TIFF ’15: The Girl in the Photographs

TIFF ’15: The Girl in the Photographs

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Crime, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, TIFF

*/****
directed by Nick Simon

by Bill Chambers Written by the son of Norman Bates and directed by a protégé of the late Wes Craven, The Girl in the Photographs is an illusorily pedigreed resurrection of the slasher genre featuring scattered compositional glories courtesy of legendary DP Dean Cundey, returning to horror for the first time since, what, Psycho II? The picture opens with its Janet Leigh (horror muse Katharine Isabelle)–literally named Janet–being abducted from her home by a pair of masked fiends (one’s a harlequin, the other a Trash Humper) who eventually leave a photo of her corpse on the bulletin board of a Piggly Wiggly-type store in the real but barely-capitalized-on town of Spearfish, South Dakota, which according to this film has a police force so lame that aspiring murderers might consider moving there.

Telluride ’15: 45 Years

Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2015, UK

Tell1545years

***½/****
starring Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay
written and directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw Andrew Haigh's 45 Years turns on a fifty-year-old mystery that resurfaces in the week before the 45th wedding anniversary of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), causing the couple to reassess what they know of each other and their place in their relationship. It's a slow unravelling, and Haigh trusts his cast to a laudable extent. In the film's best, most visually interesting moment, he has Kate look at slides projected against a sheet in the extreme foreground. Kate herself, visible to the left of the sheet, is crammed into the eave beneath a slanted attic ceiling. Her interpretation of what she's seeing dawns on her face–creeps across it like shadows pulling back across the course of a day. It's an extraordinary moment in a film full of them. Look, too, to the scene immediately following when Kate picks Geoff up from some afternoon event, and how she holds the steering wheel while he rails on about exactly everything that isn't important. The very definition of an actor's workshop and a character drama, 45 Years attacks the idea that things get easier as you get older. Geoff's toast at their anniversary party speaks to how when one gets older life provides fewer big decisions, so all one's left with is regret at the big decisions already made. In many ways, the film is about that sort of nostalgia. In many others, it's as bitter as Make Way for Tomorrow. Imagine that film, or Tokyo Story, without children.

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) [Collector’s Edition] + Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Packs

Posted in1980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

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SLEEPAWAY CAMP II: UNHAPPY CAMPERS
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Pamela Springsteen, Renée Estevez, Brian Patrick Clarke, Walter Gotell
written by Fritz Gordon
directed by Michael A. Simpson

SLEEPAWAY CAMP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND
½*/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Pamela Springsteen, Tracy Griffith, Michael J. Pollard
written by Fritz Gordon
directed by Michael A. Simpson

by Bryant Frazer Say what you will about the original Sleepaway Camp–you can’t accuse it of lacking ambition. All writer-director Robert Hiltzik had to do to sell a movie with that title in that era was cast a bunch of teenagers in a wan Friday the 13th knock-off and splash some Karo blood around in the woods. Yet he made something dark and unique, with queer undertones: the first gender-identity horror film. The story goes that Hiltzik’s script for a follow-up was rejected by producer Jerry Silva, who thought it was too dark. Instead, he forged ahead with plans to shoot two overtly-comic sequels back-to-back in Georgia under the direction of local talent Michael A. Simpson. A 24-year-old writer named Fritz Gordon got the gig on a recommendation from U.S. distributor Nelson Entertainment.

Unfriended (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Unfriended1

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olstead, Jacob Wysocki
written by Nelson Greaves
directed by Leo Gabriadze

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Unfriended‘s formal constrictions–the action unfolds entirely as a screenshot–aren’t unique (the Canadian short film Noah got there first, and then there was that one segment of V/H/S), but they still make for a novel storytelling engine, especially in the uncharted realm of feature filmmaking, where Unfriended‘s closest precursor may be 2000’s hugely-dated Thomas in Love. (Dated less by its technological crudity than by its unprophetic view of cyber-living as deviant behaviour.) It’s fascinating to see the effect that being tethered to a computer monitor has on cinematic syntax. The task of laying out the horror-bogey’s tragic backstory is here accomplished with a couple of YouTube clips, for instance, and this kind of graceless infodump in lieu of structured flashbacks or verbal exposition feels perfectly valid. Moreover, the moment the protagonist, Blaire (former Miss Teen USA Shelley Hennig), is revealed via webcam feed as the computer’s owner, these videos–conveying the suicide of a high-school student named Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman)–become retroactively poignant: the idle guilt-surfing of a teenage girl. Everything is diegetic in Unfriended; even the on-the-nose soundtrack cues come straight from Blaire’s playlist. For a century, people have argued the superiority of books over movies because the latter “can’t tell you what a character is thinking,” but Unfriended and its ilk have stumbled on something: To espy a person’s mouse-clicks is to be privy to their mood, their impulses, their leaps of logic. It’s like reading their mind. While I wouldn’t want to watch too many movies in this narcissistic key, the innovation is undeniable.

It Follows (2015) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

Posted in****/****, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

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****/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape–when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist–and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell’s follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It’s a horror movie, it’s true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it’s actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive–which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

New Year’s Evil (1980) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Newyearsevil1

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Chris Wallace, Grant Cramer
screenplay by Leonard Neubauer
directed by Emmett Alston

by Bryant Frazer Every 1980s slasher movie needed a gimmick, and New Year’s Evil has two: a Halloween-inspired holiday tie-in and a youth-culture exploitation angle. A Hollywood-based serial killer promises to murder a victim at the stroke of midnight in each of the four continental U.S. time zones, announcing his intentions by calling “Hollywood Hotline”, a New Year’s Eve countdown TV show hosted by Roz Kelly (the erstwhile Pinky Tuscadero on “Happy Days”) that features live performances by punkish new wave acts. The results are surprisingly watchable. The psycho-killer story is actually a bit twisty as these things go, with a mid-film reversal of fortune aiming to give audiences a rooting interest in the villain. And though the bands on screen (Shadow and Made in Japan) seem to be employed mainly to help pad out the film’s 86-minute running time, their proto-Guns N’ Roses sounds are not entirely disagreeable.

Vampire’s Kiss (1989)/High Spirits (1988) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Neil Jordan, Fantasy, Horror, Nicolas Cage, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Vampire

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VAMPIRE’S KISS
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Nicolas Cage, Maria Conchita Alonso, Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Ashley
screenplay by Joseph Minion
directed by Robert Bierman

HIGH SPIRITS
**/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Daryl Hannah, Peter O’Toole, Steve Guttenberg, Beverly D’Angelo
written and directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw Delightfully, extravagantly bizarre, Robert Bierman’s Vampire’s Kiss houses arguably Nicolas Cage’s most peculiar performance in the service of a piece the contemporary in every way of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and the precursor, in every way, to Mary Harron’s American Psycho. It excoriates the boy’s club of the executive boardroom, treats sexual harassment and assault like real things with real consequences, and has something to say on the subjects of race and the economic caste. It’s a canny satire of the vampire genre even as it’s an honourable addition to it, exploring those metaphorical elements that transformed vampirism in the ’80s into the equivalent of being the “cool kid” (The Lost Boys), the rock star (The Hunger), and the eternal demon lover (Fright Night). Working from a script by Joseph Minion, who not only wrote Martin Scorsese’s brilliant (and in some ways similar) After Hours but also the Scorsese-helmed episode of “Amazing Stories” called “Mirror, Mirror” (itself an antecedent to David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows), Bierman proves himself an able navigator of Minion’s liminal cartography. Vampire’s Kiss is about the spaces between and the things that fall in there.

StageFright (1987) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Italy, Thriller

Stagefright1

Deliria
StageFright: Aquarius
Bloody Bird
***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Robert Gligorov, John Morghen
screenplay by George Eastman
directed by Michele Soavi

by Walter Chaw After years spent working alongside such luminaries as Joe D’Amato, Lucio Fulci, and Dario Argento, Michele Soavi made his directorial debut with 1987’s StageFright (onscreen title: StageFright: Aquarius)–not an update of Hitchcock’s underestimated Jane Wyman vehicle, but a carrying of the giallo torch from one generation ostensibly into the next. For the uninitiated, giallo, when done right, is a perpetual-motion machine that runs off its own mysterious energy. Taking its name from the yellow covers of lurid Italian paperbacks, films in this genre split, broadly, into two sub-categories: the ones that give a passing nod to ratiocination; and the ones that don’t bother to make any rational sense at all. StageFright is of the latter school, aligning it with stuff like Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy over something like his Tenebrae (on which Soavi served as second assistant director). Sense is antithetical to StageFright. It’s a vehicle for atmosphere and delivers it in spades.

Blacula (1972)/Scream Blacula Scream (1973) [Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1970s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire

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BLACULA
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring William Marshall, Denise Nicholas, Vonetta McGee, Charles Macaulay
screenplay by Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig
directed by William Crain

SCREAM BLACULA SCREAM
*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras D
starring William Marshall, Don Mitchell, Pam Grier, Richard Lawson
screenplay by Joan Torres & Raymond Koenig and Maurice Jules
directed by Bob Kelljan

by Bryant Frazer It takes some nerve to turn an exploitative, possibly racist script treatment from a low-budget movie-manufacturing plant like Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American Independent Pictures (AIP) into a tragic meditation on the legacy of slavery in contemporary urban society, but that’s what director William Crain and actor William Marshall damn near pulled off with Blacula. Originally conceived as a blaxploitation programmer with the ersatz jive-talking title Count Brown Is in Town, the project that would become Blacula took on some gravity when Crain cast Marshall, a trained Shakespearean actor, in the title role. Marshall insisted on alterations to the script that gave the film a subtext: he would play the lead as an 18th-century African noble who, while touring Europe in an attempt to persuade the aristocracy to oppose the slave trade, was turned into a vampire and imprisoned for more than 100 years by the rabidly racist Count Dracula. In Marshall’s imagining of the story, it was Dracula who, seeking to demean the uppity foreigner, saddled him with the dismissive, derivative moniker Blacula.

Don’t Look Now (1973) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

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****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania
screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Nicolas Roeg

by Walter Chaw Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now is about looking, about ways of seeing and layers of understanding. It’s about memory and its intrusion into and influence on current states of being. It’s about the impossibility of faith or love or human relationships to illuminate truth; or it’s about how faith and love and human relationships are the only truth. It shows images out of order, presenting them in ways that will only make sense once the gestalt in which the images exist becomes clear. In every way, Don’t Look Now is designed for multiple viewings. The film warns that a life spent unexamined will end brutally and nonsensically. Without context, there is nothing, but context is nigh impossible before the end. It’s something William Carlos Williams would understand.

Penny Dreadful: The Complete First Season (2014) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2014, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Television

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Image A Sound A Extras C
“Night Work,” “Séance,” “Resurrection,” “Demimonde,” “Closer Than Sisters,” “What Death Can Join Together,” “Possession,” “Grand Guignol”

by Bryant Frazer One of the hallmarks of contemporary remix culture is derivative artistic ventures that seek shortcuts to the id, making a playful, self-aware succotash of genre tropes in lieu of inventing new cosmologies. Cleverly done, the approach can yield brainy ruminations on form and content along the lines of Alan Moore’s Watchmen or alternate-universe joyrides like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds. When the endeavour is shabby and commercial, executed with no love, you end up with smug mediocrities like The Cabin in the Woods or smarmy trash like Dracula Untold. (Nobody–not George Lucas, not Ridley Scott–seems to grok less about what made the original properties they’re trying to exploit great in the first place than the fools charged with revitalizing the monster franchises at Universal.) Somewhere in the middle, you get a project like “Penny Dreadful”, a monster mash-up set in late-Victorian London that earns no originality points for series creator John Logan, best known for his screenwriting credits on Hugo, Skyfall, and Rango. Named after the pulpy serial publications that sold in old London for a penny each, his show is even more specifically derivative of latter-day pastiches like Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula than it is of their own 19th-century sources. Still, at its best, his knock-off has an engaging flamboyance that makes it, if not must-see TV, at least agreeable popcorn drama.

Annabelle (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2014, 2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror

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½*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Annabelle Wallis, Ward Horton, Tony Amendola, Alfre Woodard
screenplay by Gary Dauberman
directed by John R. Leonetti

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Some kind of as-yet-unclassified spin-off/rip-off hybrid, Annabelle is a prequel to The Conjuring‘s prologue that recycles said prologue for the purpose of reacquainting viewers with its title character, even though Annabelle is in fact an origin story. The Conjuring, of course, purports to be based on the actual exploits of the paranormal researchers fictionalized in Poltergeist, which was shot by Matthew F. Leonetti, brother of The Conjuring‘s DP John R. Leonetti, who moves into the director’s chair with Annabelle, a movie that arguably owes less to The Conjuring (despite labouring to evoke it) than to the malicious clown doll from Poltergeist. That low-frequency thrum you sometimes hear on its soundtrack is Hollywood getting ready to fold in on itself.

The Vanishing (1988) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Netherlands, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

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Spoorloos
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege, Gwen Eckhaus
screenplay by Tim Krabbé and George Sluizer, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

by Bryant Frazer What scares you the most? If you chew on that question for a while, then imagine a narrative that gets you to that terrible place, your story might look a little like the one told by The Vanishing (Spoorloos). Completed in 1988, this downbeat thriller didn’t reach the U.S. until a couple of years later, when it coincidentally landed in New York within weeks of The Silence of the Lambs. The Vanishing isn’t, strictly speaking, a serial-killer movie like Silence, though it shares that film’s deep interest in the psychopathology of its villain. Like a good (and by “good,” I mean “lurid”) true-crime book, its interest is similarly piqued by the painful, quotidian details of an abhorrent crime.

Dolls (1987) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

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***/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B-
starring Stephen Lee, Guy Rolfe, Hilary Mason, Carrie Lorraine
screenplay by Ed Naha
directed by Stuart Gordon

by Bryant Frazer A cross between “Hansel and Gretel” and The Old Dark House, Dolls is director Stuart Gordon’s idea of a family-friendly horror movie. That is, it puts a little girl in peril from square one and admires her serenity and good-heartedness in the face of danger all around. The dark house belongs to the Hartwickes, an adorable elderly couple with an extensive collection of murderously ambulatory dolls. The little girl is 7-year-old Judy Bower (Carrie Lorraine), and the peril comes not from the old folks or their killer figurines but from her lousy parents–a loveless father and stepmother who have brought her on vacation only because joint custody keeps the child-support payments low. Joining the unhappy family at Hartwicke Manor on a dark and stormy night are fellow travellers-in-refuge Ralph (Stephen Lee), an earnest but overgrown man-child, and Isabel (Bunty Bailey, best-known from A-Ha‘s “Take on Me” music video) and Enid (Cassie Stuart), the shifty rocker-girl hitchhikers he picked up. Naturally, the guests start to disappear one by one. Who will be left at the end of the night?

The Innocents (1961) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Horror, The Criterion Collection, UK

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****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Deborah Kerr, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins, Michael Redgrave
screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote, based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
directed by Jack Clayton

by Walter Chaw Jack Clayton’s incomparable tale of sexual repression and a very particular vintage of Victorian feminine hysteria opens with shadows, wrung hands, and the sound of weeping. The Innocents is of a kind with Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: that marriage of high burlesque and menacing metaphysics that is on the one hand dense and open to unravelling, and on the other as smothering and lush as a Raymond Chandler hothouse. By opening in the exact same way as Jacques Tourneur’s/Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie–a flashback/forward to a non-diegetic scene, a sitting-room interview, a claustrophobic setting laced with musk and frustration and the ghosts of the sins of the father–it announces itself as an expressionistic piece orbiting around a Brontë heroine. Having Truman Capote adapt Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, right in the midst of his In Cold Blood period (two taxonomists of beasts in the jungle of the Id), is an act of genuine inspiration. Their shared illness infects the film.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980)|Rats: Night of Terror (1984) [Blood-Soaked Double Feature] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, France, Horror, Italy, Sci-Fi, Spain, Zombie

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Virus
*/**** Image C+ Sound B Extras B
starring Margit Evelyn Newton, Franco Garofalo, Selan Karay, Robert O’Neil
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, J.M. Cunilles
directed by Bruno Mattei

Rats – Notte di terrore
*½ Image C- Sound B Extras B
starring Richard Raymond, Janna Ryann, Alex McBride, Richard Cross
screenplay by Claudio Fragasso, Hervé Piccini
directed by Bruno Mattei

by Bryant Frazer It’s quite possible there is no better-known director of truly terrible genre movies than the late Italian filmmaker Bruno Mattei. Though I’ve not seen any other Mattei films, I feel comfortable making that assessment based solely on the “blood-soaked double feature” assembled here by the B-movie mavens at Blue Underground. By any rational measure, Hell of the Living Dead and Rats: Night of Terror are cheesy barrel-scrapings, budget-starved and blandly offensive horror counterfeits. But by the standards of Mattei’s oeuvre–which also includes nunsploitation, Nazisploitation, women-in-prison flicks, and mondo-style “documentaries”–they are the cream that rises to the top of the milk. Unless you’re willing to make a case for his nunsploitation flick The Other Hell, or maybe one of the early Nazi sexploitation pictures, these two films seem to form the cornerstone of Mattei’s reputation, such as it is, among genre buffs.

Stonehearst Asylum (2014)

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical Release, Thriller

Stonehearstasylum

Eliza Graves
*½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Jim Sturgess, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Caine
screenplay by Joe Gangemi, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe
directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Brad Anderson has made a few interesting movies that seem to be more interesting to other people. I like Session 9 well enough, The Machinist is fine, Transsiberian's fine; they're all fine. His latest, Stonehearst Asylum, based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe that's been adapted a couple of times already, is fine, too, I guess. It's the literalization of inmates running the asylum, following young Dr. Newgate (Jim Sturgess) as he travels to the titular nuthatch to begin his tutelage under good Dr. Lamb (Sir Ben Kingsley), who has some pretty unconventional ideas about how the best way to treat psychotics and the like is to not treat them at all. Also, there's a beautiful noblewoman with people-touching-her issues named Eliza (Kate Beckinsale), after whom the European version of this film is still named, which says something about what distributors think audiences will tolerate in our respective markets, methinks.

Motel Hell (1980) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Posted in1980s, 2014, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

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**/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Rory Calhoun, Paul Linke, Nancy Parsons, Wolfman Jack
screenplay by Robert Jaffe and Steven-Charles Jaffe
directed by Kevin Connor

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. If you give Motel Hell credit for anything, score it full marks for its infamous abattoir-set climax, in which an overalls-clad farmer wearing a grotesque pig mask and wielding a chainsaw battles the local sheriff–also wielding a chainsaw–over the body of a damsel in distress bound to a conveyer belt feeding an industrial meat slicer. Motel Hell wasn’t particularly original, even in the annals of American B-movies of the era, and it’s not especially scary or creepy–director Kevin Connor doesn’t have much of a taste for horror. But he was certainly able to recognize a spectacle. During a long career, Connor directed Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Mickey Rooney in a fantasy called Arabian Adventure, shot on location in Japan another horror film starring Susan George, and even helmed a TV biopic of Elizabeth Taylor starring Sherilyn Fenn. It’s the signature image of Farmer Vincent wearing a hog’s head and brandishing a power saw, though, that has followed him through the decades.

Fantastic Fest ’14: From the Dark

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland

Fromthedark

***/****
starring Niamh Algar, Stephen Cromwell, Gerry O'Brien, Ged Murray
written and directed by Conor McMahon

by Walter Chaw Conor McMahan's From the Dark is a hell of a film. Sarah (Niamh Algar) and Mark (Stephen Cromwell) are taking a little detour into the moors when they're predictably bogged down as night approaches. What they don't know is that a peat farmer has just been summarily attacked in a stagnant pool after unearthing what appears to be some sort of bog mummy earlier in the day. It's a nifty set-up for a spam-in-a-cabin scenario, and indeed, Mark discovers a ramshackle farmhouse where he and Sarah decide to spend the night–especially once they're attacked by some unseen thing apparently repulsed by light of any kind. It's an amalgam, in other words, of The Descent and Nosferatu: a horror film resting on those genre pillars of transgression, transformation, and contagion that cannily milks every possible light source in its rural environment (cell phones, an old tube television…more would be telling) for surprise and plot points.

Fantastic Fest ’14: Over Your Dead Body

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan

Overyourdeadbody

**½/****
starring Ebizo Ichikawa, Ko Shibasaki, Hideaki Ito, Miho Nakanishi
screenplay by Kikumi Yamagishi
directed by Takashi Miike

by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike’s dip into formalism and tradition continues with Over Your Dead Body, a play-within-a-play conceit whereby star stage performer Miyuki (Ko Shibasaki) reprises the legendary role of Oiwa in the classic “Yotsuya Kaidan” and finds his off-stage relationship with co-star Kousuke (Ebizo Ichikawa) beginning to resemble the supernatural relational drama in which they’ve been cast. It’s essentially the good version of Birdman, however low a bar that might be, with Miike embracing the new, languid pace of his middle-to-later career before suggesting that maybe he’s ready to let a little of the ol’ Gozu out again. Another Audition tale of a woman wronged, Over Your Dead Body can be read by the Miike scholar as further examination of the filmmaker’s sources and inspirations while providing for the neophyte enough craft and late-in-the-game Guignol to sate most any variety of bloodlust. Yeah, it gets pretty nasty.