Offseason (2021)

Following a letter that informs her the grave of her actress mother Ava (Melora Walters) has been desecrated in some way, and that her direct and personal involvement is needed, Marie Aldrich (Jocelin Donahue) and her on-again off-again friend George (Joe Swanberg) make a long cross-country drive to the island where Ava is buried. It’s Ava’s birthplace as well as the one place in the world she never wanted to return to – not even dead. Strangely, her testament said otherwise.

During the summer months, the island is a tourist paradise but now, it’s just in the process of being completely shut down for the off-season. Even the bridge connecting it to the main land is going to be closed in a few hours, so Marie should finish her business as quickly as possible. Alas, that’s easier said than done, for the graveyard keeper who wrote to her is nowhere to be found, and the rest of the island population that’s still there is in turns weird, creepy, and somewhat threatening, or all three together. There’s clearly something wrong with the place beyond the feeling of desolation that comes with near-empty places that should be full of people, and worse: something seems to have lured Marie here for a reason.

The newest film by Mickey Keating seems to be rather divisive. I’m not all that surprised about this, for it’s a calm movie that only seems interested in its narrative as a framework to hang a series of moods and evocative set pieces on. So this is a film much more dominated by long shots of Donahue walking through foggy empty small town streets, or along a desolate beach right out of a BBC Ghost Story for Christmas or Messiah of Evil than it is by its minimalist horror plot. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing at all to the handful of more straightforward sequences, nor that there’s no emotional resonance to Marie’s flashbacks to her mother’s deathbed confessions she took for delirium; rather, all of this feels part of Offseason’s evocation of mood through place.

This sort of thing is pretty much catnip to me, and even more so in a film that evokes (which really seems to be the central verb here in more than one way) films like the ones I’ve already mentioned as well as the mood of Fulci’s mid-period without the gore, the framing techniques of John Carpenter, and those parts of US local filmmaking from the 70s that found places like this film’s beach and small town for their stories to play out in. Offseason is part of a very specific lineage of films and books of the fantastic where islands and beaches are liminal places where the fantastic and the horrific enters human lives; Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth”, Messiah of Evil or Carpenter’s The Fog are just a part of this type of horror.

Because the desolate and the creepy often are, this is a rather astonishingly beautiful film (even more so given a small budget), framed and shot with a calm and elegance that I’ve not seen in Keating’s earlier film. These earlier films – as this one is as well - were all wonderful examples of how to make different aesthetic approaches a director’s own, but they were also usually intense to the border of hysteria, whereas Offseason seeks and finds a calmer way towards its own form of dread, one I find personally rather more enticing.

Donahue is pretty fantastic, too, not just because she’s suggesting a 70s indie horror heroine through look and style, but also because she’s so genuinely good at being present in the weirdness and desolation of Offseason’s world, moving through it and witnessing it with the appropriate confusion and horror but also with a certain poise that seems to suggest a kinship between her and these places. Which does make sense on a plot level, as well.

The only thing about the film that doesn’t quite resonate with me as strongly is that it explains slightly too much of what we’ve witnessed in the final couple of scenes, making the weird ever so slightly more mundane in the process. But that’s not a major problem, because it’s not a major kind of explanation, and so Offseason really leaves me a bit giddy about how good a film it is; at least for someone with my very specific tastes.

Dead Awake (2016)

Having gone through various drug and related mental issues, Kate Bowman (Jocelin Donahue) seems to have come to grips with life again. Or rather, she would have, if not for the onset of a severe case of sleep paralysis. Kate experiences it every night, with the added bonus of hallucinations (or are they?) of a standard hag-style apparition crawling onto her chest to suffocate her. Which, one night, she indeed does, supposedly from an asthma attack; too bad she didn’t suffer from asthma. Her twin sister Beth (also Jocelin Donahue) feels there’s something wrong with what happened to Kate beyond the tragedy of an early death. For one, she had a dream of her sister being suffocated in her sleep at the exact moment when that actually happened.

Then, Beth and some of her sister’s friends begin to suffer from sleep paralysis with the exact same non-hallucinations, too, so it becomes rather difficult for anyone not to believe there’s something more supernatural going on than the (not terribly) scientific explanations Kate’s former physician, Dr. Sykes (Lori Petty) delivers. As a matter of fact, without anyone else knowing, Kate had been seeking help from disgraced sleep scientist Dr. Hassan Davies (Jesse Borrego). Davies is convinced that there’s a long-standing epidemic of people actually dying of sleep paralysis, and he’s also convinced that what they see in their hallucinations is a real entity trying to kill them. Beth and Kate’s boyfriend Evan (Jesse Bradford) – who will also suffer from his own bit of magic sleep paralysis soon – just might be better off following that angle, if they want to survive.

Dead Awake is a bit of a mixed bag: the script by Jeffrey Reddick (creator of the original concept and story of Final Destination, among other things) contains some wonderful ideas, and interesting characters but the pacing seems off, sequences of tension are followed by scenes that seem to have no actual reason to be in the movie at all, and the supernatural threat stays vague rather than ambiguous. Phillip Guzman’s direction certainly doesn’t help the viewer over the script bumps. While there’s certainly nothing terribly wrong with it, the scenes of horror are rather on the generic side, only quite late in the game really using concepts of dream and sleep in any interesting ways and even then not doing much that’s visually distinguished or moody. Visually, it’s a pretty bland film, dominated by shots and set-ups that certainly do their basic jobs in the plot well enough but only seldom create a world for the audience to believe in or do much for the creepiness factor.

There’s good stuff in here too: Jocelin Donahue is good as Beth and Kate) as I by now expect her to be. Dead Awake gives her a character arc from guilt to acceptance to anger (that’s sometimes the more productive sequence) to hag-butt kicking that feels perfectly appropriate and perfectly human, and is certainly one of the real successes of the film. I also liked quite a few of the small clever details: for example how exactly the belief in the supernatural threat is what kills its victims yet also – of course – the prerequisite to beat it; or how awkward and half-crazed Davies is as what could be the film’s Van Helsing figure without turning him into a joke. The finale is also rather effective when it brings an internal struggle to life.


So, while I don’t think Dead Awake is terribly successful as a whole, I did find enough of interest in it to make it worth watching. At the very least, it tries its damndest to do something interesting. And hey, that’s certainly more than I’d say about The Conjuring.

In short: Summer Camp (2015)

Warning: I’m going to spoil a mid-movie plot twist, because it’s really impossible to explain what’s good about the film without it!

Three Americans – Will (Diego Boneta), Christy (Jocelin Donahue) and Michelle (Maiara Walsh) – have signed up as counsellors for a Spanish summer camp for kids in the beginning stages of learning English. Right now, there aren’t any children in the camp – a place that actually is an old mansion in the woods – to leave time for the three Americans and Spanish lead counsellor Antonio (Andrés Velencoso) to get acquainted before the actual work starts.

Alas, there’s something very bad in the water or the air or the saliva of a rather angry dog. Whoever gets infected by it turns pretty much into your classic rage zombie, black eyes, angry screeching, black fluids and all. In a twist on the usual state of affairs, the characters will eventually figure out that the infected don’t actually stay that way and turn back into normal human beings after twenty minutes of carnage during which they may very well have killed or been killed.

Summer Camp – a US/Spanish co-production apparently shot in Spain and directed by Italian Alberto Marini - is a sometimes clever, sometimes effective little neo-zombie movie that uses its central difference from the usual zombie biology to keep things on a smaller scale than I’ve become used to from today’s generally very apocalyptically minded zombie movies, with only a handful of characters and locations. It’s really a clever twist on the standards to enable this, though I would have wished the film had spent more time on the psychological impact probably having done horrible things while being a zombie might have on the characters. But then, Summer Camp really isn’t much for psychological depth.

The characters, despite as decent a cast as a low budget movie made in the 2010s could ask for, are not very distinctively drawn, the few bits of characterisation feeling rather perfunctory and not really important for what’s going to happen at all. This isn’t strictly a weakness, though. The film clearly just doesn’t want to spend much time without any zombie action, and once the violent part of the movie starts at a quick twenty minutes in, there’s a relentless series of violence, suspense and some set pieces that are just right for the film’s scale. There’s nary a moment where the film tries to bite off something bigger than it can chew, and generally little that doesn’t work to provide an exciting time. The characters get hysterical and make stupid decisions throughout, but they do so on the believable scale of people trapped in a horrifying situation they could never have been prepared for.

On the visual side, there’s little to complain nor to be excited about. Marini gets the job in a straightforward and effective manner that fits the film’s merrily grim tone nicely. For my taste, the director tends to overuse shaky cam during action sequences but your mileage may vary there.


Summer Camp also ends on quite the high, with a climactic little siege sequence that feels claustrophobic and properly panicky, and which is resolved in exactly the right way for the film that came before, followed by a very memorable nasty horror movie ending. It’s all very satisfying, really.

Three Films Make A Post: You were right to be afraid of the dark.

Daemonium: Soldier of the Underworld (2015): This Argentinean SF/action/horror film directed by Pablo Parés and apparently written by half a dozen people consequently features a nearly unintelligible and wildly overambitious plot that includes everything you might think of - from battle androids to rebellious arch angels –, characters whose design looks cheap yet awesome in all the right ways but who mostly lack any visible reason to do the things they do, and a running time of nearly two hours where eighty minutes would have sufficed.

Yet this is also clearly a labour of love that looks and feels like the adaptation of an especially bonkers European science fiction comic. It throws visual clichés and inventiveness at its audience with great vigour and enthusiasm, features some wonderfully chosen and framed locations (Argentina apparently looks like a weird far future post-apocalyptic wasteland), and has action scenes that are bloody, clever and much better staged than you’d expect. So, despite its flaws, I find this one impossible to dislike. This was clearly made by my people.

The Frontier (2015): Oren Shai’s deeply 70s cinema and noir inspired and 70s set crime movie is a bit of a mixed bag. Jocelin Donahue’s main performance is excellent, and Kelly Lynch and Jim Beaver lend equally good support, but the rest of the acting is very hit or miss, which is no surprise seeing as the film demands from its actors to approach 70s-style naturalism with a conscious distance. This also follows from a script which at times can feel stilted and too interested in demonstrating its knowledge of gestures taken from other movies than in making its own. The result is a film that often feels artificial for no good reason beyond demonstrating the filmmakers’ ability to make it so. Which, ironically enough, is the polar opposite to the kind of 70s cinema it can’t stop telling us it is inspired by; while the noir way of stylisation (the film’s other hallmark) never was interested in stylisation as an end in itself.

Legend of the Phantom Rider (2002): In theory, Alex Erkiletian’s western/horror mix about two ancient spirits – one good, one evil, of course – doomed to be reincarnated again and again to murder one another this time around having their little spat in the Old West, sounds like a sure enough bit of entertainment. At least if you like your westerns and your horror films and like them even better when they get together (that is, if you are me).

Unfortunately, practice finds this direct-to-video film to be rather tedious, giving us scene after scene after scene supposed to prove to the audience how evil the bad guy is but which mostly demonstrate that watching a bald guy who can’t act for shit (Robert McRay) being a bit off a sadist gets boring pretty damn quick. I have no idea how his henchmen cope with the boredom.

The House Of The Devil (2009)

It's some time in the early 80s. Financially desperate college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) stumbles upon a strangely lucrative baby sitting job for an even stranger couple, the Ulmans (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov).

Only when Samantha arrives at the couple's house somewhere far outside the city she's studying in does Mr. Ulman explain that this isn't exactly a babysitting job, but that he and his wife want Samantha to watch over Mrs. Ulman's mother. Sam is not keen at all about that change of plans, and only when Ulman offers her a preposterous $400 for one night of work does she agree to do the job.

Ulman explains that Samantha probably won't even see the old woman, and that he only needs her to be there in case an undisclosed kind of emergency happens. Surely, this strange job won't have anything to do with the lunar eclipse that will happen this night?

Once she's alone, the young woman is getting increasingly tense. It takes some time, a bit too much of the unhealthy atmosphere of the house, and some hints at the fact that the Ulmans were lying to her, but after a while even Samantha begins to feel that the whole set-up just isn't right. Of course, at that point, it's already too late and Samantha's new career as victim of satanic rituals can begin.

Ti West's The House of the Devil is a full-blooded piece of retro cinema. Not satisfied with using elements of a certain subset of the satanic panic movies of the late 70s and early to mid-80s, and mixing them with modern ideas, West goes all out in pretending he is in fact making his film in the 80s (and alas, also in avoiding any new ideas getting into it). Film stock, camera angles, the faces of the actors, the music, even the titles, everything here is designed to emulate a very precisely defined group of grim, slow and suspenseful but not too gory horror films, and it's difficult to argue with the success of that part of West's effort.

Sure, the film might be a tad too slow - especially in its middle parts - for many contemporary viewers, but so were the films West is imitating here. However, the slowness, as well as the fact that the audience knows much earlier about the danger Samantha is in as she does herself, are the film's way of generating suspense without having to show much more than the increasingly nervous young woman in a creepy house. For my tastes, it works out fine, but not everyone who has seen the film seems to agree with me here. The word combination "slow and boring" is tossed about quite often by people talking about House of the Devil, and for once, I can understand where they are coming from. Not everybody is made for watching (creepy) bonsai trees grow.

My main problem with The House of the Devil has nothing whatsoever to do with its pacing or anything technical about it.

The problem is the strange lack of ambition beyond making a film that is exactly like some (well-loved, excellent) films made in an earlier era of the genre West's film shows, the spirit of imitation that is so strong West even consciously copies the flaws of those films. Of course, it beats making another remake of a well-loved film that doesn't understand the spirit of the original and doesn't have any ideas of its own worth a new film, but it only avoids the first of these problems.

It's a wonderful thing that West is inspired by parts of the horror genre that seem forgotten and ignored by too many directors working in the genre today and tries to use techniques that have gone out of style quite unjustly, but the product of the director's labours misses out on the next step: using the style and the techniques to make a film of his own, preferably a film of his own time that speaks to and about contemporary anxieties as the films of the 80s spoke about the anxieties of their times. There's no need to just repeat what the old movies said - they already said it, and they are still there to repeat what they said on the flick of a remote.

The House of the Devil is a great replica of great horror movies, and is certainly enjoyable and technically impressive, yet it's so caught up in its admiration of a different era that it's lacking a personality of its own. It's the "retro" dilemma in full effect.

 

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