Three Films Make A Post: Evil Gets An Upgrade

Nightbreed Director’s Cut (1990): What surprised me most on watching Clive Barker’s preferred version of the film is how small the differences between this and the film’s initial version truly are, with little about them that’s fundamentally different. At least, the film still has all the flaws that always made it difficult for me to love it. So, while there’s certainly more to see of them now, the Nightbreed as a whole still feel more like alternative circus performers than any sort of ancient tribe of “monsters”, and they are still a pretty boring culture that seems based on all the least interesting clichés about oppressed groups you’ll encounter. Boone and Lori – the theoretical protagonists – are still complete non-entities, with no character traits beyond “being madly in love” and deeply stupid I could make out, which is a bit of a problem in a film that aims so clearly for the mythical and the archetypal, which might be simple but generally isn’t flat. But then, the Nightbreed probably got the destroyer/saviour there that fits them.

Faust: Love of the Damned (2000): This is Brian Yuzna at his least interesting, wallowing in the grotesque and the dubious of taste (which should be a good thing), but never really managing to actually do or say or think through it (which is a bad thing). There’s certainly a degree of joy to be found in the grotesque for the grotesque’s sake but the decisive something that would make me feel anything about the grotesquery I am seeing is missing here. The film isn’t exactly improved by lines and lines of horrible (and just awfully dumb) dialogue and a lead in Mark Frost who is certainly trying for the over the top approach that is the only reasonable one for this material but is more often than not ending up looking and sounding like a clown in a bad costume; and clown’s aren’t that frightening.

The Pact II (2014): I liked the first film of what I hope won’t become a long franchise a lot, and sequel directors Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath did make an interesting film before this in Entrance but – apart from the pointlessness of constructing a sequel to a film that really did tell the whole story by making the same film again while adding random clichés – this sequel just isn’t very good at all. Where the first film’s characterization was sharp and surprisingly deep, this one’s is trite, the characters never becoming more than actors saying words they learned from a script. Worse, some of the acting is truly atrocious (particularly Patrick Fischler is dreadful, though other performances by him I’ve seen suggest that he’s doing exactly what the directors want from him, for whatever reason), and where the first film was full of elegant and inventive moments of horror absolutely based in its characters, this one’s are mostly trite, or just jump-scaring up better set-ups from the original film.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,spanish movies,in short,horror,clive barker,brian yuzna,dallas richard hallam,patrick horvath

In short: Necronomicon (1993)

Every couple of years, I re-watch the Brian Yuzna-produced Necronomicon, asking myself – making a ridiculous and puzzled face, I suppose - why I don’t remember anything at all about it beyond the fact that Jeffrey Combs plays Lovecraft in the film’s wrap-around segments. Then, having watched the film, I realize I don’t remember anything about it because it’s far from a memorable movie, which in turn will of course lead to another round with it in five years time, unless I take a look at this useful post right here.

Because I’m a rather relaxed person when it comes to that sort of thing, I can’t even get angry about a film supposedly based on three Lovecraft tales generally having fuck all to do with the stories. I’m really rather more interested if the segments in themselves are any good. Alas…

Yuzna’s wrap-around tale is a good bit of fun, with Combs being Combs, Lovecraft being a rather two-fisted version of himself that is as much Indiana Jones as the old gent from Providence (pretend I’m now blathering on for ages about the man’s racism, because clearly that’s relevant and worthy of burning hatred when talking about a man who died in 1937), and the plot being silly, short, and with neat monster designs.

Christophe Gans’s highly gothic tale of a man (Bruce Payne) mourning the death of his wife, and nearly repeating the mistake of an ancestor (Richard Lynch), is probably the high point of the film. Sure, it has nothing whatsoever to do with The Rats in the Walls which it is supposedly based on, but the motives – if not its emotional base in love, one of Lovecraft’s least favourite emotions – it uses are very much Lovecraftian, and Gans is pretty great at building a mood that does resemble Corman’s Poe adaptations to a pleasant degree, until everything is wrapped up with fine monster designs and a shift towards nearly swashbuckling action that is the sort of thing the later director of Le Pacte des loups did already so very well at the time this was made.

I am a big admirer of Shusuke Kaneko’s 90s Gamera, perhaps the best kaiju eiga made after the original Gojira but his segment here is just a mess, finding neither a visual, nor a thematic nor even just a plot focus, with little happening in it that isn’t obvious, and nothing at all that’s interesting, unless you were always dreaming of watching David Warner in an awkward sex scene. On the more positive side, this segment does actually use plot elements of Lovecraft’s Cool Air, just not sensibly or to any effect.

Last but not least, we have Brian Yuzna’s segment, which is a very typical series of ever more grotesque effect scenes, the kind of thing I find entertaining enough as long as I’m in the process of watching it – particular with creature and, well, stuff design like it is here – but that not really makes for a satisfying climax when the grotesque isn’t in service of anything. Again, it’s no surprise I won’t remember any of this in a few years.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,lovecraft,christophe gans,brian yuzna,shusuke kaneko,jeffrey combs,david warner

In short: Amphibious 3D (2010)

It's impossible for me not to admire Brian Yuzna for the tenaciousness he shows when it comes to getting films financed. After his luck in the US ran out, he went to Spain. After that went dry, he took his leave to Indonesia. And if he then needs to take some money and some horrible actors from the Netherlands on, too, to make a SyFy Channel style monster movie, he'll do it. Movies need to be made, after all, and they're still rather difficult to crowdsource.

Unlike actual SyFy Channel films, Yuzna's attempt at the genre even shows some ambition. Consequently, this isn't just a film about a charming rogue without the charming (Michael Paré, who will sit out important parts of the movie and could have been replaced by a cheaper actor with an equal lack of facial expressions to have more money for the effects) and a marine biologist named Skylar (Janna Fassaert) encountering an amphibious giant scorpion in the surroundings of a fishing platform, but also one where the marine biologist once lost her little daughter and is now merrily projecting onto the child (Monica Sayangbati) of a black magician in indentured fishing slavery. Plus, there are hints of a more mythological background to the whole giant underwater scorpion thing.

Unfortunately, despite its ambitions for being more than the most basic of films, and a surprisingly effective horror movie shock ending, Amphibious spends most of its time going through the motions of all monster films that can only afford showing their monsters for the grand finale, which is to say it spends most of its time with various heavily accented people talking and talking with some sparse scenes of gore thrown in so you don't fall asleep. While I do appreciate Yuzna's attempts at making these non-monster scenes more interesting than usual in this sort of thing, I can't say he actually succeeds at that effort. When it's not the sloppy pacing of the film, it's the mediocre and boring acting - scenery chewers or good actors could have saved a lot here - that gets in the way, and if it's not the acting, it's Yuzna's inability to sell subtlety or ambiguity through his direction. As a director, he never did subtlety well, and that clearly hasn't changed with his ever decreasing budgets.

Once the film gets to the (not very good) giant scorpion in plain sight and the rather ridiculous attempts to fight it, it does become rather fun to watch. Unfortunately fifteen fun minutes hardly make up for over an hour of boredom and character arcs that never go anywhere, as much as I wish it were otherwise.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,indonesian movies,dutch movies,brian yuzna,in short,horror,michael paré,janna fassaert,monica sayangbati