Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 27 of 145

Mandy (2018) + Suspiria (2018)

October 24, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

MANDY
***/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Bill Duke
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos & Aaron Stewart-Ahn
directed by Panos Cosmatos

SUSPIRIA
****/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Panos Cosmatos's Mandy is an old-fashioned acid trip of a movie–like if Head were directed by Rob Zombie. Indeed, the film it owes the most to is Zombie's exceptional mood piece Lords of Salem. It's already gained a fair deal of cult cachet (as well as a surprising/not-surprising box-office run), not the least for the best use of King Crimson since Children of Men (prog-rock is having a good 2018 between just this and Private Life), for the late Jóhann Jóhannsson's bliss-out score, and for an unhinged Nicolas Cage performance augmented by Viking berserker rage superpowers. Not for nothing is Mandy a period piece opening with Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, dissolving into a pixie-font title card setting the scene as "The Shadow Mountains" in the year of our lord, 1983. Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is drawing "kinda like a jungle temple" in the remote home she shares with Red Miller (Cage). In bed, they talk about their favourite planets (hers: Jupiter, for the storms; his: Saturn, probably–no, wait, "Galactus") as Cosmatos bathes them in neon reds, then pans up into the Northern Lights arrayed above them. They canoe and it's so beautiful, the wave patterns and the blue, so blue it's almost lurid. Fire, then, a screen of it. All the elements will be represented here as metaphor for the completeness of their bond. It's not subtle. Now's not the time for subtlety.

BHFF ’18: Knife + Heart

October 21, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mexico, Romance, Switzerland

Un couteau dans le coeur
***½/****
starring Vanessa Paradis, Nicolas Maury, Kate Moran, Jonathan Genet
screenplay by Yann Gonzalez, Cristiano Mangione
directed by Yann Gonzalez

by Walter Chaw Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart is a smart film by a smart filmmaker. It’s a movie-lover’s fugue, a tribute to the heyday of gay porn and the grindhouse theatres that showed it, a salute to editors, a shrine to multi-cultural myths about birds. It’s a deep well with obvious pleasures, a film with a recognizable structure complete with solution that still manages to avoid the standard exposition and perfunctory resolution. The spiritual brother to Brian De Palma’s Body Double (exploitative and sleazy and also commentary on exploitation and sleaze), it’s a movie about looking that has as its central image a blind grackle–an extinct variety of the common pest that used to bring folks back from the dead by burning off the ever-after as it flew too close to the sun. Its central couple is gay-porn director Anne (Vanessa Paradis) and her editor and former lover Lois (Kate Moran), who churn out the sort of softcore masterpieces of art-film erotica favoured once upon a time by your Kenneth Angers, your Paul Morrisseys and Radley Metzgers. All of her work is autobiographical in some way. There’s no line separating Anne’s reality, nor her dreamlife, from the mindscreen of her movies.

Big Kill (2018) + The Toybox (2018)

October 20, 20182018, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

BIG KILL
*/****
starring Christoph Sanders, Jason Patric, Michael Paré, Danny Trejo
written and directed by Scott Martin

The ToyBox
*½/****
starring Mischa Barton, Jeff Denton, Brian Nagel, Denise Richards
screenplay by Jeff Denton
directed by Tom Nagel

Watch The Toybox on iTunes

by Walter Chaw Triple-threat Scott Martin’s Big Kill–he’s the writer/director/co-star of the film–is an old-timey western for people who think Silverado is an old-timey western. Really what it resembles is a distended episode of “Alias Smith & Jones”, where a pair of raffish, well-meaning ne’er-do-wells spend time in various clichés interacting with a stock company of NPCs that populate movies like this. The film opens with irrepressible Travis (Clint Hummel) fucking the daughter of snarling Mexican generalissimo Morales (Danny Trejo, who survives this one), thus inaugurating a boring gunfight between the Mexican army and Travis and his partner, Jake (Martin). Jake wants to know what’s taken Travis so long. Travis wants Jake to know that it’s not “screwing,” it’s “making love.” It’s that kind of movie. They’re chased across the Texas border so that Michael Paré can make a cameo, and then on to the titular town of “Big Kill,” where cityfolk greenhorn Jim (Christoph Sanders) wants to make a new life now that his wife was lost to him in childbirth. When Jim shares that with his buttermilk-scrubbed girlfriend, it sounds an awful lot like his wife was a fetus, but, you know, there you have it.

BHFF ’18: The Cannibal Club

October 18, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror

O Clube dos Canibais
***/****
starring Ana Luiza Rios, Tavinho Teixeira, Zé Maria, Pedro Domingues
written and directed by Guto Parente

by Walter Chaw Guto Parente's The Cannibal Club is satire served grisly, sexy, slick, and unsubtle, an update in theme if not form of Paul Bartel's still-unsurpassed Eating Raoul–a fable of the class struggle eternal as the 1% literally feeds, as it is wont to do, on the other 99. The more things change, and all that; it's instructive to revisit Eating Raoul's opening narration about Hollywood, which seems to apply equally to every group of monkeys in pants: "Here sex hunger is reflected in every aspect of daily life…where random vice and amorality permeate every strata of society, and the barrier between food and sex has totally dissolved." For Parente, Bartel's murderous–and eventually cannibalistic–marrieds the Blands are Gilda and Otavio (Ana Luiza Rios and Tavinho Teixeira), a rich couple living on a sprawling estate in Fortaleza, Brazil, who go through an alarming number of low-income workers together. The young men are provided by an employment agency, seduced by the lady of the house, and at the moment of climax, murdered by Otavio (who's been jerking off in the wings), butchered, then eaten. Otavio is also a member of the titular club, where the hoi polloi of Brazilian corporate culture gathers to watch a graphic sex show that ends in the murder of the chained couple, who are then, likewise, served up in the Brazilian fashion: on skewers, shaved at the table. There's a hint of Peter Greenaway in that.

Halloween (2018)

October 17, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton
written by Jeff Fradley & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw In the middle of David Gordon Green's Halloween–the night before Halloween, as it happens–a family is having a dinner to celebrate something and to meet the new boyfriend of their teen daughter when grandma shows up, drunk and possibly having a panic attack. It's already not going well, seeing as how mom is lying about having invited her mother to this little do–and when it starts going to hell, she uses the discomfort as justification for not having done it. "See? This is what I've had to put up with my whole life." The grandmother sits down and apologizes. She's spotted the man who once attacked her for the first time in forty years, and the shock has brought everything flooding back. She starts crying and no one is consoling her. It's an unbelievably topical moment in a smart, topical film, this suggestion that the effects of assault last a lifetime. That the horror of helplessness and victimization never entirely goes away.

BHFF ’18: Empathy Inc

October 15, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*½/**** written by Mark Leidnerdirected by Yedidya Gorsetman by Walter Chaw More earnest than truly clever, Yedidya Gorsetman's shoestring Empathy Inc is a competently-made (save for one dialogue sequence where the actors are clearly on different sets) and reasonably efficient take on the Vic Morrow instalment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. If it ends up resembling more the Primer version of "The Prisoner of Benda", well, so be it. The picture starts well enough, as corporate middle-manager Joel (Zack Robidas) finds himself the scapegoat of a start-up's collapse, destitute and forced to move in with wife Jessica's (Kathy Searle) demonic…

FrightFest ’18: Terrified + Luciferina

October 15, 20182018, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror

Aterrados
***½/****
starring Maxi Ghione, Elvira Onetto, Norberto Gonzalo, George Lewis
written and directed by Demián Rugna

LUCIFERINA
***/****
starring Sofía Del Tuffo, Marta Lubos, Pedro Merlo, Victoria Carreras
written and directed by Gonzalo Calzada

by Walter Chaw Demián Rugna’s Terrified is as if the ghost-hunter sequence in Poltergeist were the entire movie and instead of the one house, the entire street were haunted. It is, in other words, a lot of fun. The picture opens, as these things must, with paranormal shenanigans, which in this case involve spectral voices coming out of the kitchen pipes, leading to one of the great shock reveals in recent memory. Really. It’s a kill so radically cool and unexpected that it’s at once horrible and deliciously uncanny. Simultaneously, a next-door neighbour seems to have gone missing and in flashback we see what’s been happening to him. Then the son of poor single mom Alicia (Julieta Vallina) gets run down in the street before showing up a few days later, black from rot and stinking of the grave, to sit quietly at the dinner table. I love the image of this horrible corpse seated in a sunny dining room while everyone stares at it. You can see the gears turning. And then its milk spills and I almost stood up and left. These abominations trigger the ex-cop living with Alicia, Funes (Maxi Ghione), to join forces with a trio of elderly academics–Jano (Norberto Gonzalo), Albreck (Elvira Onetto), and Rosentok (George Lewis)–to stake out the three houses in the hope of figuring out what’s plaguing this quiet suburban street.

BHFF ’18: Boo!

October 14, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*/****
starring Jaden Piner, Rob Zabrecky, Aurora Perrineau, Charley Palmer Rothwell
written by Luke Jaden & Diane Michelle
directed by Luke Jaden

by Walter Chaw Luke Jaden’s feature-length hyphenate debut (he co-wrote the script with Diane Michelle), Boo! is an insular family drama framed against a chain-letter premise involving one religious family’s decision not to participate in paying a Halloween prank forward. What follows are a lot of jump scares and some on-the-nose dialogue that could have benefited, I think, from more workshopping. The problem is that the picture wants very badly to be about the toll of religious fundamentalism on the development of children (a well-taken point, of course), but it becomes the proselytizer itself with its straw-man of a bible-thumping patriarch, James (Rob Zabrecky), set up to bear the brunt of the film’s sins. His constant references to the “good book” feel unnatural, rehearsed, what a movie evangelical would say. When his wife Elyse (Jill Marie Jones) reveals a tragedy in their past and her unwillingness to go to James at a point of crisis because of what he would say, it raises the question of how it is these people ended up together in the first place and why, exactly, Elyse has fallen from the flock, if in fact she’s done so.

FrightFest ’18: He’s Out There + Hell Is Where the Home Is

October 13, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

HE’S OUT THERE
**/****
starring Yvonne Strahovski, Anna Pniowsky, Abigail Pniowsky, Ryan McDonald
written by Mike Scannell
directed by Quinn Lasher

HELL IS WHERE THE HOME IS
***/****
starring Angela Trimbur, Janel Parrish, Jonathan Howard, Fairuza Balk
written by Corey Deshon
directed by Orson Oblowitz

by Walter Chaw Centring on the manipulation of a mysterious and sinister children’s book, Babadook-style, Quinn Lasher’s sleek, technically proficient home-invasion/slasher flick He’s Out There takes another page out of that film’s playbook by putting kids (sisters Anna and Abigail Pniowsky) uncompromisingly and repeatedly in mortal peril. The set-up is a wilderness retreat to the lake house in the woods, where mom Laura (Yvonne Strahovski) is headed with her moppets in tow, her workaholic hubby Owen (Julian Bailey) promising to meet up with them later. This leaves our heroine alone with her kids and that creepy kids’ book along with a story told by yokel Shawn (Justin Bruening) about horrific happenings at the ol’ house, plus a missing kid (Ryan McDonald) who never was found, now that you mention it.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’18: An Introduction

October 9, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Film Festivals

by Walter Chaw Summer seems to be lasting longer, the weather in general is more severe. If the '80s were about apocalyptic fears around the proliferation of atomic weapons and an unstable President, the '10s are about those same fears multiplied by the corporatized destruction of the planet and, in a stealthy sort of way, the rise of the genuinely ignorant as the arbiters of culture and government. When George W. was President, I was interested in the defense that he seemed like the drunk uncle you'd have at a backyard BBQ. He didn't read much, trumpeted his "C" average in school, made up words, started a war because someone was mean to his daddy. Idiots found him relatable and non-threatening; "Conservative Party" developed a more literal definition. I liked to suggest the President be someone who read more than you, did things you couldn't do, was actually smart and not Fredo-smaht!. The only thing this thirtysomething percent of Americans who still think Trump is great–either cynically and opportunistically, or because they're really just stupider than fuck–were ever right about is that their elected leader is the ultimate "trigger" for people who are their betters. Like psychopathic juvies tormenting their unit nurse, they think it's worth it to distress them. It feels good and new, and as the fires grow higher, so, too, does their ardour for their golden calf.

The Evil Dead (1983) [The Book of the Dead Limited Edition] – DVD|4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

October 9, 2018****/****, 1980s, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Sam Raimi, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Zombie

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
4K UHD – Image A Sound A- Commentary A-
starring Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker
written and directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw The Evil Dead defies wisdom: It’s an ultraviolent horror film made on a nothing budget (rumoured to have been in the neighbourhood of three-thousand dollars) that still manages to produce an enduring and brilliant performance and demonstrate (like a Dario Argento shocker) that gore, if it’s perverse enough, can be the beginning and the end of horror. The product of Bruce Campbell’s hilariously physical turn, of Sam Raimi’s genius in fashioning dazzling camera moves, and of an uncredited Joel Coen’s flair at the editing table, The Evil Dead bristles with life and joy. It is a testament to how bliss and the spark of inspiration can elevate a film of any budget in any genre from routine to sublime.

FrightFest ’18: Pimped

October 7, 20182018, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

***/****
starring Ella Scott Lynch, Benedict Samuel, Heather Mitchell, Lewis Fitzgerald
screenplay by David Barker and Lou Mentor
directed by David Barker

by Walter Chaw David Barker's hyphenate debut Pimped reminds of Danny Boyle's feature debut Shallow Grave in that both are twisty, twisted chamber pieces revolving around bad behaviour that spins, mortally, out of control. It's sexy and sleek, shot every bit like an Adrian Lyne film obsessed with the mating rituals of the rich and beautiful. Opening in a lurid party scored to Peaches' "Fuck the Pain Away," it intimates that what's to follow will be a bacchanal, unbridled in its indulgence in earthly delights. And it very nearly delivers on that. Worth noting that Pimped is just one of several of this year's films that seems invested in the conversation about women's empowerment and men's proclivities towards violence, sexual or otherwise. What's interesting about this conversation in horror is that it's a fairly common one. Of all the things it's on the vanguard of, horror has always been aware of the imbalance of sexual politics. With the topic now in the mainstream, small wonder that this genre, so often derided by even its more opportunistic creators (Danny Boyle among them, as it happens), has gained some measure of popular esteem. The more ignorant cultural critics have even been emboldened to opine that horror is not horror. Those who know, know that horror was always more likely to have these difficult midnight chats.

Hold the Dark (2018)

October 4, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgård, James Badge Dale, Riley Keough
screenplay by Macon Blair, based on the novel by William Giraldi
directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw “There’s something wrong with the sky,” someone tells Russell (Jeffrey Wright). They wonder if he’s noticed it. Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark is about mythologies–how they explain the capricious chaos of the world in terms understandable, using images that are universal to us. Mother, father, child, dark, blood, fire. He tells all of this complex story of revenge, betrayal, and the hunt in these broad archetypal strokes; it’s a film written on a cave wall, and at the heart of it what are a movie and a cinema but images animated by a flicker to be told in the company of others? Hold the Dark is beautiful and spare in the way that only things told in primal, innate gestures can be, and its setting, an arctic Alaskan wilderness (played by Alberta, Canada), reflects that austerity. When there is dialogue, it’s doggedly insufficient to the task of description and explication. Russell is a wolf expert and talks about how he sees a pack eating one of their young–something called “savaging” that happens when the environment is wrong in some way. It seems counterintuitive to devour the young, but sometimes, Hold the Dark suggests (without saying it), it can be an act of love.

FrightFest ’18: Seeds

October 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

*/****written by Owen Long & Steven Weismandirected by Owen Long by Walter Chaw Owen Long's Seeds aims for the bleachers, for which it should get some credit. It's a navel-gazing exercise in which Marcus Milton (Trevor Long), an aging Aschenbach with very particular appetites, returns to the family reserve one eternal twilight to act as babysitter to niece Lily (Andrea Chen--disastrously uneven) and her little brother Spencer (Garr Long). There, he pops pills and sees tentacles the film presents as a metaphor for the repressed sexual dysfunction he nurses within what appears to be an Asian fetish, what with the…

FrightFest ’18: Hammer Horror: The Warner Bros Years

October 1, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, FrightFest

**/****directed by Marcus Hearn by Walter Chaw An affectionate if standard talking heads-plus-clips documentary covering those last years of the hale British studio's run as they tried, from the late-'60s on, to compete with the new era of permissiveness and transgression in film, Hammer Horror: The Warner Bros Years, from Hammer authority Marcus Hearn (who's published multiple volumes on the subject), is lockstep, even dry alas, but indisputably informative. I was most interested in the revelation that Hammer had wanted to work with director Michael Reeves post-Witchfinder General but that Reeves died prematurely, leaving the very weird Hitchcock riff Crescendo…

FrightFest ’18: Ravers

September 29, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, UK

*½/****screenplay by Luke Fosterdirected by Bernhard Pucher by Walter Chaw Bernhard Pucher's Ravers features a couple of nice kills, a couple of funny scenes, and a few underdeveloped character things that sap its momentum, robbing it of both a beginning and an end. Germaphobe Becky (Georgia Hirst) is a cub reporter for a no-nonsense editor (Natasha Henstridge) who tells her that in order for Becky to be taken seriously as a reporter for/by this no-nonsense editor, she has to get her hands dirty. Which is a problem for a germaphobe. Becky visits a toxic facility first and dons a hazmat…

FrightFest ’18: “It’s Alive!” – FFC Interviews ‘Frankenstein’s Creature’ Filmmakers Sam Ashurst & James Swanton

September 28, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, FrightFest, Interviews

by Walter Chaw Sam Ashurst's film of James Swanton's play "Frankenstein's Creature" is the best film of its kind since Spalding Gray and Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia. It solves the problem of shooting a static, one-set, one-man show with graceful, inventive technique. It's smart about what it does and an act of extraordinary brinkmanship that happens to pay off in spades. Both based in the UK, Messrs. Ashurst and Swanton were kind enough to chat with us from amidst the whirl and fury of London's FrightFest, where Frankenstein's Creature had its debut this past August. We started by talking about Mary Shelley's novel on the 200^th anniversary of its publication:

FrightFest ’18: Frankenstein’s Creature

September 26, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, FrightFest

***½/****written by James Swantondirected by Sam Ashurst by Walter Chaw Of all the remembrances and resurrections marking the 200th birthday of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, perhaps the most innovative is Sam Ashurst's document of James Swanton's one-man stage play Frankenstein's Creature, featuring Swanton as the monster on a single dilapidated set, delivering a ninety-minute tour de force monologue that zeroes in on the most-forgotten aspect of Shelley's novel: its wit. Swanton is by turns needling and pathetic, demanding attention and then declaring that he knows he's ugly...but look closer. He takes delight in his part in his "maker's" downfall, gleefully reenacting…

Halloween (1978) – [25th Anniversary Divimax Edition] – DVD|4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray (UPDATED)

September 24, 2018****/****, 1970s, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, FFC Must-Own, Horror

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/****
DVD – Image B- Sound A Extras A
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Kyes, P.J. Soles
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill
directed by John Carpenter

by Walter Chaw As tempting as it is to write the umpteenth dissertation on the importance and brilliance of John Carpenter’s Halloween, it’s almost enough to say that there is very possibly no other seminal Seventies film–not The Godfather, not Star Wars, perhaps not even Jaws–that has had a greater influence on popular culture. It’s a movie about a fishbowl that exists now only in a fishbowl, a picture so examined that its sadistic ability to maintain an atmosphere of horrified anticipation is consumed by the intellectualization of its hedonism=death equation. A screening with fresh eyes reveals a picture and a filmmaker owing incalculable debts to Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.

TIFF ’18: Fahrenheit 11/9

September 17, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****directed by Michael Moore by Walter Chaw Michael Moore is an often-terrible filmmaker and a repugnant human being. His films are scattershot and on the whole unhelpful. In a few meandering minutes of his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, he notes that members of Trump's inner circle have invested in his films and that when given the opportunity to hold Trump's feet to the fire in a public forum, he played the Jimmy Fallon. He appears to be owning that he's part of this disaster, but it's not clear, ultimately, what the fuck he's on about. Moore also spends time with…