Past Misdeeds: Late Phases (2014)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

His son Will (Ethan Embry) helps move blind, retired soldier Ambrose (Nick Damici again proving the fact he’s one of today’s great genre actors when it comes to playing working class people - if you watch the right movies) into a gated retirement community. Things haven’t gone well between the two men for years, Ambrose wearing his sightlessness like an armour around his emotions, and Will clearly having lost most of his patience with the old man years ago.

On his very first night, something that looks a lot like a werewolf to the audience kills Ambrose’s friendly neighbour. Afterwards, it attacks him as well, but thanks to his seeing eye dog Shadow (Raina) and the curious fact that the ocularly disabled are still allowed to own guns in the US of A (!?) the old man stays safe. Shadow, alas dies. The local authorities don’t seem to let a little thing like a dead old lady and a nearly murdered blind man disturb them much. The area of the gated community is well-known for animal attacks, so the whole thing ends up with everybody around shrugging it off as just one of these things.

Everyone, that is, except for Ambrose, who very quickly decides there’s a werewolf attacking during the night of the full moon, and that he’s the man who will get rid of it, blindness be damned. Consequently, Ambrose starts preparing for the next full moon, by very pointedly not burying his dog while still running around with a shovel, buying a huge gravestone, and annoying the most easily annoyed group of neighbours with his mixture of cantankerous humour and soldier-as-working-class member directness in an attempt to ferret out the werewolf. He somewhat comes to like the local priest (Tom Noonan, winner of this week’s price for the most impressive off-handed performance in a movie) but there’s still a werewolf to kill and – so Ambrose seems to plan – to die decently in the process, on one’s own terms.

Who’d have thought that director Adrián García Bogliano would go from often sleazy – yet certainly worthwhile - backyard horror and exploitation to making something like this (or his last two or three movies before it) - a clever, character-based piece of low budget horror that seems old-fashioned in all the good ways? Though I should probably call it classicist instead of old-fashioned, for Bogliano’s particular forte here lies in evoking the spirit of low budget genre films of the 70s and 80s. Not in a “retro” kind of manner, mind you, but via an approach to his material that seems inspired by a different era without using that era’s outward appearance as a signifier of coolness.

So his first US film – for Larry Fessenden’s (who of course also has his mandatory mini-role, this time around as a mildly sleazy gravestone seller) Glass Eye Pix – isn’t very interested in irony, or in jump scares, or in a making a movie based on other movies, but rather in exploring his main character with the help of some suspenseful werewolf shenanigans. This works out very nicely for the audience and the film, thanks to a script by Eric Stolze that uses a not exactly original character and problem (the capital-m Man who can’t express his feelings, and pushes everyone away he cares about; the old man looking for a decent way to die), and a set-up that could feel painfully gimmicky exceedingly well. And while this certainly isn’t the first (nor will it be the last) film about a man who only ever expresses himself through violence (for Ambrose’s often very funny cantankerousness is a mild form of violence too) I’ve seen this year, I don’t think there will be many others that’ll manage to make the character feel quite as real, and that are able to show the flawed humanity behind the mask without feeling the need to lay the blame for his flaws on everyone else.

As the film plays out, I found Ambrose’s (too) late attempt to reach out to his son to be quite touching, with Bogliano and Stolze resisting the temptation of laying it on too thick. The film isn’t just about Ambrose and his emotional problems, though, it also explores his and other characters’ reaction to their aging, to the realization that they are indeed in the last part of their lives and won’t ever be able to make up for their sins perceived and real, and never be able to truly change again. Unless they are a werewolf, of course, but that’s not the sort of change that does much for one’s personal development.

And while this all sounds rather nice in a character study sort of way, Late Phases also works well as a suspenseful little werewolf film. There aren’t – of course, given the film’s financial means – many large set pieces, but Bogliano has grown really good at staging suspense scenes with whatever means he has available, as well as at creating the correct mood for the tale he’s going to tell, pacing the character parts and the action effortlessly and actually building to quite a fine climax.


There are a few niggles to be had with the film, but there's really only one larger point I can come up with. It's the werewolf. While the make-up and costume certainly has individual character, it also looks a bit too much like a costume, and a very cute one at that, with Bogliano spending no effort at all hiding how awkward it looks in action. If that sort of thing distracts you terribly, I foresee distraction; I can cope with a weakness like it when the movie surrounding it is as clever and tight as Late Phases is.

In short: Manhunter (1986)

Before Anthony Hopkins chewed the scenery as Hannibal Lector, there was this Michael Mann adaptation of Robert Harris’s first novel featuring everyone’s favourite cannibalistic psychiatrist/psychiatric cannibal (in a minor role). Brian Cox gives a rather more laidback Hannibal (in this case named Lecktor), because on the psycho side, Manhunter is mostly the show of Tom Noonan as Francis Dollarhyde. Noonan goes for a performance that finds the wounded in the grotesque and the horrible, making Dollarhyde relatable as a terrible human being because we can still see his humanity in his monstrosity. In a way, Dollarhyde reflects William Petersen’s Will Graham who has wounded himself by having to become the grotesque and the horrible to understand it.

Plotwise, after about three million post Silence of the Lambs films, Manhunter does look rather quotidian, with Graham basically having all the problems all movie profilers have (whereas real life profilers, going by the books they write when they retire, mostly seem to suffer from badly inflated egos and a concept of their own importance you don’t need to be a cosmicist to find ridiculous), Dollarhyde’s peculiar obsessions looking downright sensible compared to the nonsense many of his later colleagues will get up to, and a lot of dialogue sounding very much like the psycho procedural movie version of “yada yada”. However, there’s not just Noonan’s strong performance to carry the film but also Michael Mann’s peculiar sensibilities as a director. Never has the plot been written that Mann will not turn strange through an emphasis on atypical plot beats, and the staging of scenes in highly stylized and individual manners.

In this case, Mann has decided to bury his characters in horrifying modernist architecture and the colour white, suggesting that a lot of what’s wrong with these people is caused by an overabundance of white light.

Three Films Make A Post: When the force was with them, NO-ONE stood a chance!

Final Girl (2015): Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is the best example of the problem with being consciously weird when you don’t actually have the imagination for it I’ve seen in quite a while. What is supposed to be strange only ever feels stilted and campy; what’s supposed to be dark and deep only ever turns out to be cheap and stylized for no reason. Sure, the film’s pretty to look at in its “oh, I wish I were David Lynch” kind of way, but there’s nothing at all behind the stylish pictures, and the style itself is too derivative and too pretentious to carry any meaning. Watching the film mostly left me with one big question, and not the generally interesting “what does it all mean?” or even just “what the fuck?”, but the tired old “what’s the point?”. The film sure doesn’t know, and I can’t say I found myself even caring.

The Monster Squad (1987): Fred Dekker’s much beloved movie about a bunch of kids fighting against Dracula who is getting back the band of monsters together leaves me a bit cold. Sure, I do get the film’s enthusiasm for the classic Universal monster canon, I appreciate the care the film takes with its details, and I sure as hell am not going to be too much against a kiddie monster movie that features an elderly KZ survivor in an important role (though I sure would appreciate if the film had bothered to cast someone for the role who actually speaks German instead of the ungrammatical mispronounced gobbledygook the script uses). However, I also find the film’s action not very exciting, the emotional parts too sentimental without actually working for my tears, and honestly never found myself caring about the kids (or the early turned to the side of goodness Frankenstein monster as tear-jerked by Tom Noonan). Or maybe I’m just allergic to nostalgia.

Tuno negro (2001): To dislike this Spanish slasher movie with some promising bits of giallo thrown in the mix, you don’t need to be allergic to anything but to dithering films that don’t know for what tone they are going nor are well enough directed to get away with the rapid tonal shifts. Part of the film’s problem I’d lay on it having two directors in Pedro L. Barbero and Vicente J. Martín who don’t seem to have come to an agreement of what film they were actually making, nor on how to realize it. So bits and pieces of 90s psychopath thriller, giallo, erotic thriller, and conspiracy movie are thrown all over the place without either script or direction being able to connect them. On the positive side, there are two or three good ideas among the dross, and the film’s use of the university of Salamanca and Spanish minstrels/serenade singers certainly does give the film at least interesting local colour beyond the usual slasher style.

Now, if it only did something more interesting with it.

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On ExB: Late Phases (2014)

I don’t know what your doctor recommends against the troubles of old age, but mine suggests a bit of werewolf hunting now and then.

So it’s quite a happy coincidence that Adrián García Bogliano’s Late Phases has quite a bit to say about old age and werewolves. You can find my thoughts on the movie over at the sort of hairy looking Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,adrián garcía bogliano,nick damici,ethan embry,tom noonan,other places

The House Of The Devil (2009)

It's some time in the early 80s. Financially desperate college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) stumbles upon a strangely lucrative baby sitting job for an even stranger couple, the Ulmans (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov).

Only when Samantha arrives at the couple's house somewhere far outside the city she's studying in does Mr. Ulman explain that this isn't exactly a babysitting job, but that he and his wife want Samantha to watch over Mrs. Ulman's mother. Sam is not keen at all about that change of plans, and only when Ulman offers her a preposterous $400 for one night of work does she agree to do the job.

Ulman explains that Samantha probably won't even see the old woman, and that he only needs her to be there in case an undisclosed kind of emergency happens. Surely, this strange job won't have anything to do with the lunar eclipse that will happen this night?

Once she's alone, the young woman is getting increasingly tense. It takes some time, a bit too much of the unhealthy atmosphere of the house, and some hints at the fact that the Ulmans were lying to her, but after a while even Samantha begins to feel that the whole set-up just isn't right. Of course, at that point, it's already too late and Samantha's new career as victim of satanic rituals can begin.

Ti West's The House of the Devil is a full-blooded piece of retro cinema. Not satisfied with using elements of a certain subset of the satanic panic movies of the late 70s and early to mid-80s, and mixing them with modern ideas, West goes all out in pretending he is in fact making his film in the 80s (and alas, also in avoiding any new ideas getting into it). Film stock, camera angles, the faces of the actors, the music, even the titles, everything here is designed to emulate a very precisely defined group of grim, slow and suspenseful but not too gory horror films, and it's difficult to argue with the success of that part of West's effort.

Sure, the film might be a tad too slow - especially in its middle parts - for many contemporary viewers, but so were the films West is imitating here. However, the slowness, as well as the fact that the audience knows much earlier about the danger Samantha is in as she does herself, are the film's way of generating suspense without having to show much more than the increasingly nervous young woman in a creepy house. For my tastes, it works out fine, but not everyone who has seen the film seems to agree with me here. The word combination "slow and boring" is tossed about quite often by people talking about House of the Devil, and for once, I can understand where they are coming from. Not everybody is made for watching (creepy) bonsai trees grow.

My main problem with The House of the Devil has nothing whatsoever to do with its pacing or anything technical about it.

The problem is the strange lack of ambition beyond making a film that is exactly like some (well-loved, excellent) films made in an earlier era of the genre West's film shows, the spirit of imitation that is so strong West even consciously copies the flaws of those films. Of course, it beats making another remake of a well-loved film that doesn't understand the spirit of the original and doesn't have any ideas of its own worth a new film, but it only avoids the first of these problems.

It's a wonderful thing that West is inspired by parts of the horror genre that seem forgotten and ignored by too many directors working in the genre today and tries to use techniques that have gone out of style quite unjustly, but the product of the director's labours misses out on the next step: using the style and the techniques to make a film of his own, preferably a film of his own time that speaks to and about contemporary anxieties as the films of the 80s spoke about the anxieties of their times. There's no need to just repeat what the old movies said - they already said it, and they are still there to repeat what they said on the flick of a remote.

The House of the Devil is a great replica of great horror movies, and is certainly enjoyable and technically impressive, yet it's so caught up in its admiration of a different era that it's lacking a personality of its own. It's the "retro" dilemma in full effect.

 

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