À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma: Where Are You, Satan?

If you study or follow  horror film (or genre film, or cult film) long enough, certain names start to crop up. My own education in horror films is surprisingly spotty for as much as a I write about them, and I’m always running across films I feel like I need to watch or directors to whom I need to pay attention, from a historical standpoint if nothing else. Last week, horror film lost one such director in José Mojica Marins, from São Paulo, Brazil. He was probably best known for his series of cult-films featuring a character called Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe). Until now, I’d only seen one of them - A Estranha Hospedaria dos Prazeres (The Strange Hostel Of Naked Pleasures) - and it was a prime slice of mid-70s psychedelic weirdness. He made and/or starred in enough films as Coffin Joe to make him a pop-culture icon in Brazil on the level of Freddy Krueger. Now, I’m not much of a fan of Freddy Krueger, but like I said, what I saw was definitely the product of a singular vision, and for as long as I’ve been saying “I should check out more of those films one day,” Marins’ death reminds me that there’s no time like the present, and no place like the beginning.

This, then, is what led me to sit down and watch the first Coffin Joe film, À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma (At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul), and though it’s arguably tame by modern standards, it’s also not as tame as it could be. The film it probably reminds me of the most is Blood Feast, and though it’s certainly not as balls-out weird as that film (few things are), it does have a similar fever-dream vibe, the product of melodramatic acting, cultural distance and simultaneously cheap and surprisingly graphic effects that also give this film the feeling of something that you might find yourself watching in a nightmare.

It begins with two monologues to the camera. First, Coffin Joe rants about how life is the beginning of death, and death is the end of life, and how all that matters is blood. Then, an old fortune-teller type tells us that we shouldn’t watch this film if we don’t have the heart, because this is a tale of vengeance and we risk our soul in the process - it’s real Tales From The Crypt stuff, but without the cheeky humor.

And thus we are introduced to Coffin Joe. He is the undertaker for a small Brazilian town, and he’s sort of a mix of Mr. Hyde (no Dr. Jekyll here) and the town bully from an old Western. He gleefully flaunts all custom and taboo (shortly after we are introduced to him, he’s sitting in his house, watching a religious  procession walk by, gleefully eating lamb off the bone on a meatless Friday), and he’s obsessed with continuing his bloodline. His wife cannot bear children at all, let alone the son he demands, and so he becomes obsessed with young, lovely - and most importantly, fertile -Terezinha, certain that she should be the mother of his child.  Oh, sure, she’s engaged to Antonio, but he gets what he wants, and has no qualms about taking, well, anything. Or anyone.

What follows is a pretty crudely assembled film, more a series of vignettes than anything else, demonstrating the lengths to which Coffin Joe will go, the destruction he leaves in his wake, and the price he pays for doing so. He is a prototypically Satanic figure - he doesn’t believe in God, or the Devil, or spirits. He believes only in power, and wields it to sate his appetites in many forms. He forces himself on women, beats men and women alike for defying him, and he routinely bribes the townspeople to look the other way at his excesses. The majority of the film is basically just him on a tear, first murdering his wife, then raping Terezinha, then murdering anyone who is about to discover his treachery. Which, in a town as small as this one and him as visible a public figure as he is, doesn’t feel like an especially sustainable course of action, but Coffin Joe revels in his power, utterly defiant in the face of morals, laws, and gods. None hold any power for him, and there’s something a little bracing about how few fucks he really has to give. No apologies, no justifications, just raw appetite.

But this is still basically a morality tale, as so many horror films are - the old fortune-teller from the prologue, who is the town’s bruxa. confronts Coffin Joe and tells him that for his sins, he will at midnight be visited by the ghosts of everyone he’s wronged, and they will have their revenge. And sure enough, the witch’s prophecies come true and Coffin Joe’s rampage through a graveyard turns into a waking nightmare in what is actually a fairly effective sequence, given the limited budget and technical constraints of the time. The film is shot in black and white, very much on the cheap, but what it lacks in technical sophistication it makes up for in gonzo energy. The violence Coffin Joe enacts on the townspeople isn’t downplayed in the ways we’d normally expect from films made in the mid-60s - he beats Terezinha badly and then makes a point of kissing her battered face, relishing the taste of blood, and he disfigures someone who stands up to him by mashing the crown of thorns from a statue of Jesus into his face. It’s a film that makes us watch the suffering he inflicts. His final reckoning is a gauntlet of hanging bodies, their eyes bulging, corpses with maggots squirming in their faces, spiders crawling out of eyesockets, seriously gruesome stuff. Coffin Joe is wild-eyed and totally sure of his dominance right up to the very end, but it does him no good, as the dead get their justice and he is damned. I've got a few other films about Coffin Joe, and I'm curious to see where they go from here.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Butterfly Kisses: The Camera Doesn’t Lie, Except When It Does

Oh hey, it’s another film I’m going into blind, and it’s a found-footage film! Have I not learned my lesson yet? Am I bracing myself for another round of cameras conveniently located in unlikely places, wooden acting, and “we have to keep filming - we can’t turn back now” bullshit nonsense?

Refreshingly, as it turns out, no. No I am not. Butterfly Kisses ends up being a thoughtful, well-constructed examination of found-footage films wrapped around a decent premise, but the distancing inherent in its self-reflexivity ends up robbing the film of some of its actual horror.

We open cold on a young woman filming herself using an old digital video camera. It’s sort of that whole “if you’re seeing this, then something bad has happened” kind of narrative, and she asks that whoever finds her footage, please bookend it with the first and second half of the footage she’s filming now, and that they’ll know where the cut needs to go.

She says it’s getting harder and harder for her not to blink.

Already, I’m more into it that most found-footage films I’ve seen. I like that the filmmakers didn’t resort to beginning the whole thing with a title card clumsily explaining what we were about to see, and not over-explaining things. Here’s some weird old footage with a hook at the end, and then we cut to a well-lit, professionally-shot talking head setup. This introduces us to Gavin York, a young man who, while cleaning out his mother’s utility room, found a shoebox full of old MiniDV cassettes labeled “DO NOT WATCH.” The footage that opens the film comes from one of these cassettes, and according to Gavin, these cassettes document the efforts of two film students - Sophia and Fletcher - to make a documentary about a local urban legend known as Peeping Tom, or Mister Blink, or The Blink Man. It’s said that if you stand at one end of a particular railroad tunnel at midnight, and stare down the tunnel’s length until 1am without blinking, you can summon Peeping Tom into our world. Of course, nobody can verify this because everyone who tried it ended up mysteriously dead shortly afterward. You see, Peeping Tom haunts their summoner at the corners of their vision, a figure in the background moving ever closer, every time you blink, until he is close enough to strike.

What Gavin has done is take all of the raw footage on these cassettes and edit it down to a cohesive film, telling the story of Sophia and Fletcher’s documentary and the unfortunate events that followed it. He wants to restore the footage, clean it up, and sell it as a film, like The Blair Witch Project only, you know, true. And so he has hired a film crew to make a documentary about his attempts to restore and release the footage shot by Sophia and Fletcher 11 years ago. And it’s tough, because almost nobody can find any record of these two attending their particular school, all (well, almost all) of the experts they interview and faculty featured in their footage can’t be tracked down.

It’s like everyone involved with this film disappeared without a trace.

So, really, it’s two stories - or maybe three - in one. It’s the story of Sophia and Fletcher, making their student film about the legend of Peeping Tom (who comes off as a sort of cross between Bloody Mary, the Weeping Angels, and Nosferatu) and getting more than they bargained for, it’s the story of Gavin York, who we come to realize is a failed filmmaker sure that this footage is his ticket to the big time, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, and it’s the story of the film crew that’s making a film about Gavin’s attempts to restore this footage, witness to the cost it exerts on him.

It’s all very meta - it’s a film about a film crew making a documentary about someone who has purported to dig up and restore the raw footage of a couple of film students who may have run afoul of a local urban legend. So we’re watching someone else watch someone who is in turn watching someone else. This is a lot of layers to keep up with, but it’s largely handled deftly, and it’s never too hard to follow. What it does mean, however, is that the entire film is really, really self-reflexive. It doesn’t feel too lampshadey or self-conscious, but it’s a mockumentary about a found-footage film, so characters in the film actively interrogate what makes found-footage films effective or not in trying to determine the veracity of this recovered footage and question Gavin’s motivation for pursuing the project at all. These conversations both comment upon what we’re watching and make diegetic sense. The film’s set in Maryland, and so the presence of The Blair Witch Project is felt throughout (that the recovered footage is from film students with a contentious relationship doesn’t hurt).

And as the film moves, on, we too begin to question what we’re seeing. Gavin never finished film school, and ekes out some income as a wedding videographer. His resentment and frustration at having never become the filmmaker he imagines himself to be is palpable, but we can also immediately see why he probably failed. He’s self-aggrandizing, possesses delusions of grandeur, and he’s really, really abrasive - basically his own worst enemy and utterly undiplomatic. He craves fame and wealth and has drastically overestimated the degree to which this footage is going to bring it to him. He makes all kinds of weird decisions, like trying to get it professionally restored when the whole appeal of such a project lies in the raw footage, trying to enlist the help of local paranormal enthusiasts, but refusing to share any more than he has to and expecting them to be bowled over by one bit of footage without any provenance, and alienating pretty much anyone he comes into contact with. Some of the most uncomfortable moments in this film come from the humiliations that Gavin keeps walking into, over and over again. He insists that the footage is genuine, but it comes to light that he’s made some very specific editing choices in assembling the raw footage - after all, he’s got a film crew making a documentary about all of this, and they’re asking questions of their own - and what he’s left out reveals some important things about Sophia and Fletcher. As we watch Sophia and Fletcher’s lives start to unravel, we’re also watching Gavin unravel, and we begin to question how much any of this is real.

While this is interesting from a narrative and thematic perspective, it does serve to make the film less scary for most of its runtime. As this film well knows, part of an effective found-footage film is trust - the audience has to easily suspend their disbelief and let themselves feel like they’re watching actual raw footage that someone has unearthed. By introducing elements of doubt both at the level of the raw footage and at the level of the person who claims to have discovered it, the overwhelming majority of the scary stuff ends up being less scary because our first impulse is to assume that it’s a cheat. I mean, of course it is, we’re watching a work of fiction, but within that fiction’s world, what makes it scary is the idea that Sophia & Fletcher’s footage is the real thing, and that Gavin and this film crew have unleashed something that was kept hidden. But throughout, we’re given reason to doubt what we’re seeing, and though the ending of the film does deliver some solid creepiness, having to do so on top of a somewhat convoluted story that we’ve been actively encouraged to disbelieve makes it feel like too little, too late.

This is a tough one for me, because I liked the idea of making a found-footage film which itself interrogates found-footage film (kind of like Digging Up The Marrow, but much, much smarter), and it’s reasonably well-acted, though the dialogue does get a little expository in places (but then again, we’re given reason to doubt what we’re seeing, so this actually sort of works too), there’s good attention to detail throughout. It never feels as ridiculous or implausible as some other found-footage films I’ve watched. The effects that are intended to give the raw footage its vintage look aren’t really that convincing, but everyone seems like real people for the most part and the locations all feel real and believable. I appreciate what the filmmakers (the actual ones) did and I thought it was done intelligently, but I think they ended up sacrificing what could have been a really good found-footage horror film for the sake of making a film about found-footage horror films. Still much better than I expected. but I wish it inspired more than a golf clap.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Assimilate: The CW Presents Invasion Of The Body Snatchers

Usually I don’t go in for rating the films I watch on Netflix, especially since they moved from an out-of-five model to a dichotomous thumbs up/thumbs down model, but I need to change that. They’re using these data to formulate recommendation percentages for me, and so, based on the results that led to this week’s film, I really need to start telling them what I do and do not like.

This is because Assimilate came with a 96% rating for me, and boy, was it ever not close to 96%. It’s sloppily-constructed, derivative trash.

We begin with a prologue of sorts, in which a young woman is attempting to contact her mother via cellphone, but can’t get her mother to pick up. Outside, human figures howl and shriek and run past her windows. The young woman is panicked, probably because of all the howling and shrieking, and eventually the figures break in and come for her. Apart from possibly giving away the ending, in some tenuous way. this sequence has no connection to the rest of the film. It’s never mentioned or referenced again.

Cut immediately to morning in a small Missouri town, and a close-up on some leaves that have odd little bugs crawling all over them. But never mind that, let’s meet our protagonists! Zach and Randy are budding content creators who - thanks to Zach’s nebulously-defined skills with technology and Randy’s frankly obnoxious personality - are starting a web series about what life in a small Missouri town is really like. Mostly this seems to consist of them wandering around town, striking up highly artificial conversations with people they know while conspicuously pointing buttonhole spy cams at them in an utterly failed attempt to be covert. What this means for the film is that we periodically get shots from the point of view of these little cameras, but not in any way that makes sense or communicates a specific point of view. It seems to just be there as a pretext for some quasi-found-footage imagery, but the end result is more confusing than anything else.

But, anyway, Zach and Randy and then Kayla. Zach is secretly sweet on Kayla but they’ve been friends for years, so Randy keeps urging Zach to do something about it and Zach keeps being reluctant. Kayla’s got a little brother named Joey, and Joey’s just sort of there. There’s the town’s pastor, who is just as awkwardly chummy as you’d expect the town’s pastor to be, there’s the sheriff, and there’s a neighbor lady who is sort of a free spirit. Just another day in small-town Missouri.

At least, until mysterious insect bites start causing people to act…not like themselves.

If that seems abrupt, well, that’s because it is. To cut to the chase, this is (in case you couldn’t tell from either the title of this film or the title of this post), a variation on the body-snatcher film, where some intrusive outside force begins to possess or create duplicates of the people around the characters, with the intent of replacing the entire population. These can make for really good movies - there’s something very unsettling about the erasure of identity and individuality, along with not knowing who to trust, and the feeling that everyone and everything is closing in around you.

But for a film like this to work. there needs to be a gradual escalation of tension and stakes. You start with little things - people acting out of sorts in small ways, or having odd things happen in the background. The scope, extent, and nature of the problem is revealed gradually, so that by the time the protagonists realize what’s going on - how big it is, how deep it goes, and how utterly alien and sinister its origins - it’s close to too late. Zombies are scary (if they still are at all) because they look just human enough for us to want to respond to them as human, but corrupted and wrong enough that we know that we shouldn’t. It’s the same sort of thing in body-snatcher films, whether it’s the extraterrestrials of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers or the androids of The Stepford Wives, it’s discomfiting to see familiar faces gone completely flat and blank. And unlike zombie films, there’s some kind of organizing intelligence behind it all, which makes it even more sinister.

See, that’s what you want to do if you want to make it a good film. What you don't do, is what the filmmakers did here.  First, the film doesn’t really ever establish a tone. From the opening prologue onward, the filmmakers just sort of fling events at the screen in sequence. Hey, here’s a woman being threatened! Now here’s a small town somewhere else! These two guys are wacky! Now someone’s gotten bitten by a bug! Now everyone in town is acting strangely all of a sudden!  The tone shifts on a dime - one moment, the abovementioned neighbor is getting bit by some mysterious insect, and then all of a sudden all of the major figures in town are gathering in the church basement at night out of nowhere. There’s no gradual sense of escalation, no shift from one person to another, just everything’s fine and then suddenly it isn’t. This means there’s no menace or paranoia to it. Body-snatcher movies need some kind of baseline - it’s hard to establish that things aren’t normal unless you know what normal looks like, and this movie doesn’t bother with normal. It just goes from zero to “everything’s weird” in a matter of minutes, like it knows what beats it needs to hit, but entirely ignores the idea that you need space between those beats to set them up.

The other thing body-snatcher films rely on is the reveal of the threat’s nature, when the things that look like your friends and loved ones and neighbors and authorities are revealed to be shells for something…other. It’s another way it’s similar to zombie films, except with zombie films the tension is between the roughly human characteristics and the obvious monstrosity. Like, that person is our friend, but somehow that makes seeing them with half of their face missing as they shamble towards us even worse. In the body-snatcher film, they may be acting strangely, but they still look just like our friend, and it’s when the façade is torn away that the real horror comes in. In this film,  the potential for body horror is, with a couple of exceptions, largely unexplored - mostly it’s just actors staring blankly, which isn’t all that strange or unsettling by itself given how little we get to know any of these people beforehand. For all we know, this is just how they are.

I think some of this is explainable in terms of budget. This film was obviously made on the cheaper side, with production values hovering around mid-tier made-for-TV-movie levels, to match the acting, both broad and wooden at the same time.  There are lots of shots of little bugs swarming everywhere, but also these intercuts of cheap-looking, digitally generated spores floating through the air for...reasons? Late in the film, we get a couple of looks at the creatures responsible, and they’re pretty obvious digital effects. At one point, our protagonists discover a pod with a newly-hatched version of one character’s mother in it, but that’s about it, and you get the sense it’s because they didn’t have the money to create more pods and related practical effects. I’m not going to condemn a film just for being made on the cheap (Night of the Living Dead was shot on a shoestring, and it’s a stone classic), or equate the presence of elaborate effects with quality, but in this instance, the shoddiness and paucity of effects work at a point in the film where the nature of the threat is being revealed ends up calling attention to itself. Effects work needs to be believable, and it needs to communicate something other than “we could only afford one shot like this.” It’s no sin to work cheap, but overreach or lack of imagination can undo a lot of what you’re trying to accomplish.

The result is a massive disappointment. Numerous jump scares don’t substitute for dread or unease, there’s no cohesive story, just all of a sudden everyone starts acting strangely and only our protagonists know the truth. It culminates in a siege different from any number of zombie movies only in that you need to do a lot less makeup work when the conceit is “clones” instead of “zombies.” Well, it feels like it should culminate with that siege, but there’s still too much movie to go after that. From a pacing standpoint, it peaks too early and then lingers too long . Everything is obvious, everything is foregrounded, there’s no tension, it meanders, and is so transparent in its intent as to be almost insulting.  I hate reducing my evaluation of a film to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” but goddamn, if it means Netflix doesn’t recommend any more stinkers like this, I’ve got thumbs for days.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available from Amazon

Ugh, Sick

So I spent a chunk of this week asleep with some kind of free-floating crud, and didn't have a chance to write up this week's film (which is...just as well? It kind of sucked.), but I should be on track for the coming week.

In the meantime, read A Collapse of Horses, by Brian Evenson. It's maybe not as consistent a collection of short stories as some others I've read, but when it works, it works very very well.