Skinamarink: Through A Child’s Eyes

I have this vivid memory from when I was very young, like about four years old or so. I was falling asleep, and in a dozing half-asleep/half-awake state I very distinctly saw a hand creep up over the edge of my bed, feel around a little, and then withdraw back under the bed. I did not scream, I did not freak out. I did, however, spend the next several years of my life - like, longer than you’d think - sleeping at the edge of my bed with my arm draped over the side, waiting for the hand to come back so I could catch it. So maybe I am at heart one of those idiots from a mediocre slasher movie who gets offed right away when they go to check out the mysterious noise.

But the point isn’t my foolhardiness in the face of something that should have terrified me, the point is that childhood is fertile ground for nightmares and the nightmarish. At a young enough age, everything is still fairly unfamiliar (and the unfamiliar is scary), the difference between the real and imaginary is more porous than it is in adulthood, and everything is bigger and louder than you. It’s a time when feelings of safety and security are tenuous and nighttime is when the monsters come out. Everything looks scarier, more sinister in the dark.

And this is why Skinamarink works as well as it does. It’s a dense, cryptic, almost impressionistic recreation of what it means to be small and helpless in the dark, where the monsters are. And if you’re receptive to what it’s trying to do, it will get under your skin and stay there.

The film opens with a title card that just says “1995” before diving into a series of static shots of the interior of a house. We hear muffled voices of adults and children, only catching snatches of what they’re saying. It seems like the day is winding down, and we’re able to gather that in this house, Kevin (four years old) and his sister Kaylee live with their mom and dad. It’s bedtime, so Kevin and Kaylee get tucked in. We don’t actually see their parents, and we don’t see much of Kaylee and Kevin either. Everything happens off-camera, accompanied by the same fitful voiceover. Night falls and everything goes dark, until Kevin wakes up in the middle of the night - as little kids sometimes do, to use the bathroom or get some water - to discover the house otherwise empty, lit only by the still-flickering television. It’s just him and Kaylee. His mother is gone, his father is gone.

The front door and all the windows are missing too.

There’s no real story to speak of - it’s the absolute definition of a mood piece. Kevin and Kaylee wander around a house emptied of adults, and you get the sense that at first it’s kind of fun - they can stay up all they want, watch cartoons, play with their toys, but soon enough they can tell something is very wrong, maybe more wrong than they can really appreciate. Everything is experienced from the point of view of small children who have woken up in the middle of the night. This extends to the camerawork, which is very low to the ground. Furniture and doors tower over us, and rooms perfectly normal in the daylight become something far more threatening when it’s just an open door with darkness yawning beyond it.

So what we get is a visual study of a house at night, all odd angles and stark light sources and garish colors and chiaroscuro, all painted on thickly grained, almost pointillist film with veins of scratches and artifacts running through it. The end result is that even the shadows - of which there are numerous long, unblinking shots - feel alive with something seething and tenebrous. You’d almost swear you can glimpse things in it. And sometimes there are. Sound design is expertly deployed, with long stretches of silence interrupted by bangs, clatters, and bursts of white noise, with the occasional bit of diegetic cartoon music for relief, but even that is scratchy and distant. What dialogue we get is very sparse, delivered in whispered voiceover  with the occasional subtitle, often from unnervingly close in the mix as if the person speaking is just behind us. A house at night, to a small child, is a whole other world, and one that isn’t very friendly and everything - the cinematography, the sound, the pacing- captures that very primal fear very well. It’s the fear of what’s in the dark, what’s under the bed, the sounds coming from upstairs. In this context, a simple request like “come down to the basement” becomes laden with dread. It’s not a film you watch as much as it is one you open yourself up to and let carry you wherever it’s going, which is assuredly nowhere good.

It’s a very slow burn, but a very sure one. The almost-glacial pacing means it does sag a little, but not as much as you’d think, instead working as a slow boil that has you thinking it’s just something odd and quirky at first, but goes on to layer and accumulate lots of small details until something slightly strange curdles into something downright malevolent. About thirty minutes in I realized I had to keep unclenching my hands because they kept involuntarily balling into fists, and when the film finally ended, I sagged and sighed with relief because it was over - not because it was bad, but because I finally felt some respite from the constant knot of tension my entire body was coiling into. There’s no real way to anticipate what’s going to happen from moment to moment, and a lot of the shots are the kind that in a more conventional horror movie would be a prelude to a predictable jump scare. Here, you respond to the framing but it just keeps you there, this thrumming of anxiety that won’t go away.  And all of the credits are at the front of the movie instead of the end, so when it ends we’re even sort of denied the relief of that cooldown period while the credits are rolling, that feeling that it’s okay, it’s over now. It just ends, and we have to deal with it, no comfort extended.

Everything about it - the sound, the cinematography, how scenes are staged, the occasional subtitles - conspires to create a feeling of wrongness, like we’re privy to something very private that was never meant to be seen by other people. In this, even though it’s a very different film in a number of ways, it reminds me of Begotten - nothing is explained, there isn’t really a story, visuals are ambiguous and primitive, so like that film it feels like something cursed, something that shouldn’t exist or be capable of being captured on film. We don’t get details, just hints and allusions and vague shapes that nonetheless accumulate into something very unsettling. It’s not for everyone - ironically its simplicity means it requires your full attention and engagement, and if you like watching horror films for adrenaline rushes in a safe, predictable environment, you’re probably going to think this is dumb and boring. But if you can open yourself to its very strange wavelength, it’s one hell of an experience.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Phantasm: The Undertaker’s New Clothes

 I always feel a little uneasy when I plan on tackling something that’s considered a classic in one way or another, especially when it’s something I’ve never seen before. There’s always the concern that a longtime favorite won’t have held up, but when something I’ve never seen before has a history and reputation and a devoted following and it doesn’t click for me, well…

…well, then you get Phantasm. It’s a definite cult classic, spawning multiple sequels and firmly embedded in the horror lexicon. Years ago I watched it (or tried to) and I remember feeling confused and underwhelmed enough that I don’t think I finished it. But that was a long time ago, my tastes have broadened, and it’s a gap in my cinematic education. But having seen it now, I find myself very confused by the adoration for this film, because I really don’t think it works.

It opens on a man and a woman, in a graveyard, engaging in what I think is supposed to be sex. It’s tough to tell, because they aren’t really doing the things you expect from a couple having sex, like expressing enthusiasm, or moving. The man mumbles something about how good it was, in a tone of voice you usually associate with falling asleep. But suddenly the woman has a knife! And she stabs him! For just a moment, her face is replaced by that of a gaunt, unsmiling old man. On to the next scene. The man who we just saw getting stabbed was Tommy, and his friends Jody and Reggie meet outside the funeral home adjacent to the cemetery where Tommy met his end to discuss his passing (“hell of a way to break up a trio”) and the upcoming service (“I just don’t get off on funerals, man. They give me the creeps”). Jody’s thinking about leaving town, but he has his little brother Mike to think of. They lost their parents in a car accident, and ever since, Mike’s had real abandonment issues, sticking to Jody like glue. Jody told Mike to stay home because the funeral would be upsetting, and so Mike sneaks out to the cemetery (on a very loud dirt bike) and hides in the woods to spy on the funeral through a pair of binoculars. You know, like you do. And once the service is over and the mourners have left, a tall thin man comes up to the grave, grabs the casket as if it didn’t weigh a thing, and loads it into the hearse.

It's the man we glimpsed while Tommy was dying.

So a sad young boy with abandonment issues and creepy voyeuristic tendencies discovers that strange things are afoot at the local funeral home, and after that it’s all over the place. There’s no real story to speak of, this is a movie where something happens, then something else happens, then another thing happens with varying levels of abruptness. It’s one of those movies that’s so cheap and so clumsy that it attains a level of surrealism -see also Messiah Of Evil and Carnival Of Souls - but unlike those films, it never really manages to develop much of an atmosphere or mood, so all you’re left with is one what-the-fuck moment after another, and if anything the cheapness and clumsiness undercuts a lot of the horror, rendering what should be tense, eerie moments comical.

In between scenes of Mike and Reggie and Jody talking in various combinations and a puzzling interlude with an ostensibly blind and mute fortune teller, there are a couple of nightmare sequences that, to be fair, have a certain raw vitality to them, and the strange things afoot at the local funeral home are certainly very strange - whatever you think is going on, you’re probably wrong - and events go places you wouldn’t expect if you were going into the film blind. But then the action stops so Jody and Reggie can play a quick song out of nowhere. A tense chase scene involves an ice cream truck and is thus scored by an especially tinkly version of “Three Blind Mice.” Mike interrupts a potentially tense scene by literally running through it hollering at the top of his lungs, There’s little sense of continuity and no sense of narrative flow or rising tension, and that combined with wooden acting and beyond-wooden dialogue, consistently cheap art direction, effects and set design, all has the potential to lend everything the sort of gritty strangeness you’d need for the film to get over. It really does have that weird fever-dream vibe, but some of the choices made here…well, it’s hard to tell if they’re supposed to be intentionally comic or not. The result is a film that’s hard to take it seriously even on its own level, or even to meet the movie halfway. It feels like store-brand giallo, or the kind of film out of which Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes an absolute meal.

It does have its moments, albeit few and far between. There are some effective visuals - the antagonist is a tall, thin, unsmiling undertaker who cuts a striking presence and seems to be everywhere at once, and he’s responsible for the moments when things do work. There are some other interesting visual choices here and there - washes of bright red for a particular point of view, a moment in an antique store with an old photograph that’s effortlessly dreamlike and unsettling - but there’s too few of these scattered too thinly throughout to really feel like more than missed opportunity. And so it’s really frustrating and baffling for me, trying to find the film’s appeal as a horror film. I can understand its appeal as a weird bad movie, but it’s given the reverence of something like Halloween or Night Of The Living Dead and I just don’t get it. It’s certainly striking for its time - it was released close enough to Halloween but far away enough from A Nightmare On Elm Street that I can see how could really make an impression on someone who had no idea what to expect. The rules hadn’t been codified yet. But it’s hard enough to get past the flaws now that the gap between the film I saw and the reputation it has me doubting my own sanity a bit.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

The Empty Man: Image And Substance

“Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long”

        - T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Marketing is a hell of a thing. I get that you need to on some level convince audiences to come see your movie, and part of doing that is trying to convince them that it’s going to be good. I don’t think I’m offering any penetrating insight on that front, but goddamn is it annoying when the marketing for a film frames it as one type of film when it’s really another. Maybe I’m still feeling burned by discovering the hard way almost thirty years ago that Muriel’s Wedding was not, in fact, a romantic comedy about a young woman’s love for Abba, but The Empty Man is marketed as yet another movie about a bunch of kids who mess with a Bloody Mary-style urban legend and get more than they bargained for. And it’s not that.

Well, it’s not not that, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a brooding, unsettling journey into something much bigger and darker than that, and it’s a lot smarter than its ostensible premise might lead you to believe.

The film opens on four friends taking a hiking vacation in Bhutan. They’re trekking through remote villages and up into the mountains. It’s slow going, and just when they’ve gotten far away from the nearest village, one of them takes a tumble down a crevasse. He’s not okay, and there’s a huge snowstorm coming in. They find shelter in an abandoned house and things…start to get strange. They don’t end well.

An indeterminate amount of time later, in Webster Mills, Missouri, James Lasombra is living the life of a man whose wife and child are gone. Long hours at his store selling security equipment, an especially depressing birthday dinner by himself at a Mexican chain restaurant, rattling around inside a house too big for one person. It isn’t clear right away what happened to them, but whatever it was, there’s a lot of tiptoeing around it between him and Nora, his neighbor. As it turns out, Nora’s daughter has gotten involved with some new-age self-help group and has apparently discovered the secret to transcendence. You know, like you do when you’re young. And then she disappears. Local law enforcement isn’t rushing to do anything, though, because Nora’s daughter is 18 and appears to have packed up and taken a bunch of her clothes and possessions. Nothing about this says foul play, and she’s old enough to make her own decisions. But Nora feels like something’s wrong, and James - who used to be a police officer- agrees to do some digging.

Starting with the phrase “The Empty Man made me do it,” written in blood on the mirror.

For a film that’s supposed to be about a bunch of teens running afoul of an urban legend, it’s pretty audacious in its construction. The prologue in Bhutan is about the length of a short movie on its own - to the point that I paused to check that I had the right film - and it puts some pieces into place that the film takes its sweet time to pay off. In fact, that’s probably one of the film’s bigger strengths, that it’s not afraid to take its time. It rarely feels like it’s dragging or spinning its wheels, but it is a very deliberately paced movie, very careful and spare. There’s not a lot of dialogue, mostly short, economical conversations that don’t get too stagey, and the performances are consistently on the low-key side of believable. It uses a lot of shots with little to no dialogue to communicate details - the sequence where James spends his birthday by himself in a Mexican restaurant is a great example. It’ s both comic and deeply sad and works as an economical sketch of what his life is like, even sneaking in some details that become more important later. There are a lot of little character touches like this, and the film is especially good about doing exposition through glimpsed details and asides, the kind of exchanges people with a shared past actually have, fragmentary flashbacks that feel like shards of past intruding on the present. It's exposition inferred rather than laid out plain and contrived.

It’s also not what you’d call a loud movie, in the sense that it doesn’t really go for jump-scares or melodrama. There are moments of violence, but they’re largely brief and sudden, otherwise unaccompanied by any fanfare, over as quickly as they begin. The score is mostly cold ambience, like a winter wind and the cracking of icicles, and it’s a shadowy film - there are a lot of single light sources creating oases in the middle of darkness, people moving in and out of light. It’s less concerned with scary moments than it is a constant, sinister hum, a feeling that something isn’t quite right. This isn’t a movie that jumps up and screams in your face, this is a movie that sneaks up from behind you, leans over and whispers terrible things in your ear. The quiet, spare, approach and deliberate pacing mean it gradually unspools, taking a winding path where gradual recollection and revelation play out against a landscape that feels like a trip down a rabbit hole - we’re in Bhutan, then we’re in Missouri, a hiking trip goes wrong, then a bunch of kids start going missing, there’s an urban legend involved, and that somehow opens up into something else entirely, like James wandering impossibly deeper and deeper into the bowels of an old building downtown, these strange secrets stretching farther than anyone would expect. And it just keeps twisting and spiraling into some pretty unexpected places - there are nods to postmodernism, Tibetan mysticism, cosmic horror, and it hangs together well, self-assured and quietly chilling.

On the downside, the deliberate pacing extends even to the end, which could have been tighter - it’s long enough from the big reveal to its culmination that by the time it gets where it’s going, a lot of the impact has been lost and it feels more like a foregone conclusion than anything else. In that sense, it kind of ends not with a bang, but a whimper. But the ride to get there is surprisingly good - smart and restrained and atmospheric as all get-out. I often find myself watching otherwise disappointing movies and thinking how much better their basic premise could have been in better hands. This time I came away feeling like I’d seen what could have been a really tired, obvious premise done really really well, like a gourmet version of a White Castle slider. The marketing promises junk food, but you get cuisine.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Antlers: Sometimes The Monsters Are Real

 “We pray for the children…

… who never get dessert,

who watch their parents watch them die,

who have no safe blanket to drag behind,

who can’t find any bread to steal,

who don’t have any rooms to clean up,

whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser,

whose monsters are real.”

                         - Ina J. Hughes, Prayer For The Children

Scary movies are often intended as allegories, addressing real-life monstrosities through mythical monsters. From something as intimate as grief to as sweeping as war, fictional monsters let us safely explore things that might hit a little too close to home otherwise. Of course, it seems like in the last few years the commingling of real and fictional monsters has become the province of “elevated horror” or “post-horror,” or “what people who’ve been looking down their noses at horror all this time came up with when they ran across films well-made enough that they couldn’t dismiss them out of hand.”

Okay, that got away from me. And it’s certainly not the first time I’ve effused about good films that examine real and fictional horrors in parallel. The point is that Antlers is another film in that tradition, a grim and somber story about natural and supernatural monstrosity. It stumbles at the finish line somewhat, but for most of its running time it’s pretty compelling.

Not that you’d know it from the opening title card, a bit about how mankind has pillaged the earth and awoken a malevolent spirit. It’s ham-fisted and totally unnecessary. But once we’re past that, there’s a little boy, playing in what appears to be the wreckage of an abandoned work site. He’s passing the time while his father takes care of some business, and soon enough makes his way back to the pickup truck. His dad cautions him about wandering off alone and tells him they’re almost finished. And so dad heads back into what turns out to be an abandoned mine, he and his brother wearing respirators as they clear out beakers, blowtorches, empty cold medicine boxes, all the hallmarks of bathtub chemistry of a certain type. But then there’s a noise, coming from further down the tunnel. It sounds like some kind of wild animal. We don’t get to see what it is, but it gets at them, badly.

We cut to the boy still waiting in the truck. And waiting, and waiting.

This film is basically the story of Cispus Falls, Oregon, a small town in the perpetually overcast Pacific Northwest. It’s a town the color of a bruise, a town where the mining company packed up and left, taking all the jobs with them, leaving the people to fend for themselves. It’s a place where it seems like almost everyone does everything with a sense of weary resignation and doesn’t aspire to much more than getting by. Julia Meadows is a recent arrival, teaching at the one school in town. She grew up here, had a really hard life here, ran and didn’t look back. Except now some unspecified setbacks in California have brought her right back. She’s living with her brother - the town’s sheriff - and it seems to be a fraught, cautious relationship. They spend a lot of time tiptoeing around what happened when they were kids. Until they don’t. Julia’s frustrated that she can’t get the kids to engage with her - she knows their situation, and it’s the knowing that frustrates her. She knows how badly they need some ray of light. There’s one kid who especially concerns here - Lucas. Keeps showing up in the same clothes, has trouble focusing, gets bullied a lot. He draws really unsettling picture of monsters in the dark.

He's the kid from the truck in the beginning.

So it’s the story of land poisoned by mining and a dying town poisoned by despair. Both give birth to horrible things. Cispus Falls is a bleak place - drug labs in abandoned mining tunnels, another eviction or foreclosure every week, all the things that go on behind closed doors, parents who homeschool their children so they can mule drugs or so the teachers don’t smell the meth on their clothes from their parents. Malnutrition, poverty, abuse of every type, a pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness. It’s a town with a lot of pain, and that pain’s been taken out on its children, as it was taken out on their parents, as it was taken out on their grandparents, and so on. It’s a place that was broken long ago. There’s no shortage of real monsters here. And sometimes our real-world monstrosities coalesce into otherworldly ones, as if the earth itself came alive to protest our abuses. In that respect, the town is well-realized as a character in and of itself. Even the sunny days here feel drained of anything good. 

This is complemented by a largely understated approach to the narrative - wordless looks and terse flashbacks do a lot of storytelling here, and though the gaps aren’t hard to fill in, it’s a film that mostly trusts its audience. I say mostly, because there is the occasional bit of exposition-y dialogue (and some bigger problems around this toward the end), but for the most part it’s a story told carefully and deliberately, a bit at a time, without a lot of histrionics or hysterics. This restraint extends to a score that is mostly ambient, just there enough to color the scene, and a palette primarily consisting of muddy grays and browns, with the occasional cold fluorescent light of a corner market, and a lot of desaturation in the color. There’s occasional sunshine, but not for very long, and the even more occasional breathtaking panorama of forest or mountains to break up the sad squalor of this town the mining company forgot. It’s inhabited by characters who are largely believable, though some of them get developed more than others, and though none of them feel like sketches, some people do feel like they’re in and out of the story a little more quickly than is ideal. Even if the dialogue is sometimes a little too on-the-nose, the relationships and dynamics between people feel real.

This pervasive foreboding is helped along by thoughtful pacing as well. The first two acts are mostly subdued table-setting with just enough peeks into what’s happening to build a sense of dread without giving the entire game away at first. Something bad is going on here but it isn’t immediately clear what, and not everything is exactly what it seems to be. There’s some explicit violence, but more often we’re just witness to its aftermath, the horrible wreckage of what were once human bodies, depicted dispassionately. Quick images and little details build things up leading into the third act, where all the monsters become real - and here, the effects work (always the toughest proposition for a film like this) holds up quite well. That said, the move toward more action means that some of the atmosphere is lost. Although it never stops being evocative visually, with rainy days exchanged for foggy moonlit nights and mine interiors lit only by stark red flares, it does lose some of the mood so carefully built up in favor or something more disappointingly obvious. 

And this shift toward the more obvious is why I don’t think it quite sticks the landing either, with a climax that’s a little too obvious and an “the end…or is it?” ending that feels entirely unnecessary, given how strongly this film relies on ideas of generational trauma and the nature and consequences of abuse. The obviousness of the opening title card about what mankind has done to the earth infects the ending as well. So not a slam dunk, but there’s a lot to recommend it nonetheless.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

The Oak Room: Everything Is Not What It Seems

Every now and then when I’m having one of those “let’s just pick something at random” weeks, I’ll hit something that isn’t really a scary movie by definition. But if they evoke tension or unease or discomfort, I’ll allow them. And that’s kind of what happened this week. The Oak Room (a suitably cryptic title) is described as being a story about a drifter paying a debt by telling a story to a grizzled bartender. And that sounds like it’s gonna be some kind of spooky-ass ghost story, but it really isn’t. Instead, it’s a neo-noir film with an interlocking puzzle-piece narrative, told through a series of twisting, nested flashbacks. Which is a nice structure for a story, and it does have its moments, but it’s unfortunately let down by clunky writing, some missed opportunities in the story, and performances that are loud and cartoony when they should be quiet and subtle.

It's a snowy winter night in rural Ontario - one of those nights when it just keeps coming down, when the roads are going to be rough going, and when the power’s going to cut out at some point - and Paul is closing up the bar he owns. He’s sweeping up, emptying the cash register, getting ready to turn off the neon sign outside when a figure pulls up to the front door. Paul tells them they’re closed, but they come in anyway. It’s a younger man named Steve (almost nobody in this movie has a last name) and Paul recognizes him. He isn’t happy to see Steve. Steve’s father worked (and drank) himself into an early grave trying to put together the money to send Steve to college. And then Steve flunked out after a semester or two. Steve didn’t even come home for the funeral. He owes multiple people money, including Paul, and people rougher than Paul.

Steve came back to claim his father’s worldly possessions, but Paul has other ideas. He wants to make sure Steve pays what he owes. So he makes a phone call, to one of those people rougher than him, and then they wait. And Steve tells Paul he’ll pay his share to Paul with a story about what happened a night or two ago at a bar called the Oak Room, the next town over.

He’s sure Paul’s going to be interested in hearing it.

The scope of this film is very limited, almost cozy, as befits its origins as a play. The action is limited to two bars, a pig farm, and a rural highway, in both the past and present. The limited setting works for it, though, as it creates a feeling that what we’re watching are sort of variations on a theme - a conversation, a flashback, two or sometimes three people, in vignettes connected by the conversation between Paul and Steve in the present. It’s a basic setup being executed multiple times, but with each individual instance contributing something to a larger narrative. It’s almost fractal in nature, and until the very end all of the action is in the things people say, what they reveal about themselves (or don’t), the implications of every new revelation.

So the narrative structure is interesting, and it’s well-shot, making good use of snowy nights, overcast winter days with fitful sun, and the warm amber glow of a bar at night, as if the light through the beer bottles is cast over the entire space. The soundtrack is mournful guitar, clacks and thumps that communicate both a sense of rural desolation and brewing unease. There’s the feeling that there’s something there to grasp, that the pieces are being put in front of us if only we know how to put them together, to recognize what’s important and what isn’t. And it mostly pays off, (and lets the end be a little ambiguous, which works well) though there are some loose threads here and there that feel like they’re meant to be important, to lead to some additional revelation, but don’t. Because it’s a lot of table-setting that doesn’t pay off until the third act, it can feel a little aimless until things come together. It does have an effectively mournful cast over it, to its credit. There’s a lot to this film about regrets, about irreversible bad choices, about realizing too late what mistakes you’ve made, about waking up one morning and realizing just how old you’ve gotten and how little you have to show for it.

But all of this is struggling against writing that is as hackneyed as it gets and performances that tend mostly toward the two-dimensional. Everyone’s just a little too much, a little too archetypical to be believable as people, and in most cases they’re really, really annoying archetypes. In the case of a character like Steve, it makes sense and there’s a weaselly furtiveness to him that does work, but Paul is all macho bluster and posturing and it gets pretty grating pretty quickly. The dialogue is mostly generic tough-guy talk (like, who in real life actually calls someone “college boy?”) and/or clumsy exposition of the “you have a lot of nerve coming here after [insert string of events that both characters wouldn’t need to actually restate out loud]!” variety. As often as not, characters make speeches or perform monologues instead of talking, and almost no opportunity for profanity or aggro chest-beating is left on the table. It’s the kind of story that works best in a naturalistic, downplayed style and that isn’t to be found here at all. Well, that’s not entirely true - there’s a flashback with Steve’s father that generates some real pathos, but it’s an isolated moment in what is otherwise a college sophomore’s attempt at David Mamet.

Although the structure is interesting and at least as far as that goes the filmmakers don’t insult our intelligence- we’re still left to figure out the implications of what we’re hearing and seeing for ourselves, which is good - the details are aggressively pedestrian, like a house that’s been designed by M.C. Escher and then decorated with “Live, Laugh, Love” wall art on every surface. Given how much meta-commentary there is in the dialogue about the nature of stories and how important it is to spice up the truth, I think I can see where the failings come from.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Pearl: Put On A Happy Face

I really liked the film X, and one of the things I liked about it was how it managed to be both a gritty 70s period piece and something smarter and more cineliterate than that at the same time. It was very much what it promised on the cover - a film about a group of young people who tried to shoot a pornographic movie on someone’s farm and what happened when they ran afoul of the owners - but it was also a film about youth, beauty, desire, the loss of those things, and the power of cinema. It took a very specific type of film and simultaneously celebrated, subverted, and exceeded it.

So I wondered what the deal was going to be with Pearl, a prequel to that film that the director and lead actress cooked up during a mandatory COVID quarantine. I don’t usually like prequels, especially origin stories. They tend to strip away the mystery, make the monsters less interesting. And for that matter, how do you follow something like X? As it turns out, the way to do it - and do it extremely well - is to take a type of film you don’t usually associate with horror and make a horror film out of it. It’s a specific type of period melodrama that moves inexorably into nightmare, working as a portrait of an extremely troubled young woman, as well as a continuing comment of the power of cinema, without sacrificing the horror one bit..

It's 1918, and Pearl is a farm girl who longs to trade her life of drudgery for the glamorous life of a movie star. She wants to get away, to run as far and fast from her present life as she can. And you can’t really blame her - a dour, puritanical mother, an invalid father, and a husband overseas fighting all mean that her days are nothing but chores - feeding the animals (the ones who haven’t died off), caring for her father, and the occasional trip into town to pick up medicine. Sometimes, she sneaks a bit of money to go to the picture shows while she’s in town, and she plays out the dance routines she sees on the screen for their remaining livestock. That’s her escape. That’s her moment of joy.

A moment of joy inevitably cut short by her mother, who shames her for her frivolities. Pearl comes back down to earth, the music fades, and in a fit of pique she spears one of their geese with a pitchfork. She feeds it to the alligator that lives in their pond.

You get the sense that this isn’t the first time.

If you’ve seen X, you’ll know that what we’re seeing is the beginnings of a very dark, very sad story. But to its credit, Pearl also works just as well on its own, a portrait of a very unstable young woman in circumstances that all but guarantee that she’s going to snap eventually. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when, and how ugly the fallout is going to be. And it works as well as it does in part because there’s a very strong tension between the story itself and how the story is being told. It’s filmed very much in the style of old melodramas, starting with period-appropriate titles and opening credits, everything shot in bright, super-saturated colors, lots of wipe and iris transitions, and a score of omnipresent strings and brass that slathers everything in the brightest of brights and the darkest of darks. Think The Wizard Of Oz, or the work of Douglas Sirk. This is the world as it was, or at least as it is nostalgically remembered, a brighter and more colorful time, full of promise.

But even within that, there’s something else poking through - it’s 1918, so it’s right in the middle of the flu pandemic. There are masks and there is social distancing, fears of contagion which resonate differently today. It’s World War I, and men are coming home shattered by what they’ve seen if they come home at all. The uncertainty, the wondering when you don’t get a letter back. Wondering if men in uniform are going to turn up to give you the bad news. So there’s a pervasive uncertainty, the constant specter of death and disease that is not at all whitewashed by the sunny, colorful setting. There’s also the escape inherent in the movies, but here again, there’s also the seedy underbelly of cinema - stag films, furtive and underground. It’s a film where all manner of darkness is being painted in the most vivid of colors and it lends everything a slightly hysteric edge, or the feeling that you’re having a nightmare where you start watching a perfectly harmless film that gets progressively stranger and more sinister.

And this is all embodied in Pearl, a farmer’s daughter who feels like she’s bound for something better, for the bright lights of Hollywood. Which is a classic story, but here again there is a darkness. Because it’s World War I, anti-German sentiment is high, so Pearl’s family are largely on their own. What time and energy isn’t devoted to keeping their few remaining animals alive is devoted to feeding her father, giving him his medicine, giving him some fresh air, cleaning him up when he soils himself. Pearl’s mother is hard, kept ramrod-straight by her Christian faith, absolutely opposite to accepting any form of charity. She has exchanged wanting things for making the best of what she has, but there’s a barely contained rage and sorrow at these circumstances that eventually boils over. Her mother didn’t want to be the person she is, but she has to be by necessity. And Pearl has that rage and sorrow too, combined with a seething emptiness - a lack of love, affection, attention, human contact, really, that’s created an unappeasable hunger for love and validation inside her. Repression is already taking its toll on her when the film starts. But the emptiness doesn’t stop there. Pearl’s missing something other people have, the thing that recognizes the value of life, the thing that keeps us from finding pleasure or relief in the act of killing. Pearl knows she’s not like other people, and she’s more afraid of it than celebratory of it. She knows she’s done bad things, she believes she can never be loved for as damaged as she is, and all she wants is to get away, and the violence of that desire is startling when it comes out.

And it is a violent film - in terms of both physical violence (that looks as simultaneously graphic and artificial as the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis) and also emotional violence. The feelings Pearl experiences are as raw and unmodulated as any I’ve seen in a very long time, and there’s an exchange between her and her mother that I’d put right up there with the hardest moments in Hereditary for sheer painfulness to watch. The performances in this film are consistently good, if not always substantial outside of the main roles, but Pearl absolutely tears the roof off. The force of what she’s barely keeping contained is startling in its intensity, and the blood is as super-saturated as the trees and the sky, Pearl’s smile is too wide, her cheerfulness too plastered-on, a brightly colored rictus over a rat’s nest of hollowness and total hunger. The desperation and fear and self-loathing leap off the screen.

The cinematography and editing are excellent and evocative, and the film still manages to pack in a number of sly visual and thematic allusions to the events of X, as well as nods to The Wizard Of Oz. Like X, it’s as much about the power of film - to escape, to transform, to reinvent yourself - as it is the events of the film. That it’s all shot primarily in the same location as X also creates this eerie feeling of continuity, like seeing someone who’s gone to ruin when they were still young and beautiful, which is itself an idea that X very much addresses. There’s really no secret that things are going to go bad -  it’s a horror movie, and if you’ve seen X. you have an idea of where everything will ultimately end up. But this film more or less tells you this early, with an opening scene that’s sort of a precis for the entire film - a reverie, crashing back to reality, frustration relieved by violence. And to its credit, the end of Pearl (easily one of the most uncomfortable final shots I’ve ever seen in a film) and the beginning of X create a gap of decades for us to fill in, and the implications of this film’s ending make it very hard to imagine filling it in with anything good. It takes the idea of making the best of what you have and turns it into something terrifying and tragic to contemplate. This one’s a doozy.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Shock Waves: Blast From The Past

One of my most vivid memories of being a kid growing up in 1970s Oklahoma was looking through the movie ads in the newspaper. It was the ads for horror films that piqued my interest the most - for probably obvious reasons - and I was kind of a sheltered little kid, so the sort of things promised by these lurid assemblies of art and ad copy were absolute nightmare fuel to my very active, very vivid imagination. And I was raised to believe that the best way to deal with your nightmares was to face them, so I ended up being both afraid of what these films promised, and terribly curious about them at the same time. 

Does this help explain why I, very much a grown adult human, like to write about scary movies for fun? Don’t be ridiculous. But in all seriousness, one of the benefits of living in an age where a lot of stuff is available on physical media or streaming is that I’m able to go back and revisit the films I remember seeing ads for in the paper as a kid. It’s interesting to see to what degree they do or don’t live up to what I pictured in my head. Rabid? Not so much. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Absofuckinglutely. 

So Shock Waves is sort of an indulgence, in this sense. I always wondered what kind of film it was as a little kid, but there was no way I was going to get to see it at my tender age and it never showed up on cable. So here I am, years and years later, finally settling up with one of those films that burned their way into my tiny little brain. As it turns out, it’s a surprisingly restrained film given the subject matter, and somehow its limitations work for it, rather than against it. The result is something surreal, rather than gory or sensationalistic.

The film begins in voiceover on a static image of some German soldiers, circa WWII. We’re told about Nazi experiments into developing hardier, more resilient soldiers, and battlefield rumors of Nazi troops who fought barehanded through the harshest conditions without ever slowing down or stopping to rest. And how out of all of the divisions of SS troops deployed during the war, one unit was never accounted for. This shifts to a boat out on the water, a man and his son out for a day of fishing, when they discover a dinghy adrift with one unconscious passenger inside. It’s a young woman, who starts lashing out in fear as the two attempt to rescue her. And we shift to the woman in voiceover, saying when they found her, she wasn’t even aware that they were trying to help her, and that at that point she couldn’t remember any of what had happened to her. But clearly, something had. Something terrible.

It all started on a chartered boat trip - sightseeing, scuba diving, that kind of stuff. Seven people on the boat - Ben, the captain, Keith, his first mate, and Dobbs, the galley hand. Their guests are Chuck, an affable bachelor, Norman, a peevish, abrasive car salesman, and his patiently enduring wife Beverly, and Rose - the woman we see being rescued. Things were going along fine until they hit that patch of water where their compass stopped working. Until they collided with another ship and started taking on water. Our protagonists scramble onto the same dinghy we saw at the beginning, and head for a nearby island. 

The ship they hit, it turns out, is an old, abandoned wreck. It looks like something from WWII. And then the figures begin walking out of the wreck, along the ocean floor. Figures in Nazi uniforms.

No, the math isn’t complicated. There’s old Nazi experiments unaccounted for and a bunch of people trapped on an island. What we have ourselves here is a movie about Nazi zombies. That’s not really spoiling anything. You could figure it out (as I did) from the movie poster alone. But it also doesn’t really play like any modern conception of a zombie movie, Nazi or otherwise. It isn’t hard to follow, and really there’s not that much story there anyway. The protagonists land on the island, they discover they aren’t alone, and it goes badly. But how that story gets told in ways you wouldn’t expect. This film has a narrative style best described as stiff - it’s not disjointed, per se, but every scene feels very much like a single, isolated sequence, and so the film as a whole feels less like a continuous story and more like a series of narrative snapshots arranged in a comprehensible order. It's not clumsy, but it’s definitely an assemblage of scenes rather than a movie, if that makes sense.

This extends to the performances, which are all varying shades of wooden, and dialogue that never sounds like anything other than lines being delivered. There’s also not a lot of overlapping dialogue or interruption or crosstalk, so that sense of narrative isolation burrows all the way down into the acting itself. It feels very much like everyone says their lines and then waits for the next person to say theirs before they start talking again. It’s not off-putting, but it does feel odd. And when the action really starts to pick up (which takes a little while), almost all of the actual violence takes place off-camera. I’m assuming it’s because they didn’t have the budget for a lot of effects work, but in some ways I don’t mind that - there will be a reveal (many of which work pretty well) and then a cut to the aftermath. There’s a terseness to it that actually sort of works with the stiffness of the acting and direction to create something almost like an aesthetic. Not minimalist…maybe brutalist filmmaking, since it creates a feeling of distance or remove. It’s like we’re not watching things happen to people, we’re watching people reenacting things that happened to other people.

That sense of remove means that it doesn’t generate as much heat or tension as I’d like. But there are also a number of interesting stylistic choices that I appreciated. It was made in 1977, so like a lot of other films from around that time period, it’s sort of making up its own conventions instead of adhering to an existing formula and that pays off at times. The film begins in voiceover and it’s several minutes before we get actual dialogue, the film itself is one long flashback, and I don’t know if it’s the first Nazi zombie movie ever made, but it’s a definite contender for that title, and the way it handles zombies isn’t really the “slow” zombie of something like Night Of The Living Dead or the “fast” zombie of something like 28 Days Later. They’re stealthy - they hide, they pounce, and they’re utterly, unnervingly silent. There’s an eeriness to them, especially how they walk along the ocean floor, rise from the water when and where you don’t expect it. The restraint works in a way you rarely see in zombie films. Hell, that you rarely see in horror films much anymore in general. They’re more like Michael Myers in the first Halloween film than they are what we’d think of as zombies. And there are some nicely off-kilter moments - an abandoned ballroom with a lone Victrola in the middle playing classical music, scenes plunged totally into darkness, long conversations with an off-camera character, some almost painterly uses of light and shadow, bodies lying motionless in shallow water. When I think of impressionistic filmmaking, zombie films don’t usually come to mind but there are some moments here that qualify.

The budget does show through at points, but more in how the story is told, rather than the quality of locations or practical effects. The cinematography is, with some notable exceptions, workmanlike, and the soundtrack is lots of simple early synthesizer, all burbles and swells and dissonant melodies and theremin-like ambience. But because this very simple, stripped-down approach carries through at every level of the film, it actually works.

 

It’s sort of a tradeoff - the film exchanges tension and thrills for strangeness, so it’s not as scary as it could be, but what we’re left with is something more interesting and unique, ending on a nicely unsettling and inconclusive note. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this, and I don’t know that it’s a forgotten classic or anything, but it’s very much one of a kind. Probably would have scared the crap out of me as a kid, though.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon