Death Stop Holocaust (2009) - 3/4

There are an awful lot of films trying to be grindhouse or drive-in films. The Tarantino and Rodrigues picture Grindhouse is the most prominent and is perhaps responsible for many similar films. On the other hand, with Tarantino making the style so mainstream and his followers and fans taking it up themselves, making films of this sort stigmatizes the 'grindhouse' affectation as being just more Tarantino-ism. There are, on the other hand, original grindhouse/drive-in filmmakers still working. Herschell Gordon Lewis, inventor of the gore film, just released his latest film, The Uh-Oh Show (2009), on DVD; it is as true a grindhouse picture as 2011 will allow and it is, needless to say, a small-budget ($25,000), shot-on-video picture. Tarantino's Death Proof or Rodrigues's Planet Terror can only be wearing the grindhouse aesthetic as an affectation. No drive-in filmmaker ever had a budget near Death Proof's ($30,000,000). It's unlikely they'd ever seen that kind of money in their lives. Whatever Tarantino did to popularize the nostalgia and willful imitation of drive-in and grindhouse flicks, his stigmatized followers in the shot-on-video, b-movie market are more truly grindhouse flicks than his films will ever be.

That said, even shot-on-video flicks must affect the grindhouse style. Death Stop Holocaust is a shot-on-video picture that affects the style as unabashedly as any other. The filmmaker, Justin Russell, goes so far as to insert burning celluloid effects. We know this is an affectation, because the film was shot on a Panasonic HVX 200 (a $4000 digital camcorder). There is no celluloid to burn. Nor is there any illusion that I'm at a drive-in when I recline on my futon and watch the DVD screener on my laptop. While in most cases, the affectation, then, is all it is; it goes no further than affecting the style in reference to a style of cinema that happened to appeal to and influence the filmmakers. Call it an homage or call it being hip, it is equally limited. Death Stop Holocaust seems to me a rarity in going beyond mere affectation to making use of the style to comment upon the content. Before we get to that, the content.

Death Stop Holocaust, a title seemingly drawn from a mad lib, concerns two college girls, Liz (Lisa Krenisky) and Taylor (Naomi Watts look-a-like Jenna Fournier), taking a vacation at Liz's family summer home on a nearby island. As soon as they arrive on the island, they find its denizens behaving strangely. A man tries to run them off the road in his van, a waitress distracts them while their gas is stolen, and hardly anyone else will say a word. Before they can get to the summer home, they're being terrorized by three maniacs in creepy masks.

Naturally a movie of this sort--a movie, that is to say, so threadbare in plot that it is purely about the experience--stands or falls on the effectiveness of the terrorizing. Holocaust stands. Justin Russell has the ambition, and the talent, to strive for something more than the usual maniacs-terrorizing-babes set pieces. He's definitely experimenting in Death Stop Holocaust and the results are often quite effective. The influence of The Strangers perhaps rests a little too heavily, as the masked maniacs wander the negative space of the frame silently, toying with us as much as with the victim, but not really accomplishing much else. On the other hand, this behaviour is unsettling if only in virtue of its inexplicability. And their ability and willingness to commit upsetting violence is established before the toying around even begins. We're therefore always left in suspense as to when and what they're going to do, though there's no doubt of their being able to do something whenever they please.

Beyond the maniacs, however, is where Holocaust transcends its generic conventions and approaches the truly nightmarish. For one, the town itself appears to be held in the grip of some spell, behaving in accordance with the maniacs' goals. That the oddness of the supposedly normal people in a town where Liz has fond childhood memories is never really explained, moreover, submerges us, as in our dreams of familiar places somehow altered and decadent, in the uncanny, the horror of the familiar perverted against natural order. In fact, one of the screenplay's missteps is in having a character explain any of the mystery at all, though, wisely, not much is explained.

Death Stop Holocaust transcends not just in the narrative, but also, as I alluded to earlier, in its form. The grindhouse paraphernalia are not merely doing the work of affectation. They play a role in Liz's consciousness, in the relationship between reality and nightmare. We're introduced into the film world via the classic "Our Feature Presentation" drive-in intro. This establishes the filmic reality of the world we're witnessing as the concrete reality. At times of intense horror the 'celluloid' burns up. The first time the celluloid burns is during a rape attempt; the second time is when Liz is sedated and has a nightmare. The suggestion is that reality itself, or at least Liz's experience of reality, is compromised by the sheer horror of the situations she's in. Since this also suggests a certain subjective relationship between the form and Liz's experience, we experience with her the reality of the island as a disjointed, absurd flow of nightmare. What she experiences in sedation, a sequence reminiscent of moments in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, is an indistinguishable part of her experience of the maniacs, one no more real than the other.

Despite my praise, Holocaust is not a masterpiece debut. For all of the nightmarish effects and grindhouse allusions, it may strike many horror fans as a tame picture, representing much of its brutality elliptically. That might not be a problem if the film didn't offer us suggestive glimpses of that brutality. And the various narrative lacunae, while strengthening the mysteriousness of the events, at some points simply dissatisfies. This is particularly true of the film's conclusion, which left me a little disappointed. If the film builds up to an event, some clue in the narrative must be present to make us see that event as significant in itself; and there are no such clues in Holocaust. A nightmare, after all, is uninteresting to anyone but its dreamer unless it has a point.

However, Holocaust is still a very strong debut, showing Russell's influences to be as broad as '70s exploitation, David Lynch, and modern invasion horror like The Strangers. Some work will have to be done for Russell to make his influences work with one another, but on the strength of Death Stop Holocaust, I look forward to seeing him experiment more. Death Stop Holocaust is indeed a true heir to drive-in cinema and, thanks to Russell's adventurousness, also much more.