In short: The Price We Pay (2022)

A trio of criminals – Stephen Dorff as the sensible one, Emile Hirsch in a risible performance as the kill-hungry psycho and some guy whose name I’m too lazy to look up as the soon to be dead one – and a hostage (Gigi Zumbado), fleeing the results of their bloody assault on a mafia-run pawnshop, end up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Sensible One and Psycho would be bound to murder one another sooner or later, but the dark and unintentionally funny secret below the farm is going to make that rather unnecessary.

Even working with little money, Ryuhei Kitamura only seldom can resist being a show-off, still loving tacky editing tricks and crap practical effects to bits. I would like him, and probably more of his movies, for this, but most of them end up lacking the sort of charm or aesthetic individuality that would make them work for me as the kind of cool exploitation fare they are so clearly supposed to be. To my eyes, most of his films are nearly totally lacking in this regard, as well as in decent scripts, with a couple of exceptions where I always assume somebody behind the scenes managed to channel Kitamura’s bad taste in the right directions to present his actual talents as a filmmaker.

This is not one of those movies, but rather an increasingly stupid mix of would-be post-Tarantino crime movie, torture porn, and a lot of annoyingly edited gore, mostly taking place in ugly, fake looking sets and of course a patch of desert. Dorff and Zumbado do their best with what they are given, but since the script by Kitamura and Christopher Jolley shows little idea of how to work clichés productively, and Hirsch is actively working against them, they are pretty much left alone.

Which leaves a couple of decent gore gags I’d probably have more patience for in a film made by someone working out of their family garage. So, hardly a movie at all.

Three Films Make A Post: Seclusion. Seduction. Survival.

The Detained aka Deadly Detention (2017): Ah, detention horror, the more high-school-y sub-genre of the corridor runner. Well, usually, it is. In the case of Blair Hayes’s The Detained, the corridors our detained high school kids run up and down and forwards and backwards and around in, above or under belong to a closed-down prison, for their high school has been closed because of an opossum infestation. Yup, this is one of those films that excuses all sorts of lame (and perhaps a wee bit lazy) aspects of its script by being all ironic and shit. So the main characters aren’t walking and talking clichés but ironic walking and talking clichés. We all know the drill by now. Does the “irony” add anything to the film? Does it help uncover any interesting insights? Of course not. To be fair, I have seen much worse in ironic horror, and much worse corridor runners. At least, the acting is decent, about every tenth cheesy joke is actually funny, and the basic aspects of filmmaking are perfectly competent. Hooray?

Jackals (2017): Plotwise, Kevin Greutert’s 80s set movie about the members of a family and a deprogrammer having to fight off a siege by a group of rather creepy cult members from whom they’ve stolen the family’s son back, is a very sparse film. The characters aren’t terribly deep either, but they are brought to life by a fine cast – Deborah Kara Unger, Johnathon Schaech, Stephen Dorff among them – and Greutert has an eye for using character archetypes in just the right way for the kind of film this is. Visually, Jackals is very atmospheric, and there are quite a few clever little touches: the cult’s use of animal masks and Greutert’s tendency to shoot them in silhouette is a prime example of how to make your antagonists feel ever so slightly worse than human. The pacing is excellent, and while I hoped in vain for an escalation in the direction of the supernatural, the whole film is just a tight, exciting little package in the best low budget movie tradition. Why, I even liked the kicker ending!


Wendy and Lucy (2008): This Kelly Reichardt film featuring Michelle Williams and a dog named Lucy might be among the saddest films I have seen in a long time. Plot-wise, it’s not about much more than an impoverished woman and her dog stranding on their way to Alaska in some horrible little town, with little outwardly happening, and that slowly. In truth, it’s a film about a personal apocalypse, a life that has turned to a dead end without the woman living it having quite noticed it (or perhaps rather admitted to herself), a society that replaces kindness with an insistence on proper procedures, bureaucracy, and money, and can’t even imagine not filtering everything through the lenses of these things. It’s also a film about what it means to be poor in the western world today (well, 2008, and things haven’t exactly improved, have they?), and how the worst cruelty is inflicted on people by other people who probably can’t even see it. There’s also an absolutely horrifying encounter with a half-crazed man played by Larry Fessenden that puts further emphasis on the way poor women have it even worse. It all adds up to something so sad, filmed and acted with such care, words – my words at least – can’t really do the film justice.

Feardotcom (2002)

Still haunted by his inability to shave properly catch a serial killer named The Doctor (strangely enough not Colin Baker, but Stephen Rea doing a silly voice and a silly accent, probably because he wanted something to do), despite the guy streaming his murders live on the internet, police detective Mike (Stephen Dorff or the piece of wood they painted to look like him) stumbles upon a series of very curious deaths. The victims seem to die in accidents or by somewhat natural causes, but all of them see terrible things before their deaths and bleed from the eyes. The last bit puts health inspector – or something – Terry (Natascha McElhone or a different piece of painted wood) on the case too, and she won’t stop helping Mike even though it’s clear after five minutes of investigation that there’s no illness involved in these deaths. The script will also very randomly drop a romance between Mike and Terry on us, even though none of the scenes between them suggest any emotional connection at all, let’s not even speak of chemistry. In fact, it looks as if the actors were just as surprised by the development as the audience is.

Anyway, some disconnected dialogue scenes that stand in for an investigation later, our heroes learn that the victims are killed by a haunted website with the rather awkward URL of “feardotcom.com”, an address that perfectly encapsulates the quality of the writing here. Apparently, the site is haunted (and designed?) by a ghost named Jeannine (sometimes Gesine Cukrowski in low level bondage gear, sometimes Jana Güttgemans, a little girl wearing a particularly obvious wig). Jeannine is a victim of the Doctor and uses her powers of net haunting to curse random people coming to her site. The curse will kill a victim after 48 hours of exposure via their greatest fear, unless, apparently, they catch the Doctor. Why Jeannine  thinks people like two German-speaking punks who have nothing whatsoever to do with law enforcement will be much help there, particularly since she doesn’t bother to actually tell her victims what she wants from them, is anybody’s guess. I’m not particularly hopeful the writers or director William Malone knew.

In fact, I have to hold myself back not to make a “you know nothing, Jon Snow” joke here, for the writing as a whole is so inconsistent, implausible and random in all the wrong ways, only utmost politeness can hold one back from heaping personal abuse on the people responsible. Consequently, the plot outline above is a best guess effort.

At the time it came out, Feardotcom was positioned as an attempt of getting at some of that sweet money reserved for bad US remakes of markedly superior Japanese horror films without actually having to buy any rights (or, one might add, perhaps with a degree of unkindness, without actually having a script). In practice, there certainly are some plot parallels to Nakata’s Ringu or Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo but there’s exactly zero of the complexity or aesthetic achievement of these films visible on screen. In fact, the film seems more in the spirit of Italian rip-off cinema of the 70s – with the little difference that where Italian rip-offs of successful movies were often highly entertaining, Feardotcom is mostly boring.

Much of that boredom is what happens when a cast of characters consisting of non-entities mostly lacking the single character trait even a slasher movie victim gets wander through thematically indifferent set-pieces which in turn meander between vapid and unexciting horror sequences shot in very dark rooms, third-rate would-be Seven-style serial killer non-thriller scenes shot in very dark rooms, and flash cuts too embarrassing even for a White Zombie or Marilyn Manson video clip.

I could probably live with the total lack of thematic coherence, the film’s disinterest in its own narrative, and the non-characters if the visual aspects of the film suggested anything beyond Malone having seen some music videos, and a David Fincher film and probably once having heard of Japan and Italy and now crapping it all back on screen without rhyme, reason, a concept, or even an idea of mood. The courageous handful of defenders of Feardotcom (and all power to defenders of hopeless causes like this) tend to argue the film is actually a rather stylish affair but to my eyes and ears, there’s no coherence to its style, and therefore no style at all.

In short: Space Truckers (1996)

John Canyon (Dennis Hopper) is one of the last independent interstellar freight haulers. Thanks to an unfortunate incident concerning a (space) truckload of genetically modified piggies and a guy getting sucked out of a space trucker diner window into the outer dark, Canyon has to haul ass from his latest stop quickly, having to take on a load meant for Earth that just stinks of trouble. Because it’s one of those weeks, he also finds himself teaming up with former Company (boo hiss) rookie trucker Mike Pucci (Stephen Dorff) and his own favourite (space) waitress, granddaughter-aged Cindy (Debi Mazar), the woman who has just promised to marry him if he gets her to Earth. There just might be a love triangle situation in the making here. Also, the mysterious load our heroes are carrying is a bunch of bio-mechanical warrior droids built to invade Earth for exactly the Corp Canyon hates so much. Should be an easy voyage, then.

To keep with the traditional intro sentence for every write-up of this silly SF comedy lark ever written: this is not the finest film Stuart Gordon ever directed. In fact, it’s pretty much a bunch of ideas that are not really funny enough to carry a whole film, connected by a series of random sight gags, a hilarious Western-style soundtrack, and actors like Dennis Hopper and Charles Dance seeming to have quite a bit of fun with the whole thing.

How much fun any given viewer will have with Space Truckers will probably depend on their patience with certain jokes just carried on for too long, their love for watching Dennis Hopper doing improbable things, and their willingness to trade in ninety minutes of their life time for a film that contains jokes about a cybernetic penis with a starter. At times, I found myself giggling merrily at the whole thing, appreciating the improbable yet fun production design; at other times, my eyes went to the clock and my thoughts to the age-old question if there’s an official rule that states comedies aren’t allowed to be plotted consistently or carry actual emotional weight beyond the jokes. In other words, Guardians of the Galaxy this is not, but it might be an okay way to while away one’s time. Or not. (Yup, I’m as decisive as the film’s plotting, here).

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