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
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A Wounded Fawn: Hell Hath Plenty Of Fury

It’s tempting to say that the fables and fairytales we’re told as children have been sanitized (and there is some evidence that the original stories by the Brothers Grimm were, well…really grim), but if you stop and think about it, there is some heavy shit in those stories. It’s just that as kids the gruesome can be as entertaining as the relatively innocuous can be frightening. So when the Big Bad Wolf wears the grandmother’s skin to deceive Red Riding Hood, it isn’t necessarily met with horror by children. But present someone wearing someone else’s skin to an adult and it’s a whole different vibe. Gretel And Hansel knows this...that fables and fairytales are generally really fucking scary.

And that’s why I think A Wounded Fawn works as well as it does. It’s an interesting, surreal fable that nestles neatly in between Piercing and Fresh, while going to darker and stranger territory than either of them.

The film sets out its stall early, beginning in an high-end auction house, where a sculpture of the Erinyes is up for bidding. Lots of people representing very wealthy people, one hand holding their phones, the other gesturing to up their bids. The sculpture is finally sold to a woman named Kate for more than twice the opening bid, and we follow her home, as she sets the sculpture down and opens a bottle of wine. A knock on her door brings Bruce, the representative of another client from the auction. He wants to make Kate a backdoor deal for the sculpture, paying her twice her bid and throwing her a bonus on top of that. She asks for a percentage of his commission on top, and he winces, but agrees. She asks him why the additional effort, and he says that his client saw something beautiful, and wanted it. Kate does not live to see the sunrise.

Cut to Meredith, a museum curator out with some friends. She’s met a guy - handsome, charming, who has invited her on a weekend getaway. She’s looking forward to getting some for the first time in awhile, even if she doesn’t know much about him. He was at a recent antiquities auction for whom her museum had done some provenance work. His name is Bruce.

He sees something beautiful, and he wants it.

So right off the bat, you’ve got your dude who is obviously not what he seems and the woman that he takes somewhere for nefarious murder-type purposes. And, like in Piercing and more recently Fresh, things do not go like he planned. Which is, in and of itself, not that surprising. There’s definitely an audience for films where someone takes a woman to a secluded location and then tortures her for an hour and a half before killing her, but those aren’t really my kind of film. So the reversal of expectation is in and of itself expected. But where Piercing and Fresh were both battles of will between the protagonist and antagonist, as well as studies of weak, fragile men who commit violence against women, this film almost immediately gets weird with it, showing us everything that follows from Bruce’s perspective. And it’s kind of a doozy. Like I said, the film really is giving you an idea of what’s going to happen by beginning with an image of the Furies, and this is mythology given teeth. Kate was not his first, not by a long shot, and what follows is a long night of retribution that dives into imagery that is equal parts classic Greek mythology and surrealist art. We aren’t sure where it’s going to go, but it isn’t going to be anyplace good.

Part of what makes the film work is the degree to which it is stylized. It’s shot on film, which in addition to the grain and texture gives it a slightly retro feel. Much like Piercing, this looks like a solid remaster of a much older film, and the only real concessions to modernity are mentions of ridesharing services and smartphones. Otherwise, this could easily be a giallo-inflected horror film from the late 70s or early 80s given a loving restoration. Warm lighting and appropriately bloody, gooey practical effects add to this feeling and lend the film an immediacy that underlies even its most surreal turns. The performances are solid, and though the dialogue’s a little purple (much moreso as the film gets stranger), it’s not to the point of distracting and even makes sense given the nods to classic mythology. It also benefits a lot from a very crisp editing style and cinematography that favors alternating longer takes with vivid stills and quick close-ups, almost like punctuation marks, which creates tension even if it does rely a little too heavily on at least one type of shot.

It's not clear how much of what is happening is supernatural and how much could be explained by the hallucinations of someone who is badly injured, but I think that’s sort of the point – the most practical explanation is that we’re watching someone finally have a reckoning with the life they’ve lived up to this point in a way that combines memory and art and myth into a nightmare fugue, another is that the myths are all real and this person’s time has come in the ways of old. The conclusion does land on one particular explanation, but only at the very end, with a long final take that reminds me of a more blackly comic version of the ending of Pearl. But in this sense it reminds me of the better parts of As Above, So Below, harnessing classics and myth to tell a horror story.

That said, there are some definite flaws. The second half of the film goes a little slack with an extended pursuit sequence that consists of someone just sort of running through the woods and seeing things, which feels a lot less interesting after the close tension of the film’s first half, It also use some of the same jumpscare-adjacent shots a little too often, and there’s one sequence involving a wood-burning stove that ends up just being silly, but it ends well, and the strange turn it takes works in its favor. Not a complete success, but its ambition is impressive and it has a strong, consistent vision that makes me want to see more takes on myth in horror. Fables and fairytales and myths are intended to be instructive, and scaring the shit out of people is certainly one way to teach them that their bad deeds will lead to a bad end.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

From Beyond: Pushing Boundaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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Be My Cat: Only Make-Believe

I’ve written (at length, possibly exhausting length) about the problems I have with most found-footage films. Long story short, it’s a style of filmmaking that aspires to mimic reality, so when it works it really works, because there’s something viscerally upsetting about watching terrible things happen without the comfort of the distance that conventional moviemaking affords. But a lot of the time, the filmmakers don’t go far enough to make what they’re doing realistic, instead falling back on the usual filmmaking toolkit or lazy workarounds. And those take me out of it immediately. Nothing sucks me in like making it easy to forget I’m watching a movie, and nothing loses me faster than reminding me that no, I’m just watching a movie.

Be My Cat (subtitled A Film For Anne) does a pretty nice job of playing to the strengths of the style, and the result is mounting dread, a story of obsession and the blurring of performance and reality.

The film opens with a title card indicating that the footage was assembled from 25 hours’ worth of raw footage found at the “Be My Cat” crime scene. Understated, straight to the point. The little detail about there being 25 hours of raw footage is never elaborated upon, it just sort of hangs there, an unsettling little detail. I like that. It immediately cuts to Adrian. He’s a filmmaker in Romania, and he appears to be recording a pitch, directed at actual real-life actress Anne Hathaway. He wants to make a film with Anne.

A film about a Romanian filmmaker who is obsessed with an American actress.

We know from the title card that this isn’t going to end well, but it isn’t immediately apparent how. At first Adrian just seems kind of goofy and awkward, the kind of person whose dreams so far outstrip the possibilities available to them that you sort of want to laugh at him, but that doesn’t last very long. He engages in constant, almost insistent monologuing, punctuated by the nervous, reflexive giggle of an adolescent boy seeing porn for the first time. It’s easy to imagine getting stuck talking to him at a party and being unable to extricate yourself as he prattles on and on with no interest in letting you get a word in. And the more he talks, the more the cracks start to show. We learn that he was bullied in childhood to the point of agoraphobia, and that he developed a fixation on Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, a fixation that calcifies into seeing both girls and cats as innocent and sweet and cute, not like nasty, aggressive boys and dogs. He still lives with his mother because it’s difficult for him to leave the house for any amount of time, let alone leave town. He’s troubled, seriously troubled, and it isn’t too long before it becomes apparent that his grip on reality is tenuous. 

So this isn’t a film with any dramatic twists or anything - you pretty much know what you’re getting right off the bat, it’s just a matter of how long it’s going to take Adrian to crack and how bad the damage is going to be when it does. It works as well as it does because it’s presented as found-footage, and as found-footage goes, the execution is solid. It looks like it really was all shot on the same camera (and might very well have been), the sound isn’t perfect, the editing is choppy and the performances all emerge from improvisation so there’s a real naturalism to it. There’s background noise and passers-by, not everything is always captured neatly in frame, there are plenty of shots of the camera pointed at the sidewalk, forgotten in the midst of an argument. It feels homemade and the locations are all grubby hostels and apartment buildings in Eastern Europe. It is easy to forget, moment to moment, that you’re just watching a movie.

Even when you’re aware that you’re watching a movie, it’ s likely because a large part of this film is examining the blurred line between image and reality. Everyone uses their real names or variations on them, so we’re watching a Romanian filmmaker named Adrian make a film about a Romanian filmmaker named Adrian who is obsessed with an American actress who is himself making a film about a filmmaker who is obsessed with an American actress. And throughout the film, the character of Adrian displays a confusion between fiction and reality fueled, it seems, by the idea that fiction is much more comforting. There’s a line in The Blair Witch Project about how things don’t seem so bad when you’re looking at it through the viewfinder of a camera, and that’s a big part of the text here. The camera is a distancing tool, and it seems like that’s what Adrian is doing, at least initially. He’s making a film to convince Anne Hathaway to come to Romania to star in a film that he wants to make about a filmmaker who is obsessed with an actress, and he’s definitely working out his obsessions through the filmmaking process, using the fiction that this is a fiction, that it’s all make-believe, in order to put some distance between himself and the violence that results from his obsessions and his tangled, thorny past. It’s clear to the audience from early in that the actresses he hires to play the role of Anne are not in safe hands, beginning with impossible acting demands, moving on to an insistence that things not look fake, which becomes a need for the actresses to be “transformed” when they are not perfect enough. It’s my understanding that part of the progression that serial killers often go through is rehearsal of their fantasies, as a midpoint between fantasizing and acting on those fantasies. They’re working up the courage to do it. And that’s what it feels like we’re watching - we’re watching someone taking the first steps toward acting on their fantasy, and justifying it by telling themselves that it’s not them, it’s a character. Not that it matters to his victims.

In some ways, it’s sort of a less-cartoony Sorgoi Prakov, and though it doesn’t reach the heights of feral lunacy that film does, I think it’s the better film, because it is more believable. Adrian doesn’t really go full maniac at any point, he’s the same giggly, oddly insistent nobody throughout, evoking pity and irritation and horror in equal measure. It drags a little at the very end, but I think it comes good with an ambiguous ending that denies us anything neat and tidy, leaving us with the feeling that the film didn’t so much end as we were shut out of anything that came next, and that what seemed like a breakthrough for Adrian could be anything but. It’s an intelligent film that works well within the limits that found-footage prescribes.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

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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
 

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

The Reflecting Skin: The Nightmare Of Childhood

“Kids can be so cruel.” Let’s think about that for a second. It’s certainly true, as any veteran of childhood or adolescence can attest. But it’s also often used dismissively, as if it’s a self-evident statement, not something to explore. But it’s worth looking at more closely because it’s almost two sides of the same coin. Cruelty is part of innocence, because if you don’t know that what you’re doing hurts someone or something, you’ll do it, and you’ll laugh, and their pain is no lesser for it. It might even be worse. Childhood can be full of casual cruelty because often you haven’t yet learned regard for anything outside yourself. And all too often, horror sells the idea short by going no further than the idea that if it’s creepy when an adult does it, it’s even more creepy when a kid does it.

I’ve had the cult film The Reflecting Skin on my radar for awhile, and I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to get around to it, because it’s really striking. It’s lyrical, haunting and strange, a story of cruelty, and tragedy, and innocence lost, all wrapped tightly together like a ball of venomous snakes.

It’s rural somewhere in the 1940s, a stretch of lonely farmhouses standing in oceans of wheat under an unblinkingly blue sky, and the film begins with summer childhood shenanigans, three friends playing out in the fields, up to some kind of mischief. It’s horrible, and bloody, and the three friends - Kim, Eben, and Seth - laugh and laugh and laugh at the prank they’ve pulled, oblivious to their own viciousness. In its wake, we follow Seth back home. His family runs a gas station and garage, and they’ve got another boy, Cameron, off fighting in the Pacific. There’s a peculiar, solitary woman who lives a little way. It was she who was the target of Seth and his friends, and he’s sent to apologize. She’s reclusive, pale to the point of colorlessness, clad all in black and although she looks young, she tells Seth very seriously that she is over two hundred years old.

Seth knows what she is. His father reads pulp novels about creatures like this.

What follows is the story of one summer in Seth’s life - the mysterious neighbor lady, the secrets everybody keeps, and a string of unexplained deaths striking at the little community’s most vulnerable members. It’s like an Andrew Wyeth painting came to cold, surreally detached life, and it’s a story suffused with pain. Everyone in this film is damaged somehow, estranged from their own feelings and experience, wounded by life in one way or another. There’s Seth’s mother, seething with rage at the disappointment of her life and taking it out on Seth and her husband alike. There’s Seth’s father, taciturn, resigned, passive and ultimately pathetic. Joshua, obsessed with his own sins, and Dolphin, the mysterious neighbor lady, brought from her home in England to this rural place by a husband now long-gone, repressed and constricted and utterly alone. And lurking in the margins, the sheriff and his deputy, both with eyes like stone, and a nameless young man in a black Cadillac, whose intentions are unclear but don’t seem wholesome at all. The result is a lot of cruelty, because everyone is disconnected from themselves and from everyone else, consumed by their own horrors and obsessions. And in childhood, you don’t know any better, so Seth, already damaged by his mother’s abuse, moves through this broken and damaged world, hurting and being hurt and not knowing the why of any of it, while real evil lurks right under everyone’s nose.

And it’s a story told vividly. This would never be mistaken for a realist piece or character study, not when everyone is so alien and alienated, but it leaps off of the screen. The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, with color choices that can only be described as painterly, and careful consideration for composition in every shot. It’s full of little details and moments that aren’t exactly subtle, but convey the impression that everything about this film is pointed in the same direction, devoted to telling this story using every means at its disposal. Hell, there are moments where even the editing is breathtaking and evocative. The orchestral score is lush, prickly and foreboding, giving it the feeling of some kind of timeless fable, and the result is rife with a sense of strangeness. It’s a film that is perfectly willing to have bizarre things happen and not bother to explain them (the sheriff’s introduction is both startling and oddly funny, and Seth finds…something…in the barn that becomes a confidante), but at the same time it doesn’t feel gratuitous or contrived. It’s a bleak existence seen through the eyes of a child, and even if it doesn’t make literal sense, it makes emotional sense. The whole thing feels like a languorous nightmare.

I think it’s lazy to call things “Lynchian,” and all too often just means something is a little quirky, but here I think it does make sense. Thematically, it operates on a somewhat similar wavelength – everything and everyone seems at a slight remove from reality and each other, as if they’re sleepwalking through their own lives and only capable of communicating in the most direct, emotionally naked way possible without the heat of actual emotion. There’s a strong undercurrent of desire contorted by repression as well, and the suggestion of a small town hiding dark secrets, so I definitely see similar notes to Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, but maybe less hermetically sealed, if that makes sense. It’s a story of growing up and the loss of innocence, and a story about wounded people trying to find connection, and a story about the senselessness and inexplicability of sudden untimely death, a fable told in the merciless glare of a perpetually, unbearably blue summer sky. I don’t think I’ve seen something that hit me like this since Possession, and though this doesn’t plumb that film’s lunatic depths, it comes a lot closer that most anything else I’ve seen.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

The 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 

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.

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Alleluia: Not For Love Or Money

I don’t run across a lot of doomed romances in the process of writing this thing. Maybe “romance” is the wrong word because most of what I’ve seen have been the stories of two people who end up entwined in something incredibly destructive to both of them. The folie a deux isn’t restricted to horror - I mean, Heavenly Creatures, Bug and Natural Born Killers aren’t technically horror movies, Dead Ringers probably is though - but for the most part, any kind of love story in horror tends to be a folie a deux. Dracula is not a love story, so miss me with that nonsense.

Alleluia, loosely based on the real case of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, could be mistaken for a folie a deux, but I’m not sure it is. It’s a study in appetite and need, and what happens when two unappeasable hungers meet each other. It ends up being more of a reversal of what you initially expect going in and kind of an interesting companion to the director’s earlier film, Calvaire.

Gloria is divorced, and lives with her daughter. A friend of hers is trying to encourage her to get back out there, which is tough when you’re a single mom and work as a morgue attendant. Nevertheless, her friend answers an ad placed by someone named Michel and Gloria agrees to meet him for dinner. Michel, at least to the outside observer - or at least to me - is, well…off-putting. He presumes to order the wine without consulting Gloria and then manipulates the entirety of their conversation, managing to make being a shoe salesman into something kind of creepy. He does some intro-level Sherlock Holmes shit, determining things about people based on their footwear. Maybe it’s a difference in cultural sensibilities, but nothing about this dude says “second date” to me. Gloria ends up taking him home and to bed with her.

And the next morning, of course, he’s up and almost out the door when she catches him. He explains that he has to come up with some money to pay one of his vendors - sales haven’t been great lately - and she offers him money. There’s some back-and-forth about how it’s a lot, he can’t possible take it, but eventually he does, and promises to be in touch soon. After a day or so, Gloria is having sobbing fits, curled up in the fetal position. So she goes out looking for Michel, and sure enough, finds him at a local nightclub carousing with any number of women. She’s been played, and she confronts him. He admits to it, admits that this is what he does - he seduces lonely women, takes their money and moves on.

And just when you expect her to kick him in the nuts and spit in his face, she asks to be with him. He can keep doing what he’s doing, she’ll even help. She just wants to be with him. And he agrees.

The obvious story here would be that Michel has not just seduced, but has in fact ensnared Gloria, making her an increasingly more willing accomplice to his increasingly more deranged crimes. It’s certainly set up that way at the very start, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s more broken and damaged than he is sinister, and she, in her desperate, near-feral hunger to be loved and desired, is actually the more dangerous of the two. Michel doesn’t know any other way to relate to people, and is to some degree replaying out one of the most central relationships in his life over and over again. Ultimately, it’s not really about the money for him, it’s about the seduction and the money is just a way to sustain this lifestyle for him. If anything, he’s more pathetic than anything else.

But Gloria…whatever had been brewing inside of Gloria ever since her divorce, meeting Michel absolutely uncorked it. Her loneliness and need to be loved and desired is all-consuming, as is evident in the fits of sorrow and despair she experiences when Michel isn’t around, or when Michel is doing what she knows he does. It’s in how she talks about love as this all-consuming force. Michel compulsively seduces other women, because it’s the only thing he knows, and Gloria cannot stand to see him with other women. It’s obviously a dangerous combination and you know it isn’t going to end well. The film is divided into four acts, each named for a different woman, and with each one you see the tug of war between their competing appetites get more and more intense, more and more violent. And it isn’t a jealous, abusive man keeping a woman prisoner, as is the case more often than not in real life, it’s this man desperately trying to placate this woman that he’s afraid to cut loose.

As I said above, it’s directed by Fabrice du Welz, who is also responsible for the very good films Vinyan (another take on obsessiveness) and more relevant to this film, Calvaire. Visually, it takes place in the same France as Calvaire - it’s very muddy, rainy and gray, and the homes and villages are kind of squalid. It’s a place where the sun shines through clouds if it shines at all, full of miserable little hotels and apartments, old farmhouses that have seen a lot of wear. It’s as if in a world with so little beauty, the search for something good becomes obsessive. And it’s textually and thematically sort of a riff on some of the same ideas as Calvaire as well - the way loneliness and isolation warps our ability to make healthy, functional connections with others. and having the same actor play Michel as played Marc in Calvaire adds to this - he’s like Marc gone to seed, exploiting people’s attraction to him instead of running from it, but still ending up the witness to (and victim of) violence done in the name of desire. He is still an object of obsessive attraction, and even though Michel leans into it in a way that Marc did not, the end result is still the same. In trying to be what someone else wants him to be, it never ends well.

That said, of the films I’ve seen by du Welz, this is probably my least favorite (which still makes it better than a lot of what I watch). The translation is a little clumsy in places, which imparts a flavor to some exchanges that I’m not sure is what was intended, and though Michel’s realized well-enough in terms of why he is who he is, Gloria’s leap into the deep end feels very abrupt. We don’t know much about her beforehand, so it’s difficult to tell if her obsession is the result of extensive neglect or even abuse, or if Michel’s seductive talents are just that powerful (there is the little ritual he does ahead of each conquest, though that doesn’t seem to be something meant to be taken literally). The end result makes it feel sort of arbitrary and I think we miss out on some potential depth there, though their resulting dynamic is realized very well over the four acts of the film. It’s uncomfortable to watch in a number of places, doesn’t deal in clean platitudes, and has an ending that puts the “bleak” in “oblique,” and these are all good things in my opinion. So really, I’m nitpicking. It’s sort of a truism that love makes us crazy, and it’s equally so that the behavior of people in romantic movies would be hideously illegal in real life, but there’s no fantasy here. Just hard, sad truths about need.

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Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi: Rinse, Repeat

As someone still in the process of familiarizing myself with classic Italian horror, one conclusion to which I’ve come so far is that although much of Dario Argento’s work is easy to appreciate (and certainly creates a template others have followed), Lucio Fulci’s work is, to me, more interesting. It’s less sophisticated - actually, in some ways it’s downright primitive - but that gives it a sort of gonzo verve that I don’t really get from Argento’s films. Even Suspiria, which is admittedly pretty bonkers, takes a bit to really spool up. But from the very beginning of The Beyond, it felt like “strap in, this is gonna go places.” And it did. There’s something I like about a film that’s just willing to go berserk, I like the feeling of having no idea what’s coming next.

And so I have to say, I was looking forward to Paura Nella Citta Dei Morti Viventi (City Of The Living Dead, also screened in the United States as Gates Of Hell), the first in Fulci’s “living dead” trilogy, of which The Beyond was the second film. I was looking forward to it, but it ended up being kind of disappointing. It’s as gonzo as I expected, but it’s also oddly meandering, which makes for an overall frustrating viewing experience.

This film gets right down to business. Plain, stark opening titles over a tracking shot through a cemetery. A priest wanders through the cemetery, as if lost in thought. The location is Dunwich, Massachusetts, where as we will learn later “all those witches were burned.” Elsewhere, in New York, a group of people are holding a séance with a psychic named Mary Woodhouse - a séance that starts to go awry when Mary has visions of the priest we just saw hanging himself. Cut back to the priest, who has in fact just hung himself. Mary screams and falls to the ground, convulsing. Then she dies. Perhaps it’s a slow news day, because a reporter named Peter Bell notices all the commotion outside the brownstone where Mary died, and figured there was a story there - especially after the police are really evasive about what happened.

So Peter sneaks into the hospital, trying to figure out what happened to Mary, when she sort of just…wakes up again? Maybe she got better? It’s never really explained. The important thing is that this priest committing suicide in a cemetery in a town where witch trials were once held ends up being some kind of supernatural hat trick, opening one of the gates to Hell. Now the ghost of this priest is wandering around and the dead are coming back to life. This is less than ideal, and Mary, along with Peter, sets off to find the cemetery where this priest hung himself, because if they don’t close the gate by All Saints Day (the day before Halloween), the dead will flood out of their graves and overrun the planet.

That’s pretty much it, and the rest of the film alternates between Mary and Peter trying to find where this cemetery is based on her visions and everything going really, really badly in Dunwich in assorted ways to assorted people. So, to start, it has a lot of the same hallmarks as the film that would follow it. It’s got the same wooden acting (almost nobody in the film seems especially fazed by anything that happens, at least, not until it starts getting really gross) and dialogue so awkward and clumsy that it’s almost surreal. The approach to storytelling isn’t so much storytelling as it is just things happening without much rhyme or reason. About the best way to describe it is that it’s crude. But, like The Beyond, this is one of its virtues as well. The limitations mean that some things end up being communicated via interesting shot composition or elements just blinking in and out of existence, and the extensive effects work is simultaneously cheap, novel, and tactile. This is a very…gooey…movie, and there were a couple of points where my feelings were exactly balanced between “well, I’ve never seen that before” and “oh god, my lunch is really restless at this moment.” It’s pretty inventive on that front, and I have to say, having to rely on simple optical and practical effects make it visceral, both figuratively and literally. This is what I like about Fulci’s films - they are very much experiences and they’re far enough out of my comfort zone that I never know where they’re going to go, even if I’m kind of queasy as I take the ride.

But those are the strengths. The weaknesses are, unfortunately, just as compelling. I don’t know that I can call this an ensemble film so much as it is a film with a bunch of characters in a few separate locations, but the end result is something less like a single movie and more like a collection of side stories without a single actual story to hold it all together. This gives the whole thing a meandering feel, where it just sort of moves from one set of characters and locations to another without much in the way of urgency or singular driving action. Sure, Peter and Mary are theoretically the main protagonists, but they don’t get any more or less screen time than any other group, so it just sort of feels like they’re over here, doing some stuff. There’s also Sandra and her therapist Gerry, Gerry’s suspiciously young girlfriend Emily, then Emily’s younger brother John-John (yes, “John-John”), Bob, who appears to be the town pervert, a couple of lovebirds who come to a nasty end, some dudes in a bar, and a man in whose garage Bob takes refuge, and his teenage daughter. The film bounces back and forth between all of these groups, and a lot of the film is similar action playing out in each group - characters are confused, something spooky happens, something disgusting happens right afterward, and somebody generally dies - so it feels repetitive as well as highly mechanical. Open scene, establish people, introduce creepiness, introduce gore, lather, rinse repeat.

The result is a movie that’s only an hour and a half long, but feels like two and a half hours, and on top of that, the end is a baffling mess- the film doesn’t so much end as it does just…stop. It’s not so much anticlimactic as it is nonsensical. I’m glad I watched The Beyond first, because I suspect if I’d started here, I wouldn’t have gone any further with Fulci’s filmography. At least I know he managed to pull it together (relatively speaking) for his next film.

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