The Oak Room: Everything Is Not What It Seems

Every now and then when I’m having one of those “let’s just pick something at random” weeks, I’ll hit something that isn’t really a scary movie by definition. But if they evoke tension or unease or discomfort, I’ll allow them. And that’s kind of what happened this week. The Oak Room (a suitably cryptic title) is described as being a story about a drifter paying a debt by telling a story to a grizzled bartender. And that sounds like it’s gonna be some kind of spooky-ass ghost story, but it really isn’t. Instead, it’s a neo-noir film with an interlocking puzzle-piece narrative, told through a series of twisting, nested flashbacks. Which is a nice structure for a story, and it does have its moments, but it’s unfortunately let down by clunky writing, some missed opportunities in the story, and performances that are loud and cartoony when they should be quiet and subtle.

It's a snowy winter night in rural Ontario - one of those nights when it just keeps coming down, when the roads are going to be rough going, and when the power’s going to cut out at some point - and Paul is closing up the bar he owns. He’s sweeping up, emptying the cash register, getting ready to turn off the neon sign outside when a figure pulls up to the front door. Paul tells them they’re closed, but they come in anyway. It’s a younger man named Steve (almost nobody in this movie has a last name) and Paul recognizes him. He isn’t happy to see Steve. Steve’s father worked (and drank) himself into an early grave trying to put together the money to send Steve to college. And then Steve flunked out after a semester or two. Steve didn’t even come home for the funeral. He owes multiple people money, including Paul, and people rougher than Paul.

Steve came back to claim his father’s worldly possessions, but Paul has other ideas. He wants to make sure Steve pays what he owes. So he makes a phone call, to one of those people rougher than him, and then they wait. And Steve tells Paul he’ll pay his share to Paul with a story about what happened a night or two ago at a bar called the Oak Room, the next town over.

He’s sure Paul’s going to be interested in hearing it.

The scope of this film is very limited, almost cozy, as befits its origins as a play. The action is limited to two bars, a pig farm, and a rural highway, in both the past and present. The limited setting works for it, though, as it creates a feeling that what we’re watching are sort of variations on a theme - a conversation, a flashback, two or sometimes three people, in vignettes connected by the conversation between Paul and Steve in the present. It’s a basic setup being executed multiple times, but with each individual instance contributing something to a larger narrative. It’s almost fractal in nature, and until the very end all of the action is in the things people say, what they reveal about themselves (or don’t), the implications of every new revelation.

So the narrative structure is interesting, and it’s well-shot, making good use of snowy nights, overcast winter days with fitful sun, and the warm amber glow of a bar at night, as if the light through the beer bottles is cast over the entire space. The soundtrack is mournful guitar, clacks and thumps that communicate both a sense of rural desolation and brewing unease. There’s the feeling that there’s something there to grasp, that the pieces are being put in front of us if only we know how to put them together, to recognize what’s important and what isn’t. And it mostly pays off, (and lets the end be a little ambiguous, which works well) though there are some loose threads here and there that feel like they’re meant to be important, to lead to some additional revelation, but don’t. Because it’s a lot of table-setting that doesn’t pay off until the third act, it can feel a little aimless until things come together. It does have an effectively mournful cast over it, to its credit. There’s a lot to this film about regrets, about irreversible bad choices, about realizing too late what mistakes you’ve made, about waking up one morning and realizing just how old you’ve gotten and how little you have to show for it.

But all of this is struggling against writing that is as hackneyed as it gets and performances that tend mostly toward the two-dimensional. Everyone’s just a little too much, a little too archetypical to be believable as people, and in most cases they’re really, really annoying archetypes. In the case of a character like Steve, it makes sense and there’s a weaselly furtiveness to him that does work, but Paul is all macho bluster and posturing and it gets pretty grating pretty quickly. The dialogue is mostly generic tough-guy talk (like, who in real life actually calls someone “college boy?”) and/or clumsy exposition of the “you have a lot of nerve coming here after [insert string of events that both characters wouldn’t need to actually restate out loud]!” variety. As often as not, characters make speeches or perform monologues instead of talking, and almost no opportunity for profanity or aggro chest-beating is left on the table. It’s the kind of story that works best in a naturalistic, downplayed style and that isn’t to be found here at all. Well, that’s not entirely true - there’s a flashback with Steve’s father that generates some real pathos, but it’s an isolated moment in what is otherwise a college sophomore’s attempt at David Mamet.

Although the structure is interesting and at least as far as that goes the filmmakers don’t insult our intelligence- we’re still left to figure out the implications of what we’re hearing and seeing for ourselves, which is good - the details are aggressively pedestrian, like a house that’s been designed by M.C. Escher and then decorated with “Live, Laugh, Love” wall art on every surface. Given how much meta-commentary there is in the dialogue about the nature of stories and how important it is to spice up the truth, I think I can see where the failings come from.

IMDB entry
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Pearl: Put On A Happy Face

I really liked the film X, and one of the things I liked about it was how it managed to be both a gritty 70s period piece and something smarter and more cineliterate than that at the same time. It was very much what it promised on the cover - a film about a group of young people who tried to shoot a pornographic movie on someone’s farm and what happened when they ran afoul of the owners - but it was also a film about youth, beauty, desire, the loss of those things, and the power of cinema. It took a very specific type of film and simultaneously celebrated, subverted, and exceeded it.

So I wondered what the deal was going to be with Pearl, a prequel to that film that the director and lead actress cooked up during a mandatory COVID quarantine. I don’t usually like prequels, especially origin stories. They tend to strip away the mystery, make the monsters less interesting. And for that matter, how do you follow something like X? As it turns out, the way to do it - and do it extremely well - is to take a type of film you don’t usually associate with horror and make a horror film out of it. It’s a specific type of period melodrama that moves inexorably into nightmare, working as a portrait of an extremely troubled young woman, as well as a continuing comment of the power of cinema, without sacrificing the horror one bit..

It's 1918, and Pearl is a farm girl who longs to trade her life of drudgery for the glamorous life of a movie star. She wants to get away, to run as far and fast from her present life as she can. And you can’t really blame her - a dour, puritanical mother, an invalid father, and a husband overseas fighting all mean that her days are nothing but chores - feeding the animals (the ones who haven’t died off), caring for her father, and the occasional trip into town to pick up medicine. Sometimes, she sneaks a bit of money to go to the picture shows while she’s in town, and she plays out the dance routines she sees on the screen for their remaining livestock. That’s her escape. That’s her moment of joy.

A moment of joy inevitably cut short by her mother, who shames her for her frivolities. Pearl comes back down to earth, the music fades, and in a fit of pique she spears one of their geese with a pitchfork. She feeds it to the alligator that lives in their pond.

You get the sense that this isn’t the first time.

If you’ve seen X, you’ll know that what we’re seeing is the beginnings of a very dark, very sad story. But to its credit, Pearl also works just as well on its own, a portrait of a very unstable young woman in circumstances that all but guarantee that she’s going to snap eventually. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when, and how ugly the fallout is going to be. And it works as well as it does in part because there’s a very strong tension between the story itself and how the story is being told. It’s filmed very much in the style of old melodramas, starting with period-appropriate titles and opening credits, everything shot in bright, super-saturated colors, lots of wipe and iris transitions, and a score of omnipresent strings and brass that slathers everything in the brightest of brights and the darkest of darks. Think The Wizard Of Oz, or the work of Douglas Sirk. This is the world as it was, or at least as it is nostalgically remembered, a brighter and more colorful time, full of promise.

But even within that, there’s something else poking through - it’s 1918, so it’s right in the middle of the flu pandemic. There are masks and there is social distancing, fears of contagion which resonate differently today. It’s World War I, and men are coming home shattered by what they’ve seen if they come home at all. The uncertainty, the wondering when you don’t get a letter back. Wondering if men in uniform are going to turn up to give you the bad news. So there’s a pervasive uncertainty, the constant specter of death and disease that is not at all whitewashed by the sunny, colorful setting. There’s also the escape inherent in the movies, but here again, there’s also the seedy underbelly of cinema - stag films, furtive and underground. It’s a film where all manner of darkness is being painted in the most vivid of colors and it lends everything a slightly hysteric edge, or the feeling that you’re having a nightmare where you start watching a perfectly harmless film that gets progressively stranger and more sinister.

And this is all embodied in Pearl, a farmer’s daughter who feels like she’s bound for something better, for the bright lights of Hollywood. Which is a classic story, but here again there is a darkness. Because it’s World War I, anti-German sentiment is high, so Pearl’s family are largely on their own. What time and energy isn’t devoted to keeping their few remaining animals alive is devoted to feeding her father, giving him his medicine, giving him some fresh air, cleaning him up when he soils himself. Pearl’s mother is hard, kept ramrod-straight by her Christian faith, absolutely opposite to accepting any form of charity. She has exchanged wanting things for making the best of what she has, but there’s a barely contained rage and sorrow at these circumstances that eventually boils over. Her mother didn’t want to be the person she is, but she has to be by necessity. And Pearl has that rage and sorrow too, combined with a seething emptiness - a lack of love, affection, attention, human contact, really, that’s created an unappeasable hunger for love and validation inside her. Repression is already taking its toll on her when the film starts. But the emptiness doesn’t stop there. Pearl’s missing something other people have, the thing that recognizes the value of life, the thing that keeps us from finding pleasure or relief in the act of killing. Pearl knows she’s not like other people, and she’s more afraid of it than celebratory of it. She knows she’s done bad things, she believes she can never be loved for as damaged as she is, and all she wants is to get away, and the violence of that desire is startling when it comes out.

And it is a violent film - in terms of both physical violence (that looks as simultaneously graphic and artificial as the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis) and also emotional violence. The feelings Pearl experiences are as raw and unmodulated as any I’ve seen in a very long time, and there’s an exchange between her and her mother that I’d put right up there with the hardest moments in Hereditary for sheer painfulness to watch. The performances in this film are consistently good, if not always substantial outside of the main roles, but Pearl absolutely tears the roof off. The force of what she’s barely keeping contained is startling in its intensity, and the blood is as super-saturated as the trees and the sky, Pearl’s smile is too wide, her cheerfulness too plastered-on, a brightly colored rictus over a rat’s nest of hollowness and total hunger. The desperation and fear and self-loathing leap off the screen.

The cinematography and editing are excellent and evocative, and the film still manages to pack in a number of sly visual and thematic allusions to the events of X, as well as nods to The Wizard Of Oz. Like X, it’s as much about the power of film - to escape, to transform, to reinvent yourself - as it is the events of the film. That it’s all shot primarily in the same location as X also creates this eerie feeling of continuity, like seeing someone who’s gone to ruin when they were still young and beautiful, which is itself an idea that X very much addresses. There’s really no secret that things are going to go bad -  it’s a horror movie, and if you’ve seen X. you have an idea of where everything will ultimately end up. But this film more or less tells you this early, with an opening scene that’s sort of a precis for the entire film - a reverie, crashing back to reality, frustration relieved by violence. And to its credit, the end of Pearl (easily one of the most uncomfortable final shots I’ve ever seen in a film) and the beginning of X create a gap of decades for us to fill in, and the implications of this film’s ending make it very hard to imagine filling it in with anything good. It takes the idea of making the best of what you have and turns it into something terrifying and tragic to contemplate. This one’s a doozy.

IMDB entry
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Shock Waves: Blast From The Past

One of my most vivid memories of being a kid growing up in 1970s Oklahoma was looking through the movie ads in the newspaper. It was the ads for horror films that piqued my interest the most - for probably obvious reasons - and I was kind of a sheltered little kid, so the sort of things promised by these lurid assemblies of art and ad copy were absolute nightmare fuel to my very active, very vivid imagination. And I was raised to believe that the best way to deal with your nightmares was to face them, so I ended up being both afraid of what these films promised, and terribly curious about them at the same time. 

Does this help explain why I, very much a grown adult human, like to write about scary movies for fun? Don’t be ridiculous. But in all seriousness, one of the benefits of living in an age where a lot of stuff is available on physical media or streaming is that I’m able to go back and revisit the films I remember seeing ads for in the paper as a kid. It’s interesting to see to what degree they do or don’t live up to what I pictured in my head. Rabid? Not so much. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Absofuckinglutely. 

So Shock Waves is sort of an indulgence, in this sense. I always wondered what kind of film it was as a little kid, but there was no way I was going to get to see it at my tender age and it never showed up on cable. So here I am, years and years later, finally settling up with one of those films that burned their way into my tiny little brain. As it turns out, it’s a surprisingly restrained film given the subject matter, and somehow its limitations work for it, rather than against it. The result is something surreal, rather than gory or sensationalistic.

The film begins in voiceover on a static image of some German soldiers, circa WWII. We’re told about Nazi experiments into developing hardier, more resilient soldiers, and battlefield rumors of Nazi troops who fought barehanded through the harshest conditions without ever slowing down or stopping to rest. And how out of all of the divisions of SS troops deployed during the war, one unit was never accounted for. This shifts to a boat out on the water, a man and his son out for a day of fishing, when they discover a dinghy adrift with one unconscious passenger inside. It’s a young woman, who starts lashing out in fear as the two attempt to rescue her. And we shift to the woman in voiceover, saying when they found her, she wasn’t even aware that they were trying to help her, and that at that point she couldn’t remember any of what had happened to her. But clearly, something had. Something terrible.

It all started on a chartered boat trip - sightseeing, scuba diving, that kind of stuff. Seven people on the boat - Ben, the captain, Keith, his first mate, and Dobbs, the galley hand. Their guests are Chuck, an affable bachelor, Norman, a peevish, abrasive car salesman, and his patiently enduring wife Beverly, and Rose - the woman we see being rescued. Things were going along fine until they hit that patch of water where their compass stopped working. Until they collided with another ship and started taking on water. Our protagonists scramble onto the same dinghy we saw at the beginning, and head for a nearby island. 

The ship they hit, it turns out, is an old, abandoned wreck. It looks like something from WWII. And then the figures begin walking out of the wreck, along the ocean floor. Figures in Nazi uniforms.

No, the math isn’t complicated. There’s old Nazi experiments unaccounted for and a bunch of people trapped on an island. What we have ourselves here is a movie about Nazi zombies. That’s not really spoiling anything. You could figure it out (as I did) from the movie poster alone. But it also doesn’t really play like any modern conception of a zombie movie, Nazi or otherwise. It isn’t hard to follow, and really there’s not that much story there anyway. The protagonists land on the island, they discover they aren’t alone, and it goes badly. But how that story gets told in ways you wouldn’t expect. This film has a narrative style best described as stiff - it’s not disjointed, per se, but every scene feels very much like a single, isolated sequence, and so the film as a whole feels less like a continuous story and more like a series of narrative snapshots arranged in a comprehensible order. It's not clumsy, but it’s definitely an assemblage of scenes rather than a movie, if that makes sense.

This extends to the performances, which are all varying shades of wooden, and dialogue that never sounds like anything other than lines being delivered. There’s also not a lot of overlapping dialogue or interruption or crosstalk, so that sense of narrative isolation burrows all the way down into the acting itself. It feels very much like everyone says their lines and then waits for the next person to say theirs before they start talking again. It’s not off-putting, but it does feel odd. And when the action really starts to pick up (which takes a little while), almost all of the actual violence takes place off-camera. I’m assuming it’s because they didn’t have the budget for a lot of effects work, but in some ways I don’t mind that - there will be a reveal (many of which work pretty well) and then a cut to the aftermath. There’s a terseness to it that actually sort of works with the stiffness of the acting and direction to create something almost like an aesthetic. Not minimalist…maybe brutalist filmmaking, since it creates a feeling of distance or remove. It’s like we’re not watching things happen to people, we’re watching people reenacting things that happened to other people.

That sense of remove means that it doesn’t generate as much heat or tension as I’d like. But there are also a number of interesting stylistic choices that I appreciated. It was made in 1977, so like a lot of other films from around that time period, it’s sort of making up its own conventions instead of adhering to an existing formula and that pays off at times. The film begins in voiceover and it’s several minutes before we get actual dialogue, the film itself is one long flashback, and I don’t know if it’s the first Nazi zombie movie ever made, but it’s a definite contender for that title, and the way it handles zombies isn’t really the “slow” zombie of something like Night Of The Living Dead or the “fast” zombie of something like 28 Days Later. They’re stealthy - they hide, they pounce, and they’re utterly, unnervingly silent. There’s an eeriness to them, especially how they walk along the ocean floor, rise from the water when and where you don’t expect it. The restraint works in a way you rarely see in zombie films. Hell, that you rarely see in horror films much anymore in general. They’re more like Michael Myers in the first Halloween film than they are what we’d think of as zombies. And there are some nicely off-kilter moments - an abandoned ballroom with a lone Victrola in the middle playing classical music, scenes plunged totally into darkness, long conversations with an off-camera character, some almost painterly uses of light and shadow, bodies lying motionless in shallow water. When I think of impressionistic filmmaking, zombie films don’t usually come to mind but there are some moments here that qualify.

The budget does show through at points, but more in how the story is told, rather than the quality of locations or practical effects. The cinematography is, with some notable exceptions, workmanlike, and the soundtrack is lots of simple early synthesizer, all burbles and swells and dissonant melodies and theremin-like ambience. But because this very simple, stripped-down approach carries through at every level of the film, it actually works.

 

It’s sort of a tradeoff - the film exchanges tension and thrills for strangeness, so it’s not as scary as it could be, but what we’re left with is something more interesting and unique, ending on a nicely unsettling and inconclusive note. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this, and I don’t know that it’s a forgotten classic or anything, but it’s very much one of a kind. Probably would have scared the crap out of me as a kid, though.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Geung See: Cheating Death

As the old saying goes, the only inevitable things in life are death and taxes. But people have certainly been known to cheat on their taxes, and the desire to cheat death isn’t far behind. Maybe we aren’t ready to go, maybe we aren’t ready for someone else to go, and in fiction the things we’ll do to prevent it from happening usually do not end well. There’s something fundamentally unnatural about it, lingering when you shouldn’t. 

And that’s the beating heart of Geung See (Rigor Mortis). It’s a haunting, beautifully realized story about the time we have left to us, however we feel about it.

It opens, fittingly enough, at the end of something. Two people slumped against the wall across the room from each other, there’s a big pool of blood there. It doesn’t look like either of them is long for this world, and there’s a voiceover talking about the ridiculousness of life. The “I suppose you’re wondering how I got here” is unspoken, and we cut to some time before, as Siu-Ho, a washed-up movie actor, is moving into a run-down apartment block in some backwater nowhere. It’s an enormous, brutalist tower, practically a city unto itself. We don’t know much about why he’s there, though impressionistic flashbacks suggest he’s a man who’d grown apart from his wife and child. The apartment’s already mostly furnished - things left over from the previous tenants, who left some time ago and the unit hasn’t been rented since.

But as he soon discovers, it isn’t exactly empty, either.

Siu-Ho’s arrival places him right in the middle of the lives of a bunch of people dealing with the liminal space between life and death - people who see ghosts, people who see their death coming and are trying to outrun it, people visited all too quickly by death, desperately trying to undo it, people who used to hunt ghosts for a living and have nothing left to do, and people who try to embrace death only to be rejected. It mixes horror with the sort of grungy urban fantasy also depicted in films like Heartless and Night Watch. It’s a world where spirits inhabit monolithic tenements right along with the residents and where ghosts are both literal and metaphorical, both restless spirits and traumatic memories. 

There’s a sense of worlds coexisting - the ancient and the modern, the living and the dead, the practical and the magical. There’s the cranky old man who runs the restaurant on the ground floor of the building - the one who knows everyone’s orders by heart, and has arcane tools and equipment gathering dust in his apartment. There’s the kindly old woman who mends everyone’s clothes (even though she isn’t very good at it) and the things she’s willing to do for love, and the mysterious older gentleman who helps her, who has a nasty cough he can only soothe with something taken from old clay pots. There’s the young homeless woman and her son, living in the margins, seeing the dead behind the apartment door. They aren’t pretending to be one thing while really being another, they’re both at the same time. There’s no real separation between the different worlds, and there’s a feeling of acceptance or maybe even fatalism about it - this is just how it is. This is what it means to live, this is what it means to die. The whole film has a mournful and elegiac tone to it, from the beginning to the very end, a sense of seeing the end coming and waiting patiently for it to get here.

A lot of this comes through in the visuals. It’s shot in a largely desaturated palette - even the occasional flashbacks, though somewhat more colorful, are still largely soft golden tones or brightly white in sharp contrast to a present that ranges from muddy, drab colors to an ashen gray that’s almost oppressive. Often the film seems monochromatic, with the only real color coming from blood and flame. And it’s not just the cinematography that’s visually stunning, there are also a number of highly evocative sequences that express the more fantastic side of this world in dreamlike imagery where the world bends and softens into someplace else, or in vivid flashbacks, or striking visual metaphor. Even little details, like the furnishings of a home sketched onto a boiler room wall with chalk, tell you about this world as much as the more dramatic set pieces, which are consistently good and inventive. Though it was made in 2013, you wouldn’t know it to look at it. 

And where the visuals are doing so much heavy lifting, the rest of the film shows a certain amount of restraint. The music is minimal, mostly ambience that adds to a feeling without being intrusive. You feel it more than you hear it. And as always, there’s something lost in the translation of the dialogue, but not too much, and the performances are generally pretty low-key and believable. This is not a histrionic film, it's one pitched at everyday conversation, the banter between people who’ve known each other for a long time, whether friends or not, the shorthand of long-married couples. So it feels grounded in a way that helps give the fantastic elements more gravitas. They feel more like people than characters for the most part, so when things start to go bad, there’s real pathos there - these are lives being destroyed, not characters getting bumped off.

There’s a lot going on here, but it never feels cluttered or overstuffed - there’s dark fantasy, a few wuxia action sequences, and a lot of flat-out horror, surprisingly violent at that, and though I wouldn’t call it gratuitous, it definitely goes to some very upsetting places. But it all fits together damn near seamlessly. Honestly, I don’t have much bad to say about this, it does get a little confusing at points toward the end, but not by much, and it ends strong on a deeply mournful note that brings everything back full circle. It’s a good start to the new year.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi