Three Films Make A Post: They’re watching…They’re waiting…They’re back!!

Visitors of the Night (1995): 1995 was of course peak alien abduction time in (at least US) popular culture, and once the X-Files (still beloved around these parts) opened the flood gates, TV movies like this alien abduction tale directed by TV veteran Jorge Montesi quickly followed. Despite featuring Canada’s finest Stephen McHattie in a smaller role, the film at hand sure is no X-File, but a tepid family melodrama about some nice bourgeois lady and her nice bourgeois kid troubles. Sure, there’s a bit of generational abduction business, and some suited government people are in the game as well, but the way this plays out, the film really rather would avoid the SF/horror trappings completely and go through a lot of family whining and hand-wringing about not understanding one’s teenage daughter. That you might actually use the fantastical elements to strengthen the family melodrama and vice versa seems to be beyond the film’s grasp or imagination, but then, the family melodrama itself isn’t exactly sharply written, either, so what does one expect?

Wretch (2018): How much anyone will get out of this very indie little horror movie by Brian Cunningham about the consequences an encounter with a supernatural entity during a druggy night in the woods has for three friends, will certainly have something to do with one’s willingness to just let a film unfold slowly and in its own way and pace. At first, the whole thing did feel a bit too muddily structured and ambiguous to me, but the film actually goes somewhere specific, and the at first obtuse looking way it gets there is a planned and proper approach, at least if you’re willing to follow the film where it leads. Which, as it turns out, is to one of my favourite supernatural entities, so that’s a bonus, too.

But the movie’s rather strong in other regards too: the acting, particularly by Megan Massie, is better than usual in this sort of thing, and the film does some great work starting out with rather typical character and relationship types but then complicating them repeatedly. Because this aspect of the film is so strong, it also recommends itself as a portrayal of destructive human relationships that is – unlike in the quite a bit more “professional” Visitors – indeed strengthened and made clearer by its supernatural element.


Roadkill (1989): Much less perfunctory and much more entertaining than Visitors and rather more playful than Wretch is this Canadian indie movie, that is so late 80s/early 90s Canadian indie, it involves the talents of Bruce McDonald, Don McKellar and Valerie Buhagiar while of course sporting a soundtrack by Nash the Slash and various Canadian luminaries. It’s the sort of black and white road movie that tonally and stylistically fits with the type of thing Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki were doing at the time, including these directors’ use of the local and the specific, so it’s clearly part of a very particular international style of indie filmmaking, but also rooted in places and people the directors find in Canada and punk rock adjacent art. Of course, while it is taking efforts to demonstrate it is coming from a particular time and place, this isn’t mumblecore (this particular kind of filmic horror lurking in the future of none of these filmmakers), so there’s also a fabulist and imaginative streak to the film, and a personal sense of weirdness and peculiarity visible in basically every moment of its road movie tale.

Three Films Make A Post: What's left when the light goes out?

The Vanishing aka Keepers (2018): On paper, Kristoffer Nyholm’s film is a great little thriller inspired by the Flannan Isles Mystery, shot beautifully, acted intensely and effectively by Gerard Butler, Peter Mullan and Connor Swindells, providing a wonderful sense of place and a not implausible tale. However, for my tastes, there’s something missing here that never makes the terribly things that happen genuinely involving, an abstract look at the characters that talks about loss and guilt but doesn’t truly get into the minds of the characters but only ever observes from the outside. And that’s not really how you portray pain.

Serenity (2019): Curiously enough, even though it is a very different kind of film, Steven Knight’s film about fisherman Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) and his troubles with a big tuna he is obsessed with, a minor noir plot, and some weird shit that’s certainly going to turn out to be meaningful, also never managed to actually connect with me emotionally, even though it clearly wanted to quite, quite, desperately. As long as the film’s a noir, everything’s peachy and fun enough, even though the film’s cast (also including people like Anne Hathaway, Diane Lane, Djimon Hounsou and Jason Clarke) seems to be a bit overqualified for the ciphers they are playing, and an influx of the mildly weird has never annoyed me. Alas, once the film puts its cards on the table, it may explain why everyone’s a cipher, but it also does nothing whatsoever to actually make a viewer care, what with the people whose fates the film’s actually about hardly even appearing in it. I’m also not sure I buy the film’s weird moral discussion that somehow floats around the question if catching a tuna fish named Justice is better than killing a total piece of human shit.


Hellmouth (2014): Speaking of weirdness, John Geddes’s film (written by Tony Burgess) concerning the strange misadventures of a graveyard keeper played by the great Stephen McHattie in a heavily metaphorical world whose visuals suggest the horror fan version of the influences of Guy Maddin, is certainly weird, too. However, unlike Serenity, this film’s metaphorical language seems fully thought through, and its protagonist’s reality may be as dubious as that of McConaughey’s character but it also comes together instead of falling apart when you think about its meaning. Fortunately, this isn’t just an allegory, but also a film that clearly revels in German Expressionism and its followers, as well as in providing McHattie with many an opportunity to demonstrate a wonderful ability of making the film’s strangeness real and personal.

Search for the Gods (1975)

Young Willie Longfellow (Stephen McHattie) - scion of a the Boston Longfellows, I have you know – is travelling the world on a very 70s rich boy kind of search for himself. After a stint in Central America, he has followed the trail of good old liar Carlos Castaneda (repeatedly name-dropped and an obvious inspiration for the film’s brand of the “druggy wisdom of the native people” shtick) to Taos, New Mexico. There, he stumbles into a proper adventure concerning a golden medallion a dying shaman entrusts to him, made from a mysterious unearthly medal a shadowy figure and his main henchman Raymond Stryker (Raymond St. Jacques) want to acquire by all means necessary.

Also involved are ancient aliens, Genara Juantez, the granddaughter of the shaman (Victoria Racimo), the somewhat shady Shan Mullins (a baby-faced Kurt Russell), and an inspiring elderly exposition machine (Ralph Bellamy). There will be a peyote-based test of Willie’s spirit, betrayal, extremely dubious science, and as much adventure as a mid-70s TV film meant as a pilot for a show about Willie’s further adventures finding more medallion pieces that never happened can afford.

The enjoyment one derives from Jud Taylor’s Search for the Gods will most certainly depend on a viewer’s tolerance or love for the kind of pseudo-science and pseudo-religion the decade it was produced in loved so particularly well; this is basically a more honestly fictional episode of In Search Of… with a bit of harmless villainy and violence thrown in.

So if you’re allergic against magical natives, white boys finding themselves through them, absurd ancient alien theories and dynamite-based archaeology, you’ll not find much to like here. Me, I like this sort of things quite a bit, particularly in a case like Search for the Gods where a movie may be a bit silly and a bit cheap, but is actually trying its best with its tropes. So while I rather doubt its depiction of the Taos people is terribly close to their actual cultural beliefs, the film is respectful towards them, certainly not avoiding all magical native business (that would be rather difficult in a film like this, really) but also not landing too far in that particular kind of fantasy. Plus, I just can’t complain about a good peyote-based test of the spirit, authenticity be damned.

It certainly helps that Willie comes over as a genuinely thoughtful and nice guy, not so much a white saviour as a white dude who accidentally asks the right questions at the right time; there’s also nobody to save, really. The film’s treatment of Genara is surprisingly sensible, too, giving her room enough to breathe and be a person, and while not completely avoiding clichés (this is not the sort of film that does that or wants to), providing her with a much more interesting character arc than you’d expect from a native American woman in a mid-70s TV movie. Even the romance between her and Willie is at least half thought through, both characters having mirrored experiences as people who are not at home where their home is supposed to be. The later-born cynic will of course add that Willie’s not being at home as a rich Bostonian is probably a rather easy cross to bear, but you can’t really expect a deep analysis of class structures from a mid-70s TV movie about a possibly alien medallion, nor does this detract much from the film’s general pleasantness. Plus, McHattie turns out to be just as good at playing the soulful nice guy as he is in the rather less nice roles he’s now specialized in, so all this never actually damages the character much.

Racimo as Genara is fine too, keeping a straight face in the sillier moments and nicely avoiding a too melodramatic turn otherwise. The cast’s main weakness is actually Kurt Russell, who surprisingly enough just doesn’t have the charisma yet to play the sort of half-trustworthy rogue he is supposed to be in a convincing manner. Really, he mostly comes over as whiny.

The film’s pacing tends a bit to the meandering side, but Taylor makes much out of the locations (at least in part this was actually shot in Taos), clearly realizing that the desert landscape is one of his greatest assets here. The “people with torches wandering through the desert” set-up for the peyote ceremony is particularly atmospheric, as all scenes of that kind tend to be, but the ceremony itself is pretty fun too, using very simple means and some excellent eye-bugging from McHattie to be trippy and mildly threatening without a budget for special effects.


Apart from the absence of actual aliens on screen, there’s little more you could ask of Search for the Gods, giving its circumstances, so if this sort of thing is like catnip to you, as it is for me, or if you at least think this sounds interesting beyond the cast, you will probably find a nice little TV movie here.

In short: Death Valley (1982)

As if going through his parents’ divorce and now making a tour through Arizona and particularly Death Valley with his mother (Catherine Hicks) and her new/old boyfriend who likes to pretend he’s a modern cowboy played by Joe Don Baker even though he’s hawking real estate and played by Paul Le Mat weren’t enough to trouble a little boy, little Billy (Peter Billingsley) stumbles into a caravan that’s actually the scene of a murder. Neither Billy nor the grown-ups realize it at the time, mind you, and just when they encounter the same caravan as a wreck surrounded by police by the side of the road, do they realize something was very wrong.

Billy took a medallion from the caravan, and wouldn’t you believe it, the nice waiter (Stephen McHattie) in their hotel is wearing one just like it! Billy is a clever little boy, so he gives the thing to the local sheriff (the Wilford Brimley); unfortunately not before the nice waiter has seen is too. For reasons best known to himself, after dispatching the sheriff and, as you do, stowing his corpse in a cupboard, the killer waiter now begins to stalk Billy and his family with murderous intent.

Death Valley’s director Dick Richards started his career as an ad director, and watching the film, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise. The film’s visual style is certainly slick, and the plot goes through all of the expected motions of a film neither quite a thriller nor a pure slasher with perfect competence. However, there’s a certain lack of depth that makes it easy to fall back onto the old cliché of ad directors not tending to make very brainy films. And not just because it telegraphs its supposed plot twist early on in the scene when Brimley gets offed.

It’s one of those films that really doesn’t do anything that’s wrong, but it also doesn’t much that’s right, and certainly little that’s interesting. Quite a few scenes here should by all rights be real suspenseful nail biters but there’s an emotional distance to the film that makes it very difficult to become very excited by much what’s happening in it. You know you are supposed to be on the edge of your seat, but the film never puts in the effort to actually drag you there.

The whole affair doesn’t become more interesting once you have copped to the fact that the whole subplot about new boyfriend trying to prove himself to Billy has all the psychological sophistication of a very special episode of a contemporary TV show. On the plus side, Stephen McHattie could be pretty creepy without the script he’s working from actually providing much help even this early in his career, and Peter Billingsley was a great precocious kid performer.


It’s just all a bit too riskless and harmless to grab me.

Pay the Ghost (2015)

During a Halloween parade, Charlie (Jack Fulton), the seven year old son of academic Mike Lawford (Nicolas Cage) disappears without a trace after saying something about “paying the ghost”.

With the first anniversary of his disappearance closing in, Charlie is still missing. Mike and his wife Kristen (Sarah Wayne Callies) have separated, and Mike’s still – understandably – obsessing about what happened to his son, making himself an annoyance to the detective on the case (Lyriq Bent), and spending a lot of time in front of the traditional newspaper clip and photo wall every obsessed person and every serial killer in the movies calls his own. Maybe, Mike’s even going crazy, for he is beginning to have visions of his son, seeing what might be signs pointing him in the direction of a supernatural solution to the mystery.

In fact, the evidence for the supernatural is piling up so fast, soon Kristen, Mike’s work BFF (Veronica Ferres), and even the detective begin to believe.

Horror movies made for a mainstream audience are blessed and cursed by the fact they aren’t made for a genre-savvy audience: blessed, because they don’t have to go through the rituals of fanservice and might just look at old ideas from a different perspective; cursed, because they might not realize they are actually walking well-trodden paths, and because they aren’t allowed to dig as deeply into certain uncomfortable zones as their core genre siblings.

Uli Edel’s adaptation of a Tim Lebbon novella is more an example for the curse than for the blessing (well, it’s a horror movie after all), because boy does it avoid to actually dig into the emotional horror that losing a child must be for a parent, instead keeping to the middle-ground of okay melodrama where even the most hurtful things don’t make the people they happen to actually unattractive, and where obsessions are so mild, they can be expressed by a man posting flyers and getting slightly miffed with a cop. The film’s acting the same way when it comes to the treatment of horrible things happening to children too, never actually stopping and thinking what a series of yearly disappearances and murders of three children over centuries in the same area actually means. And no, it isn’t being subtle, it’s just avoiding the horrifying as much as it possible can.

In fact, the script is so tepid when it comes to these things, the film can count itself lucky it does at least have Nicolas Cage, who is at the same time doing his utmost to not play a cartoon character as per his more usual and really putting more effort in than the script deserves, making the film feel much more alive and human than it has any right to be. I had forgotten how good Cage can be at this sort of thing.

The rest of the cast – including Stephen McHattie in a minor role with big dreadlocks which alone would make the film worth watching at least once – is rather good too. They also just aren’t given much to get their teeth into. It’s all very professional, and competent, but totally lacking in anything comparable to actual human emotions or actions.

Uli Edel’s direction does little to help things into a more interesting (or, you know, creepy) direction – it’s slick, it’s competent, and it completely fails at making anything here resonate emotionally. He’s also just not very good at managing scare scenes, the film ending up completely unable to even stage a simple jump scare effectively, much less turn what should be the film’s moments of actual horror into anything else than a mild repetition of visual motives we all have seen in better films. It’s all very tasteful, at least, except for the finale when things become utterly ridiculous, but good taste can only get you so far with a film that by all rights should be about horrible things happening to people who not at all deserve them.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,canadian movies,reviews,horror,uli edel,nicolas cage,sarah wayne callies,stephen mchattie

Three Films Make A Post: When the angels kiss the demons,... you'd better be ready.

Wolves (2014): I didn’t get the memo, but it turns out we needed another urban fantasy YA coming-of-age movie where a lot of acting talent (poor Stephen McHattie and Jason Momoa! Poor everyone else!) is wasted on a script that has not a single memorable idea, dubious dialogue, characters without all that pesky character, and a story that’s so obvious and by now so overdone even the least imaginative viewer will know and understand everything that’s going on here before the thirty minute mark is reached. Things like subtlety, complexity and ambiguity are of course completely out of the question, following the seeming philosophy of about 50 percent of YA stuff that “young adult” means “stupid”, which I – as a former young adult – find pretty infuriating and patronizing.

After reading various interviews with director/writer/Solid Snake David Hayter that talk up his love for classic monster movies, I’d also have expected this to be, you know, more of a monster movie, and less of a crap superhero origin tale. I’d have taken a good superhero origin tale – which we know Hayter as a writer can do – but that’s not happening in this one either. As a director, Hayter is slick but lacking in style or taste, leaving us with a movie that’s not horrible but intensely forgettable.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014): So, if anyone asked oneself how the Michael Bay empire would react to the fact that the last half decade or so has proven that you can in fact make a blockbuster movie that has a degree of intelligence and personality and still keeps all the explosions, this piece of crap is your answer. Bay and his troupe just don’t care as long as the money keeps coming in, and, going by script and direction of this thing, putting effort in when you might as well get paid without making any is against the Baysian principles. So, yeah, Turtles is still everything that made older Bay productions so hateful, including no effort, no love, no sense of fun and a script so idiotic it’s difficult to believe it was written by actual human beings.

Bigfoot Wars (2014): Speaking of crap, there’s also this concoction of breasts and gore that might sound fun on paper (everyone love’s a bigfoot, even if they seem to be the new zombies after all) but is horrible in all aspects beyond the good old “well, at least the camera’s in focus most of the time”. For some, this might just barely push the so bad it’s good buttons. Me, I found myself annoyed and somewhat bored. The film seems made in the same spirit of not giving a crap as the Bay Turtles, though Bigfoot Wars does at least have the excuse of a tiny budget. Not that this helps much when you actually have to sit down and watch it…

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,superheroes,stephen mchattie,jason momoa,david hayter

Satan's School for Ghouls: The Tall Man (2012)

This October, the agents of M.O.S.S. are digging deep into the heart of Halloween, taking a look at films about demons, the devil, and every kind of fiend. You can find our collected annals of evil here. In the first of my contributions, I interpret the definition of "fiend" as broadly as humanly possible.

(Warning: even though I'm not going to go into this film's twists in any detail, discussing anything about it can't help but touch spoiler territory, so proceed at your own risk. Structural spoilers ahoy, too!).

The charmingly named US mining town of Cold Rock, Washington (as always doubled by British Columbia, the Bronson Canyon of the 90s and beyond) has taken a turn for the worse ever since the mine shut down years ago. It's now a poster child for picturesque poverty and squalor, like a kid's version of Winter's Bone. But there's something worse than mere poverty stalking the town's streets. For some time now, the town's children have been disappearing one after the other, without a trace. The townspeople are convinced their children are taken away by someone who has taken on mythical proportions in their minds. Thus they have turned him into "the Tall Man", a creature half monster from under your bed, half mystery.

This case is quite beyond town sheriff Chestnut's (William B. "Cigarette Smoking Man" Davis) abilities, but Lieutenant Dodd (Stephen McHattie), the big city cop sent to take care of the case, hasn't proven to be any more effective. He's hanging around, watching the town by night, getting nowhere. Things change when the child of Cold Rock's only remaining medical professional, the nurse moonlighting as a bit of a social worker, widow of the town's now dead and practically sainted GP, and designated protagonist Julia Denning (Jessica Biel), is kidnapped. In the following hours, some truths about what is really going on are bound to get to light, though not all of them will be pleasant, or believable to an audience.

If Pascal Laugier's The Tall Man is one thing, then it is willing to be more unpredictable than it at first seems to be. The film starts out like your typical stylish Hollywood thriller, with a plot, characters and narrative beats that are realized with great technical proficiency by people of obvious talent. It begins as the type of film that is clearly competently made, but also a bit boring thanks to what looks like a total lack of imagination; really not what I had hoped for from the guy who made my favourite piece of "torture porn", Martyrs.

However, after forty minutes of the expected have firmly established in the audience's mind what kind of film it is watching, Laugier pulls the rug out from under our feet twice in short succession. The first time he does it only changes the sub-type of thriller the film is working in, suggesting a classic piece of small town paranoia, but the second one undermines all the unspoken assumptions one makes when watching a movie of this style and type, assumptions about the nature and character of protagonists and audience identification. Laugier uses its audience's knowledge of filmic structures against itself. For the following half hour or so, the film thrives on a rather delicious feeling of confusion, because now that it has shown how far it is willing to stray from the conventions of the genre it is working in, everything seems possible, any direction open again. For once, the question of what the hell is going on in a thriller actually becomes pertinent again.

Unfortunately, the film's problems begin once Laugier decides to answer the question about what is going on. I would argue that, after the awesome (in the classic sense of the word) double-twist, there were only two ways the movie could have kept what its build-up promised: either by not answering the central questions of its plot at all, but keeping to suggestions and hints to incite feelings of dread and/or hope, or by giving an answer that's as dark and unpleasant as it could get away with.

Instead, the film ends on a curious mix of sentimentality and the sort of classism that makes a few distracting noises to pretend it isn't classist but humanist. There's pretension of going for a morally grey zone, but it's just damnably unconvincing after a film that seemed interested in doing interesting things with the genre it is working in, a film that seemed to be willing to go to uncomfortable and surprising places. Even worse, the ending we get is banal and therefore deeply unsatisfying, leaving the carefully built mood of what came before and the promises of mythic depth behind for the least exciting and thoughtful ending. Which at least is in keeping with The Tall Man's unpredictability.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,french movies,canadian movies,reviews,pascal laugier,jessica biel,stephen mchattie,william b. davis,jodelle ferland,thriller

Exit Humanity (2011)

The end of the US Civil War marks the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, at least in Tennessee, where Exit Humanity takes place. Six years after the beginning of that particular end, veteran Edward Young (Mark Gibson) returns from a hunting excursion to his cabin in the woods to find his wife a zombie and his little son gone.

Edward begins to roam the area around his home until he finds the kid, also as one of the walking dead. After Edward kills has killed him, he at first tries to kill himself too, now that everyone he loved and everything he believed in is gone. But a not quite successful attempt at that, and the look at a picture of a waterfall many days of travel away that gave Edward hope all through the war changes his mind. Before he'll die, he wants to throw his son's ashes into the waters to give him at least some semblance of peace.

On his travel there, Edward meets a man named Isaac (Adam Seybold), whose sister Emma (Jordan Hayes) has been abducted by former General Williams (Bill Moseley) for his pet "doctor" Johnson (Stephen McHattie) to experiment on, the witch Eve (Dee Wallace), and just possibly reasons to regain his own humanity.

Whenever I think a certain sub-genre of horror movies has finally reached the point of oversaturation, that nothing of further interest can be done in it anymore, a movie like John Geddes's Exit Humanity appears and actually manages to be a fantastic zombie movie at a point when such a thing seemed increasingly improbable to me. Exit Humanity also manages to be yet another excellent entry among the growing number of horror westerns.

What makes this particular film so special are a handful of things. Most obviously, there's the film's unhurried pacing that isn't caused by the typical indie horror problem of a script that's burying its core themes and plot in boring minutiae, but really is what the film's mood and its characters call for. There are long and important scenes of Mark Gibson alone with nature that are quite a bit more exciting than anyone could have expected. Geddes knows when and how to end scenes (another of my indie horror pet peeves is that too many directors don't seem to know how to do that at all), which slow moments to show because they are important for an audience to understand the characters, and which dramatic moments not to show.

Exit Humanity is a handy reminder that the quality and rhythm of a movie are determined as much by the things one leaves out (we never get to see Edward killing his undead wife, for example, but only witness the aftermath) as by those one includes. I was also very impressed by Geddes's ability to provide the film with a sense of place and time, making impressive use of the landscape of Ontario that may not be strictly authentic as a portrayal of woods in Tennessee but feel real and alive to me; the rather lavish (and free as in beer) nature of the landscape also provides Exit Humanity with the best enhancement of its bleak yet hopeful mood a film could hope for.

Additionally, the director makes two decisions that sound horrible on paper, yet in practice work out very well. Showing some of the film's more dramatic sequences in pretty rough animation may be a budgetary decision (or it may not be), but it's a decision that just works, giving these moments a quality of the mythical or the nightmarish that is perhaps more effective than just another action scene would have been. Strangely effective directorial decision number two is to have large parts of the plot and philosophical musings of Edward being narrated by the off-screen voice of Brian Cox. I generally hate off-screen monologues, but - again - Exit Humanity's mostly just works. Cox has just the right voice for the monologues he's given, and the film seldom falls into the trap of only telling its audience the things it is already seeing. The primary reason for the voiceovers may be to fill in some gaps in the plot, yet his voiceovers don't feel like an inorganic stop-gap; in fact, it's hard to imagine the film working as well as it does without them.

The acting is Exit Humanity's final trump card. The well-known actors in smaller roles (a traditional element in independent horror movies) are doing a fine job here, with nobody just slumming for a cheque for a day's work (so no Michael Madsen). The true stars are the lesser known Gibson, Seybold and Hayes though. The trio go through the film's more difficult moments with grace and style, always keeping their characters from becoming the horror movie clichés they could have been in less capable hands.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,john geddes,mark gibson,jordan hayes,adam seybold,brian cox,dee wallace,bill moseley,stephen mchattie,horror,western,zombies

Pontypool (2008)

Formerly popular talk radio host Grant Mazzy (the brilliant Stephen McHattie for once in a film that's as good as he deserves) has a new job quite low on the media food chain in the small Ontario town of Pontypool. Little does Grant suspect that another snowy night of dreary small town news and his rather desperate attempts to still play the big talk radio guy in surroundings where that just won't work will turn into something quite different. An outbreak of strange yet murderous behaviour strikes the small community and Grant, his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and technician Laurel-Ann Drummond (Georgina Reilly) will the spend the night trying to correlate the contents of the catastrophe, and possibly, just possibly, to survive it.

See how I tried not to spoil even the slightest thing about Pontypool here, even though the 'net's full of all details about the film, and everyone in the market for it should already have seen it? It's not part of my new spoiler-free review philosophy - that I don't have - but a result of my conviction that some films need and deserve to be watched without too much foreknowledge.

It is hardly a spoiler, though, when I tell you that Canadian indie director (and improbable TV hired gun) Bruce McDonald's trip into the world of the horror movie - based on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess who is also responsible for the film's script - is a pretty singular variation on the zombie outbreak movie as seen through the lens of somebody who doesn't feel the need to make the same movie every other director working in the same sub-genre has already made (some of them, like that guy named George, repeatedly) again. Instead, McDonald aims a bit higher and to the left, and produces a film that works fantastically as a thriller, yet maintains a sense of the playful and of the skewed philosophical you don't get to see on screen - zombie cinema or not -  all that often.

Pontypool is a film that finds the fine line where the horrifying and the absurd meet and dances on it for most of its running time, never stumbling, never faltering.

That McDonald manages this on a budget that probably wouldn't be enough to pay for your average Hollywood star's hairdresser is more than just a bit impressive, too. Most of what the director achieves he does through the fine art of reduction. The whole film basically takes place in one and a half rooms, features only a handful of actors and very little outward action for most of its running time - in fact, large parts of it consist of the most dreaded of things, people talking - yet where this would be reduction born out of need with other films, Pontypool lets it look like the best, or the only, way this particular story could be told.

Much of the film's effect (in this viewer: giddiness, excitement, and the pressing need to convince other people to watch Pontypool, too) is based on everyone involved in it doing everything right: Burgess' intelligent and complex script eschews simple answers to everything and can do ironic distancing without sacrificing its characters' humanity. McDonald keeps everything tight, uses the visually unexpected (and some great editing magic) without ever falling into the trap of pointing out his own efforts in a self-congratulatory way. The director clearly trusts his actors to do their jobs as well as he does his own. The actors - not only in the obvious case of McHattie but just as much those of Houle and Reilly - are rewarding this trust by doing a perfect job as well, bringing the intimated complexities of their characters to live and letting their jobs look effortless once they have to sell the weirder (and the last act can get pretty damn weird) elements of the story. And did I mention the sound design? I don't want to use the word "perfect" again, but what can you do?

Pontypool is just a great film, the kind of film that does everything right, so it's a bit frustrating when you're talking to people who are absolutely in the market for its type of intelligence, its type of weirdness, and its kinda-sorta zombies, and still haven't seen it. So, if you're reading this, and haven't found time for Pontypool until now, please do. It might just change everything.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,horror,zombies,bruce mcdonald,stephen mchattie,lisa houle,georgina reilly,reviews

Three Films Make A Post: Monsters walk the Earth in a ravishing rampage of clawing fury!

Watchmen (Ultimate Cut) (2009): I know, as a good little nerd I'm bound by law to hate Zack Snyder and everything he has ever done with an intensity sane people reserve for guys who eat babies, or are Hitler, but I just don't. In fact, I think Snyder's highly artificial and operatic version of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen ain't half bad. Often, the film nearly manages to reach the heights its aiming for with its choice of source, at other times, it gets bogged down in slight bloat or is trying to stay so close to surface elements of the comic that it's veering into the territory of the unintentionally comical, but the latter does come with a territory as inherently ridiculous as the superhero genre (that I love just as much as Snyder seems to do).

In other words, I think Watchmen is a perfectly fine film.

 

I.K.U. (2000): Taiwanese-American arthouse director Shu Lea Cheang made this hard softcore low budget movie in Japan with a predominantly Japanese cast and crew, and it's pretty much like an outsider's dream of what a Japanese cyber-porn movie would look like. There is some sort of story about a sex-data collecting android called Reiko in there, but Cheang seems more interested in burying it under every cheap visual trick you can afford when you're producing your movie digitally. The whole film works inside of the stylistic parameters of Japanese low-budget cyberpunk films like Tetsuo, just with sex taking the place of the violence, and gender- and sexual fluidity that of less precisely located bodily transformations. Like its predecessors, it'll either give you a headache from exposure to too much visual and audial information in too little time, or make you quite happy in its own psychedelic way.

 

Drive Angry (2011): Well, depending on your preferences, this charming little ditty about Nic Cage crawling from hell to save his baby granddaughter and driving, angry, is either the End of Western Civilization made film or an adorable attempt at making a movie that is exactly like an old grindhouse film without even a hint of the intelligence other lovers of the form like Rodriguez and Tarantino apply to it.

Being who I am, I'm obviously pretty alright with both interpretations. What's not to love about a film featuring Nicolas Cage grimacing and mumbling, Amber Heard perfectly emulating all the sexy good-naturedness of 70s exploitation heroines who deserved better than their filmic surroundings gave them, William Fichtner doing his best Christopher Walken impression, random nudity, horrible jokes, and a bit of the old ultra violence set to generic rock music?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,superheroes,action,pinku,horror,zack snyder,nicolas cage,amber heard,shu lea cheang,jackie earle haley,jeffrey dean morgan,carla gugino,stephen mchattie

Three Films Make A Post: It Will Scare You To Pieces!

Red: Werewolf Hunter (2010): Syfy Channel original movies are one of the banes of human existence. Somehow, these films always manage to take a perfectly good b-movie idea (in this case: Little Red Riding Hood's descendants are a clan of werewolf hunters) and make a disappointingly bland movie out of them. If it's not the miserably bad CGI and just plain uninventive monster design, it's scripts that go through the motions of being an exciting ride instead of actually providing one, and direction so devoid of personality or style you couldn't get away with in most TV shows anymore, that kill films of this type. Or - as in Red - all those things at once.

Most of the actors on screen seem as bored by the film as I was. The only exceptions are Felicia Day and Stephen McHattie - both are game, but find no-one who wants to play.

Twice Dead (1988): Ostensibly a horror film about a haunted house, Twice Dead really wants to be a film about two annoying teenagers fighting a gang of late 80s Hollywood "punks". Director Dragin doesn't even seem to be trying to make the "punks" or the ghosts even the least bit menacing, creating a film that feels tired and pointless. The mandatory 80s cheese is not ripe enough to make up for Twice Dead's lack of anything else.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010): It would probably have needed a better world or a lot of bad compromises to let Edgar Wright's intensely nerdy and geeky and clever comic adaptation become the blockbuster Universal seems to have wanted it to be.

On the other hand, what do I care about Universal's bottom line when the film as it is is just about perfect, beginning with its pixelated Universal logo? That logo is just the beginning of the movie's show of just the right amount (which is to say a lot) of love for the formative pop-cultural influences of many people my age or a few years younger.

But beside this love, Wright's film also has a clear look for the things that just might be wrong with its pop-cultural loves and consequently its characters, and so never steps into the trap of using its cleverness only for the sake of being clever. The hyperactive excitement bolsters a (at its core old-fashioned) story about growing out of being a jerk. Just like it was in the comics.

In any case, the film's fidelity to its sources also explains why a certain type of elderly movie critic just didn't get Scott Pilgrim, and also explains to me why so little of what these guys have to say about movies interests me anymore; they are just so goddamn old that their little souls have shrivelled to the point of having no ability to recognize joy when they encounter it in a movie anymore.

Looks like I'll have to change my "I generally dislike comedy" shtick, too, or I'll at least have to amend it with "unlike Edgar Wright's got something to do with it".

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,comedy,in short,felicia day,stephen mchattie,michael cera,mary elizabeth winstead,edgar wright

In short: Kaw (2007)

US small town sheriff Wayne (Sean Patrick Flanery) is going to be whisked away to the Big City by his newly acquired wife Cynthia (Kristin Booth) soon. Cynthia's a professor of Cultural Anthropology and initially only came to town to study the (single) Mennonite family of the place, but probably realized how ridiculous that project was and instead grabbed herself an ex-teen star.

I don't think Wayne did expect his last day as a sheriff to be filled with all the fun you have when fighting off a swarm of mad-cow-diseased, hyper-intelligent ravens who decide that now is a good time to improve their diet with human flesh.

Then there's some business about Cynthia spending half the film hiding in a well because she thinks the Mennonites want to sacrifice her. I mean, she's a Cultural Anthropologist, so she's gotta know best about the Mennonite sacrificin' ways, right?

Not that the day of school bus driver Clyde (Stephen McHattie, for some reason acting as good as if he were in a real movie) is any better. Protecting three annoying teenagers and their teacher from birds with the power of tool use ain't a tea party, either.

What starts out promising deeply derivative yet competently made 90 minutes of birdsploitation soon turns into a ridiculous pile of bad and deeply idiotic ideas delivered with all the style a film directed by some random dude the producers just grabbed from the street can muster.

I actually did like Sheldon Wilson's previous film Shallow Ground quite a bit, but that one seems to have been made by a very different person - someone who cares about making a good movie.

This isn't to say that Kaw isn't an entertaining film. In a "point and laugh at the movie" way, this can be a whole lot of fun. There are incredible amounts of lazy stupidity to laugh about, starting with the whole Mennonite business which is incredibly offensive, yet does make no sense whatsoever. Obviously "screenwriter" (and I use the term loosely) Benjamin Sztajnkrycer didn't even bother to research their religion and mores on Wikipedia, or he would have stumbled upon that whole non-violence thing.

The best, or most painful, moment goes to the birds, though. Nothing can beat the scene in which the (improved by mad cow disease!) ravens throw rocks at the school bus window to get at the tasty treats inside. Bruno Mattei himself would be proud.

Equally brilliant is the way the film keeps the characters isolated from each other in times of the cell phone. It just ignores that cell phones exist and are used by nearly everyone you'll meet in the real world. Obviously, if the film doesn't mention them, its audience won't realize that they are there. It's also possible that everything takes place in an alternative history where the cell phone was never invented, ravens are more clever than dolphins, and Mennonites are reeaaal frightening. Alas, the film never bothers to tell us.

The only thing the Kaw has going for it (well apart from surprisingly decent effects, but how cares about them in this context?) is Stephen McHattie, who puts so much more effort into his work than anyone else connected with the film that the words "tragic waste" can't help but come to mind.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,stephen mchattie,sheldon wilson,in short