Brooklyn 45 (2023)

World War II hasn’t been over for long. A group of old friends and war veterans are invited to the Brooklyn home of Lt. Colonel Clive Hockstatter (house favourite and horror hero Larry Fessenden). It’s not the happiest of reunions: one of the men, Archibald Stanton (Jeremy Holm), is on trial for a rather nasty war crime, and there are other tensions in the group as well. Former interrogation specialist/torturer Marla (Anne Ramsay) has brought her husband Bob (Ron E. Rains) with her, and the men really aren’t keen on a guy who married everyone’s sweetheart, particularly when he’s decidedly lacking in the demonstrative manliness they just love to indulge in.

These and other conflicts will come to the fore soon enough, but the reason Hockstatter has asked them to come is rather different. He wants his friends to take part in a séance meant to conjure up the spirit of his dead wife Susan, who killed herself after nobody believed in her wild tales of some German-born greengrocers in the neighbourhood being Nazi spies.

The séance goes rather well– depending on one’s opinion about being trapped in a room by ghosts. Hockstatter puking up a puddle of ectoplasm from which the arm of his dead wife arises is only the first surprise of the evening, and soon the whole affair turns into a long discussion about the morality of war and duty, and horror cinema’s favourite theme, guilt.

Ted Geoghegan is certainly one of the more interesting directors of low budget horror movies working right now. He doesn’t appear to want to make the same movie again, so he follows the Fulci (etc) homage of We Are Still Here and the Western as horror of Mohawk with what amounts to a filmed stage play.

Not surprisingly, the resulting film is very dialogue heavy, much more focussed on its characters talking through some ethical problems they encounter and slowly revealing some dark secrets/their true selves, while also taking a look at the nasty side of the Dream of America, than it is on its supernatural horror. The supernatural side of the film really is only ever an enabler for what Geoghegan is truly interested in here, and – apart from one pretty outrageous gore gag concerning Larry Fessenden’s head – really takes up very little of the film’s interest.

If you’re hoping the supernatural to be thematically relevant instead of plot convenient, this is certainly not going to make you happy. Given my tastes, I found myself somewhat disappointed by that element of the film – I think the film could have done more to use the supernatural as a way to explore its thematic interests and been all the more interesting for it.

Particularly since the dialogue isn’t always strong enough to carry everything the film is attempting to say about America or its characters. While there are certainly moments with the proper weight and cadence here, there are just as many lines that are simply too stagey and stilted to work as coming out of the mouths of these particular characters. The dialogue also tends to be a bit too clear and obvious. There’s a bluntness to it that sometimes suggests a film a bit afraid of its audience not getting what it is trying to say about its characters, their guilt and their country. Which is a particular problem when what it is trying to say has been said dozens of times before, often with more subtlety and complexity, and when it works with a stable of actors who play their asses off, and would certainly do so as well if the material were just a little more nuanced.

All of which sounds rather more damning than what I actually think of Brooklyn 45. I certainly do respect its willingness to be as stagey as it is, as well as its decision to express what it’s going for in a manner that feels rather old-fashioned today. That its approach doesn’t resonate terribly well with me is more a matter of taste than anything else.

We Are Still Here (2015)

Emotionally reeling from the accidental death of their grown-up son, Anne (Barbara Crampton) and Paul Sacchetti (Andrew Sensenig) decide moving out of the house he grew up in might assist them on their way to closure. Turns out, moving to Aylesbury, Mass., situated right in Lovecraft Country might not have been the best idea to that end, for there’s something very wrong with the house they move to.

There’s a reason the place had been left uninhabited for thirty years. Particularly Anne finds herself confronted with various low key haunting effects that suggest the presence of the spirit of their son, but surely, actual ghosts don’t move to new homes with people. There’s also something deeply wrong with the house’s cellar that manifests itself in unseasonable heat, the smell of burning flesh, and – if you’re an unlucky electrician – the crispy-hot living dead.

After some time of weirdness, Anne convinces the more sceptical Paul, who still can’t quite wave away what’s going on, it might be a good idea to call a couple of friends of hers for help. May (Lisa Marie) and her hippie husband Jacob (the inevitable yet lovely Larry Fessenden) do have a talent for contacting the spirit world, it turns out, but there’s something worse in the house than just a few – already pretty damn bad, it’ll turn out – ghosts.

If you’re like me, you’ll probably already have read various bits and pieces about Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here emphasising how much of the film is a loving homage to Lucio Fulci. That’s absolutely true, too, but if you expect a film that feels or is meant to feel like a Fulci flick from his great period, you’ll probably end up confused or disappointed, for Geoghegan uses certain markers of Fulci’s aesthetic in a way often antithetical to the old maestro’s approach. I rather think that’s a good thing, too, for what would be the point in making a film that’s only aping a gone great?

But let’s start on the obviously Fulci-esque elements: the film’s colour-scheme, the characters’ wardrobes and the production design are very much taken from Fulci’s playbook, as are the nods towards Lovecraft (bonus points to Geoghegan for using Aylesbury instead of a more obvious place). And there’s really no doubt in which direction the scene with the electrician in the cellar nods; even though what happens to him is rather different to the doom of a certain Fulci workman in a Southern cellar.

However, no Fulci film – from whichever career phase – would ever have featured as naturalistically drawn characters as the Sacchetti’s (speaking of nods…), actual people with actually believable interiority who mostly do things that make sense, even when these acts are ill-advised. Crampton and Sensenig are rather wonderful as the Sacchettis too, selling much of the sadness and loss, as well as their long intimacy with gestures, posture and looks, without them or the script feeling the need to oversell it and drift into a more melodramatic direction.

Geoghegan’s script does in general – except for one bar scene involving Monte Markham telling the local bar owner stuff she already knows quite well for no good reason apart from clueing the audience in – tend to find the sweet spot between showing and telling and seems to trust in the audience not to need every little thing spelled out for them. Of course, this generally logical and humanly believable approach is pretty much the exact opposite to Fulci’s (and Sacchetti’s) love for slow, dream-like series of strange occurrences vaguely drawn characters just stumble through. I do think it works very well for We Are Still Here, mind you.

Keeping with the Fulci, even the way the film uses gore, once it arrives for the final act, is very different from the maestro’s, replacing the slow lingering on the bizarre and gloopy with relatively quick edits. Though it still is rather bizarre and gloopy.

All in all, Geoghegan uses elements of Fulci’s filmmaking to turn out a more conventionally accomplished movie, losing the dream-like, weird and just plain crazy mood in favour of being an effective, clever, and well-acted low budget horror film. I certainly won’t blame a film for being that.

In short: Pod (2015)

When his brother Martin (Brian Morvant) leaves his physician brother Ed (Dean Cates) a disturbed sounding and more than just a little disquieting message on his answer phone, Ed grabs their estranged alcoholic sister Lyla (Lauren Ashley Carter) and drives off to the cabin in the middle of nowhere where Martin lives to stage a neat little family intervention.

Martin, you see, has been having psychological problems ever since he left the army, perhaps based on what may or may not have happened to him in one of the last US wars. His last institutionalization was on Ed’s head, though he isn’t quite convinced anymore that was the right idea to help Martin get better. Or rather, he isn’t until Lyla and he arrive at Martin’s cabin. There, Martin doesn’t just threaten them with a rifle for a bit but also starts off on an insane, long, and very loud rant about the experiments the government did on him, the “pods” they created as horrible weapons, how he found one of these pods in the woods – or maybe it found him - and how how he has now locked it away in his cellar. From here on out, things escalate rather quickly, for as insane as Martin sounds, he really has something rather monstrous locked away down there and the government – as represented by yet another Larry Fessenden cameo – truly is somehow involved.

Sure sure sure, yes yes yes, Mickey Keating’s indie horror exercise in conspiracy theories and mad screeching is not the most original of films, and it’s true, it can be a somewhat annoying film thanks to its insistence on ever-increasing loudness and cheap shock effects.

However, watching Pod, I found myself mostly enjoying it, the shameless and unapologetic way it mixes alien conspiracy theories’ greatest hits, its clear disinterest in being tasteful when that means giving up on having fun or diluting the pure power of SCREAMING LOUDLY IN YOUR FACE for at least two thirds of its running time. And while that might sound pretty dumb, this isn’t a dumb film at all – at least, the way it plays with its clichés feels rather clever to me, playful without becoming lamely ironic.

Obviously, this sort of film needs acting dialled up to eleven, and that’s exactly what the small cast provides for your eighty minutes of dysfunctionality. Particularly Morvant gives his all in what might not be the most authentic portrayal of somebody suffering a psychotic break but certainly is an effective – and very loud – one, leaving no head un-pounded and no eardrum still.

3 Films Make A Post: The Marsupials

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009): Fox continues to crap all over one of my favorite parts of pop culture. On the bright side, while Brett Ratner's unbelievably bad and disrespectful (of the first two movies, of the comics, his audience and possibly humanity at large) third X-Men film nearly had me in tears of pain, at least half of this masterpiece of unintentional humor produces tears of laughter. The other half unfortunately is the pure teeth-gnashing annoyance that results when you let robots who have been fed a diet of all the wrong action film clichés and are now eagerly ticking the action film ticky boxes one by one write your film, instead of actual human beings.

 

I Sell The Dead (2007): This comedy about the misadventures of the two body snatchers played by Larry Fessenden and Dominic "I was in Lord of the Rings and Lost" Monaghan who specialize in graverobbing the undead started out a mite slow, but soon won me over through a difficult to achieve mix of playfulness, genre homages and humor I for once did find funny. It also works as a love letter to all poor proletarian bastards who ever had to pay their rent through work done for madmen and mad scientists, making this some kind of low class horror fan feelgood movie, as if one of those British social realist filmmakers had suddenly developed a sense of humor and met a member of the working class he's always going on about.

The only thing I didn't like about it was Ron Perlman's oirish accent, if mostly for reminding me of the dreadful Mutant Chronicles.

 

The Hills Run Red (2009): The basic premise of an obsessed film student and entourage trying to track down a copy or at least the production traces of the single, infamous and lost horror film of a disappeared filmmaker and landing in a backwoods horror movie has the possibility to make for an intriguing, even intelligent film. Too bad that director Dave Parker just trots out one bad horror movie cliché after the other without ever doing anything interesting with any of them. Instead, we get groan-worthy characterization, mostly dreadful acting and the sort of script that bases its view of the world and psychology exclusively on other movies that themselves didn't have much of a clue about anything to begin with. Adding some Scream-like laziness hidden under the veil of "irony" just means adding insult to injury.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,superheroes,action,horror,comedy. larry fessenden,ron perlman,dominic monaghan,in short

Habit (1997)

Sam (Larry Fessenden) is going through a hard time: His father first disappeared, then died, he is a borderline alcoholic and his girlfriend Liza (Heather Woodbury) has left him for a kind of trial separation.

When he meets Anna (Meredith Snaider) at a Halloween party it is lust on first sight. Anna likes to be mysterious. She does not talk much about her past nor her present. Actually, there is not much she and Sam do talk about. Instead they have sex.

Which would certainly a nice thing for Sam, if not for Anna's special kink: she bites Sam and sucks his blood. At first this just feeds Sam's obsession with Anna even more, but when his health and his grip on reality slowly deteriorate and his friends start to look at him funny, he gets strange ideas about this lover who hates garlic, does not eat and is never around during daylight.

The problem with obsessions is that it is hard to get rid of them.

 

Larry Fessenden is an interesting case. A true independent filmmaker with a very personal style and very individual themes, he has made his home inside the horror genre while using the aesthetics of independent filmmaking that have come down from John Cassavates. As it goes with artists who trade in bastardized forms, Fessenden tends to sit between the chairs. He's too much of a horror filmer for parts of the art house crowd and too much of an art house director for some horror fans. He does not seem to care much, though.

Habit is a kind of remake of a film he made fifteen years earlier, made basically with the same core cast. I'd like to compare the two films, but I haven't seen the earlier version, so I'll just go with the theory that Fessenden must have had a reason to film it again.

Fessenden's decision to play the lead role himself suggests an auto-biographic reading of the film's story about addiction, obsession and self-destruction (and it seemed quite obvious to me that Anna is exactly what Sam is looking for - his own special way of an easy way out).

I wouldn't be impressed if the vampirism in the film only worked as a metaphor - a trap art house directors using non-realist elements step into all too often - but the supernatural here is metaphor and fictional reality at once, making for a fascinating and balanced way to look at a very imbalanced life.

Visually, Habit is a beautiful example of the classic hand-camera and guerilla location shooting style, which is a very effective way to give everything a semblance of reality.

Hyper-realism is a style the acting goes for too. This and the 1982 version are the only movie acting credits for most of the actors (with Fessenden himself as a big exception), yet a certain amateurishness in the performances just helps to keep up the film's mood. Well, if you ignore Aaron Beall whose reading of Sam's best friend Nick is false all the way through.

What is most fascinating about the film for me is something completely different though. It is Fessenden's eye for the little gestures of his characters that makes the film more than a nice little distraction, as well as the story he does not tell, yet that is barely visible in the cracks and crevices of what we are shown.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,larry fessenden,horror,reviews,art house

Wendigo (2001)

Therapist Kim (Patricia Clarkson), her husband commercial photographer George (Jake Weber) and their son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan) make a weekend trip to the (snowy and cold part of the) country. On the way to their home for the weekend, they run over a deer and meet the local Deliverance extras who were hunting it, among them Otis (John Speredakos), whose unprovoked hostility and anger disturb the family even more than the dead animal.

When they finally arrive at their destination, they find a bullet hole in one of the building's walls. Not troubling at all. Miles doesn't sleep well the following night. His sleep is disturbed by dreams of violence and a dread that something terrible will happen.

The next day, the family makes a few purchases in the nearest town. While nobody is looking, a Native American (Lloyd Oxendine) tells Miles (and us) the myth of the Wendigo, an angry spirit dominated by uncontrollable hunger and violent anger. When the boy agrees to the stranger's question if he believes in ghosts, the man gives him a figurine representing the Wendigo and disappears. Later happenings will make quite clear that he is a spirit himself, if not the Wendigo.

Later that day, George takes Miles sledding, only to fall from the sled, shot.

Ah, Larry Fessenden, how I respect you. Ah, Larry Fessenden, how irritating your films can be. In a world where most horror films don't even try to be more than the same old, same old, only with a little more gore and increasingly less talented actors, Fessenden represents a more independent mentality. Sure, you will find clichés like The Native American Spirit and The Evil Hick, but Fessenden doesn't tell cliché stories.

The visuals and the storytelling of Wendigo owe more to the traditions of independent drama than to usual horror fare, the interest of the film lies primarily in the family and their relationships with each other. The supernatural is secondary and mostly used as a metaphor. But this is exactly where the film's problems start. Fessenden doesn't seem to trust his viewers to grasp the meaning of his (not very complicated) metaphors nor the (quite obvious) themes of his movie. So he is spelling them out as loudly and directly as possible, nearly ruining the second third of Wendigo by the incessant repetition of things I had already understood the first time. Do we really need to hear parts of the Elder's monologue about the Wendigo three times, especially when three very capable actors make this completely unnecessary?

Which leads us directly to the film's second problem. Fessenden seems to trust his actors as little as he does his audience and seems to actively undermine their work, again by spelling out what their acting makes clear enough. The worst offender is the moment when the dying George tries to tell his family indirectly how much he loves them. Intercut by Fessenden with the smiling face of a baby, just in case somebody has a very bad sense of hearing, I suppose.

So, why do I still recommend the film? Because, even as heavily flawed as Wendigo is, it's a film that shows deep commitment by the people making it, a sense of urgency I can't help but respect. And Fessenden can be a very good director when he is not trying to clobber us with heavy-handedness. Here is someone with a clear and concentrated sense of style who can and does achieve moments of great creepiness as well as moments of great tenderness.

Add this to the very good acting and a surprisingly ambiguous ending (no clear morals in this film, to my surprise) and you may not have a film that gels as good as I would like, but at least something well worth watching.

 

 

Technorati-Tags: reviews,american movies,horror,drama,larry fessenden