Three Films Make A Post: There's something in the snow…

Emily the Criminal (2022): This fine crime movie about what living in a capitalist hell hole can do to a person’s moral self (which makes it something of a neo noir, now that I think about it) by John Patton Ford (who also scripts the film) was a bit ignored when it came out last year, unfairly so, I must say. It’s not an outwardly spectacular film, but one that follows the downwards drift of its protagonist (Aubrey Plaza in a fantastic performance) with an observant and careful eye, finding tension as naturally in the set of Plaza’s shoulder as in the slowly evolving plot, and doing so brilliantly.

Project Wolf Hunting aka 늑대사냥 | neuk-dae-sa-nyang (2022): Kim Hong-seon’s South Korean action horror movie on the other hand only ever wants to do things that are outwardly spectacular. Mostly, this combination of “Die Hard without a proper protagonist on a prison transport ship”, a zombie super soldier, various conspiracist plot twists and so on, manages to do this quite entertainingly. I’m convinced the production sucked up all the movie blood in Korea, bloody and gloopy as things get. Kim shows himself as quite adept at finding new ways to deliver carnage for the full two hour runtime, so he deserves all the blood he can buy.

Apart from the typical outrageous and pretty nonsensical plot twists you’d expect (which are fortunately delivered with verve and proper earnestness), there are also a couple of very South Korean moments when the film shifts and twists a little against genre rules, killing off the “wrong” characters at the “wrong” times to keep the audience on their toes.

Winterskin (2018): How much one will appreciate this predominantly cabin-bound movie by Charlie Steeds, working with his usual coterie of actors, may very much depend on one’s tolerance for fake American accents, done badly. For this tale of a young man looking for his father in the wilderness and getting stranded in a cabin with an old woman of dubious mental health is a cornucopia of dubious American accents whose horribleness it is difficult to ignore. If a viewer can make their peace with them – I did, though perhaps with some cursing and gnashing of teeth particularly during more dramatic sequences involved – they may very well appreciate how much good Steeds does in other regards: how tight and interesting his framing of the central log cabin sequences; how much a film taking place in a fake American snow wilderness uses ideas of the macabre that belong very much in the US tradition of someone like Bierce; how cleverly the film escalates its threats and gore to the over the top yet still on budget climax.

Three Films Make A Post: Carrol Jo Hummer--A working man who's had enough!

White Line Fever (1975): I know that this film by Jonathan Kaplan about an independent trucker played by Jan-Michael Vincent taking on the long-haul version of The Man has quite a few admirers. However, for me, the mix of traditional trucker exploitation, hicksploitation humour and earnest working class “Organize!” doesn’t really quite come together. Taken alone, every given scene is a perfectly fine example of its given genre, together, they result in a film of wildly fluctuating tone and uneven pacing that really would have needed to decide where it wants to put its emphasis.

Kill Me Again (1989): This is the first of now quality TV director John Dahl’s neo noirs after his time as a music video director, a series of films that would lead to at least two absolute classics of the genre. For its first two acts, this is nearly on its way to that status as well. Dahl uses his slick and polished style and the desert sun to perfectly replace the play of shadow and light of the classical noir, letting his characters go through variations of classic tropes that get enough of a twist to feel new. Val Kilmer (before he apparently started to believe that the main job of an actor is to sabotage the movie he is in), his then wife Joanne Whalley and Michael Madsen fit into this surface bright noir world perfectly.

Alas, the film breaks down nearly completely in the final act, with too many implausibilities even for a noir, and a bad case of random plot twist syndrome.

The Dry (2020): While I respect it and its approach, I can’t say I really enjoyed Robert Connolly’s adaptation of Jane Harper’s novel as much as I’d have liked too. There’s certainly a great sense of the dry Australian outback it takes place in on display, and the film also makes the book’s flashback structure flow much more organically than its source.

But for my tastes, the film is a bit too distanced from the crime(s) and the people at its heart, using a clinical look on its characters and their travails that makes it difficult to empathise with them, packing little emotional heft despite being about things of great emotional weight.

On the Border (1998)

Warning: I do vaguely discuss some of the film’s plot twists!

A couple of years after an involvement in a bank heist gone wrong, Jake Barnes (Casper Van Dien) is working as a bank guard in a tiny town on the US side of the US/Mexican border. He’s not leading a boring life, though, because he spends his free time having an affair with Rosa (Rochelle Swanson), the wife of his very sweaty boss Ed (Daniel Baldwin). To make matters more interesting, the couple is planning on ripping off the bank in a couple of days, for while there’s usually little worth the risk of robbing it inside, this coming Saturday, there will be a whole load of mafia money locked up in there.

There are – of course – complications. For one, Ed’s gotten the idea Rosa is indeed cheating on him and wants Jake to find out who it is. As it will turn out, Jake and Rosa aren’t the only ones who want that sweet sweet mafia money, either. One Barry Montana (Bryan Brown), probably the guy for whom the phrase “toxic masculinity” was termed, is rather interested in the money too. Barry sics his private slave Kristen (Camilla Overbye Roos) on Jake to seduce him and convince him to partner up for the robbery.

Jake does realize that Kristen’s supposed to be a honey pot, yet he still feels drawn to her, as she seems to be to him. She does, after all, have a probably perfectly true horrible story about her being sold to Barry to tell, and seems to only want to get away from the arsehole and out of the life. Because that’s not trouble enough for one film, Jake’s former partner in the old heist that worked out very badly indeed, a completely crazy person called Sykes (Bentley Mitchum), is lurking around the plot’s edges, trying to get an angle. And here I thought robbing a bank was easy.

Going by the IMDB, Bob Misiorowski’s sleazy, pulpy little neo noir is a TV movie, though going by the filming style and the rather large amount of nudity and sex in it, it must have been made for HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime. It’s a proper neo noir (though one with a genre-atypical ending), however, the sexy bits not being the only important parts of the film, unlike in the neo noir’s sleazier little sister, the erotic cable TV thriller. There is, however, indeed a lot more sex and nudity in this one than it would strictly need for its plot. It is pretty much equal opportunity nudity, though, so there’s quite a bit of Van Dien’s qualities in addition to the female nudity on display, too.

I suspect one’s liking for On the Border will have a lot to do with one’s tolerance for films that attempt to include basically all the tropes and clichés of a given genre, for broad acting, as well as for Caspar Van Dien’s sex face, the last being not pretty. This is not what anyone would call an intelligently constructed thriller, rather it is one that just heaps complications and plot threads on its poor protagonist, half of which will acquire stupid yet also highly entertaining twist in the final ten minutes. It’s the “throw as much as possible at the audience, logic be damned” approach, something which doesn’t generally end in films that make much sense. But then I’m a bit of a sucker for simple stories made absurdly complicated, as I am for film that wallow in genre tropes as much as this one does. Sometimes, it’s simply enjoyable to watch a dance you know by heart even though its steps are obfuscated by a whole load of weird hand gestures and mumbling.

Even better, Misiorowski actually gets around to twisting some of the genre tropes of the neo noir, sometimes even in fun ways. So the horrible fake accent you roll your eyes over does indeed turn out to be fake, one of the film’s two femme fatales (why have one when you can have to in a film, right?) isn’t actually one, and the film’s solution does use the general way movies tend to side-line their Mexican characters for a little surprise. Now, before anyone thinks too much of these elements, they are still embedded in a whole lot of sleaze and violence. As I like it.

It would be terribly remiss of me if I ended this without mentioning On the Border’s fine bunch of caricature villains. I can’t imagine living a life where one wouldn’t enjoy a pretty paunchy Daniel Baldwin sweating and being sleazy towards his wife and prostitutes and babbling nonsense about simple being stupid. Or Bryan Brown’s lovely portrayal of a perfect caricature of a vile man (without the Australian accent, I’d put a Trump joke right here). Or how Bentley Mitchum’s minor villain is all twitchiness, verbal tics and drug-fuelled craziness, just one step away from becoming a circus geek.


On the Border is the neo noir interpreted as a sleazy, fun low budget movie, and even though that is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, it sure is mine.