Three Films Make A Post: Lock The Bets.

To Your Last Death aka The Malevolent (2019): There’s hardly any horror animation coming from the USA, but even with that state of affairs, there’s no reason for anyone not into certain forms of sadomasochism to inflict this thing as directed by Jason Axinn on themselves. The best thing there is to say about the movie is that it managed to acquire some name actors, so Ray Wise rants, William Shatner babbles, Bill Moseley does a great Bill Moseley imitation, and so on. One can’t help but think that actual voice actors would have been a better investment as well as cheaper, but even then, there’d still be primitive animation with bland design and the script to cope with. The less said about the animation, the better; the script tries for the en vogue bashing of the rich but does so with no wit, without even the little insight you need for this sort thing, showing neither intelligence nor coming up with even a single interesting idea.

Emma (2020): Fair warning: I’m not an admirer of Jane Austen’s smug and self-satisfied style of irony that only ever snarks at things but does sod all to change them at the best of times – I’m more of a Bronte kind of guy. However, Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation of Austen’s “Emma” has problems all of its own making, namely a love for emotional abstraction and ironic distance that makes Austen’s work feel emotionally involved, and a tendency to aestheticize every single frame so that it basically screams “2020!” without any reason for it apart from the film feeling the need to tell its audience how very clever it is. It’s like The Favourite without the gall, the smarts, the empathy hidden behind cynicism and without the point in this. However, from time to time – I blame the excellent cast as lead by Anya Taylor-Joy – the film suddenly stops posing for a scene or two, threatening to turn its talking clothes horses into actual people for good, only to fall back into smug self-satisfaction and that deathly distance a couple of minutes later.

I honestly have no idea what the filmmakers were thinking.

Yella (2007): But let’s end on a less annoyed note. Nominally, German director Christian Petzold’s Yella reworks the basic set-up of the grand Carnival of Souls here, but in practice he’s using just as much of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, showing himself in typically German fashion more interested in the psychological than the ghostly and weird. This is still a wonderful film, mind you, just don’t go in expecting a movie that’s in dialogue with Herk Harvey’s film. What we get is a sort-of thriller about love grown bitter, abuse and most of all the horrors of late capitalism and how they twist and shape people, all embodied in a great, nuanced performance by Nina Hoss.


As is necessary for this sort of material, Petzold is great at handling ambiguities, portraying states of mind, personality and world that have drifted into liminal spaces. Small town Germany and the kind of German city Petzold usually treats always have that quality of liminality, an air of irreality one has to have experienced to believe, so they are a perfect fit for a cinematic ghost story. It sometimes still surprises me so few German filmmakers make any ghost stories.

In short: Jeepers Creepers II (2003)

A few days after his happy adventures in Jeepers Creepers, and just a day before the end of his 23-day eating orgy, the Creeper (Jonathan Breck) naps the younger son of of farmer Jack Taggart (Ray Wise). Take note, for Jack’ll build a custom harpoon cannon later on.

But before we get to Jack and his harpoon cannon, we get to witness the monster’s stalking of and attacks on a busload of jocks and three cheerleaders. I can barely tell these people apart, except that some guys are black, one white dude with little pig eyes is a racist and a homophobe, and one of the cheerleaders (Nicki Aycox) develops some clairvoyant powers to take care of exposition duties. There’s a bit of a sidestep into would-be Lord of the Flies territory that doesn’t even manage the standard of early The 100, and a bit of monster fighting until the film devolves/culminates in about half an hour of increasingly silly action sequences featuring Ray “Harpoon Farmer” Wise.

Usually, I’m all for sequels that aren’t exact copies of their originals, and I’m most certainly for them escalating things appropriately. Alas, the second Jeepers Creepers, again directed and – unfortunately - this time around also written by Victor Salva, is the kind of sequel that throws the baby out with the bathwater, completely misunderstanding and ignoring what was good about the first film and mostly doing the opposite. Which leads to a slightly more upmarket SyFy Original movie, and a film I probably would have enjoyed more if it – being a sequel – had not automatically invited direct comparison to the first film.

So where the first Jeepers was a film that used its monster as a mystery with increasingly bizarre powers, whose mixture of the generic and the very strange turns it into something threatening and surprising the sequel treats it as a permanently flying, mugging – Freddy Krueger style wise-cracking can’t be far off – dude in a monster suit off-handedly taking on a busload of non-entities that can replace the first one’s siblings only in number and getting into a harpoon fight with a just as wildly mugging Ray Wise (whom I buy about as much as a farmer as I’d buy myself in the role). Where the first film is actually creepy and clever, this one starts silly and becomes outright stupid early on, culminating in the whole harpoon fight sequence, which has to be seen to be believed.

Now, I’m not saying it’s not fun watching this kind of nonsense – it certainly is, particularly since Salva may not care about recreating anything of the mood of the first film but sure as hell still knows how to shoot a pretty looking picture – it’s just that this sort of nonsense is a terrible sequel to Jeepers Creepers.

Digging Up the Marrow (2014)

Horror director Adam Green (in a somewhat meta move played by Digging’s director Adam Green) has been contacted by one William Dekker (Ray Wise). Dekker claims to know about a secret society of the monstrous and the deformed who have moved underground into a place he calls the Marrow, and that he’s been observing their activities from a distance ever since.

Dekker now wants Green to document his experiences, and the film we are watching is of course the supposed product of that documentary work. There are early hints – apart from his theories – that Dekker is either much crazier than he seems or lying to Green and his intrepid camera man Will Barratt (actual camera man Will Barratt about whose actual intrepidness I know nothing but hope much), but although the director catches them, he really rather wants to believe that monsters are real. Plot developments will in turn push Green in turn closer to the side of belief as well as closer to a healthy scepticism but – this being a horror movie and all – there might just be something in his future that’ll convince him which of the positions is true. Which, as it turns out, just might not be the position more conducive to his, or his wife’s Rileah’s (actual wife of Adam Green Rileah Vanderbilt) physical health.

I am, as I so often am, quite surprised by how much I enjoyed Adam Green’s fake documentary, specifically because I hated his Hatchet, loathed his Hatchet 2, and really didn’t like his Frozen at all, which is not the sort of thing that makes a boy optimistic about his encounters with a director’s further works. Digging Up the Marrow is of course quite a different film from those three, and while it shares the Hatchet movies’ love for showing off its director’s – clearly humongous – knowledge of horror history, it does not generally do this by going for the most obvious goal in the most mean-spirited manner. Where the director’s other films always felt to me like smug declarations of superiority about their own material (though I’m pretty sure they are not meant that way, going by interviews with Green), Digging Up instead feels like a love letter, in particular to the monsters of Alex Pardee (whose inspired monsters come to life a little in the final act in rather awesome form), Nightbreed, found footage movies, and probably Ray Wise, realized with just the right degree of critical distance.

The main element of the film I suspect quite a few people will have their problems with (apart from the usual, “found footage sucks”, “we’ve seen this all before and it’s just not realistic” etc, blah blah that always seems curious to me in a genre where people will gladly watch the 678th Friday the 13th film about a dead killer with a hockey mask killing the same clichés as in the 677 movies before), is Green’s decision to centre the film on a fictionalized version of himself instead of a random made-up director character. I’m of a bit of two minds on this one. I can see how Green doing Green in an environment that actually is his own adds to the veracity as well as the ironic element of the film, adding that decisive bit of real documentary to the fake documentary. On the other hand, there are a few moments that seem to be a bit too self-indulgent, like the scene with Kane Hodder whose only function seems to be to demonstrate that Green hangs out with Kane Hodder, something that’s only very tangentially relevant for anything else in the movie. As an actor, Green is fortunately not too bad, so there’s no problem there; as a director, he manages to keep a film where really not much happens early on moving without piling on stuff, avoiding the pitfall of all bad and many mediocre POV horror films, the draggy first hour, while doing some clever and subtle stuff with misdirecting his audience’s attention.

Speaking of acting, a part of Digging Up’s particular charm rests on the shoulders of Ray Wise, whose performance as Dekker is absolutely fantastic, making a joy of scenes that really only consist of him talking to Green describing his monster encounters and dubious theories, scenes that could in lesser hands have turned out so silly, they could have robbed the film of all tension and believability. Not surprisingly, Wise is still great at being intense and weird, selling everything he needs to sell, the peculiarities in his behaviour the film’s narrative will never (and really can’t) explain feeling like actual parts of Dekker’s persona.

That alone is wonderful stuff, but Digging Up is additionally a rather clever film that actually has something to say about our (it’s possibly the “humanity at large”-us, even) need or want to belief, the paradox lying at the heart of wanting to believe in monsters and loving monsters like we horror fans tend to do, all expressed with degrees of elegance you don’t see every day. And would you believe it, finding what one wishes for might just see one ending up staring into a camera like the character in a Lovecraft tale scribbling his final message about a hand at his window?

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In short: The Rift (1990)

aka Endless Descent

A new-fangled, experimental military sub, the "Siren", has disappeared in the depths of the ocean, all contact to it has been lost. The contractor company responsible for the sub brings its designer Wick Hayes (Jack Scalia), who had left them once it became clear his bosses were working for the military, back into the fold to take part in the rescue mission for the "Siren". They're quite convincing, too, for if Wick doesn't help the company they'll put all the blame for the submarine's accident on him, even though they changed the initial design so heavily the ship's not even using the same type of drive anymore. I suspect not even the patent office would buy that one, but then my name's not Wick.

Anyhow, to make the rescue mission as successful as possible, it is decided that the rescue submarine will be the "Siren II", of the exact same build and model as the disappeared ship (because why not take a gamble), commanded by tough Captain Phillips (R. Lee Ermey at his least shouty), and crewed by a random assortment of people of various nationalities (as you do when hunting top secret submarines), among them the obvious traitor (Ray Wise), the black "comic" relief character (John Toles-Bey), the Italian comic relief cook, and Hayes's ex-wife (Deborah Adair). Need I even mention that everybody on board has already been informed it's supposed to be Wick's fault that the "Siren I" disappeared?

Whatever can go wrong when the mission turns into a fight against a big underwater rubber monster, and later leads our heroes into a sub-oceanic cave full of a whole zoo of various other rubber monsters?

The Rift, a Spanish-US co-production, is veteran Spanish director of schlock Juan Piquer Simon's entry into the small late 80s/early 90s wave of kinda-sorta underwater Aliens-by-way-of-Abyss rip-offs. I suspect this specific sub-sub-genre came to pass when an exploitation film producer finally realized that there just wasn't room in space anymore for further Aliens-a-likes, and used all his power of creativity to think up the high concept of "Aliens under water".

Simon's film is actually one of the more entertaining entries into this not particularly awesome circle of films, mostly because it, while putting a check mark beside a lot of Aliens' plot points, has the feel of a type of slightly SF-nal horror movie that could have been made anytime between the 50s and the time of its own production. Sure, the 50s version would have been a bit less gory, and a few details would have been different (no evil government experiments in the 50s, but radiation problems), the basics however are still the same, and the audience still watches mostly to see some monsters.

Simon seems to realize this quite clearly, and does a nice, clean direction job of the pretty silly and flat script, without wasting much time on filler, characterization or any other stuff that doesn't have anything to do with showing us monsters doing monster stuff or charming submarine models.

The whole affair is a bit dumb, obviously, and scientifically dubious (there's even some reversing of polarity going on), but it's also unpretentious and fun, which is all I would ever ask of a film like it.

 

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