Vampire Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)

October 13, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Teen, Theatrical, Vampire

Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant
**/****
starring Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux
screenplay by Ariane Louis-Seize, Christine Doyon
directed by Ariane Louis-Seize

by Angelo Muredda Puberty is a vampire in Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, a stylish but flimsy debut that has little to say on the subject of either depression or vampires in spite of its title. A likeable, low-stakes coming-of-age allegory about the growing pains of being an outsider (among other barely scratched subjects), the film slots in nicely next to spooky-adjacent young adult romances like “Wednesday” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, for whatever that’s worth. It also makes a nice calling card for Louis-Seize’s likely future in franchise television, her comic world-building better suited for a sitcom with genre notes than a feature, where her characters are reduced to the sort of easily summarized traits that would make them stand out in a pilot.

Telluride ’23: El Conde

September 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Chile, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Horror, Telluride, Vampire

***½/****
starring Alfredo Castro, Catalina Guerra, Paula Luchsinger, Diego Muñoz
written by Guillermo Calderón & Pablo Larraín
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw El Conde is the bitterest of farces: a satire of excess and great evil that uses vampirism as a blunt metaphor for the forces that sap places and entire peoples of their share of a nation’s fortunes. Always timely, Chilean director Pablo Larraín turns his attention to his country’s last bogey, Augusto Pinochet, who, with the support of the United States government, staged a brutal coup in 1973 and consequently ruled Chile with an iron hand until 1990. Among the disastrous programs initiated by his regime? Abolition of all trade unions–an act that seems specifically pointed, given the millions poured into this project by Netflix. The country’s wealth tanked as Pinochet’s exploded. At the time of his death in 2006, over 300 criminal charges were left pending against him. Larraín speculates that Pinochet staged his death to avoid continued persecution and is, in fact, a centuries-old vampire who once fed on the blood of Marie Antoinette. The image of a young Frenchman licking her blue blood fresh from the guillotine’s blade is, in a tidy nutshell, critique of thaumaturgical contagion: hereditary wealth and power, distilled into the tastes of a vampire so smitten by the tang of royal blood that he steals the Queen’s head and keeps it in a jar as a fetish object. When he seduces a young nun in the present day of the film, he first makes her dress up like Antoinette and is dismayed when she shows not just disinterest in the onanistic trophy he uses as a reference for her costume, but actual disgust.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

August 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Horror, Italy, Malta, Theatrical, UK, Vampire

**½/****
starring Dracula, Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham
screenplay by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw I like André Øvredal movies. I liked Trollhunter, and I loved Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, along with most of The Autopsy of Jane Doe. They deliver exactly what they promise and do so with an at times striking sense of how to convey the poetry of the beginning of things. His movies feel like mythology, in a few cases are mythology. And like mythologies, they’re earnest, direct, and deceptively simple in narrative but rich with subtext. He makes sense for a Dracula prequel–not a Vlad the Impaler creation story, but a picture extrapolated from the “Captain’s Log” portion of the Bram Stoker novel that details, in just under 2000 words of the seventh chapter, the fate of the doomed freighter tasked with bringing Dracula’s stuff over from Transylvania to England, whose crew became provisions for the grand fiend en route. Murnau’s Nosferatu covered the voyage in a few swift, expressionistic strokes (coffin play, hilariously), allowing Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter to expand on the circumstances while paying homage to that film’s character design. As played by Javier Botet, Øvredal’s Dracula is barely humanoid at all.

Blood (2023)

January 27, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Thriller, Vampire

***/****
starring Michelle Monaghan, Skeet Ulrich, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong, Skylar Morgan Jones
written by Will Honley
directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Of the films Brad Anderson’s made over the course of a long and varied career, the ones I remember best are his slow-burn haunted-asylum movie Session 9 and his portrait of progressive madness, The Machinist. Both are focused on how a person can get fixated on obsessive thoughts, and how elastic reality might become to conform itself around those fixations. He’s the perfect chronicler of this fraught moment where belief has come to be as valued as fact–and more powerful, too, in the defense and inspiration of division and atrocity. His Blood is a queasy folk horror, its title referring to the thickness of it in relation to water as well as the only sustenance, the human variety, a little boy named Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) can tolerate after encountering something that lives in the hole of the dead tree in the woods behind his house. The two, family and its enervating qualities, are inextricable. In one way, Blood is about the evolutionarily proscribed madness of becoming a parent to a parasitic lifeform you love, whether or not it loves you back–that it would devastate you to lose, even as it’s born with no ability to survive on its own.

Poltergeist (1982) + The Lost Boys (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

October 25, 2022****/****, 1980s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Spielberg, Teen, Thriller, Vampire

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

POLTERGEIST
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais & Mark Victor
directed by Tobe Hooper

THE LOST BOYS
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw’s already written definitive reviews of Poltergeist and The Lost Boys for this site, so much time has passed since they were published that I feel obliged to say something original about these films before moving on to the Blu-ray portion of this review. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, each celebrating milestone anniversaries this year (fortieth and thirty-fifth, respectively), have aged unusually gracefully. Partly this is due to the Star Wars-festooned bedroom of Poltergeist and the comics-store hub of The Lost Boys being evergreen–though what was once indicated by Robbie’s C-3PO lightswitch cover (his middle-class privilege) and Sam’s pedantic knowledge of Superman lore (his lack of social life) may not come across as clearly to a generation of viewers that has grown up with Jedis and superheroes as the inescapable sum of pop culture. Moreover, these are not naïve films that invite condescension, and any doubts about their sophistication (aesthetic and otherwise) are laid to rest by the instantly dated attempts to drag them into the 21^st century: Gil Kenan’s remake of Poltergeist and the dtv sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe.

All the Moons (2020) – Shudder

February 10, 2022****/****, 2020, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, France, Spain, Streaming, Vampire

Ilargi Guztiak
****/****
starring Haizea Carneros, Josean Bengoetxea, Itziar Ituño, Zorion Eguileor
written by Igor Legarreta, Jon Sagalá
directed by Igor Legarreta

by Walter Chaw The Catholic Church has an outsized influence in the events of the last couple of centuries. They have increasingly occupied the role of collective boogeyman in the West as we start to reckon with the consequences of Manifest Destiny, the Age of Exploration, and the attempts to eradicate indigenous peoples in the name of a wrathful God too small to allow other faiths. The mission project in the West, the Residential schools designed to separate children from their cultures in the name of a monoculture arrayed around a cannibalistic blood cult steeped in atrocities committed under the banner of their notion of Heaven. The Magdalene laundries in Europe, the sexual abuse scandals so rampant they’re less scandals than functions of a diseased system that shelters monsters, shuffling them around to unsuspecting diocese to avoid coming clean about the extent of their callow predation. The church has aligned itself with the “pro-life” movement in the United States, a fanatical and radicalized cult invested in the oppression of women and sexuality. Heavily politicized, they suckle at the public teat and continue a baked-in tradition of profiting greatly from the fear and loathing of the very poor, the very desperate, the very stupid. Every new revelation is met with obfuscation, denial, and obstruction instead of a willingness to shine light into the corners of their unresolvable, bestial intolerance and sinfulness. Throughout history, the Catholic Church, as an organization, has proved emblematic of absolute power corrupting absolutely. It’s become a synecdoche for abuse. Of course, this makes it a fertile plot where fulsome gardens of horror can grow.

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (2021)

June 23, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Vampire

****/****
starring Patrick Fugit, Ingrid Sophie Schram, Owen Campbell
written and directed by Jonathan Cuartas

by Walter Chaw The reason Dwight (Patrick Fugit) goes to diners is to eat a little toast, drink some coffee, and listen to other people go about their lives. His sister, Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), waits tables at one where she suffers the indignities of the service industry with pallid, resigned despair. Between them, the extent to which they can empathize with people beyond their bubble will drive their existence to a crisis. Cut from the same cloth as Jim Mickle’s exceptional We Are What We Are and destined to be compared to Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (hereafter My Heart), the hyphenate debut of Jonathan Cuartas, finds its closest analogue in Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, which is similarly about the brutal banality and biological horror of caring for a terminally-ill loved one. Dwight and Jessie look after their brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell–so good in Super Dark Times), who needs to drink blood to survive. Sunlight burns him badly and instantly. Well into puberty, he still acts like a child–not for any sort of mental disability, but rather, we surmise, because of a lifetime spent in a handful of the same rooms, his brother and sister as his sole companions.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Climate of the Hunter

August 23, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Vampire

***/****
starring Mary Buss, Laurie Cummings, Ginger Gilmartin, Ben Hall
written by Mickey Reece and John Selvidge
directed by Mickey Reece

Fantasia Festival runs from August 20 to September 2, 2020. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Micky Reece’s Climate of the Hunter is a delightful riff on ’70s no-budget grindhouse psychedelia–a take on Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire that unlike, say, The Love Witch, understands The Velvet Vampire as something other than just aesthetics to be aped. Which is not to say Climate of the Hunter isn’t aesthetically spot-on, even beautiful at times, in its filmic, weathered, period-appropriate way, but rather that it additionally captures that specific air of griminess attendant to artifacts like Rothman’s picture: the feeling that it’s not operating under any rules, so all bets are off. There’s a maverick quality to it, and a sly sense of self-knowing humour that stops short of being self-satisfied.

FrightFest ’18: Short Film Showcases 1-3 + Miscellany|7 Questions with Filmmaker Chris McInroy

November 7, 2018****/****, 2018, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Interviews, Lebanon, New Zealand, Revenge, Short Films, South Korea, Spain, Thriller, UK, Vampire

This is a nearly complete overview of FrightFest '18's short-films lineup, though technical issues unfortunately prevented us from screening Catcalls, Puppet Master, and Right Place Wrong Tim.-Ed.

by Walter Chaw

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE 1

We Summoned a Demon ***/**** (d. Chris McInroy)
Funny how the coolest '80s throwback film that isn't It happens to be this short by Chris McInroy, which channels the light ethos of that era, with VHS nasties shock-effects scattered across its brisk, five-minute runtime. Idiots Kirk (Kirk Johnson) and Carlos (Carlos Larotta) attempt a little witchcraft by sacrificing a rooster and playing a record backwards on a plastic portable turntable. They're trying to make Kirk cool so he can ask out "Brenda" for tacos, but it doesn't work. Instead, they summon a demon (John Orr) from a neon-smoked Hell portal they can't control. Or can they? With its crackerjack timing, its tight script, and the effortless control and camaraderie of its leads, We Summoned a Demon works wonders in a short span. DP E.J. Enriquez's lighting schemes make the whole thing look like Michael Mann's The Keep, and, sometimes rare for shorts, the movie knows its length and absolutely murders its landing. Listen for composer Bird Peterson's smooth sax riff when Kirk finds his inner cool. Comedy is hard, guys; We Summoned A Demon is butter. (Scroll down to the end of these capsule reviews for an interview with Chris McInroy.)

Twilight (2008) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

October 22, 20182000s, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance, Teen, Vampire

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

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Peter Facinelli
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

by Bryant Frazer Author Stephenie Meyer says she wrote her first novel, Twilight, in three months’ time, after the central idea came to her in a dream. Leaving aside the question of whether the notion of a moody teen vampire love story set in and around a high school in the Pacific Northwest is remarkable enough to require that the Muses mainline it directly into your subconscious, the romance of Bella Swan, a quiet, self-abnegating high-schooler from a broken home, and Edward Cullen, a smoking-hot vampire who sparkles under sunlight and has sworn off human flesh, hit a sweet spot. Teenage girls, especially, responded en masse to Meyer’s vision of a smouldering, beautiful boy with the power to end your life at any moment but the grace and restraint to keep his hands to himself. Can you tame him? These sexual politics feel retrograde–the lovestruck nymphet at the mercy of a man forever struggling to keep his carnal desires at bay–but I try to steer clear of kink-shaming. If a strange relationship makes you swoon, whether it’s molded into Twilight‘s denial-of-desire shtick or 50 Shades‘ bondage spectacle, that’s your business and the movies can give you a way to explore that. Disapproving thinkpieces will blossom; feminism will survive.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Tokyo Vampire Hotel

July 31, 20182018, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Vampire

**½/****written and directed by Sion Sono by Bill Chambers This feature-length truncation of a 6½-hour Amazon Japan TV series finds kitsch provocateur Sion Sono presiding over another apocalypse, as gun-crazy vampire clan the Corvins trap young Japanese singles inside their Technicolor hotel "for one-hundred years" while the world outside allegedly becomes ash. Tokyo Vampire Hotel is unconventional, to say the least, though what struck me as its most audacious flourish--Sion's credit and the movie's title appearing 42 minutes into this 142-minute film--might just be an overlooked remnant of an individual episode. Believe it or not, shearing over four hours from…

Vamp (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 20161980s, 2016, Arrow Video, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Vampire

Vamp1

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chris Makepeace, Sandy Baron, Robert Rusler, Grace Jones
screenplay by Richard Wenk
directed by Richard Wenk

by Bryant Frazer In concept a little bit After Hours and a little bit An American Werewolf in London, Vamp attempts to transplant some New York cool into a story set in the L.A. underground, where a downtown strip club is staffed by lithesome vampires who prey on losers and outsiders yearning for companionship in the lonesome city. Vamp isn’t scary, though it’s fairly stylish, thanks in large part to Grace Jones, who flew into Hollywood with an entourage (including artists Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Richard Bernstein) to play Katrina, an exotic dancer with an appetite for flesh. While the film is pleasantly weird whenever she’s on screen, that’s not much of the time. The bulk of it is a laid-back assemblage of moderately clever ideas–a bunch of clockwork gears that never mesh into anything much.

Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995) [Collector’s Edition] + Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood (1996) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Discs

November 30, 20151990s, 2015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire

Demon Knight
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett, Brenda Bakke
written by Ethan Reiff & Cyrus Voris & Mark Bishop
directed by Ernest Dickerson

Bordello of Blood
*/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras A
starring Dennis Miller, Erika Eleniak, Angie Everhart, John Kassir
screenplay by A.L. Katz & Gilbert Adler
directed by Gilbert Adler

by Walter Chaw I didn’t have HBO as a kid. Didn’t even have cable. When I went over to friends’ houses, I would spend a lot of time wanting to watch MTV to try to catch up on all the popular culture I was missing. “Remote Control”, the first Jon Stewart show, “Dream On”, “The Kids in the Hall”–each of them represent gaping holes in my pop education. Lump in the Walter Hill-produced “Tales from the Crypt” anthology program with that group of things I knew about but only by title and reputation. My first exposure to the EC Comics-inspired/adapted-from show was through reprints of “Tales from the Crypt” and “Strange Tales” comics during the early-’90s industry boom. Then Ernest Dickerson’s fantastic Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (hereafter Demon Knight) satisfied every single expectation I had of something seeking to honour the ghoulish, sometimes puerile depravity of William Gaines’s seminal source material. It’s as gory as it is corny and smart as hell for recognizing that those were the only requirements. Doesn’t hurt that the practical-effects work is goopy and inventive. Oh, and the cast is exceptional.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Yakuza Apocalypse

October 2, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Horror, Japan, Vampire

**½/****directed by Takashi Miike by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike makes one, sometimes two, sometimes three movies a year, which is not so remarkable as the fact that they're often exceptional. He's as fecund as a Fassbender and hasn't shown signs of the same catastrophic burnout. Even his middling projects have moments in them to recommend--no less so his latest, Yakuza Apocalypse, a return to the Yakuza genre that gave him mainstream credibility (such as it was) and the supernatural horror genre that gave him cult immortality. This one isn't about anything that I could ken, really, but it is technically…

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

May 5, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Nicolas Cage, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Vampire

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.

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

April 7, 20151970s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire

Blacula1

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 18^th-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.

True Blood: The Complete Sixth Season (2013) – Blu-ray with Digital Copy

June 15, 20142013, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Television, Thriller, Vampire, Werewolf

click any image to enlarge

Image A- Sound A Extras B-
"Who Are You, Really?," "The Sun," "You're No Good," "At Last," "**** the Pain Away," "Don't You Feel Me," "In the Evening," "Dead Meat," "Life Matters," "Radioactive"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The penultimate season of "True Blood" was fraught with behind-the-scenes turmoil. Creator-showrunner Alan Ball had departed the series and his replacement, Ball's old "Cybill" cohort Mark Hudis, was himself replaced partway through the season by long-time "True Blood" scribe Brian Buckner. (Ball has a history of tapping out after five seasons and being notoriously difficult to replace–"Six Feet Under" ended when it did because he couldn't convince anyone to take over.) Whether this directly contributed to an abrupt plot development that effectively cleaves the season in two, the truth is that "True Blood" weathers these personnel changes invisibly enough as to affirm it is either on autopilot by now or, to be less generous, was already something of a runaway train that had only ornamental use for a conductor. Whatever the case, the show's sixth year represents a marginal rebound–though at this point in my "True Blood" journey, I'm just a masochist ranking the instruments of torture.

Argento’s Dracula 3-D (2012) – Blu-ray 3D & Blu-ray

February 5, 20142012, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy, Romance, Thriller, Vampire, ZERO STARS

click any image to enlarge

Dario Argento's Dracula
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
starring Thomas Kretschmann, Maria Gastini, Asia Argento, Rutger Hauer
screenplay by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, based on the novel by Bram Stoker
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw I used to love Dario Argento. Heck, who didn't? But at a certain point, it became clear that the quality of Argento's work is directly proportional (or it was for a while) to the quality of work he's riffing on. A shame that lately he appears to be mostly riffing on himself–the elderly version of a vital artist doing his best to recapture something he's lost. It was Hitchcock as muse, of course, initially, joining Argento at the hip for a while with Brian DePalma, who was doing kind of the same thing at the same time with about the same audacity in the United States. There was genius there in the Deep Reds and Suspirias, certainly in the logic-bumfuddling submerged ballroom the heroine must enter to retrieve a key in Inferno. Argento didn't really start to make bad movies until after Tenebre. Since, with notable half-exceptions like Opera and The Stendhal Syndrome, he's made almost nothing but. It all comes to a head–or a tail, as it were–with Dario Argento's Dracula: the worst entry in a filmography that includes stuff like Sleepless and Giallo, and frankly belonging somewhere in the conversation of the worst films of all-time. Until you've endured it, I can't quantify it. Coming from someone once revered for his innovative camera, for his groundbreaking work with music and production design–coming from the guy involved at some level with the conception/production of Once Upon a Time in the West and Dawn of the Dead, fer chrissakes (who, indeed, counted Leone and Bertolucci and George A. Romero as friends and collaborators), it's a fucking tragedy.

Lifeforce (1985) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

July 22, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller, Vampire, Zombie

Lifeforce2

**/****Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May
screenplay by Dan O’Bannon & Don Jakoby, based on the novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Bryant Frazer The early 1980s must have been a weird time to be Tobe Hooper. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had made him one of the most notorious directors in the world, and Poltergeist vaulted him onto the A-list. He would have been on top of the world if not for an extended controversy over that film: Poltergeist was produced by Steven Spielberg, and there were widespread rumours that he actually directed it, too. Hooper denied it and Spielberg issued oddly-worded statements that permanently muddied the waters. Whatever the truth of their collaboration, the controversy was a blow to Hooper’s reputation. His Texas Chain Saw felt almost like outsider art–raw and twisted, it was the antithesis of the burnished Spielberg style. Poltergeist, on the other hand, was the very quintessence of a Steven Spielberg film, from its familiar suburban family in distress to its richly detailed mise en scène‎. If Hooper really did direct it, it doesn’t say much for his authorial voice that he left virtually no discernible fingerprints on the final product.

Byzantium (2013)

July 4, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Vampire

****/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Caleb Landry Jones
screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on her play
directed by Neil Jordan

by Walter Chaw What is it about the Irish character, that particular quality of melancholy fatalism, that seems to inform the great works of native sons Beckett, Joyce, and maybe Yeats in particular? I like G.K. Chesterton’s description of Ireland as a place of “men that God made mad,/For all their wars are merry,/And all their songs are sad.” It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda’s criminally underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire. To that film, add John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan’s Ondine, and now Jordan’s rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora. As for Byzantium, it’s beautiful, and sad, and has an eternity to it that’s reflected in its tale of a “soucriant,” a succubus of sorts with a Dominican history and favoured by Jean Rhys in novels that were themselves attempts to come to terms with the tragedies of her life as an outsider. Jordan, well-read and never shy about expressing that literariness in his pictures, is producing in his later work the very evocation of a city from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (a book he once told me he admires): Ersilia, an abandoned city built not of walls, but of strings the lost inhabitants used to mark connections with one another. Jordan weaves an intricate web with Byzantium, a film that, before even attacking the tensions within, provides tensions without in its title, most likely taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which is itself about tensions between the “artifice of eternity” and the temporariness of youth. Turns out, the film is about that, too.