the modern day.

I also can't talk about certain things I want to talk about due to spoilers, but I'll just say that the film is not as kind to its gay character as I was hoping it would be. It's another case where the non-hetero relationship is the one fraught with grief and misery. Gay Grief is practically its own genre: no film with a gay couple can be as carefree and puppy-love-laden as one with a straight couple. I am thankful at least that the grief in The Siren is formed out of love instead of the inclusion of scenes of homophobic violence, as most movies with gay folks seem to think it's necessary to have, and I also don't want to make it out like the het couple isn't also somewhat screwed up- he's a guy, she's a deadly lake monster. But I just came into this hoping to see a gay couple save each other and instead I got angst and bad decisions.

I really liked the way this treated the siren, though, because I felt like it emphasizes the tragedy of her story rather than making her blindly murderous and unremorseful. Almost the most horrific thing about this film is the way she's forced to live. The drownings aren't a thing that she wants to do; she wants more than anything to have somebody get into the water with her and just be with her, or to get out on land and be with them, but she also knows that the second anybody does get into her lake, she will have to kill them. There's a lot of themes like culpability and forgiveness (or lack thereof) in this and I really think it's one of the year's best.

Mad Cowgirl (2006)

directed by Gregory Hatanaka
USA
89 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I watched this right after Mutant Girls Squad because I thought it might make a good companion piece simply based on the fact that the two films both follow the formula of "girl + violence". That's about the only thing they have in common, though, because while Mutant Girls Squad is 100% bonkers 100% of the time, Mad Cowgirl has enough of a grip on reality to recognize when it's losing its grip on reality, and that's what makes it interesting.

So this film is about a woman who gets mad cow disease from bad steak served to her by her brother, but the way it presents this narrative is very unconventional. A lot of dark, edgy movies like to advertise themselves as ~*a look into [insert unstable person's name]'s psyche*~ but usually all that means is they use some bad POV shots or something. Mad Cowgirl does this thing where it seems like everything is seen directly from the perspective of the main character, but not in terms of physical POV or anything; we see and experience mad cow disease and the spiral into tumor-induced delirium at the same time the main character does. I don't know how accurate this is in representing the actual symptoms of mad cow disease, but I think it's more dedicated to being a subjective portrayal than a realistic one.

It also, to an extent, just feels like daily life in its un-glorified state. The things the main character is bombarded with aren't really that strange when you consider the baggage any of us walks around carrying. A lot of the film revolves around anxiety: religious anxiety, anxiety over family relationships, anxiety over an ex, job anxiety, and of course on top of it all is the stress of news reports coming out about people losing their minds after eating steak. For this reason it's hard to actually pinpoint when the protagonist gets infected, because although there's a definite downward slope near the end of the film, her whole experience is based off of discomfort and paranoia from minute one. Was she carrying the disease since before the beginning of the movie and her blaming her brother for it was a mistake?

Something that makes the events of Mad Cowgirl feel even more surreal is that most of the characters who aren't the protagonist act completely unaware that they're players in her bizarre inner world. I'm impressed by the way the writing in this is able to swing from the strangeness of the main character's experience to something emotionally impactful. In particular I felt really bad for her doctor, who seemed genuinely invested in this girl and was the one who had to find out the brunt of what she'd done at the very end. He does add to the surrealism, though, as even though he's speaking what I believe is Sinhalese for the majority of his dialogue, the main character (who only ever speaks English and French) appears to understand him just fine.

I expected this to be basically an exploitation film, and I don't know, maybe it kind of is, but it feels more personal than that. There's something naggingly tragic about this that I never really find in exploitation. Sarah Lassez adds most of the appeal, and again, her ability to swing from totally mundane to the height of prion-disease-related death trips is commendable.

Mutant Girls Squad (2010)

directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura, Noburu Iguchi, Tak Sakaguchi
Japan
85 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I'm an avid proponent of reclaiming the horror genre and horror tropes as a tool for minorities to express their experiences. Japan has given us a lot of material to work with by making a whole bunch of movies in which girls have superpowers and turn into monsters and stuff, and while a lot of it is so steeped in gross, sexualized portrayals of children that I don't know who would want to reclaim it, there's also a ton of gems like Mutant Girls Squad that are perfect for re-contextualizing into a message that being a Strange Woman™ is a source of great power.

Most of the motifs in this movie are direct metaphors for being a trans girl or a girl who likes other girls and you can't change my mind on this. This can be said for pretty much any movie where a young person discovers that they have powers that ostracize them from their peers (bland Marvel interpretations of marginalized "mutants" aside), but in this film it's especially good as a representation of being a girl, realizing that something about you separates you from other girls, and then finding out that there's been other girls out there the whole time who share your feelings of alienation. Also, for being a movie with a lot of really crude body/potty humor, Mutant Girls Squad is surprisingly low on any actual sexual violence, instead choosing to use sex imagery as something funny and goofy as opposed to anything really hurtful or ill-intentioned.

Now, where this movie becomes disappointing if you, like me, are trying to view it as a positive representation of girls taking back control over the ability to define who they are is when the squad of mutant girls kind of implodes on itself at the end. Unfortunately at this point I'm used to seeing stories where marginalized people start to gain autonomy, only to turn into irredeemable destructive monsters who commit war crimes in the end. This represents privileged peoples' fear of us: they'll let us feel good about ourselves as long as we stay isolated and subservient, but if we start to assemble- if even one of us manages to assert power and become a threat to the ruling class- we're now out of control and dangerous. It was disheartening to see Mutant Girls Squad fall into this trap of contrasting "good", docile, non-violent girls against unruly, angry girls.

But then again, this is a movie where three girls fly around on another girl like a hoverboard. This is a movie where people talk after getting their heads sliced into three parts. This is a movie where a woman gets hacked and slashed into the shape of a loaf of French bread. I would say "it's not that deep", but I think everything means something and no art- including splatter flicks from Japan- is apolitical. I did still have a lot of fun during this movie though. It would not have been what it was if not for Yumi Sugimoto's genuinely solid screen presence. Her fight scenes were good enough to be in a non-slapstick film.

Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972)

directed by Bob Clark
USA
87 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This is one of those movies that are (to me) almost killed by how insufferable their characters are. The friend group who run afoul of an ancient occult curse is comprised of grown-up theater kids who do nothing but snark at each other and praise their own egos, and while this can be funny occasionally, more often than not it's unbearable. It is an improvement on the wide-eyed, utterly incapable teenagers who typically incur the wrath of dusty old necromancy spells unwittingly, and it makes the whole film feel much more self-aware, but I got so tired of hearing these people talk that I got annoyed at the movie itself. If we didn't have to spend so much time with the characters, it wouldn't be nearly as bad, but it's close to an hour before anything interesting happens.

After that hour, though, the film really hits its stride. There's a weight to this, I feel; a significance to everything that almost makes me want to pull out the L-word* because it doesn't have the frivolous and gory feeling of a bad zombie movie, but also is too firmly within the horror genre to be a dark comedy or drama. The dead don't just walk here. They're not vessels emptied out and absent of any animating force aside from the desire to feed. These beings are vengeful, spiteful; I don't know what they are anymore but they certainly aren't human. They transcend their papier-mache wounds and plasticine teeth. They become a message of warning but also an inevitability, a glimpse of the hate that might possess someone ripped from warmth and light and thrown into the grave, then humiliated and treated like a plaything by the arrogant living. Only in George Eastman's death scene in Anthropophagus have I encountered this kind of zombie ennui.

If only modern horror could ditch its obsession with neon and synthpop and embrace the example set by films like Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things: moog. The score of this is something out of Scooby-Doo, warbling and wibbling and sounding altogether perfect for spooky Halloween horror nights with friends. Sometimes it's good for a score to sit in the background and accompany crucial moments, but sometimes having music be intrusive nearly to the point of being unfitting gives a horror movie a much more fun atmosphere.

I can't say I didn't think "come on already" at multiple points during this film, but nevertheless I really enjoyed it. It's not like anything else I've seen, exactly. Somewhere between the humor and the hackneyed shambling undead is a deeper meaning. That part near the end where one of the group is hustled off by zombies who clearly show intent and strength is a great blurring of slow zombie/fast zombie lines. I'm trying not to think about the fact that Bob Clark would eventually go on to make Baby Geniuses.

*Lovecraftian

Equinox (1970)

directed by Jack Woods and Dennis Muren
USA
80 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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I guess this film is pretty famous as far as B-movies go, since it got a Criterion release. I'm wondering if that's because it's truly a fan favorite or because the director would eventually go on to work on the SFX for Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and Terminator, as well as other acclaimed things. Because honestly this is not a good movie.

Equinox is basically the epitome of the "It was a nice day... UNTIL THE EVIL CAME!" plot. A bunch of young adults go have a nice picnic and are interrupted by some creepy old guy in a cave who laughs evilly and foists a mysterious book onto them, which they can't refuse. They, of course, commit the cardinal sin of reading words in Latin out loud, thus summoning a whole host of claymation horrors. Much of the film is just hysterical to me because of its randomness, like the unexplained sinister cave dude; the absolutely golden faces the demon park ranger makes trying to deliver big, wet nonconsensual smackers to the women characters; and the guy at the end yelling for "My cross... my cross!!" over and over, which becomes 10x funnier if you pretend he's shouting about a guy named Mike Ross. Maybe that last one is only funny to me. Well, me and/or anybody watching this who is named Mike Ross.

Despite being inept and weird, this film becomes worthy of recognition and remembrance instead of rotting away in a basement somewhere is by virtue of its very existence, I believe. The question of why this was rescued from the dustbin of history by Criterion while other films that I personally believe are better remain available solely on youtube in horrendous 360p came up in my mind several times, and I think the answer is that if one amateur horror film is worth saving, they all are. I mean, would you tell somebody who spent thousands of hard-earned dollars (or zero dollars- the effort matters more than the budget) on their film, "Sorry, this sucks, it deserves to languish and eventually be forgotten"? More silent films have been lost to poor storage and/or catching on literal fire than are available to us today, so in an era when we have the tools to preserve film indefinitely, are we really going to decide what should and shouldn't become history?

Equinox seems an unlikely film to have influenced horror filmmakers in the decades to come, but I think that without it the landscape of the genre would be that little bit less unique (and have less claymation). I didn't care for its depiction of women as helpless and childlike, or its overbearing Christianity, or its overbearing everything else, but I don't think the effort put into it deserves to go unrecognized and forgotten.

The Singing Ringing Tree (1957)

directed by Francesco Stefani
Germany
74 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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So this is an East German fairytale about what the title says it's about. "The singing, ringing tree" sounds exactly as good in German as you might imagine it would. Apparently this holds some nostalgia for people who grew up on the BBC in the 60s and 70s, as it was exported and showed as part of a world fairytale showcase, and I've seen not a few people say that it frightened them very badly as a small child, which is understandable.

I was curious about what an East German fairytale might look like because I'm used to watching fairytale films from the former Soviet Union (and not really anywhere else as I'm not fond of them). It's got much the same look as the Russian Fantastika films I watch so many of- in fact it's nearly identical. I don't know if it'll ever stop being slightly creepy to me the way films like this look so obviously confined to a sound stage, or how plastic-and-cardboard the whole environment is, or the way the costumes look horrifically sweaty and uncomfortable despite the fact that I'm sure the effects department did their best. It's all glitter on the ground and multicolored plants, but no decorations on the walls, nothing too detailed, just fancy colors to catch the eye and hide the fact that there's nothing behind them.

The most unsettling thing about this is the fact that it's got one of those "valiant" princes who really should have realized the princess wanted nothing to do with him and left her alone, and it's even creepier that this is framed as her fault and she's made to come around in the end. I get that the message being conveyed when she refuses the prince is that she's haughty and picky, but... you can be picky when it comes to suitors. I mean, with material things, we can recognize that the princess is being picky. Her complaining about everything that isn't the luxury and softness of her royal home is being picky. But you can't force somebody to accept being courted by a man they don't have any interest in and then get upset with them for that the way you could get upset with them for refusing a $1mil car because it's last year's model. And it's ten times worse that she eventually becomes the lovely beaming bride for this random man, and it's presented as the ideal outcome instead of having her will broken.

The surface message of this isn't, of course, "comply with strange men or you will be brainwashed to comply". It's that being petty and mistreating everybody around you will only isolate you and leave you alone with your sadness, which is valid. Seeing the princess slowly realize that being nice to everyone is the best way to go is cheerful and good. But the undertone of this is one of submission, and I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but it's still, like I said, really skeevy. At one point the princess is transformed so that her outside is as ugly as her inside, and she's given a bigger nose and darker hair, which is... yeah.

Born of Fire (1987)

directed by Jamil Dehlavi
UK/Turkey
84 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Born of Fire is essentially a good versus evil story, which when you get right down to it is the backbone of virtually every story in the world. There are sub-themes and variations, but the brilliance of this plot is that any flavor you can imagine can be added to it to bring it from being a simple morality fable on the level of things you tell to kids to an epic, sweeping tale imbued with cosmic significance. Born of Fire is one of these cosmically significant pieces- almost a tone poem- that also happens to be nearly identical in plot to "The Devil Went Down To Georgia".

I was afraid at first that the parts set in Turkey (a good majority of the film) would be exoticized, but the way this film has its white, non-Muslim characters interact with a setting in which they're a minority is honestly done really well. I am sure this is due to not having been directed or written by white people. This is probably the only film I've seen thus far in which evil is defeated by use of Muslim prayer, and Muslim musical tradition plays heavily into the combatting of dark forces as well, and for that it's unique- good vs. evil is, in most English-language films, portrayed in a very transparently racially tinged way in which the forces of good are light and white and the forces of evil are ancient, powerful forces ritualistically summoned from hot sandy places. You don't usually see a protagonist going to said hot sandy place to bring down the powers of evil. The film is almost deceptively boring before it gets into the scenes in Turkey, and then it really shines, as if it had been restraining itself with normality up until then.

I referred to this as a tone poem because after a certain point it loses almost all grip on a traditional narrative and opens itself up to being perceived with other senses. There's a rhythm to this, a groove that it falls into that it repeats and returns to throughout the film- flute/Master Musician/mother/father/prayer- and it mounts into imagery that doesn't necessarily have to do directly with the good versus evil struggle but is an element of it all the same. Essentially it's a film that's 99% ambiance and 1% story, but the story is infused into the ambiance and vice versa. It's a whole-body film, it's something you have to clear your schedule and your mind to fully appreciate.

It's really, really obvious that Tarsem Singh was influenced by this with The Fall and The Cell. That same kind of narrative presented through images and atmosphere is practically his signature move. Born of Fire is a bit more meandering and trippy than either of those films (meandering/trippy as they themselves are), and it seems so committed to its aesthetic that it forgets how to wrap it all up and treats us to an ending we're not sure what to make of, but the journey to get to that ending feels so monumental and immersive that I didn't really care how it all played out. Images that might not have immediate meaning are revealed to be inherently meaningful because every image, no matter if created by a human hand or not, is inherently meaningful.

Body at Brighton Rock (2019)

directed by Roxanne Benjamin
USA
88 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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From the beginning, the first thing that this movie made me think about is that we all really gotta watch more horror films made by women. The difference is just so stark- I watch the main character of Body at Brighton Rock strut through the forest listening to 80s music without a care in the world and I think, "If this were directed by a man he would never make her so unapologetically peppy and preppy, because to men this signals childishness and incapability". That this girl is written as being naive but still capable of saving herself shows a depth of character that a lot (not all, admittedly) of men would dismiss as impossible when trying to write a woman for film.

Our protag does do some pretty inadvisable stuff, but her final judgement of character is not given entirely on the basis of her being bad at hiking, and that's what I liked about the way Body at Brighton Rock was written.

I love horror movies set in the forest, especially ones in national parks because while the whole idea of a park is to preserve the wilderness, they're still, to a degree, maintained and staffed- and that makes them into a kind of liminal space not unlike a haunted house: something where people are supposed to be within reach, but where you can still find yourself alone and helpless under the right (or wrong) circumstances. Everybody knows not to venture off into a dense, unmapped forest, but we should be relatively safe in national parks provided we're not total idiots. And when we're not safe, that gives us the same feeling as being inside a house, meant to be a home, now infested with spirits and other negative entities out to get us.

But sometimes you just get eaten by a bear. I don't think mentioning the bear attack at the end of Body at Brighton Rock is a spoiler because it really doesn't have anything to do with the plot and the main character ends up alright. Now maybe Backcountry spoiled me with its unexpectedly gruesome and way too realistic bear scene, but the bear scene in this film just fell so flat it felt almost out-of-place. They seemed to be treating the bear as a human antagonist- I could almost hear it going "ow my eye"- which was a mistake, and also the foley was so odd as to be immersion-breaking. I'm sure it's almost impossible to get a bear mauling scene right given the danger of working with an actual bear versus the inadequacies of CGI, but again... Backcountry did it, somehow. It's also a little strange that the bear is featured prominently on the film's poster when its actual appearance takes up maybe two minutes and isn't the most significant element of the film at all.

I really liked this, though. The director is working on a remake of Night of the Comet which I just found out about and am now super hyped for. I love the ambiguousness of the ending, the gauntlet of horrors the protagonist goes through without being sure of what's the most pressing danger, and the forest setting. You kind of have to suspend your disbelief for some things but I don't mind doing that anyway.