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.

Film Review - Blue Velvet

Film Review:

Blue Velvet

WHEN Lynch broke out onto the scene with his smash-hit horror Eraserhead, he thrilled teenagers looking to grab onto their dates in the cinema and wooed the maturer audience with a sweet romantic story of a couple overcoming a situation laden with conflict. It even had a cute baby! After that came the Academy nominated biopic Elephant Man, and some failed movie for nerdy fucks (who even reads anyway?). In 1986, he returned to form with the taut and sexy thriller Blue Velvet. What a hoot!

This Ain't Your Daddy's Noir

ONE day, young Jefferey (Kyle McLaughlin) finds an ear in a field near his home whilst on the way back from a hospital visit. Intrigued, he takes it to a neighbour of his who works as a detective for the police force. He is then approached by the policeman's daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), who tells him more about the case. At the centre of the intrigue is the sultry Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), and fuelled by a need to be part of the mystery, Jefferey hatches a plan to sneak into Dorothy's apartment - what he sees in there, however, drags him into a world he is not ready for.

So far, so cliched right? You've seen this story; read this story before. Blue Velvet hits all of the same plot points, and even most of the same character points that you would were you to sit down with this premise and plot out the most hackneyed version of this story.

And yet...

Psycho Sexua-Oh God What?

THIS steamy thriller may have the trappings of a sexy story about the criminal underground, but everything about the steamy elements feel horrible and perverse. Famously, Lynch not only struggled to get the film made, but there were widespread reports of audience walkouts. Prominent critics wrote in disgust of the events and tone of the story - and yet, it has been considered one of the great contemporary American films for over two years now. The film got a reaction at the time, and retains its power.

The key to this is because the shock tactics the movie employs are not your usual shock tactics. Lynch doesn't get in there and just turns things up to eleven, as it were: at least, not in any conventional manner. He plants seeds. He creates unease in a way only Lynch can. The opening to this film is one of the most iconic in contemporary cinema, with its picturesque placid suburban setting, which unfolds slowly into something much darker.

Jeffery himself is a personification of the insidious nature of the sexual aspect to the film - even more so than the iconic Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). In some ways he could have been your traditional bland main character. Certainly, he has no really well established motivation for getting involved in the story, and is even handed much of the early about the plot by other characters. There is, however, something subtly off about him, in much the same way there is something off about everything Lynch's hand touches. At one point Sandy, now besotted, tells him to drop the investigation. "I can't tell if you're a detective or a pervert," she says in another scene. He's definitely the latter, although it is arguable that within the confines of Blue Velvet that both are the ostensibly the same thing. He stalks and leers his way through the movie exactly like a pervert, and it becomes sort-of clear that whatever is driving him, even he can't put a name to.

There's one famous set-piece in this movie that anyone who has heard of the film has probably heard about to various degrees of detail. It's a testament to the character work, filmmaking and understanding of the psychology of the conflict. You can see a truck coming straight at you, but when it hits you it still hits like a truck.

In Dreams

SOMETHING about David Lynch's world building allows him to just do things in a film no one else can. His films often have a real anachronistic sensibility. Blue Velvet feels like it was set in the eighties using eighties genre conventions, written by a time traveller from the fifties. Everyone talks a bit funny, shares a common sentiment of what is proper and what is normal, and it's off. There's obvious big examples of this, but it's the small choices that are the most effective. Background extras, production choices; be it a carpet or wallpaper or a strange choice of outfit.

Perhaps the most striking moment is the In Dreams section of the film. It comes at a moment of real peril, where Blue Velvet is beginning to really feel like a gritty Eighties crime drama, where it looks and feels like a conventional movie. Then they cut a to a flat, wide shot of a scene supposedly in a bar, but appears in actuality to look like an old person's home. The whole scene plays out like an absurdist play - it never works to actual deflate the tension, but it certainly twists and distorts it. At a moment where the plot seems to really be plotting in, Lynch seems to drag us into a strange dreamscape, but not even any old dreamscape either: this feels like a 100% Lynchian dreamscape.

ACTING

IF there is one thing entirely unsurprising about the cultural impact of Blue Velvet, it is that Dennis Hopper's performance as the villainous Frank ingrained itself onto popular culture. Whenever Frank is on-screen he dominates it. He shouts and screams and goes on monologues that feel like they would play well with an audience that is obsessed with the dark glamour of the Batman villain The Joker. It has been remarked on that both Hopper and Isabella Rossellini give very, very strange performances - in general, everyone in the movie seem as if they are caught in their own strange dream, but for both of them it is especially pronounced

Rossellini as Dorothy always seems like she's on something. She has an odd voice, almost kermit-y, and an accent that appears wane and drift strangely. Much like the domineering Frank, she seems on a very different wavelength not just from everyone else, but from the world in general. Her actions, her speech patterns: a performance that would be outright bad in a different movie. Yet, within this movie? Just works.

Where Convention Meets Madness

ULTIMATELY, Blue Velvet is one of those "auteur" films. It is impossible to understand where the film ends and Lynch's own crackpot psyche begins. Many filmmakers seem to strive to be as original as ever, but Lynch carries with him something unremittingly strange and stylised. Blue Velvet hits all of the notes you expect to hit, but also hits lots of strange notes along the way. The trick is that somehow things never actually go properly off the rails, whilst always seemingly like it's gone completely off the rails all together. Lynch might be the best plate spinner in the world whose act seems to consist of smashing plates, all the whilst keeping them all intact.

Highly recommended if you're a filthy fucking pervert or something else. Like, you know, a eunuch, if those still exist.

Film Review - Ex Machina

Film Review:

Ex Machina

"...that's not the history of man. That's the history of gods."

IN the age of incels and feminism, masculinity has taken on a rather a nuanced and peculiar auspice. Anyway, Alex Garland's ruminations on concepts of toxic masculinity and technology lets us ogle sexy robots.

Power Dynamics

FROM the moment that our plucky protagonist Caleb (Domhnaill Gleason) sets foot in erratic genius Nathan's (Oscar Isaac) estate, he finds himself locked in a strange game of hyper-masculinity. Nathan is his boss, and immensely powerful - Caleb has only been invited to his vast estate as a prize.

Nathan hasn't brought Caleb to his super-secret facility just for yucks however: he wants Caleb to take part in a Turing test on his newest creation that could change the world forever: Ava.

The centrifugal point of the drama comes from the dance Ava and Nathan are both doing with Caleb. The tension between Ava and Caleb is always complicated, because it introduces an idea that is ill-at-ease with the fundamental premise of what is going on: is Caleb attracted to Ava, despite her clearly being a robot. Ava's innocence with a hint of coyness, and the way she changes her behaviour when the camera is off, messes with Caleb on a fundamental level. He's constantly at odds with himself throughout the movie thanks to her.

Nathan carries with him a dangerous tension and never lets Caleb forget how much he is in Nathan's power, whilst constantly telling him to relax. Their relationship is more complex than it could have been in this movie, which has a very specific sci-fi heart.

Actual Sci-fi

CLASSICALLY, hard sci-fi's failing is good characterisation, so it's a pleasure to say that not only does the film have good characterisation, it is also really, really good sci-fi.

Part of its power comes from its clarity. Ex Machina knows what it is about. Characters are given choices and express their ideas and conflicts through technology and how technology shapes us. If it is a little on the nose that Nathan's Google-surrogate Blue Book is named after a Wittgenstein book, it just demonstrates that the story has very clear goals and ideas. 

Is it important that Ava has a sex? Is it important if Ava can have sex? Ava's existence exemplifies both a more traditional examination of what consciousness and sentience means, coupling it with the base objectification that comes with the male gaze. Few times, at least to my mind, has an interrogation of masculinity come through such an explicit sci-fi lense - and hard sci-fi, not space battles and light sabers.

Dead Space

GARLAND'S maiden voyage behind the camera is ambitious. His direction emphasises the space around the characters, the size and bareness of facility, the looming walls and ceilings, the barriers between the characters. Characters are often framed with a lot of dead space in the shots, often one will be much less centred than another. His stark style sobers up the potential silliness of a man looking to pork a robot. The exterior shots emphasise a barren beauty and vastness to the surrounding landscapes. We're almost never allowed to feel safe or cozy in the facility.

Messy Choices

EX Machina is not a film of big twists or shocking reveals. It allows the tension, the characters and concepts to carry the very simple plotting that lends the story its strength. However, certainly narrative choices made at the end of the story leave me slightly torn. There's a sudden muddle to everything about the finale, in terms of character and theme, and although the story leaves on a haunting note, it's something I'm personally still trying to parse.

HARMONY isn't available to the general public yet, so why not give Ex Machina a go instead?

Film Review - Demons

Film Review:

Demons

SO, this one is just stupid.

True Horror

FAMOUSLY, there are three primal fears: illness, madness and aggressive high-street leafleters, and Demons starts with a thrilling chase as one of our protagonists Cheryl is unable to evade a man inviting her to a special showing of a movie. Truly, director Lamberto Bava knows the real horror of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Oh, and then an eclectic cast of characters gather to watch the movie, and its horror spills out from the screen and into the audience, who then have to battle for their survival.

A Real Horror Show

ANYONE who has seen any number of terrible 00s teen slashers understands the formula by now: gather together a group of loud and obnoxious teenagers, then enjoy them being murdered one by one. It's an exercise in vacuity, junk food for the mind. Demons may have dissimilar trappings initially to that audience, but once the core ensemble-ish cast takes its place, it becomes clear enough that is the story we are very much in for.

Ensemble-ish because Demons is a fundamentally muddled film. There are audience-insert protagonists that are mostly de-emphasised through much of the movie, most of the characters move as one big screaming mob. The really fun premise becomes sort of muddled quickly and receives absolutely no development. Nothing, really, receives any kind of development. Often the physical locations are is unclear: the geography of the rather beautiful cinema is under-utilised. About halfway through a subplot is introduced only for nothing to happen with it. The result is basically a big, incompetent mush - although it has great productions and a lot of the shots actually look really good too.

Ew
FOR what it is worth, once the demons show up the film absolutely commits to being disgusting. The special effects are great, and horrible. Transformations and costumes are cartoonish in all of the right ways, and the violence is unflinching. It is everything that a horror B-movie can, and should, be in this case.

A special shout-out goes to a specific moment later on in the film, where one of the characters appears to give birth out of her back to a distorted gremlin-type creature. It is so over the top and demonic that it feels like it is entirely wasted on this movie.

A Big Surprise
DEMONS is a silly horror with great 80s special effects, no shortage of gore and some really big silly set-pieces. It is very far short of a good film, and yet it should at least be a highly entertaining romp. It isn't. It just really isn't. A large chunk of the movie you're not really sure what exactly is happening, if the movie is really going anywhere or why you should give two shits about any of the characters. In any real way it is difficult to engage with whatever is going on at any point.

Part of the problem is it is a little too competent to be properly incompetent. A lot of it looks good, and structurally the narrative very classic. Some of the cheesy moments feel very self-knowing and play up to it. It's just not bad enough to be properly entertaining or in any sense interesting, but its not good enough to be, you know, good.

Finish With a Bang (Or At Least a Decapitation)
THINGS do eventually turn around when everyone except the final two characters die. Suddenly it feels like the film recovers a sense of direction and narrative drive, aided by the escalation in ridiculous set-pieces. The movie is able to translate into something of a romp, and feel entertaining by then. Before long it becomes extremely 80s, even rather post-apocalyptic.

Not enough, however, to really save an underdeveloped and unengaging mess.

Film Review - Night of the Living Dead

Film Review:

Night of the Living Dead

NIGHT of the Living Dead is a bold and challenging movie, one that challenges one of the central archetypes of our society: are women really from Venus? Maybe ghouls are from Venus, it posits.

A Cabin in the Woods

THE movie starts inauspiciously, burning with low-key anticipation. We're quickly introduced to siblings Barbara and Johnny, and just as quickly we're unintroduced to Johnny as he is murdered by a shambling ghoul. Panicking, Barbara flees from her pursuer, eventually finding herself taking refuge in an abandoned cabin in the woods.

Soon she is joined by the resourceful Ben, and shuts down into a state of shock. As good as alone, Ben has to find ways to keep the shambling dead at bay whilst protecting Barbara. But are they really as alone as they think?

Eye of the Tiger

ROCKY is undoubtedly the most famous boxing movie of all time - arguably, the most famous sports movie all time. Yet, there's barely a punch thrown all movie. The movie is defined by almost everything else except the boxing - primarily the characters, their relationships to each other and their differing relationships to wider society. Such it is for Rocky, such it is for Night of the Living Dead.

Zombie films tend to be defined by two things - the emotional stress the situation puts on the characters, and the way it forces them to make choices; also big gory set-pieces. You don't watch The Evil Dead series for its intricate characterisation and deep emotional resonance. By contrast, Night of the Living Dead is relatively slight on set-pieces and almost lacking gore by any contemporary measure (although for the time its gore was admittedly considered utterly shocking and depraved). The drive of the film comes less from the shambling corpses, and more from the way characters are shoved together in small and claustrophobic confines. It's a real twister of expectations, and in many ways a very different beast from most modern zombie romps.

In Your Heeeeeeeead

WHEN paradigm shifts, it's very sexy to pretend that they happen over night. There's this big, important and easily digestible event that happens overnight, and suddenly we're all waking up in a different world. The truth is that this is an absurd and rather juvenile way to view the world.

George A Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead is rightly hailed as one of the most important horror movies of contemporary cinema, as well as one of the modern pieces of myth making that defined the idea of zombies - at the same time, it's a fairly obvious soft adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. I Am Legend has been adapted three times, and its most recent Will Smith-helmed version, it was marketed as both a zombie film and a vampire film. This have-your-cake-and-eat-it comes from the ambiguity of the source material: it is never clear what exactly the creatures that torment the main character are.

Night of the Living Dead plays the same card: radio broadcasts at first refer to this national crisis as an epidemic of "murders". Later, the reanimated corpses are referred to as "ghouls". The word zombie is never used at all, and at this point it was generally heavily associated with Haitian voodoo, inextricable from the culture and, indeed, racial subtext.

In modern times, our cultural schema of what a zombie is almost always links it with plague or disease. Infected wounds make people become zombies - during Night of the Living Dead, however, it is posited that a radiation from a space satellite from Venus is causing the dead to rise. The dead don't need an infection to rise, too - characters that die during the movie arise again regardless of what killed them, or what contact they have had with the ghouls.

Whisper, Don't Shout

HORROR is filled with screaming women. On this current horror rampage I'm undergoing, I've had my ear-drums assaulted any number of times. Barbara spends a good section of the start of the movie chased by a corpse, and finding herself in the gravest peril, yet she barely makes a noise. Judith O'Dea takes a role that is very much a staple of many horrors (both pre and post '68) and plays it with a real sense of weight, where it easily could have been silly.

Her performance, and generally silent presence throughout, encapsulate much of what makes this movie power. It's all about the silence, all-low key. Some movies look to evoke emotion and atmosphere by screaming in your face, but Romero underplays his hand as much as he can. It's also nice to see a movie that doesn't feel like it needs to over-explain plot details or character actions, and handles trusts its audience to follow along with some very strong visual storytelling without handholding.

Penis Measuring Contests

IT has been written many times that Romero's "of the Dead" series is not really about the zombies at all. Night of the Living Dead is, it has been postulated, about race.

It takes a while for that really to thematically make sense: sure, there is the fact that the main character is black, and a resourceful and well spoken black man at that too, but that itself seems a little on the slim side. What seems much more prominent, and what seems to resonate much more strongly with the times it was living with, is the overbearing and obnoxious hyper-masculinity that happens between Ben and Mr Cooper. Both have very specific ideas about how to survive the crisis and after a point it seems like being right is more important to either than actually surviving. In a scenario where doom seems almost inevitable, both lose sight of what is really at stake.

A Matter of Aesthetics
NIGHT of the Living Dead is an atmospheric and tense film shot in black and white, and as such immediately evokes a sense of German expressionist cinema. The film brilliantly uses darkness to suspended characters almost in a vacuum at times. The dead feel very original, surprisingly - they look distinct from zombies in many ways, despite setting a lot of the tropes about what zombies will look like in cinema afterwards. The low-key settings and rustic production compliment the lower key performances. Apart from when it is at its most intense, Night of the Living Dead is a film that is subtle and quietly intense.

*

Seminal or not, Night of the Living Dead is a fun sit, and a classic story executed well.

Film Review - Christine

Film Review:

Christine

CERTAIN brands, and certain authors with very strong brands, seem inextricably linked to adaptations. Defined by them, sharpened by them. Before the film market became over-saturated with comic book films, Scottish writer Mark Millar couldn't so much as twitch his pen without studios clamouring to buy the rights, and referring to James Bond as originating in novel form feels positively anachronistic at this point.

Surely, this is true of no one else more than it is true of Stephen, King of Horror; Christine went into production before the finished book had even been published!

She's a Beaut

YOUNG Arnie is a shy young nerd lacking in confidence, and suffering under the yoke of overbearing parents. His best friend, superchad and quarterback, Dennis is trying to drag him out of his rut, but alas no can do. Doesn't help that the two of them are targeted by a gang of high school bullies and there's a new girl at school who's a real good looking doll, despite being a total nerd. Dennis is even willing to spurn the advances of the lead cheerleader in pursuit of her.

Then Arnie is struck by love at first sight. A red '58 Plymouth Fury that has seen better days. There's a nice little detail when he first sees her: 'Stop,' he says, 'back up. I want to see her again.' He instantly recognises her gender, and immediately purchases her from her archetypal Ominous Hick Old Man owner. Before long he's full of confidence, dating the new girl Leigh and standing up to his parents. The driving force for this change however, his relationship with the mysterious Christine, turns out to be underpinned by dark obsessions and even the supernatural.

Silliness Abounds

LOOK, we get it, we've all been there. Puberty has set in and the last days of a hot summer have not long faded into autumn. The kids-cum-young-adults are embarking on a new year at high school, so when Arnie and Dennis are talking about getting laid at the start of the film it all makes sense. Their classmates, too, makes sense, as the other boys slaver over the girls and the lead cheerleader makes eyes at star quarter back Dennis. It all becomes rather strange, however, when we are introduced to new girl and love interest Leigh being given a tour of the school by presumably a teacher or even a principal? Whomsoever he is, he recommends the school's marching band; 'a good way to meet boys,' he assures her in a very King manner of inappropriateness. Even the creepy old man who sells them the car seems to be in heat: 'She had the smell of a brand new car. That might be just about the finest smell in the world, except maybe for pussy.'

Aggression seems to be going about too. King seems to have a thing for turning schoolyard bullies, who would normally be portrayed as petty cowards deep down, as violent sociopaths. It takes the generic high school drama bully (who looks 10-15 years older than everyone else) barely thirty seconds to go from stealing our main character's to drawing a switchblade on him. When the teacher saves our plucky heroes he proceeds to violently manhandle the bully. Later, when Arnie takes Christine to be stored and fixed up the garage owner is inappropriately overbearing and threatening to a paying customer. It's a silliness that all feels part and parcel of King's writing, and part of the reason that it is more or less impossible to divorce the creator from the creation.

It's All Character Building

WHEN King is really on his game, King's character work can be really good. Certainly, the ground blocks are there - that we see who Arnie is outside of his home life and then have it contextualised by his home life is a nice touch. It strongly evokes, to my mind, Eddie from It. There's not enough joining dots however - when is transformed by power of love into a teddy boy, it more or less happens off-screen. Scenes where he confronts his parents come well after the transformation has happened, and the scene where he becomes romantically involved with Leigh is used a character beat in Dennis's story. We're told over and over about the obsession, but that we don't see it develop slowly robs it from much of its power.

Dennis is framed oddly within the film. At first, he is positioned as a co-star at worst within proceedings. He interacts with more characters and has more solo lead time than the main character. There's a humility and shyness to him that makes him unusually likable for his character archetype. Then the narrative seems to more or less lose track of him for the midpoint of the movie, as all of the high-school drama elements of the script are left by the wayside. Leigh has no real personality beyond the men in her life - early on one character says she seems smart, and in another scene she is in the library reading a book.

Go Grease Frightning!

For a reasonable amount of the movie's run time, the story eschews traditional horror structure. Were it not for the opening sequence, the audience would have to wait more than half of the movie for the first recognisable horror set-piece to come along. Almost of the plot movements follows beats that are straight out of a high school drama playbook, until they aren't.

Much of the lack of traditional horror drive in the story is the lack of obvious threat on any of the main characters. Aside from one moment when the car makes an early attempt at Leigh, there is very little in the way of overt threat - and when the overt threat happens, it is overwhelmingly targeted at the film's more obvious antagonists. This could have been a subtle and ambiguous, but instead leaves the film feeling muddled and unfocussed. It's a half-eaten bildungsroman, a psychological thriller light on the psychological, a horror without much supernatural threat. 

Prowler

On the flipside, the actual handling of the car, the centre piece of the movie, is absolutely nailed. There's an old adage in horror that you shouldn't show the monster; fear's greatest weapon is the imagination. Christine, by nature of the premise, makes that a tall order, so the movie never tries hide her. Instead, it lets her sit there, not moving. The way she is framed in shots gives them impression of a predator, waiting patiently.

In this inaction, the nature of the threat she poses remains obscure, and as such it suddenly becomes the case that we haven't seen the monster yet. Most of the tension film comes from her silent and unmoving presence, the unspoken idea that she is silently affecting the world around her. Unlike the book, the movie never chooses to really explain much about Christine, meaning that even as she pounces she remains unknowable. In many ways, she's underrated as a classic movie villain.

Style is Substance

Long before JJ Abrams was a lens flair in his father's eyes (although technically he was seventeen at the time), John Carpenter's use of lens flairs coupled with his signature music style that defined 80s horror and action helps to lift Christine. For all my writing of how King's hands define the story, Christine is the child of two auteurs, and many of Carpenter's directorial signatures are to be found in Christine. If the substance of the story has King's fingerprints all over it, the filmic choices made are pure Carpenter.

Carpenter is an interesting director because he so clearly embodies (and in many sense, created) most of the cheesiness found in 80s genre movie. Coupled with a premise so ridiculous as an evil car that a young teenager falls (romantically) in love with, this could have been a recipe for disaster. Carpenter, however, has a flair for being on the right side of cheesy. It's enjoyable and even unironically cool, whilst also being ironically enjoyable. Ultimately, it's the visual and audio storytelling that really elevates this movie.

There's a specific sound synth cue that plays whenever Christine is introduced in the screen that positively makes me tingle. If for no other reason, watch it for that. You'll have a fun time.

Film Review - One Cut of the Dead

Review:

One Cut of the Dead

THERE'S something inherently dangerous about films about film making. It seems like every year there is another Oscar nominated film about how the power of films or show business can save the world - especially whilst Weinstein had his slimy paws all over it. Whilst the power of the media and entertainment in our globalised world is undeniably, it's probably best that the industry doesn't masturbate all over itself in public whilst staring at its own reflection. In that sense, Once Cut of the Dead is a refreshing watch.

A Play Within a Play

ONE can only imagine that when Shakespeare helped codify the meta-textual literary technique of a play within a play, he was imaging that one day in the far future he'd be setting the groundwork for a lighthearted Japanese zombie romp whose playful ambition and attention to detail are a joy throughout. Well rest well big Willy! One Cut of the Dead is finally here to realise that vision.

Something's amiss in the state of A Warehouse Somewhere In Japan: a small crew of filmmakers are making a zombie film. We're introduced within the fictional movie within the movie at first, but One Cut is not interested particularly in this facade, and the curtain is pulled back rather quickly. Before long, however, the cast and crew are beset by a real horror, and the fanatical director sees this as his chance to make the greatest horror ever made. A real life horror story.

Ten Minutes Until the Audience Explodes

THE first ten to fifteen pages of a script are very important - it has to contain the hook that will not only bring readers into the world, but also persuade studios and producers to make the movie in the first place. Some movies show their working very bluntly - Sluaghterhouse Rulez a couple of years ago being a specific example of this done poorly in comedy horror. By contrast One Cut is fluid and natural in the way it establishes the dynamics between characters, the motivations and personalities of those characters and the situation they find themselves in. It's all delivered with a speed and overtness that could very well have been artless and blunt, but a clever script keeps it from ever being those things.

It is not, however, a script that keeps its secrets particularly well. What is going on, and what the next twist is going to be, is not exactly super hard to figure out. This, again, works for One Cut, rather than against it. Proper foreshadowing and use of poetic irony might de-highlight surprise factors, but they allow the contrivances of the movie to feel entirely natural.

Look After the Pennies

IN light of this, the joy of One Cut is not the "what", but rather the "how". If you can see a twist or turn coming, it is the fastidious attention to detail that will take you off guard. Things half-glanced earlier often become important or expounded upon. The clever scripting allows a lot to be done with as little as possible. The nature of the project itself - a single cut movie - demands a certain exactitude, but rather than being their as a necessity, the attention to detail is what allows the story to flourish. Many of the big surprises come from things that you noticed but thought were innocuous that later turn out not be!

Both in premise and in execution, One Cut is a convoluted beast. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for the director to lose grip of the story, or for the audience to become naturally lost. So much of the visual storytelling, and of the specific use of setting within the movie, helps with this too.

As they say the the devil is in the details. Or the zombie. I don't know. Maybe they say that in Japan.

Laugh Until You Cry Die

IT would be trite, perhaps, at this point to the link tragedy and horror have with comedy. Many of the most enduring pieces of comedy have a black heart. In theory, horror and comedy are natural bedfellows, but in practise they're often terrible roommates. Sometimes they're trying to be too funny, sometimes they're not funny or scary, and all too often they disregard character and narrative in favour of lampshading cliches in the least imaginative way possible. Even very good recently examples have struggled to juggle both tones properly - Jordan Peele's ambitious and often impressive Us springs immediately to mind.

Where One Cut distinguishes itself is that at any given moment it really knows what it is and what it wants to do. It's never actually reaching to do anything too out there, for all of the script and filmmaking's ambition and intricacy. The nuts and bolts of the story are simple and filled with heart. This, ultimately, is what will make you laugh and what will linger with you.

One Cut of the Dead is a joy. It's silly and fun, it'll make you laugh and it'll make you feel good, and since we're all dying of the plague and the capitalistic structures of globalisation are collapsing around us, plunging us all into a new dark age, what else could the doctor order? Not medicine certainly. Not since Brexit.

Film Review - Phenomena

Film Review:

Phenomena

ONCE upon a time young Jennifer Connelly was even younger Jennifer Connelly, Before the goofy muppetry of Labyrinth, before the rocky camp sing-a-longs and the eldritch horror of David Bowie's codpiece, there came Phenomena, a fantastical slaser helmed by the Don of Giallo himself, Dario Argento.

And, Dear Readers, it fucking rocks.

Confusing and Distracting Metatextuality

WHEN embarking on a Stephen King novel, or, indeed, one of the uncountable hoards of adaptations that he leaves strewn in his wake, there is a very easy way to tell if Stephen King had writer's block when he set out to write the story. Is it set in Maine? Is the main character a middle aged writer? It creates a weird metatextual blurring that feels entirely unintentional and incidental, yet also distracting. A similar thing can be said for when actors or actresses play parts named after them.

Anyway, in Phenomena Jennifer Connelly plays Jennifer Corvino, daughter of a famous actor who is sent to Switzerland to study at an all-girls boarding school. Not all is well in pretty rural Switzerland, however. Murder's afoot. An unknown assailant is killing young women, the police are lost and only Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasence rocking a pretty dece' Scottish accent) seems to helping them make headway with their case. 

Soon Jennifer crosses paths with him after incident that involves her sleeping walking, witnessing a bit of a stabbing, falling off a roof, escaping from probably-rapists and meeting a domestic monkey, and they discover that she has an affinity for telepathic communication with insects. Using this power, she may the best hope to discover who the killer is and where the bodies are hidden.

Basically Functional

On a basic level the plot of the movie is very tried and true, even by 1985, on a couple of levels. It's partly a hero's journey - a young hero is possesses a power that will help them defeat a great evil, but first must be guided by a wise old teacher to use those powers. On the other hand it's a potboiler slasher film - gritty murders are happening and using clues the main character has to figure out who, where and why. It's an interesting structural contortion, but done with enough finesse that the film never lacks cohesion.

There's a certain detail orientation to the script concerning it's central motif - insects - that helps make a lot of the exposition feel more atmospheric and less generic. Prof Mc's ominous trailer bait speeches are given a sprinkle of authenticity by the fact they fit so seamlessly and naturally into the context that the characters find themselves in. The dialogue is largely function otherwise, although it is questionable how well forty-five year old Argento knows how young teenage girls speak and act around each other.

Mostly, however, the plot is a solidly functional affair. Dario's writing seems to flourish in during the set pieces - he masterfully evokes a moment, whilst he builds the foundations around it with a workmanlike determination. The scenes establishing the cast of characters and the setting are all fine. There's adequate foreshadowing, if something is going to be important later it will be established earlier. When there's plotting to be done the film never lingers, prioritising economy.

The nuts and bolts of the story all do their job to keep the viewer engaged. It is not, however, where the movie shines.

The Silly as The Serious

WHEN a set-piece in a movie is described as nightmarish, normally it is meant in a more metaphorical sense, but in Phenomena both the denotation and connotations work. There's an abstraction in the events, a distortion of time and place that makes a lot of it feel unreal. On the one hand this does make some of the more tense moments "safer" than they otherwise would be, but a line is towed well enough that it never outright deflates tension.

If the movies keeps an keel pace-wise mostly, whenever the tension is ratcheted up the movie is suddenly not afraid to speed up or slow down as it pleases. Juxtaposed against the everyday reality of the story, this heightens the uncanny in the set-pieces and big horror moments. Not uncommon, of course, in a horror, but yet another sprinkling of unreality.

The music, too, swells from brooding understated synth into overpowering eighties slasher synth. There's even a soundtrack cameo from Motorhead and a couple of spins of - of all things - Flash of the Blade by Iron Maiden. Flash of the Blade!

I could have sworn I was the only person that loves that song.

Adding to the dreamlike feel of the set-pieces is the degree of silliness so many of them are imbued with. As someone who didn't spend my formative years in the eighties I can't say for sure how silly they seemed at the time, but Scream did something specific to the minds of a certain generation that were becoming desensitised to such things. What Phenomena does so successfully, however, is to somehow have its cake and it eat. It commits hundred percent to the ridiculousness on screen - trusting if the audience has gone this far they're staying on the train - whilst dipping at many points into outright absurdity. There's a real glee to be found in some of the rather baffling creative decisions, yet also work to not destroy the tension precisely because of the already established dreamlike tone.

Your Friend Pestilence

It, perhaps, shouldn't be a surprise to find that many of the cliches of modern day teen-scream flicks are occasionally subverted or outright mocked in classic horror movies. Hell, Jackson was doing this in The Haunting of Hill House in 1960. Phenomena, sure enough, is a savvy movie, and Argento is literate enough in horror and crime cinema to throw a few curve-balls and misdirections.

The main inversion, however, present in the movie is perhaps the only part of the movie that feels like it could have been better developed. As one of the base fears of the human psyche, endless horror movies have been dedicated to how scary insects are. In Phenomena, however, Dr Mc posits:

"In ancient Greece the butterfly symbolised the soul, the so-called "psyche". From the Greek for butterfly "psykhē". What is this association between insects and the human soul? Is it because of the multifarious mystery of them both?"

As piece of theme setting, it's a hell of a good start. Films like Phenomena that trade so often on shock value may not seem rich territory for having well developed themes and more cerebral ideas underpinning them, but Phenomena set the table with some nicely before deciding it was too full. Rather a shame too.

It's All Double Dutch Italian to Me

There are certain production things that are rather off - Connelly and Pleasance aside, I'd hazard a guess that the cast most of the cast were Italian and either couldn't speak English or had a tenuous grasp on the language. As a result much of the ADR-ing is distractingly bad, especially with the younger actresses, and considering how bad their dialogue, specifically, was to begin with...

***

In conclusion this movie has an Iron Maiden deep cut so you should watch it.