The Mask of Medusa (2010) - 2.5/4

The Mask of Medusa is the final film of Jean Rollin, as sure-footed an auteur as the horror genre ever had. His films are more appropriately thought of as fantasies, or 'fantastique', as the man himself preferred. They're fantasies of a peculiar variety, modern and urban, infused with a sense of mythology. Rollin created and advanced his own mythology with each film, particularly in his later films like Two Orphan Vampires and Nuit des Horloges. Each of these films is populated by an array of characters who spend most of the screentime talking about themselves in mythopoetic ways. While I find this aspect of his films alienating, personally detesting his self-absorbed characters, I also, upon reflection, understand his process and respect the films. It's the mythopoetic process that is the key to Rollin's process. His characters are not so much individuals as they are mythologized aspects of the human psyche, not unlike Jungian archetypes. But Rollin is not content, as are so many filmmakers and authors, to merely take Freud or Jung wholesale; he delineates his own archetypes of the human soul, making himself one of cinema's few psychologists and philosophers. When his characters speak interminable monologues about themselves, they speak about us. They are the parts of human consciousness below the surface of time and space, as the obnoxious young girls in Two Orphan Vampires are the dreamlife, the visionary life, of Man smothered by millennia of rationalism and Christianity.

If Two Orphan Vampires is an invective against the over-rational modern world created by Plato and St. Paul, it's little surprise that his final film reaches beyond Plato and Paul to the Greek myths. Heidegger, who also thought Plato's thought to be responsible for our over-rational world that can only conceive of truth in a mathematically coherent sense, similarly looked to the Greeks for inspiration. Rollin, with the same earnestness given his own mythology, treats the Greek myth of the Gorgons as a modern fantasy. Medusa is an old woman (Simone Rollin) who turns people to stone in order to feast upon their lifeforce. However, her memory has been taken by her sister Euryale, who, in turn, has been blinded by Medusa. Now Medusa stumbles by intuition to an abandoned Grand Guignol theatre where she discovers her sisters Euryale and Stheno living in the basement. There is a confrontation resulting in both their deaths. Then Stheno runs off with her dwarf boyfriend, while Jean Rollin himself buries Medusa's head. In the second act, Stheno lives under a cemetery with Medusa's head and Euryale's statue. To occupy herself, she lures a black dancer into her lair and shows off her weird life and history.

Much like Two Orphan Vampires and, though I haven't seen the film myself, from what I've read, Nuit des Horloges, Medusa is a naive, oneiric investigation of these mythopoetic archetypes. By 'naive' and 'oneiric', I mean only that there's no hint Rollin does not entirely believe in his made-up mythology, no facetiousness, no irony; and that his sheer conviction in his mythology gives it that dreamlike certainty in lies. (But isn't Rollin's point, as in Two Orphan Vampires, that dreams are not lies, that our modern society of Plato and Paul has made us think of them as such?) Just like this films, plot is of little importance. We watch the characters stand around talking about themselves, moving from one mystifying situation to another. We're left to enjoy the philosophy, if we can understand the archetypes, and the beautiful imagery, as when Stheno sinks her teeth into a black woman's 'gorgeous' ass.

So how do we understand this dream of Medusa, skull-eating, and biting a black woman's right butt cheek? Medusa 'mesmerizes' and 'petrifies', turning innocents to stone, and then experiences guilt. Euryale and Stheno live beneath the Grand Guignol and consume skulls mixed with blood. All sorts of interpretations could fit. I suppose what most strikes me is the melancholy, wistful tone of the film. Medusa is filled with regret, her main concerns those of memory and death. She is the eldest of the Gorgons, blinds the middle sister Euryale, and mutes and maddens the youngest, Stheno. Perhaps there's some personal reflection by Rollin on how one feels at the end of one's life, and perhaps there's some grander reflection on the past weighing on the present. Isn't Medusa at her most free without her memories? And isn't it telling that Medusa's first victim is a teenager? Isn't the Gorgon diet on the dead significant? In the second Act of the film, Stheno is held in the cemetery, a place of the dead, by the power of her sisters. When the black dancer, Cornelius, hears her story of her sisters and leaves the cemetery, Stheno disappears. Perhaps Rollin bids us have a healthier relationship to the past, to the dead, to be free from the past lest we end up petrified.

And then I could be totally wrong. A grander, mythological interpretation closer to that of Two Orphan Vampires could be equally plausible, starting with the location of the Grand Guignol as key. The truth is, I haven't 'figured it out'. I watched the film twice, put in an hour or three of thought, then decided to let it ferment. Rollin and I have never really gotten along, so this is nothing new. I never cared for the earnestness I mention above, I often loathe the self-absorbed monologues of his characters and the apparently meaningful but totally unnatural behaviour of all his films' denizens. I usually enjoy the poetry of the imagery most of all. The only Rollin film for which I have held any genuine affection is Les demoniaques, but even that film is a brisk swim into the jaws of frustration, as the Jamaica Inn cum Poe-esque ghost story is interrupted by an idiot in a clown costume. Like many Rollin films, Medusa is a difficult, sometimes boring, frustrating film, but still a very interesting one worth watching, filled with exceptional Gothic imagery, and moments of great vision. I have a feeling The Mask of Medusa will lurk in my subconscious for years to come.

The Sleeper (2012) - 1.5/4

I had high praise for filmmaker Justin Russell's previous film, Death Stop Holocaust. Like Death Stop Holocaust, The Sleeper is a throwback, this time to '80s slasher movies instead of '70s grindhouse horror. But what made Death Stop Holocaust so good, what made me praise it, was certainly not the 'grindhouse' style it affected, nor any of the throwback qualities in an of themselves; it was the nightmarishness and the willingness to experiment in an almost Lynchian way with creating terror, quite contrary to anything in the grindhouse style. With The Sleeper, however, Russell does not seem aware of what made his previous film good, as he excises the best parts of Death Stop Holocaust and this time runs with pure throwback.

The Sleeper concerns a maniac who decides to terrorize a sorority with creepy phone calls and, eventually, a hammer jabbed in the eyes. As sisters begin disappearing, the house mother calls the police. Our attentions are focused on a new pledge, who is naturally set to be our final girl. Of course, some subplots involve the horny frat boys who want to bed some of the sorority sisters. If you know your '80s slashers, it's just a waiting game until most of the cast is killed and the final girl escapes and kills her pursuer.

The problem with The Sleeper isn't so much being a full-on homage. I like '80s slashers very much. However, being a lightweight connoisseur of the subgenre, I'm also very well aware that many slashers are bad, not in the good way, but in the very dull way. They're not all indie splatter hits like Maniac! and The Prowler, subtle classics like Halloween and Black Christmas, or even second-tier honourables like American Gothic, Just Before Dawn, Hell Night, or He Knows You're Alone, or even the Halloween sequels. You have a lot of rubbish like Night School and Prey, or, at the very worst, Blood Lake. In fact, even some of the memorable slashers aren't that good. Black Christmas and The Prowler are accorded much more respect than their artistic or entertainment values warrant.

My point is that Russell doesn't make The Sleeper an homage to the really good slashers, but to the bad ones. From the credit graphics onward, it's clear this is one of those made-on-the-cheap Canadian co-production sort of slashers no-one really remembers because they were too banal to be worth the neurons. I could best describe it as He Knows You're Alone meets Black Christmas. The phone calls and sorority house are Black Christmas, albeit not as good, and the killer, whose identity is irrelevant, reminds me of the He Knows You're Alone killer.

The very unfortunate reality is Russell is so incredibly successful at making his homage that it plays exactly like one of those bad '80s slashers. There are already far too many bad '80s slashers as it is, we didn't need one shot on DV. It's an interesting experiment, but one whose success entails its failure. Had Russell veered from his project course, as he did in Death Stop Holocaust, he could have had a very interesting picture. But The Sleeper is just too faithfully a throwback, to a frankly misguided cinematic space, that it's not very interesting at all.