Siksa Kubur: Death Is Not The End

I made this observation a few weeks ago, but it continues to interest me how you can start to pick up on particular cultural touchstones once you’ve watched enough horror movies from a particular country or part of the world. Spain really likes demons and demonic possession as the prime mover behind its horror, Japan has its nods to animism, the importance of the family unit, and water as a symbol for the presence of the supernatural, England does a lot with ancient beliefs and pagan tradition. This doesn’t describe every film from these places, of course, but they pop up enough to seem like things particular to those places.

And I’m starting to figure out some stuff about Indonesian horror as well. It’s interesting how much of it serves as cautionary tales about what happens when you don’t live a pious life – curses that follow generations when someone violates Islamic traditions are pretty common – and just how…wacky…it is. At their best, Indonesian horror films, whatever they might lack in technical polish or savvy, have a wide-eyed earnestness to them that carries the films over rough spots, like an Islamic Chick tract. It’s very no-fucks-given, and Siksa Kubur (Grave Torture) is one of the better examples.

Sita and Adil are brother and sister, who until recently worked in their family bakery. But something terrible happened, something driven by religious fear, and now they’re orphans, taken in by an Islamic school where they are taught a trade alongside being taught how to be good Muslims. But Sita isn’t having it – it was religion that got her parents killed, stories about the torment that the impious suffer even as they lie in their graves. The soul is tortured in the afterlife, the body is tortured after burial. She’s angry and determined to believe that it wasn’t her parents sinning that got them killed – it was religion that killed them. Her teachers can’t answer her questions, they just call her a sinner for her troubles, and she doesn’t want to stay there. She grabs Adil and they head for a tunnel that’s supposed to take them off the school grounds, but it goes on a little too long, it gets a little too dark, and they meet someone there. A young boy named Ismail…

…which just happens to be the name of a former student who died under mysterious circumstances.

Probably this film’s biggest strength is the way it plays around with conventions of the genre. Normally Indonesian horror films are pretty straightforward, but this one isn’t afraid to leave the whole “protagonists have to return to some kind of cursed village to undo something terrible” story in the dust and set everything much more firmly in the modern world. It’s a story about the tension between faith and doubt, how religion is used as justification for violence, the way unresolved grief can become obsession, and the nature of morality. Which is a lot to pack in, but it doesn’t really feel forced, everything plays a role in getting the audience to the end of the story, which takes detours through revenge stories, attempts to apply scientific methods to the supernatural (an obsessed sibling out to disprove supernatural phenomena gives this some definite Oculus vibes), meditations on aging and mortality, and stories about the wealthy and powerful attempting to cheat hell. You think you know where it’s going, but there’s a real WTF-ness in how the story unfolds in some surprising directions as it goes, but without ever feeling jarring – everything emerges from what precedes it, while packing in the requisite moments of supernatural menace and a walloping dose of “say your prayers and you won’t get tortured in the afterlife” that is becoming, to me, an absolute staple of Indonesian horror films.

Another staple of Indonesian horror films is energetically janky effects work and this film is no different in that regard. In this case, though, the production values are really good otherwise so it’s a more jarring contrast than in other Indonesian films where the whole thing feels sort of grungy and so relatively primitive effects work blends right in. In a couple of places it’s especially glaring, almost comic when it shouldn’t be. Blackly comic, but still. On the other hand, there are a number of moments that do a lot with less – voices where there shouldn’t be any, little bits of creepy business in the background, an especially grisly game of hopscotch – which buy the film a fair amount of goodwill for the moments when things don’t really land. The performances are a little variable, but the actors playing Adil and Sita – as children and adults – do a really good job and keep the film feeling grounded. And even when the performances aren’t as strong as they could be, there’s a lot of raw emotion in them which gives the whole thing a feeling of intensity and genuine unease that you don’t always get in horror films. Sometimes the story feels like it’s turning on a dime but it manages to make it work in the end, especially in a third act that gets seriously weird in places – I can’t remember the last time I saw a film actually pull off nested nightmare sequences this well.

Apart from the uneven effects work, there are a couple of other problems – the end is an absolute head-scratcher, the setup for the central conceit is a little convoluted (like, that’s a lot of work and planning just to prove a point), but it manages to stay away from easy jump scares, has some nice moments of visual flair, and some surprisingly heartfelt acting that manages to elevate it above your basic ghost story and your basic Indonesian religious tract. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s nice to see something a little more contemporary-feeling from this corner of the world.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

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
Available on Hulu

Late Night With The Devil: Illusionists

Not that anyone (I don’t think) actually believes that television and film are actually magic, but they get described in those terms often enough. And I get it, you’re talking about signals sent through the air (or as pulses down cables) that captivate us, make us laugh and cry and scream. Film and television show us the impossible from thin air. How is that not magic?

But of course it’s not. It’s technology, it’s editing, it’s special effects. It’s the illusion of continuity and motion, of images reproduced from little blobs or blocks of color, of meaning created through camera angles and lighting and music and more besides. The whole point of illusion is to show us things that aren’t there, or that aren’t what they appear to be.

Late Night With The Devil is, for the most part, a well-crafted story about illusion; it’s a story about what seems to be versus what is, and the price paid for success.

It’s 1977, and Jack Delroy is one of the most successful late-night talk show hosts on the air. Every night, his show “Night Owls” brings viewers the mix of sketch comedy, banter, and celebrity interviews one would expect from the genre, consistently at the top of the ratings without ever quite managing to dethrone late-night powerhouse Johnny Carson. But Delroy’s suffered a number of setbacks of late, including the untimely death of his wife Madeleine from cancer. Ratings are slipping, and forays into more sensationalistic waters haven’t really turned things around. His contract is up for renewal, and so Jack Delroy has one last chance to keep his show on the air. It’s Halloween night, and he has a very special line-up of guests ready to go. There’s the celebrated spirit medium Christou, a former magician-turned-skeptic named Carmichael Haig, and a young psychologist named June Ross-Mitchell. Dr. Ross-Mitchell has written a book about her work with a young girl named Lilly, who seems to suffer all of the symptoms of demonic possession.

It's Halloween night, 1977, and Jack Delroy is hoping for an audience with the devil.

What we’re watching is ostensibly the unedited master tape of the night’s broadcast, which in a way really sets up this idea that what we’re watching is a carefully crafted illusion. Delroy’s talk show is a television show that presents an appearance of bonhomie onstage while behind the scenes is carefully controlled chaos, naked ambition, people letting down their masks to reveal the cowardice, venality and desperation underneath. The smiles snap back into place once they come back from commercial. And the guests on the show itself are a conversation between reality and illusion. For all of his theatrics, Christou is really just cold-reading and being fed information by his assistant, Haig points out the ways that showmanship masquerades as the supernatural at every turn (in as pompous a fashion as you’d expect), culminating in a sequence about hypnosis that draws a sharp line between what is experienced and what is reality while suggesting that television itself might be a form of hypnosis. It’s not really a film where you can’t be certain of what you’re seeing (it’s pretty clear-cut on what’s going on), but it plays with these ideas of perception and artifice well.

In terms of artifice, period pieces are always risky, but this film does a nice job of capturing the 70s zeitgeist – the clothes, the color palette, the corny jokes, the cultural references, the sexism – and brings together a number of historical and pop cultural moments in a pleasing way. You’ve got the emergent religious cult weirdness of the late 60s/early 70s with allusions to  the Bohemian Grove, the Church of Satan, the Process Church, and anachronistically a little bit of the Branch Davidians. On top of that you’ve got the nascent interest in demonic possession sparked both by films like The Exorcist and interest in parapsychology, both of which set the stage for the recovered-memory Satanic panic of the 1980s. The film opens with lots of footage from riots and protests and sensational crimes like the Manson murders, setting the stage as a U.S. in turmoil, feeling like everything is falling apart. Delroy’s show is the kind of place people come to for pleasant refuge in a world where maybe…just maybe…the devil is real. This film has a very good idea of what its sandbox is, and it’s patient about building its world, laying detail in carefully, and (with one annoying exception) does a good job of not overexplaining things, leaving the audience to piece things together as everything comes to a head. The performances are a little on the stagey side, and although that makes sense for television, it’s the case even in the moments that are supposed to be behind the scenes; the exception to this being the actress playing Lilly, who is just fantastic – extremely unnerving but with a lot more restraint that I usually see from someone asked to play her role.

And this speaks to the film’s biggest problem, and it’s an appropriate one – verisimilitude. The conceit is that we’re watching the master tape of a live television broadcast that ended horribly, and when the focus is on the television show, it works really well. But there are these interstitial moments that are supposed to be what’s going on while they’re on commercial break, and they’re shot as fairly clean black-and-white handheld footage. What television network would have cameramen roaming around backstage filming confidential conversations? It doesn’t need the found-footage conceit to work, and it just ends up getting in the way. Worse, it dispels the illusion, and for a story where willingness to believe leads all kinds of bad places, it’s an irritating misstep in an otherwise well-made film.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Longlegs: Bad Vibes

What makes a horror film scary? I feel like this is a question that maybe isn’t wrestled with as much as it should be, given the amount of dreck that stops at “murder a lot of people in as messy a fashion as possible” and calls it a day. But to be fair, it’s not always easy to quantify what makes something really scary. Often it comes down to, for lack of a better word, vibes.

And sure, vibes don’t come out of nowhere, they’re a product of things like performance and mood and cinematography, but they’re ineffable in the sense that either you’ve got the vision and the way to see it realized or you don’t. If you don’t have a vision, the best you’re going to do is something competently produced that might get a few jolts out of people, but isn’t really scary. Vibes can go a long way toward making up for flaws, because unless it’s really egregious, I won’t remember bad filmmaking choices, but the creepy, haunting, unnerving stuff will stay with me for ages.

Longlegs - a bleak, deeply unnerving marriage between police procedural and occult nightmare - does fumble things a little, but as a vision it is so fully and confidently realized that you’re mostly too busy trying to crawl out of your skin to notice them in the moment. It is all about the vibes.

It’s the story of FBI agent Lee Harker. She’s withdrawn, odd to the point of being off-putting, but she’s also shown an unusual amount of insight into difficult cases. And right now, her insight is very much needed, because the FBI have a serial killer on their hands…well, that’s not exactly right. They have a number of crime scenes, where entire families have been brutally murdered, typically by the father. What’s giving law enforcement trouble is that at every scene, they find a letter written in some kind of code that they aren’t able to crack. No other physical evidence that anyone else has been there, just the letters.

And each letter is signed “Longlegs.” 

As it turns out, Harker can decode these letters. She doesn’t know how, but she can. And she can tell where the killer’s been, or about to be. On paper, this shouldn’t work as well as it does, because on paper it’s a movie about a mysterious serial killer who shares what appears to be a psychic link with a detective. I fucking haaaaaaaaaaate shit like that. Hate hate hate hate hate. But here, it works. And I think it works because even though it’s the corniest kind of story you can tell, the way it’s told transforms it into something warped and sinister. So it’s almost like you’re watching a cursed version of a mediocre thriller. A lot of this is accomplished through performances that are uniformly a little…off. Everything’s a little stilted, everyone’s a little distant and strange. There’s a medical examiner who’s almost creepier than the actual serial killer, and it’s not because the medical examiner is evil or the serial killer in disguise…that’s just how the actor played him. Everyone in the film is like that to one degree or another, and that alone contributes to the feeling that you aren’t so much watching a movie as you are having a nightmare in which you’re watching a movie.

The visuals are equally unsettling - the film is set in 1990s Oregon, and everything is gray and cloudy and damp, with traces of snow clinging here and there. Interiors are often dimly lit as well, though not to the point of being unreadable. This is a world where there’s just not a lot of light, and we move from the institutional strangeness of FBI headquarters (if you’re at all familiar with the very good game Control, it’s definitely giving The Oldest House in places) to crime scenes that suggest awful, awful things without ever really tipping their hands entirely, to the cramped, stifling home of Harker’s mother, a woman damaged by some past tragedy to the point of hoarding and agoraphobia. Even Harker’s own home, which should feel warm and cozy, just feels like a place where something awful is just waiting around the corner all of the time. It’s the unease of places that you know aren’t normal, of homes that aren’t home-like, of innocuous spaces late at night, when they should be empty but aren’t. This is not a film where anywhere ever feels safe. There are flashbacks to crime scenes smeared with blood, bodies under blankets and location markers, again giving us glimpses that only fuel our imaginations, all punctuated with title cards in stark black and red. There are very few shots with more than one person in the frame at once (and sometimes shots where the tops of heads are out of frame, which is especially disconcerting), creating a sense of isolation and disconnectedness, emphasizing the alien feel of the entire thing. It’s something of a slow burn, punctuated with sudden moments of terrible violence, arresting, surreal imagery, and grainy flashbacks to the 1970s that shrink the aspect ratio to a square, like home movies that you’re pretty sure nobody was ever meant to see.

So the vibes are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and doing it admirably. That said, there are some places where it trips a little, mostly in the third act. It spends the first two setting up this really unsettling world, but there are some elements of the story that are maybe a little too easy to see coming from very early on, and others that really get sprung on the audience in the last act in what does amount to a bit of an exposition dump, albeit one that manages to sustain the atmosphere of the first two acts. There’s an element that’s important to how the killer is doing what he’s doing that gets introduced in the second act, but because the whole film feels so fucking weird already, its importance doesn’t really come across and when it’s brought back in the third act, it does feel like it’s coming out of nowhere. Finally, there’s one particular twist that was just convenient enough to leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, even though it was, once again, revealed in fine, striking fashion; something hidden and in plain sight the entire time.

The overall effect is, as I’ve said, like you’re watching a film with elements that you recognize and a story that you’re pretty sure you should be able to follow, but feels wrong somehow, as if whatever evil lurks in the story has managed to infect the film itself. It’s been getting a lot of (simplistic) comparisons to The Silence Of The Lambs, and if you’re looking for that kind of macabre crime procedural, this is not going to scratch that particular itch. But if you’re willing to immerse yourself in its nightmare logic, it’s one that will stay with you.

IMDB entry

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

We Need To Do Something: It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is an annual competition to see who can write the worst opening sentence in fiction, named for the author of the novel Paul Clifford, which begins “It was a dark and stormy night.” It’s been going since 1982, which is a lot of genuinely awful opening sentences, and I’ve found it pretty entertaining in the past, but to my mind, a sentence written to be deliberately awful is never going to be truly awful. Knowing it was constructed to be bad makes it entertaining to me. It’s sort of a corollary to the idea that a film made explicitly to be a cult film will never actually be a cult film. There’s an earnestness that you need and can only get when the filmmakers are being utterly serious. It’s the gap between ambition and execution, not to mention disregard for filmmaking convention, that makes bad films into cult sensations. If the Bulwer-Lytton contest is an example of something being funny because the people are in on the joke, films work the opposite way.

But nobody’s going to mistake We Need To Do Something for a cult film, or a comedy, really. It takes place on a dark and stormy night, and it’s just a misfire. It’s clumsy and muddled, with a few good moments, but not nearly enough to redeem it.

I’ll say this, it’s got a nice opening shot of a woodsy suburban neighborhood at dusk, as gray storm clouds start to roll in. It’s foreboding, but not overly so. Cut to a family walking into what appears to be a nice, if small bathroom in someone’s home. Lots of brick, tile, glass block, sort of evoking Spanish style alongside angular modernity. They’re laying down a blanket, and appear to be settling in to ride out a storm. It’s a married couple - Diane and Robert, and their two kids, Bobby and his older sister Melissa. They’ve got boardgames, and Robert’s sipping from a big insulated water bottle, but it’s already clear that something’s a little off. Melissa was late getting home and keeps insisting she was doing homework at her friend Amy’s house, but she’s evasive about it. Robert’s kind of abrasive and short-tempered, and Diane keeps messaging someone on her phone, but won’t let Robert see it and it turns into a whole thing. Meanwhile, it’s getting dark outside and, well, stormy. Then there’s a loud crash outside the door, and when Robert tries to see what it was, he discovers that a tree has crashed through their house and is now solidly blocking the door.

They’re trapped. And there’s something else out there.

It’s not impossible for movies that start off being about something that could actually happen and escalating into the supernatural to be good (see, for example, The Descent), but it doesn’t feel like this film can make up its mind about what it’s trying to accomplish. It doesn’t help that the entire family starts off annoying going into it. Robert and Diane begin the film deep into the first act of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, all sidelong looks and snapping at each other about things they won’t say out loud. Robert is especially bad – it’s clear right off the bat he’s an abusive alcoholic trying to be in charge of a family that stopped respecting him a long time ago, Melissa is your basic sullen, nobody-understands-her teenager, Diane is brittle and a little shrill, and Bobby is an odd duck in a way that is slightly off-putting. If there’s one through-line to this entire film, it’s the feeling of being stuck in a small room with a bunch of very irritating people, and the result is impatience as much as it is tension. You’re trapped in there with them, but not in a way that promotes sympathy.

So you’ve got protagonists who are various shades of unlikeable, and a story best described as confusing. It begins as a standard survival story – you’ve got a bunch of people trapped in the same place, without enough resources to go around, and on the one hand, it makes sense that this family holes up in the bathroom when the possibility of a tornado is on the table. That’s what you’re supposed to do. But on the other, they bring a blanket and…some board games. No water, no snacks, no flashlight, no radio. As someone who grew up in prime tornado territory, those are the basics. But, to be fair “suburban family has no fucking idea what the basics are” is a plausible narrative, and if the filmmakers had committed to that, slowly drawing the families’ secrets out as things got worse…well, it still wouldn’t have been a slam-dunk, the writing is broad and the performances not especially nuanced (Robert especially threatens to chew the scenery), but I think the clarity and focus of that kind of story, especially in such a claustrophobic environment, would have had some punch to it.

Instead, the filmmakers inject a supernatural element (with, to be fair, one of the more effectively startling moments of the film), and again, if they were to commit to that, that’s fine too. But the film vacillates, giving neither narrative the room it needs to breathe. The build-up works, at first, but then takes this unnecessary elaborative detour that takes the supernatural element and scrambles it all up until you aren’t sure what the fuck is happening apart from the actual suffering being experienced by these four people. The survival story doesn’t work because they’re so angry with each other to start that you can’t really tell the story of a happy family descending into savagery. The supernatural story doesn’t work because, apart from being confined to two or three moments in the film, it can’t commit to a particular logic or direction, it’s just spooky shit that is initially revealed to be due to one thing, but no, maybe it’s another, or maybe it’s the first thing, or…you get the idea.

And this lack of focus even shows up in the narrative fundamentals. This is a film that, at different levels, doesn’t really think through the details. We get a shot at the beginning that establishes the bathroom door as opening onto the interior of the house (as one would expect), but once the storm is over it seems like the door is looking out onto an exterior, as if the tree demolished the entire house, which…that’s not how collapsing trees work. A trapped snake conveniently becomes un-trapped, blindness disappears as soon as it arrives when it’s necessary for the character in question to act, a smartphone lost in the rain is found perfectly functional. And the supernatural piece gets all of its development in flashback (said flashbacks containing some stuff about self-harm that borders on romanticization, at least enough to feel icky) and that part of the story ends up being all muddy because it’s not satisfied with a very simple, straightforward cause, it piles stuff on and ends up close to incoherent.

There are bits here and there that could be pieces of a better movie, a couple of effective set pieces, some details that are actually nicely underplayed, and some repeated imagery which could be leveraged into a suggestion of dream logic and the idea that this might not be what it appears to be, but nope. It’s not funny enough or strange enough to be a cult film, not deliberately outrageous enough either. It’s just as banal and clumsy as “it was a dark and stormy night.”

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Susuk - Kutukan Kecantikan: The Needle And The Damage Done

Criticism of foreign horror films are, in some ways, a very fine line for me to walk. On the one hand, I appreciate them for the opportunity to experience new perspectives and see things cast in what is to me a new light, but there’s also the danger that I’m exoticizing them, prizing them for their mere difference from my own cultural default or worse, expecting something from them that they have no obligation to deliver. If someone wants to approach your bog-standard mass-market horror film made in the U.S. from their own non-U.S. point of view, they can do that. That is entirely their prerogative. In the case of last week’s It Lives Inside, the result isn’t going to be especially interesting, a mix of multiplex horror cliches and some simplistic treatment of the immigrant experience.

I didn’t really plan it this way, but Susuk - Kutukan Kecantikan  (Implant - The Curse Of Beauty, roughly translated) is very much the opposite of last week’s film – it’s made from a very specific cultural perspective with little regard for Western tastes. It has its moments, but it never really coheres.

Ayu and Laras are sisters making a living in Jakarta, in two very different ways. Ayu is a makeup artist who, when the film opens, is working on a bride-to-be ahead of her wedding. Her phone keeps buzzing, and it’s Laras, who’s leaving messages as she gets dressed for what appears to be a fancy night out. But Ayu’s busy and can’t take the call. When she finally gets a chance to listen to her voicemail, Laras is apologetic, acknowledging that she hasn’t been a very good sister, but that she’s working on turning things around, and Ayu’s reaction, interestingly enough, is a resigned sigh and wondering why Laras has to use her as “her excuse.” So it’s clear that their relationship is somewhat fraught, even if it isn’t clear why. We do get a sense, though, of what it might be as Laras travels through the city in a cab. She and the driver seem to know each other very well, and he doesn’t pick up any other fares. He’s taking her to her…appointments. With her…clients.

And this particular client appears to be a man of some wealth and influence. He’s very happy to see her, as he’s bought her a ring. And Laras, much wiser to the game than he is, knows what’s coming and tries to let him down gently, despite his insistence that he is willing to leave his wife and daughter behind to be with her. She knows this isn’t what he wants, knows how it’d look, knows what it’d mean for her. She tries to let him down gently, but he can’t believe it and, as is so often the case with men of wealth and influence, decides that if he can’t have her, nobody can, pushing her off of a balcony onto the roof of a car below.

Ayu gets the call and meets the cab driver at the hospital. She’s angry with him, telling him that he was supposed to look after her. Laras is in rough shape - multiple broken bones and serious head trauma. She’s on life support and isn’t expected to last much longer. There’s a tearful conversation, and Ayu, as her only living relative, makes the decision to discontinue life support. It gets turned off, her heartbeat slows, then stops with the steady whine of a monitor flatline…

…and then Laras sits straight up in bed and starts screaming.

A cursory examination of her x-rays reveals that Laras is wearing a number of susuk - extremely thin gold needles placed under the skin as talismans, as a means of binding powerful spirits to the wearer to confer a boon, often cosmetic in nature. Laras has had too many susuk put in, and the powerful magic they contain is keeping her in a state between life and death. And so Ayu takes her back to the rural village where they grew up, the place they left behind, to try and find a cure. Modern medicine has no idea what’s going on, so they need to try something more spiritual in nature. But there are bad memories in their village, resentments and grudges and secrets.

This film, to its credit, manages to be at once both culturally distinct and universal. Susuk is a specifically Malaysian practice. It predates the introduction of Islam to Indonesia (and as such, is considered haram) and is a practice without any real equivalent in North America (though now it has me wondering about the possible merits of an adaptation that centers on the cosmetic surgery industry – needles, beauty and all). So the language – not just actual language, but cultural language – is distinct, and there are no concessions to Western sensibilities here. This was an Indonesian film made for Indonesians. I have to engage with it on its terms, and I like that. But at the same time, there are ideas here that do transcend culture. This isn’t just a film about a sister’s attempt to lift a very culturally specific curse that is product of a culturally specific practice. It’s also a story about the sometimes-difficult relationships between sisters, especially when they’re all the other has. It’s a story about the lengths people will go to for beauty, it’s about shameful family secrets, and the pettiness and hypocrisy of small-town life. These are things anyone can recognize, and they ground the film well. The notes may be different but the song is familiar.

The execution, however, does have some problems. It’s sort of a fitful film  – its pacing is somewhat erratic, building dread and then letting it fizzle for extended periods of “take Laras to this person to see if they can help, then take her somewhere else,” and though there are some nice turns there (it’s the usual thing where the religious authority can’t help so they seek out someone who knows the old ways, but here he’s sort of a sketchy dude instead of a reclusive mystic), there are stretches where it feels like not much is happening, or not enough is happening to sustain a mood. It’s also a dark film. Not thematically (well, sort of, thematically), but actually dark, especially in the first half, and so a lot of moments that I suspect were meant to be startling (this film likes its mysterious figures showing up out of nowhere) don’t really land because you can’t really see what people are reacting to. You’ll see Ayu scream at the sight of something, but the something she’s screaming at is difficult to see. The exact nature of the supernatural menace inhabiting Laras is never really made clear beyond possibly being a powerful djinn, but also possibly just the restless spirit of another person, and the result is something that feels a little one-size-fits-all, rather than emerging from a specific mythology and tradition. There are mysterious figures in the shadows, creepy hallucinated moments, some quasi-possession stuff that’s impressively visceral and probably the film at its best, and even some fairly effective (if slight) body horror. The difficulty in locating a coherent logic made it feel a little generic in that regard, and though things do pick up in the third act, the climax takes place in the middle of the night in a rainstorm, so again it’s sort of tough to figure out what’s going on.

It doesn’t land with the impact that it should, because there’s this pervasive feeling of not being sure what’s going on. But, all told, I’d rather watch something that doesn’t always land but shows me new ways of looking at the world, that tells stories using imagery with which I’m not already familiar, than something thoroughly homogenized with the thinnest veneer of and gestures toward other cultures.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix

It Lives Inside: Assimilated

For me, one of the best things about living in an age where streaming video makes all kinds of films more accessible (even if it does mean putting up with commercials inserted at the worst possible moment) is discovering the breadth and variety of horror films from across the world. Different traditions and cultures and value systems mean that different things are a source of horror in different parts of the world, or even that the same things are scary, but in very different ways, and it’s refreshing to see things in a new light, or even see things you’ve never seen before.

None of which are to be found in It Lives Inside, a dull, rote film about the struggle for identity in an immigrant family, told with the nuance and subtlety of an After School Special.

It opens on the aftermath of something terrible. A house in shambles, moans and screams coming from the basement. A slow dolly shot takes us through the wreckage and into the one place we’re pretty sure we don’t want to go - that basement, where a badly charred body clutches a glass jar, something writhing inside.

Meanwhile, at some point later, in another household entirely, a family of three is coming together around the breakfast table. It’s Poorna, busy finishing up the meal, her husband Inesh, just getting home after working the late shift, and their daughter Samidha, who’s getting ready for school. Samidha doesn’t stop to eat, she has teenage socializing to do, against her parents’ objections. Poorna extracts a promise from Samidha to help with the preparations for a holiday celebration that’s coming up and Samidha reluctantly agrees. At school, one particular topic of conversation is Tamira, who is basically the other Indian girl at this high school. She’s weird, doesn’t have any friends, eats her lunch under the bleachers, and she’s started acting even stranger. She looks like she isn’t sleeping or taking care of herself. Tamira corners Samidha in the hallway and begs her for help. She has this thing that she has to feed. It eats raw meat, and it’s so hungry. She can’t deal with it on her own.

Tamira holds out the glass jar we saw in the prologue, and Samidha, in a fit of embarrassment, slaps it out of her hands, where it shatters on the floor.

The math is not hard to do. That jar had something evil inside of it, and now that Samidha has freed it, it’s wreaking havoc on pretty much everyone, and it’s up to Samidha to stop it. This is not a subtle movie - the thing in the jar is a spirit from Indian mythology, run amuck among whitest suburbia. It’s a film about culture clash, and in that respect it couldn’t be any more obvious. Samidha is the picture of aspirational assimilation, she insists on being called “Sam,” contemplates lightening her skin in her selfies, distances herself from family holidays as well as from Tamira, who used to be her best friend when they were kids, and from whom she immediately distanced herself when they got to high school. Poorna is a stay-at-home mom, speaks Hindi and is a firm believer in tradition. Inesh is more Westernized, speaking English, indulging Samidha’s aspirations and urging Poorna to give her space. So we have one parent who insists on keeping tradition, one who doesn’t, and a daughter trying to run away from her heritage as quickly as she can. And the evil spirit she has to stop is one from Indian mythology called a pishach, which, according to the film, is a dark spirit that feeds on negative emotions, souls and raw meat, and is somehow born from loneliness and isolation. All of which manages to jibe with the information I was able to find online while still making it sound like the most generic evil spirit ever.

And that’s not my only problem with the film, but it’s a big one - it’s absolutely an instance of a generic U.S. horror movie. It all takes place in what appears to be one of the numerous adjoining Southern California suburbs where movies like this tend to take place, and the narrative itself is mechanical and perfunctory, a repeated loop where Samidha tries to figure out what’s going on, she and other have to react to something nobody can see and somebody dies, Samidha has a nightmare, repeat for 90 minutes that feel much, much longer. The nightmare sequences take place in red-lit darkness, people get jerked around like ragdolls by an invisible beast, and that’s sort of it until the confrontation with a special effect at the climax. The filmmakers have no idea how teenagers talk (as someone whose job puts them in regular proximity to people in their late teens, I have never heard someone call a party a “kick-back.” Ever.), and of course there’s the obligatory romance with the hottest guy in school. The performances, cinematography, and scoring are unremarkable but competent, and here again there’s not a single original moment in the whole thing.

My other big problem with the film has to be the degree to which it squanders its ostensible premise. Horror films can absolutely grapple with the experiences of immigrants and the ways some things follow them from their home country no matter how far they run, as in His House. And Indian mythology definitely has its share of rich, horrifying creatures as aptly demonstrated by Tumbbad. So it’s absolutely possible to tell this story in a nuanced, human way that paints the immigrant experience in its messy, conflicted complexity while also being scary as hell, introducing the Western world to the monsters of another time and place. But ultimately Desi culture plays next to no role in the film, and any pretense of examining Samidha’s experience as a young Indian woman in the U.S. goes out the window pretty early except to the extent that it can advance the plot. It’s generic horror start to finish, complete with Final Girl confrontations and Samidha learning the lesson that it was in fact her mother who was right and she who was wrong, ending on a one-year-later note that cribs pretty hard from The Babadook with a “the end…or IS IT?” kick. The film’s as eager to avoid anything really specifically Indian as Samidha is, and that’s sort of amusing on a meta level but doesn’t make for a very interesting film.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

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

Where The Devil Roams: Love Will Keep Us Together

There’s only a handful of directors who make me legitimately excited when they put out a new film. Some careers are more uneven than others, and it’s not unusual to follow a good film with a turkey. But even more than that, it’s not that many directors whose work really engages me, shows me something that stays with me long after I’ve seen it. There’s good filmmaking, and then there’s filmmaking that makes me feel like I’ve seen something transformative. There are only a few directors who make me say “they’ve got a new film coming out? I am fucking there.”

Among them is…well, it’s not a single person. You might call them a filmmaking collective if that weren’t the most pretentious-sounding thing ever. The Adams family is a married couple - John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu. They write, direct, act in, shoot, edit and score their own films, with some outside help for effects work and marketing, via their Wonder Wheel Productions imprint. But their films are, in some important way, homemade. It’s often the case that writing and directing is shared. When one of them isn’t on-screen, they’re behind the camera. This would be a novelty if their films weren’t so good. I’m not familiar with their dramas, but they’ve made a couple of horror films that do seriously impressive things with the budgets they have, and have a style and vision absent from a lot of larger productions. They’re a little rough around the edges, but are so much more interesting than most films with far larger budgets. I’m a fan, pure and simple.

Where The Devil Roams is probably their largest production yet, and maybe it does overreach a little, but all of their usual strengths are intact, so this is still a striking addition to horror film. There’s nobody else out there making films like they do.

The opening is scratchy black and white. There’s a stage, and an attentive audience. A legless man comes out from stage left, and begins to read a prologue about the devil Abaddon and his doomed attempts at love. His heart is lost, his love scattered in pieces. The audience applauds, and so our story begins. It’s the story of three people - Seven, Maggie, and their daughter Eve. Seven was a country doctor, and the horrors he saw during World War I left him so traumatized that the sight of blood renders him catatonic. Maggie worked for him as a nurse, and Eve cannot speak, but sings with the voice of an angel. They have a family act of sorts featuring Eve’s singing, and they travel a dying carnival circuit, among the freaks and carnies, trying to eke out a living. It’s getting harder and harder to get by, and sometimes things get desperate to the point of violence. There’s one act that consistently does well. He’s a magician of sorts, calls himself “Mr. Tipps,” and his act consists of some religious testimony, followed by the dramatic appearance of a pair of shears, which he then uses to snip off his fingers, one by one. One evening, after the show, Eve comes by his tent out of curiosity, and watches him take a special needle and thread out of a box, and carefully stitch his fingers back on.

He has, he says, made a deal with the devil.

Their films typically have a pretty unhurried, conversational pace, at least at their outset, but this one is a much slower, at times almost obtuse affair compared to previous works. It’s not necessarily clear exactly what’s happening for most of the first act, and even once it is, the whole thing relies more on mood, as sort of a tone poem, than anything else. It’s a film with a lot of stillness and air between words, and I think right at the point where I was asking myself “okay, where is all of this going?” was when it all started to cohere. And it does cohere, but it takes a little bit. It’s definitely a film that requires more patience and goodwill on the part of the viewer than most.

But even at its slowest, there are things to appreciate about it. One real strength of their films is their striking, distinct visual sense, and this one is no different. There are a lot of beautifully framed shots, set up almost like tableaux, and because this film is set in the Depression-era U.S., there’s an interesting aesthetic at work, using a mix of black and white, desaturated color, and full vivid color, and the action is punctuated by photographic stills, sepia-toned, full of dusty light, reminiscent of crime scene photos from the early 20th century. The carnival itself tends toward the macabre in the appearance of the performers, and as a result the whole thing has an unearthliness to it that feels like something between the works of Guy Maddin and Diane Arbus. Dialogue and performance has typically been the weak point in their previous films, but here it actually adds to the dreamlike (or nightmarish) quality of the film, along with a score consisting mostly of drums, bass, distorted guitar and ethereal singing. It’s as singular a treatment as anything else they’ve made.

And for the most part, it rewards the viewer’s patience. Gradually, as more and more about these people is revealed, the clearer it becomes that the prologue was indeed the thesis for the film. It’s a story about love, attachment (in more ways than one), and the sacrifices we make for the ones we love. We desperately try to hold things together, to hold ourselves together, to keep our relationships together, and when they or we come apart, the things we have to do to repair that…well, we find ourselves doing things we never thought we’d be able (or willing) to do. The unhurried pacing (punctuated by striking moments of violence as the film progresses) muddies the final act a bit, drawing things out a little longer than they needed to be, though it does come good with a tragedy that escalates things quickly in horrific fashion, leading to a final image as startling as anything else they’ve done.

It’s definitely not as tight as their other two horror films, and I think their attempts to make a period piece might have stretched their resources, but the Adams family are responsible for a singular vision that doesn’t owe jack shit to traditional horror cliches. Even flawed, their films are absolutely worth your time.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

The Devil’s Rain: (It’s) Hail(ing), Satan

One of my more vivid memories of childhood is looking through the movie ads in the daily newspaper, because they were always designed to be as eye-catching and, in the case of horror films at least, as lurid as possible. Promising all kinds of truly horrific sights, my still-developing brain hadn’t yet learned to take things with a grain of salt, and the visuals in the ads would send my imagination into overdrive. A few of those films stuck in my brain and since I’ve become an amateur horror film enjoyer, every now and then I’ve taken it on myself to check them out, to see if the reality could come anywhere near living up to my childhood expectations. I mean, the answer is no. It’s always going to be no, because the imagination conjures far worse things than film does most of the time and I had a really vivid imagination as a kid. Maybe one of them has come close, but that’s it.

The Devil’s Rain, then, is another instance of me indulging a curiosity from childhood and this one’s probably the least frightening of the bunch. It’s not really a good movie by any metric - it’s borderline comic in places, featuring a cast that makes it even harder for viewers of a certain age to take it seriously, but it does have its moments.

It opens, without music, on credits laid over selections from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, pretty well-established shorthand for “this is going to be about hell” at this point. That leads into, well, a dark and stormy night. No, really. It’s pitch-black and the rain is absolutely pelting down. Inside her house, Emma Preston stares fretfully out the window, worried about her husband Steve, who’s out there somewhere. Her son Mark tries to reassure her, but she says something about how all of this is happening just as she saw it. So that’s odd. And soon enough, Steve’s truck pulls up in front of the house, and he gets out. But he doesn’t come inside, he just stands out there. He tells Emma that someone named Corbis wants a book that she has in her possession, and to come to Redstone - a deserted mining town nearby - with it.

And then the thing that was her husband dissolves into a puddle of slime.

With this, Mark resolves to head to Redstone to confront Corbis, insisting that the book - a large, dusty, old-looking tome that they keep safe under the floorboards of their home - is not theirs to bargain with. It’s actually a better start to the film than I might be making it sound. There’s a sense of isolation and threat to the sequence with the rain and the dark, and there isn’t too much exposition so we’re left knowing that something bad (and unnatural) is happening, something the Preston family has been anticipating for a long time, but that’s about it. Unfortunately, it’s sort of downhill from there for the most part. The general pace of the film is “people go one place, and then they go another place,” so then the action jumps away from Mark’s confrontation with the mysterious Jonathan Corbis to introduce us to Mark’s brother Tom and his wife Julie, who…just happens to be a psychic.

Why is she a psychic? As it turns out, it’s mostly a narrative device to explain Corbis’ whole history with the Preston family and to drive the characters from one location to another. Mark goes to Redstone, and then Tom and Julie follow when she gets a horrible vision about what’s happening to Mark, so really it’s sort of a movie about the members of a single family taking a trip from their homestead to an abandoned mining town and discovering that whoops, there’s an evil cult there. That sounds kind of reductive, but at least until the end of the film, that’s really kind of it. The acting’s mostly melodramatic, and the dialogue (especially in the confrontation between Mark and Corbis) is pretty purple and overblown. It’s not an easy film to take seriously.

And this isn’t helped by what are obvious budgetary limitations. The whole thing takes place in a couple of locations, one of which is an abandoned mining town, which is where the film spends most of its time. The stunt work is not the most convincing I’ve ever seen (a car plows into a tree at maybe 0.5 miles per hour, a tumble down some stairs might be the gentlest I’ve ever seen on film), and the practical effects work ranges from the surprisingly effective to the downright laughable. And the cast is full of people who were, as another review put it, either on their way up in their career or on their way down. If you were a kid in the 1970s or 80s, the majority of this cast is going to be very, very familiar to you from various films and television shows of the era. And it’s not their fault, but their familiarity does detract from any atmosphere this film might have at any point. At least two or three of them are so well-identified with other characters or shows that it’s difficult in the modern day to see them as any other character. You should be going “oh shit,” but instead you’re going “hey, it’s that guy!”

It's not all bad – the opening is pretty strong, the character of Corbis is surprisingly sinister, there are some genuinely creepy moments sprinkled throughout, and the climax makes up for the lack of action beforehand by being as deliriously gooey as Lucio Fulci at his best. There’s some potential camp value to the film having had Anton LaVey as a technical consultant, but the film itself isn’t really that campy. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I’d love to basically see the satanic cult version of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, and this ain’t it.

It might seem unfair, like I’m holding this film to modern standards that it has no chance of meeting. But this came out after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and before Halloween, so in context it really does seem like an example of the sort of thing that horror was beginning to outgrow. And it doesn’t help that it doesn’t have the relentless eeriness of another low-budget film about cult goings-on from around the same time, Messiah of Evil. Between its overall clumsiness and its cast, I think this one hasn’t aged so well. Not in the cultural sense, there’s nothing objectionable about it, really, it’s just difficult to take seriously. This is one for watching with some friends and some beers.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon (this is available on Blu Ray? WTF?) 

Consecration: But Now I See

It just occurred to me as I started to write this how many movies I’ve seen that take place in monasteries or convents. Something about the somber surroundings, the isolation, the presumed holiness or sanctity…it’s fertile ground for creepiness to be sure, but also has the problem of any well-worn location - the more a location lends itself to a particular type of story, the easier it is to just tell that particular type of story, and the easier it is to tell that type of story, the less likely it is any other type of story will ever get told. It’s why we have so many movies telling the same stories about old Nazi bunkers from World War II, or the same stories about abandoned mental hospitals. So yeah, stories in monasteries and convents will probably feature an unusually secretive or zealous religious order who are hiding some terrible secret, and someone coming in from the outside to investigate a series of mysterious deaths. I’ve seen that done well, and I’ve seen it done really badly.

Consecration - a brooding, careful, deliberate story that’s equal parts mystery and supernatural horror - doesn’t really break the mold much but it largely does what it does well, save a narrative choice toward the end that brings all of the momentum to a screeching halt for the sake of overexplaining something that you’ve pretty much already figured out.

We meet Grace Farlo as she’s walking down the street, with a voiceover monologue telling us that her brother always believed she had a guardian angel, while she believed in nothing. But now, she says as a white-habited nun approaches her, she’s not so sure. Flash back to some indeterminate amount of time before, and Grace is receiving the news that her brother Michael - who became a priest - has been found dead at convent in a remote corner of Scotland. Initial findings suggest that he murdered another visiting priest before taking his own life. Needless to say, Grace has a difficult time believing any of it went down like that, and travels to the convent in question to find out what actually happened. The convent is home to an especially - some would say fanatically - devout order of nuns, an order dedicated to the protection of a very important holy relic. As Grace approaches the convent, the Mother Superior recites their litany: “There is only one God…

…and his shadow.”

So on one level it’s your basic “person investigates unwholesome goings-on at a convent that hides a mysterious secret” story, as is almost inevitable with the location. And Grace is very much a woman of reason and science among the especially devout, so you have that element of attempting to explain the inexplicable through reason versus faith. The bones of the story are nothing new in that respect, but for the most part, it’s the execution that saves it. Sight is a consistent through-line - Grace is an ophthalmologist, one of the nuns has gouged out her eye because believes she saw the devil, and visions of the past and future play an important narrative role. And it’s a movie, so what we see is important to how we experience and understand the story. It’s assembled with care, and it keeps us guessing for about the first half of the film with a mixture of flashbacks, hallucinatory visions, and what might (or might not) be nightmare sequences, in a process that gradually reveals more and more about what actually happened here and why. It makes good use of disparate images and moments that hint at connections without making them obvious right off the bat, all set in an atmosphere of gloom, overcast rural Scotland, old convents and older ruins, all drab and gray with the white-habited nuns standing out almost like ghosts. The expected story beats are punctuated by a number of arresting visuals and striking moments throughout, and the cumulative effect is one that keeps us guessing as the film gradually builds to a revelation.

Which, unfortunately, is probably connected to the film’s biggest weakness. It’s not a bad revelation, and it’s all set up well by the creepily devout nuns, the pleasant, affable representative from the Vatican who, along with the sisters, has another agenda (because of course), and there are visual touches here and there, and small asides that broadly hint at nefarious goings-on without ever really giving things away ahead of time. Now, attentive viewers will probably figure out the twist sooner than it’s revealed, and that’s down to familiarity with the genre and the setting as much as anything. It’s a solid execution of a formula, but…it’s still a formula. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. The problem is what ends up serving as sort of a false ending on the heels of the big revelation. Once the truth has been revealed, the film stops its momentum dead to show us exactly how everything happened start to finish, and we don’t need all of it to get the point across. The problem is not revisiting key scenes with new information or context, that’s a perfectly respectable narrative device, and a big part of playing fair in any film with a twist (still looking at you, High Tension). The problem is that it pretty much revisits all of them, well after we get the point. It’s just gilding and regilding and regilding the lily and it brings everything to a halt in doing so. Any surprise evoked by the big reveal just evaporates, right when you want to bring the whole thing to a crescendo. Maybe a brisker montage would have worked, maybe intercutting all of it with the revelation itself, but as it stands it just kills the mood dead and does the actual end - a nice bit of circularity that pays off an early startling moment - a disservice by making it feel like an afterthought, something appended as an “oh yeah” after somebody finishes telling you what it was you just watched.

I don’t know that it would have been a transcendent bit of film, it’s still pretty beholden to narrative convention, the performances are good and it’s very well-shot, but it could have still packed a punch. In a film with the amount of subtext this one had about sight and belief, I guess I just wish they hadn’t been so literal about showing us everything.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon

Seytan: We Have The Exorcist At Home

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

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

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

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

It sounds like a bunch of rats up there. 

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon