Berberian Sound Studio (2012) - 2/4

The plot description I had read of Berberian Sound Studio that intrigued me was, "A sound engineer's work for an Italian horror studio becomes a terrifying case of life imitating art." This is the main plot description from IMDb. The most glaring gem in the sentence is 'Italian horror studio,' suggesting the Gothic horrors of Mario Bava, the lurid Gialli of Sergio Martino, the supernatural weirdness of Dario Argento, the gore of Lucio Fulci, and the gifted nonsense penned by Dardano Sacchetti. The second, and to me more tempting gem is 'sound engineer,' calling to mind two of the greatest thrillers ever made, The Conversation and Blow Out. I expected a lot.

Maybe that's not fair to Peter Strickland. BSS is the filmmaker's second feature film, made independently and on a limited budget. Of course, these aren't actual standards to which I am holding the film. I expected a skillful homage to Italian horror, maybe a bit of a mind-bender, with sound playing an important role. Something to that effect.

Despite the claims to "life imitating art," however, Berberian Sound Studio really has little to do with Italian horror. Toby Jones plays Gilderoy, a British sound engineer hired to work on an Italian horror film that seems to fit somewhere between The Witchfinder General (a British film) and Mark of the Devil (a German film). He thought it would be an 'equestrian' film. What ensues is the small, awkward dramatic tensions between the bully Italian producer and the meek Brit. Whiffs of intrigue come from the lead voice actress's suggestions of something more malign. Little actually happens, however, until she quits and Gilderoy is literally absorbed by the film.

The film's action, due to budget, style, or both, takes place almost entirely in a single sound-studio room, a bedroom, and an office, with a few black background abstractions. The tensions between Gilderoy and the Italians, his moments with the actress, I found all very intriguing, even seductive. This is really a credit to Strickland's command of style and tone. However, his highly portentous approach to style can be tedious, as it continues to promise explosions that never happen.

The closest to a climax BSS offers comes about in the final twenty minutes and is much closer to David Lynch's Inland Empire than anything Italian. I don't think surrealism or reality-twisting is the unique province of David Lynch. However, when one treads too closely to Lynch's territory, comparisons will follow. What Strickland does in BSS was, frankly, done better and more interestingly in Inland Empire. From Berberian Sound Studio, I was expecting something much different and much less evasive.

Strickland's explanation is that "the film is out of view, and you only see the mechanics behind it." In a sense, this is true. The fictional horror film Il Vortice Equestre is out of view. However, the conflicts in Strickland's film do take place in view: the are the tensions between the British sound engineer and the Italians; between the oversensitive Gilderoy and the grisly horror film he's making. If this experience is supposed to drive him into some psychological or even metaphysical breakdown, it's preposterous. Many British actors and crew worked on Italian horror films. They lived to tell the tale. What Gilderoy goes through is a mildly unpleasant experience. It'll make a good story to tell friends at the pub. We might listen to the story and say, "Wow, hmph, those Italians!" We'd never say, "They should make a movie about that." An interesting experiment, but ultimately a disingenuous one.

Rites of Spring (2011) - 2.5/4

Since time immemorial, plucky blondes have been known to be disasterous for harvests. That's why they had to be sacrificed to crop gods all the world over. Or at least given entry-level secretarial positions. Jump forward hundreds of years, and we have all but forgotten the wisdom of our forefathers. Now plucky blondes appear in board rooms, vote in senates, and even write movie reviews.

The Rites of Spring begins with a failed harvest of sorts. A blonde (Anessa Ramsey) has cost the corporation that employs her $10 million. The boss has no idea who was responsible for the blunder, so he's fired some others whom he either appreciates less or wants to fuck less. Before she can confess her mistake to save her colleagues, she's kidnapped and taken to a barn, where an old man tortures her and her friend. Meanwhile, the stooges who got fired plan a heist to kidnap the boss's daughter and get $2 million in ransom. Their desperate plan takes them somewhere in the woods not far from where the blonde kidnapper has taken her. She escapes and finds her colleagues, but something much worse than the old guy is following her.

Rites of Spring begins with that intricate bit of plotting, which serves the dual purpose of giving us a lot of assholes we want murdered and not boring us during the exposition phase. Maybe there's a comment in there on the persistance of old-time harvest values in modern society or karma and consequences or something. I don't know. What it does is launch us into the real meat of the movie, which is somewhere between a slasher and a creature feature.

Here Rites of Spring is only moderately successful. The blonde is just plucky enough for you to care about her survival and the creature is just dangerous enough to make you fear for her safety. The basic mechanics work. However, giving the creature a blade to kill with really takes away from his creature-ness. And his creature powers make him such a formidable slasher, that it's hard to buy the blonde has enough pluck to get away--we're talking astronomical levels of pluck.

The creature's purpose and significance, and its relationship to the old man are all sources of intrigue that drew me into the film. Perhaps these were the most interesting aspects of the film, in fact. Far more interesting than who was double-crossing whom in the heist subplot. Yet, in the abrupt ending, I realized I knew more about the heist than the creature and old man. All we do know is it has something to do with the harvest. Is the creature the shambling personification of winter, the death that must come before the harvest? Or is it just a zombie with a scythe? Or is it a real harvest deity that needs plucky blonde blood? What radius does its harvest goodness spread once it's been given some delicious girl meat? We never find out.

Overall, Rites of Spring is a decent indepent horror flick, more ambitious and much better executed that the majority of its kind. About half way along, unfortunately, the more interesting aspects of the film seem abandoned to easy, cheap slashing and horror movie cliches, suggesting filmmaker Padraig Reynolds forgot the wisdom of our forefathers and did not sacrifice his plucky blonde.

Hemlock Grove (2013) - 2.5/4

Hemlock Grove is yet another werewolf-and-vampire-based series, this one peculiar in being produced exclusively for Netflix. The directorial talent featured is primarily Eli Roth (Hostel) and Deran Sarafian (Interzone), two directors I like very much. That bodes well. But with TV or web series, it's not the direction so much as the writing that matters. In Hemlock Grove's case, the very promising content is consistently weakened by its sloppy writing.

Hemlock Grove is the titular small town where some girls are getting murdered by a mysterious animal that eats their genitals, chews them in half, and leaves their parts around town. Just before this starts happening, a gypsy boy and his mom, clearly werewolves of some sort, move to town arousing old enmity with the town's rich-folk, the Godfreys. The Godfreys, for their part, are clearly vampires of some sort and owners of a mysterious medical facility where god-knows-what experiments take place. Over the course of the episodes, these families draw together somewhat against a mutual enemy. Who could it be?

The plot and style of Hemlock Grove perhaps bares some superficial comparison to Twin Peaks. You have an ordinary town in which some murders begin to occur and the oddness of these people become manifest. HG is nowhere near is skillful as TP, however. Rather than slowly drawing us into the mysteries of these people, like you get in Twin Peaks, our face is rubbed into their perversion or oddness in the first episode. Flashbacks come fast and free early on, giving us full family histories. Content that should be meted out over several episodes is dropped wholesale upon us without mystery or intrigue.

The characters, for their part, prove far too mercurial. Some of them, like the Godfreys, begin so unpleasant in the first episode or two that their characters are essentially worthless for the plot. So the writers conveniently ignore all that was set up in the first episode to make them relatively affable people. This is particularly the case with one of the main characters, Roman Godfrey, the troubled badboy who becomes a sweetheart pal of gypsy Peter. Roman's mother, Olivia (Famke Janssen), probably the most heinous character in the series, suddenly becomes just as kind and compassionate. That's bad writing. They needed slow, careful development.

Even worse writing takes over in the final two or three episodes. A climax and resolution are necessary, but the writers have so written themselves into a corner that several uses of a deus ex machina are made to get out. Disappointments ensue as characters never reach the dramatic or ironic conclusions their development suggest--they just kind of evaporate.

The actors chosen are another problem. The veteran cast, namely Famke Janssen, Dougray Scott, and Lili Taylor are all fantastic, bringing to life characters that could have come across as very bland (Peter's mom) or belabored (Roman's mom). Kaniehtiio Horn as the perptually-in-hot-pants fortune-teller Destiny is the only young cast-member to hold her own with the elders. In terms of look and performance, Bill Skarsgard and Calvin-Klein-reject Landon Laboiron are just fine, their accents aside. But they lack chemistry that they really needed to make the buddy aspect of the series work. With the dialogue they had to work with, they aren't entirely to blame. But whomever we blame, without that sense of their fraternal connection, the emotional backbone of the series is an arthritic mess. Peter's and Roman's friendship is really the series core; it's too bad no-one making the series realized this.

These problems aside, there is a lot to like in Hemlock Grove for the horror fan. The werewolf transformation sequence is great. The various subplots introduce a multitude of oddities, from virgin births and mad scientists to intenstine-eating and glowing mutants. There are also some great gore effects. Some fun splashes of perversion. There are, moreover, far more questions than there are ever answers, which the final episode only makes worse. So, if you liked the series so far, there's probably more to come.

The ABCs of Death (2012) - 2.5/4

The ABCs of Death has perhaps drawn more attention due to its sheer breadth of directorial talent than due to the formalist conceit. With 26 geek-gen directors involved, it was hard not to run into the title while browsing IMDb. The conceit itself is a fairly familiar 'brainstorming' technique: choose a letter of the alphabet, a word that starts with that letter, then base a work of fiction off that word. Each of the 26 directors was given this freedom, with the condition only that the short they produce contain a death. Needless to say, there's little consistency and one has to be ready to be surprised, pleasantly or not.

The overall experience of ABCs of Death is the major triumph of the film. Critiquing the individual shorts, an activity I will briefly partake in below, is itself a part of the ABCs of Death experience and one of its most enjoyable aspects. ABCs brings the short film festival into your home and allows you to be the judge and jury--not so much the executioner, alas. You see 26 shorts, some of them brilliantly creative, some of them a waste of time, some of them just confusing, and you get to hurl the full rotten-fruit-basket that is your tastes at them. The more people you watch it with, the more fun this probably is.

In my case, I watched with my wife and we both agreed Malling's "H is for Hydro-Electric Diffusion," a Nazisploitation liveaction Furry sketch, was the most enjoyable and creative of the segments. That gets the Palme d'Or from our Living Room Cannes. We absolutely loathed "G is for Gravity" a lazy POV segment of a guy falling and drowning. From there, our tastes diverged. I loved "Y is for Youngbuck," an oversaturated dreamscape of blaring '80s keyboards and abused trust, but she thought it was foolish. She liked Xavier Gens' "X is for XXL," which I thought trite. I thought "W is for WTF" was extremely enjoyable and certainly lived up to its chosen 'word,' but for her cinematic headfuck she preferred "R is Removed," which I found a little too pompous.

The sheer variety of styles and content ensures you will find a few shorts you enjoy, a few you don't mind, and a few you hate. There are some avant-garde shorts, like the French-produced smugness of "O is for Orgasm," some animation like Morganthaler's tedious "K is for Klutz," comedy like Yamaguchi's amusing "J is for Jidai-geki," highly ambitious epics like "V is for Vagitus," and throw-away vignettes like Angela Bettis's "E is for Exterminate."

If there is anything consistent about ABCs of Death other than death, it is a peculiar obsession with toilets and what goes on in them. Whether its Ti West's rubbish short about a miscarriage in a toilet, Hardcastle's toilet monster, or Iguchi's tale of a lady absorbed into fart-heaven, most of these directors equated creative freedom with dick- and fart-jokes. The few that did not have earned my respect.

A week after seeing the film, I still find myself treasuring the experience. There is no other film like ABCs. Not yet, anyway. There are plenty of anthology films, but none that gives so much content. There'll be some significant rewatch value in revisiting some favorites and some forgottens. Ultimately, however, we can all make our own ABCs of Death by compiling a disk of shorts and may have just as much fun with it, if not more.