Nude Per L’Assassino: Sex And Violence And More Sex

Horror movies, like pretty much any other movie, are products of their time and the culture in which they’re made. And horror movies also tend toward transgression, since they’re largely dealing with the kind of stuff more polite entertainment doesn’t. What this means in practice is that the older the film, the more likely it is that it will have…not aged very well. Values and norms change over time, and some things that used to be acceptable aren’t any more. So I’ll sometimes find myself watching a movie where I’m more grossed out by the way the people in it behave than I am by blood and gore.

In my limited experience, gialli are especially susceptible to this. A type of film made largely in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, gialli have some ideas about sex, sexuality and gender that are by modern standards pretty repugnant. And Nude Per L’Assassino (Strip Nude For Your Killer) is definitely no exception. I mean, with a title like that, it was never going to be subtle. But even though it isn’t as viciously nasty as some I’ve seen, the way it seems to be equal parts murder mystery and softcore sex film ends up being pretty distracting.

It comes in pretty hot, opening with a woman at a doctor’s office getting an abortion. It’s not as lurid as it could have been, thank goodness, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. Halfway through, she appears to expire quietly in the chair. It’s an unusually low-key sequence, ending with the doctor calling someone in a panic. They’re going to move her back to her apartment and make it look like she died of natural causes. They dump her in the bath and start the water running, then they leave.

Some days later, a mysterious figure catches up to the doctor as he’s about to walk into his house, and stabs him to death.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, fashion photographer Carlo is busy trying to bed an attractive woman while he’s out in public…taking photographs, I think? He’s very much the kind of dude who doesn’t take “no” for an answer, which is gross enough, but somehow it’s worse that the woman he’s pressuring into sex (in a public place, no less) relents and goes along with it. Apparently, “no” means “yes” in this movie, and it’s pervasive. When Carlo brings her back to the fashion design house, he sort of dumps her on the head of the agency and finds out that one of their models apparently died of natural causes. Hmmm. And then only a couple of days later, another employee dies. It takes a bit for people to start putting it together, but a mysterious killer is targeting everyone who works for this design house. Someone’s out for revenge.

The biggest problem with this film is the same problem as pretty much any other Italian movie in the genre from the mid-70s – pretty much every man in this film is one flavor of pig or another. It’s more chauvinistic than misogynistic or homophobic (I still haven’t gotten the taste of New York Ripper out of my mouth), but there’s plenty of dudes who don’t take no for an answer, who have no sense of boundaries, who’ve never heard the word “consent.” And on top of that, most of the women in this film are sexually available in one way or another. Carlo has a brief, tense exchange with aspiring photographer Magda, who is intent on proving herself as a photographer on her own merits, but this doesn’t stop her from turning around and seducing Carlo in a darkroom for…reasons? It really does underscore the idea that boundaries and consent don’t really mean anything. No matter what she says, she really wants it. Even a scene with two cops interviewing someone can’t resist having one of the cops spend the whole thing leering at a scantily-dressed woman in the office. Why is she scantily-clad? That’s a good question. With the exception of two nurses in a brief hospital scene, pretty much every woman in this film ends up getting naked, whether it makes sense or not. It ranges from the somewhat uncomfortable - there’s a brief scene of a woman getting slapped around toward the end - to the pathetic, as another executive at the design house attempts to pay a woman to sleep with him, and when he’s unable to perform, he cries for his mother. I didn’t feel dirty after watching it (still looking at you, New York Ripper), but I did yell “ew, gross!” more than a few times at the way dudes acted in this film and at the subtext about sexual availability. I’m usually able to calibrate for older films, but in this instance it ends up being distracting.

So it’s very much of its time, to the point that it is kind of a distraction, but there’s also not a whole lot of movie outside of the gratuitous T&A. Apart from that, it’s sort of a mixed bag. The editing comes straight from the school of “meanwhile, in another movie,” the acting is nothing to write home about, and there’s very little mystery to it. It’s not so much that the killer is immediately obvious as it is it just one person after another dropping like flies until the very end, where the killer is revealed mere seconds before process of elimination would make their identity clear to the audience. It doesn’t have the stylishness of Argento’s work or the deranged vision of Fulci at his weirdest, but it’s mostly cohesive (if not especially interesting in how it develops the story) and it does manage a decent amount of suspense with a repeated motif of running water, heavy breathing, and a near-subliminal insert shot from the beginning of the film heralding the killer’s arrival. The deaths are quick and nasty, full of blood that looks like tempera paint, but they aren’t overly sadistic, and both men and women get killed. So it isn’t as icky as I was afraid it was going to be, landing more on inappropriately horny in a way that mostly just made me roll my eyes. It’s grainy, with pops of color and rainy streets at nighttime, and it’s got the requisite cop-show up-tempo score mixed in with some lighter pop music from the period. I’m beginning to see what people mean by “Eurosleaze” after watching this, and though it has its merits as a style of film, the “sleaze” part makes it a little tough to appreciate.

Film - especially horror film - is a place where you can explore difficult or upsetting ideas, grapple with uncomfortable emotions and express things in strong, vivid terms. I don’t like moral panics or pearl-clutching, and I don’t think that any particular creative work’s value should be determined by its adherence to a particular set of norms and values. Judging the films of 40-plus years ago by the values of today doesn’t make much sense to me. But anything that yanks me out of a movie is going to be a problem, and this one’s just juvenile and gross enough to be distracting. 

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Near Dark: Families Of Blood And Choice

If it isn’t clear from previous posts, I am extremely picky about vampire movies. Mostly because I feel like they’ve been done to (ha-ha) death, and if I’m being honest, the Twilight series both made serious bank and sort of ruined the concept for awhile. I’m not really a fan of the vampire as romantic figure, like you get with Interview With The Vampire or the Twilight series. The whole “oh woe is me for I live forever and must watch all beautiful things wither and die” schtick? Miss me with that. Films like 30 Days Of Night are more my speed. I like it when they’re threatening.

Needless to say. Near Dark has been on my radar for some time as a highly-praised hidden gem of the genre. But it wasn’t easily accessed on streaming until recently, and so when I saw it was available, I jumped on it immediately. And now having seen it, I definitely understand its cult-classic status; it’s a sharp, gritty Western about the nature of family that deals in blood in a couple senses of the word.

It’s a lazy night in rural Oklahoma, the mosquitos are out, and three good ol’ boys are scuffling and shit-talking like you do when you live someplace where that’s all there is to do. They spy a pretty young lady enjoying an ice cream cone, and one of the three - a strapping young man named Caleb - decides to shoot his shot with her. Her name is Mae and it goes fairly well, but she’s awfully concerned about getting home before sun-up. Caleb thinks she’s got a strict daddy and he’ll just charm her out of trouble, but there’s something vehement, almost desperate about it. So Caleb decides that he’s going to blackmail her. He’ll get her home before sunrise, but she has to kiss him. And Mae kisses him, and then bites him. Hard. Hard enough to draw blood, and hard enough for her to drink. Which she does before leaving a dazed Caleb on his own to recover. And when Caleb finally comes to, he feels like shit - sick, woozy, gagging.

When he stumbles out into the sunlight, he starts to burn.

Along comes a Winnebago, its windows lined with foil, and Caleb gets snatched up by the occupants. There’s Jesse, Diamondback, Severen, Homer…and Mae. Whatever it is they do, they don’t like to leave witnesses, and Severen cheerfully explains that he’s going to cut Caleb’s head off. Mae points out that she bit him but didn’t bleed him out. So now Mae has made him everybody’s problem. They have to explain to him what he is now, and what it’s going to take for him to survive. They’re going to see if he’s got the stomach for it. Meanwhile, back at the family homestead, Caleb’s father and little sister are worried because Caleb’s gone missing. Local law enforcement doesn’t seem too bothered - young man like that, he’s probably just off with a girl or something and he’ll come home soon enough. But they know Caleb better than that. So we have Caleb, and two families. There’s his father and little sister, and then this motley band of…well, nobody’s saying the “v” word, but they drink blood and can’t go outside during the day. It’s not much of a leap.

There’s nothing romantic about these vampires; theirs is a life of one stolen vehicle after another, hiding in barns and garages, sleeping under tarps and never staying in one place for too long. Very few of the usual cliches apply – sunlight’s lethal but they don’t give a shit about crosses or running water or garlic. They don’t even have fangs, but they kill and they drink and they live through almost everything else. The violence is quick and brutal – practiced killers who have learned that this is what they need to do to survive. And some of them, especially Homer and Severen, seem to really, really enjoy it with the glee that comes from realizing that rules are just constructs and there’s nothing stopping you from refusing them. But there’s a raw desperation to them akin to any group of people on the run - they’re just one step ahead of getting caught, they can’t ever settle down in one place, and at the end of the day, what they have is survival and really not much else. Mae seems to see some beauty and wonder in the idea of being alive long enough to be around when the light of distant stars finally reaches Earth, but none of the others seem to find joy in anything other than respite and murder.

Vampire movies with a family subtext are nothing new at all – the idea of one vampire siring another makes it a pretty short leap. But there are a bunch of ways to do it, as The Lost Boys, Twilight, Interview With The Vampire, and My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To can attest. This film pits biological family (the blood part of blood being thicker than water) against a potential family of choice (that, well, drinks blood). Jesse and his brood are very much in the margins, and it could be argued that there’s not a lot of choice involved, but they’re a bunch of people bound by sharing the thing that makes them different from the norm. So there’s some subversion going on here. Usually it’s the biological family who are the terrible assholes and the family of choice who are welcoming and kind, but here, it’s tenuous. Caleb wants nothing more than to return home, but doesn’t think he can, and the family of choice, usually the safe haven for outsiders, is accepting him begrudgingly at best. Either way, it comes down to blood.

This film also came out in the same year as The Lost Boys, but where that film was closer to slick, glossy teen dramas of the time, with a definite comic streak (and a butchering of one of my favorite songs), this is deadly serious, gritty and raw the way exploitation films of the period were; it’s easy to see the influence of this film in the nomadic True Knot of Doctor Sleep and the ultraviolent road trip of The Devil’s Rejects. It takes full of advantage of the sprawling landscape of the Southwest, the long stretches of road only sparsely dotted by gas stations and roadhouses and the sort of dark that swallows people up. Jesse’s brood are apex predators, practiced at existing in the margins where people aren’t likely to be missed.

And for a lower-budget film, it definitely has some moments of visual flair – there’s a shootout in a small bungalow that makes light more dangerous than the bullets flying, and there’s lots of fiery sunrises and sunsets, long lonely vistas scorched by the sun. The soundtrack is lush synthesizer and stabs of action-movie guitar, which serves to both ground it in the 1980s and heighten the exploitation-film feeling. The protagonists are pretty uniformly decent and The Good Guys, a father who wants his son back, the adorable younger sister, and a good ol’ boy in way over his head. But the antagonists have some flavor to them – Severen, the gleefully unapologetic killer, Jesse the dour patriarch who, with Diamondback (very much the mother figure) is just trying to keep their little family alive and off the radar, Mae is sort of a nonentity, mostly defined by her affection and protectiveness toward Caleb, and Homer, who might be the most interesting one – he’s someone who has been a little kid for a very, very, very, very long time, and the resentment and loneliness are palpable.

So there’s a lot to recommend this, and probably my only complaints are that the tension between one family and the other isn’t really as fully developed as it could be. Caleb’s not really running from anything, and the story can’t seem to settle on this new existence being either alluring in its freedom from morality and consequences or a desperate fight for survival that he’s been thrust into. There are elements of both, but they’re never really fleshed out, and I found the ending a little pat and free of meaningful consequences. But apart from that, it’s a hell of a ride and that rare vampire film that I actually like.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Fresh: Men Only Want One Thing, And It’s (Really) Disgusting

Last month was full of varying flavors of cinematic disappointment at this here thing of mine, and it was starting to annoy me a little. I can handle the occasional stinker, sure, but after awhile it starts to wear on me. I like watching good films, not dunking on bad ones.

So I’m really grateful for Fresh, a very tense, sharply pointed story about women as commodity and objects for consumption. It isn’t subtle, and it’s pretty straightforward in its construction, but it’s very well-executed.

We meet Noa on what is clearly not a good date. There’s awkward silence, a lack of chemistry so absolute that it creates a vacuum, and it goes painfully downhill from there. Dating apps are full of inane come-ons and unsolicited dick pics. It’s tough out there for her, and she commiserates with her friend Mollie about it. Mollie thinks she needs to be more willing to take risks, to just say “fuck it” and follow her heart. And that’s how she finds herself in the grocery store one night, talking to Steve. He’s handsome, charming, funny…a plastic surgeon, so he does well for himself. There seems to be some chemistry there. And so they go out for a drink, and he’s still handsome and charming and funny, so Noa says “fuck it” and takes him home. And that turns into something more promising, so when Steve invites her away for a romantic getaway out in the country, Noa - despite Mollie’s concerns - goes for it. One snag, though - Steve’s got something he has to do, so instead of heading out directly, they’ll overnight at his place and leave first thing in the morning. Mollie’s really concerned at this point, but Noa’s sure it’ll be fine.

And Steve has a really nice house, as befits a plastic surgeon. It’s modern, sprawling, but still feels pretty cozy. There’s easy conversation, some dancing, some drinks…and the next thing Noa knows, she’s waking up in a windowless room, shackled to the floor next to a futon mattress.

As it turns out, Steve services a very particular clientele, made up of people with very specific appetites. He’s not going to kill her, because his clients prefer the taste of the meat when it’s fresh.

This is a great example of what I like to call a film that isn’t a horror movie until it is. Most of the first act could be any kind of romantic comedy - you’ve got the dating woes, the supermarket meet-cute, the flirty chemistry. If you just happened across it, you’d think it was a rom-com. It’s only as it starts to move into the second act that notes of unease really begin to creep in, and then it all snaps shut like a steel trap. And once it does, it is firmly and unapologetically about women as something to be purchased and consumed. As I said, this is not a subtle film, but it does manage to both make observations about the things women have to deal with every day, large and small, while at the same time being a tense, economical story about survival. The men in this film don’t fare very well, but it’s in ways that are entirely believable, and speak to the ways that male selfishness and entitlement constantly betray women.. The date Noa is on at the beginning of the film is excruciating in and of itself - we wouldn’t call it horror, but it is an especially mundane, banal form of horror, the indignities waiting for you out there as a woman.

And as the film progresses, the horrors become more explicit, but no less rooted in the ways male selfishness and entitlement cause suffering on whatever scale. Men who only want one thing, men who can’t handle rejection, and the women who sell out other women to maintain their own comfort and prosperity, it’s all very much up there on the screen. There’s maybe one moment during the climax when it’s more than a little on-the-nose, but it doesn’t really ruin the moment or anything, and the film manages to mine a narrow but deep vein of black humor throughout that runs the usual problems with dating in the modern world through a bloody funhouse mirror.

It's not an especially flashy film, visually, but it’s got a consistent identity and a nice sense of place. A lot of the film takes place in Steve’s house, which looks like something out of a relatively restrained Michael Mann film, all brick and earth tones and natural rock and moody lighting. He’s a well-to-do man whose relationship with an attractive woman rides this woozy line between captor/captive and suitor/courted, which gives it a seductive element that seems adjacent to what (little) I’ve seen of Fifty Shades Of Grey and in that sense could be seen as a sardonic comment on it. That’s the fantasy, this is the reality. The rich man will keep you in his red room because you are meat to him. And we get sporadic flashes of his customers, lovingly unwrapping the parcels they’ve paid tens of thousands of dollars for and consuming them in ways both crude and impeccably refined. The soundtrack is an impeccably curated mix of the sort of pop songs and ballads you’d expect in romantic movies combined with foreboding ambiance and sharp, discordant stings. Flashes of its romantic comedy beginnings shine through in what doesn’t quite ever broaden out into grim parody, but definitely creates a feeling of discordance that almost seems mocking. And late in the game, it presents a nice juxtaposition between the idea of the object (women as actual meat) and the subject (the personal effects left behind), how behind dehumanizing terms like “the product,” there are actual lives and identities and futures lost, which takes what is already a pretty harrowing experience and makes it sobering as well.

For me, this film brought to mind the use of the phrase “body count” to describe the number of sexual partners someone has had. That strikes me as gross, but it seems apt here. Steve’s got a high body count, and even if it isn’t sexual conquest, the women are still objects to be consumed and discarded, commodities to be purchased in order to satisfy desires, and the film makes that point with the confidence of a cleaver chopping through the meat on a block.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
 

The Strangers: Knock Knock

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

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

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

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

And then there’s a knock on the door.

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Available on Amazon 

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

I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale: Sex And Violence

For as much lip service as Halloween gets for being the beginning of slasher films, there are any number of films that precede it, and something I’m starting to realize the more I dive into Italian horror is just how much of the prototypical slasher film’s DNA comes from giallo. Sure, it’s a term that encompasses more than just horror, but within the ones most commonly associated with horror, starting with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, you see what would eventually lead to Halloween and all the dross that came after. And as someone who doesn’t really like slasher films, a lot of the early examples are more interesting in how they don’t hew to a formula (because the formula didn’t exist yet) or bring in elements of other films. 

And to this end, I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale (Torso) is a noteworthy addition to the list. It’s an Italian horror film that doesn’t have the visual flair of something like Suspiria or Deep Red, or the gonzo weirdness of something like The Beyond, but acquits itself well and probably works even better now because of a shift in cultural norms.

It opens, as many of these films do, lurid and weird. Someone’s photographing a bunch of women sort of writhing around naked in soft focus. There’s a child’s doll, and a set of fingers comes into frame to gouge out its eyes. So already we have a pretty good idea of what we’re in for. Cut to an art history lecture, and a professor examining the relationship between sacred art and artists who are non-believers. We’re introduced to a number of female students - Flo, Carol, Dani, Katia, Jane and Ursula. It’s coming up on the weekend and they’re making plans. For Flo, “plans” consist of driving to a remote area and making out with a guy.

They did not include a masked figure murdering both of them, but there you go.

The basic structure of the film is as simple as any slasher film - people try to figure out who’s doing all the murders, murders keep happening, often strangulation with a very distinctive-looking scarf, eventually there’s a final reveal and confrontation. The music’s pretty stock, the settings aren’t especially flashy, but it’s well-paced and has, I think, a couple of things going for it. First, intentionally, it makes good use of the trappings of the whodunit. Just when you think you’ve got a particular character nailed as the killer, something comes along to upend that and make you question your own judgment. It’s pretty engaging on that front, and the final reveal feels earned, if not just as melodramatic in its explanation as any other film in the genre. I don’t like thinking of films in terms of “kill scenes,” but I think it handles the requisite scenes well - they’re mostly set-up, and though the violence is sufficiently graphic, it’s not lingering or gratuitous. It gets pretty gnarly at points but you never feel like it’s indulging for the sake of it.

The second thing is, I think, not intentional, but more a factor of the way sensibilities have changed since the 1970s, when this was made. It’s a film that is very much of its time. The original title translates to “the body showed traces of carnal violence” and if I didn’t know better, I’d say this film was key in the inclusion of sexual content in later slasher films. There is lots and lots of gratuitous nudity in this film, starting with the opening credits but by no means ending there. The scenes don’t need it, and it’s lingered upon. It’s strictly directed at the female characters and it’s utterly unapologetic. The camera leers and so do pretty much all of the men in the movie. Like, literally there’s one scene that’s just a bunch of men gawking at a woman. Like, that’s it. Both in how they’re treated visually and in how the male characters talk about them, the women in this film are completely objectified. So right off the bat, there’s something alienating about this film, in the degree to which it is the product of a sensibility you rarely see depicted so blatantly any more. But I think the alienation helps it - we’re presented with a world very different from our own, and that creates a certain atmosphere.

This is further assisted by the nature of the men in the film. With a couple of exceptions, all of the men in the film are creepy to one degree or another. It’s tough to tell how much of it is intentional and how much of it is just because it was an Italian film made in the 1970s. but, as it does in Black Christmas, it adds this uneasy layer to the film - it’s already a hostile atmosphere, and on top of that, pretty much anyone could be the killer. Is it the art professor who hits on Jane and takes a compliment about his eyes really strangely? Is it the student clearly obsessed with Dani, who wears a suspiciously familiar-looking scarf and starts choking a sex worker when she suggests he might be gay? Is it the apparently well-meaning doctor who gives a bunch of them the once-over on a train out of town? Is it the weaselly owner of the newsstand who sells scarves like the one from the killings? Is it one of the two dudes who grope Katia and then try to beat her up when she rejects them? Is it Dani’s uncle, who isn’t above checking her out surreptitiously while she’s just wearing a towel? It could be any of them because they’re all equally complicit in treating women like objects that exist for their pleasure and nothing else. It’s like these women are adrift in a sea of predators because misogyny makes everything a minefield for them.

The first act sets up all the suspects, the second act starts picking people off, and the third brings it home, though interestingly enough, instead of getting more frantic toward the climax, it slows way down and plays most of it as an extended game of cat and mouse, making the big reveal pretty much at the last possible minute. True to the form, there are plenty of cryptic flashbacks, murders performed by a mysterious figure in black leather gloves, the requisite pop-rock soundtrack (chase scenes are never more mellow than they are in films like this), and plenty of blood. There’s strangling, stabbing, eyes getting gouged out, heads getting crushed by a car, the usual, though the violence is far less fetishized in this film than the sex, about which attitudes are as confused as you’d expect - plenty of women traipsing around naked for reasons, dialogue about what this particular man would do to that particular woman, but a scene of the killer peeking in on two women kissing has the kiss itself obscured by a conveniently placed headboard. There’s also an early instance of the Final Girl, predating Halloween by a good five years. It doesn’t hit the most deliriously berserk heights of the form, but it’s also much more coherent and keeps up a good sustained feeling of tension and unease. Nobody and nowhere feels safe in this film.

It is, in some ways, a very workmanlike film. It doesn’t exceed expectations, but there’s also not too much to complain about - there’s one very goofily choreographed fight scene that looks more like a slapfight than anything else, but that’s about it. If you have a low tolerance for men being gross about women, this is not your film, and though it isn’t as transcendent as something like Suspiria or The Beyond, it’s very solid.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities: A Whitman's Sampler Of Horror, For Good And Ill

It’s been awhile since I tackled a horror anthology. When they’re good, they do with film what good short story collections do with literature. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, it’s easy for horror to get sort of bogged down in the longer form - I think horror is at its best most often when it’s concise and doesn’t overexplain or overstay its welcome, and the longer the story goes on, the tougher it is to really sustain whatever mood or feeling the story is trying to evoke.

But if I’m being honest, I didn’t necessarily watch Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities with the express intent of writing about it, but it made a distinct impression (not always good, but still), and the film I intended to write about this week ended up being sort of a dud - it wasn’t horror (even by my admittedly generous standards) and moreover it was, well, just sort of there. And I think didn’t think “gosh, that was a really dull story in some very lovely settings” was going to be much of an insight. Cabinet Of Curiosities doesn’t always work - it doesn’t have a single cohesive tone running through the stories, and many of the episodes drag on too long, but there are some real gems in there too.

There are eight episodes, each with a different writer and director, and they end up breaking down into three groups: EC Comics-style morality tales, H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, and more straightforward horror. So, I’m going to group the episodes that way, instead of strictly chronologically.

EC Comics-Style Morality Tales

Episode 1: Lot 36

Nick is an Iraq War veteran with a lot of resentment about the way he was treated when he came back home, and he’s decided to blame it on minorities and immigrants. He does what he can to get by, and that mostly consists of a tidy little scam he’s got running with the owner of a local self-storage place. Periodically, the owner will place the contents of units that haven’t paid their rent up for auction. This is apparently pretty commonplace, as the existence of the show Storage Wars would suggest. Except that Nick is able to outbid everyone else with the assistance of the owner, and then they split the profits from the content of the unit. So the owner’s basically double-dipping with Nick as his proxy. Nick’s in a bit of a tight spot - his truck gets vandalized by an angry competitor, he gets banged up in the process, and the last couple of hauls haven’t been great. So the most recent lot - Lot 36, the property of someone who just died of a heart attack - needs to pay off. And Nick finds all kinds of stuff in there - lots of antique furniture, including what appears to be a séance table…

…and three books about the summoning of demons. The fourth volume is missing, and Nick can get a lot for a complete set.

I think there are a couple of things that keep this from being an especially strong episode. First, it feels like thirty minutes of story rattling around in forty-five minutes of run time. The setup is fairly simple - weaselly jerk gets in over his head out of sheer greed and ends up tinkering with forces he doesn’t understand - but it’s not presented in a way that’s enough to sustain half of a feature-length film. It feels padded, and the time isn’t really used to flesh out the characters. Which is another problem - most of the characters feel like they inhabit the same world, but there are two who feel dropped in from a much more cartoonish story, and it’s jarring as a result. This could have been played much lower-key and I think it would have worked a lot better. But instead we have some unnecessary back-and-forth before the story really comes to a head, and when it does, the inevitable moral comeuppance feels sort of bolted on, like they decided at the last minute to make it that kind of story.

Episode 2: Graveyard Rats 

Masson is a grave robber in post-WW1 Salem, Massachusetts, doing his best to keep his head above water. He’s in debt and increasing competition in his unsavory trade is making it harder and harder for him to really bring in profitable hauls. Not to mention the rats, who seem to be able to tunnel right up through the caskets and make off with the pretty, shiny things that Masson needs to make any money. But he gets wind of a wealthy aristocrat who has just been laid to rest, and so once again he sets out in the dead of night, locates the grave, begins digging, unearthing the casket, only to find that the rats have beaten him to the punch, making off with the entire body. The bottom of the casket is completely gone, and in its place, a tunnel leading down deep into the earth.

And so, desperation nipping at his heels, Masson crawls into the earth.

In some ways, this episode is an improvement over Lot 36, in that it’s much more concise. It’s only about eight minutes shorter, but it uses its time much more efficiently, establishing the situation and then using most of its running time on Masson’s claustrophobic journey through an extensive warren running under the graveyard and the horrifying things he finds there. There’s much more beneath the earth than he thought, and what started as a dive down becomes a frenzied scramble to reach the surface. This episode is much more in the classic mold of the EC Comics-style morality tale, complete with a twist comeuppance that ties the whole thing together elegantly. And all of that is good about it, but it’s based on a story from the time in which it’s set, and something about the dialogue, though appropriate for the period, comes off as more affected than anything else. I don’t know if it’s the performances, but it all feels sort of stagey and artificial and so I found it hard to really get into it. Everything felt a little caricatured, and though campy is definitely in the wheelhouse of these sorts of stories, here the ingredients didn’t quite gel.

Episode 4: The Outside

Stacey is a shy, awkward teller at a bank. She has a loving husband, she enjoys doing taxidermy in her spare time, but she feels left out of things at work, where the other tellers - so much prettier and more glamorous - natter on about the expensive, exclusive things they buy, the vacations they take, gossip about the other employees at the bank, and Stacey wants more than anything to be able to join in, to be accepted by the rest of them. And one day, she gets her chance - one of the other tellers invites her to her annual Christmas party, and Stacey does everything she can to doll herself up, labors over just the right present, worries over every detail. And, of course, she’s totally out of place and out of her league among these women, and her handcrafted gift has nothing on the fancy gifts the hostess has gotten everyone - tubes of fancy skin lotion called Alo Glo. It’s the latest thing, extremely hard to get, very exclusive. And Stacey is sure it’s everything she’ll need to be just as pretty as the other women, to finally belong. Except when she uses it, her skin starts to redden and peel. But that’s normal, she thinks. So she uses more. And more.

And her body starts to change.

Of the three morality-tale episodes, this is easily the most successful. It locates body horror in a glossy, garishly colored vision of 1980’s Midwestern life seen through a slightly fisheyed, distorted lens. It all looks slightly unreal, and the performances follow, pitched at a level of deadpan absurdity that brings to mind Fargo by way of David Lynch. Stacey is both protagonist and antagonist, her own worst enemy as her insecurities consume more and more of her waking life. And what I think makes it work is that it’s played very straight, on a very even keel, no matter how horrible it gets (which it definitely does toward the end) and it ends in a way that isn’t typical for morality tales, refusing to tie everything up neatly and ending on a distinctly unsettling note.

H.P. Lovecraft Adaptations

Episode 5: Pickman’s Model

The time is 1909, and the place is an art school in Arkham, Massachusetts. Will Thurber is there to become the best painter he can, to make great art. Like his fellow students, he’s fiery, passionate, and extremely competitive. And mid-term, along comes a new student named Richard Pickman. Pickman is older than the rest of them, and has something of a shadowy past, his family having been the subject of some rumor. But he’s an excellent artist, inspiring a mixture of awe and jealousy in the rest of the students. He seems driven by something, even more than the rest of them, as if he’s trying to exorcise something through his art. He and Will strike up a friendship, and Pickman invites him around to his quarters to view the paintings he’s been working on outside of class.

Paintings that give Will nightmares.

Right off the bat, I’m going to give the filmmakers for both this and the other Lovecraft adaptation props for choosing stories outside of the Cthulhu mythos. That’s already pretty well-trod ground at this point, so it’s nice to see some of his other work getting attention (and removing the grosser elements of Lovecraft’s sensibilities in the process). The settings feel right, and unlike Graveyard Rats, the characters act and sound like people from the early 20th century without coming off as performances or caricatures (though it is sort of interesting to see what part of the U.S. Pickman's accent is going to visit from one scene to another). But I think this episode, more than any other, suffers from an overlong running time. It’s slightly more than an hour, and the original story was pretty succinct, so there’s more than a little wheel-spinning. And, although it’s been a long time since I read the original story, I don’t recall the climax and conclusion being part of the story at all - it’s much more generic horror, out of step with Lovecraft’s style, and feels like it was appended to flesh out the running time. It isn’t necessary and doesn’t add anything to the story.

Episode 6: Dreams In The Witch House

Walter Gilman has spent most of his life trying to part the veil between this world and the next. It’s personal for him, as he saw his ailing twin sister Epperley, in her final moments, dragged away through some portal into a mysterious forest. It’s haunted him ever since, and he’s determined to find a way to get to her and bring her back to the world of the living. But for all of his time as a member of the Spiritualist Society, he’s never found a legitimate instance of someone speaking to the dead. They all end up being frauds and charlatans. At the end of his rope, he follows up on a dubious lead about a substance referred to as “liquid gold” - a drug that allows you to see into the spirit world and gives you access to the “Forest of Lost Souls.” So Walter - at a loss for reliable housing and about to experiment with some really dangerous shit - rents a room in a boarding house that’s seen better days. It’s going for cheap, and the last occupant - a woman named Keziah Mason - was executed for witchcraft.

The walls are covered with arcane writing and symbology. And there’s something scuttling behind them.

Unfortunately, I think this was the nadir of the series - the episode is disjointed, the performances range from decent to hammy, there’s not much of a clear through-line for the story, and things that I’m pretty sure worked well on the page end up coming across as silly on the screen. Is it the quality of the effects? Is it being maybe too faithful to the text? Possibly. All I know is that between one particular casting choice (whose performance is fine), the setting, and the way the story is realized, the whole thing sort of feels like Harry Potter on bath salts, but not, you know, in a good way.

Straightforward Horror

Episode 4: The Autopsy

It all begins with a horrible mining accident. An elevator full of miners is coming up at the end of their shift, when one of them, Joe Allen, comes barreling along behind, landing on top of the elevator cage. Something tumbles out of his hand - some kind of small, spherical piece of technology. It starts humming and beeping, and then it explodes, killing him and the other miners. This is the worst accident they’ve seen in awhile, and so the sheriff, Nate Craven, calls in for expert help. There are something like eleven autopsies that need to be conducted in short order, so the mining company can distance themselves from it and avoid any liability. So Nate calls in his old friend, a medical examiner named Dr. Carl Winters. Carl’s getting on in years, but he’s very good at his job, and knows the score. A makeshift morgue has been set up for him, and he’s going to be at it all night. Once he’s settled in and has all of his equipment laid out, he looks at the file to determine where to start.

And as he does, Joe Allen’s body starts to move.

I think all of the straightforward horror episodes are the strongest ones in the series, and this one’s a doozy. It’s got a great graveyard shift vibe, this doctor all alone across the hall from a roomful of corpses, lit from above, everything else silent as the rest of the town sleeps. The performances are convincing and understated, with some later revelations emerging naturally from what went before. And once it gets rolling, it’s a doozy - sharp, merciless, grisly, and even more impressive, it’s as carried by one extremely unnerving monologue as it is the more explicit stuff. In its own way, it’s as Lovecraftian as the actual Lovecraft adaptations (if not moreso) and it just tightens the screws tighter and tighter and tighter until it ends with a great twist and moment of discovery. Short-form horror at its best.

Episode 7: The Viewing

It is very much 1979, and wealthy, enigmatic recluse Lionel Lassiter has invited four people to his home for a special occasion. There’s the famous music producer Randall Roth, astronomer Charlotte Xie, best-selling author Guy Landon, and celebrity psychic Targ Reinhhard. If they know each other at all, it’s only by reputation, and none of them really know why they’ve been invited here. Lassiter and his doctor, known only as “Dr. Zahra,” want their input into the nature of an artifact that has come into his possession. Words, music, the mind, the stars - he thinks all of these will be important. So he prepares them with a mixture of cocaine and a bespoke drug of Dr. Zahra’s design, to put them all on the same wavelength. They walk into the next room, where the artifact sits on a pedestal, part sculpture, part meteor.

And then someone touches it.

What follows is mostly everything going berserk all at once. This episode was directed by Panos Cosmatos, whose previous films - Mandy and Beyond The Black Rainbow - are definitely an acquired taste, but one that I very much have. If you’re on his very specific wavelength, you’ll be into it. If not, it’ll probably seem like self-indulgent nonsense. And it sort of is. His films are very much about style and aesthetic over everything else, but it works, at least for me, because in addition to pressing very specific aesthetic buttons that are very much my shit, he turns everything up to the point of near-surrealism. This is no different. Lassiter’s house is a marvel of early 80s cocaine chic (complete with gold-plated AK-47), the majority of it is shot like a music video from the time period, and Lassiter is delightfully sinister - like Timothy Leary gone rancid. When things pop off (literally, in some cases), it lurches immediately into Cronenberg territory, a little bit of alien biology and a little bit of Scanners. Sure, some of the other characters are saddled with kind of goofy dialogue and Cosmatos really likes his shaggy-dog endings (which I think is a weakness), but if you can overlook those things, this is a ride - equally strange, funny, and gross.

Episode 8; The Murmuring

We open on a research presentation. Nancy and Edgar Bradley are ornithologists, studying the murmurations of starlings - when they flock, it’s more like a swarm than anything else. There’s an intelligence there, and they’re getting close to a breakthrough. So they pack up and head out into the country, someplace close to the water, where they can observe flocking from a great distance, record their songs and film the murmurations as they happen. They can focus on their work, and very much not focus on their recent tragedy. Edgar’s holding up, Nancy less so. It’s a secluded home on the beach that’s been tended to by a caretaker ever since the original tenants - a mother and son - vacated it. At first, everything’s fine, Nancy’s maybe a little hesitant, a little closed-off, a little private, but given what they’ve just been through, that’s understandable.

And then Nancy starts seeing apparitions - a crying boy, and a screaming woman.

This is very much a straightforward ghost story in the traditional style - beautiful old home with lots of secrets and dark corners, beautifully overcast and windswept vistas, and ghostly figures urging someone to tell their story. Much of the tension comes from Edgar’s insistence that Nancy is seeing (and hearing) things as the result of unprocessed grief and Nancy trying to convince Edgar that what she’s seeing is real while at the same time being in absolute denial about her grief. So it’s as much a story about the corrosive effects of unprocessed grief and trauma as it is about the supernatural and how one parallels the other (much like the director’s equally excellent prior film, The Babadook). It’s spooky without relying on jump scares, atmospheric, and smart, with excellent performances from both protagonists.

So by my estimation, about half of the episodes are good (with two being flat-out excellent), three are flawed, and one just doesn’t work. Given how diverse the episodes are in tone and how different the source material and directors are, this is probably not a bad ratio. I’d be happy to see another season of this, if only to see more good work from established writers and directors and picking up some new ones to check out. And, apart from some of the stuff from Turkey and India that they’ve got right now, some of the better examples of horror on Netflix right now.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

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
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Deep Fear: Not As Deep As It Thinks

Trying to make a movie - any kind, really - that is “about” something is, in my opinion, generally a losing proposition. Mostly because all films are about something insofar as they’re a product of a particular time and place in a particular culture, rely on a particular level of technology (which feeds into an aesthetic), as well as the experiences and worldviews of the director and cast in terms of the choices they make. Whether people are consciously aware of it or not, thematic narrative is an emergent property of the filmmaking process. So when someone consciously decides that they’re going to make a film that addresses a specific theme or issue, they run the risk of making it didactic, hectoring, and obvious. Not always, but usually the ones that work the best in my experience address whatever it is in terms of someone’s experience, through the circumstances of their life. There’s a difference between telling a story that leads to the viewer saying “that’s fucked up” and making your entire film 90 minutes of you telling the audience “well, actually, this is fucked up.” It really does come back to “show, don’t tell” most of the time. 

And this is one of the problems with Deep Fear, though not the only one. It’s only fitfully effective, lacks structure, and in its attempts to say something about a larger issue, can’t quite overcome its clichés. 

It doesn’t get off to a promising start, with one of those prologues that tells us what we already know, that there’s something bad down in the tunnels below Paris. A graffiti artist is listening to music on a cassette Walkman circa 1989, but it just happens that he can fast-forward exactly to the start of the next song. As someone who actually used that technology, that is…not really a thing. Right off the bat, it seems like plausibility is not going to be a concern. Soon enough, there are strange noises coming from the end of a tunnel, artist gets dragged off. 

Fast-forward about four years or so, and three friends are sitting in a bar, shooting the shit over drinks. Henry is celebrating his last weekend as a civilian before reporting for military service. Max and Sonia are there for moral support. Well, Sonia does nip off to the restroom to meet an acquaintance who sells her a little baggie of something to keep the party going and clues her in to something fun he’s going to be doing tomorrow night if she and her friends want in .And this is how Henry, Max, and Sonia meet up with Sonia’s friend Ramy for a night of exploration. See, Ramy knows a way into the Paris catacombs, the ancient tunnel system running under the span of the city, once used for the disposal of the dead, now an enormous labyrinth ripe for exploration and the sort of things you do away from the prying eyes of the law. 

There are all kinds of things down there.

Apart from the on-the-nose prologue, it takes awhile to set things up, spending a lot of time with the characters Which is fine, but it doesn’t do much to develop the characters themselves. Henry is kind of a bro, Max is a dorky hypochondriac (we know he’s a dork because he wears glasses), and Sonia is…not white. That’s kind of it. So we’re given the opportunity to learn about them, but there’s nothing to learn. There’s a nightmare sequence that underlines Sonia’s otherness in a way that feels shoehorned in, and kind of unnecessary given what happens later. Ramy is their guide, and otherwise kind of a nonentity. There are a few other characters, but they’re even less than that. None of them are especially obnoxious, but nor is there enough to really feel much of a connection to them either. 

Once they get down into catacombs, things pick up a bit with the blind claustrophobia of the setting. There are lots of tight squeezes, uncharted areas, and unstable tunnels, and the precariousness is pretty well-realized. It’s by no means of the same caliber as The Descent, but it’s reminiscent, especially in terms of needing to manage your way through increasingly smaller spaces and worrying about collapses, not knowing if there’s another exit somewhere. There’s good potential here, and a run-in with some neo-Nazi skinheads sets up the opportunity for real tension (as well as making the earlier nightmare sequence less necessary than it already was), but though it provides the impetus for everything that happens in the third act, it’s sort of forgotten almost immediately until it becomes relevant again, but when it does, it’s not in any meaningful way. It’s a very fitful film in this way - it has promise that goes undeveloped, tension that dissipates when its cause is sort of abandoned for the next thing, and the third act starts by developing something interesting before discarding it for a pretty stock-standard “people get picked off one by one by implacable monster” thing. The nature of the monster, without spoiling it here (don’t even read the IMDB entry for this one, really, the brief blurb gives too much away), isn’t especially imaginative either. It’s something we’ve seen before, and ultimately it doesn’t amount to much beyond people getting fed into a metaphorical meat grinder, with an ending that makes a fairly on-the-nose statement about the immigrant experience in France. 

It's interesting to think about alongside As Above, So Below, though - that film used the premise better but had an utterly ridiculous protagonist. This film had the better protagonists (or at least more believable as people) but didn’t use the premise all that well. There’s also a touch of Creep (the somewhat icky 2004 one) in the idea of the ghosts of war continuing to lurk under the surface of the cities wounded by it, and though it isn’t as invested in humiliating its protagonists as that film, it’s not really doing anything with the idea either. It sort of feels like the filmmakers had a generically solid idea for a monster movie set in the Paris catacombs, but decided it needed to “mean something” and so they made character and narrative choices that amount to “treating people badly because they’re different from you is bad.” Which isn’t exactly earth-shaking as revelations go. Fairly shallow for a film set so far below ground.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

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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

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