Slices of Life is a horror anthology film containing three stories, all directed by Anthony G. Sumner. Each story addresses an aspect of life--work, home, and sex--and are bound by a frame story in which an amnesiac girl starts to remember her own life.
Anthology horror movies are very difficult, especially on a low budget. The short horror film is a difficult craft in itself. Justifying the inclusion and order of the short films in an anthology often appears arbitrary. Sumner's approach shows a degree of thought and seriousness, as well as familiarity with the genre, that is of an unusually high order and these virtues are consistently present in each story.
The first, and best, of the stories, "W.O.R.M." concerns a sadsack mailroom clerk who uses experimental technology to make people be his friend. He's actually a rather likeable guy, thanks to a fine performance by Jack Guasta. But he has the misfortune of inhabiting a kafkaesque corporate office that rewards jerks and bullies exclusively. Sumner crafts this environment so expertly and believably that the eruption of a Cronenbergian sex-and-violence nightmare into this environment seems an appropriate and fitting end to its denizens.
The second story, "Amber Alert," is a well-crafted ghost story in which a pregnant woman begins to receive visitations from a kidnapped little girl. The outcome is a bit predictable and the telling too reliant on digital effects, though they are at times beautifully inventive. The depiction of an African American male may strike some viewers as either amusingly or lamentably racist.
The final story, "Pink Snapper," concerns a brother-and-sister duo who leave their abusive uncle and stumble upon a mansion in the woods where a girl is chained up in the basement and a body has been butchered in the bathtub. "Pink Snapper" is an excellently structured suspense-and-gorefest with a Hennenlotter sort of vibe. It works primarily on a visceral level, and it works very well. The practical effects in this segment are particularly praiseworthy.
The films are ordered almost like a work of classical music, the first movement exciting, the second slow and somber, and the third fast and playful. I found the momentum of the film highly engaging, making the heavily-allegorical conclusion, venial if a little misplaced. Sumner's work in each short is deft and thoughtful. It's a degree of
seriousness too often lacking in independent film. The stories and gore
are all consistently entertaining and thought-provoking, and the overall
design of Slices of Life is as elegant as the creepy scrapbook props of the
frame tale.
It's a shame that an independent, anthology horror film that's this good is so viciously trashed in its Internet Movie Database rating (3.7 at time of review). Slices of Life is what horror filmmaking is and a horror fan must be pretty jaded not to get some thrills from it.
Slices of Life (2010) - 3/4
Wolf Town (2010) - 2/4
A group of youngsters take a road trip to a local ghost town where they are attacked by an unfriendly wolf pack. They have to use their ingenuity to defeat the wolves, hiding in the abandoned buildings of an old mining town. Not a terribly inspired plot. Wolf Town would be a fairly indistinct, low-budget animal-attack movie were it not for a few admirable quirks that made me want to write about it.
The most impressive of Wolf Town’s features is, oddly enough, its psychological realism. The film’s psychology is, in fact, infuriatingly realistic. In countless films, a total wimp like Shaun in Shaun of the Dead becomes an ass-kicking badass the moment a real threat shows up. Perhaps we all believe really intensely in the fight-or-flight response or, as I think, we believe the world works like video games. If we’re really good at Resident Evil and have shot enough zombies, we’ll be ready for a real zombie threat. I suspect the people who spend all day playing Resident Evil would do little more than defecate and die when the real zombies showed up. Lazy, videogaming nerds like to believe they have inner badasses just waiting to come out, but they don’t: a pussy is a pussy is a pussy is a pussy, as Gertrude Stein never said. It’s curious how this implicit belief is one also shared by the conservatives who think video game violence can translate into real violence. Both are wrong, of course. Video games and real life threats are totally unrelated.
The protagonist of Wolf Town, Kyle (Levi Fiehler) is a pussy, as his friend tells him. He’s so afraid to ask a girl out, he contrives the road trip just to do it. He’s humiliated when he sees her with Rob (Josh Kelly), an alpha male sort of guy who did ask her out. When Rob says ‘Let’s just go to Vegas’, Kyle is ready to back down. When the wolves arrive, Kyle remains a pussy who whines and cries, while Rob remains an alpha male, barking out orders and making decisions. This is psychological reality. Meek guys like Kyle do not become alphas whenever a tense situation arrives. And as much as the film’s sympathetic focus on Kyle may make us dislike Rob, and as tedious as overconfident people are, someone has to make the decisions and Kyle is clearly not up to it. This is the psychological realism I admire in Wolf Town. It’s very refreshing, even while it’s infuriating. We want Kyle to man up, but he, like many of us, can’t just do that: it’s not who he is.
That said, there is a feeling of cheapness to Wolf Town. What budget Rebel did have was probably spent on the ghost town setting, a charming concatenation of shacks with an inexplicably intact saloon. The sense of cheapness is probably due to the wolves clearly being huskies and alsatians with a bit of fur-paint, and we rarely see more than two on screen at any given moment. On the one hand, director John Rebel deserves praise for using real animals instead of CGI. On the other hand, the use of real dogs does limit what he can do. We’ll never see a wolf injured in any way on screen, for instance, nor will be see them performing impossible jumps.
Rebel settles for editing the dogs wherever they need to be, giving the wolves a strangely mystic quality. This mysticism would be egregious were it not pervading the whole film. The dogs don’t just try to scare their victims off; they disable their car and steal their cell phones. The film’s subtext is one of nature vs humanity. The wolves just want a space to be without human interference, a place that belongs to nature. It’s a line of argument I don’t think carries much weight, whether in Wolf Town or in Avatar, because humans and their activities are a part of the natural order; but it is what it is.
Wolf Town is a mildly entertaining way to pass eighty minutes, especially for wolf-lovers. But the film does drag. However praiseworthy the real dogs and psychological realism may be, Wolf Town could have done with a ton of CGI wolves getting chopped to pieces by a bunch of badass nerds. In a film like this, fun is more important than realism.
Chain Letter (2010) - 2.5/4
When I took some sociology courses back in college, I remember the professor assigning an essay by Ted Kaczynski, also known as The Unabomber. Most of us were skeptical, because we knew him as a bomber rather than as a scholar. However, he's an intelligent man with developed ideas about technology and man's place in society. Having read his thought, I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a full-blown philosophy. But he had ideas. The ideas, however, are more shallow than his 'fans' would care to admit. Basically, he argues that humanity has, through technology, built up an environment that is so dramatically different from the environment it was evolved to inhabit, that it has dehumanized itself, made happiness impossible and alienation the norm. While I certainly think the argument is coherent and even somewhat convincing--has the oddness of our technologically sculpted world not struck all of us in some circumstances?--there's a tinge of paranoia to the view that I could never ignore. Beside the paranoia, one also wonders, 'What dehumanization?' Most humans thrive in the environment we've created. In fact, as with any animal that transforms its environment, our transformations have been designed with our own comfort and even flourishing as an end. What he thinks is lost in not living primitively is nebulous, a loosely defined notion of how things ought to be. His claims are just a complicated reiteration of the belief that things aren't what they used to be, that the past was better, that the changes we're bringing on ourselves are for the worse. Historians have discovered evidence that there were worries that writing itself would be the ruin of mankind. The same worries cropped up about email, and now about cellphones. There have always been those who resist technologies and the way they alter human behaviour and consciousness, and the Unabomber was just a more zealous one of those.
The Unabomber is mentioned during Chain Letter, an indie horror film that just hit Netflix Instant for instant viewing in your home via the miracle of modern technology. In fact, all of the ideas I bring up in the above paragraph are raised in the film. From the opening credits, a montage of reports with soundbytes regarding contemporary technology's intrusion into our lives and its discontents, it's clear Chain Letter is striving to say something about technology and its antagonists. There have been quite a few horror films that try to have something to say about technology, or that are just content to use it, but Chain Letter manages to be an unusually intelligent effort.
The plot concerns a chain letter unleashed upon one student at a high school. The student, out of spite and stupidity, sends the chain letter on, and from there it spreads. Whoever deletes the chain letter is murdered, often in a particularly cruel manner. Naturally one of the students starts digging deeper to figure out just who or what is behind the killings. A detective (Keith David) does likewise.
Chain Letter succeeds largely because the writing is smart. The script tries to stick to the ideas, even while playing out the horror formula. Discussions about the role of technology, and vignettes of possible intrusions by technology, blend naturally into the action and do not seem out of place in the characters' lives or minds. The film's engagement with its own ideas is sufficiently developed that there's some ambiguity about its position. Those who use technology for dangerous ends, those who abhor technology, and those who embrace it unthinkingly are all equally criticized.
Where Chain Letter falters, and very badly, is the horror action, unnecessary and unfitting 'torture porn' that seems particularly egregious in light of the film's climactic revelations. To make a point about the dangers of technology, need one really have a girl pulled to pieces by two cars? Or a boy chained up and ignited via trip-wire trap? There's no reason for any of that other than the desire to create some Brutal Horror setpieces. They are fairly brutal, but they're place in the narrative is hardly seamless. Chain Letter will be more enjoyable if you enjoy the ideas and issues it raises.
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.
Porkchop (2010) - 2/4
A large budget and good production values aren't really needed to make a fun film. Just a supple imagination. What's sad about Porkchop is that it begins so imaginatively and ends so banally. The first two thirds of Porkchop are almost a whole other film, a bizarre teenage sex comedy in which a stereotype nerd, a British punk, and a robot (voiced by Evil Dead II's Dan Hicks) all try to get some from a cheerleader and a post-punk lolita, while their more normal friend plays his girlfriend (Ruby Larocca) and the cheerleader.
This rogues gallery heads out for a camping trip, the journey to which makes up the comedy portion of the film. This part of the film is very good. While the acting and caricaturizations are all over-the-top, the characters are funny, the dialogue is witty--often so much so it's quite surprising--and delivered just as it should be. Knowing this film to be a horror film about a pig-headed killer, of course, meant I was in wait for the backwoods slasher action to greet the oddball characters. And that seemed very promising to me. Played as a horror comedy, so much could be done in the same absurd style that characterized most of the film. I imagined the epic battle that might ensue between pigman and robot, for instance, or the horrible death that might be leveled on the punk character.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The last third of the film uses next to nothing of the potential created in the previous two thirds. Once the killer, Porkchop, shows up, the film becomes a poor slasher. In a few minutes most of the characters are dispatched. The robot falls to pieces with one hit--which should be a lot funnier than it actually is. I hoped I'd never say this about any movie, but this could have used fewer pigmen. Or the characters should have put up some amusingly odd fight against the pigman. What does work in the last third of the film is the few bursts of comedy that interrupt the slasher action and the very few moments where horror and comedy really do mix.
While I can't give Porkchop a higher rating given its general weakness as the backwoods horror film it purports to be, I certainly applaud the imagination and absurd humour Eamon Hardiman and co-writer Zack Bassham invest in this film. It's like Revenge of the Nerds meets Don't Go In the Woods made on a $100 budget. Hopefully Hardiman will get better budgets and fulfill his obvious potential better than Porkchop did.
Rage (2010) - 2/4
- I have killed a man for wounding me,
- A young man for hurting me.
- If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold,
- Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold. (Gen 4:23-24)
And the insane biker in Rage shall be avenged seven-hundred-seventy-sevenfold, as one offense sends him on a spree of murder and rape of anyone the protagonist, Dennis Twist, knows, has spoken to, has shared breathing space with, or has seen on TV. I exaggerate, but the explanation for the violence is quite tenuous. We all have violent fantasies, most of which are probably disproportionate to the offense that occasioned them. Most of us are very talented at keeping fantasy as fantasy. This film is about a guy who clearly cannot do that. After Dennis (Rick Crawford), a douchebag husband, leaves his sweet wife (Audrey Walker) for a day in town, he meets his mistress and breaks it off in a flurry of exquisitely bad dialogue like, "Were you loving your wife all those times your dick was in me?" He's then pursued by a biker obsessed with making his life miserable, culminating in, as I say, murders and rapes.
You know who else couldn't control their rage? The Great Lord Zeus, King of the Gods. I'm not being glib. Or I am, but only slightly. You see, the filmmaker Christopher Witherspoon, who also plays the biker and has a cameo as The Guy in the Garage Talking about Spielberg's Duel, purposely makes allusions to the biker as a force of fate, not unlike in Greek tragedy. In fact, the Guy in the Garage Talking about Spielberg's Duel even brings up the idea that the truck in Duel is a force of nature. I think Duel is about masculinity, actually, but that's beside the point. The point is that the biker can be seen as a force of pure karma whose personal motivations are scarcely relevant. Dennis's misdeeds, conscious or unconscious, are being revisited upon him many-fold through the person of the biker, and Dennis's guilt allows it to continue. Indeed, were anyone genuinely pursued by karma, our collective misdeeds could seriously fuck us up. Seriously.
When this force of karma is visited upon characters who really have no connection with Dennis's misdeeds, however, the plot is a little lost. Perhaps the anxiety of wanting to make an exciting film had Witherspoon inserting unnecessary violence, or contriving distractions for the biker in order to spare Dennis. I wish he had stuck to his thematic guns and just punished the hell out of Dennis. The character is kind of a douche, though he is trying to do the right thing and return to his wife. However, even when his wife's life may be in danger, he continues trying to hide his affair from her. When she's being assaulted, he cowers in a corner and whines. Dennis continues to whine long beyond the time for whining. So he's not just a douche, he's a pussy too. If anyone deserves enormous on-screen punishment, it's ol' Dennis Twist. Not his wife and not the beer-bellied neighbour. In fact, there is little to no reason provided in the film for harming these people.
I don't think it was wise of Witherspoon to bring up Duel in the midst of Rage, as Rage does not compare favourably. Spielberg's direction of the on-road action is excellent, keeping the momentum of what could so easily be a repetitive and dull film ever increasing until the climax. Moreover, Spielberg had a screenplay by one of the greatest writers of genre screenplays in cinematic history, Richard Matheson, ensuring not an extraneous or weak line of dialogue. Rage does not keep up much momentum, perhaps because there's too much distraction in the city setting chosen. Pausing the chase to discuss fate and the meaning of life with one's therapist doesn't help the pace, nor does bringing one's car in to the garage, chatting with the mechanic, and overhearing a discussion about Spielberg's films. The decision to take the violence off the road for the climactic scenes also serves to divide the action, making it discontinuous and the pace choppy.
Perhaps Rage would have worked best not presenting itself as a road-terror movie, or even staying mostly off-road. Because as a cat-and-mouse road-terror movie, Rage just doesn't hold up to other contenders. Duel, Joy Ride (2001), Hush (2009), and the opening of Jeepers Creepers (2007) are all better at it. This is a major problem in Witherspoon's writing and structuring of the film. Where the film's prime pleasure should be in the cat-and-mouse game, the road games, it really is in the periphery. The cat-and-mouse game is frequently uninteresting or, when interesting, like a bad lover it climaxes too soon. I found myself distracted by the mystery of who is behind the helmet, a mystery that never even threatens our attention in Duel and is already revealed before the action of Joy Ride.
Still, Rage is clearly its own movie with its own themes and internal logic. I enjoyed a good many of the finer touches, dark humour like closing a shower curtain before murdering the victim inside. The sleek, shiny textures of the biker's accoutrement as rendered on digital video are also very enjoyable in a purely sensuous way. And overall, the film does comment on a real truth of this world: there's a lot of rage out there as it is, so we should all try to be a little considerate to others. While a bumpy ride, so to speak, Rage is an interesting film that follows its premises to the end. I hope to see more from Witherspoon, preferably not tying himself to an influence next time.
Road Train (2010) - 2/4
Road Kill is actually the title for non-Aussies. Road Train, or Royd Troyn if we want to transcribe accurately, is the Australian title. A royd troyn, for those of us not in-the-know, is what Americans call a 'semi' and the British call a 'lorry.' But you're also welcome to use 'big rig,' 'Mack truck,' 'transport', and just 'big effin' truck!'. There's a little more to the royd troyn, howehvah. It has not just one but multiple rectangles hooked to the back of it, not unlike a train. Hum.
Road Kill does have to do with a big truck. As in so many other films, like Duel (1971) and Joy Ride (2001), it has to do with a big truck terrorizing the bajeezus out of some road wimps. For better or worse, the writer of Road Kill decides to do something different with the road-terror movie. To wit, the film takes the road-terror movie and turns it into a magic-realist existential journey. Arguably, all road-terror movies are existential journeys. But this one knows it is. I'm not saying it knows what it's doing. I'm just saying the filmmakers were trying to make allegory here.
Just what does the big truck do? It finds and terrorizes two college-aged Australian couples, of course. One of those couples is having sex and the other isn't. The couple that isn't having sex isn't having sex because the female part of the couple decided to also have sex with the male part of the couple that is having sex. Can't blame the male part of the couple that isn't having sex for not wanting to have sex with the slut who screwed his best friend. But he has bigger fish to fry, because of that big truck I should get back to. The big truck finds these mildly unpleasant flakes and runs 'em off the road. When they go to investigate the truck, they find it empty and steal it. Or is it stealing their souls?
As they drive away, they all fall asleep. The presumptuous truck drives them off the road to the edge of a cliff and lets them simmer for a while. They yell at each other a lot, which I think Australians do in any situation good or bad, and ultimately decide to split up. Here the psychology of everyone in the group is perverted while the imagery of Cerberus is superimposed over the truck. Is the truck a vampiric denizen of hell leading these banal young adults to the end they deserve, with a sort of Antonionian sense of contempt for bored and empty lives, or are they all just suffering from sunstroke, dehydration, and infection? Decide for yourself.
Road Kill works a lot better if you imagine most of what happens as a hallucinatory nightmare of sunstroke than as a genuine magic realist mechanism without explanation. Otherwise, you're bound to view these youths as under assault by pure allegory, and in doing so you'll find yourself suffering the same fate. Either way, however, the prime joys of the film are in the explorations of the mechanism of the truck and, I suppose it's implied, the mechanism of fate. My favourite moment is when a character reaches into the guts of the truck seat and pulls out a key, resembling something from a Cronenberg nightmare. While the truck gradually grows more interesting, the character interactions grow increasingly tedious as their psychoses leave no real trace of their original personalities, and thus is evaporated what little character development and dramatic tension between them there was. Watch for the truck.
Hisss (2010) - 2.5/4
I've heard a little about Bollywood, but haven't seen much. Their cinematic form seems to have discarded all notions of consistency in tone and has instead striven to entertain in every possible way simultaneously and often conflictingly. Hisss is a Bollywood film directed by American-as-Apple-Pie Jennifer Lynch. How much of her vision remains is hard to say, but she's disowned the film. How many shots were directed by her is also hard to say. But the resulting film is nevertheless both entertaining and interesting.
"I may have brain cancer, but I can still piss like a horse." The man who utters that line is the film's villain, a psychopathic white guy (Jeff Doucette) who wants to become immortal. The best way to become immortal is to find some cobras mid-coitus, kidnap the male, put him in an aquarium, and randomly administer electric shocks. The female snake then transforms into a hot Indian supermodel (Mallika Sherawat, in this case), a snake goddess, who will find the kidnapper and trade a special diamond for her mate. This diamond can grant immortality.
Of course, it won't really go down like that. Shapeshifting snake deities will just eat you and vomit your semi-digested corpse into the nearest gutter. And that's where Hisss is a horror film. Mallika does come to the city looking for her mate. But the only trail she has is the people who assisted in the kidnapping. Instead of questioning them, she sniffs them out, swallows them, and vomits them up in nasty, slimy balls. For vore fetishists, this is no doubt very exciting stuff.
It also excites the interest of a local detective, however. Despite having little to do with the plot itself, the film is strangely concerned with the detective's personal life. He and his wife have been striving to have children, but she keeps miscarrying. Meanwhile, his mother-in-law--easily the film's finest character--believes he's really a woman, a lonely spinster in need of love. She also thinks the news broadcasts about the snake goddess's victims is a TV series starring her son-in-law.
Apparently Jennifer Lynch conceived Hisss as an absurd love story between the snake goddess and her snake lover. The producers, however, conceived of the film as a snakewoman horror film with a hot babe slinking around naked. The mixture is strangely Shakespearean in the way it appeals to high and low cultures, poetic and entertainment interests at the same time. That's not to say the film is brilliant; the producer interference has probably done a lot more harm than good. The film's finest moments are likely fragments from Lynch's vision: the poetic, fairytale moments when Mallika slithers up a tree or light post totally naked and, in silence, longs for her stolen love--the whole film, in a way, is moving toward the completion of the interrupted coitus. There are also parallels between the snake couple and the detective and his wife that are rather nebulous as the film stands, something to do with love, fertility, and respect for life. Their destinies are bound together. Alas, whatever message Lynch was going for here is tough to decipher.
One of the stranger responses I had to Hisss was to wonder why the snake goddess would work so hard to pursue her snake mate when, in human form, she has her pick of all these human males. Even though she is technically a snake, she's in human form; she could stay in human form and have a human mate. The film seems to deliberately pull these anthropocentric strings. As a man, I found myself almost jealous of the snake: why should he get this hot mate when we humans are such superior males? Perhaps this anthropocentrism as part of what Lynch wanted to explore with this film and why she made efforts to parallel the humans to the snakes. In the film's present form, it's hard to say.
However mangled and inconsistent Hisss may be, it is a fascinating mixture of conscious and subconscious, art and entertainment, poetry and exploitation. Weird, often unintentionally funny, the film is worth at least one viewing for Western horror audiences, to whom snakewomen movies, a subgenre of Indian cinema, are unusual.
The Shrine (2010) - 3/4
The Shrine , the latest film from Canadian filmmaker Jon Knautz (Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer) centers on two curious, headstrong women. Carmen (Cindy Simpson), a journalist, and her assistant Sara (Meghan Heffern), defy their editor's orders and, with Carmen's boyfriend Marcus (Aaron Ashmore) tagging along, decide to investigate a series of disappearances centered in a Polish hamlet. The investigation leads them to a barn/church in the middle of a field where thugs chase them off, and to a mysterious fog over a stretch of woods. After both women enter the woods, one after the other, and stare at the demonic statue at the center, they must run for their lives from a local cult.
What makes The Shrine work so well is that it continues to evade anticipation throughout and does so without cheating. From beginning to end, it's difficult to predict just where the film is going. The fog, the statue, and the cult are obviously all linked in some fashion; but since all three are equally mysterious, there's no guessing just what's going on. Many films rely on some form of cheating to keep the viewer confused. The most infamous example of this may be High Tension. The Shrine pulls some sleight-of-hand, particularly in its use of subjective camera-work, but it never cheats; it earns our continued absorption in its mysteries and this interest is paid off as the mysteries are sufficiently dealt with.
If there's any major problem with The Shrine, it's an over-reliance upon these mysteries. The characters seem to spend the majority of the film walking or running from one location to another. The intervening confrontations and/or set-pieces are either non-events or very brief. As a result, there is more atmosphere than suspense. This isn't necessarily a problem, of course. Many great horror films, like Mario Bava's or Peter Weir's, are almost all atmosphere and mystery. The problem for The Shrine is that it does appear to strive for suspense, moments of tension, and when they work--and occasionally work quite well--they just aren't sustained long enough. For suspense to work patience is required.
To get deeper into The Shrine, though, I want to talk a little about about theory. Particularly, Linda Williams's famous article, "When the Woman Looks." The basic thesis of the article is twofold. The first point is that "In the classical narrative cinema, to see is to desire" and "The woman’s gaze is punished...by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy. " Any time a woman in a horror film grants herself the privilege of fulfilling her desire to see, to know, what she shouldn't--like Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil--she is punished. The second point is that the reason female curiosity must be so punished is that "the woman’s look at the monster offers at least a potentially subversive recognition of the power and potency of a non-phallic sexuality," namely the monster's. The woman sees herself in the monster, or the monster in herself: both are an alternative to male sovereignty and thus both must be oppressed by males to retain that sovereignty. Horror films are a way of representing the eruption and repression of these threats (monsters and women), however subconsciously, to the satisfaction of male viewers.
This is where I find The Shrine most interesting. Because, if Williams is right, The Shrine should be extraordinarily satisfying to male viewers--and as a male viewer, I confess it sort of is. The character of Carmen, firstly, is a strong, defiant, stubborn, and curious woman. There's no question that she's the leader of her little group. Whatever objections her boyfriend brings up, she doesn't just disagree with him in discussion, she totally plows over him and speaks for everyone: "We're going!" This character trait, in fact, makes her rather annoying. It would be just as annoying in a man. Dictatorships are never really pleasant. This only makes it all the more satisfying when she's finally broken and forced to realize all the wrong she's done. But first, let's look at the wrong.
What Carmen and Sara do is enter the fog and gaze upon the demon statue. It's telling that Knautz has only the female characters do this. The man stays outside. In the Williams paradigm, what the women are doing is (1) becoming curious, (2) satisfying their curiosity by taking control of the gaze and (3) finding in the gaze the monstrous alternative to phallic sexual power. And most importantly, (4) they are punished for satisfying their curiosity in this way. Both emerge from the fog traumatized and disoriented. Then the subsequent events of the film befall them.
Spoilers Begin Here
The 'subsequent' events of the film are also very telling, and even suggest Knautz intentionally rather than subconsciously pursued this theme. The first is Sara's death, which occurs at the hands of the cult. The cult, which struggles to subdue those possessed by the demon statue, holds her down and pounds a mask onto her face. As the mask comes down, we see on the inside of the mask two spikes that will pierce her eyes. What's important about this is that the eyes are particularly being punished, the eyes that were used in the gaze upon the demon. In the fate of Carmen, we see what the all-male cult is frightened of: the powers of the demon overcoming the powers of men. Carmen slaughters (1) a traditional family of father, mother, and child and (2) the priest of the cult. The demonic power is a non-phallic potency that threatens to destroy male power just as Carmen herself bulldozed over her boyfriend's part in decision-making. Carmen, then, is given the same treatment as Sara, with the participation of her boyfriend.
There are a lot of other details in The Shrine that can be explored in relation to this theme. For one, the demonic statue doesn't stay still when the women gaze upon it. As Carmen moves to the side of the statue to take a second photograph (and photography is a fitting motif) she's startled to find the statue's head has moved and the hollow sockets are staring right at her. She gazes into its eyes for a long time, in the film's most haunting and frightening moment, and it gazes back, like a hypnotism sequence from a Dracula or Svengali film, until its eyes bleed. Also of interest is the masculinity of the demon statue. Its body is large and muscular, its brow heavy. Also noteworthy is that the editor Carmen works for is male. It all amounts to a statement, however intentional or not, against the modern, liberated woman who presumes to know too much and, even worse, to take charge.
Spoilers End Here
While this aspect of The Shrine is interesting, it's not a message I can entirely get behind. A less pronounced idea is a statement against idle tourists, male or female. Ever since I saw a picture of Newgrange and spotted a stainless steel handrail installed into the stone for accessibility I've marveled at how tourism can totally exploit a region and its history for idle curiosity: "just to see." The tourists who happen by the demon statue in the fog are aptly punished for their idle curiosity. Had they taken the time to consult some locals, get to know and respect the area, they'd have saved themselves the trouble of dying.
Whatever Knautz's intention in making The Shrine so misogynistic, his efforts resulted in a fascinating and unique film with a good share of surprising moments. A little shy on the gore, this is just some smart and effective atmospheric horror--an increasingly rare approach. In fact, The Shrine is one of the best atmospheric horror films of the last few years.
The Clinic (2010) - 3/4
Insidious (2010) - 2.5/4
The narrative structure of Insidious is a very familiar one: a family begins experiencing peculiar phenomena in their new home; they do what they can to overcome it on their own; then they have recourse in a medium who takes over the show. This formula was crystalized with Poltergeist and has routinely been the basis for haunting dramas ever since. The Orphanage and Insidious are two of the more distinctive films to make use of the formula, The Orphanage by means of its harrowing conclusion and Insidious through pure spook-show gusto.
The plot concerns a boy, Dalton, who falls into a coma. Afterward, Dalton's mom begins to hear spooky sounds from her infant child's room, see shadowy apparitions in quick glimpses, and generally sense that there's "something wrong with that house." As the trailers have made clear already, it's not the house but the boy who's haunted. His comatosed body is, as a parked car is in the ghetto, a vessel just waiting to be occupied. In come the cavalry--some goofy "ghost-hunters" and a medium who seems to know her stuff--to bring Dalton back into his own body.
The film's invented mythology is simultaneously interesting and silly. The notion we're pitched is that New Agers are right and we can indeed astral project some spiritual body outside of our corporeal body (that's latinate for 'bodily body'). The dead have their spiritual bodies cast into some realm called the 'Further', a gloomy mirror of our world. Any living person projecting can wander out to the Further, but at their own peril. Ghosts, or something worse, will try to take his body. They can even hold your spiritual body captive. It's all rather foolish, but it yields some good fruit.
Wan does extract a lot of spookiness and beauty from his collision of astral and real space. The ghost sequences are frequently effective in producing not jumps but chills. One particularly skillful tracking shot of a house exterior in broad daylight, while a supernatural occurrence is visible through the windows, is one of the most unsettling moments in recent supernatural cinema. This barrage of spookiness that comprises the first half of the film is at times masterful and, had the film continued with such strength, may well have resulted in a masterpiece.
However, a masterpiece was not to be. While the latter half of the film is certainly not without its merits, it is dissipated by overactivity, a need, perhaps from the producers, to make 'things happen' rather than allow the film to have its effects. Instead of unsettling occurrences, Wan gives us a red-faced CGI demon scuttling along the walls, reminding me somewhat of an inferior film, The Frighteners. Wan is clever enough to let us see the demon only in short glimpses, though even these are too much.
Where Wan is at his strongest is in shooting the inanimate. He has a unique talent for imbuing the inanimate with the uncanny. Toys, photographs, a gramophone, a red door, drawings, doll-like ghosts ("doll girls" in the credits) are the materials out of which Wan creates that very distinctive emotional resonance. No number of ghostly jump scares or scuttling demons could equal what he does with his montage of claws, sparks, and toys set to the tune of Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe through the Tulips" or his moody camera arcs up stairs and around buildings. Even as the film begins to weaken toward the climax, these moments punctuate and elevate the film with abstract beauty and mystery.
The weakest part of Insidious is the silly story from Leigh Whannel (who also plays one of the ghost hunters). But how that story fits its formula is in itself interesting and worthy of consideration. Films of this formula have tended to be about domesticity and the family unit in Western society. Any formula in a film genre does tend to address ideological concerns of some sort and this one addresses family. In Insidious, there is only one adult male in the picture. There are, however, several mother figures. Dalton's mother, Dalton's grandmother, the medium, and the old woman ghost. The only other character that could be construed as an adult male is the demon, described as a man with a fiery face. Of all the males in the film, the only one that could be considered a powerful male, or in any way 'alpha', is the demon. The dad is ineffectual and avoids confrontation until the film's climax. The wife runs the family and, as we find out, the grandmother has powerfully influenced her son's life. Her influence has created a man-child who is himself raising three children, two of whom are male.
So what we have in this family is a situation the reflects a contemporary society of feminized, domesticated men: men who frequently assume the role of house-husband and to whom any traditionally female task other than being pregnant is one to be shared. Of course, the situation is not only one of what tasks men do in the home, but an emotional climate of sensitive, mollycoddled boys raised with kidgloves to be wimpy, ineffectual men dominated by their wives.
(Spoilers in the following paragraph.)
The demon that threatens to overtake Dalton, then, seems to reflect a semi-conscious effort to reclaim classical masculinity, a powerful male force that creates its own laws. What threatens to break through and destroy the family unit is a return of the now untenable patriarchal order. What we expect from the father is to be powerful enough not to require that patriarchal order, to be able to resist it and return to a life of equality, now stronger than before. While the father does man up to rescue his son, the film's conclusion of the boy returning to his body, the father being taken over by the powerful old woman ghost, is clearly step in the wrong direction. The conclusion leaves us alarmed and dissatisfied, hoping for the female force to be oppressed and the strong male to return to do it.
(Spoilers end here.)
In the end, Insidious is a visually strong film hampered by a silly, overexplained story. Wan dreams up several inventive means of chilling the audience visually, but the dialogue pulls us back into the uncomfortable world of needless plot. The film nevertheless remains fascinating and worthy of at least one viewing to enjoy the ride and appreciate Wan's talents. With only a single, bloodless murder, the film is also as child-friendly as Joe Dante's Gremlins or The Hole.
The Unforgiving (2010) - 1.5/4
South Africa is puzzling insofar as it is a civilized, democratic, European-ized country and yet continues to partake of the barbarisms that afflict many other African nations. According to the IRIN, there are roughly 500,000 rapes committed in South Africa every year, 15% of which are under 10 years of age. A CIET survey found that 60% of school-age children, male and female, believed forcing sex on another is acceptable. The worst of all is that the authorities themselves appear to be complicit.* When I found The Unforgiving, a horror film made in South Africa, I had a hunch it would involve cycles of violence, possibly rape. And I was not disappointed.
The Unforgiving, a film by newcomer Alastair Orr, begins with a police interrogation of two victims of a serial killer. As they're being interrogated, you'd be correct in assuming they are survivors. The killer wears a gas mask and performs his work in some urban ruins in the South African roadside desert. These killings involve a degree of torture and teasing, cat-and-mouse games, before the final blow is dealt. Each survivor tells a story that isn't entirely consistent with one another's and is, in fact, seemingly full of holes. The detective probes further to find the cause of these discrepencies.
During the interrogations, we're treated to what appear to be flashbacks. However, the flashbacks aren't consonant with what is being stated in the interrogation. Nor do they seem to overlap with one another's statements. These apparent flashbacks are the film's strongest point, keeping the viewer mystified while in fact being ordered quite neatly. The closer one comes to the end of the film, the more one is able to piece together the chronology of what has been seen, some flashbacks and some, in fact, flashforwards.
The story finds its center in an incident of sexual sadomasochism and its cause that results in a cycle of brutal violence. Every character in this film gets their head smashed against the ground at least a dozen times. The statement is simple. Whatever poingnancy is gained by virtue of commenting on the South African situation is flattened and largely uninteresting by failing to have any interesting content. A comment in a work of art should say more than the wikipedia article. Consider this a rule of thumb.
Unfortunately, while the film is very well structured, and for this Mr. Orr, as writer, can pat himself on the back, it is not a particularly enjoyable film to watch. The characters are little more than abused-and-abusive husks of blood and expletives. To support a message about the violence in one's society, one owes it to that society as an artist to represent it in an emotionally potent manner, placed in characters that are real people. However decent a job the actors do--and they are quite good--these characters are not real people; and worse, they're annoying. That our glimpses of these characters are caught through unnecessary close-ups on their eyes, mouths, and possessions, wildly shakey camera-work, and very brief shots, as short as 1/5th of a second in action sequences, does not help humanize them at all.
In torture films, of course, one is free to just enjoy the brutality for its own sake. While there are some good efforts at brutality in The Unforgiving, it largely amounts to bloody snouts. No matter how many times a man's head is smashed into the ground, he gets away with blood over his nose, mouth, and chin. Other attempts at brutality we're prevented from seeing with sneaky edits.
From the title, indicating the inability to let go of abuse, onward, The Unforgiving tries hard to have significance and to be crafty. Its success is very moderate. The chief pleasure of the film is to be found in mentally putting together the chronology puzzle Orr creates in structuring. Otherwise, the same content has been portrayed elsewhere, as in Hostel (2005), Penance (2009), I Spit on Your Grave (1978/2010), Last House on the Left (1972/2009), and many other torture and rape/revenge films, much more effectively.
* - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_violence_in_South_Africa
Primal (2010) - 2.5/4
Here's something original: a group of young adults find an excuse to drive into Middle of the Woods, Nowhere, where something bad happens and they start getting killed. Even more original is that half of the group is male and the other half female, guaranteeing sexual banter and activity. Thus is the plot to Primal, a film about an ancient cave painting and its surrounding grounds that seem to have the uncanny ability to transform animal life into ravenous monstrosities of a very high order. Dace, an anthropology student, survivalist, and, of course, part-time bodybuilder, leads his five friends to the undiscovered painting for the purposes of producing the greatest thesis ever, but finds, instead, sex and violence.
Since the title is 'Primal', we may as well begin with primality. The primal human is driven not so much by considered desires but by biological necessities: to survive and to reproduce. Survival involves hunting and defending himself and his own. Reproduction obviously involves a man spraying semen in a woman. So, primality involves sex and violence. What's most interesting about Primal is the dynamic it creates out of its characters' attitudes towards primal behaviours.
The obligatory car ride into the jungle economically acquaints us with these in three pairings: Dace is the sexual and rough alpha male; Mel is a flirtatious, sexual and domineering female. Chad is a bookish alpha-male-wannabe who obliges his girlfriend's (Mel's) sexual urges, but isn't always 'into it'; Kris is a girl-next-door whose greatest dream in life is to make babies. Warren is a joker who remains detached from sexual politics and interests except for comedic purposes; Anja is intelligent, independent, and more introspective--the Final Girl, in short. The first pairing is the most sexual and most capable of violence; the second stage is the ordinary and average; the third stage the more introspective and least capable of violence.
The journey from cultivated university life to the primitive jungle parallels an interior movement from refinement to primal behaviour that emphasizes the sex-and-power politics hidden beneath the veneer of civility. Chad's submissive character, for instance, fills him with resentment toward his girlfriend for her emasculating strength and Dace for his dominant personality, and toward both for their mutual flirtation. Mel insists on talking about her genitals and tries to force Anja to say 'cunt'; she also plays flirtatiously with every male.
The film's symbological structure emphasizes this movement. The film's activity is divided between a few locations that all have culturally-accepted phenomenological significances: the campfire, with its connotations of civilization, is the place where the group tries to fight back the onslaught of primality; the murky pond, a stock-image for the subconscious, is the place the infection derives from; the dark, stifling cave, in which the source of the infection resides, is a conceptual cognate of a womb, where the most primal of a being and/or species dwells.
Naturally it is Mel and Dace that are first affected by the forces at work in the film. Mel becomes a savage huntress, all fangs, stalking the prey of her former friends. Soon she finds a co-hunter and mate in Dace. This leaves the surviving members of the party to escape one way or another. The behaviour of each character is an expression of the tensions set up in the car trip that comprises the film's first act. Chad will face Dace, Anja will face Mel and, of course, the cave, and Kris will endure a poetic, if blackly comic, fate.
This is not to say the film's characterization is particularly strong. They are for the most part stock characters one finds in any commercial horror film. The bulk of characterization is put on Anja--as is the lot of the Final Girl--and what there is of it is pretty shallow: she is afraid of dark, enclosed places. Caves, for instance. The film's strength is in playing these stock characters against each other in a situation where their stock characteristics, viz. their attitudes toward sex and their position in the social hierarchy, really are salient points about them and about humanity. A sort of meaningful generality is drawn out of these stocks by virtue of the film's emphasis on dynamics of sex and power.
Where the film does faulter is not in its content, but in its form. When sitting at one's editing software, it's perhaps easy to imagine that highly-kinetic camera movements combined with fast cutting is going to lead to heightened intensity for the viewer. To a certain extent, it does. If the camera moves too fast and the cuts come too soon, however, the effect is lost. The cinematographer of this film has difficulty standing still during any intense scene and the editor can't hold an idea for a second. There are also a series of zoom-ins and zoom-outs that occur at these moments, whether added in-camera or during editing I don't know, that distracted from the action even further. The director, no doubt, desired to have the audience share in the confusion of the characters. But an audience can be trusted, with some subtle assistance, to empathize their way into feeling that confusion without unpleasant camera-work. For a film that otherwise uses conventional style, the subjective camerawork is neither necessary nor helpful.
Nevertheless, Primal does contain a fair number of suspenseful moments and is deftly able to sustain its mounting tension to the climactic moment. The director makes skilled use of his stock characters and claustrophobic situation to pull the audience toward a surprising and fascinating conclusion that, hopefully, will make you think of what I've said in this review: Primality is all about eating and screwing.
The Ghost Writer (2010): A Political Ghost Story
(This essay contains spoilers.)
"Unfinished Business
The primary reason for ghosts to be sticking around. They want revenge, their story to be told, or simply to be informed once and for all that they are, in fact, dead. To get rid of the ghosts, the hero or heroine will have to either do extensive research in old newspaper articles or communicate somehow with the ghosts. Once their business is finished, they vanish in a flash of light."(1)
But what if the ghost and the hero are unwittingly the same person? The first ten shots of The Ghost Writer show a vehicle deprived of a driver aboard a ferry, then a man's body, deprived of life, lying in the surf on a beach. Over the final shot in the series, a long shot of the body, Ewan McGregor's voice begins, "You realize I"--cut to him eating lunch with his agent--"know nothing about politics." By the eleventh shot Polanski has already let us know that this character (who never gets a name of his own) is the ghost of the body in the waves. He's not literally a ghost, of course; but in effect his raison d'etre in the film's world is to settle the unfinished business of that body and he will haunt all the places, from room to vehicle, that body has occupied during life until the business is finished.
The body on the beach is a long-time aide of former prime minister of the UK Adam Lang and ghost writer of his memoirs. McGregor's character, "The Ghost", a soft-spoken Englishman, is hired to ghost-write the memoirs into more marketable material than McAra had left them. He's taken to an island off the coast of New York where he has a month to get the book ready under the watch of Lang's wife, Ruth, and political aide and mistress Amelia Bly. As political controversy explodes around Lang when it's discovered he had authorized the torture of four terrorist suspects, all British citizens, McGregor begins finding traces of McAra's research that lead into a conspiracy way over McGregor's head and sends him running for refuge with the very man heading the investigation into Lang's war crimes. McGregor believes Lang had been recruited by the CIA, but his questioning is cut short when Lang is assassinated. During the opening gala for the memoirs McGregor has successfully ghost-written, he gets the last hint and discovers the wife, Ruth, is the CIA agent and Lang had been her puppet, and thus the puppet of the United States, all along. McGregor is then unceremoniously killed off-screen by a mysterious black car.
The reason McGregor can be killed so unceremoniously is that he's a ghost. Once he's discovered that Ruth is the CIA agent and informed her of his knowledge, he has finished the business for which he exists and ceases to be. Polanski prepares this progress carefully. When McGregor is first given the job as ghost writer, he's shown leaving the publishing house headquarters and hailing a taxi. When McGregor exposes Ruth (only to us, alas), he's shown, fittingly in the film's final shot, leaving the same building and hailing a taxi in the same spot; this time, however, the taxi ignores him and he exits the frame, where a car speeds after him and, well, into him. So, Polanski actually rhymes the moment the ghost is given his 'unfinished business' and the moment after he finishes it. By having the story come full circle to the publishing house a fatalistic sense is imparted, suggesting that the moment McGregor accepted the role of ghost he had signed his doom.
Between these moments a dialectic reminiscent of Polanski's The Tenant (1976) begins. The Tenant is about a man assuming the apartment of a woman who committed suicide and becoming increasingly paranoid that the other tenants are trying to transform him into the suicidal previous tenant. The Ghost Writer, similarly, has McGregor resisting assuming McAra's life, resisting, as it were, haunting. He refuses to use the BMW he's offered because the groundskeeper tells him McAra loved it. He resists taking over McAra's room on the island and, once in the room, is disgusted to find the man's clothing left behind. Upon removing the clothing, however, he uncovers McAra's secret research taped to the bottom of a drawer. This is the moment he assents to being McAra's ghost. He then sleeps with Lang's wife, as it's very possible McAra did, and finally takes the BMW. Furthering the ghost motif, he finds McAra's directions still programmed into the vehicle's GPS. He decides to follow them, further ghosting McAra, just as ghosts are said to perform functions and frequent places they used to do while alive. He then calls the telephone number on the back of a photograph in McAra's research and finds himself in contact with Lang's enemy Rycart, betraying Lang just as McAra had done.
Of course, McGregor is hired to be Lang's ghost, not McAra's. Where McGregor is a ghost who struggles unsuccessfully to have identity of his own--throughout the film he only introduces himself as a 'ghost' and we never learn his name--Lang's problem is that he's all identity without any real soul of his own. He has too many ghosts. Everything is decided for him. In one scene McGregor is asked to draft a statement to send to the press. In the following sequence McGregor returns to his hotel and sees a member of the press on television quoting his words as Lang's. Innocence is lost then; we realize a prime minister is not so much a person as a team, the minister himself or herself a silver-tongued figurehead at best. So Lang has been. The first paragraph of the manuscript McAra has written states that 'Lang' is from an Old English word meaning 'tool.' Lang has been a tool manipulated throughout his whole career. He himself is strangely empty, void of content. Rycart confesses not understanding the man after working with him for fifteen years. Just as a shot-by-shot analysis of Plan 9 from Outer Space would prove mystifying, Lang is mystifying if only because there's nothing to puzzle out. He was a skirt-chasing, handsome actor not the least bit interested in politics and in him the CIA found something malleable. He has been a face used by the United States, through his CIA agent wife.
That is rather abstract, however. Lang is, of course, a human being with as much a mind and personality as anyone else. It is as a political entity that he is empty. As a person, he is a fascinating character insofar as he may be the only entirely honest character in the film. When Lang tells McGregor that he entered politics because he fell in love with Ruth, Polanski gives us no reason to doubt him. He's wrong, but he seems to believe it. In some sense perhaps it is still true; we don't, after all, know the depth and extent of Ruth's manipulation: did she ever love him? When confronted by McGregor, Lang asserts that he has never taken orders once in his career. That's very likely as well; that is to say, it's likely he believes this.
What McGregor and Lang have in common is the way they are easily manipulated by others under the guise that they have free will. In a key sequence early in the film, McGregor's first conversation with Ruth, she states two important points: McGregor's presence is her idea and she doesn't like Adam being out of her presence because, she implies, he's incapable of thinking for himself. Both men are joined in how they fall under her will. McGregor, like Lang, is chosen for his position for how easily he can be controlled.
If Lang did indeed enter politics out of love for Ruth, one could easily wonder what happened. Throughout the film, Ruth is one of the most bitter, vindictive, acerbic characters in recent cinematic history. Scarcely a line she utters isn't barbed and venomous. What makes The Ghost Writer such a great film is how so little is given to us directly, yet all the information is there, much as the threatening information is indirectly present in McAra's manuscript. Ruth is clearly much more intelligent than her husband and had always been the more politically motivated of the two. Her faustian agreement with the CIA, represented by the Mephisto-esque Paul Emmett, has led her down a road of unfulfillment as merely a footnote in the political career of her inferior husband. When asked if she never wanted to be a politician in her own right, she snaps back to McGregor, "Didn't you want to be a proper writer?" Even her apology to him is dripping with vindictive sarcasm, "I've hurt your feelings." In her unfulfillment she's become increasingly bitter, leading her husband to stray to Amelia Bly (an older woman) and, as she confesses, to stop taking her (i.e. the CIA's) advice.
Throughout the film, Bly is associated with light and Ruth with rain and darkness. Lang even tells us that he first met Ruth in the rain. The obvious effect is to make us feel gloom and depression when she's in frame; Polanski lets her affect us much as she affects Lang. The presence of rain also tends to suggest the malign, conspiratorial influence. The first shots of the film, when the BMW is discovered empty, are in rain. The final shot of the film, when McGregor is killed, is in rain. When Ruth learns an old man knows McAra's body was planted on the beach, she suddenly rushes out into the rain. Amelia (a name meaning "better") offers Lang freedom and Ruth, as always, has been a manipulative presence. After arguing with Ruth, we see Lang against the window like a fly in a jar. He's attempting to have a will of his own. McGregor's death comes as a result of leaving Amelia to send a note to Ruth informing her what he knows. Ruth and the clandestine political machinations she stands for consistently brings misery and death.
Ultimately Lang's, and Ruth's, salvation is in assassination. Stripped of a physical existence, Lang becomes pure image, as he was always expected to be; he is now a total tool, and more powerful than he had ever been in life. During the gala, as McGregor discovers the truth about Ruth, Lang's face is everywhere, watching, from the covers of the book McGregor wrote, the "voice from beyond the grave." If Lang has become a sort of ghost himself, he casts off his treacherous ghost writer and gets his revenge. Lang's face, as you can see above, peers out from behind a building, presiding over the murder of McGregor. With both "the ghost" and McAra dead, his legacy is secure. Even Rycart has to bow to the power assassination grants and call the 'war criminal' a patriot. Thus ends the ghost story, a victory of a political ghost over an ethical ghost.
Politically the film's target is clearly America on the one hand, and a very uninformed populace on the other. Lang's assassin kills him because he holds Lang responsible for the death of his son in Iraq. Lang's responsibility for that death is negligible. Lang is not even responsible for the war crimes of which he's accused. Nor is his wife. The importance of a figurehead like Lang is to absorb the accusations, to be the figure of blame. When contemplating getting mugged for a decoy manuscript given him by Lang's lawyer, McGregor calls himself a 'tethered goat'; at the same time, a news flash is running about Lang's involvement in the torture of the four terrorism suspects, thus linking McGregor's incident as a decoy with Lang's investigation as a war criminal. Lang is, similarly, a tethered goat, then. If people knew that the political world is a world of ghosts, wills working without being seen, they'd know how ridiculous it is to hold Lang responsible for what a whole system--ultimately the national security agencies of the United States, the supreme ghost in the film--moves him to do. But as McGregor confesses in his first line, we "know nothing about politics."
America is, however, more of a symbol than a target. The film's real theme is the identities, emotions, and energies of individuals that get swallowed by a political machine beyond any individual's control. Ruth, for various reasons--being a woman and her admittedly poor public speaking skills--couldn't become the politician she desired to be, but accepted being relegated to a politician's wife. Lang, a real person who enjoyed acting, is transformed into a political figurehead, or, as McGregor puts it, 'a craze.' McGregor, the ghost, the common man, doesn't even have an identity in this system. The moment these people start asserting their own wills and emotional needs against the system, they are put in danger of being destroyed. In the cases of McAra, McGregor, and Lang, this danger is realized.
Another of the film's themes is the essentially dubious nature of second-, third-, fourth-, nth-hand information. The film's climax is a tracking shot of McGregor's note passing hand after hand on its way to Ruth. The information in the note has been encoded in the manuscript McAra wrote. But whence did McAra get this information? Research and Google, perhaps? Is it even correct? We don't know. The nature of a ghost-writer is to convey information as though written by someone else; it's an inherently deceptive role. The information McGregor finds himself given is itself sometimes deceptive, such as the dates Lang confuses. McGregor's own words are, as I noted, reported on television as Lang's. We live in a world where we're inundated with information--Google, books, television screens in bars, airports, hotels--but rarely have any idea where it really comes from. Some of it is trustworthy, based on painstaking research; some of it is mere surmise; some of it is mistaken; some of it outright deceit. McGregor's position in The Ghost Writer is attempting to sort out to which of these categories the information he's given belongs and we needn't believe his sorting is necessarily correct.
In many ways The Ghost Writer, though from source material not original to Polanski, is a summa of Polanski's film career. The island location reminds one of Cul-de-Sac. The investigation into overwhelming intrigue and the failure of the protagonist to be a hero recalls Chinatown. The political conspiracy recalls Frantic. The paranoia over loss of one's identity recalls The Tenant. McGregor's character also reminds one of a softened and British Dean Corso of The Ninth Gate, which also dealt with books. Lang and his relationship with his wife recalls, indeed, MacBeth.
So, as with many Polanski films, but perhaps with The Ghost Writer more than any other, what you see and think you know upon first viewing becomes questionable upon rewatching. So little is given to us as direct information, so much has to be surmised both by McGregor and by us viewing the events through McGregor's perspective, that our surmising could be completely mistaken. McAra's death could have just been an accident. According to Ruth, he did indeed like spirits. The vehicle's path to Paul Emmet's house could have been Ruth's, as Emmet was her tutor and thus an old friend. McAra's belief that Emmet recruited Ruth could be totally erroneous, a mistake grounded upon a google search. (Most of the information on conspiracy websites is rubbish.) Neither Rycart nor Lang had heard Emmet is with the CIA, even though it's the second or third result on a google search for his name. Are they stupid or do they just not believe every foolish conspiracy theory? Is Lang the puppet he seems to be? And finally, although I maintain the car's path seems too deliberate, it's been pointed out to me that McGregor could just have been hit by a car accidentally. He was, after all, standing in the road. What does remain is that in the order of the film's universe, the Ghost is discarded once the business is finished: both Lang's business and McAra's business, and perhaps the audience's business.
(1) http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfinishedBusiness, 14/09/2010.
Madness (2010) - 3/4
Madness is a particular kind of horror film that has direct roots in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the post-millennial era this particular horror film structure has become even more popular. I could tell Madness is this kind of horror film when the gas station appears in the first ten minutes of the film. At that moment I knew something creepy would happen at the gas station. I knew that the traveling protagonists would ignore the creepy event. I knew that they would run into a band of dangerous backwoods folk and some of them would die. I was correct in all these assumptions.
The foundation of this horror structure is the presumed autonomy of the travelers. In this case it is two young women. Usually the travelers are young, as youth is the age when we usually strive to express autonomy through adventure. The travelers get together and go on a road trip. They are totally free to chart out their own path in the world. They usually have a destination, but it is a destination of their choice. They choose their destiny. It never occurs to them that the world is not as pleased about their freedom as they are. They take for granted that the world is a safe place, that the rest of the world is similar to their home. These films are structured to punish this autonomy. The sense of security and freedom in the world that permits these young people to leave the 'nest' of their hometown and make their own destiny is destroyed. The destruction of security is always performed by an embodiment of savagery. In Christian-era folk stories, the vessel of danger is usually a pagan, as in Hansel and Gretel. Pagans were the perfect vessel for embodying all that is opposed to civilization, such as the security and freedom laws and morality ensure, because they were the people deemed spiritually backward in a spiritual society. In a socio-political society like ours the embodying vessel of anti-civilization is a socio-politically backward people, such as Nazis (Frontière(s)) or rednecks (The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
The presence of the gas station is thus highly significant. If the road and the car connote autonomy, then the gas station is a moment of dependence on society. Total independence from other people is not possible. The gas station scene always includes a warning of some sort. A local warns the youths not to go where they're planning to go or some creepy or startling event suggests there may be danger ahead. The gas station thus forms the bridge between venturing-too-far and thereby becoming lost-in-the-woods and a legitimate exercise of autonomy. The gas station is the moment the characters can realize that they've gone too far and must return home. They invariably never do return home and they are consequently punished for their wanderlust. The message of these films, then, is always that the wanderers should have been content to stay home. It's a dangerous place outside of home. More abstractly, these films also warn against excessive independence, particularly the independence found in choosing one's own destiny. Overstepping the bounds of personal freedom posits the individual outside of a sphere of security. Even in those films where a victim survives the ordeal, one wonders how that person will ever be able to leave her house again. She's seen and now she knows that it's a dangerous place out there, both physically (away from home) and psychologically (excess independence).
This structure receives its crystalization with Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is a peculiarly American structure. In the Hansel and Gretel tale the children are sent from home. This is also true with Little Red Riding Hood. The traditional fairy tales with similar structures therefore aren't about autonomy expressed through travel. There is also a component of travel-unto-horror in films like The Old Dark House. But the Femm family is more civilized than their guests. That's a major point of The Old Dark House. The focus is on the decadent civilization rather than the travelers' freedom. It is only in the midst of the '70s, with the explosion of freedom in the USA, that the travel-punish structure arises. This is indeed odd for a nation that values independence so strongly. It is as though Americans have a need to see their urge for independence and autonomy punished on screen. Or perhaps, more subtly, the need is to see their own urge to punish autonomy cathartically presented and dealt with in the film, so they might return to being good Americans with their urges to enforce conformity repressed. There is also a spiritual aspect to this structure. America is unofficially a Christian country. But the total freedom to choose one's own destiny is a secular, humanist, or even existentialist notion. The clash of secular freedom with Christian conservativism in '60s and '70s America may go some way toward explaining the rise of this structure. The enemies of independence in this structure are represented as savage monsters, or monstrous savages.
Now let's return to the film. Madness is a good instance of the travel-punish film. Two cheerleaders are on their way to a cheerleading competition. They stop at a gas station. There they meet and collect two men whose car broke down. One of the men sees the gas-station warning in the form of a creepy, masked man, but he ignores it. They are soon driven off the road and taken prisoner by brutish rednecks. Sadistic cat-and-mouse games ensue as the protagonists struggle to escape and the rednecks struggle to torture and kill their prisoners.
What makes Madness a good instance of the travel-punish film is the way it goes beyond the formula. Most travel-punish films are doggedly formulaic. There are usually around four victims and a killer or two. The killer(s) catch and torture the victims. One victim either gets away or all the victims die. That's all. Not so with Madness. There's a certain ineptitude to Madness that suggests the filmmakers, that is the three writer-directors (Sonny Laguna, David Liljeblad, Tommy Wiklund), weren't so much aware that they were transcending the formula. There are certainly some good creative decisions on display, but also a lot of creative and fortunate errors. In their amateur enthusiasm for the subject they stumble into transcendence. They manage more brutality and more realism than most other films of this kind. Living up to the title, there's just a certain madness to Madness that makes it all work. For instance, instead of sticking to the four protagonists, they throw in another victim who appears to be decomposing while alive. There was no need to include this character. His inclusion makes the narrative untidy. But there's a certain reality to that. It shows the inventiveness of the filmmakers and their eagerness to create more horror situations. Similarly, there's an extraneous villain who does little more than wander around in a bathrobe with a lantern. His inclusion is totally unnecessary. Yet his unexplained addition enriches the situation if only by its sheer mysteriousness. The inclusion of extraneous characters left me with the sense that we're not aware how 'big' this operation is. We're sure neither of how many killers nor of how many victims there are.
The camerawork is another instance of blessed ineptitude. That's not to say the compositions are bad; they aren't. However, the directors seemed to think shooting the whole film without a single tripod would be a good idea. And against all odds, it is a good idea. The camera is always wiggling at least a little as though we're seeing through someone's eyes. Add to this the filmmakers' knack for creative angles and the result is a strong paranoia. One senses the victims are always being watched no matter where they are. Their vulnerability is always thrust against us. They're babes in the woods.
Then there's the ineptitude of the characters. Despite being apparently prolific murderers, these rednecks are disorganized beyond anything I've seen in a film of this sort. They use weak duct tape to tie up some victims, fail to search their pockets for knives and matches, and leave weapons everywhere. There's one amusing scene that emphasizes this as a protagonist keeps exchanging his weapon for a better one. As silly as this seems, it allows for more creative scenes on the one hand and heightened realism on the other. Why must all backwoods murderers be extremely organized and efficient?
This realism extends beyond the ineptitude into brutality. The protagonists cry often. All the actors are Swedish and their struggles with English leave the acting occasionally stilted. But crying is universal. I had trouble deciding whether the crying is mean-spirited or humanizing. Ultimately, I found it to be humanizing, as I did start to sympathize with these characters. It could be seen either way, though, as it can be jarring to have characters suddenly humanized in a film of this sort.
There is another interesting feature of Madness. I couldn't help but notice that all the villains have eye problems. One wears thick glasses, another has a discoloured eye, and another has extremely sleepy eyes. They also spend their spare time watching rape films on VHS. They watch Cannibal Holocaust for sure. If I identified the dialogue correctly, they also watch Deliverance at some point. I won't go so far as to say there's a deliberate theme. There is nevertheless an interesting symbolic connection between watching violent films, damage to the eyes, and inflicting harm on others. That is the notion that the uncivilized eye sees and enacts what it sees, while the civilized eye can be assimilate violent imagery without making its owner violent.
So Madness may alienate some viewers due to its obvious flaws. There is, after all, a grammatical error in the first frame of the film. For those willing to see past the language barrier, however, Madness delivers a brutal, suspenseful horror experience. It has the sort of foolhardy inventiveness one can only get from amateurs. And I mean 'amateur' in the purest sense of the term: those who do it for the love of it.
Cut (2010) - 1/4
In my review of Hush, I write that a new subgenre of horror film has developed throughout the 2000s. That is the terror film. The terror film creates a limited situation, usually located at an isolated house in the country, places a group of "real" people inside the situation as protagonists and then sends a siege of murderous humans as 'monsters' against the protagonists. The motivation doesn't matter. What matters is that the protagonists have a limited number of options and the monsters have a seemingly infinite number of options. This renders the protagonists extremely vulnerable. Each of their decisions will result in terror for the audience, because each could result in death or injury. The result is unpredictable due to the semi-omnipotence of the monsters. The best and purest example of the terror film is The Strangers. Vacancy and Funny Games are also decent examples. Hush and Joy Ride combine the terror film with the road chase film, Joy Ride being the superior of the two. One comes to appreciate the art of these terror films when one is faced with an inferior terror film like Cut.
There is no question that Cut is recycling the ideas of The Strangers and Vacancy. The monsters have painted faces in the style of Vacancy. The setting is a house in the country in the style of The Strangers. The structure of the film is a by-the-numbers terror film. There is the tantalizing ringing of the doorbell at the beginning. It was a knock in The Strangers. In The Strangers, it was paced well and the girl was left alone. In Cut, there are other people upstairs and the pace is just off. The ringing comes too early and too frequently, or perhaps the problem is that the door is too close to the living room and, well, unlocked. Soon it goes beyond a ringing doorbell to breaking something. In The Strangers, a window is broken, if I recall. In Cut, it's a garden gnome or two. There's something vaguely silly about that, but it gets the point across. Eventually, a monster must make an appearance. In The Strangers, one is seen in a patch of deep-focus negative space. No attention is called to his presence; one's eyes are simply drawn to the negative space and one is shocked to discover something there that shouldn't be. In Cut, a startling sound effect tells one, "Look what we have here!" There is no thrill in discovering the danger for oneself. Then the cat-and-mouse game begins. Mostly a cat game, as the monsters seem able to slip in and out at will, just as in The Strangers. The smaller size of the house and the clumsy, roving camera makes these monsters appear as much like actors told to run down the stairs at the moment as like dangerous thugs with knives.
Then there is the issue of "real people." The terror film thrives upon giving us real people. The terror film's vision of 'real people' is nearly always people in the midst of a painful situation that involves much drama. In Vacancy it's a divorce. In The Strangers it's a shot-down marriage proposal. In Hush it's a break-up. Michael Haneke was more clever with Funny Games and gives us people who do seem real without contrived conflict. Cut put a bunch of humanizing or "realistic" character traits on a wheel and spun: a pregnancy here, a career man there, a guy with loan shark troubles, a guy trying to write a cliche horror film script. And they are all very dramatic people. They make the characters in Romero's Day of the Dead seem sedate. They never listen to one another and are yelling from beginning to end. If the "real" people in The Strangers and Vacancy with their bickering and communication problems are annoying, imagine six of them all in a small house together. Two of these characters actually managed to be decently enjoyable, due to being the least dramatic and due to the actors' screen presences. Those are the loan shark guy, Michael (Dominic Burns), and the career man, Jack (Zach Galligan, of Gremlins fame). Of those Michael is the most enjoyable. We first see him telling an uncomfortable story about a public homosexual rape with ambiguous conviction. Let's hope we see more of Dominic Burns in the future.
As always, the dominant attitude of the terror film seems to be that the major problems of our lives that seem so important are in fact so very trivial. In the face of absolute terror, in the face of the absurd threat of having one's life stolen away for no good reason in a purposeless universe, our quibbles melt away and the sense of a life unlived overwhelms. I'm reminded of the John Donne passage Val Lewton cites in The Seventh Victim, "I run to death, and death meets me as fast,/And all my pleasures are like yesterday." It is the inverse. Running from death, all one's missed pleasures are held out of view in a possibly unreachable tomorrow. Careers, pregnancies, money, sex are all such trivial things compared to survival. At least, this is what terror films imply. It's what Cut implies.
Cut also undermines its own implications by implying more, however awkwardly. There is no good reason for what happens. But there is a reason. More of a reason than in The Strangers. The tagline, No second chances tells you so much. In life, unlike in a film or game, one can't rewind or restart. One bad choice can put one up against the aforementioned absurd threat. In Vacancy and The Strangers, there is no bad choice: the threat truly is absurd. In Cut, there is more responsibility, literally and figuratively, on the part of the victims. Cut hates its own protagonists as much as I did. In fact, I probably hated them because Cut did. They had it coming. Even though they didn't, really.
As much as I try to find something worth pondering in all the films I review, as much as I try to support first-time directors, Alexander Williams's Cut offers very little to consider. Aside from Michael's story of homosexual rape and a brief movie-in-a-movie scene, there is almost no extra-narrative material to enjoy and no worldview on display. Cut briskly and single-mindedly enacts its formula; its characters and settings exist for that formula. And that formula has been enacted much better in the other films I mention throughout this review.
