The First Omen: The Burden Of History

So much of what I don’t like about sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, reimaginings, etc., is how they so often pale in comparison to the film from which they spring. They tend to be exercises in reduction, pulling one thing from the original film and beating it into the ground over however many attempts are made to wring more cash out of the original idea. And everything else that made the original gets missed, ignored, or worse, deliberately jettisoned for a “fresh new take” on the property. Do you really need a fresh new take on a story after only one film?

Which is what makes The First Omen such an oddity to me. It’s actually pretty good; moreover, it would have been even better as a stand-alone film. If anything, the narrative debt it owes to the original film works against it, dragging it down instead of letting it be its own thing.

It’s Rome in 1971, a city teeming with civil unrest, and a novitiate named Margaret has come here to become a nun. She’ll be working at an orphanage that takes in women who are unmarried and pregnant, providing a home and education for their children once they’re born. The assignment hits home for her - she was orphaned and made a ward of the church herself, though her memories of those times aren’t all pleasant. She was a troubled girl and got her fair share of discipline from the sisters who ran the orphanage. And now she’s come all the way from the U.S. to seal her vows in the heart of Catholicism. While getting a tour of the facilities, Margaret spies some drawings done by some of the children. It’s the usual whimsical crayon scrawls, except for one that depicts a number of sad, hollow-eyed young girls looking up at a bigger girl floating above them, disheveled and slightly deranged though no less sad. It’s the kind of drawing that would likely inspire a wellness check in modern times. She’s told it was done by Carlita, a troubled girl with a history of violence, who spends most of her time segregated from the other girls.

Bad things tend to happen around Carlita, and nobody wants to talk about it.

In some ways, this film is at a fair disadvantage. Even if we factor out its connection to a film about the Antichrist, it is still yet another film where a nun or priest or someone about to become a nun or priest finding themselves at a monastery or convent that seems to be hiding a dark, dark secret. So it’s difficult to sustain any sense of mystery from a couple of different directions. If there’s a convent, there’s a dark secret. If there are nuns, at least some of them are complicit in hiding this dark secret. And because it is a prequel to The Omen, we have a pretty good idea how it’s going to end. Even if we don’t know how it’s going to get there, we know where it’s going. And in horror movies, you really don’t want to see the end coming from a mile away. Maybe it’s because this sort of story has a pretty narrow range of possibilities associated with it, but it was really hard to shake the feeling that this film was checking all the boxes on a list of things that need to be in a convent/monastery with a dark secret movie.

And that sucks, not just because formulaic, predictable stories are the ruin of good horror, but also because this film is really well-made in a lot of ways. The performances are generally on the right side of understated and there’s an acuity and restraint to it that films like this rarely have, if ever. For once, the dark secret doesn’t just stop at “well we’re nuns but we’re actually evil nuns,” there’s at least a rationale there, for as much as it matters. I think more could have been done with it in relation to the film’s time and place, but I appreciate it not just being a bunch of Satanists in habits and wimples. And it’s actually pretty scary! There is no shortage of startling moments, but they aren’t jump scares, and as often as not they’re presented in ways that are inventive. There’s especially something sort of unblinking about how this film treats the female body, and there’s one moment around childbirth that’s as unsettling as anything David Cronenberg did in The Fly or Dead Ringers. I feel confident that these filmmakers could have made a really good movie about the church as a patriarchal force, resistant if not actively hostile to change, intent on controlling women’s bodies and done so in a way that could have been stark and horrifying, if they weren’t saddled with the need to tell a story that dovetails with a film made in 1976 (and remade in 2006, for that matter).

And that’s really the sticking point: The need to tell a story that leads into an existing story really hobbles and constrains this film, to the point that the end drags out for far, far too long in order to absolutely cement this story in relationship to The Omen. The world-building and exposition may be necessary (or at least somebody thought it was necessary) because this is a prequel, but it compromises the quality of the film as a singular film. It shoehorns it into a well-established formula and gives it a foregone conclusion for an ending, and damned if the film isn’t still pretty good in spite of all that. I really want to see more from these filmmakers, ideally not straitjacketed by a studio’s need to create more product in the Omen franchise space.

IMDB entry
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Lux Æterna: Film Horror

The process of making movies is sometimes referred to as “magic,” and that’s usually meant in a benevolent way, describing the process of surprising and delighting an audience. But magic also involves deception, trickery and misdirection. And other types of magic involve blood sacrifices and bargains with powerful evil. The more powerful the magic, the higher the cost.

Lux Æterna (Eternal Light), a short, dizzying blast of a film, makes a good case for the filmmaking process involving all of these things, if only metaphorically.

It begins with a quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky about the supreme happiness an epileptic feels in the moments before the onset of a seizure, followed by old black-and-white footage that illustrates the type of torture implements used in the Middle Ages to get witches to confess. And then from there, we’re presented with a conversation between two women, with one asking the other if she’s ever been burned at the stake. It’d be easy to dismiss this as arty nonsense, but it doesn’t take long for things to come into focus. The two women are Béatrice and Charlotte - Béatrice is directing a film and Charlotte is her lead actress. They’re preparing to shoot a scene in which Charlotte is going to be burned at the stake, and at least for the moment, it’s a quiet, pleasant conversation between two veterans of the industry about their experiences.

And then they’re called to set.

This is not precisely a horror film, the same way that Berberian Sound Studio was not precisely a horror film. It’s not a horror film, and it’s not a film about horror. It’s more a film about the horror of film, of the deep, dark holes into which people fall as a result of trying to get something up on the screen. We get about ten minutes of quiet, thoughtful conversation before we’re pitched headlong into the roiling chaos of a movie set. And it really is chaos - this isn’t a lot of people moving purposefully and doing their jobs like some kind of industrious beehive, this is a lot of messily egotistical people playing tug-of-war with everyone’s time and attention. Béatrice is an actress-turned-director and it seems like nobody has any faith in her, with her producer openly conspiring to get her fired and replaced with the director of photography, who himself seems like an obstinate shithead. There are extras and supporting actors to wrangle, some of whom are not happy with the demands being made of them. There’s a particularly annoying film journalist who’s managed to worm his way on-set and is trying to pull people aside at the worst possible times, and someone named Karl whose purpose there (if there is one) is never made clear, and all he does is pitch actresses on his “new project” when they need to be getting ready. The producer and DP yell at Béatrice, she yells back at them and at everyone else not doing their jobs, and Charlotte sits in the middle of it all, the closest thing there is to the calm in the eye of the storm.

It's a short film (slightly less than an hour), but I think that’s for the better because it’s a very uncomfortable experience. The majority (if not entirety) of it is shot using hand-held cameras, which gives everything a raw immediacy and a bit of seasick wooziness to it. Following Béatrice and Charlotte as they try to get from point A to point B to shoot a single scene only to be waylaid at every turn by yet another person who needs to speak to them right now about stuff that really doesn’t matter gives the whole thing the feeling of one of those dreams (or nightmares, depending on how you think about it) where you’re just trying to get someplace, but the harder you try to get there, the more lost and sidetracked you get. And the cinematography is as aggressive as the characters; there’s a lot of split-screen work used to show us two different people’s experiences at the same time, or showing us one person from two different perspectives, in some moments even turning away from one camera to confront the other in a manner that reminds me of nothing so much as Timecode, a film I haven’t thought about in years. It, too, was a film about the messy way films get made, but it never reaches the hysteric heights that this one does, nor does it make the point this film makes about women, the men who are sure they know what is best for them, and the way that the former are often (as they have been for hundreds of years) sacrificed for the egos of the latter. It’s not an especially subtle point, with a small handful of female characters endlessly surrounded by hordes of men cajoling, flattering, ordering and threatening them, clearly resentful of their agency or casually underestimating them. Whether the stake is real or set dressing, someone’s getting burned.

All of the disparate ideas - witch trials, the demands of cinema, the power of light to create feelings and experiences (some overwhelming - the film opens with a warning for people with photosensitive epilepsy and believe me they are not fucking kidding) come together in a climax where a lighting glitch turns a scene full of angry men ranting at three women posed on stakes into a stroboscopic frenzy that eventually swallows everything. But there is none of Dostoevsky’s ecstasy, just the final moment where the center fails to hold and everything falls apart.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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Dabbe 6: Too Much Of A Good Thing

One of the reasons I don’t think sequels and remakes work well in horror is that a sense of finality is important, and the impulse to take the same characters and drag them through a series of increasingly improbable events dilutes that, and it starts getting harder and harder to explain how all this weird shit keeps happening to the same people. The horror is lost and replaced by “welp, here we go again.” And that’s why I think the Dabbe series works well - instead of putting the same people in increasingly contrived situations and piling up elaborate, pointless continuities, this series puts different people into variations of the same basic situation. You start fresh each time.

Well, up to a point. Dabbe 6 (or Dab6e: The Return) has all of the cinematic strengths of Dabbe 4 and Dabbe 5, but at this point, the degree to which each film tells the same basic story is becoming formulaic, and at almost three hours long, it’s…too damn long.

We begin, as always, with something that happened in the past. Here, a man sits in his house surrounded by magical paraphernalia, and a woman, hidden behind a screen, is handing him personal objects and clippings of hair and nails belonging to someone else. She’s paying him to curse someone named Mukadder, and it sounds like a pretty gnarly curse. Flash forward an indeterminate amount of time, and Atye is, along with her husband Cafer and sister Ayla, taking care of her ailing mother…

…whose name is Mukadder.

You can probably guess where this is going, especially if you’ve seen Dabbe 4 or 5. Ayla is in the room when Mukadder dies of something horrible, and Ayla immediately starts suffering from visions and hallucinations and waking nightmares. Her behavior becomes violent and erratic, and Atye begins to wonder if she’s possessed. Her husband - who is an unfaithful scumbag - is dismissive of the idea, insisting that it’s psychological - a traumatic response brought on by witnessing the death of her mother. The psychiatrist treating Ayla is running out of ideas and rational explanations. Against her own better judgment, she refers them to a psychiatrist who has been, essentially, professionally disgraced for considering possession and curses as a possible explanation for mental illness. Once the pieces are all in place, shit goes berserk.

And that’s really the strength of this film and the other films in the series I’ve seen - the filmmakers use the camera like a blunt instrument, packing in dramatic lighting, unusual framing and angles, ghostly manifestations, interludes of total chaos and startlingly visceral moments of violence, all with the kind of raw, frenetic energy captured in the original Evil Dead. It’s got its first-person moments, but it isn’t really a found-footage film, not as aggressively stylized as the rest of the film is. Lots of deep red and green lighting and the frame is often heavily vignetted, which lends a bit of claustrophobia to the whole affair, like the darkness is creeping in around the edges. It’s not afraid to mix up the subtly creepy and the absolutely in-your-face, gory close-up stuff, and it gets a surprising amount of mileage out of things like jump cuts and skipping frames. Reviews on IMDB (for what that’s worth, which isn’t much) reduce it to a jump-scare film, but it’s not that predictable or mechanical. Yes, there are a lot of scary things popping up out of the shadows, but it feels relentless and confrontational, and the film manages to be simultaneously expressionistic and gross. The performances aren’t especially nuanced, but that’s fine - the actress playing Ayla goes at her scenes with the gusto necessary to keep that out-of-control feeling going. The translation is a little clumsy, but gets the job done, and only gets embarrassing around the psychological or psychiatric material, which is kind of part for the course for horror in general.

And so if this were as tightly constructed a film as the other two, it’d be solid. But it suffers because everything takes much longer than it needs to. The film goes back to the nightmare sequence well a little too often (with an extended multi-person sequence that spills into the ludicrous), and films like this benefit from being tightly paced. This one isn’t. At two hours and forty minutes, there’s plenty of air between moments, and a lot of the tension drains out of it. This unnecessarily slow pacing also robs the climax of a lot of tension, going on for so long that by the time the twist is revealed, it sort of feels nonsensical and then gets dragged out and out and out and out.

Not that it’d be a surprise anyway, because although the way the story is told is distinct, this film hits all the same beats as the others. It seems like in any Dabbe film, you’ve got a pair of sisters, possession by a djinn, a tension between science and faith, a curse laid on somebody in the past, the need to return to a shunned, abandoned village, and a last-minute twist revelation that reveals someone unexpected to be evil. And this one checks all the boxes. The first time it was enjoyable, the second time it was “oh, this is familiar,” and this time it’s “wow, they really do just stay telling the same story over and over, don’t they?” Which is too bad, because there’s energy, intensity and vitality to it that’d shine if it had received a more aggressive edit, and if they played with those elements some more - familiar doesn’t have to mean predictable - it’d be proof-of-concept for a much better way to keep a (ugh) franchise going. But it is starting to feel a little churned out.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

From Beyond: Pushing Boundaries

As a teenager, one of my favorite horror movies was Stuart Gordon’s adaptation (if you can call it that) of H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West: Reanimator.” It was the first in a series of Lovecraft adaptations he would do, and he had a very definite style. You could rely on them to be full of melodramatic acting, effects that were probably about as good as he could manage on the budgets he had, and a weirdly sexual undercurrent that was more unsettling than titillating.

In this respect, From Beyond is sort of the platonic Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptation. It doesn’t have the black humor of Re-Animator but it also doesn’t have the pervasive nastiness of Castle Freak. It’s a film about appetites and a hunger for stimulation and experience that gets increasingly more deranged, and the film getting more deranged right along with it.

It is late at night, and Crawford Tillinghast is working in the attic of a large, old house with what appears to be an array of very sophisticated computer equipment. He is assisting Dr. Edward Pretorius with experiments that would allow them to, upon attuning to exactly the right resonant frequency, view things normally invisible to human beings. Generate a magnetic field that vibrates large tuning forks, throw open the doors of perception. That’s the idea at least, and as Tillinghast runs the equipment through its paces, the room begins to fill with a queasy purple light, and suddenly the air is filled with swimming and floating…things. It’s working. He calls out to Dr. Pretorius, who comes into the room, sees their success and promptly turns everything up to 11 against Tillinghast’s protests.

There’s something out there in the ether. Something big. And now it can see them.

Needless to say, it does not go well for Pretorius or Tillinghast, and by the time a neighbor has called the cops to report more weird lights and noises, they arrive to find a distraught Tillinghast trying to flee the house, and Pretorius’ body upstairs in the attic, his head…twisted off. So, of course, Tillinghast ends up locked up in a mental hospital while awaiting trial for Pretorius’ murder, explanations for how he managed to twist another person’s head clean off be damned. Dr. Katherine McMichaels is assigned to evaluate him to determine whether or not he’s competent to stand trial. But McMichaels has a reputation for a degree of brilliance matched only by her disregard for ethics. She’s compelled by Tillinghast’s account of what happened, and want to take him back to the house to see this equipment for herself. She wants to know how it works. So Tillinghast and McMichaels return to the scene of the crime, accompanied by police officer and hearty skeptic “Bubba” Brownlee. It doesn’t go well for them either.

This film is contemporary to the original Hellraiser, and both films are very much about the hunger for sensation and experience. About wanting to feel more, the lengths people will go to accomplish that, and the often terrible costs. Hellraiser explores it through the supernatural, this film uses weird science instead, but BDSM figures prominently in both as a signifier for exploring the outer realms of feeling. As it turns out, Dr. Pretorius had some pretty serious kinks, and it even seems to be the case that this was the whole reason he was pursuing this line of research in the first place. And the more McMichaels works with the resonator, the more she develops the same urges. So this is a film that is very much about appetite. We witness McMichaels develop something almost like an addict’s dependence on the resonator device, one that produces dramatic shifts in her behavior. Brownlee is constantly talking about food, cooking hearty dinners for the three of them. The resonator ultimately produces radical physical change, and radical hungers to accompany them. In one particular scene, these hungers are sated while an alcoholic in the throes of delirium tremens looks on in horror. All examples of the wreckage caused by appetites.

There’s also some examination of the ethical concerns of research and patient care in the margins. Parallels are drawn between the strange science that drives the film and the state of mental health care at the time, in the form of a psychiatrist who holds McMichaels in contempt for her disregard for the well-being of the people upon whom she experiments, but also does not hesitate to dismiss the idea that Tillinghast isn’t culpable for Pretorius’ death, and is more than happy to use equally injurious methods in the name of “treatment.” The real difference between Pretorius’ resonator and ECT, for example, is that one is legally sanctioned and the other isn’t, but they’re both technology that gets into the brain and stirs things up.

Which is a lot for a film that is best described as “lurid.” The resonator paints everything in purples and magentas (the color out of space), one character’s perspective is depicted in smeary thermal-camera vision, the dialogue is as purple as the resonator’s glow, and the acting is done in the broadest of strokes. The effects are reminiscent of those in John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing on a somewhat lower budget, but with a couple of exceptions work pretty well even to modern eyes. It’s all slimy and goopy and full of things that look somewhat human until they erupt into something that isn’t human at all, and even if it’s clear that they’re effects, they still have a grungy power to them. I don’t think any of this is a problem – I actually find it kind of endearing. That might be nostalgia talking, but it’s exactly the intersection of melodramatic, violent and bizarre to which such loving homage was paid in Malignant. It’s bonkers and still has the ability to startle all these years later. There’s more than a little uncomfortably nonconsensual behavior, and the way mental health is discussed hasn’t aged especially well either, but that was pretty par for the course in 1986.

The first time I saw this, I was 17 or so, and expected another Re-Animator, but wasn’t really prepared for what I got. It’s a much more straight-faced affair, with a suitably bleak ending, and there are some moments that are still pretty startling and transgressive today. It’s sort of equal parts Hellraiser, The Thing, and early Cronenberg, which makes it much better than I thought at the time.

IMDB entry
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The Burned Over District: An Attempt Was Made

 (I will probably get a little spoilery in this one, but the story doesn’t really have twists and turns, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The story also doesn’t have much of a story.)

Making films is difficult. Maybe I don’t fully appreciate just how difficult, but I know that even low-budget indie films still require a great deal of money and equipment and logistics, and generally don’t have the luxury of multiple locations, high-end cameras or lighting, a schedule that allows for experimentation or even multiple takes. And this is a point raised usually in defense of films that fall short - the idea that making a film is hard work and so criticism is unjustified. That is patently horseshit. You could run a marathon while wearing wrist and ankle weights and be working really hard the whole time as a result, and it isn’t going to make you the winner. You can appreciate the difficulty of doing something and still recognize when it isn’t a success.

Like this week’s movie, for example, in case you were wondering why I was ranting about criticism. The Burned Over District is a clumsy, amateurish attempt at cosmic horror that doesn’t so much miss what’s good about cosmic horror (although it misses that too) as it does miss the basics of storytelling.

It begins as a hazy, sun-drenched reverie. An attractive woman, gazing at someone lovingly. There’s no dialogue, just soft music, softer lighting, and what seems to be a quiet moment with a loved one. And then it is over, cut short by broken glass and blood and crumpled metal. A man and the woman we’ve just seen are sitting in the front of a car, and she appears to be badly injured. As it turns out, her injuries are fatal, and that is how Will Pleasance loses his wife, Natalie. Cut to some weeks later, and his mother (his shrill, awful mother) and his sister are visiting him to see how he’s doing. He isn’t doing well, which really is to be expected when you’ve watched the person you love die right in front of you. His sister’s sympathetic, his (terrible) mother less so, and then they leave.

Sometime later, Will’s out hunting in the woods and in the process of trying to take down a deer, encounters a hole in the ground. A really, really large hole that goes pretty deep. It looks like it might have been an old well, since the sides seem to be lined with brick. But now it’s just a gaping maw, above which dangle a number of crude wooded shapes bent out of twigs and saplings.

Almost like talismans.

There’s no really elegant way to get into this. The film is basically “man loses wife, is very sad about it, then cult shit out of nowhere.” The two things aren’t really connected at all. Like, to the point that in the scene where Will discovers the hole, a friendly older man just pops up suddenly to express his concern and deliver a big exposition dump about the history of the hole. Which is on Will’s property, which makes it odd that he’s never seen it before, especially if he spends any amount of time in the woods hunting. That he’s out there hunting without any safety orange on and with his finger perpetually on his rifle’s trigger is a whole other matter, but he and Natalie have apparently lived out here for a long time, and he’s never seen this hole before today, even though it’s been out here for centuries. And then there’s someone right there to explain it to him. The whole film is nakedly mechanical in that sense, a collection of things that need to happen that never feels like an actual period of time in someone’s life. It’s not chaotic, but things do happen without any real rhyme or reason. Why is Will’s mother back at the house? Who knows? Why is Will’s sister driving back into town in the middle of the night? No idea!

This is made even more obvious by how the story (such as it is) is actually being told moment to moment. The performances come from the ACTING! school of acting, all hammy and melodramatic and two-dimensional. And the writing comes from the WRITING! school of writing, all speeches and cliches and things that nobody ever actually says. It’s a film full of people saying lines, instead of characters inhabiting a believable space. And what they have to say isn’t even especially interesting. So yes, there’s an evil cult in this town that’s been worshiping what’s in the hole for ages (big surprise), and they are boring. The moments when the cult’s leader makes grand pronouncements like cult leaders do, they ramble, they go on and on, and they’re almost less oratory and more just him kind of explaining the same things over and over again while the other members stand around in sort of quasi-Mennonite outfits for no apparent reason.

And I cannot stress enough how ineptly the story is handled. It’s not especially complicated or unfamiliar – man, grieving the recent death of his wife, discovers that the town he lives in holds a dark secret. That is not in and of itself a problem, you can do some good stuff with that. The problem is that the story has an almost-complete absence of connective tissue. Natalie’s death has almost no role in the overall story, even as a facet of Will’s character. Basically, he’s drunk, sloppy and reckless, there’s a nightmare sequence early on, a sort of vision much later and that’s kind of it. At one point, someone intimates that the cult had something to do with her death, but it’s never followed up. I think we’re supposed to get the idea that Will isn’t thinking straight because of grief, but there’s no attempt to establish that or contextualize his actions. It seems almost irrelevant: Wife dies, I’m sad, whoops, there’s a portal to some interdimensional evil on my property that I’ve somehow never noticed and it’s being worshipped by a cult made up of most the townsfolk. There’s no discovery, one thing just sort of happens after another in isolation. He and Natalie have lived in this small, ostensibly tight-knit town for some time and somehow Will has to be told that there’s one really powerful, influential family that owns everything, and nobody else in town seems to know who Will is. That’s what makes small towns such fertile ground for horror - everyone knows everyone else, and everyone’s keeping secrets. For that matter, we're introduced to most of the townspeople as weird cultists first, and then as respectable citizens, which is just...ass-backwards. Again, the effectiveness of this kind of story lies in not knowing who to trust, at the revelation of which friendly neighbors are in thrall to some eldritch menace. When you know it's everyone right off the bat, there's not much you can do with that.

This is so egregious that there’s one scene where Will’s sister is sitting in the kitchen having a drink, then the wind blows a door open, some mysterious force shatters the cup in her hand, and she is subsequently compelled to…walk out into the middle of the woods where she discovers a ritual sacrifice going on. That’s the only way they could get her out there to witness that? It boggles the mind. Add to that the bog-standard pompous speechifying by the cult leader, and the odd way that the story seems to wrap up at the halfway mark to make room for a second half that is one long revenge sequence, and it’s a baffling experience.

There are a few redeeming qualities – it’s obviously got a smaller budget, but it looks pretty good. There’s lots of beautiful footage of snowy woods and mountains, clouds scudding across the sky, and the lighting is generally stark and nicely lurid in places. In general, the film has an aesthetic that would sit nicely next to homages like The Void, and the filmmakers are surprisingly good at not telegraphing startling moments given how not-good they are at so many other things. The violent moments are goopy and visceral in a way that fits with the overall aesthetic and manage to avoid being either gratuitous or silly, but the whole thing is so incoherent, the climax is so hilariously cliched (complete with a Final Girl cocking a shotgun), dragging out entirely too long before ending in what was probably supposed to be a moment of awe and horror but comes across like a bunch of people standing around, unsure of what to do next.

That it’s not especially original isn’t an issue – there are only so many stories in the world – but top to bottom, the execution is so fumbling and inept that it even screws up the basics. They tried, yes. But they failed.

IMDB entry
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Cuando Acecha La Maldad: When The Strength Of Men Fails

Something I’ve observed about movies dealing with demonic possession is how often human frailty is a central part of the narrative. More precisely, that evil is able to do its work and triumph because of human frailty. The devil, these films seems to say, doesn’t really need to work all that hard at it because people can basically be counted on to do the wrong thing, or to buckle at the exact moment they need to stand firm. Father Karras’ doubt in The Exorcist, the fervor of Thomasin’s parents in The VVitch, the sheer volume of dysfunction in the Graham family as a whole in Hereditary. All evil needs to do is sit and wait and let us do all the work.

And Cuando Acecha La Maldad (When Evil Lurks) is another strong entry in that particular canon. It’s a bleak, visceral take on the perniciousness of evil and how it’s aided by human frailty. I think it doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it’s a hell of a ride to get there.

It’s the middle of the night somewhere in rural Argentina, and brothers Pedro and Jimi hear gunshots out in the woods. It doesn’t sound like someone hunting - the timing of the shots is off, and it sounds like a revolver and not a rifle. Needless to say, they’re not going to go looking. Not in the middle of the night. Besides, it might be the neighboring landowner, Ruiz, and they’d rather not get on his bad side. Pedro’s already pretty sure Ruiz doesn’t like him. So, the next morning, they set out in the direction they were pretty sure the shots came from, and soon enough, happen upon the remains of a person, strewn along the forest floor. It doesn’t look like an animal attack - the cuts are too clean. His belongings are scattered around, including parts of some mysterious brass device, and a journal. There’s a photocopy of someone’s ID, and a map. It looks like he was headed to Maria Elena’s place. She’s reclusive, has two sons, and nobody’s seen or heard from her in awhile.

As it turns out, Maria Elena’s had her hands full. Her oldest son, Uriel, is…sick. Very sick. And sick in a way that medicine cannot cure. Uriel is hosting something. Incubating something not of this earth. And in this Argentina, that’s just a fact of life. These things happen, there are rules and procedures for dealing with them, and you have to be very careful, lest you taint everyone and everything around you with its evil. It is supernatural evil as contaminant, as virus. Pedro and Jimi realize that the body in the woods was someone dispatched to “help” Uriel - that is, euthanize him safely, in a way that would prevent the demon he carried from being born into the world. Nobody else is coming, Uriel isn’t going to last much longer, and when he dies, it will bring ruin to the entire village. So Pedro and Jimi decide that they know what has to be done.

They’re going to get Ruiz and his truck, and drive Uriel as far out of the village as possible and leave him to die there. They’re going to make it someone else’s problem.

Needless to say, their less-than-brilliant plan doesn’t go off without a hitch. And that’s when the deaths start, and Pedro, knowing that he and Jimi and Ruiz done fucked up, decides to do the right thing…well, no, he decides that he’s going to get his family together and get the hell out of Dodge. What follows feels like a simultaneous attempt to outrun disaster and reckoning for all of the mistakes Pedro has ever made. He’s running as fast as he can, his entire life unraveling one step behind him. It’s set in a world that shares some narrative similarities to the equally impressive Asmodexia – it is a world in which evil is a known fact, and has been for some time. And like that film, there’s a sense that we’re coming to this story late, as everything is drawing to an  inevitable close. One character refers to “the end of faith,” and there’s definitely a feeling of institutional apathy or indifference, as if everyone has just resigned themselves. And apathy and indifference are, historically, what lets evil flourish.

It’s a film very much with its own vision for an otherwise well-surveyed topic, though. Possession in this film is something foul – this isn’t your typical “really pale, shackled to the bed and spilling tea it couldn’t possibly have” thing, this is the metaphor of evil-as-disease painted in the broadest strokes, in bloated, festering, pustulent bodies, whose fluids communicate its evil as surely as any contagion. It’s evil as ebola or bubonic plague. It’s an ailment that is physical and spiritual in nature, and the line between it and human failings are blurred. People who are possessed say horrible things to manipulate others and cause them doubt, but so do people who aren’t possessed, who still harbor lingering bitterness and grudges. Where is the line between them drawn? Human failing, like indifference and apathy, does its part to help evil thrive, as Pedro and Jimi pretty much make every wrong decision you can make, let their impulses get the best of them time and time again, and all of it helps evil along. In that it also reminds me of The VVitch, how normally loving family impulses get bent and twisted to serve evil’s ends. Pedro is far from a perfect man, and he doesn’t redeem himself at all, but he’s just one more imperfect person in a story full of imperfect people, so he isn’t solely to blame. Everyone is. Evil is already everywhere.

None of this is, on paper, especially new. Possession-as-disease is nowhere near a new idea (though this is an especially down-and-dirty take), and as I’ve already beaten to death, human failing is a big part of this type of story. But I have to say, this is, in terms of visual storytelling, a real cut above. It places instances of graphic, shocking (and shockingly graphic) sudden violence right alongside moments that are singularly quiet and eerie, communicating wrongness with surprising restraint. It’s as content to put everything in our faces as it is to suggest and leave things off-camera, and the result can be a little disorienting, but not in a bad way. There’s a real absence of safety in this approach, and the rhythms of the film are such that those moments will absolutely catch you off-guard. It’s a film that has no interest in letting you catch your breath and that’s as much about its willingness to abandon predictability as the urgency of Pedro’s situation. There’s a sense of dread inevitability, that evil has already won and is just waiting for Pedro to catch up to that fact, and in that sense I’m reminded of The Dark and the Wicked. What does it want? Who knows. It’s just there, a fact of the world, utterly merciless and implacable. They’re going to lose, it’s just a matter of how long they have left.

Perhaps my only real complaint about the film (apart from a slightly dodgy translation) is that the ending is a little anticlimactic. It’s certainly not a hopeful ending, but after the horrors Pedro (and by extension, us) has witnessed, I expected something world-consuming, and it doesn’t quite get there. But then again, this is a film about the futility and impotence of flawed people in the face of evil, and in that sense it feels right. The outcome was never in doubt, and the strivings of men to hold back the tide meant nothing.

IMDB entry
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

Dashcam: The Ugliest American

Folks, I am not gonna lie, this one’s going to be difficult. Not for you to read, I don’t think, but for me to make some sense out of, because Dashcam was an extremely frustrating film to watch. It’s a found-footage film, but for once that’s not a bad thing, because it’s got the sort of headlong plunge-into-nightmare intensity of the best moments in V/H/S. No, the problem here is that it’s also got a protagonist so deeply unpleasant and unsympathetic that it’s a huge distraction. Every now and then I’ll watch something that sticks with me for awhile, and this film does, but for all the wrong reasons.

It opens cold on what appears to be a livestream for “BandCar: The Internet’s #1 Live Improvisational Music Show Broadcast From A Moving Vehicle.” You’ve got the name of the show at the top of the screen and her show’s audience chat scrolling up in the lower left-hand corner, and it becomes apparent pretty quickly that “live improvisational music show” consists of Annie taking words suggested by her chat and working them into one of the most puerile, clumsy attempts at rapping ever. So we’ve got a white girl…in Los Angeles…rapping…usually about buttholes…and livestreaming it for an audience. As protagonists go, already a tough sell.

But wait! There’s more! This is all taking place during the height of pandemic lockdown! And she’s a dedicated conspiracy theorist! She thinks masks are a government plot! And she taunts people about it everywhere she goes! So, sick of the “oppression” she’s experiencing in the United States, she decides to take off for England - she’s going to stay with her former bandmate Stretch, just get away from all the stress and hassle of a novel virus causing hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. When she gets to England, she greets her sleeping friend by spitting in her hand and slapping him awake. Charming.

One huge fight with Stretch and his partner (who has less than zero interest in putting up with Annie’s shit), she steals Stretch’s car for reasons and drives off into the night. After getting ejected from a coffee place (a pattern is starting to emerge), she ends up in a deserted chip shop. She contemplates cracking open the cash register, but before she can, she’s interrupted by the owner, who offers her a large sum of cash to drive her friend someplace. At this point, it’s clear that Annie doesn’t exist in a world where good judgment is an option, so she agrees. The woman’s friend is Angela. Angela is a silent, masked, elderly woman who looks extremely ill. Soon enough, Annie decides this was a bad idea and shoves Angela out on the side of the road, driving off looking for god-knows-what…

…only to realize that Angela has reappeared in the back seat.

What follows is the story of what has to be the worst night of Annie’s life, and normally I’d talk about how the narrative proceeds, what the cinematography is like, and all of that. But Annie sucks all of the air out of this movie. I cannot stress enough how obnoxious this character is. She’s the picture of a very specific type of person - she lives in Los Angeles, her only source of income is what could generously be called niche livestreaming content (but she can still afford to jet off to England at a moment’s notice), and she expresses herself by engaging in what is absolutely the most rudimentary form of rapping in the most juvenile fashion possible. Constantly. She never drops character, everything is a joke to her, everything is another opportunity for “content.” Speaking only for myself, she’s like nails on a chalkboard made flesh based on this alone. On top of that, we have her atrocious, conspicuous posturing - she wears a sweatshirt with the word “liberal” crossed out on it with a MAGA hat, and she’s written the word “SLAVE” across the mask that she habitually wears under her chin. It’s ideology as temper tantrum, desperate attention-seeking like a five-year-old shouting the one bad word they know in the middle of the room, waiting for someone to react. If someone this simultaneously antagonistic, self-involved, and unconcerned with the people around her did not already exist, they would spontaneously congeal from the grubbiest corners of the Internet like a fatberg of all of our worst impulses.

And I think playing the character so bad and so loud ends up being harmful to the film. First, our engagement with the protagonist shifts from “oh no, what’s going to happen to her?” to “I cannot wait for this person to die,” and that tends to make horror less effective for me. I don’t ask that the protagonists of a film be angels or even necessarily good people, but I think they should be, at the very least, relatable. They’re our way into the world of the film, so when they’re alienating, we’re alienated from the experience of the film. Second, a lot of screen time is taken up with her antics, which ends up having sort of a numbing or deadening effect. There’s no opportunity for rest, no quiet spaces to accentuate the loud ones. It’s just a barrage of chaos. Sometimes it’s the antagonist, as you’d expect, but then it’s also the protagonist throwing one shitfit or another. It just never stops, and so what should be building intensity is instead just one insensate blare. There are still some effective moments of escalation, but I can’t help but think they’d hit even harder if our main character weren’t filling every quiet moment in the film with more of her bullshit. 

Finally, for a good chunk of the film, her stream’s chat scrolls up the left side of the screen, and the majority of them are enablers, egging Annie on, taking her side against the people she’s abusing, using terms like “cuck” and “libtard” freely, and treating everything they’re watching like it’s entertainment, no matter how awful it gets (and it gets pretty awful). If it happens on the Internet it’s not real, so why care? The few people that do seem to take the atrocities unfolding in front of us seriously get mocked and shouted down. They’re basically a Greek chorus of shitheads. The chat itself is a distraction insofar as it divides our attention, as well as being depressingly accurate at showing how the distancing effect of Internet communication can bring out our worst impulses. One way or another we’re spending most of our time with monsters, so it’s hard to feel much of anything for anyone except Annie’s poor friend Stretch, who gets put through a wringer for absolutely no good reason.

But apart from that (in a “how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln” sort of way), it’s actually a pretty well-constructed film. It uses signal loss plausibly to subtract the distraction of chat during especially tense sequences, steadily raises the pitch from sketchy to full-on nightmare, and doesn’t noticeably violate the constraints that come with everything being streamed through phone cameras. Shots aren’t always perfect, sometimes the camera’s pointed at nothing, and sometimes that nothing turns into something in ways that actually elicit dread. The stunt and effects work is very good, and the filmmakers know not to linger too long on anything - just a glimpse of blood, bared teeth, something getting torn is enough. There are some really creepy moments as well, and a sequence toward the beginning that has to be one of the grossest things I’ve seen in awhile (this is a film in which not all, but most, bodily fluids come into play). So if Annie were played much more low-key, like she and Stretch were both normal human beings, I think this film would have packed a wallop. As it is, it’s sort of tiring because we’re mostly just trapped with this awful, awful person who is as much a force of destruction as the actual monster of the film, if not more of one.

If I were to quibble, there are a couple of moments that stretch plausibility - people sort of reappearing out of nowhere, the action conveniently ending up at one particular location toward the end) - but the lunatic momentum sort of carries you past it. It’s deeply frustrating - it really does feel less like a horror movie and more like an exercise in different types of disgust. It’s a hard watch, but not in a good way.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
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À L’intérieur: What's Black And White And Red All Over?

I’ve talked before about how the once-vaunted New French Extremity ended up being more hype than substance (not to mention nebulous as all get-out - the Wikipedia entry includes a whole lot of films that aren’t even French), but for every Frontiere(s), which wouldn’t know subtlety if it walked up and smacked it in the face with a lead pipe, there’s a Martyrs, which has a thesis, actual narrative craft, and a willingness to let some things remain ambiguous. What these two ends of the continuum have in common, and seems to be broadly characteristic of the movement (to the extent it actually exists) is a confrontationally graphic use of violence and a tendency toward nihilism. When it’s done well, it makes for a singular experience that is by no means for everyone. And when it’s not done well, you get Frontiere(s). 

À L’intérieur (Inside) is definitely done well, and what it lacks in narrative sophistication it makes up for in atmosphere, tension, and a use of violence that blows right past glib and titillating and lands smack dab in the middle of outright grueling. I can’t remember the last time a film made me exclaim “that is fucked up” out loud so many times before it was over. It's an unrelentingly intense, disturbingly intimate siege film marred only by one totally unnecessary stylistic choice.

The totally unnecessary stylistic choice makes itself known immediately, with what is pretty clearly a computer-generated animation of a child in the womb, floating peacefully. It’s fake, it’s clearly fake, and it’s faintly ridiculous. There’s an opening voiceover as a woman talks about how her child is safe and nobody’s going to be able to take it away from her now. Which is maybe a little intense, but then there’s a screeching of metal, a shattering of glass, and a cutaway to a visibly pregnant woman sitting in the wreckage of a car, dazed and bloodied, a man slumped over dead in the seat next to her.

The woman is Sarah, a photojournalist, and the man was her husband. She lost him in the crash, but her baby is still alive and healthy. Flash forward a few months, and it’s Christmas Eve. She’s going to deliver on Christmas Day. What does she care? The man she loves is dead, she has no interest in seeing her extended family, no interest in celebrating anything. So she makes plans for her editor to drive her to the hospital tomorrow morning, and settles in for the evening, all alone in a house that’s a little too big now. And then there’s a knock on the door. There’s a woman outside, asking to come in and use her phone. Sarah’s understandably skittish, being all alone in the middle of the night, so she begs off, suggesting the woman go to a house down the street, it’s Christmas Eve, there will be plenty of people home elsewhere.  But the woman persists, so Sarah says that her husband’s just gotten home from his shift and is asleep. The woman promises to be quiet, but Sarah isn’t giving in.

And then the woman says “your husband isn’t home, Sarah. He’s dead.”

There are at least a couple of general reasons to watch horror. One is entertainment - the adrenaline thrill that comes from being startled, from tension and release. It’s the ability to experience scary situations vicariously. Horror as thrill ride. The other is art, in the sense of experiencing a creative work for the sake of the experience it evokes, the way it makes you feel. This can be more complicated than thrills, and can prod at our boundaries, maybe take us beyond them. When you go past your limits, everything is new. Inside is most definitely not entertainment. As is the case with Martyrs, people who watch horror films to see teenagers get skewered by a masked maniac are not going to like this film, because the violence in it has consequences. It’s not the punchline to a joke. There’s visible suffering, it’s up close and it’s damage and pain, people don’t die right away and it’s messy. It’s upsetting because it’s supposed to be. You’re not supposed to enjoy it. 

But even by those standards, fuck this is a violent film. Blood is everywhere, right from the opening scene and impressionistic opening credits that turn it into something textural. The majority of the film takes place inside Sarah’s house and by the end it is absolutely painted red, as is Sarah.. Blood sprays, spurts, spills, smears all over the place. You can’t get away from it. Harm is quick and brutal, except when it’s prolonged and agonizing. Whatever sharp object someone can find, it’s getting used in as graphic a fashion as possible. It’s not a complicated story, Sarah’s being put through a wringer and she has no idea why, and by extension so are we. That’s the point - the absolute senselessness of it, the way this horror finds its way in in the form of The Woman (she is never named). This is happening, regardless of how you feel about it. It’s an intimate film, mostly two people in a single location, and a lot of it happens up close. The violent moments, sure, but also conversations, examinations of faces exhausted, in agony or fear or rage. Apart from a blackly funny sequence toward the start featuring a nurse who absolutely cannot read the room, there's pretty much no humor either. It’s not a film with a lot of opportunity for distance.

But there are films like this that are just endurance tests without a lot of value otherwise, and a big part of what separates this from grosser, more exploitative stuff - still looking at you, Frontiere(s) - is that it’s clearly made with skill. This is a film that uses lighting really, really well - shadowy interiors, backlit figures like darkness cut out of the world, remorseless fluorescents, complemented by a grain to a lot of shots that gives it a rough and immediate texture without looking cheap or like an attempt at pastiche. The pacing is efficient, accomplished largely by interrupting action with sudden, shocking cutaways that keep the audience on the back foot. This isn’t a film that strictly adheres to the rhythms of a scene, anything can happen at any time, and so once it gets going, it always feels tense. There isn’t a lot of exposition - it doesn’t need it, like I said, it’s a pretty straightforward story - but there’s enough ambiguity that you’re sort of left wondering exactly what has happened, little throwaway lines that make you say “wait, what?” and are never followed up, so there’s this faint air of mystery to it all that lingers once it’s over. Performances are believable all around, with The Woman especially standing out - she’s calm, feral, and piteous by turns and the energy is always palpable. Sarah spends most of the film in shock, literally or figuratively. This is a woman who’s already grief-stricken, thrust into something so much worse. And the whole thing is scored using minimal, pulsing synthesizer, some strings and white noise, it’s effective all the way through without ever being intrusive, coloring scenes without upstaging them.

That said, there are some moments that beggar belief - one group of police officers makes a baffling choice regarding someone they already have in custody, people who by all rights should be dead aren’t, but just as often it adds to the surreally nightmarish feel of the whole thing, where not everything is explained neatly and so you sort of wonder how much of this is or isn’t actually happening. The film never commits either way. More egregious is the repeated use the dodgy CG effects of a child in the womb, as if the baby is reacting to everything going on around it. It’s hokey, the effects look cheesy, and it adds nothing to the film. You could cut out those interludes (of which there are more than a few) and it would only help the film. But despite that corny nonsense, the film gets over because everywhere else it’s utterly sharp and ruthless, unsparing and implacable. This was one that had me feeling wrung out afterwards. It’s a hell of a thing, and maybe the only other film apart from Martyrs that justifies New French Extremity in horror. 

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon