Three Films Make A (Grumpy) Post: A new vision of terror.

Malignant (2021): Surprise, I don’t like the newest James Wan movie, like nearly every other film he made. Unlike with somebody like Rob Zombie, I’m always disappointed when a Wan movie yet again doesn’t click for me, for Wan is so clearly a ridiculously talented director.

Alas, he’s also one apparently not the least bit interested in applying his powers to material worth a damn. This non-Conjuringverse movie clearly wants to be a Dario Argento giallo circa Opera, seeing how many elements the film cribs and how much it quotes from that era and style. But where the good (and often the mediocre) giallos manage to use their style as substance, the film at hand is just a series of barely coherent, very pretty, and completely pointless scenes that barely manage to make a movie at all. In a particularly catastrophic development for what he film is going for, there really doesn’t even seem to be one unified style to it, there’s no plot or theme to speak of anyway (though there is, of course, an expectedly stupid late movie “revelation”), so all we’re left with is a film whose scenes only connect via their colour scheme.

My Son (2021): In an act that tragicomically completely misunderstands the strengths and weaknesses of improv, this remake by Christian Carion of his own film sees poor James McAvoy stumble through a complicated plot without being provided with a script or dialogue, whereas every other actor is. The result of course consists of many a scene of McAvoy – who also doesn’t seem to have been provided with prompts to tell him what any given scene is supposed to be about – floundering or going off in directions the rest of the film doesn’t want to follow, because everybody else isn’t there to improvise with him, but to unsubtly push him into the directions the script says he must go. Which is the absolute opposite of what improvisation is supposed to be about.

Much of this is shot very prettily, but this prettiness works not at all with the lack of direction this filmmaking approach can’t help but produce. The pacing is dreadful, obviously, and while McAvoy is certainly doing his best, the whole affair is custom built to make him fail.

Crescendo (1970): Because this is apparently not a day to talk about films I enjoyed, how about what I take to be the by far worst thriller Jimmy Sangster wrote for Hammer? The script has openings for all the little clever bits, the subversive push and the great use of well-worn tropes as the other movies in the cycle did, but in practice, everything about it feels the wrong kind of tacky, terribly conservative in its conception of psychosexual hang-ups, and simply just not that interesting.

How much of that is Alan Gibson’s rather bland and ineffective direction, how much Sangster having an off month is anybody’s guess.

Three Films Make A Post: 7 Directors. 7 Tales of Terror. 0 Working Cell Phones.

Scare Package (2019): In part, my dislike for this 7-segment omnibus movie is not the film’s fault. I’m not the biggest fan of meta comedies at the best of times, so the film’s meta tendencies would not have been ideal for me at the best of times. However, my problem with this particular film isn’t that the humour is meta, but that it is that lazy kind of meta that does little else than point at a trope, go “har-har, look at that trope!” and then not actually does anything of interest with that discovery, certainly nothing that will provide you with any kind of insight into the whys and wherefores of a trope, leaving it at the pointing out of that fascinating fact that a trope indeed does exist, and it will now subvert it by, um, pointing at it. Also, aren’t jokes supposed to be funny?

The Deeper You Dig (2019): Now, this sort of thing on the other hand warms the cockles of my stony heart, what with it being made by a mother-father-daughter trio (Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams) from the Catskills making their very own indie horror film together. It’s a tale of guilt and revenge from the grave with a big element of the surreal and the Weird, creating just the right mood of strangeness out of snow and found locations. It ends on a wonderfully macabre note, with a perfectly fucked-up happy end much superior to your usual horror bullshit happy ending.

It’s indie horror, so you’ll have to live with pacing that’s sometimes just a bit slow (ending scenes is always a bit of a problem in this area of the art), and some strained acting in the minor roles, but the rest of this is so creative and convincing, these really are only minor flaws.

Filth (2013): And then there’s this pretty insane and messed up bit of very Scottish crime filmmaking based on a novel by Irvine Welsh. The film does a lot of what one is tempted to call stunt filmmaking with an unreliable narrator perfectly played by James McAvoy in one of his best performances, incessant breaking of the Fourth Wall, and scenes that may or may not be dream sequences, but does it so well this feels like the most sensible way to tell this particular tale, perhaps the only way to understand the broken mind of its protagonist.


For the film also manages something very difficult extremely well: showing us a terrible human being doing terrible things, but also showing us his pain and suffering as a fellow human being, his suffering from mental illness, causing compassion for a man without ever wanting to use our empathy to excuse him.

In short: Glass (2018)

Warning: I’ll spoil some elements of the film; I’d argue there’s not much to actually spoil here, though, for the idea of spoilers does suggest the existence of dramatic tension to be spoiled.

After the nearly good Split, I, the eternal optimist, was hoping its sequel, Glass, might just be that curious beast – a second M. Night Shyamalan movie making good on the great genre director The Sixth Sense had once promised.

What I then watched was pretty much the opposite: a slow and tedious crawl playing out like a bad bottle episode of a TV show that takes more than two hours to get through what’s at best a thirty minute plot (which often seems barely to exist at all anyway). You’d hope the film would at least enhance this non-experience via the mysterious arts of characterisation and mood-building, but the little personality anyone on screen shows belongs to a cast just a little too good to feel quite as empty as they are written. Why you’d cast Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy and Bruce Willis and then have them proceed to basically do no acting whatsoever, or why you’d let James McAvoy double down on his obnoxious performance in the first movie is anyone’s guess. But then, this one was written by someone (cough) who seems to believe he is - in a superhero movie in 2018 - doing something cleverly deconstructive by pointing out tropes the audience by now knows quite well from film where things are actually happening to keep them from falling asleep, and by doing a plot twist (that’s barely even a twitch) that consists of the film saying “Gotcha! You thought it was this standard ending trope! Instead I’m using this different yet even more standard ending trope! And I’m doing it as slowly and dramatically awkward as possible”!


Dramatically awkward is the watchword for the whole film. Glass is full of scenes that are slow (so slow) while having no apparent function in the narrative at all, going on for what feels like an eternity, pretending to do something immensely deep and clever the audience needs time to grasp while actually presenting not much at all. It doesn’t help here that Shyamalan seems to have lost every bit of dramatic instinct he once had. Take the triple “tragic” death scene before the end that gives two of the main characters and about a hundred of McAvoy’s personalities and their respective supporting characters way too much time to die (oh so slowly), drawing things out until even the last possibility of reacting to this nonsense with anything but laughter or eye-rolling disappears. I honestly have no idea what the filmmaker was thinking with these scenes. But then, I have no idea what he was thinking with the rest of the movie either.

Split (2016)

Three high school girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) are kidnapped by a mysterious man (James McAvoy). It soon becomes clear that he suffers from dissociative identity disorder – which may or may not exist in real life – and tries to hit the world record with 23 different personalities. Some of them – called “The Horde” by their peers even though a trio does not a horde make – have enough of everybody but their psychiatrist (Betty Buckley) not believing their disorder actually exists, and are trying to bring forth a 24th personality, known as The Beast.

The Beast, it will turn out, is a super-powered cannibal who follows some bizarre pseudo-philosophy positing that people who haven’t suffered severe enough traumata in their life are only good to be eaten because they’ll never be able to acquire super powers. Seriously.

I know, I know, I’m writing about an M. Night Shyamalan movie again, even though it’s clear by now that the man’s sensibilities work like the noise of chalk on board on me. However, Split turns out to be one of his more palatable movies for me. I wouldn’t call it a good film, mind you, but at least this one is just a handful of better directorial decisions, a minor re-write, and losing about twenty minutes of runtime away from being one. It’s what I’d call an interesting effort, and one that’s nearly on to something with its attempt to examine the connection between trauma and superpowers quite a bit of superhero comics do indeed suggest. It’s just too bad the film mostly does said examination through a very slow and even more obvious series of flashbacks concerning Taylor-Joy’s character, incessant insane ranting by McAvoy, and some pseudo-scientific warbling from the psychiatrist.

Visually, this is one of Shyamalan’s successful efforts. His films usually look slick, but here (as at the beginning of his career), the slickness goes hand in hand with an ability to craft at least decent suspense sequences and even the creation of a nice atmosphere of doom. That last one is certainly helpful when it comes to building up to the appearance of The Beast, nearly convincing one that something of apocalyptic important is going to manifest. Unfortunately, The Beast manifest is just James McAvoy mugging into the camera.


Which brings me to the film’s most surprising weakness, an inexplicably terrible performance by a really fine actor, one which becomes even worse in contrast to the measured and thoughtful ones by the always wonderful Taylor-Joy and Betty Buckley. But then, going all Nicolas Cage on us when asked to play a guy with dissociative identity disorder whose main on-screen personalities are going to be a nine-year-old, a gay fashion designer, some mumbly psycho, a woman (sorry, that’s her defining character trait apart from being evil too), and a superpowered cannibal with a messiah (well anti-Christ, because this is a Shyamalan joint) complex, is an understandable acting choice. It’s also the completely wrong one, because it stretches the suspension of disbelief asked of the audience beyond breaking point by showing off how contrived and absurd the whole thing is instead of giving it the humanity a proper acting job instead of a circus show might have provided. Of course, it usually is the director’s job to realize this sort of thing and influence an actor accordingly, last time I checked, so I suppose that’s, alas, how Shyamalan wanted it.

Three Films Make A Post: Don't scare to sit, Don't scream to see, Don't shock if it's.....fierce!

(The) Mark of Cain (1986): This Canadian good twin/batshit twin (Robin Ward) thriller is a pretty neat little low budget thing, directed roughly yet imaginatively by Bruce Pittman whose career mostly took place in the realm of undistinguished TV work. The script is pretty okay, the setting is tight and claustrophobic, and the film's very well worth a watch if you don't expect anything earth-shaking, or crazy, or surprising.

Trance (2013): How much one enjoys Danny Boyle's neo noir Trance will absolutely depend on one's willingness to suspend disbelief when confronted with a film of perfectly convincing style and an acting ensemble (particularly Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel and James McAvoy) much better than the over-constructed series of events in the script deserves or needs; really, not since the heights of the giallo have I seen a thriller with more dubious ideas about psychology, hypnotism, and plain logic. Which isn't to say that I hated the film, or even really disliked it. Boyle pastes over the film's problems with such verve I found myself even thinking it to be rather more clever than it actually is when the third act began, a thought I was cured of when what seemed a rather cute deconstruction of the femme fatale archetype in the final, final twist turned out to be just another manipulative movie woman who doesn't care over how many dead bodies she has to step to get what she wants (though what she wants is not money, for a change).

Opstandelsen (2010): Casper Haugegaard's Danish (fast) zombie short (about 49 minutes) movie is a particularly fine example of wonderfully effective horror filmmaking of the kind you can do on a budget if you know what you’re doing. Haugegaard clearly does, so we end up with a low budget zombie movie that hits a lot of expected beats yet does it so competently it seems to be absolutely beside the point to complain you've seen it all before; because you haven't seen it all before quite like this. The film's script is particularly fine, giving the actors exactly the amount of material to work with necessary, without trying to do too much itself, nor leaving the actors out in the rain. Haugegaard even handles the whole "zombies as metaphor" thing well, treating the zombie apocalypse as just another opportunity for members of a highly dysfunctional family to keep eating away at one another even after they are dead.

The result is a bleak, well-paced, effectively gory short film that doesn’t overstay its welcome for one second.

 

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In short: X-Men: First Class (2011)

After the insults to my beloved X-Men that were Brett Rattner's third X-Men "film" and whatever that Wolverine abomination was supposed to be, I had a hard time giving anything this particular studio would do with one of my favourite universes in pop culture the benefit of the doubt, and dithered about seeing this prequel pretty long and hard.

So it did come as a bit of a surprise to myself that I loved pretty much everything about First Class (with its particularly bland version of Emma Frost as the major exception, but Bryan Singer's X-Men films had a particularly bland Storm, and were still pretty darn great), even the self-conscious winking in the direction of its predecessors and the comics, and John Dykstra's sometimes surprisingly weak special effects.

What makes me a very happy X-Men fanboy about the film is that Matthew Vaughn and/or the script actually got what - at least Chris Claremont's X-Men - are all about (hint for Brett Rattner: it's not being shit), and kept the many changes he made to the film's characters and relations well inside the emotional and ideological parameters of the comics.

I was particularly delighted by Michael Fassbender's Magneto, who is allowed all the complexity, bad-assery and fragility he had at the height of Claremont's run on the comic. Vaughn plays fair with Magneto's and Xavier's respective positions, too, which adds an actual moral tension below the comic book ones.

Of course, there might be a bit too much blockbuster characterization shorthand as shown in the somewhat broad way the film treats most of the rest of its characters for some viewers, and some of the film's big speeches might sound a bit mechanical to the same people, but I found myself experiencing these elements of the film as tonally appropriately close to the comics I still love and pretty entertainingly old-fashioned in a mainstream cinema world where one-liners rule.

For me, First Class is a movie fun and dumb and clever and playful enough to nearly make up for what Fox did to the Phoenix Saga, the sort of film that made me run, not walk to my Essential X-Men books (who can afford colour reprints or singles?), smiling happily.

 

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