by ·Comments Off on We Are What We Are (2010, Jorge Michel Grau)

Oh whoops, I thought I heard this was really good, but now I see all C-ratings from criticwire. Maybe I heard that about the gender-reversed remake by the Cold In July guy. Anyway, when a remake is available it’s usually a sure bet to watch the original first, and I thought a Jorge Michael Grau horror would be a nice tie-in with the Jorge Grau horror (no apparent relation) I just watched – a GRAUsome double-feature to go with SCOTtober.

A man dies at the mall, and his family pretty much falls apart, immediately losing their watch-selling business, starting fights and calling attention to themselves. Older Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro, the dad from Here Comes The Devil) is supposed to be the new leader, which violent, impulsive brother Julian resents. Dad used to bring fresh bodies to his cannibal wife and kids, and he apparently never trained the rest of them in the art of not being noticed, so the two boys perform some blatant attacks and end up bringing home a prostitute, but mom doesn’t approve of prostitutes and brings the body back to her vindictive friends. The movie also follows Let Sleeping Corpses Lie‘s lesson that cops are absolutely the worst – corrupt and terrible at their jobs.

A few interesting shots and good performances but mostly the movie is being purposely obscure and no fun, as if actng weird about its cannibal violence can turn it into Dogtooth. Played at Cannes alongside The Silent House, Sound of Noise and Bedevilled. Grau made Ingrown in the first ABCs of Death, has a new agoraphobia thriller called Big Sky.

by ·Comments Off on The Nightmare (2015, Rodney Ascher)

Self-reflexive documentary interviewing a few people who suffer from sleep paralysis, during which they feel like they’re awake but unable to move and being tormented by malevolent entities in their room. Ascher’s movies are always a pleasure to watch – the sound, editing, and reenactment footage are all great here. It includes occasional behind-the-scenes footage – slates, the camera resetting for a creepy move behind a wall, the “entity” actors prepping a shot – as if to remind us that they’re reenactments.

Arguably not a horror movie, but it’s the first movie since Candyman that I’ve been afraid would follow me out of the screen into the real world, since some people begin experiencing sleep paralysis after hearing stories about it. Therefore it is one of the most effective horror movies ever. Also disturbing in the way that it ends – one sufferer finds Jesus and quits having nightmares, the others have some ideas but it seems like their torment is still ongoing.

A. Nayman for Cinema Scope:

[Ascher] suggests that the sorts of visions common to sleep paralysis are actually deeply embedded in the collective subconscious. Exactly how they got there in the first place is a question that The Nightmare doesn’t really try to answer, but its entire M.O. is baldly provocative. Like the haunted TV broadcasts in Ascher’s beloved Halloween III: Season of the Witch or the cursed videotape in The Ring, it’s a film that means to infect its audience with its imagery.

by ·Comments Off on Crimson Peak (2015, Guillermo del Toro)

Can’t figure out why this was made – straightforward haunted-house murder story with predictable twists, feeling at times like a remake of The Devil’s Backbone minus the evocative wartime setting. One character sees ghosts that lead her to the truth behind some murders, ghosts have similar look to the earlier film, phantom blood emanating from cracked-china holes in their translucent faces. But it’s undeniably a beautiful film, sumptuously designed with gorgeous candlelight and shadows and snowy mist, falling leaves, costumes, big creepy crumbling house, and so on. Nice iris-out effects complete the period look. Definitely good to see Guillermo returning to his gothic-horror roots – an enjoyable film to soak in, leaving me satisfied without that post-Martian malaise.

Mia Wasikowska has become a fave of scary/creepy movies (Stoker, The Double), plays a bookish New Yorker with rich dad Jim Beaver (TV’s Deadwood and Supernatural). Incestuous baron siblings Loki (Mia’s Only Lovers Left Alive costar) and Jessica Chastain (Take Shelter, Interstellar) are in town raising funds for their clay-excavation machine. Loki marries Mia and takes her home to England where she discovers he does this a lot, and the bodies/ghosts of his previous rich-girl wives are buried in red clay pools in the basement. Pacific Rim star Charlie Hunnam is Mia’s friend from home who comes to her rescue. Did I mention that Jessica Chastain is an axe murderer? That’s something you don’t expect.

by ·Comments Off on The Martian (2015, Ridley Scott)

Every year a new Jessica Chastain movie where Matt Damon’s left all alone on a planet. A Ridley Scott movie with screenplay by Drew Goddard, I was expecting the light tone, the relentless science (this movie loves science), the upbeat ending, the highly convincing Martian landscapes, but I wish the visuals were half as impressive as those in Prometheus. Maybe I needed to watch the 3D version.

Wounded Damon is left on planet by Chastain and Michael Peña and crew, NASA head Jeff Daniels argues with project head Chiwetel Ejiofor and something head Sean Bean on what to do, with further ground help from Kristen Wiig and Donald Glover and Eddy Ko.

I completely enjoyed this at the time, so not sure if it’s the movie’s fault or some other reason that I turned on it a few days later, deciding it was formulaic entertainment and that all movies look the same and I need to start watching new kinds of things before I start boring myself. I’m looking at showtimes for Crimson Peak and Bridge of Spies and Coming Home and Truth and Sicario and Beasts of No Nation and thinking “ugh, how awful” and pondering going on an avant-garde spree (or at least a Nagisa Oshima spree) instead. It’s probably just a phase. In the meantime, The Martian is my Birdman of the year: convincing in a theater, troubling immediately afterward.

by ·Comments Off on Here Comes The Devil (2012, Adrian Garcia Bogliano)

Intense movie, and a good one to have watched right after Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Prologue of illicit lesbian sex followed by an intruder cutting off one girl’s fingers was confusing at first, but ties in at the end. A few scenes later a married couple is touching each other in the car while their kids go play on a cursed mountain (and end up disappearing for the night), and I’m getting the sense that this is a 1970’s/80’s-style horror that cruelly punishes sexual activity. Noel Murray in The Dissolve: “Ten minutes into the film, Bogliano has established a cruel syllogism, suggesting that growing up leads to sex, and that sex leads to all sorts of horrors.”

Field of fingers for Kyle McLachlan to find:

I forgot about this once the kids disappeared and returned as pod children. The kids are finally discovered dead in a cave on the cursed mountain by their mother, who pieces together that the kids she brought home last week are demons who cut class, levitate and have sex with each other, terrifying their babysitter. But mom makes the mistake of telling her impulsively violent husband, who shoots her in the cave, both of them shown leaving the mountain later as pod people.

Bloody parents:

Meanwhile there’s the finger-collecting madman from the start – he’s said to have also been possessed by the mountain. And there’s the local creepy voyeur who lives near the mountain. The parents wrongly suspect him of kidnapping and abusing the kids the night they disappeared, sneak into his trailer and murder him. So you’ve also got the local sheriff investigating this murder, and a gas-station guy who is basically The Harbinger from Cabin in the Woods.

Mom spots the voyeur:

Sheriff comes to visit – Bogliano likes these De Palma shots:

Murray again:

Here Comes The Devil, at its root, is a film about parental anxiety. Felix and Sol are watching their children mature before their eyes, knowing that soon they’ll be cut loose into a hazardous world full of predators and malevolence – and that when that happens, whatever’s keeping this family together will likely lose its hold. Here Comes The Devil is at its best when it’s at its least literal: when Bogliano confronts the inevitability of personal loss, whether it’s as a result of demonic possession or not.

Almost plays as a panicky sequel to Picnic at Hanging Rock. Violent dad was Francisco Barreiro of We Are What We Are and some Nicolas Pereda movies. Bogliano made Bigfoot in the first ABCs of Death, has a new one called Scherzo Diabolico.

by ·Comments Off on Burying The Ex (2014, Joe Dante)

Anton Yelchin (Ian in Only Lovers Left Alive) likes ice cream girl Olivia (Alexandra Daddario of Texas Chainsaw 3D), is tired of his vegan environmentalist girlfriend Evelyn (Ashley Greene of Butter) but before he can break up with Evelyn she’s killed by a truck (unconvincing death scene weirdly scored by a Phosphorescent song) and later comes back as a bitchy zombie.

Full of easy horror references, out-of-date gender politics and default-sounding movie-dialogue. Anton’s half-brother, the Ed to his Shaun, is Oliver Cooper (Project X) who I think gets nearly killed by Evelyn but comes back at the end, or wait, does he come back as a zombie? I’m trying not to give this too much thought and pretend it’s not by the same Joe Dante who made Gremlins and Matinee. Also: it’s another movie where someone is keeping a secret for no reason other than plot contrivance, and Anton is a massive horror movie fan but doesn’t know how to dispatch a zombie.

by ·Comments Off on Lesson of Evil (2012, Takashi Miike)

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve watched a Miike movie. I caught the Zebraman double-feature at the beginning of 2012, and he has made nine new ones since then. Here’s one of those, a high-school horror/slasher that’s fortunately better than One Missed Call. Acting, cinematography all quite good, but the top IMDB comment “brutal fun, but nothing more” seems accurate.

Mr. Hasumi (Hideaki Ito of The Princess Blade, Over Your Dead Body) is the hotshot new teacher, good looking, sensitive to his students’ problems. He gets involved in everyone’s business, seemingly as a benevolent authority-type. Student Keisuke leads a cellphone exam-cheating ring and teacher Radio Tsurii may be blocking cell signals to stop it. Mr. Kume is blowing his student Masahiko, and Mr. Shibahara is sexually blackmailing student Miya. Rina is being bullied at school, or perhaps her jittery dad is overreacting – we’re never sure. The dad dies in a fire after Hasumi gets involved, and Hasumi “rescues” Miya but then starts sleeping with her, using Mr. Kume’s apartment, which he’s blackmailing Kume to use, and maybe Hasumi’s not such a hero after all.

I didn’t think it seemed very much like a horror movie by this point, but then Hasumi kidnaps cheater Keisuke and tortures him to death with a soldering iron. Flashback to Hasumi’s time at Harvard, during which he and another grad student went on a small murder spree. Hasumi is more ambitious now, grabs a shotgun and massacres every kid at school during a halloween-party lock-in. He basically murders everyone in the entire movie, except a couple kids who fool him at the end, then as he’s feigning insanity while being locked up, we’re promised “TO BE CONTINUED” by the titles.

After suffering through a scratchy German record of “Mack the Knife” a few times, we’re finally rewarded with an American rock version during the massacre. Oh also Hasumi’s shotgun sometimes turns into a fleshy Naked Lunchy eyeball thing that speaks in the Harvard guy’s voice.

Radio Tsurii was Mitsuru Fukikoshi (star of Sion Sono’s Cold Fish), soldering victim Keisuke was Shota Sometani (star of Sion Sono’s Himizu), pederast Shibahara was Takayuki Yamada (star of Sion Sono’s Shinjuku Swan) and one of the girls was Fumi Nikaido (star of Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell). Why am I suddenly getting the urge to check out some Sion Sono movies?

by ·Comments Off on Kotoko (2011, Shinya Tsukamoto)

This fits in nicely with Tsukamoto’s Haze and Nightmare Detective, which featured lead characters more convincingly distraught and psychologically unbalanced, more grimly depicted than you’re used to seeing in horror movies (always with crazed handheld camera). Now we’ve got a young mother (Cocco, who also wrote the story and songs and did art direction) living alone with her toddler. Just that simple character setup (young mother + child) is enough to make you cringe if you’ve seen any Tsukamoto movies.

Sure enough, she is extremely tormented, overprotecting the child at some times and plotting to murder him at others. Actually she does murder him onscreen, but since the movie reflects her baffled view on reality, he turns up alive a minute later. Fortunately (as rarely happens in horror movies) people notice that she’s clearly an unfit mother, take the son away and leave him with relatives, and Kotoko passes the time between her allowed visits sitting home, cutting her arms and watching them bleed.

But where’s Tsukamoto, who likes to star in his own films? He plays an award-winning novelist (his first book is entitled Bullet Dance) who begins stalking Kotoko after hearing her sing on a bus. He’s concerned for her safely, encourages her to cut him instead of herself. That relationship is going alright until he turns out to possibly not exist… and she’s excited that she’s getting her son back until that also turns out not to be true. Epilogue, she’s in the loony bin being visited by her now-teenage son and doing crazy crying dances in the rain.

The first few minutes are insane – Kotoko sees people as twins, has to quickly determine which of the two is the evil one trying to destroy her so she can fight back. “I don’t see double when I am singing.” The movie’s a bit long (have I mentioned that I love Haze‘s 50-minute length?), padded by Cocco’s songs.

by ·Comments Off on A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014, Roy Andersson)

More deadpan sketches from the Songs from the Second Floor creator. Seems more despairing than funny, focusing mainly on two terrible novelty salesmen, but it’s punctuated by some crazy and memorable scenes – like when King Karl XII’s entire army passes by a modern-day bar, and the king enters on horseback – then again a few scenes later, defeated by the Russians (which actually took place in 1709). Then there’s the one scene of generous warmth and happiness, set in another bar run by Limping Lotta, who sings that she’ll trade drinks for kisses from the soldiers.

M. Sicinski:

The final shot in Pigeon, and therefore of the trilogy, involves random citizens at a bus stop, trying to help a confused man decide if it’s Wednesday. “But it feels like Thursday,” he protests. After awhile, an older man in a suit delivers the final word: “You can’t feel what day it is. Yesterday was Tuesday. Today is Wednesday. Tomorrow is Thursday. You have to keep track of these things. If you don’t keep track of that, chaos will reign.” This pronouncement, gentle but firm, is the voice of liberal democracy, avuncular but brooking no disagreement. Some of us take years to sort out what it means for us to be human. But this man knows. If Pigeon finds Andersson lost in a shell game where every move is the same, it’s probably because this voice, and others like it, are winning every time.

Won the top prize at Venice, where it played alongside Birdman, The Look of Silence and 99 Homes – and Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain, which has barely been heard from since.