Red Krokodil: Life Sucks And Then You Die

I’ve taken the opportunity to do something a little bit different this October. During a time when more people are watching (hopefully) good horror films, I’ve been making a point of watching the sorts of horror films I normally avoid, for whatever reason. So far I’ve covered a film made by someone who makes horror films for megaplexes, a film from a genre I don’t really like, and a film that I started to watch once and abandoned after about 15 minutes because the acting and dialogue really sucked. And to wrap up this loosely-themed spooky season, I’m tackling underground horror, also sometimes called “extreme horror.” These are films, usually made very much on the cheap, that are intended to be so shocking or upsetting or transgressive that they’ll never receive any kind of wide release.

My window into this world is a company called Unearthed Films, whose stock in trade is almost entirely underground horror. They specialize in limited-run DVD and Blu-Ray editions of things like the August Underground and Guinea Pig films, something called the “Vomit Gore Trilogy,” and a collector’s edition-quality release of A Serbian Film. If you’re unfamiliar with these titles, the links I’ve provided are safe to click, but this is real “if you know, you know” territory. If you don’t, I wouldn’t go looking – I’m not really sure you’ll be better off for having done so. None of it is illegal, strictly speaking, but these are definitely the kind of films that get banned or seized by customs occasionally. I don’t watch films like this for the same reason I don’t really like slasher films. In general, they aren’t about people as much as they are pretexts for putting a lot of really unpleasant stuff on film or video to titillate fans of graphic violence and people whose sensibilities are so numbed that nothing else affects them. They’re just cinematic endurance tests, and that doesn’t interest me.

Which brings me to Red Krokodil. It’s part of Unearthed’s catalog, the subject matter is right in the wheelhouse, and most importantly, it’s one of the rare films of this kind to actually show up on a mass-market streaming service. As committed as I am to the bit, I’m not spending additional money just to watch something called Slow Torture Puke Chamber. It’s not as sensationalistic as it could have been, and it does seem to aspire to something more than just gross-out, but it just doesn’t get there.

It opens with a crawl describing the drug of the title. Krokodil (Russian for “crocodile”) is a homebrew heroin substitute, a morphine analogue made by combining cough medicine that contains codeine with a bunch of gnarly solvents like benzene and hydrochloric acid, as well as red phosphorous, medicated eyedrops, iodine, and a bunch of other shit never intended for human consumption. It first showed up in Russia, where poverty and draconian drug laws made it a last-ditch solution for heroin addicts. It’s made entirely from over-the-counter ingredients, so pretty much anyone can make it. And its effects are short-lived and the withdrawal exceptionally painful, so batches get cooked up in haste, under less-than-laboratory conditions. The result is where it gets its name, an injectable drug so full of impurities that skin around the injection sites quickly takes on a gray-green, scaly quality, as ulceration and necrosis set in. Trust me, you do not want to do an image search. You will see things far worse than anything in this film.

It's followed by an exterior shot of a Russian city, bombed-out ruins covered by some kind of haze or fog. And in this city lives a man, alone in a tiny apartment. His kitchen counter is covered with chemicals, a small pot bubbling on the stove with something black and tarry in it. The man is filthy, unshaven, his hair lank and greasy, and he’s clad only in bloodied bandages around his hands, elbows, and knees, and a pair of stained undershorts that are almost more holes than fabric. He inspects himself in the bathroom mirror, and notices a new set of lesions spreading from behind his ear. He pokes at them carefully before returning to his work.

There really isn’t a story to this film, and certainly no plot. It’s less about the horror of the titular drug (which is plenty horrific in real life) and more about using it as a vehicle for a recurring motif – holes as disintegration, but also as something through which something more can be glimpsed. There are holes in the body, holes in the walls and doors, shattered windows. Sometimes blood comes through, sometimes light, sometimes a view to another place, sometimes monsters. Though, to be honest, this really makes it sound more cohesive and illustrative than it really is. Mostly it’s just aimless footage of a filthy man lolling around an even more filthy apartment alternating with occasional reveries in nature (which, to be fair, do provide some respite from the squalid claustrophobia of the apartment) and hallucinations which range from dread-provoking to just sort of puzzling. Sometimes he just sort of lies there, sometimes he has nightmares, sometimes he’s in pain. He cooks up and shoots up, and occasionally looks out the window. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of narrative to it, even implied. The dream and nightmare imagery is either so innocuous or oblique that it’s hard to tell what we’re supposed to take away from it. It’s either meaningless, or so intensely personal and specific that it might as well be meaningless, since we’re never given any kind of insight into the man’s experience. Interspersed throughout is a voiceover monologue about, I dunno, life, the universe, childhood, the flesh…it’s the sort of obtuse portentous rambling you’d expect from a stereotypical student film, a lot of stuff that probably sounded deep as shit to the person who wrote it but just comes off as self-important nonsense.

The technical execution isn’t bad, I’ll give it that. The music and sound design are both pretty good, establishing an emotional tone that probably could have done all the heavy lifting without the monologue. The cinematography in the outdoor sequences is competent, and the interiors (as gross as they are) make good use of harsh white light filtering in through the windows, as if it is perpetually daytime outside the apartment and perpetually nighttime inside. There’s some allusion to a nuclear war having occurred or occurring, and the light that streams in does convey the feeling of someone caught in the glare of the blast. It’s not a gratuitously gory or disgusting movie, much to my surprise – I could think of a much more lurid story featuring this drug than what we got – but it’s still not for the squeamish. It’s still a film about the effects of a drug that starts eating your flesh away as a matter of course, and the restraint means that the moments we do get have an impact. I wonder how much of the restraint was a function of budget, since the practical effects are few and far between, but again, what’s there is pretty effective.

It's not hard to watch in the sense of pain and suffering, but it’s certainly hard to look at, between the overall squalor and the occasional bits of body horror. It could have leaned into the latter a lot more than it does, and I’ll at least give it props for that, but it doesn’t really use it in the service of anything especially compelling or even easy to follow – it’s a lot of moments strung together, some of which work in isolation, but most of which don’t, and even at just under 90 minutes it still manages to feel interminable as a result. Finally, it ends on a note that was probably supposed to be really powerful, revelatory and transcendent, but mostly just elicited an eyeroll from me. Yes, we get it, life is pain and loss feels like the end of the world, this is in no way an obvious or hackneyed idea and nobody has ever made this observation before.

I suppose that underground horror is a lot like above-ground horror, in that it’s occasionally capable of something interesting (I still maintain that A Serbian Film, as unpleasant as it is, has artistic merit), but a lot of it won’t be. It’s easy to mistake naked atrocity for substance and justify it as exploration of humanity’s dark side, but that requires acknowledging the humanity in the first place, and though this wasn’t as sensationalistic as it could have been, it wasn’t really about humanity either. It was a lot of degradation and disintegration that ultimately didn’t mean much.

So that’s four films that represent things I don’t like. I’ll admit that Malignant, though not very scary, was surprisingly enjoyable. And Terrifier, though ultimately just more people getting fed into a metaphorical (this time, at least) woodchipper, did have more visual flair and style than I thought it would. But Bite really was as bad as I thought it was in its first 15 minutes, and whatever people who enjoy extreme horror get out of it, it’s nothing that I really need to experience for myself. So I’m going to keep trusting my instincts. Now, back to the stuff I’m actually looking forward to checking out.

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Bite: Sometimes You CAN Trust Your First Impression

This month, I’m marking spooky season by watching the kinds of films that I normally avoid. First it was a film directed by James Wan, then a slasher film, and now today I’m looking at the kind of movies that I start to watch and then shut off about 10 or 15 minutes in, switching to something else instead. This isn’t a huge category, but it’s definitely happened more than once. And it’s not because the film’s too upsetting or disturbing or gross or whatever, usually it’s because the acting is immediately so bad that I can’t imagine sitting through an hour and a half of it. I try to be open-minded, but there are days when my patience for bullshit wears thin.

And this is exactly where Bite fits in. I was able to get through about 15 minutes of it before I tapped out the first time I watched it, but it’s always nagged at me, like maybe I didn’t give it a chance. So I took another shot at it and was ultimately rewarded with…well, a case of squandered potential.

We start with what looks like home-recorded video footage of Casey and her friends Jill and Kirsten in Costa Rica for Casey’s bachelorette weekend. She’s engaged to Jared, who – Jill and Kirsten keep reminding us – is a catch. He is both attractive and successful. But Casey’s getting cold feet. She’s afraid that she and Jared aren’t on the same page about some important stuff, she doesn’t have the greatest relationship with her mother-in-law, plus all the uncertainty attendant to such a big life change. So there are these moments of doubt and reluctance interleaved between all the sun and sand and drinking. There’s a lot of drinking. A lot of drinking, culminating in Casey vanishing with a very friendly guy they just met for awhile.

Cue the next day and the hangovers, and the regret, and the guilt, and the decision to try and wash it all off by visiting this super-secret lagoon where the water’s so clear “it’s like you’re standing in the sky.” After a long, long walk down the beach and into the jungle, they come to a small body of water (not as clear as advertised) in a secluded cove. Jill and Casey take a dip, and at some point Casey gets bitten by something under the water. Nobody thinks anything of it.

And nobody really thinks anything of the clutches of small, translucent eggs coating the rocks around the water.

So, if it’s not obvious from the title, this is a film about how a bite from a mysterious insect goes horribly wrong and has all kinds of gross, gooey consequences for Casey. As such, it can basically be divided into two halves. The first half focuses on Casey’s anxiety about her upcoming marriage, and as it turns out, there’s a lot to be anxious about. Her future mother-in-law is bitter and puritanical, and doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for her precious baby boy. It also doesn’t help that she’s Casey’s landlord and lives in the building. Jared, the precious baby in question, is an absolute mama’s boy who won’t stand up to his mother at all and is more than happy to abstain from sex with Casey until marriage because that’s how mother wants it. The whole reason Jared knows Casey is because they live in the same building, and they live in the same building because that’s how mother wants it. It’s like that. Casey doesn’t want children and Jared really, really does, and they haven't discussed this yet. That is not a small thing at all. That is a page on which you both must be. So there’s all the tension around those things and her guilt at whatever indiscretion happened in Costa Rica, and the wedding is right around the corner and Casey’s been so paralyzed by all this hassle and uncertainty that a lot of planning isn’t locked in yet. And now this weird bug bite she got is turning into a really nasty blistered rash.

I guess this is supposed to be some kind of character study, but it doesn’t really work in that regard. That’s because the dialogue and performances are all stilted and two-dimensional. Everyone has a single defining personality trait and that’s it, and nobody in real life actually talks like the people do in this film. This is what got me to shut it off the first time. There’s only so much freshman creative writing workshop attempts at dialogue you can take before you’re done. And on top of that, most of those single defining personality traits suck. Casey is somewhat sympathetic if only because what’s about to happen to her is wildly out of proportion to her shortcomings, Kirsten seems basically decent, and there’s a kindly neighbor who shows up exactly twice to inquire after her health but everyone else beyond that is terrible. Her future mother-in-law/landlord is gratuitously awful, Jared isn’t paying attention to her or her needs at all (unless there’s something in it for him), and as it turns out, Jill is the stock scheming, manipulative backstabber. That’s sort of it. So the character study doesn’t work because there’s no depth or nuance and the sort of things you should be exploring in a character study go unexplored. Everyone’s basically a cardboard cutout.

That pivots into the second half, where things start to really get gross. And, to its modest credit, I do think that the imagery that comes with insect-related body horror is uniquely disquieting. It’s a very alien angle on life, one that brings with it ideas of infestation and radical transformation. So I think there was a real missed opportunity here to connect Casey’s fears of pregnancy to the specific nature of the body horror involved. Clutches of eggs, queens, drones, hives, cocoons…they could have really dug into some of those ideas and used them to explore the idea that becoming a mother strips you of your identity and even humanity outside of that role. Casey’s on the verge of major life changes and is understandably anxious about them, and she’s trying to hide her regrets and shame and uncertainty from everyone. It could have been really cool if the filmmakers had embodied those feelings as the bizarre metamorphosis she’s undergoing, Casey desperately trying to pretend that everything’s fine while her body is turning into something she doesn’t understand.

They could have done that, but they sure as shit didn’t. Instead we get some sub-Cronenberg’s The Fly antics where one by one, people wander into Casey’s increasingly filthy (and convincingly stomach-churning) apartment and encounter Casey as she descends…well, it’s not really into anything expressly insectile, mostly she just gets really grody-looking. Then they’re dispatched in a variety of gruesome ways that don’t obey any internal logic. Casey’s transformation really just translated into her being able to do whatever the scene requires, whether it makes sense or not. So the second half of the film is mostly just people walking into a meat grinder made up of gooey practical effects, and then the whole thing just sort of ends with a “the end…OR IS IT?” sting (or bite, as the case may be). It doesn’t really escalate so much as it plods inevitably forward, and I’m assuming the filmmakers thought the gore and gross special effects would carry the whole thing, and they really don’t.

A couple of other films came to mind while I was watching this. The director previously made a film called The Drownsman, which I wrote about a long time ago. And that film was an oddity in that it damn near passed the Bechdel test while at the same time showcasing some truly appalling relationships between women who are supposed to be friends. It was, if anything, even more ridiculous than this film. The other, recommended to me by the streaming service after I finished this, was Contracted. I’ve written about Contracted too, and for its shortcomings (any film that has sexual assault as a central plot point is walking through a minefield in my opinion), it did a lot of what this film does and could have done, but better. Like this film, the acting and dialogue in Contracted was stilted and cartoony, but somehow there it was so off-kilter it almost became an aesthetic. And it was a film about a young woman let down by all of the people who were supposed to support her, people who are uniformly selfish and awful, and because of something terrible she goes through a radical physical transformation that almost serves as a metaphor for her experience. It’s not a perfect film at all, but it points to how you can make a movie like this and end up with something worth thinking about beyond “wow…that’s a lot of slime.” Sometimes it’s worth looking past an initially disappointing first impression, but…this is not one of those times.

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Terrifier: Insane Clown Parting (Your Head From Your Shoulders)

It’s been a long time since I took the month of October to do something a little different. While most people are talking about the horror films worth watching, that’s what I’m trying to do most of the year, so instead I try to change it up. But I think the last time I really committed to the bit was a month of films that aren’t horror films, but are totally horror films, and that was a long time ago.

So I decided that for this spooky season, I’m going to focus on the kinds of movies I usually avoid. I got the idea after watching Malignant, which, despite my reservations, ended up being fun. Although I can’t guarantee that any of the others film I watch this month will get the same reception, there’s a willful perversity to the idea that I like. I spend most of the year focusing on my lane, so October seems like a good time to stray from it, maybe interrogate my dislikes a little.

With that in mind, I really don’t like slasher movies. I like watching horror films that unnerve me, get under my skin, make me feel things, that scare me. And I don’t find slasher films very scary. Because once you get past the spectacle of ludicrously graphic violence, there’s not much there, usually. I know many people find gore and violence upsetting – and don’t get me wrong, when graphic violence is used to help tell a story with relatable people and actual emotional stakes, it can be a powerful storytelling tool, but gore and graphic violence by themselves, for their own sake, don’t really move me. At that point it’s hard for me to see them as anything other than an exercise in special effects. There’s often not much consideration for the characters, not a lot of effort to make them relatable, sympathetic people, and at their worst they can be downright reactionary.

Basically, bloody death without a story and emotional stakes or worse, presented as entertainment, isn’t my deal. And so I decided to watch Terrifier, which has a decent reputation as a pretty unapologetic slasher film. To its credit, isn’t especially reactionary (maybe a little), and it’s made with style, but at the end of the day, it’s the prototypical slasher movie stripped down to its bare bones. It’s a movie where nobody exists as anything more than cannon fodder, and the violence is the only point.

We open on a news program, where the host is about to interview a woman who is the only known survivor of the Miles County Massacre, a murder spree that occurred a year ago, last Halloween. It ended with the killer – known as Art the Clown – dead. Or so the survivor says, despite his body mysteriously vanishing from the morgue. But she’s insistent, and it’s easy to see why, as Art left her with a face that’s very hard to look at. The idea that whoever did something that horrible could return is not a comfortable one. And somewhere out in the city, there’s someone watching this program. Someone so incensed by what they see that they smash their television.

Someone putting on greasepaint and a clown costume and gathering up a bag full of very sharp implements.

And then back at the studio, we cut to the host in her dressing room talking on her phone, making all kinds of disparaging comments about the appearance of the woman she just interviewed, before the very same woman suddenly attacks her and begins mangling her face while laughing maniacally. That is a thing that happened. Now we’re following two young women, Tera and Dawn, who’ve just left a Halloween party, and discover that someone’s slashed Dawn’s tire. Tera calls her sister Victoria, who’s busy studying for finals, but agrees to come get them when her roommate staggers in drunk with some dude in tow. Tera and Dawn walk into the nearby pizza joint to get a slice while they wait. And then they look over and there’s this, like, really creepy dude in a black and white clown costume who just, like, keeps staring at them. Dawn teases Tera that he thinks she’s really cute, and then gets a selfie with him while Tera’s just getting wall-to-wall bad vibes and you can kind of tell that Tera probably prevents Dawn from making some seriously bad decisions on a regular basis. The clown never speaks, never blinks. He just keeps staring.

This is basically a slasher film with all of the fat trimmed from it. It’s not even an hour and a half long, and the story doesn’t really extend past there being a bunch of people out on Halloween night for one reason or another and now an evil clown is murdering all of them. No history, no backstory, no legends. There’s an evil clown and he’s killing people. So it gets right down to business. On the one hand, the near-minimalism of its approach is something to appreciate, but at the same time it’s also laying bare just how little there is going on beyond sensationalism here. No niceties, you just came for the killing and we know that, so here you go. In that regard, it’s all pretty two-dimensional.

But I will give it this: this film has a well-realized aesthetic. It’s grainy, the colors are garish, and everything is starkly lit. Every scene feels like a well-lit island in a sea of darkness - almost theatrical, as if spotlights are illuminating sets that consist of what’s necessary for the scene and nothing else, which makes the stripped-down, minimalist feel seem more intentional than crass. The score is ominous synthesizers right out of a 1980s slasher movie, and so along with the visuals, the whole thing feels vintage without feeling like pastiche. It evokes a mood and feeling without calling too much attention to it. Art the Clown does make for an interesting antagonist as slasher-film killers go. He’s clad and painted all in black and white, which stands out well against the blues and reds and purples and harsh light sources spilling over the rest of the frame. His face is stark white with gaping black holes for eyes and a mouth, and he’s totally silent, doing all of his expression through mime. I have to say, it’s a nice change from your bog-standard hulking figure in some kind of mask, and it ends up making for a lot of pretty striking moments, along with injecting some pitch-black wit into the proceedings. I don’t know that I would have wanted a backstory or any kind of dialogue or anything from the antagonist, because the inexplicable, near-supernatural murder clown thing worked better than I expected it to.

Outside of that, it’s wholly of its type. It's a grungy film, where every location is believably deserted, abandoned, and filthy, and there’s a lot of blood and guts (with Art’s costume getting more and more bloodstained, and the shocking red against the white is an effective visual), and though the effects aren’t the cheapest I’ve seen, they’re low-rent enough that it’s relatively easy to maintain some kind of comfortable distance from the horrible shit that’s happening. Which, yeah, that’s one of those things I don’t like. That’s what makes pain and suffering entertainment, when you can hold others’ torment and ugly deaths at arms’ length. The camera lingers on bodies getting punctured, stabbed, shot, mauled, gnawed on, stomped, and sawn in half. That’s the point of the film and really the only thing that matters. I don’t dislike these characters, certainly I don’t think they deserve their fates, but I can’t really say that I care about them either. You know right off the bat that this is a film where lots of people will die, and they do. There’s no surprise to it, no shock or upset, really. And we don’t get to know them, no there’s nothing to hope for, nobody to root for. It’s a bunch of gross death scenes broken up by cutaways to other people or someone walking from one place to the next to meet whatever fate has in store.

This film is unapologetically what it is - a film made for people who expect scene after scene of violence, and on that front it delivers. It’s got a more cohesive aesthetic than I expected, and some vivid moments among the gore, but I can’t say it’s changed my mind about the genre.

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Malignant: Out Of My Head

It’s probably safe to call me a member of the No Fun Club when it comes to horror films. I don’t especially like horror comedies, and I like my horror to be bleak and unsettling and not especially interested in entertainment. I get that, and I’ll own it. This is mostly because the whole reason I started writing this a really long time ago was because I felt (and still feel) like horror isn’t extended enough respect as cinema. And so, as a result, I tend to be very much into Very Serious Horror That Is Not Fun At All, Because Entertainment Is Bad.

And that’s probably not fair. And I realize this because although I didn’t find Malignant frightening, let alone bleak or unsettling or whatever, it was so much fucking fun to watch that I can’t dismiss it. It’s a love letter to earlier eras of horror film crafted with thought and vision and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

It opens on a shot of an old, gothic-looking building, looming over a stormy night. A title reads “Simion Research Hospital, 1993.” Inside, Dr. Florence Weaver is recording a report about a patient named Gabriel to tape (we know it’s videotape because it’s got that viewfinder overlay with a blinking red light in the corner, like you don’t actually see on videotape unless it’s in the movies). And then, as you’d expect, someone interrupts to tell her that Gabriel has gotten loose. There’s a lot of hurrying down corridors lit in lurid, flashing colors, as this other person exposits that Gabriel isn’t affected at all by electricity, that he’s almost drinking it up, and there’s a trail of bodies along the corridor. Something’s been cornered inside a room, almost feral. Finally it’s subdued and strapped into a chair. That’s when Dr. Weaver says “it’s time…to cut out the cancer.”

On that note, we jump to the present day, and a young woman named Madison. She’s visibly pregnant, and very tired. She’s been working extra shifts to save up money for after the baby comes. Her husband, Derek, is lounging on the bed watching television, presumably tired after his arrival from Abusive Creep School. Madison is really concerned about this pregnancy after suffering a number of miscarriages, and Derek starts off unsympathetic, before moving pretty quickly to cruel, and from there he gets rough, pushing his pregnant wife into a wall. She hits her head hard enough to leave blood behind. When Derek walks out, she locks the door behind her and lies down on the bed, where she has a horrible nightmare about a mysterious figure getting into the house and stabbing Derek to death.

And when she wakes up and walks out of the room, Derek’s lying there, dead. Just like she saw it happen.

So what we’ve got here is Madison and her sister Sydney trying to convince the police that she didn’t kill her husband, and that’s she’s having visions of more murders as they’re happening. And, as you’d expect, the pair of detectives assigned to the case aren’t believing her. If this sounds like something you’ve seen before, maybe more than once, that’s probably not an accident, because this film is an homage to a whole range of things. It’s got elements of 1980s slasher films as well as the weirder, grungier stuff Stuart Gordon was doing back then, along with giallo, proto-slasher films like Black Christmas, and thrillers like Eyes Of Laura Mars. It’s not self-consciously retro, it’s got the effects budget of a more modern horror film, but everything else about it screams one flavor of 80s schlock or another.

And it works. It works because those flavors are note-perfect. This is a film from a reality much like our own, but one where there’s a mysterious gap in the dictionary where the word “subtle” should be. I really thought that the opening scene would end with an off-screen voice calling “cut” and establishing the protagonist as an actor in B-grade horror movies, but no, that’s just the vibe. From jump, it’s ridiculous. Performances are consistently over-the-top, the dialogue is immediately overheated and mostly consists of pure exposition of the “you know you haven’t been the same since [insert long string of events here]” variety and lots of stating the obvious (during a firefight, someone actually says “they’re shooting at us” without any irony whatsoever.) You’ve got the stock wisecracking police detectives, and a crime scene technician whose sole defining features are that she is 1) mousy and single, and 2) clearly hot for one of the detectives. And everything is played completely straight, without a single ounce of self-consciousness or winking at the camera. Which is exactly how you do something like this.

Almost all of the scene-to-scene beats are predictable, which is a big part of why I didn’t find the film scary, the rhythms are so familiar that they’re almost comforting. But they’re all executed with a great sense of visual style - a shot that follows Madison through her own house from a top-down cutaway view, the doors and walls stretched impossibly high comes to mind, as does the way the killer is presented as an entirely black shape as if he’s a living silhouette, all black leather and a stylish gold dagger like he stepped right out of an Argento film. There are plenty of Dutch angles, everything is slathered in the most lurid reds and blues you can find, and there’s sinister music painted over every scene. With the exception of a few sedate exteriors, everywhere in this film is shadowy, covered in cobwebs, foggy, and with light pouring in from one angle or another. It’s like the cinematographer was instructed to make everything look like a nightmare sequence from one of the early Elm Street films. Much like the dialogue and performances, it’s all so earnestly overblown that it comes out the other side as art.

And it’s all paced with a wonderfully delirious sense of escalation. By and large it seems like the story of a young woman who has some kind of mysterious psychic link to a killer, and it continues along in that vein until the last act, when everything gets more grisly before going utterly apeshit. It gets much weirder and much bloodier than everything preceding it without getting any more serious in tone, blending the giallo-style flashbacks that reveal exactly how everything really happened with some classic body horror. Like everything else about this film, it swings for the fences and I found my jaw in my lap at how melodramatic and audacious the whole thing ended up being. As much as I’m partial to grim, unsettling, straight-faced horror, I have to admit I was absolutely delighted to take this ride. I guess I needed a reminder that I don’t need to always treat this like some kind of intellectual crusade, that it’s okay to loosen up and get out of my head sometimes, and I’m glad this film provided it.

IMDB entry
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No One Will Save You: Taken Away

There’s a podcast that is, as near as I can tell, about films that are so bad they end up transcending their own badness. It’s called “How Did This Get Made?” and although I’ve never listened to it, that phrase got me to thinking. See, I’ve seen some real stinkers over the years I’ve been writing this thing, but I’ve never really asked myself how those really garbage films got made. I know how they got made. There’s a mindset out there that horror movies don’t need to actually be good, they just need to deliver scares and gore and maybe some titillation. So somebody puts up the money, the assumption being it’ll be a pretty safe bet to turn at least a modest profit. This can describe exercises in ineptitude and in slick mediocrity alike.

And it’s not like the people responsible are really to blame for this - if a casual look at box office numbers and the state of criticism in the enthusiast press is any indication, a lot of the people spending money on horror films aren’t exactly picky. Maybe scares and gore and titillation is all some people are looking for. Hell, the notion of a horror film that’s actually thoughtful and intelligent and made with some level of artistry is so alien to some critics that they’ve invented the term “post-horror” or “elevated horror” to describe it. And…no. It’s not elevated, you’ve just set the bar that fucking low because you’re a condescending jackass. How do those films get made? They have commercial potential. That’s it.

And this is why I find myself asking how No One Will Save You got made. It is by no means inept or mediocre. But in its premise and narrative and execution, it’s very hard to sum up neatly, and it’s certainly surprisingly non-commercial for something distributed by 20th Century. It’s not like anything I’ve seen before, and that’s not something I say very often.

It opens on a lovely old farmhouse set back in the woods on a beautiful, sunny day. A young woman named Brynn lives there, and she’s up and about, sewing cute sundresses, packaging them with ribbon and thank-you cards to mail off presumably to paying customers. It’s easy to imagine that she has a successful Etsy store. The house is sunny and full of charm, and in her basement workspace, she’s got a whole miniature town laid out across a long table. A picture-book village being kept by a picture-book young woman, shot in picture-book colors and lighting. You half-expect animated birds to land on her shoulders before she bursts into song. She grabs the packages she needs to mail and drives into town. The town is Mill River, and it’s as lovely and charming and bright and sunny as her house and the world that encompasses them both.

But all is not well here. As Brynn drives through town, heads turn to stare, lips curl in disgust. She waves at someone, and the wave goes unreturned. She tosses the packages in the mailbox, shunned. From there, a visit to her mother’s grave, and then home to write a letter to her friend Maude. She notices an odd circular patch of dead grass on her lawn, and gives it extra water.

And then, that night, when all is dark - that real country dark, just you and the stars - Brynn notices that her door is open. The door is open, and she hears footsteps. Footsteps and low, inhuman chattering.

This is the kind of film that might get tagged as “high concept.” It’s ultimately an alien-invasion film very much in the mold of something like Signs or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (with which it shares a basic visual vocabulary, all tall, skinny grey aliens and floods of light so dense they’re almost solid), but as the film goes on it gets gnarlier than Close Encounters ever did, and all of this is surrounded by the mystery of how Brynn ended up with the life she did, young and alone in this big old house, a pariah to the local community. And, on top of all of that, it’s doing this with an almost total absence of dialogue. Apart from a diegetic piece of music with sung lyrics, there are a total of five words spoken throughout the entire film, and two of those are repeated, so it’s only three distinct words. It could be very easy for this to devolve into a gimmick, but it doesn’t - there are a lot of things almost said, faint murmuring in the background too indistinct to make out, so the end result feels more like an entire film of the awkward silences that come when the person you’re talking about enters the room. The tentativeness before saying the thing that’s hard to say. It’s not that people don’t talk, they just don’t talk to Brynn. And since Brynn is the only person on screen for large swaths of the movie, it creates a palpable sense of isolation. The film’s title feels like it’s directed at her.

And this is on top of the faint but persistent strangeness of the film’s tone. It really does feel like it takes place in some kind of idealized all-American small town, but almost as soon as that impression is established, it becomes clear that something’s off - the way nobody talks to or even smiles at Brynn, all of the miniature houses arranged as if she’s building her own perfect little town, in her letters she alludes to something she regrets. From the start, there’s a sense that something’s off here. There’s a mystery to unfold, and then when night falls, it all turns into a siege film.

And the siege film works pretty well. It’s a mix of cat-and-mouse and fraught confrontation, and the beats are all pretty familiar but executed crisply and with restraint and a good sense of rhythm. The aliens start off as your garden-variety greys, strange but not especially threatening. But as the film goes on they become increasingly more inhuman, their features becoming more exaggerated, their manner more savage. They chase Brynn, roaring, clambering and skittering like spiders. There starts to be some suggestion that maybe they’ve already infiltrated the town, leading to a bit of body horror to round things off. Between the wordlessness (compensated for by a score that knows exactly when to sting),and a lot of the action taking place in a big house late at night, there’s a good, solid hum of tension to it that never really crescendos but never flags either, ticking along like a slightly too-loud metronome. You can’t really ever quite relax, right up to a climax that eschews edge-of-the-seat thrills, leaning more into revelations about how Brynn’s life ended up like this, before dropping an ending into your lap that somehow manages to recapitulate the film’s sunny opening in a way that is now, with context, chilling.

It makes sense that a film about an alien invasion is going to deal with the idea of people being taken away, but there’s a lot of different ways you can be taken away - alien abduction, sure, but also nostalgia, wishes for a better time, and worse. Some are taken from us too soon. Somehow this film manages to do justice to all of them. It’s both intensely familiar in its feel and simultaneously like nothing else, and I’m sure a lot of people aren’t going to know what to do with it. That’s their problem. There’s a lot to like in a film that harnesses nostalgic ideas about Americana and classic alien-invasion imagery and uses them to tell a surprisingly tense story about the escapism and denial of nostalgia. I’d rather watch that that the umpteenth iteration on Saw any day. I don't know how this got made, but yeah, more risky stuff like this, please.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu 

Busanhaeng: The Hero’s Journey

I’m sort of tired of zombie films in general. The idea of a zombie apocalypse has been so overdone that it’s hard for me to see how you can mine any real dread out of the concept. As often as not, the ones that aren’t outright goofy or excuses for rivers of gore boil down to Mankind Is The Real Monster, which okay, sure, but after awhile there’s not a whole lot that’s new or interesting that you can do with that. I get that you sort of have to focus more on humanity because zombies, at their most effective, are effective because they are ciphers - a human form with all the humanity drained away - and that kind of blankness is unnerving when handled well, but maybe doesn’t make for the most engaging movie all by itself.

So the default is how the existence of zombies affects the living, and it’s very easy for that to turn into all of the ways that humanity can be bad. I’m not saying that isn’t a legitimate thing to explore (it’s a big part of horror, really) but…I dunno. It’s so easy for it to turn into relentless miserabilism. And that’s dull in its own way.

And this is a big part of why it took me so long to get around to watching Busanhaeng (Train To Busan). No matter how much praise I heard, all I could think was “ugh, another zombie movie.” But I’m really glad I came around. It’s an intense, kinetic story about survival and the things we sacrifice for it. And yeah, that’s what a lot of zombie movies end up being about, but what this film does right is ground the story in sympathetic characters whose plight makes the point in ways that feel personal, rather than setting up a grim situation and preaching.

It’s just another day in South Korea, as a truck driver encounters a roadblock where his truck is inspected and disinfected before he can continue on. There’s been some kind of leak at the biotech research facility nearby and they’re here making sure nothing spreads. Just another hassle trying to get his cargo to its destination, and no sooner does he get through the roadblock than dammit, he hits a deer. Terrific. Now he’s going to have to clean off the front of the truck and he’s already late and so, grumbling, he drives off.

And then the deer stands back up.

Meanwhile, back in the big city, fund manager Seok-woo is having his own hassles. Some recent news reports about mysterious mass animal deaths have him concerned about one of the companies in which his fund holds stock, and he tells his assistant to sell it all off. This is a big deal and stakeholders aren’t going to be happy, and neither are his bosses. But it’s his call to make and his static to deal with. On top of that. he’s divorced from his wife, and they share custody of their daughter, Soo-an. And she wants to spend her birthday with her mother instead of him, and she’s prepared to take the train all the way to Busan to see her, all by herself. She’s all of eight or nine years old. Seok-woo really can’t take the time off work - this decision, however sure of it he is, is going to mean a lot of reports and a lot of meetings on top of all of the reports and meetings he already has just because he works in finance. But he loves her, and he’s acutely aware that even though he has to spend so much time at work to provide her with a good life, it means that he’s not actually around to watch her live it. And she feels it too. So he finds the time to take the train with her from Seoul to Busan, where she will stay with her mother. They board and get seated, and Seok-woo, unable to stop following the news, sees reports of outbreaks of violence all over the south.

Outbreaks of violence, and some mysterious illness.

So in short, we have a train full of people hurtling through a country that is rapidly falling apart due to what is, pretty obviously, a zombie outbreak. Communications are patchy, people can’t get through to their loved ones, and the news just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And like so many disaster movies, this becomes how everyone’s true character gets revealed, who these people are in a crisis. There’s nobility and selfishness, cooperation and craven opportunism, the best and worst humanity has to offer. Bur it’s not a turgid exercise in moralizing, it’s a crisp, knife-sharp exercise in relentless tension and momentum. Because it’s mostly set on a train, there’s a lot happening in a very enclosed space, one strictly demarcated by doors between cars, which focuses most of the action on a moment-to-moment, foot-by-foot struggle for survival. This alternates with interludes in larger, open public spaces, which allow for grander moments highlighting the scope of what’s happening. And part of why both work so well is that this film takes the same approach to zombies as films like [REC], 28 Days Later, and World War Z  - they’re like an insensate force of nature, falling and spilling over each other in waves and piles, a flood and encroaching plant species and predator all at once. Transformations are marked by slightly over-cranked camera work, which makes them feel even more frenetic, lurching and hissing and hurtling forward with headlong momentum. Everything and everyone in this film is in motion.

And it doesn’t spend too much time on the zombies themselves - encounters are mostly quick and nasty, with just as much of the tension coming from gradual, understated reveals of a nation falling into chaos. The way the news footage on the train goes from isolated instants of violence to mass panic, all played out with equanimity on little screens, pulling into a station only to find it utterly deserted, save for smears of blood and abandoned riot equipment, far-off cities that have erupted in flames. It’s either at a remove or hideously immediate, with not a lot in-between, and it’s very effective in that regard. We’re not in the middle of the cities as they collapse, we’re coming along in the aftermath. It’s a story told equally in small, understated reveals and claustrophobic, oppressive action sequences, and there’s not a lot of room to breathe. The pressure is sharp and constant, as much about how these people relate to each other and the decisions that they make as the insensate corpses flailing toward them. There’s definitely an element of “who will survive, and what will be left of them?’ to it -  everyone’s put to the test, and not everyone passes. There’s not a ton of depth to the characters, but they’re distinct and relatable, and at the center of it is Seok-woo, torn between the ruthless calculation that serves him so well at work, and kind, sensitive Soo-an. Who is he going to be in this situation? It’s a story about the people on this train.

That said, there is a pretty clear through-line here about social class, and one that definitely hits different in a post-COVID-19 world. You’ve got the people in coach and the people in first class, and while everyone else is following directions, hurriedly moving from one place to another, hoping to remain safe, men in suits with smartphones are arranging private escape routes, leveraging insider information, making exceptions of themselves and sacrificing anyone and everyone for their own self-preservation. I was immediately reminded of a photo I saw on Instagram during lockdown of some tech bro who’d amassed cases and cases and cases of toilet paper, showing off his hoard like it was something to be proud of. Neckties act important symbols of class and resulting inequality, at one point literally being used to bind doors shut to keep people out. It’s not an especially subtle allegory, but no less effective for it.

And this is what I think makes it such a strong film - it’s not just spectacle, not just gooey gore effects and wallowing in violence, and it’s not just another “humans bad” reduction either. There are elements of that, but it’s clearly grounded in human frailty, weakness, cowardice and venality. There are clear heroes and clear villains, but also a lot of people who fall somewhere between those two poles, in the messy, complicated place between, and so it’s a journey of growth (or lack thereof) as much as anything else. And on top of that, it’s supremely tense, harrowing, and full of striking visual moments. It’s also a journey of escape, of flight away from a danger that is everywhere and the increasing impossibility of safety. Brains (braaaaiiiiiiiiiiins) and brawn alike.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Tubi 

Pengabdi Setan (2017): The Family Skeletons

Never let it be said that I’m stubborn about the movies I watch. I’m stubborn about plenty of other things, but not that. Awhile back I watched an old Indonesian horror film called Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) and yeah it was crude, kind of clumsy and downright goofy in spots, but it had a real energy to it, a wild-eyed earnestness that got it over the rough spots. Good shit. Well, it came to my attention that someone did a remake of it in 2017, and before I checked that out, I watched one of the director’s later films, Impetigore, which I wrote about last week. I was…disappointed. It was visually impressive but the story was repetitive, sort of obvious, and it didn’t take long to squander any goodwill the impressive opening garnered. And that took the remake of Satan’s Slave off my to-watch list.

But here’s the thing - I have a few friends whose tastes in film I trust, and one of them had really good things to say about the remake and…even more unusual…even better things to say about its sequel. So I’ve got a remake…made by someone whose other work didn’t do it for me…that also includes a sequel. That’s kind of a hat trick of Things That Make Me Not Want To Watch Movies.

But, I gotta say, this particular person doesn’t miss often in my estimation, and as it turns out, the 2017 remake of Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) is actually pretty damn good.

It’s 1981, and out in the Indonesian countryside, there’s a family going through a tough time. Bahri and his wife Mawarni live with Bahri’s mother, and with their four children - Rini, Tony, Bondi, and Ian. Mawarni used to make a good living as a pop singer, but three years ago she was struck by a mysterious illness that’s left her bedridden, frail, and barely able to speak. Money’s extremely tight because the royalty checks from Mawarni’s albums are drying up, and the medical bills do not pay themselves. There’s a lot to do - make sure the younger kids are fed and off to school, look after Bahri’s mother, and attend to Mawarni’s  needs, listening for the bell that she rings when she needs something.

And when, after a particularly restless night, Mawarni finally passes away, it’s very sad, but it’s also a form of closure. The waiting’s over, and now the grief can begin. Bahri leaves for the city, to arrange for new sources of income. This leaves Rini, the oldest, in charge of the house. And that’s when it all starts - Bondi starts acting strangely, figures walking through the graveyard that backs up to the family house…

…and, in the middle of the night, the sound of a bell.

I don’t unilaterally dislike remakes - I do think they can be lazy attempts to capitalize on nostalgia, and ones that are shot-for-shot identical seem pointless to me. But this ends up working as an interesting riff on the original - one that keeps the same basic structure, but remixes it enough that it isn’t entirely predictable. Roles are shuffled around, events are recontextualized, and the result is very different from the original without being unrecognizable or even unfamiliar. It’s basically the same story told through two different zeitgeists, and that makes all the difference. The original was broad and intense, with all the subtlety of an emergency siren. It was a story about how you have to say your prayers or the monsters will come, damn near close to a morality tale. It was almost an after-school special with ghosts and zombies. This is a much less didactic film, one that makes the circumstances of this family’s misfortune less cut and dried, and religion doesn’t necessarily save the day this time around. There’s also a bigger focus on the relationship between all of the different family members, and though it’s not the master class on dysfunction and secret-keeping that Hereditary is, there’s definitely some overlap along those lines. A mother dies, and what she took with her to the grave is going to come back to haunt everyone. It’s the story of a family sticking together in the face of adversity, at the mercy of forces that have been aligning against them out there in the dark.

It’s also a much more subtle film. It does a really good line in spooky, creepy, classic ghost-story ambience, and though the beats are nothing especially novel, they’re executed well and don’t rely on quiet-quiet-quiet-quiet-BANG! jump scares. This is a film with lots of shrouded figures in windows and doorways, shots where there’s nothing in the room until there is, and even when it’s pretty clear how it’s going to go down, it uses that familiarity to create the anticipation that the inevitable payoff needs to get under our skin . Most of the film takes place in the family home, which is old, run-down, kind of grungy, with lots of corners and long hallways and not a lot of light. It manages to be sprawling and claustrophobic at the same time, and since a lot of it takes place at night, in the dark, there really isn’t a point when it feels like a safe place to be. The use of sound is also really important here - small things like the ringing of a bell, knocking on doors, old Indonesian pop music, all of it heralds something bad, and I like how much atmosphere and tension the film gets out of relatively minimal gestures like that. It’s not really a gory film (with one relatively brief but vivid exception), and the effects work is significantly better than the original. That’s not a high bar to clear by any means, but it means the sharpest moments hit like they should. It doesn’t have the raw, gonzo energy of the original and I do miss that, but the overall result is a much consistently better film, one that does a nice job of maintaining a steady simmer of tension throughout.

I do have a couple of complaints, though. The translation is a little lacking, as is so often the case, but the feeling still shines through. It’s also a much more involved story than the original, expanding the family and the people around them, and though I appreciate the moments of revelation, I think some of them were maybe a little rushed and didn’t have quite the impact they needed. This was most notable at the very end, which provided a nice twist and nod to the original, but the execution felt a little abrupt, so something that should have landed like a bombshell instead sort of blew past the viewer in a rush to set up the sequel. But, I have to say, based on how well this worked, I’m actually sort of curious about the sequel, and I never say that. I get the sense that family secrets aren’t that easily outrun.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon