by ·Comments Off on The Loved Ones (2009, Sean Byrne)

Another rock & roll movie from the Devil’s Candy guy. Traumatic backstory comes back around in the end in a different way than expected. Lola likes a boy Brent, but the boy likes Holly. So Lola has her dad kidnap the boy and bring him home to enact their own little prom. The boy is resistant to this idea, so they nail his foot to the floor, then drill a hole in his skull and threaten to “boil his brains.” He escapes and kills the dad, so she throws him into the boyfriend pit… but he’s got a hammer, and now has to kill all the boyfriends.

The boy must’ve been a coworker in Send Help, his Cooper Hoffman-like friend was in The Proposition, and Cooper’s goth prom date is now Sonya Blade in the Mortal Kombat movies.

by ·Comments Off on Night Visions, part 1 (2001-02)

Discovered a whole anthology horror series I’d never heard of before, from a couple of Goosebumps producers, hosted (succinctly) by Henry Rollins. What joy!

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Quiet Please (Joe Dante)

Nervous city boy Cary Elwes goes camping to relax, only to spend the whole trip trying to get away from noisy, arrogant camper Brian Dennehy. But it turns out Cary is the serial killer the city news had been reporting on, bad luck for Brian.

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The Occupant (Joe Dante)

Someone is intruding in divorcee Bridget Fonda’s house and moving stuff around, only enough so she’ll notice, not to tip off the police. She thinks someone is living hidden in her house – tries telling her ex, tries telling a random guy who buys her dinner when her card is declined, tries praying to god. Turns out Bridget is the person living hidden in the house – it hasn’t belonged to her since the divorce. That’s the second episode in a row where our tormented protagonist turns out to be the dangerous crazy person (and this was better than the camping story).

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The Bokor (Start Gordon)

Real clunky writing, as the cadaver assigned to a team of medical students turns out to be a bokor, “an evil voodoo priest.” But this was a fakeout by one student (the princess in Super Mario Bros.) to scare the others (a Bride of Chucky cop and a Lucky Louie regular), so her doctor boyfriend (Jason London of Carrie 2) can bury them alive for witnessing him stealing morphine. Twist: he double-crosses his girl and buries them all then goes home to his sweet morphine. Twist: Princess knew about bokors because she is one, and returns from the grave to dissect him alive.

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Patterns (Start Gordon)

Nicely apocalyptic, the best of this batch with the classiest cast. In interview with psychologist Miguel Ferrer (deep in between Twin Peaks seasons), arrestee Malcolm McDowell (in a slack period before replacing Donald Pleasence in the Halloween remakes) nervously explains that he has a contract with god and needs to do his OCD rituals or else people die. Ferrer is not convinced, so they drug and isolate the patient, then reality starts collapsing in a manner more random-cartoony than apocalyptic-horror, now Ferrer needs to take over doing the OCD patterns in order to keep the planes in the sky.

by ·Comments Off on Three Extremes (2004, Miike & Park & Chan)

Dumplings (Fruit Chan)

Bai Ling of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is abortionist-chef Aunt Mei, and her latest rich customer is from Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2. I once watched the feature-length version of this on bootleg DVD, which defeats the point of bathing in all the lovely green shades brought out by Christopher Doyle, shooting a WKW movie without the blurry slow-mo. The movie’s other point is to gross you out with all the baby-eating, which evokes Monty Python’s crunchy frog sketch. Customer wants to look youthful forever so her bigshot husband Tony 2 will keep liking her, and maybe eating babies is the answer? Nice peek into early-century medicine, doctor handing out mood-altering pills to pregnant women.

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Cut (Park Chan-wook)

Opening long-take of a vampire film-in-the-film, the camera doing that post-Fight Club thing where it has to float through objects. Later, the vampire film’s director (the No Other Choice guy) has been tied up on the same set, while an extra from his films explains his class resentment while chopping off fingers from the director’s pianist wife (the chef/daughter of Oldboy). The extra has got an overcomplicated revenge plot (and a nice dance routine), and everyone ends up confessing too many things until the wife gets close enough to bite her kidnapper’s neck off, then the director strangles her while she’s still immobile.

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Box (Takashi Miike)

Writer dreams of a man burying a box, then has a long, slow conversation with her agent. Writer is near-catatonic, flashbacks reveal she was half of a contortionist circus act whose act involved two sisters who could fold themselves into two small boxes. One night she locked her sister in the box and attacked their keeper with a dart, then the place burned down. Sorry to make the movie sound exciting – it’s mostly her moving very slowly while feeling trauma, reliving the fire again and again, until her dreams/visions allow her to apologize to the dead sister in the box after being berated by the circusmaster.

by ·Comments Off on Accident (2009, Soi Cheang)

Sourfaced Louis Koo leads a hitman squad, staging deaths as accidents, along with older Uncle, female Woman, and Lam Suet. They pull off their latest job – electrocution via kite string – but Uncle is losing his marbles, then an out-of-control bus plows into Lam Suet. Louis starts tailing people involved with the job, convinced his team is being taken out by a rival. He thinks Woman is against him so he kills her, then their final client falls from a window. Gorman: “Master of the surveillance state goes crazy when the apparatus is turned against him, then has an epiphany about the cruel vicissitudes of pure chance.”

Koo between the Election movies and Breaking/Romancing. Woman was Anthony Wong’s wife in Motorway. Lam Suet was Lam Suet. Uncle was a Sammo/Jackie Lucky Star who died last Halloween. Next year we should have a Devil’s Vendetta / Ghost Snatchers double-feature in his honor.

by ·Comments Off on Funny Games U.S. (2007, Michael Haneke)

Hadn’t watched the original in so long I’ve forgotten most of it, so why not refresh my memory with the remake, which everyone says is exactly the same movie but in English. No missteps noted in the adaptation, this worked out great for everything except the actors’ reputations. I’ve only seen one movie each by tormented parents Naomi Watts and Tim Roth (not counting Twin Peaks season 3) in the last two decades but maybe that’s a me-problem. Tormentor Michael Pitt was tenth-billed in Seven Psychopaths (so, not a psychopath). His softer-spoken (briefly-dead) co-conspirator is Brady Corbet, who was just getting started, first starring in all the big arthouse dramas and now directing them.

Family members attempt escape, all are caught and executed, just another stop on these guys’ tour of lake houses. When these movies first came out I wasn’t familiar with Naked City, which plays a couple times, but now I realize the movie is about two cool John Zorn fans struggling to put up with regular society.

by ·Comments Off on La Captive (2000, Chantal Akerman)

Tense music cranks up as pretty, vacant young Simon (Almeyer, also in Oliveira’s La Lettre) realizes everyone is keeping secrets from him. His beloved Ariane (Sylvie Testud of Lourdes) loves to sleep, tells him nothing of substance, changes her stories.

After she sings a courtyard duet with a neighbor, Simon goes out to solve the mystery of women, asks some women about their relationships with each other, takes everything they say literally, then comes home and confuses his girlfriend, deciding they should break up, then deciding they should stay together, until she swims out and disappears in the sea.

Impeccable looking movie. I immediately read the Christine Smallwood book afterwards, a very good analysis of Akerman and Proust tied together with the right amount of autobiography.

Simon with his grandma Françoise Bertin, a Resnais regular:

Smallwood:

The film constantly switches registers. There is a softcore shower scene; conversations that are screwball in their absurdity; an expressionist dream of dramatic shadows; a line of simpering sex workers straight out of Fellini; a talky, Rohmer-esque conversation about love over drinks in a bar.

by ·Comments Off on Joint Security Area (2000, Park Chan-wook)

Part political/military drama, part murder investigation, and part a Korean Joyeux Noel. Park’s third feature, and his earliest to make a splash over here, with the future stars of Lady Vengeance, No Other Choice, and Parasite. At a tense militarized border, a couple southerners accidentally cross north and aren’t received too badly, so they cross north again and again, hanging out with their new friends. After they’re discovered and a shootout ensues, it’s up to Lady V to discover the truth.

by ·Comments Off on The State I Am In (2000, Christian Petzold)

Would’ve made a good One Battle After Another double-feature. A wanted couple is staying on the move, low on resources and comrades. Their teenage daughter is starting to become a liability, acting impulsively and attracting attention. In increasing order of importance, the daughter just wants: cigarettes, stability, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, trip-hop. A boy she meets tells her about his parents vacant modernist house, so the family moves in and plans one more bank job. Surely if they can pull this one off they’ll be home free.

Dad ended up in the teen trilogy Vampire Sisters. Mom would return as the mom in Miroirs No. 3, and the girl would go on to be stunt-cast in Carlos.

by ·Comments Off on Down With Love (2003, Peyton Reed)

Revisited one of the greatest battle-of-the-sexes 1960s-flashback non-musical comedies with K and her mom. Really a two-person show, with good supporting parts for Ewan’s boss Niles (who should’ve been in more movies) and Renee’s agent Sarah Paulson (unfortunately best known as the psychologist in Glass).