The Midnight Meat Train Review

There’s a pretty clear trend in the works of one Mr Clive Barker (a theme that I’m sympathetic with in real life) which goes as follows: heteronormative people are boring. The most obvious and outstanding example of this is Hellraiser/The Hellbound Heart, which obsesses over the way Frank and Julia transgress social norms and presents the BDSM devilangel Cenobites as the centrepiece of the movie; our literal main character, Kirsty, is there more out of a nod to the necessity of narrative structure. In the epic fantasy tale Weaveworld the evil witch Immacolata and her sisters, as well the shady salesman Shadwell, have personalities that dominate the narrative whenever they appear, compared to, again, literal main characters Cal and Suanna who practically vanish into the furnishings (if you’ll pard on the pun). In Cabal (and presumably Nightbreed) our straight main characters are made more engaging by portraying them in a heightened manner; Boone’s precarious mental state starts with him being gaslit into jabbering madness and his partner’s adoration for him is transformed into an obsession that feels perverse. More grounded characters like Kirsty and Cal allow the audiences to find a way into the story without identifying themselves with the freakish excesses, but that limits them and makes them so much more beige than the colourful world and people that surround them.

All of which is to say that it is very much in the spirit of Clive Barker’s works that the central couple of The Midnight Meat Train are boring as fuck. Leon (Bradley Cooper) is a freelance photographer who specialises in selling pictures of crime scenes to local newspapers. His work, however, is considered potentially more than just sensationalist sleaze - a local art curator (Brooke Shields) is interested in his work, but wants him to not shy away from capturing violence at its most brutal. When he encounters and stops an attempted rape happening in a subway station, only to find out that the woman he saved becomes a victim  of a string of disappearances happening in New Yorks subway trains, a door is opened to a world of greater violence that might serve his ambitions.

Notice how, through all of that, there is no mention of his girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb)? The emotional core of the movie hinges on their relationship, but she does very little beyond exist and work at a diner. Plot things move forward with or without her, and the characters are all sketched so thinly through the use of dialogue that manages the double header of generic and awkward, it is hard not to feel like their relationship (and her as a character) are inessential and unengaging. It is also entirely not in the original short story, which at under twenty pages long was admittedly going to need beefed up.

So if the emotional core of the movie fails utterly, is there anywhere where it succeeds? Back in the late 00s Gore Verbinski remade The Ring and decided that he wanted movies to look a little more like Kermit the Frog. The Ring was a sensation, children throughout the land whispered about the incredible levels of green it had attained, and as such everyone and their mother (if they were a nepo baby) started to slap heavy handed colour correction on films as a stylistic choice. Films from that era have a heightened unreality to them, which is always a little bit ugly.

Amongst a crowded field, The Midnight Meat Train is a particularly off looking example. It’s shiny neon grime and crushed shadows give the whole film and garish quality. The ridiculous CGI doesn’t help matters either, with dangling eyeballs and vibrant red entrails, often splattering towards the screen in a way that makes me think it was meant to be 3D. The first time we see Leon he is clearly chroma keyed against a backdrop, and it instantly sets the visual tone.

Clive Barker described it as “a beautifully stylish, scary movie”, which is true if your bar for scary and stylish is Looney Toon cartoons. When Vinny Jone’s villain character, wielding an absurdly shiny meat tenderiser, murders a woman her head whirls around so fast it literally made my friend burst out laughing.

This, perhaps, is the key to actually enjoying this movie: it’s cartoon nonsense, post-Raimi/Jackson splatterfest. The garish ugliness of the films aesthetic does confer a sense of sleaze and exploitativeness that cycles back to being kind of fun. There are even a couple of moments where the CGI gets out of the way and lets practical effects take over. Within the era of torture porn, these CGI-free moments are genuinely grisly and brutal. Director Ryuhei Kitamura doesn’t believe getting out of the way  of the story either, and there’s at least one fight scene that is so comically overdirected it cycles back around to being sort-of legitimately spectacular. The Midnight Meat Train undoubtedly embodies a heightened sensationalism and a sense of spectacle that gives it a real charm.

There’s a lot of legitimately entertaining aspects of The Midnight Meat Train, and even a thematic core that could have been something; photography of graphic violence as entertainment and so on. With more nuanced script it could really have been something, which is surprising since Barker himself is attached as an Exec Producer. Candyman this ain’t.

One of the least sleazy parts of the movie is a sex scene between Leon and Maya, which typifies the problem with them as characters and their relationship; it is over forced and tries way too hard, and as such mostly feels boring and superfluous. Ultimately, The Midnight Meat Train spends far too long lingering on an undercooked and bland central romance, and if the least sleazy part of your movie is the sex scenes, then something isn’t quite coming together.

The Boogeyman - Review

In a way it feels reductive to say that the entire direction of the canon of Western horror, especially in film form, can be drawn across the laylines laid down by one Stevie King, but to say otherwise would feel dishonest. It is upon his coke and alcohol fuelled blueprints we build our cities. He is the sewers and the plumbing; he is the cherubic gargoyles and the craggy grotesques. Upon watching Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman it felt almost pointless to learn later that the film is an adaptation of a King short. Even if it wasn’t, it still would be.

It is tempting, even outside of the shadowy monolith of Stephen King (of the lesbians), to talk of the prominent horror filmmakers whose finger prints can be found in The Boogeyman. Wan, Flanagan, Jennifer Kent. But what are we all if not the strange collection of inherited neurosis passed onto us by our parents (and that scene from It)? At some point The Boogeyman must stand on its own feet.

As must Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher), who has just lost her mother in an accident. Bullied at school, she finds herself herself with a younger sister who has developed a fear of the dark and a father who, despite being a therapist, refuses to open up to his daughters about his own loss. Compounding the difficulties, a strange man turns up at their house for a therapy session who may (read:will) be bad news.

In both life and movie making, there’s a lot to be said about specialisation. Being too general risks mediocrity. There’s a reason the English language idiom cautioning against being “all things to all people”. Try to please everyone and you risk pleasing no one.

So what is The Boogeyman? Based on director Rob Savage’s previous work it would be not unfair to expect a simple ghost train ride, something he has shown himself to be a dab hand at already. Indeed, there’s a lot of the demarcation of that style of storytelling in here: slow, dark camera crawls, set pieces that build towards jump scares, a monster costume that doesn’t quite hold up when you see too much of it. They’re well crafted too, with a real eye for imagery. Of special note is younger sister Sawyer (Vivian Lyra Blair)’s particular choice of lighting. But the script is too interested in the interiority of the characters to be a pure jump-scare fest, paced 

So is this a family drama? Certainly some of the stronger parts of the movie is the time taken, the patience of both tone and pacing, in creating the aforementioned sense of interiority with the characters. The pace is good too, a mid pace between slow lingering and twitchily overexcited.

When the family members interact it is easy to see a warmth behind the distance created by the tragedy they have suffered. There is, however, the problem that not only does the father figure basically just disappear for a chunk of the movie, but also the fact their interpersonal drama never really propels the narrative. Not many of the big moments in the movie are really about their relationship.

Wait! I hear you say - this is 2023! It must all be an artsy metaphor for trauma. There’s potential febrile ground there: the dramatic, as opposed to narrative, premise is that the film is about a family mourning the loss of their matriarch. Could this haunting be a manifestation of their grief? Thematically, the movie tips on the inert. Those themes are in there, but are not particularly explicitly or implicitly developed. There’s some great earthy bits of production design, and therapy and communication exists as a motif, but those dots aren’t connecting. When Sadie asks her father (Chris Messina) to talk to her, the movie is as reticent as her father to do anything substantial with the invitation.

There’s a lot in there to like, but all of the very decent pieces of the film have not been assembled into the best version of itself. The Boogeyman is, quite simply, a jack of all trades. In its own way it is fascinating for that. Here’s the finger prints of the way Wan and Wannel reshaped popcorn horror in the 00s, Flanagan’s tight writing and dramatic maturity, the “elevated” trauma porn of Hereditary and The Babadook: here’s a film which is the last ten or more years of a horror, and is not a particularly good example of any of it.

If this review seems rather negative, I’ll leave you with this: when I stepped out of the cinema, my friend immediately declared that it was “better than it needed to be.” For what it is worth, I agree, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

A "short" list of Shudder reccomendations

 

It’s dark out there folks. Cold. You know what that means?

Prime reading time!

Also you could watch a horror film, I guess. They do rather suit the darkness.

Here’s some Shudder recommendations:

Shudder has loads of things in it you’ve probably seen already, but if you haven’t why haven’t you? There’s Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, which helped redefine modern cinema as well as standardising the zombie mythology within the West that will (ironically) outlive us all. What about Romero’s Season of the Witch? It’s from the rough-around-the-edges era of Romero’s filmmaking, where he produced such oddities as the entirely excellent Martin. Season is a clumsily feminist story that hits all the modern beats of witchcraft as female empowerment, as an unfulfilled housewife decides to stop putting the needs of other people ahead of her own, and it has an off-beat rhythm that I found rather hypnotic. The Crazies is from a similar-ish time period, but is a lot more hinged than either The Season of the Witch or Martin, and is remarkable for the way it plays with who really is the antagonist of the movie.

The good Hellraisers (1+2) bring some fantastical body horror, whilst Cronenberg’s Scanners brings some sci-fi body horror, and it is worth nothing that the other Cronenberg (Brandon, David’s son) also has a body horror on there: Possessor. I didn’t love it the way that some do, but it’s a worthwhile watch for its slickly oozing visual set pieces and some stark portrayals of existential identity crisis in a way that is very visual indeed. Cold and controlled throughout, laced with strong but underdeveloped sci-fi concepts, it might be more your bag than it was mine. There’s also some very tactile, not to mention effective, body horror to be found the Spanish language Shrew’s Nest, a domestic drama set in the 50s. It is about an agoraphobic shut-in who one day finds herself having to nurture an injured man back to health in her claustrophobic flat. It all goes brilliantly. Obviously. Benson and Moorhead’s Spring does a very remarkable thing, in that it actually finds away to have me enjoy narrative and dramatic beats normally found in YA fiction. It’s a YA body horror, and as someone with no love for the genre (notice the lack of the much beloved Tigers Are Not Afraid on this list), it’s an effective low key journey, beautiful and quiet.

Confusingly, there’s no Stephen King adaptations on this list at all, so we’re just going to have to make with the excellent 1980 film The Changeling. It’s your traditional haunted house horror fare, but very well executed. Sad, spooky and surprisingly full of imagery that is reminiscent of a certain J-horror movie. In a similar vein, the Iranian-American produced movie The Night is a solid and entertaining modern horror movie. It very much toils in the shadow of The Shining but is still a strongly paced ride, paranoid in all of the most fun-borderline-silly ways. Part of me wants to stick up for it, too, because there is a twist in the movie that a lot of critics decided meant that the movie was saying something that I just don’t think it is; you’ll know it when you see it. There’s some really great sequences where the very setting itself seems to warp, which is similar to The Witch in the Window and Room. Room has done itself dirty by giving itself a title that two much more famous movies have already made imbued with some, well, strong connotations, but it’s a high concept and shorter movie that I enjoyed quite a lot without letting my internet-corrupted brain get in the way. Of all the films I have mention in this loose collection of haunted houses, my favourite is probably the aforementioned The Witch in the Window. It moves at slow pace in all the right ways, it’s very sad in an empathetic and has a sequence near the end which is as successful a piece of dislocation of place as I’ve ever encountered in any visual medium. Worth also highlighting Goodbye Mummy too, an Austrian psychological thriller that feels like a haunted house film without necessarily being a haunted house film. Film makers Fiala and Franz do an excellent job making the middle class over-clean splendour of the protagonists’ house feel alien and creepy, despite being an elegant piece of straight-out-of-a-flat-pack minimalism.

Takata’s Ring brought modern technology into the world of horror in a way that was decisive and immediately impactful, and we’re still waiting for that moment in our new internet era. There’s three movies that explore found footage gimmicks to make that leap: Host, a movie about a group of friends doing a séance over Zoom, is an entertaining foray, lingering as it were in the shadow of COVID, and was a real darling of the horror scene in early lockdown days. Better yet is Deadspin, a rollicking live stream of an obnoxious prankster looking to make his big comeback after being kicked by his sponsors for, uh, “comments”. It’s a tricky balance to have us spend ninety minutes with an annoying protagonist, but Deadspin’s poise and tonal balance between humour and horror is impeccable. Last, but certainly not least, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, is quite possibly my favourite film of the year. It’s about a young woman participating in a viral creepy pasta craze. Anna Cobb is mesmeric, which is just as well because it is almost a single hander. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. There’s also Broadcast Signal Intrusion, a film that is about the past from the point of view of people who have internet access, a paranoid conspiracy thriller with J-horror aspects and psychological uncertainty throughout – also not a found footage film, for the sake of variety.

Talking of Ring, there’s more than a few East Asian movies worth checking out on Shudder. No doubt Battle Royale and Oldboy very much go without saying. What about the South Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters? It’s a structurally unusual movie that slides between being a tense and psychological domestic drama to some of the best horror set pieces I’ve literally ever seen on screen. It has a really communal feel, being about more than just a single person’s journey; Pulse is very much the same, but in a very different way. Pulse is a smothering film, directed by my favourite director called Kurasawa (not joking), unrelenting and extraordinarily downbeat. It’s one of my favourite movies, but it’s emotionally quite difficult to get through – and, again, like A Tale of Two sisters it has some truly remarkable horror set pieces. For something a little emotionally lighter than the two previous films look no further than Noroi: the Curse. A found footage gem, Noroi is a reminder that this period of films from Japan that really broke into the West just delivered so consistently. It’s creepy and just weird enough. Moving a bit more into the South-East of the continent, Laotian film The Long Walk is a quiet, deliberate film that is rather a brilliant sit. The film always teeters on the edge of being ponderous, but Mattie Do’s controlled instincts are well judged enough that the films pace is introspective and weighty rather than dull.

Enough of this heavy stuff, I hear you say, let’s have some fun! Well Slaxx, confusingly, is a film about haunted jeans, but also a social commentary. It’s a fun time, although at times it tries too hard to make jokes rather than letting the natural absurdity or the set-up do the heavy lifting. There’s a couple of classics from the post-Raimi world like Demons and Night of the Demons, but if you want a real piece of absolute eighties nonsense there’s Chopping Mall. It’s pretty bad, watch it with mates, get drunk and have a great time. Shutting your brain off for Body at Brighton Rock is not the worst idea either, a film which strands its protagonist in the middle of nowhere with a body and manages to maintain tension without overcomplicating itself. Daniel isn’t Real, a movie that sort of belongs alongside such luminaries as Malignant and The Perfection in many ways, but with a far stronger sense of intention and control. Daniel isn’t Real, a film about a young man and the evil invisible friend he’s had since he was very young, is exactly silly and serious enough at the same time. Senagalese supernatural western thriller Saloum was a film I actually saw in the theatre, and is full of lots of very effective constituent parts. It's a driving action film, then it's a slowburn thriller, then it's a very fast burn dark fantasy. Does it work as a cohesive whole? Not particularly, but the parts are great at least.

On the outright comedy side of things Psycho Goreman, somehow, side-steps being annoying and lands on being awesome. For my money the best comedy I’ve seen in ages is a pretty little ditty called Greener Grass. It’s the best movie Paul Verhoeven never made. It’s Lynch, it’s Waters; it’s a tension headache, it’s toothache, it’s a migraine. It’s about that US phenomenon of “soccer moms”, and it is as damning an indictment of the Western middle classes as you can imagine.

Want something a bit more worthy? Well, there’s Donnie Darko, but since you’ve no doubt seen that already let us visit France. Eden Log is a movie that I am recommending, the first half an hour of which involves a man crawling through mud, and yes I do actually think it’s pretty good. Not as good as Evolution, which is so French and artsy that it is practically painful, so obviously it is completely great. Be ready to not worry too much about conventional narrative structures. There’s also Antrum, which might not be pretentious at all, but definitely carries itself with the airs of pretension, and a very big dollop of insanity. Most of the talk around the movie is the gimmick that frames it – the idea that the film you are watching is cursed – but for myself that is the weakest part of the movie. Going further down this weird old rabbit hole, Eyes of Fire, is an American movie directed and written by then artist Avery Crounse. It’s a western, and definitely remains a western for the first third of the movie; this initial section is blandly competent and decently paced, but when it really loses itself it really loses itself, and hoo boy. The psychedelic folk horror nightmare that results in many ways feels like a very strong forerunner to Lynch’s Twin Peaks.

Talking of folk horror, there’s Witchfinder General and The Blood on Satan’s Claw, both stone-cold classics that are worth watching, with the caveat that they are also both disarmingly extreme. The unfettered nihilism of Witchfinder General is especially striking, and within a time where we are all desensitised beyond recognition it is still really, really fucking grim. Talking of really fucking grim, have you seen The Hills Have Eyes? It’s amazing that Craven, whose name would become synonymous with fun, produced such a gruelling effective piece of ugly violence early in his career.

If you haven’t seen any Argento yet, there’s Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Tenebrae and Phenomena lurking here. The latter, especially, is all of his most ridiculous predilections in a high-art schlock masterpiece I find irresistible. If you can’t get enough of the music in these films, Piercing has you covered. It’s an American adaptation of a Japanese novel filled with music from 70s Italian moves. There’s an intensity and singularness to the film, about a man who is planning to murder a prostitute, that is compelling and fascinating, but also belie a disarmingly funny experience. Big reccs.

Metaphors. We’re in a horror world of horror as some sort of metaphor for trauma. You can talk about Heriditary or Get Out if you want to blame someone, but for myself The Babadook remains a gold standard for extremely emotionally complex spooky times. A strong and comparable Australian film, that does all of the same things to a comparable level of devastating effect, is Relic, a film about three generations of women living together and dealing with the realities of ageing and illness, specifically around dementia. For my mind it’s a better movie than Hereditary for dealing with things that are actually hereditary. A Banquet evokes a much more specific comparison with St Maud, and although it sort of loses its way halfway through, I really found it an effective and affecting watch. Good Madam fits excellently here as a film nakedly about the country it was filmed in, South Africa, and the race relations therein. It isn’t in a rush to coddle the viewer, and rightly so.

So, when organising this list of recommendations, to peek behind the curtain, I organised movies into subgenres of sort. There was one subcategory I named “Chris What the Fuck is This?”, and I think it is time for some of that nonsense. You’ve read over two thousands words of this, I’ve written over two thousand words of this, so we’re all a bit loopy. The Baby is a dark comedy or a psychological thriller or a, I dunno, film. It is a film I watched. You should watch it too. While you’re at it watch the Phenomena films, they’re entertaining and weird and really feel like some interesting weirdo’s authentic vision. They sort of know exactly what they are and kinda sorta can’t decide what they are and I love all of them unconditionally, although I’ve not seen the fifth, and last, one. They’re about an alien who comes to earth with nefarious intentions, not unlike the B-movie glory Xtro. Apparently there’s a genuine link between Phenomena and Xtro, too, with the cult success of Phenomena encouraging producers, in an out of character move, to encourage Xtro’s writer and director to be more weird and niche to get that cult audience dollars. A different time. Xtro is weirder than can be articulated with mere words, and as such brilliant fun. Low budget auteur Frank Hennenlotter’s Basket Case is also available, and you should watch it even though you also definitely shouldn’t. At least it isn’t Brain Damage, which is also amazing.

You’ve – surely – already seen Carnival of Souls, a little slice of nightmare that feels like Lynch’s existence hinges on, but have you seen Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood? It’s not remotely similar beyond the carnival theming, but watch it anyway. It is also a ridiculous psychedelic B-movie that feels like it has an epic scope beyond its actual low budget jankiness. Edited with the same incompetent charm as an early Romero, to take us back to the start. If you like drinking blood, Bliss is a striking, kinetic and simple story done with lots of style and character. It’s not a complicated narrative maze, but it also rules despite the unfortunate deadweight of it being about vampires.

Finally, and broadly uncharacterisable, is Phil Tippet’s Mad God. A stop motion animation full of vomit and shit and blood and puss; a descent into hell, or maybe some other place. It’s incredibly uneven but also incredible. You need to sink into it, drown in it.

 

Film Review: The Changeling

Film Review:

The Changeling

A changeling, in traditional folk tales, is a child stolen by the faerie folk and replaced with a fairy child. It's a cuckoo for humans, and likely came about as a way of explaining post-natal depression in an era before, well, psychological science. It is absolutely not - take note YA authors - another name of a shape shifters.

The Haunting of Changeling House

Composer John Russel (George C. Scott) lost his wife and daughter four months ago in a car accident; now he's ready to start working again, and start living again. He takes up a position in a university at Washington and moves into a house that could not be more clearly haunted from the moment that you set eyes on it. Russel doesn't, however, have the foresight to know that he is in a horror movie, so settles in to his new life. Doesn't take long before his new life throws up a surprise or two...

You've seen this movie before, you've read this book before; you've crouched fireside with a torch under your chin and told this story before. This is a haunted house story at its most essential. A guy lives in a house, spooky things happen, he investigates and it turns out the ghost of a wronged soul dwells within the walls. What makes The Changeling absolutely worth watching is how well-realised it is within that very well worn framework.

The House Talks

The Changeling moves at a slow clip. It takes its time. He doesn't move into the house for the first fifteen minutes, and there are no horror set-pieces. The filmmakers assemble the pieces slowly and carefully, lulling the audience into the world in an understated way. There's a patience to it that is gratifying. As such, tension simmers and the creepiness - well, it creeps slowly but surely under your skin.

One of the focuses of the story early on, as it motors at a sedate pace, is the surroundings. The film is filmed with a great emphasis on place, especially within the house itself. Wide shots aplenty. Many of the shots are either from low or high angles, making them seem small in the house, or making the house tower over them. It is the star of the show, and it is shot like the star of the show.

Aesthetically, the house itself is just a perfect piece of casting. It screams haunted house. It looks like how I imagined the house in The Haunting of Hill House - the original adaptation of which (The Haunting, 1963) is no doubt a key inspiration. Early on especially, it feels like the house itself is the malicious, malevolent presence. Banging doors, noises in the pipes, running taps: classic staples of haunted housery.

Deja-Vu

One of the things that struck me very strongly during watching The Changeling is the similarities that it bares towards many of the key films in the eruption of J-horror that happened during the noughties. One scene specifically surely has to have had some influence on Ringu - the source novel was written over a decade after The Changeling hit theatres.

The iconography is very similar too, and very good to boot. Much of The Changeling's most memorable moments are not what happens so much as the images. Whilst the story may be deftly hitting familiar beats, the power of the visuals and the lightning help The Changeling feel like its own beast, and lend power to what could otherwise be tired and generic. The wheelchair, especially, is a haunting image, and one that is borrowed to this day in haunting house stories - the modern Hill House adaptation, to call back to early, is a good example of this.

The other thing that The Changeling has in common with J-horror is that your dear narrator, man of iron nerves, actually found it genuinely creepy in a way I haven't since I watched Ju-on (The Grudge) as a teenager. Whatever it was, there is a quiet power to the visuals, the score and the pace, that really had me on edge.

Big Endings

And then the end happened. In every sense it is absolutely the right ending to the film - it ties up the plot points and escalates both the set pieces and imagery in scale. Both in terms of the storytelling and the filmmaking the decisions made are the right ones.

Unfortunately, it overplays its hand and really than ratchetting up into horror, descends slightly into farce. It becomes the silly and generic spookfest that the premise suggests it should be. It's all very well done and fun in a schlocky sense, but it is does not fit tonally with the understated and genuinely creepy movie it was capping off. A shame, because otherwise The Changeling smashes it out of the park.

Film Review - Audition

Film Review:

Audition

WHEN a film director has over one-hundred directorial credits to his name, they're either an artistically bereft journeyman or an idiot savant. The former is doomed to a filmography of basic competence, uninspired mediocrity. The latter? You'll get incredibly entertaining badness, or streaks of genuine genius.

Audition is genuine genius.

Have You Ever Had Loveless Sex?

AOYAMA is a widower – his wife died when his son was still a child, and now he’s middle aged and his son and friends are convinced that he it is about time he found himself a new wife. His friend Yoshikawa has a plan. He’s a film producer, and a new cheap film his company are producing are auditioning women who may be suitable for Aoyama. With this in mind, he co-opts the auditions as a job interview for Aoyama to find his new wife.

It soon becomes clear that Aoyama, however, having already read through the applications for the role, has only one woman in mind: the quiet and shy Asami. Despite Yoshikawa’s misgivings about the mysterious woman, Aoyama begins a relationship with her.

Much of the early tone of the movie is funny. In many ways, it plays out like a romcom that doesn’t understand how deeply creepy and misogynistic its premise is. It would not be the first either.

Audition isn’t a romcom.

To Scar a Generation

THE mid-00s saw rise to what seemed to be the culmination of sensationalist violence in horror cinema (and fiction in general): torture porn, or gornography. A sub-genre of cinema whose use of shock tactics are tuned up so high that they literally use torture to titillate audiences. The Saw franchise and the films of Eli Roth are the most obvious and well-known examples of the sub-genre.

Seven years before Roth's Hostel and six years before the first Saw film, Takeshi Miike's Audition scarred an audience by avoiding such excesses. It is often listed amongst the great torture porn films, and one set-piece is infamous for its gratuity, yet Audition is an exercise in restraint. That one of the founding films of this genre is bloodless should tell you a lot about the power of its imagery, and the director’s control of tension.

No Safety

IF the horrific climax of the movie is the part that everyone remembers, it works so well because of the set-up. So much of the movie consists of not much happening, and somehow it’s a tough, tough sit.

Everything that creates this feeling is very quiet and subtle. There’s no jump scares and little scary music, and not horror set-pieces and a lot of quiet emotional discussions. Audition feels incredibly unsafe without ever doing anything that feels unsafe, exactly. It’s all so subtly wrong, so off, so simmering. When Audition hits like a truck, it is because it has spent the runtime softening you up. It’s a testament to the fact that any emotional or memorable moments in stories are defined more by the rest of the story than they are by the power of the visuals.

Singularity of Purpose

ALTHOUGH Audition successfully uses a fairly diverse cocktail of tones (at times going so far as being funny), it is a very focussed and simple story. It takes care to introduce us to the internal world of the characters, as much through visuals as through actual plot points. It has a slight plot; not particularly much really happens. Big revelation and twists happen within the context of the final scenes.

Some stories are all about a single scene or moment. Most obviously are twist movies in horror or psychological thrillers – it was all in their head all along. Shamylan’s Sixth Sense came out the same year as Audition and is one of the most recogniseable examples of this. In a totally different medium, Final Fantasy 7 is another contemporary of Audition’s that does this effectively. Audition, of course, does this too. Big emotional moments and narrative slight of hands are saved for the correct moment and, to repeat a phrase I used earlier, it hits like a train. 

Film Review - Society

Film Review:

Society

"A matter of breeding Milo."

IN our times of economic instability, politics that is swinging globally towards fascism and a rampant pandemic, the slogan "eat the rich" - and all that it connotes - seems more and more relevant. In 1989 when Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock) bites into an apple at the start of Society, he finds it infested with worms. Little does he know where it'll take him...

High Society

BILL'S convinced he is adopted, that his blue blooded parents and sister are not his real family, and that there is something strange going on. He's your typical jock framed in a very saved-by-the-bell high school drama - star football player and soon to be year president. The girls want him and the boys from the other big clique resent him. His world is dumped on its head when his sister's ex (Tim Bartell) turns up at a date and plays him a tape recording of what appears to be an incest orgy,  seemingly confirming his paranoia around his familial situation.

Much of the movie happens in a bright, flatly lit manner much befitting of a daytime American soap opera. It's been compared to Ferris Bueller gone wrong. It's a high school drama in the most insubstantial of ways, portraying the petty irrelevance of a glamourised teenage life with a sense of absurd importance. Everything, however, is off. Part of this, admittedly, is just a clumsy script and some bad acting - at points it works quite nicely and feels intentional, other times less so.

Underdeveloped

AS a protagonist, Bill leaves rather a lot to be desired. The bare bones are there - his motivation and paranoia are well defined by the movie, and he has a number of relationships that have potential for development. Said development is lacking. Severely lacking. At a number of points, both love interest Clarissa and best friend Milo go out of their way to either do things for Bill or to get his attention, and it's never properly established why exactly. The movie is in love with Bill, and demands very little proactivity or anything -actually- interesting from him. Milo spends a lot of the movie stalking Bill and pranking him, in order to provide transparent red herrings for the audience and be there in case the plot needs him.

In general, the plot's touch with characters isn't great. Neither does it have a firm grasp of structure: it feels like it cuts out a lot of the first act and fails to establish the characters paranoias properly. At the start of the movie, he tells his therapist his issues - we don't ever see it or feel it. The final act is also about a third of the movie (although this turns out to really be a blessing in disguise). The narrative structure, the dialogue and character work, the plotting - it's all rather on the shaky side.  

Beautiful People

Society draws many obvious comparisons - the uncanny hidden darkness of the world of Blue Velvet, the shallow awfulness of American Psycho, the paranoia coupled with a blandly pretty lick of paint of Stepford Wives. Recent Oscar winner Parasite flickers at the edges of vision. In a certain sense, it is a profoundly unoriginal - a social satire but how the rich seem weird and gross? Seen it, been there. It's definitely been done better.

Everyone in this movie except Billy, Milo and Clarissa is absolutely awful or grotesque in any manner of ways. Maybe the sister is introduced as not an unlikeable character, but before long she's loathsome too. The movie is transparent and blundering almost in how much its clear we should dislike its slimy and smarmy cast of characters, lacking the guts of something like American Psycho to even follow a main character who is among the worst examples. This is particularly clear with Billy's girlfriend at the start of the movie, a vapid harpy who he discards for the seductive and mysterious Clarissa, and the movie doesn't bat an eyelid. This is meant to make him seem more real, not less.

Dancing With the Audience

EARLY on, Society asks the audience a question - is Bill crazy, or is something untoward going on? Well, the film is very poor, from the outset, at really cementing that ambiguity.Society's script lacks the elegance and narrative slight of hand to really pull off that tension.

More than that, thematically it wouldn't make sense were the movie to be all a psychological fugue state on Bill's part. Society, from early on, is very clear that it is satirising the life and attitudes and entitlement of the rich. During the mad finale, one of the major characters even draws direct comparisons with the Roman Empire, evoking the likes of Caligula. The film is always straddling the line of farce and once it reaches its explosive finale, it commits. Hoo boy, does it commit.

All's Well That Ends Well

If this review has been rather negative so far, it's because Society isn't exactly great until the finale. As aforementioned, the structure of the movie is totally unbalanced, and roughly a third of the movie is taken up by the final act. This is a good thing. This is a very good thing.

Director Brian Yuzna was, prior to Society, best know for his work with the now deceased Stuart Gordon (very Scottish name that one). Gordon is best known for Re-animator and Into the Void (or possibly some cult film called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), both of which are big silly extravangzas of ridiculous special effects and Lovecraft inspired visuals. Society sets this up with moments of incredibly idiosyncratic body horror that almost feel like they really didn't happen. This is an unusual bit of filming subtlety, and it pays off dividends with the bombastic and absurd conclusion. The sunny soap opera visuals of the earlier film when compared to what happens later? It's beyond absurd and is 100% what makes the movie worth watching.

Society is one hell of a ride that's worth it at the end - there is some fun and funny stuff along the way, and the movie does move at a decent pace, but maaaaan. Quite the ending.

Film Review: Gerald's Game

Film Review:

Gerald's Game

LOOKING to spice up your long dead marriage? Got some unresolved childhood trauma? Well, does your quasi-abusive husband have a holiday for you!

Handcuffs included.

Picturesque Woodlands

WHEN you're in the middle of a Stephen King adaptation you're not on solid ground, but when you start off driving through rural woodlands probably safe to say you've not got a tremendous time ahead of you. That's where Jessie and her husband Gerald find themselves, however. They're on a holiday retreat to revive their ailing relationship. In a cabin in the middle of nowhere they look to rekindle their romance in the bedroom - but after Gerald handcuffs Jessie to the bed, he suffers a heart attack and - rather rudely - dies, leaving her chained to the bed.

It's a smashing premise. The setting is has an eerie beauty to it, Flanagan's style feels like a nice de-emphasis of style that allows drama and character focus. Subtlety is a bi-word that I'm going to keep going back to because it's so much of what is great about the movie, and when that subtlety goes away?

Early on, the film establishes a pattern: subtly and tensely establish themes or characteristics or conflicts that simmer, before coming out and having characters explain to the audience what was meant to have been conveyed already in case we have recently been lobotomised. The plotting is controlled and subtle, but the script often doesn't trust the audience - or, perhaps, doesn't quite know how to fill out its running time - so often undercuts those small moments and small ideas. Part of this might be a function the content of the source material.

To Film, the Unfilmable Film!

GERALD'S Game, the theory goes, is an unfilmable novel. Reading between the lines, as it were, the reason for this is the internality of the original story. It's a woman chained to a bed angsting and feeling hungry and sore. Not conventionally the stuff of escapism. Psychological thrillers often draw heavily from horror and crime set-pieces, as well as art-house cinema, to propel the story along and a story with a character just strapped to a bed doesn't allow for much of that. Instead, it's about an unspoken internal struggle.

Save for the fact that there is in fact plenty of talking. The moment the film should lapse into a quiet visual struggle for survival it never stops shutting up. It gives us a lots of details about the failing relationship, about the characters and especially Jessie's childhood. Most of these details are welcome, in and of themselves at least. The way they are reached is through exposition. The movie allows itself to be easy to watch and easy to follow by being so explicit and baldfaced about giving us such information.

As a horror fan, I'm not much of a fan of jump scares - jump scares are cheap and easy, but even worse they dispel the tension. They're a release. They allow the audience to get comfy in the fact that the horror has revealed itself and now either the protagonist escapes, wins or dies. It allows us a comparative level of safety as viewers. Mike Flanagan, to his credit, doesn't really do jumpscares (although there is one in this movie, and to be fair it's genuinely excellent). What happens with the dialogue, and the hallucinations that say the dialogue, is they help create a feeling of safety for the viewer. It's easier to watch a film because of it, and a story about a woman strapped to a bed whilst horrible things both happen around and rise from her past shouldn't be an easy watch.

Flanagan Back Again

BEEN a busy old few years for good ol' Mike Flanagan. As mentioned earlier, he's no James Won style jumpscarer or set-piece dependent horror filmmaker. He doesn't go for you Eli Roth shock tactics. His plotting foreshadows nicely, and his touch with characters is decent. Between a slew of well received horrors, the success of his King adaptations (he even directed Doctor Sleep, The Shining's sequel) and the way The Haunting of Hill House captured a digital audience, he seems to have taken the reigns on mainstream horror cinema for recent times.

Having seen 2019's largely excellent adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, I found it hard to separate that viewing experience from this. As a fan of the novel, the Netflix Hill House series always felt like it owed much more to both It and The Shining. A lot of the best and worst things about Hill House are also present in Gerald's Game, beyond just the shared cast. Dodgy acting, especially from younger actors, and an inability to write dialogue for children; great splicing together of the past and present, taking great pains to route character traits and decisions in their past. A restrained touch on traditional horror visuals and set pieces. A stark visual style, and a subtle expression of place as important; a tendency to over-explain and general overwriting, without letting scenes or ideas breath to percolate.

For what it is worth, Carla Gugino deserves a shout for an utterly fantastic performance. There might be shaky ones in there, but she's a titan and helps to elevate the film to a level it would not be at without her.

A Good Bone Structure

IT'S a shame that Gerald's Game is at great pains to point out how the themes and character moments connect, because there's a clarity and power to them that should have worked. From the ideas of blood and meet, to the stray dog, to Jessie's past and Jessie's present, from the Moonlight Man to the handcuffs it all works brilliantly until pointed out. Once laid so bare, it seems clunky. Artless.

For all of the talk of Flanagan's restraint, he does have moments of flair in the set-piece. Whenever the enigmatic Moonlight Man is on-screen the movie feels like it has an intensity that is not only excellent on a horror level, but feels like it is a meaningful character moment. He knows when to strike, and when he does it is effective.

WITHOUT wanting to properly wade into spoilers, the ending fell very flat for me. Like, to the point that it might have tipped the balance from a film with a lot of very good and kinda bad and surprisingly boring into just bad. Then again, maybe that makes him the perfect modern visual heir to Stephen King - perhaps lacking his idiosyncratic madness, but fully able to cover most of his unpredictable range in any given piece.