Haute Tension: Final* Girl

It’s years in the rear-view mirror by now, but one of the through-lines for what got me writing about horror movies for fun was the New French Extremity. It’s not a label anyone really uses anymore, which is probably for the better, since - at least in terms of horror films - the whole thing sort of fizzled out quickly. To the extent it ever was a movement (which is debatable), it produced some excellent films, and some absolute turkeys.

Haute Tension (High Tension) is one of the most frequently mentioned examples of New French Extremity, but I have to say, it’s much closer to the turkey end of the continuum. What we basically have is an effective, if workmanlike, slasher film that starts off strong before being marred by a slack third act and what has to be one of the most head-clutchingly ridiculous twists I’ve ever seen in a film.

We begin at what is presumably the end. There’s a woman sitting on an examination table in a hospital gown. Through the gap in the gown, we can see that her back is striped with deep cuts and abrasions, some severe enough to need stapling shut. There’s a camera recording her as she mumbles something about nothing keeping “us” apart again. Then we flash back to this same woman, running through some woods, covered in blood. Something bad has happened, but we have to go back to the beginning to understand it. Marie (the young woman from the introduction) and her friend Alex are college students, off to Alex’s family home in the country to study for exams, far away from the distractions of the city. No booze, no parties, no boys. Lots of winding country roads, and they pass by a truck driver parked on the shoulder in a rusty cargo van. It becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s got someone else in the truck with him, in the act of fellating him. But Marie and Alex have driven on by this point. And they’re long gone by the time the truck driver tosses what turns out to be a severed head out the window. It’s a striking moment, I’ll give it that.

Meanwhile, Marie and Alex arrive at Alex’s house, and after meeting her folks and her little brother, Marie repairs to her guest suite to get some rest. It’s late at night, it’s been a long day, and it’s been a long drive.

It’s late at night, and there’s a knock on the door.

So I’d say it sets its stall out early, but in a way that really effectively builds the tension of the title. We’re introduced to Marie and Alex, take some time to get to know them and their whole deal, and then this sudden, shocking segment with the truck driver gets dropped into the story like a time bomb before returning to these young women on the road. Something very bad is going to happen, but it’s not going to happen yet, and now that we know this lunatic is out there, we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop, as Marie and Alex and Alex’s family are all blissfully unaware of what’s headed straight for them. In some ways, it reminds me of how the original Halloween teased Michael Myers through the better part of the film, always just slightly out of frame or out of focus or partially hidden behind scenery. The longer he’s out there, the worse it gets.

And I’ll say this, when this film works, its stock in trade is definitely tension. Once night falls, it doesn’t really take long for things to pop off. And once they do. they don’t really let up. We don’t really know anything about any of these people apart from Maria and Alex both being sort of party girls and Alex’s family seeming nice enough. But at least for the first couple of acts, sheer momentum gets the film over in the absence of much emotional investment in any of the characters. Once the action starts, it doesn’t really slow down. It’s a violent film (as slashers often are), but the violent segments are a mixture of off-camera restraint and almost confrontationally detailed. We don’t always see what’s happening, but what we do see is more than enough. There’s a lot of blood in this movie, spattering and pooling and spraying, and a lot of people in visible distress, and if it doesn’t always linger on the violence it does linger on their suffering and pain. It’s a grubby film as well – a lot of it is shot in sort of a sickly yellow that makes everything look sort of stained or used, at least outside of the farmhouse setting, and the killer is oily, sweaty, and grimy in a filthy jumpsuit, dirt under his nails, as bestial as his introduction would have you think. He doesn’t talk much, mostly just grunts as he brutalizes everything in his path. Crisp editing helps to keep the action moving, Marie trying to avoid this sudden menace in the confines of a fairly cozy farmhouse, so for the first couple of acts, it’s a film in almost constant motion. But that’s the first couple of acts. The third is where everything falls apart.

First, the film, despite being a French production, is dubbed into English, and although it isn’t too distracting at first (there is the odd verbosity you get when you’re trying to fit dialogue in one language to the speech patterns of another), as the film goes on more and more of the dialogue is in French and subtitled in English, and any attempt to make dubbed dialogue fit the actors’ speech goes right out the window.. It doesn’t seem like a stylistic choice, as much as someone just stopped doing their job. Why it wasn’t all in French and subtitled from the get-go is a mystery. I don’t know that it would have saved the film, but it would have seemed like less of a rush job. And for all of the tension of the beginning of the film, once the action moves away from the farmhouse the pace grows looser and looser until we’re left with a not-especially-exciting “chase scene” that consists of two cars driving at a sensible speed through the woods, capped by increasingly ludicrous levels of violence - cartoonish in a way that earlier moments weren’t - and false endings. It goes from claustrophobic and…well, tense…to something much more bland and formulaic.

But the worst of it has to be a reveal in the third act that makes very little sense in term of literally everything that came before. I don’t mind twists, for the most part. But a good twist relies on the film playing fair with the audience up to the moment it’s revealed, so that rewatching it (or even getting the flashback that spells it all out) gives you the opportunity to put the pieces together yourself, to see how the truth was staring at you the whole time. Clever use of misdirection and new context goes a long way, but this isn’t like that at all. It’s not just that there’s no opportunity to figure it out, or even anything we could observe that might suggest that not everything is as it seems. We actually see things throughout the film that actively contradict it. You can use clever staging of shots to hide things in plain sight, but this film doesn’t bother. It just…I guess for lack of a better term, it just straight-up lies about everything we’ve just seen, for no apparent reason. It adds nothing to the film except sort of a cheap “gotcha” moment. The end result is the feeling that the filmmakers had about an hour’s worth of a decently suspenseful if not especially substantive movie and realized they needed to come up with another thirty minutes, so they just sort of winged it. And it shows. In the sloppy dubbing, in a climax that wanders aimlessly, in a last-minute revelation that makes absolutely no sense, it fucking shows.

This is a film that gets mentioned as one of the biggest of the New French Extremity (for what little that’s worth), but it’s easily one of its biggest disappointments. It doesn’t have Martyrs’ well-crafted story, or Inside’s claustrophobic, confrontational tone. It’s closer to something like Frontier(s), with its reliance on blood and screaming and active contempt for storytelling. I was spoiled for the big twist going in (part of why I’ve taken so long to write about it) and I was still surprised at how half-assed it was. The more I think about this film, the angrier I get.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Hermana Muerte: I Saw The Light

As far as I’m concerned, prequels are worse than sequels, and heaven knows I don’t like sequels. Horror thrives on mystery, and prequels and sequels alike tend to dismantle that mystery. Sequels tend to belabor what worked so well in the original films, but now we’re expecting it, so its power is lost. Prequels, on the other hand, strip away the unknown from the original film. I don’t want origin stories for my monsters, I want them to be unknowable and terrifying. I want them to be facts of the world, irreducible.

Well, most of the time. There are always exceptions. Even as I’m writing this, I’m thinking that I wouldn’t mind seeing a Lovecraftian take on Breaking Bad, about a man who turns to dark rituals out of desperation and gradually loses everything. I’d watch that. But back to the matter at hand. Hermana Muerte (Sister Death) works as a prequel to the very good demonic possession film Veronica for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a fully realized story about an incidental character from Veronica, and second, because it’s put together with skill. That said, while it’s well-constructed, I found it an easier film to appreciate than to fully like or engage with.

The film begins in Spain, in 1939, with scratchy, home-movie footage of a little girl in a small village. She’s clutching a cross and staring ecstatically into the sky. People crowd around her as she appears to witness something, to see something only she can see. She kneels, arms spread wide in supplication or in a reenactment of the crucifixion. It’s hard to say. Ten years later, a young woman in a novice’s habit walks up to a convent, bleached white under the midday sun. It’s the little girl, all grown up. Her name is Narcisa, and after years of being locally celebrated as “The Holy Child,” she’s come here to take her final vows. Before the civil war, it was a cloistered convent, but what sisters were able to make it back have re-opened it as a school for underprivileged girls. Narcisa will be teaching classes as a replacement for Sister Ines. The sisters are…evasive…about her departure.

All seems about as well as it can - the girls learn lessons alongside performing chores around the convent, the better to provide them with skills that will be useful to them once they reach adulthood and have to find employment - or a husband. But there are little things - children’s balls that come rolling down the hallway with no girls in sight. Games of Hangman that appear on the walls. Loud banging and weeping in empty hallways.

Girls that have disappeared, never to be seen again.

The thematic spine of this movie is the way people and nations have to grapple with their past and the things that haunt them. Narcisa experienced an ecstatic vision of the Virgin Mary as a child, and has been wracked by doubt ever since, even as she became something of a local celebrity. Was it a vision sent from God, or the Devil? Why won’t God send her a sign that what she saw was divine? She prays, she fasts, she mortifies her flesh, still nothing. Some of the sisters see her taking the vows as a good thing, the “Holy Child” dedicating herself to God, but others believe she’s a charlatan, or worse. It seems like part of Narcisa wants to run away from all of it, the pressure, the expectations, the resentment, the burden of being her, but wherever she goes, there she is. Likewise, the sisters of the convent are still wrestling with the fallout from the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Spain. The way the convent was ransacked, the sisters who were lost, the ones who left and never came back. The war is over, but its reminders are all around them. Bullet holes pock the convent’s entrance, and the Mother Superior says that no amount of lime will ever cover them. Everyone and everywhere is scarred. The convent’s bloody history is written into its walls, sunken deep into its stone, and the sisters really, really don’t want to talk about it.

And dark secrets are the spine of the majority of ghost movies. This one is no different, following pretty standard narrative beats - lots of little things like chairs tipping over by themselves, footsteps when there’s nobody there, mysterious noises, somebody’s mementos left forgotten in the back of a closet, pictures missing from a photo album, the usual. And, of course, all of this leads Narcisa to start asking questions and digging into things nobody wants exhumed. The first act is slow, maybe even a bit meandering as Narcisa keeps experiencing things she can’t explain when she’s awake and oddly specific nightmares when she’s asleep. At the same time she’s getting a sense of how the convent and school work, but it’s all very gradual and understated. Things start to cohere a little more in the second act as Narcisa learns more – there’s a ghostly girl that all the students are afraid of and that the sisters (of course) insist doesn’t exist. They’re very, very keen on drumming that nonsense out of the girls’ heads and very upset when Narcisa take the girls seriously…just like Sister Ines did. Of course, Narcisa is going to continue sticking her nose where the sisters don’t want her to, out of a sense of guilt and a need to make good on her legacy as the local miracle. There are, of course, consequences, setting us up for a third act that does a good job of making up for a relatively static two-thirds as everything sort of goes off at once. Narcisa recapitulates her childhood with visions that are far less ecstatic and much more revelatory, past and present come together, like a piece of paper folded over in half, and all becomes clear, and there is a great and bloody atonement for the sins of the past. Just because you refuse to acknowledge something, that doesn’t make it go away.

Ultimately, this is pretty frustrating film for me, as it’s very well-made, but it ended up leaving me sort of cold. It has its startling moments (and the climax does a lot of the work here) but a lot of it isn’t anything especially novel early on, either narratively or visually, so it maybe doesn’t have the impact it could. More so than Veronica, it hews to very classic storytelling techniques and imagery, and though I like it when filmmakers appreciate the classics, in this case it feels like I’ve seen a lot of this before. That is, when I can see at all – part of the problem with filming inside a convent is the lack of lighting, so a number of scenes are dark enough that it’s difficult to make out what’s supposed to be happening and I think some moments that were meant to be revelatory or shocking got lost. But this eases up as the film goes on, as if more and more light is being let in as the truth becomes known, and there are shots that somehow manage to be beautiful and bloody at the same time. It’s not uneven, but it does take a little while to really get going, and the evenness sometimes feels static.

To its credit, it’s not a prequel to Veronica in any kind of franchise origin story way. The degree to which it intersects with that film is that this is the story of an incidental character from Veronica, a character I described as “the obligatory creepy nun,’ and it’s a story entirely her own, with no attachment to the story it precedes. This is the story of the obligatory creepy nun in her youth, before she was the imposing figure who had seen some shit (and relinquished her sight as a result). As in Veronica, eclipses play an important role, and the whole thing ends with Narcisa recapitulating her childhood before we move to the present and meet Veronica and her classmates, unaware of what is yet to come for them. It all fits together neatly, and it’s a film where nothing is gratuitous, but I wish it inspired more than a polite clap.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

Gwledd: Conspicuous Consumption

There’s something about the wilderness - there’s an uneasiness to our relationship with it, a wariness. Even people who love the wilderness acknowledge that it is not safe. Like our wariness of the dark, I think it goes back to our earliest days as a species, when things lying in wait in the dark, or the forest, or the long grass, or the lake, could leap out and end us. And just like we light fires against the dark, we build walls to keep the wilderness out. Modernity is not just about ease and comfort, but also about protection. A reassurance that yes, we have tamed the wilderness, and it can no longer hurt us.

Of course, this is a foolish idea, and Gwledd (The Feast) is a sharply and skillfully told story about how we presume mastery over the wilderness at our peril.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is a diesel-powered drill boring into the earth, like something you might use to explore for oil or take core samples. Its operator lurches away from the drill, staggers across the green, green fields, and collapses insensate, blood leaking from under his ear protection.

In the middle of the Welsh countryside, there is also a house, and the entire story takes place here and in the surrounding woods. Inside, a family is getting ready to host guests for dinner. There’s Glenda - a farm girl who married up, upon whose family property the house is built. There is Gwyn, a successful politician and Glenda’s husband, and their two sons, Guto and Gweirydd, both of whom seem profoundly out of place, city boys plucked from their flats and set down in the middle of rolling hills and tall trees. Glenda is nervous - she doesn’t host often and she’s eager to make a good impression. She’s arranged for Lynwen, a young woman who works at the nearby village pub, to come out and assist with food preparation, service and cleanup. But Lynwen wasn’t able to make it, and recommended Cadi, who also works at the pub, in her place. Cadi turns up, oddly quiet, at the gate to their property. No car, no bus, no bicycle. One minute she isn’t there, and the next she is.

As if she appeared from thin air.

So you’ve got an obviously wealthy family with a nice, aggressively modern home out in the middle of the country, and the entire story takes place over the course of a single day. The film begins by sketching in the family, who they are and who they are to each other. There’s an ambivalence to Glenda - she seems proud that she’s erased almost all signs of her rustic upbringing by tearing down the old family home, but made a point of saving old quilts and blankets and one of her mother’s old dresses. The abstract painting in the dining room is a rendition of the property and its boundaries. She has left home, and she has never left home. Gwyn is a gruff, emotionally distant man’s man who likes to sit out in the woods, sip whiskey and shoot rabbits that he then leaves Glenda, the former farm girl, to skin. Guto is a troubled bad boy, floppy hair, electric guitar and neck tattoo, who liked living in London, with its parties and easy access to heroin. Gweirydd, has temporarily dropped out of medical school to train for a triathlon, and right off the bat there’s something dissolute and unwholesome about him.

They could have been a poor little rich family caricature, but they aren’t entirely. There’s a restraint to their depiction that keeps things from getting too histrionic (until it’s right for them to do so). You do get the expected beats for this sort of story, but they aren’t the sum total of these people. Glenda fusses and orders Cadi about, but isn’t above helping to make the food, even joining in with Cadi when she starts singing an old familiar song. Gwyn is very much the potentially corrupt politician, but doesn’t seem especially unlikable or abusive and seems to genuinely see his office as a privilege. He has appetites, yes, but they’re human-scale. Guto and Gweirydd are the resentful children you expect, but they aren’t raging assholes and they have their reasons. Guto is irresponsible and directionless, but he’s sensitive and passionate. Gweirydd  does seems like the kind of rich dilettante who decides he’s going to take a break from med school to be an athlete, but like Guto, he seems wounded by his father’s disapproval and emotional distance. The cliches are there, but everyone seems actual like people underneath those cliches. And Cadi floats through all of this, almost entirely silent.

And in that sense, Cadi sets the tone for the film. It’s not especially dialogue-heavy (several minutes elapse before anyone speaks at all), nor does it have music outside of a few diegetic pieces. It tells its story through silence and its sharp interruption. The film is punctuated across its running time by title cards that move from innocuous (“I want to make a good impression”) to disquieting (“She mustn’t be awakened”) and by scenes and segments that play out quietly until something ends the quiet – a scream, a gunshot, a piercing sound, a shocking act, cutting to the next scene and its relative quiet abruptly, so we don’t have time to fully process what’s just happened. It could threaten to become cliched or repetitive, but it doesn’t. It adds to a feeling of inevitability, like a steady march. 

And it's chilly and austere, all overcast countryside and a home that’s made out of sharp angles, glass, bleached wood and brick with more than a hint of the mid-century modern about it. Shots are artfully composed, themselves all lines and angles and figures placed in relation to the house, or each other, differences in focus and glass between them,  with good use of slow fades and superimposition. It’s a slow burn, but one that lets you know, however subtly, or not that something is wrong right off the bat, and it’s content to build the unease and the surrounding story in the background, through asides and details dropped in gradually. The first two acts are table-setting (in some cases literally) but there’s a constant drip of unease. You know immediately something bad is going to happen, even if the shape of it isn’t immediately apparent. Some things that start little and start early become big and bad by the end, some things are revealed late to good effect, some things you may be able to see coming from early on, but not in a way that gives it all away. This film is exceptionally good at giving you bits of information gradually and allowing you to make the connections yourself.

And when it all comes to a head halfway through the third act, it does so in blood and flame and screams. There’s one bit of what I thought was unnecessary flashback and there’s some brief montage at the end that felt unnecessary and sort of tacked-on, but these are minor quibbles. It’s another excellent addition to the fine British tradition of films about the pagan power of nature and the awful cost of disregarding it.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Lo Squartatore Di New York: Not A Nice Place To Visit, And I Certainly Don’t Want To Live There

As near as I can tell, there are a couple of different types of Italian horror films that get filed under giallo. You’ve got the stylish (or at least stylized) murder mysteries, where lots of people get stabbed or strangled or otherwise dispatched by mystery figures in black leather, and then you’ve got the zombie/demon movies, where some gate to hell or another gets opened up and all kinds of gooey monstrosities emerge to kill, eat, and both eat and kill people. Where do cannibal movies fit? If/when I ever make a point of watching any, I’ll let you know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I know that giallo describes a wider range of movies than this, but this is what I’ve observed so far. And regardless of which of those two types it is, there’s one thing they have in common: They’re bonkers. Not a shred of subtlety to be found. The more I think about it, “outrageous” really fits, in that they’re both wildly unconcerned with plausibility and also likely to evoke outrage.

And in both those regards, Lo Squartatore Di New York (The New York Ripper) fits the bill in spades. It’s the kind of film that gets described as being “very much of its time,” but really that just means it’s sleazy and gross on multiple levels. Worse, as far as I’m concerned, it seems to bring together the two types of giallo I outlined above, but does so without including the strengths of either. The narrative doesn’t hold together, and it’s bloody and violent without being either stylish or over-the-top enough to get over. It’s kind of the worst of both.

That said, I have to applaud the opening. We get a scenic view of what is presumably the East River, and an older gentleman walking his dog along the trash-strewn asphalt adjacent to the riverbank. Ah, city living. He finds a chunk of wood and he throws it. Like the very good girl she is, his dog brings it back. So he throws it again, and she dives into some bushes to retrieve it. But when she comes out, he looks at her in dismay, as the camera cuts to her standing there holding a decomposed human hand in her mouth. It’s not an especially surprising scene, I would have been more surprised if it had gone any other way, but then it freeze-frames on the shot of the dog holding the rotting hand and plays all of the opening credits over it. It makes you look at that hand. The movie is saying “you are in for some shit,” and it’s right.

Cut to world-weary police lieutenant Fred Williams at the precinct house, taking the statement of a dotty old landlady who is reporting one of her tenants missing. Does his cop intuition tell him there’s more to this than a flighty young woman who’s taken off for an impromptu trip? No, not really, but he’s the protagonist, so he’ll have to do. We move from New York’s finest standing around looking bored to a young woman riding her bike to the Staten Island ferry. She accidentally scrapes against a car along the way and the driver makes a point of loudly explaining to her that she’s a menace to society with the brains of a chicken and how “you women” should stay at home where they belong. And yeah, that’s…this movie came out in 1982, and that’s pretty much how the whole film is going to be. As luck has it, he’s parked on the ferry, and as they get underway, this young woman takes the opportunity to slip into his car and write “shit head” on the inside of the windshield in lipstick.

But before she can finish, she is interrupted by someone with a switchblade. Permanently.

So Lieutenant Williams gets assigned to investigate the Mysterious Case Of Why Women Are Turning Up Dead. He is ostensibly assisted by a psychologist named Dr. Paul Davis, who will be helping him develop a profile of the killer. I say “ostensibly” because mostly all Dr. Davis does is play chess, look smug, and belittle the people around him. What follows is a lot of stuff happening, in no particular order. This is a film that doesn’t move from scene to scene so much as it lurches from scene to scene, and though you can make out something of a story, there’s not a whole lot of attention paid to pacing or structure or anything like that. Characters are routinely introduced with little to no context in the way that you expect that connections between them will be revealed, or that they’ll cross paths and things will make more sense, but not so much. In most cases (at least the women), they’re in the movie to get murdered and that’s kind of it.

So this is a film about a police investigation into a series of murders, but I can’t really call it a procedural, because that implies that there’s anything resembling procedure. This film makes leaps in logic that would easily take Olympic gold if it were an event. Apparently, Wiliams is able to determine the killer’s age and that they’ve lived their entire life in New York City from…a blood test. That’s…that’s not a thing. The killer makes a point of calling the police to taunt them, and even though this taunting consists of the killer saying “you’re so stupid” a lot and quacking (yes, quacking), Davis determines from this that the killer is very intelligent and cultured. In theory, Williams is working with Davis to catch the killer, but they confer maybe three times over the whole film – large sections go by apparently having forgotten this was supposed to be happening. Davis’ analysis of the killer is empty psychobabble, but really, that’s just par for the course. It’s easy to tell that everything in this film is based on someone’s speculation about what police work and psychology are, since presumably there was no money or time for a consultant, and so they just made shit up. Most of the film is just ping-ponging between characters, setting up red herring after red herring. Is it the man with two fingers missing, who attacks a woman on the subway? Is it the wealthy doctor with some very specific kinks? Is it the young painter whose girlfriend narrowly escapes the killer? Is it Dr. Davis? Hell, is it the police chief? The answer will surprise you, because it’s totally unrelated to any of the clues the film has planted.

So it’s a clumsy, incoherent story, told in clumsy, incoherent fashion. The dialogue’s as stilted as you’d expect from an Italian production set in New York (Williams to the police chief: “Well, if it isn’t the big chief person himself”), although there’s enough location shooting that it feels like New York, and it’s New York of the early 80s, all grubby and run-down, subway cars scabbed over with graffiti and dingy apartments and porn theaters in Times Square. All of which is explored in the most prurient and salacious way possible. Is there any real reason why one of the murders requires a lengthy sequence at a live sex show? Not really, and yet here we are. There are more than a few shots of nude female bodies on morgue tables, many of the women happen to be naked when they get killed, and there’s one sequence involving a nude woman and a razor blade that is genuinely nasty. The effects are still obvious, but well-done enough that it isn’t as comical as it could be. And there’s one sequence with the wealthy doctor’s wife and two men in a bar that had me wanting to take five or six showers once it was over. Put simply, the film is misogynistic as fuck. Women exist in this movie to be naked and/or stabbed. They’re sex workers, or someone who had the nerve to talk back to a man, or stuck-up rich women slumming for rough trade, and even the one the film goes out of its way to tell us is a genius? She’s also prone to hallucinations. Bitches be crazy, am I right? We learn that Davis is most likely gay – does it end up mattering? No, thank goodness, given the genre’s track record with homosexuality, but it’s portrayed through a fairly leering one-off scene that ends up contributing nothing to our understanding of him either. It’s an uncomfortable film to watch, and not in the sense of being confrontational, so much as it feels like you’re stuck in conversation with an oily little creep who thinks jokes about rape are funny.

It just sort of bounces back and forth between murders and aimless conversation until the third act, which keeps you guessing (or more specifically, confused) right up to the end, revealing a rationale for the murders absolutely head-clutching in how convoluted it is. Even by giallo standards, it’s kind of a doozy, coming out of nowhere, just like everything else about this film. It’s a thriller without the visual flair of those giallo at their best, and it’s got the graphic violence of the more straightforward horror giallo without being evocative, and it manages to preserve all of the gross attitudes of the period. So it’s evocative of another time, absolutely, but it’s a time that nobody in their right mind would want to revisit.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

The Ninth Configuration: You Don’t Have To Be Crazy To Work Here, But It Helps

One of the most common ways that horror comments on the human condition is by locating real tragedies and concerns in the language and imagery of horror. Literal monsters stand in for metaphorical ones. This is not an especially earth-shattering observation, I know. Mostly I bring it up because every now and then I’ll run into a film that borrows a lot of the language and imagery of horror to tell a story about the human condition. Which sounds like I’m just saying the same thing, but it’s sort of taking the trappings and conventions of horror films, gestures universally associated with horror, and locating something that isn’t horror at all within them. The film Monsters comes to mind, basically the story of two people getting to know each other as they journey across a stretch of Mexico made hazardous by the intrusion of extraterrestrial life. The monsters from outer space are just part of the environment, not at all the point. It’s sort of an eversion of the horror film.

All of that, because I think that best describes The Ninth Configuration. It’s a film with a horror setting, a premise ripe with horror potential, written and directed by the author who brought us The Exorcist, an absolute classic of the genre. But for all of that, it’s less horror and more drama about what it takes to cope with horrors.

It’s another gray, overcast day in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. A guard stands a lonely watch in a poncho, manning a checkpoint at the entrance to a large, foreboding, gothic-looking castle up the road. He admits an official vehicle, and goes back to standing there. The car winds up the road and into the courtyard of the castle, where a number of men run around in a mixture of costumes and pajamas. It’s a lot of hectic activity and one or two officers fruitlessly attempting to contain it. It looks like a madhouse, because…well, it is. One of a series of hidden, secret installations set up by the military to study soldiers who’ve come back from Vietnam suffering psychotic breaks. So far, every therapeutic approach they’ve tried hasn’t really worked, and so the Army has sent one of their top psychiatrists, Col. Hudson Kane, to take over supervising treatment.

Kane has some…unconventional…ideas about treatment.

For most of its running time, this film feels like an example of postwar absurdism in the vein of Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow, operating from the idea that war and the institutions that wage war are themselves absurd, themselves insane, and so are in no position to judge those driven insane by waging war. As a matter of fact, madness seems to be the only sane response. It’s an idea that’s probably at its most mainstream in the television series adapted from the novel and film M.A.S.H., a long-running institution on television from the early 1970s to early 1980s. And the patients here are very much in the antic, borderline-comic vein of that show. Nammack thinks he’s a superhero, Fromme thinks he’s a doctor (and not actually a doctor, as Kane discovers to his dismay), Reno is working on adaptations of Shakespeare performed by dogs, Fairbanks has multiple personalities, Bennish thinks he’s from Venus, and Cutshaw - an astronaut who decompensated as he was preparing to go to the moon - doesn’t seem to be delusional, just very angry and reluctant to be serious about anything or engage anyone honestly. 

They are depicted as clearly delusional and/or unstable. But at the same time, the purportedly sane ones don’t fare much better. Fell, the acting psychiatrist, seems to be treating the whole situation as absurdly as the patients do, though it seems clear in his case that it’s out of a resignation to the insanity of the entire war, and Kane’s intense calm and unflappability, as the film goes on, seems to be hiding even deeper cracks. Perhaps the only thing worse that someone who’s lost it is someone who’s lost it and desperately trying to hide it. And it’s definitely laid out like a horror movie. It’s a gothic-looking castle in the foggy mountains of the Pacific Northwest, housing a bunch of deranged veterans, playing out their delusions to the bemusement of the regular military staff and the weary patience of the doctors. There’s very much this idea that the inmates are running the asylum, and so when Kane proposes to try something different, to indulge them, to let them act out their fantasies without the staff intervening, this is where the film takes a turn, as you’d expect. But it’s not the turn you think. 

There’s an obvious way for this film to go, what it seems like it’s leading up to, and a lot of that is in the horror-movie trappings, the repeated shots of the castle in the nighttime, rain pounding down on gargoyles and hooded statuary, as if a mad scientist is about to create horrid, unnatural life, ironically juxtaposed with jaunty music. Conversations are as often as not conducted in voiceover, accompanied by shots of empty rooms, statues and wall decorations. A picture of Bela Lugosi as Dracula serves as a silent comment on the accommodations, and scenes inside Kane’s office look out on the rest of the castle, the space outside his doorway a hive of chaos. There’s a mixture of sinister and frenetic that seems to promise something bloody and awful, but in the third act there’s a revelation, one that reframes the film as one about whether or not salvation is possible. Honestly, it works. The tensest scene in the whole film is an extended (painful, hard-to-watch) moment outside of the hospital where you’re waiting for violence to break out, at this point it’s almost inevitable, but hoping it won’t, because in some way there are souls in the balance here. Not in any supernatural sense, just in the sense of someone desperately needing to be shown that people can act selflessly and what it’s going to cost to do just that.

The film is quite literally like a long, dark night of the soul, and when the sun finally comes out and the curtain is raised on what we’ve just seen, it feels like something has lifted, like sins have been forgiven, as they have historically been forgiven. It’s comic, it’s tragic, it’s uncomfortable, it’s like very, very few other films I’ve ever seen.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

The Pond: Stagnant

I sort of feel like trailers are a necessary evil for this thing of mine. I like going into films as blind as possible, but if I’m curious about something or am just casting about for more films to consider, trailers (and trailer compilations on YouTube if I’m being totally honest) can give me a quick thumbnail sketch, not just in the trailer itself, but how it’s put together. If the trailer indulges in the stylistic cliches of the moment, the film probably will too. If it doesn’t, if it shows me something promising, then cool. Now I’ve got another movie to check out.

Usually it serves me pretty well, but I gotta say, I feel like I got suckered this time. When you watch the trailer for The Pond, it’s promising - you think it’s gonna be some out-there folk/cosmic horror shit, but no, it’s just a pointlessly cryptic slog that feels like someone watched shows like Katla and Zone Blanche and thought it’d get over on quirk alone. It does not.

That said, it’s got a pretty striking opening shot. It’s an aerial view of a body lying in the middle of a field. The shot is held for a bit, before the body…just gets up and walks away. It’s a little odd, a little sinister. But that doesn’t last long. We cut to a man sitting in a small, modest trailer, typing out things on a laptop. He doesn’t even have a name, he’s credited as “The Professor.” And he’s definitely the stock academic – salt-and-pepper beard, rustic sweater, sleeping with a former student, the whole deal. He’s living on a remote island in a rural part of Eastern Europe, studying…something? It’s never clear, he’s just looking at a bunch of maps of incidence rates of things like death from disease, obesity rates, paths of hurricanes and deaths by accidents, and they’re all connectable by Fibonacci spirals. Then he types out some quasi-profound stuff like “SOCIETY PRODUCES FEAR” and he looks up some stuff about how we can only see a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum…so there could be things out there we cannot see! Spooky! When one shot shows him consulting a website called “The Daily Science,” it is…not reassuring. He was apparently suspended from his position at…a university, I guess?...because he has some weird ideas about impending apocalypse. At least, I think that’s the deal. Nothing is made very clear, which is in and of itself not always a bad thing, but this film has a bad habit of dropping all kinds of stuff into our lap with little to no context or opportunity to figure things out for ourselves. There’s little telling, and no showing. Just a bunch of stuff that’s supposed to add up to something and never really does.

So he’s out here with his former student and his daughter by his late wife, in some kind of academic exile. He’s convinced that there’s something terrible coming and he’s on the verge of grasping it, and so he’s out here in the sticks, in a trailer camp on the edge of a large pond (hence the title, though the importance of the pond is never made clear) in a small community of people whose chief defining characteristic is that they’re all kind of weird. There’s another guy that the professor plays chess with, and they have conversations that I think are supposed to be mysterious and inscrutable but just come off as the musings of a college freshman who just discovered weed, there are two obnoxious little girls who keep pestering the professor to let his daughter play with them, there’s a woodsman with an anger management problem, and a boatman who ferries people across the pond. He doesn’t speak at all, he just sort of sits slumped and unresponsive in the boat with a strange piece of headgear that looks sort of like pillows that you just keep strapped to your head. It’s all reminiscent of that whole strain of television that sort of sprung out of Twin Peaks, the rural community where strange things are happening, except in my experience those shows have actual characters with lives and relationships. Here, less so. It’ s just a bunch of people out in the middle of nowhere being gratuitously weird. Every now and then the professor’s daughter will talk about a monster that she sees in her nightmares, and every now and then someone in an effectively creepy mask made out of branches will sort of show up in the background. Nobody really comments on it.

So the narrative falls flat, and so does the execution. This film was written and performed by people for whom English is not a first language, and though I won’t fault anyone for that by itself, I think the decision to have English be the film’s spoken language was a mistake. The dialogue is clumsy and stilted, as are the performances. People don’t say things so much as they recite them, and it’s all slightly off – not the worst translation I’ve ever heard (still looking at you, Seytan), but…just awkward enough to inhabit some kind of linguistic uncanny valley. It's sort of off-putting, and again, this by itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but it doesn’t feel intentionally off-putting. Everything is delivered so flatly, with so little emotion that it’s almost parodic, a comedic approximation of Scandinavian art films where people stand stiffly and say things that you get are supposed to be profound but just seem like nonsense. I don’t know that the filmmakers were going for profundity so much as surrealism, but they didn’t hit that either. Mostly it’s just obtuse, and there’s no payoff, no revelation of some kind of purpose behind the strangeness. What horrifying truths I think we’re supposed to glean all show up in the last ten minutes, and because our ability to invest in these characters is minimal, and the stakes never really made apparent, they feel less like horrifying truths and more like “oh, okay.”

And absolutely none of this is helped by the film’s pacing – well, I say “pacing,” but there’s one pace: Slow. Things just sort of happen at the rate of a drip, People say things, they move from one place to another, occasionally something odd or unsettling pops up in the background before moving on to the next thing, without notice or comment. It’s a bad sign that I was only about a third of the way through it before I was moved to check to see how much longer I had. It’s not slow enough to create a feeling or mood, it’s just a metronomic plod with no rising tension, no moments of action, just one thing after another. It’s clumsy, frustratingly slow, and…drab. Gray, overcast, colorless, and that’s a legitimate choice, but when everything else about the film is equally colorless, the overall feeling is…well, again, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it oppressive, it just sort of lands at dull. At 90 minutes, it’s a trudge. Flat people delivering clumsy lines in a gray setting. The number of even slightly unsettling moments can be counted on one hand, and they pass as unremarkably as any other moment in this film.

Slow, strange, cryptic, bleak, all of these are valid choices, I think. But cryptic only works if the audience can, by the time the film is over, make some connections for themselves. There doesn’t have to be one correct interpretation (miss me with all of the videos “explaining” the endings of movies) or anything, just the opportunity to derive some meaning from it. And slow, strange, and bleak only work if they evoke a mood, if they make the audience feel things. Nothing about this film inspires feelings beyond impatience and frustration. The trailer promises something upon which the actual film can’t even begin to deliver.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Seytan: We Have The Exorcist At Home

The Exorcist is one of the most well-regarded horror films ever made. It’s a classic, surprisingly forward and transgressive for its time. It’s scared the shit out of a lot of people. And like any successful horror film, it’s also spawned sequels, prequels, reboots, re-imaginings, almost all of which pale considerably next to the original. You don’t make something monumental without seeing it crudely duplicated over and over, every successive attempt missing the point more and more.

And I think the peak (or maybe nadir) of this has to be Seytan (Satan), a hilariously shameless Turkish rip-off of The Exorcist, its crudeness startling and comic in equal measure. I cannot call this a good film, but it’s definitely a ride.

It opens on an archeological dig in the Middle East, and a somber, bearded man combing through the unearthed artifacts. He finds a small, sinister-looking idol, stares at it meaningfully for a few minutes, before walking up to a larger idol to compare them. The larger idol, well…it looks like a papier-mâché attempt at Godzilla. This kind of ends up setting the tone for the movie in general.

Meanwhile, back in Turkey, Ayten is a well-to-do woman who lives in a large house with servants and her daughter, Gul. Her husband appears to be very absent, not even bothering to show up for Gul’s upcoming birthday. But Gul seems happy enough, a pretty regular kid who has an imaginary friend to keep her company and  a Ouija board to play with. Ayten’s got her hands a bit full, though – she has to plan Gul’s birthday party, figure out how to get Gul to warm up to her new gentleman friend Ekrem, and deal with that loud rustling and banging coming from the attic at all hours.

It sounds like a bunch of rats up there. 

Okay, so, when I say this is a rip-off of The Exorcist, we are talking damn near shot-for-shot, right down to a musical motif that sounds like Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” to a legally actionable extent. If you aren’t familiar with The Exorcist, just know that there are literally dozens of you out there. It’s basically the ur-demonic possession movie, the one that sets the standard and creates the vocabulary, for better or worse, for all of the ones that come after it. If you are familiar with The Exorcist, this is all going to seem very familiar. It opens in the desert at an archeological dig, moves to the home of a wealthy woman in the city and her daughter’s mysterious illness, the whole deal. Almost all of the beats are the exact same. Some adjustments are made for the replacement of Catholicism with Islam, but it’s all pretty vague on that front, sort of generically religious instead. The priests are replaced with an imam (the bearded man from the opening) and Ekrem’s friend Tugrul, who is an expert on exorcism and demonic possession as a cultural construction of mental illness. Tugrul has all of Father Karras’ guilt, having just put his mother in an insane asylum because he can’t care for her anymore. The crucifix that features in one of the most transgressive scenes in the original has been replaced by what looks like a letter opening with a devil’s head on it, but when I say it’s all the same beats, I mean it – the progression of Gul’s symptoms are the same, she undergoes the same grueling medical treatments, all the supernatural manifestations line up the same way.

But at the same time, it’s approximated so crudely that it comes out the other side as something much more bizarre and unintentionally comic. It's contemporary to the original (circa 1974), and was clearly made on the cheap even for its time, and the version I watched is not at all remastered or cleaned up or restored. It’s grainy, blown-out, there are moments where the quality of stock they’re using changes visibly so a few minutes have this bluish cast out of absolutely nowhere. They aren’t quite Manos: The Hands Of Fate-level production values, but they’re definitely close. This is especially evident in a burnt-in subtitled translation that had to have been done by the first person they could find with any grasp of English, for how inept it is. I’m used to translations missing the mark here and there, but this is egregious to the point that they sort of go on their own journey parallel to the film. They start off reading like they got run through a translation program a few times, and then you start to see editing marks intended to denote misspellings or unclear phrasing, left in the subtitles. But then it gets better, moving onto snarky asides about the dialogue and an honest-to-God parenthetical note to look something up on Google later. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, proofed these before superimposing them over the video file and this has to be the first time I’ve seen subtitles also serve as a Greek chorus on the quality of the movie and appear to turn self-aware. And that’s the unintentionally comic stuff. There’s also an actual punched-in-the-balls gag, complete with pained mugging, just sort of dropped into the middle of a scene. It’s like putting a pratfall, complete with slide whistle, into the middle of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

And yet, as comic as it is, the crudeness also gives it a fever-dream intensity that does serve as an interesting contrast with the original’s slow burn. This is a film that loves a sudden cut and a fast zoom, and quick cuts back and forth between close-ups. It likes to hold shots a little longer than you’d think (which makes Gul’s electroshock therapy especially disquieting, a genuinely unsettling moment in the middle of all the goofiness) and pretty much all of the shots are static. So that simultaneous urgency and stiffness, along with the surreally broken dialogue and low-budget effects best described as “chunky,” gives it a certain nightmarish edge as well.

It has none of the feeling of mounting dread that the original does, and there’s not a single ounce of subtlety or nuance to be found. It’s got pretty much all of the story beats of the original with little to no narrative connective tissue, just scene, cut, scene, cut, scene, cut, scene all the way to the end. But its weird primitive energy makes you feel like you’re not entirely sure what you’re seeing. It’s one of those films that feels like maybe you actually watched it late one night, or half-hallucinated it as you drifted in and out of sleep. Or like the cinematic equivalent of Ghana’s singular movie posters, something that bears some resemblance to the original film, while diverging in ways that careen off into the far reaches of sanity.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

The Strangers: Knock Knock

Having just come off of a month when I made a point of watching nothing but the kind of stuff I usually avoid, I think that for the most part, the take-away is that I avoid those kinds of film for a reason. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t learn anything, but very little changed my mind. It didn’t feel like a bummer or anything, but I came out the other side looking forward to sinking my teeth-eyes into stuff that seemed promising.

And so I decided to start with The Strangers. I know this came out awhile ago, but this isn’t my first shot at it - I’ve started it a couple of times in the past and each time I’ve had to shut it off. Not because it’s bad, but because it creeped me out so much that both times I ended up saying “nope, not today.” I finally made it all the way through, and yep, it’s an absolute masterclass in tension and threat, with an impeccable sense of restraint.

The films opens with a title card and narration explaining that it’s based on true events. Is it? Maybe, maybe not, but if nothing else it reminds me of the opening to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, that stark title card and somber voiceover promising something grim. And it definitely starts grim. We get the interior of a house, petals scattered on a bed, more petals scattered around the kind of box that contains an engagement ring, a record running into its end groove on the turntable, over and over. Glass on the floor. A shotgun sitting out, along with an axe. Blood on the wall. This is the aftermath of something terrible, discovered by two young missionaries who end up making a panicky 911 call instead.

The night before, James and Kristen are coming back from a wedding, arriving at the house we’ve just seen. It’s all set up for something romantic, petals everywhere and a bottle of champagne with two glasses out, but as we see them, Kristen has dried tears on her face and James is extremely quiet. There’s an awkwardness between them. Nothing is really said out loud, but it’s easy enough to figure out. James asked her the kind of question that accompanies flowers and champagne, and he didn’t get the answer he was expecting. So here they are, left to make the drive back to a home decorated for a celebration that will never happen. So what we have at this point is essentially a drama about a moment in their relationship that has just turned into something else. Take out the opening title card and scene and this could just as easily be a straightforward drama, and I really like that about it. I like horror movies that are dramas until they aren’t, that are about actual people with feelings and lives. There’s a sad tentativeness to them, a lot of feelings all happening at once. James is calling his best friend to come get him as soon as he sobers up, to ride back with him, to spare Kristen an extremely awkward road trip. He’ll sleep on the couch. Kristen takes a bath and cries. The pain they’re both experiencing is evident.

And then there’s a knock on the door.

What this relationship drama turns into is a siege film, but one that is almost excruciatingly patient. Most siege films are loud, intense, mile-a-minute once they get started, but this film is very minimal and careful in its approach. It’s all about little moments, blink-and-you-miss-it moments, sudden, sharp moments that stab into an uneasy quiet. Really important beats as often as not happen silently in the background, where figures gradually emerge from the shadows, or are suddenly there under a single streetlight, and then gone again. It’s bad when you can see them because you know they’re there, but it’s even worse when you can't see them because you don’t know where they’ve gone and that is worse. The tension is constant, and there’s never really a moment where the masked figures menacing James and Kristen aren’t in control of the situation. It’s very cat-and-mouse, in the classic sense of a cat toying with its prey until it’s exhausted, only then finishing it off.

This sense of restraint carries through to the performances, much to the film’s benefit. Dialogue is sparse and to the point, but you still get a sense of who these people are because the actors do a very good job of playing actual people, complicated and vulnerable. Kristen and James begin the film navigating a lot of different feelings, it’s clear from the performance that Kristen loves him and doesn’t like that she’s hurt him, but isn’t ready for marriage yet. She doesn’t want to leave him but doesn’t know what comes next, either. James is feeling crushed, rejected, humiliated, all of the intended romantic gestures for what was supposed to be a special night surrounding him, shouting out his failure. It makes everything that follows even worse, in the sense that they’re already so devastated, and we’re entering their story on a tragedy. And then when everything pops off, when it becomes about life and death, Kristen responds by focusing on staying alive and James responds by trying to be the big strong protector, trying to be her knight in shining armor. But in doing so, he’s dismissive of Kristen, telling her she couldn’t have seen what she saw. He’s sort of in denial but also hellbent on taking charge, and so maybe we can see why she wasn’t ready to marry him just yet. It’s not really his fault, he’s a pretty traditionally masculine guy who’s just been dealt a serious blow to his self-image and he’s trying to recover, to reassert himself. He isn’t a coward or a bully, but it’s pretty clear pretty quick how inadequate his response is going to be in the current situation. And none of this is spelled out in neon, it’s all little asides and how they carry themselves. We get a sense of who they are as people just by watching them, which is what you want.

The same care that goes into pacing and performance is also evident in the cinematography. It uses a lot of hand-held camerawork, which serves to make everything feels more intimate at the start and then more urgent the further in we get, it’s not found-footage but there’s an immediacy to it as a result. There are also shots that are very still, very specifically composed to draw our attention in a specific direction, to great effect. Most of the film takes place very late at night, so the streets are empty and everything is quiet. Everyone’s asleep, and the house is deep in the country so the nearest neighbor is nowhere close. The isolation is palpable. And the house itself is very much a home, lots of cozy wood paneling and well-worn furniture, a place on the wall where James and his brother’s heights have been recorded over the years. James’ intentions mean there’s a lot of warm light from candles, and because it’s late at night, there are lots of shadows and isolated light sources. The assailants are all wearing white masks, so, like Michael Myers before them, they sort of fade in and out of the shadows, their stark, ghostly faces sometimes just hanging in the darkness.

There’s a refreshing lack of explanation here, a refusal to give us any kind of concrete answers or explanations for what we’ve just witnessed. Even when the assailants finally remove their masks, we never see their faces. There is no grand, elaborate reason for all of this, no monologuing. It just is, and the sun rises and we come back to where we began, knowing everything that happened the night before. It’s simple and horrible and stark and plain. It’s horror, and it’s exactly what I needed after a month of things missing the mark in one way or another.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon 

Red Krokodil: Life Sucks And Then You Die

I’ve taken the opportunity to do something a little bit different this October. During a time when more people are watching (hopefully) good horror films, I’ve been making a point of watching the sorts of horror films I normally avoid, for whatever reason. So far I’ve covered a film made by someone who makes horror films for megaplexes, a film from a genre I don’t really like, and a film that I started to watch once and abandoned after about 15 minutes because the acting and dialogue really sucked. And to wrap up this loosely-themed spooky season, I’m tackling underground horror, also sometimes called “extreme horror.” These are films, usually made very much on the cheap, that are intended to be so shocking or upsetting or transgressive that they’ll never receive any kind of wide release.

My window into this world is a company called Unearthed Films, whose stock in trade is almost entirely underground horror. They specialize in limited-run DVD and Blu-Ray editions of things like the August Underground and Guinea Pig films, something called the “Vomit Gore Trilogy,” and a collector’s edition-quality release of A Serbian Film. If you’re unfamiliar with these titles, the links I’ve provided are safe to click, but this is real “if you know, you know” territory. If you don’t, I wouldn’t go looking – I’m not really sure you’ll be better off for having done so. None of it is illegal, strictly speaking, but these are definitely the kind of films that get banned or seized by customs occasionally. I don’t watch films like this for the same reason I don’t really like slasher films. In general, they aren’t about people as much as they are pretexts for putting a lot of really unpleasant stuff on film or video to titillate fans of graphic violence and people whose sensibilities are so numbed that nothing else affects them. They’re just cinematic endurance tests, and that doesn’t interest me.

Which brings me to Red Krokodil. It’s part of Unearthed’s catalog, the subject matter is right in the wheelhouse, and most importantly, it’s one of the rare films of this kind to actually show up on a mass-market streaming service. As committed as I am to the bit, I’m not spending additional money just to watch something called Slow Torture Puke Chamber. It’s not as sensationalistic as it could have been, and it does seem to aspire to something more than just gross-out, but it just doesn’t get there.

It opens with a crawl describing the drug of the title. Krokodil (Russian for “crocodile”) is a homebrew heroin substitute, a morphine analogue made by combining cough medicine that contains codeine with a bunch of gnarly solvents like benzene and hydrochloric acid, as well as red phosphorous, medicated eyedrops, iodine, and a bunch of other shit never intended for human consumption. It first showed up in Russia, where poverty and draconian drug laws made it a last-ditch solution for heroin addicts. It’s made entirely from over-the-counter ingredients, so pretty much anyone can make it. And its effects are short-lived and the withdrawal exceptionally painful, so batches get cooked up in haste, under less-than-laboratory conditions. The result is where it gets its name, an injectable drug so full of impurities that skin around the injection sites quickly takes on a gray-green, scaly quality, as ulceration and necrosis set in. Trust me, you do not want to do an image search. You will see things far worse than anything in this film.

It's followed by an exterior shot of a Russian city, bombed-out ruins covered by some kind of haze or fog. And in this city lives a man, alone in a tiny apartment. His kitchen counter is covered with chemicals, a small pot bubbling on the stove with something black and tarry in it. The man is filthy, unshaven, his hair lank and greasy, and he’s clad only in bloodied bandages around his hands, elbows, and knees, and a pair of stained undershorts that are almost more holes than fabric. He inspects himself in the bathroom mirror, and notices a new set of lesions spreading from behind his ear. He pokes at them carefully before returning to his work.

There really isn’t a story to this film, and certainly no plot. It’s less about the horror of the titular drug (which is plenty horrific in real life) and more about using it as a vehicle for a recurring motif – holes as disintegration, but also as something through which something more can be glimpsed. There are holes in the body, holes in the walls and doors, shattered windows. Sometimes blood comes through, sometimes light, sometimes a view to another place, sometimes monsters. Though, to be honest, this really makes it sound more cohesive and illustrative than it really is. Mostly it’s just aimless footage of a filthy man lolling around an even more filthy apartment alternating with occasional reveries in nature (which, to be fair, do provide some respite from the squalid claustrophobia of the apartment) and hallucinations which range from dread-provoking to just sort of puzzling. Sometimes he just sort of lies there, sometimes he has nightmares, sometimes he’s in pain. He cooks up and shoots up, and occasionally looks out the window. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of narrative to it, even implied. The dream and nightmare imagery is either so innocuous or oblique that it’s hard to tell what we’re supposed to take away from it. It’s either meaningless, or so intensely personal and specific that it might as well be meaningless, since we’re never given any kind of insight into the man’s experience. Interspersed throughout is a voiceover monologue about, I dunno, life, the universe, childhood, the flesh…it’s the sort of obtuse portentous rambling you’d expect from a stereotypical student film, a lot of stuff that probably sounded deep as shit to the person who wrote it but just comes off as self-important nonsense.

The technical execution isn’t bad, I’ll give it that. The music and sound design are both pretty good, establishing an emotional tone that probably could have done all the heavy lifting without the monologue. The cinematography in the outdoor sequences is competent, and the interiors (as gross as they are) make good use of harsh white light filtering in through the windows, as if it is perpetually daytime outside the apartment and perpetually nighttime inside. There’s some allusion to a nuclear war having occurred or occurring, and the light that streams in does convey the feeling of someone caught in the glare of the blast. It’s not a gratuitously gory or disgusting movie, much to my surprise – I could think of a much more lurid story featuring this drug than what we got – but it’s still not for the squeamish. It’s still a film about the effects of a drug that starts eating your flesh away as a matter of course, and the restraint means that the moments we do get have an impact. I wonder how much of the restraint was a function of budget, since the practical effects are few and far between, but again, what’s there is pretty effective.

It's not hard to watch in the sense of pain and suffering, but it’s certainly hard to look at, between the overall squalor and the occasional bits of body horror. It could have leaned into the latter a lot more than it does, and I’ll at least give it props for that, but it doesn’t really use it in the service of anything especially compelling or even easy to follow – it’s a lot of moments strung together, some of which work in isolation, but most of which don’t, and even at just under 90 minutes it still manages to feel interminable as a result. Finally, it ends on a note that was probably supposed to be really powerful, revelatory and transcendent, but mostly just elicited an eyeroll from me. Yes, we get it, life is pain and loss feels like the end of the world, this is in no way an obvious or hackneyed idea and nobody has ever made this observation before.

I suppose that underground horror is a lot like above-ground horror, in that it’s occasionally capable of something interesting (I still maintain that A Serbian Film, as unpleasant as it is, has artistic merit), but a lot of it won’t be. It’s easy to mistake naked atrocity for substance and justify it as exploration of humanity’s dark side, but that requires acknowledging the humanity in the first place, and though this wasn’t as sensationalistic as it could have been, it wasn’t really about humanity either. It was a lot of degradation and disintegration that ultimately didn’t mean much.

So that’s four films that represent things I don’t like. I’ll admit that Malignant, though not very scary, was surprisingly enjoyable. And Terrifier, though ultimately just more people getting fed into a metaphorical (this time, at least) woodchipper, did have more visual flair and style than I thought it would. But Bite really was as bad as I thought it was in its first 15 minutes, and whatever people who enjoy extreme horror get out of it, it’s nothing that I really need to experience for myself. So I’m going to keep trusting my instincts. Now, back to the stuff I’m actually looking forward to checking out.

IMDB entry
Available from Tubi
 

Bite: Sometimes You CAN Trust Your First Impression

This month, I’m marking spooky season by watching the kinds of films that I normally avoid. First it was a film directed by James Wan, then a slasher film, and now today I’m looking at the kind of movies that I start to watch and then shut off about 10 or 15 minutes in, switching to something else instead. This isn’t a huge category, but it’s definitely happened more than once. And it’s not because the film’s too upsetting or disturbing or gross or whatever, usually it’s because the acting is immediately so bad that I can’t imagine sitting through an hour and a half of it. I try to be open-minded, but there are days when my patience for bullshit wears thin.

And this is exactly where Bite fits in. I was able to get through about 15 minutes of it before I tapped out the first time I watched it, but it’s always nagged at me, like maybe I didn’t give it a chance. So I took another shot at it and was ultimately rewarded with…well, a case of squandered potential.

We start with what looks like home-recorded video footage of Casey and her friends Jill and Kirsten in Costa Rica for Casey’s bachelorette weekend. She’s engaged to Jared, who – Jill and Kirsten keep reminding us – is a catch. He is both attractive and successful. But Casey’s getting cold feet. She’s afraid that she and Jared aren’t on the same page about some important stuff, she doesn’t have the greatest relationship with her mother-in-law, plus all the uncertainty attendant to such a big life change. So there are these moments of doubt and reluctance interleaved between all the sun and sand and drinking. There’s a lot of drinking. A lot of drinking, culminating in Casey vanishing with a very friendly guy they just met for awhile.

Cue the next day and the hangovers, and the regret, and the guilt, and the decision to try and wash it all off by visiting this super-secret lagoon where the water’s so clear “it’s like you’re standing in the sky.” After a long, long walk down the beach and into the jungle, they come to a small body of water (not as clear as advertised) in a secluded cove. Jill and Casey take a dip, and at some point Casey gets bitten by something under the water. Nobody thinks anything of it.

And nobody really thinks anything of the clutches of small, translucent eggs coating the rocks around the water.

So, if it’s not obvious from the title, this is a film about how a bite from a mysterious insect goes horribly wrong and has all kinds of gross, gooey consequences for Casey. As such, it can basically be divided into two halves. The first half focuses on Casey’s anxiety about her upcoming marriage, and as it turns out, there’s a lot to be anxious about. Her future mother-in-law is bitter and puritanical, and doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for her precious baby boy. It also doesn’t help that she’s Casey’s landlord and lives in the building. Jared, the precious baby in question, is an absolute mama’s boy who won’t stand up to his mother at all and is more than happy to abstain from sex with Casey until marriage because that’s how mother wants it. The whole reason Jared knows Casey is because they live in the same building, and they live in the same building because that’s how mother wants it. It’s like that. Casey doesn’t want children and Jared really, really does, and they haven't discussed this yet. That is not a small thing at all. That is a page on which you both must be. So there’s all the tension around those things and her guilt at whatever indiscretion happened in Costa Rica, and the wedding is right around the corner and Casey’s been so paralyzed by all this hassle and uncertainty that a lot of planning isn’t locked in yet. And now this weird bug bite she got is turning into a really nasty blistered rash.

I guess this is supposed to be some kind of character study, but it doesn’t really work in that regard. That’s because the dialogue and performances are all stilted and two-dimensional. Everyone has a single defining personality trait and that’s it, and nobody in real life actually talks like the people do in this film. This is what got me to shut it off the first time. There’s only so much freshman creative writing workshop attempts at dialogue you can take before you’re done. And on top of that, most of those single defining personality traits suck. Casey is somewhat sympathetic if only because what’s about to happen to her is wildly out of proportion to her shortcomings, Kirsten seems basically decent, and there’s a kindly neighbor who shows up exactly twice to inquire after her health but everyone else beyond that is terrible. Her future mother-in-law/landlord is gratuitously awful, Jared isn’t paying attention to her or her needs at all (unless there’s something in it for him), and as it turns out, Jill is the stock scheming, manipulative backstabber. That’s sort of it. So the character study doesn’t work because there’s no depth or nuance and the sort of things you should be exploring in a character study go unexplored. Everyone’s basically a cardboard cutout.

That pivots into the second half, where things start to really get gross. And, to its modest credit, I do think that the imagery that comes with insect-related body horror is uniquely disquieting. It’s a very alien angle on life, one that brings with it ideas of infestation and radical transformation. So I think there was a real missed opportunity here to connect Casey’s fears of pregnancy to the specific nature of the body horror involved. Clutches of eggs, queens, drones, hives, cocoons…they could have really dug into some of those ideas and used them to explore the idea that becoming a mother strips you of your identity and even humanity outside of that role. Casey’s on the verge of major life changes and is understandably anxious about them, and she’s trying to hide her regrets and shame and uncertainty from everyone. It could have been really cool if the filmmakers had embodied those feelings as the bizarre metamorphosis she’s undergoing, Casey desperately trying to pretend that everything’s fine while her body is turning into something she doesn’t understand.

They could have done that, but they sure as shit didn’t. Instead we get some sub-Cronenberg’s The Fly antics where one by one, people wander into Casey’s increasingly filthy (and convincingly stomach-churning) apartment and encounter Casey as she descends…well, it’s not really into anything expressly insectile, mostly she just gets really grody-looking. Then they’re dispatched in a variety of gruesome ways that don’t obey any internal logic. Casey’s transformation really just translated into her being able to do whatever the scene requires, whether it makes sense or not. So the second half of the film is mostly just people walking into a meat grinder made up of gooey practical effects, and then the whole thing just sort of ends with a “the end…OR IS IT?” sting (or bite, as the case may be). It doesn’t really escalate so much as it plods inevitably forward, and I’m assuming the filmmakers thought the gore and gross special effects would carry the whole thing, and they really don’t.

A couple of other films came to mind while I was watching this. The director previously made a film called The Drownsman, which I wrote about a long time ago. And that film was an oddity in that it damn near passed the Bechdel test while at the same time showcasing some truly appalling relationships between women who are supposed to be friends. It was, if anything, even more ridiculous than this film. The other, recommended to me by the streaming service after I finished this, was Contracted. I’ve written about Contracted too, and for its shortcomings (any film that has sexual assault as a central plot point is walking through a minefield in my opinion), it did a lot of what this film does and could have done, but better. Like this film, the acting and dialogue in Contracted was stilted and cartoony, but somehow there it was so off-kilter it almost became an aesthetic. And it was a film about a young woman let down by all of the people who were supposed to support her, people who are uniformly selfish and awful, and because of something terrible she goes through a radical physical transformation that almost serves as a metaphor for her experience. It’s not a perfect film at all, but it points to how you can make a movie like this and end up with something worth thinking about beyond “wow…that’s a lot of slime.” Sometimes it’s worth looking past an initially disappointing first impression, but…this is not one of those times.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Terrifier: Insane Clown Parting (Your Head From Your Shoulders)

It’s been a long time since I took the month of October to do something a little different. While most people are talking about the horror films worth watching, that’s what I’m trying to do most of the year, so instead I try to change it up. But I think the last time I really committed to the bit was a month of films that aren’t horror films, but are totally horror films, and that was a long time ago.

So I decided that for this spooky season, I’m going to focus on the kinds of movies I usually avoid. I got the idea after watching Malignant, which, despite my reservations, ended up being fun. Although I can’t guarantee that any of the others film I watch this month will get the same reception, there’s a willful perversity to the idea that I like. I spend most of the year focusing on my lane, so October seems like a good time to stray from it, maybe interrogate my dislikes a little.

With that in mind, I really don’t like slasher movies. I like watching horror films that unnerve me, get under my skin, make me feel things, that scare me. And I don’t find slasher films very scary. Because once you get past the spectacle of ludicrously graphic violence, there’s not much there, usually. I know many people find gore and violence upsetting – and don’t get me wrong, when graphic violence is used to help tell a story with relatable people and actual emotional stakes, it can be a powerful storytelling tool, but gore and graphic violence by themselves, for their own sake, don’t really move me. At that point it’s hard for me to see them as anything other than an exercise in special effects. There’s often not much consideration for the characters, not a lot of effort to make them relatable, sympathetic people, and at their worst they can be downright reactionary.

Basically, bloody death without a story and emotional stakes or worse, presented as entertainment, isn’t my deal. And so I decided to watch Terrifier, which has a decent reputation as a pretty unapologetic slasher film. To its credit, isn’t especially reactionary (maybe a little), and it’s made with style, but at the end of the day, it’s the prototypical slasher movie stripped down to its bare bones. It’s a movie where nobody exists as anything more than cannon fodder, and the violence is the only point.

We open on a news program, where the host is about to interview a woman who is the only known survivor of the Miles County Massacre, a murder spree that occurred a year ago, last Halloween. It ended with the killer – known as Art the Clown – dead. Or so the survivor says, despite his body mysteriously vanishing from the morgue. But she’s insistent, and it’s easy to see why, as Art left her with a face that’s very hard to look at. The idea that whoever did something that horrible could return is not a comfortable one. And somewhere out in the city, there’s someone watching this program. Someone so incensed by what they see that they smash their television.

Someone putting on greasepaint and a clown costume and gathering up a bag full of very sharp implements.

And then back at the studio, we cut to the host in her dressing room talking on her phone, making all kinds of disparaging comments about the appearance of the woman she just interviewed, before the very same woman suddenly attacks her and begins mangling her face while laughing maniacally. That is a thing that happened. Now we’re following two young women, Tera and Dawn, who’ve just left a Halloween party, and discover that someone’s slashed Dawn’s tire. Tera calls her sister Victoria, who’s busy studying for finals, but agrees to come get them when her roommate staggers in drunk with some dude in tow. Tera and Dawn walk into the nearby pizza joint to get a slice while they wait. And then they look over and there’s this, like, really creepy dude in a black and white clown costume who just, like, keeps staring at them. Dawn teases Tera that he thinks she’s really cute, and then gets a selfie with him while Tera’s just getting wall-to-wall bad vibes and you can kind of tell that Tera probably prevents Dawn from making some seriously bad decisions on a regular basis. The clown never speaks, never blinks. He just keeps staring.

This is basically a slasher film with all of the fat trimmed from it. It’s not even an hour and a half long, and the story doesn’t really extend past there being a bunch of people out on Halloween night for one reason or another and now an evil clown is murdering all of them. No history, no backstory, no legends. There’s an evil clown and he’s killing people. So it gets right down to business. On the one hand, the near-minimalism of its approach is something to appreciate, but at the same time it’s also laying bare just how little there is going on beyond sensationalism here. No niceties, you just came for the killing and we know that, so here you go. In that regard, it’s all pretty two-dimensional.

But I will give it this: this film has a well-realized aesthetic. It’s grainy, the colors are garish, and everything is starkly lit. Every scene feels like a well-lit island in a sea of darkness - almost theatrical, as if spotlights are illuminating sets that consist of what’s necessary for the scene and nothing else, which makes the stripped-down, minimalist feel seem more intentional than crass. The score is ominous synthesizers right out of a 1980s slasher movie, and so along with the visuals, the whole thing feels vintage without feeling like pastiche. It evokes a mood and feeling without calling too much attention to it. Art the Clown does make for an interesting antagonist as slasher-film killers go. He’s clad and painted all in black and white, which stands out well against the blues and reds and purples and harsh light sources spilling over the rest of the frame. His face is stark white with gaping black holes for eyes and a mouth, and he’s totally silent, doing all of his expression through mime. I have to say, it’s a nice change from your bog-standard hulking figure in some kind of mask, and it ends up making for a lot of pretty striking moments, along with injecting some pitch-black wit into the proceedings. I don’t know that I would have wanted a backstory or any kind of dialogue or anything from the antagonist, because the inexplicable, near-supernatural murder clown thing worked better than I expected it to.

Outside of that, it’s wholly of its type. It's a grungy film, where every location is believably deserted, abandoned, and filthy, and there’s a lot of blood and guts (with Art’s costume getting more and more bloodstained, and the shocking red against the white is an effective visual), and though the effects aren’t the cheapest I’ve seen, they’re low-rent enough that it’s relatively easy to maintain some kind of comfortable distance from the horrible shit that’s happening. Which, yeah, that’s one of those things I don’t like. That’s what makes pain and suffering entertainment, when you can hold others’ torment and ugly deaths at arms’ length. The camera lingers on bodies getting punctured, stabbed, shot, mauled, gnawed on, stomped, and sawn in half. That’s the point of the film and really the only thing that matters. I don’t dislike these characters, certainly I don’t think they deserve their fates, but I can’t really say that I care about them either. You know right off the bat that this is a film where lots of people will die, and they do. There’s no surprise to it, no shock or upset, really. And we don’t get to know them, no there’s nothing to hope for, nobody to root for. It’s a bunch of gross death scenes broken up by cutaways to other people or someone walking from one place to the next to meet whatever fate has in store.

This film is unapologetically what it is - a film made for people who expect scene after scene of violence, and on that front it delivers. It’s got a more cohesive aesthetic than I expected, and some vivid moments among the gore, but I can’t say it’s changed my mind about the genre.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon