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.

Film Review - Lords of Chaos

Film Review: Lords of Chaos

This review has to, really, start with a disclaimer - I don't get on well with biopics. There's been plenty of amazing real life stories that when recreated within the lense of a film camera that have seemed to fall flat. Maybe it's the fact that Hollywood biopics present a fictionalised version of a real event within the auspices of it being a real story, whilst also looking and feeling like a fictional story? Structurally, biopics always seem to have an uneven relationship with narrative structure; they want to engage us on a level we're familiar with whilst presenting life in all of its amorphousness.

Jonas Åkerlund's Lords of Chaos suffers from some order of that same structual awkwardness. The movie follows Oystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, founde of the infamous Norweigan black metal band Mayhem. Starting with their inception in the mid-80s, we see Mayhem's gradual rise into a music scene obsessed with a theatrical form of "darkness" - showmanship that evokes satanism and paganism in the form that it is demonised by Christianity. Quickly, however, Euronymous's rhetoric pushes the band into a situation that spirals out of control.

At its outset, Lords of Chaos presents itself as a movie "based on the facts, the fiction...and what really happened", which is a rather neat way of skirting around the fact that it does not, in fact, know exactly wants to be. When we first meet Euronymous, he's goofing around with his friends whilst a chipper indie-comedy style voice narrates the story. In an upbeat tone, he warns us that the story will "end badly".

The core of the movie is predicated on Euronymous's relationship with two other members of the band Per "Dead" Ohlin and Kristian "Varg" Vikernes: Dead in the earlier half of the movie, whilst Varg taking up the bulk of the latter part. In the part focusing on Dead and Euronymous, there's a youthfulness and carefreeness to the story, as well as the choppy structure associated with biopics wherein they try to capture events in a filmic way that don't have a natural narrative structure. In one pivotal scene, Dead demands that Euronymous shoots him in the head whilst they're hunting a cat in the woods. Åkerlund's light touch makes it difficult exactly to parse what is really happening in this scene - is it funny, serious, intense or just really strange? Is Dead playing into his cultivated persona or is he pushing Euronymous or does he genuinely want to be shot? It's ambiguous in the wrong ways.

And yet, it sort of works. In a running motif throughout, we often see characters watching The Evil Dead, specifically many of its most gory moments. In Evil Dead, and such, the cartoonish and garish violence happens after a build-up, with a flourish; not so with early parts of Lord of Chaos. What are ostensibly genuine horror set-pieces are sprung upon you with a lightness and lack of build-up that make them strange and fascinating. Dead himself is a very strange character, lacking any real narrative arc or easy classification within traditional character archetypes. It's a strange and compelling.

In the latter part of the movie Euronymous and Varg take the centre stage, and it feels more like the movie gets a shape and coherent narrative drive. Anyone familiar with the real life story knows exactly where it is heading, and even if you don't the movie isn't interested in playing it as some sort of mystery. Instead, tension is caused by the inevitability of events that play out.

There's still an ambivalence around exactly what the movie is trying to be, but it is less successful because it feels like Åkerlund knows what he wants the movie to be, but doesn't quite get there. Part of the problem is that both Euronymous and Varg are archetypes in the way that Dead never was, and the result is just broadly less interesting.

One of the stranger decisions made is that the broadest theme of the work is friendship - Rory Culkin plays the part of Euronymous with a sensitivity and vulnerability throughout, seemingly at odds with what the script is actually doing; it fits strangely with his role as a cult leader, possessing a strange almost goblin-esque charisma.  Emory Cohen makes a convincing nerdy fan and a far less convincing violent sociopath. Neither Dead nor Varg have relationships that get enough time to breath for us to properly feel invested in them, and yet many of the major character beats Euronymous has later on is predicated on that idea. After a point the prevailing feeling of the movie is that these are just a bunch of geeks and misfits in over their head. The movie never takes what they are doing particularly seriously, and is far more concerned with humanising them in, frankly, one of the less interesting ways.

As mentioned earlier, this movie is a genre blender of sorts. When what are ostensibly horror set-pieces pop up, they are visceral and often enjoyable in an almost cartoonish manner. At the most basic level, Åkerlund delivers a lot of the tropes that are part and parcel of both genres without the film ever collapsing in on itself and just outright not working. It's not an expert tightrope walk, but he never falls off either.

It is perhaps apropos that this review is sort of as confused as the movie - this is an entertaining and interesting movie. At worst, it's an engaging way to introduce yourself to the genuinely interesting real life events. Also the music is dece'.