Road Games (1981) - 2.5/4

For all of us who’ve ever thought Rear Window (1954) would’ve been better as an Australian trucker movie with Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, well, there’s Road Games. Written by the great Everett De Roche for Richard Franklin (who went on to do Psycho II (1983)), Road Games is a very fun movie that’s probably a lot more light than it ought to be.

Stacy Keach is Pat Quid, the over-educated, wisecracking, American trucker who reads Chaucer to his pet dingo for fun and hauls pig carcasses across Australia for work. My kinda guy. When Quid notices some suspicious activities surrounding a mysterious van (is there any other kind?), like the sexy hitchhiker it picked up just kinda disappearing, he begins to wonder if that guy isn’t the Ripper he keeps hearing about on the radio.

Like Rear Window, we’re supposed to wonder all along if the guy in the van is really a killer or just a guy who likes screwing hitchhikers—not a crime in Australia at that point. But I don’t think there’s any real doubt about who the killer is or whether Quid is over-imaginative. Keach is so damned likeable in the part, there’s no doubting him. The real question is whether he’ll be able to convince the other loonies he meets on the road.

But Quid doubts himself. And as he does so, various oddballs from the Australian roads come his way, much to our amusement. There’s a lot of good comedy here, like in many of Hitchcock's quirkier films. And it serves a purpose. The suspicions begin to fall on Quid, as his efforts to thwart that van he keeps stumbling upon get him in deeper and deeper trouble.

Jamie Lee Curtis shows up as a helpful hitchhiker, ‘Hitch,’ interested in solving crimes and a little slice of Keach. Fresh off Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Prom Night (1980), and Terror Train (1980), she comes with the promise of getting a good slasher movie. But that never really happens. More Rear Window than Dressed to Kill (1980), the killer remains at a distance, observed and, since we’re in a truck, stalked, but never really confronted or fled from. In fact, the killer’s identity is ultimately quite a let-down. There’s little real carnage or thrills, just classical suspense. 

That’s where the Hitchcockian style tends to hurt the movie, as it seems to really need a more vicious slasher element to it. Instead, we stick close to our protagonist and the final confrontation can only go one way. It’s rather quaint. But the playfulness of Road Games goes a long way to mitigate these disappointments. Quid and Hitch are fun to hang out with.

Amateur Porn Star Killer (2006) - 1/4

Amateur Porn Star Killer. I like that title. The cover depicts a beautifully sculpted female back, her hair up over her dog collar and her hands bound at her buttocks. One assumes she’s one of the amateur porn stars to be killed by a maniac hell-bent on working through the agonizing memory of his father’s death at a porn star’s hands after a blizzard of cocaine. Of course, it’s not fair to judge a movie on whether it matches my expectations. It is fair to judge it on whether it’s even a real movie.

I received a signed copy of this non-epic from director Shane Ryan and I’m saddened to dislike it so much that I’ve shifted my dislike onto the director—who seems to be a very nice young man. I just don’t see evidence of that in his movie. The plot is really provided by the text at the beginning and end of the movie. A serial killer named 'Brandon' (Shane Ryan himself) smooth-talks sluts into motel rooms where he browbeats them into taking off their clothes and sucking his dick. For their efforts, he kills them. The catch is that he records the murders on store-rented VHS tapes. But only the most unrented, forgotten movies, like Meet the Deedles (1998), so the murders takes forever to get discovered. 

I think that’s a hilarious idea. I’d love to see Robert Patrick’s multi-layered performance in Double Dragon (1994) interrupted by a snuff movie. But that’s not really what we get in Amateur Porn Star Killer. The real action of this movie is this: Brandon picks up an underage girl, talks to her from behind his camera for fifty straight minutes until he finally gets her out of her clothes and onto his dick. Then he kills her. To keep us from getting bored, I guess, footage of him screwing some blonde girl keeps getting superimposed over the footage of him trying to screw the brunette.

This is actually how a lot of semi-amateur porn starts. Some douchebag picks up a girl in public, takes her back to a room somewhere, and talks down to her for a few minutes. With real porn, they cut the crap and get her naked as quickly as possible. Ryan drags it out, but the result is the same. He really does pop his dick out on camera and she really does suck it on camera.

The problem here is the ambition to make anything more than just amateur porn. There are attempts to make this gritty, like the snuff footage in 8mm (1999). Of course, this is supposed to be shot on VHS, so it makes no sense to digitally add celluloid deterioration. Magnetic tape does not deteriorate like that at all. Moreover, the superimpositions of the other sex footage suggests that it’s being recorded over something else. But, again, this is supposed to be recorded over Weekend at Bernies II (1993), not his home sex tapes. The other sex scene, incidentally, does not even end in murder!

The worst offense of all for any attempt at pseudo-snuff is that the murder doesn’t actually happen on camera. What kind of self-respecting snuff film doesn't have the murder happen on camera? Ryan has no problem getting his dick sucked on camera or fucking this girl on camera, but when it comes to splashing around a little stage blood, he gets squeamish.

Amateur Porn Star Killer seems like an excuse for Ryan to bang co-star Michiko Jimenez and show it to his friends. Judging from the interview included on the DVD, I think he put in way more effort than was probably required. Amateur Porn Star Killer 2 and 3 are more of the same. And, like the first in the series, Ryan credits the girls he screws as co-writers. In the third, moreover, his co-star is Regan Reece, of Cum Drinkers 3 (2006) and Stairway to Anal (2010) fame. The point is that this is really just poorly-lit home sex tapes with some text thrown in to tie it into some vague plot. It is amateur porn. It’s more Max Hardcore than Vincent Gallo. There’s nothing wrong with that, other than most of it is chit-chat and not actual porn. If you want to make porn, just make porn.

 Shane Ryan has what it takes to be a true pornographer, both in front of and behind camera. He seems to have that personality and he’s photogenic enough. He’s missing his calling by disguising his real interests and abilities with these pretenses.

Turkeyshoot (1982) - Revisiting an Ozploitation Classic

Turkeyshoot, or Escape 2000, is one of Brian Trenchard-Smith’s classic Ozsploitation films, along with Dead-End Drive-In (1989), before he started directing Lifetime movies. Turkeyshoot is really composed of two parts. The first half is a Cruel, Futuristic Prison movie, like Fortress (1992) or Riki-Oh (1991), and the second half is a Most Dangerous Game movie. The staples of both types of movies are hustled through with enthusiasm and imagination, rarely missing a beat or dragging. There are a few missed opportunities, but this is balls-out fun with the manic barbarism Trenchard-Smith excelled in.

Steve Railsback and Olivia Hussey are snatched up in what looks like some sort of middle-class gift shop for the crime of—I dunno. Railsback pissed someone off and Hussey made the mistake of saying, “Hey, stop kicking him in the ribs repeatedly.” For her trouble, she awakes in the back of a truck with a slutty blonde and is carted off to the prison of her dreams.

The prison is, of course, run by a sadistic warden. When are these prisons not run by sadistic wardens? It’s part of the job description. Sadistic Warden II, must have advanced experience in sadism or equivalent education. This fella’s named ‘Thatcher,’ because nobody liked Margaret Thatcher. His personal goal, he decides, is to break Steve Railsback. Because Railsback is the peppy, defiant guy we’re going to like. Sadistic wardens hate those guys. So much of the torture goes to him.

The prison guards are known as ‘toads,’ we learn, and have all been castrated and/or dismembered because it’s supposed to make them meaner. Despite this, they repeatedly try to rape Olivia Hussey. She spends a lot of time running and screaming, when she’s not getting pep-talked by the blonde and Railsback, or avoiding the co-ed shower room.

The beatings, torture, and attempted rapes are all the usual fare you expect in the first half of a prison movie. Usually I don’t like the first half of a prison movie. The whole point of the first half of a prison movie is to make you swell with resentment and splenetic fury as the heroes are helplessly oppressed. It’s just the build up so you can enjoy the hero kicking the ever-loving crap out of the sadistic warden. With Turkeyshoot, it’s hit-and-miss. Railsback’s tortures are kinda lame, Hussey is never really in danger of getting raped, and the worst that happens is a young woman is punched in the face and another prisoner offers to bury her alive.

The catch with Turkeyshoot is, instead of getting a second-half of warden-killing, it turns into The Most Dangerous Game (1932). During the prison scenes, Trenchard-Smith sets the ground for the hunt to come. We meet Thatcher’s rich, powerful friends as they prepare. The lady with exploding arrows, the gay guy with a bulldozer and beastman (who may or may not be his lover--it's the subtlest thing in this movie), and the fat, old politician with a shotgun. Cool villains, except for the old guy. Once Railsback pisses Tatcher off enough, he decides it’s time to go a-huntin’.

Each of the villains pick out a prisoner they want to hunt, torture, and kill. Thatcher’s is Railsback. The old guy gets Hussey. The archer gets the slutty blonde. The hunting sequence is fun and suspenseful, like most human hunt movies. It’s really the wacky villains that elevates it above the average, however, almost like Class of 1984 (1982). They each get to perform a kill, showing off their unique style of playing with their victims.

Turkeyshoot’s reputation as an exploitation gem is largely due to its wacky, anything-goes approach and the general sense of being over-the-top. By today’s standards, it certainly seems to be far from the top, however. There is little gore to speak of. The nudity is swift. The villains have a sense of cruelty, but they could be much worse--compare to the Hostel movies. Trenchard-Smith’s direction also tends to be aloof. There’s little in the way of stylistic innovation or Hitchcockian manipulation. A flat, transparent presentation of the action is his approach and that’s probably not the best for the hunt sequences.

Hussey’s character was another major, missed opportunity. She spends most of the movie cowering, shrieking, and gazing in terror like a tipped cow. She never fights back, though she’s awfully good at fleeing behind Railsback. I’m not even sure why she’s in the movie, other than the be the tantalizing piece of ass to motivate Railsback. 

But Railsback is already motivated by social discontent. He plays into the subtext. The warden is named after the conservative British Prime Minister. The lady with the arrows represents elitist leisure at the expense of the poor. The gay dandy with the bulldozer the culturally elite and the rich, Trump-like developer, plowing over the commoners. I don’t know enough about Australian culture and history to take the discussion much further, but it’s clearly comprised of distaste for British influence and ‘80s yuppyism.

Whatever its flaws or ambitions, Turkeyshoot is still a pretty unique film. This is the sort of movie they rarely make anymore, the kind that could never be a chore to sit through, that has intelligence, and yet can be enjoyed equally with the brain off.  It’ll continue to be an exploitation classic. And in the hands of the right director, it is certainly ripe for a remake.

Walled In (2009) - 2.5/4

Walled In, based on the psychological thriller Les emmurés by French author Serge Brussolo, concerns a pretty, young engineer (Mischa Barton) assigned to find a building's weak points for her dad's demolition company. The building is an odd structure built in the middle of some marshland by an eccentric Italian architect, Malestrazza. During construction, a madman cemented several inhabitants into the walls. The only inhabitants left are Deborah Kara Unger, her intense son, and two other weirdos. Assisted by the boy, the engineer finds discrepencies in the building's blueprints and gradually uncovers more of its secrets.

Walled In is the sort of European thriller that would have been very much at home in the '70s, alongside films like The House of Laughing Windows. Like such films, Walled In has a serious, artistic sensibility that seems at odds with the conventional macabre the content seems to keep steering toward and yet never revealing. At times psychological thriller and at times suggesive ghost story, Walled In never quite settles until the disappointing climax. The building itself and its provocative nature is really what sustains the whole film.

The source of just about all the trouble with Walled In is how much the narrative fixates on the teen boy. After a fascinating first twenty minutes that sets up the film's major conflict between a talented engineer and an almost living building she respects too much to want to destroy, nearly all the plot twists and turns center on whether she can trust the boy or not. The questions of what Malestrazza was up to, what the real purpose of his mysterious building is, whether it is haunted, what was the real reason for the immuring of the victims--all the truly interesting questions, in other words--are largely left in abeyance and only answered peripherally to the questions regarding the boy.

The boy is just not that interesting. As a side-order grotesque, he would be fine. But as the entree, he is not. This is not the actor's fault at all. On the contrary, Cameron Bright performs the character with the awkward stiffness the character seems to really need. The screenplay is at fault for presenting the character as just a bland, melodramatic device. It is unfortunate that the tale's climax and conclusion ultimately hinges on just this melodrama.

While I have not had a chance to read the novel, I suspect it is filled with philosophical discourses and historical speculations that director Gilles Paquet-Brenner was at pains to work into engaging cinema. There are a lot of great ideas throughout that just don't quite work. Walled In certainly has much to recommend, particularly Karim Hussain's beautiful and potent photography of the spooky, dystopian set and the Saskatchewan grasslands. Much as similarly confused films, like Mariano Baino's Dark Waters, Walled In will probably be re-discovered a decade or two later as a forgotten gem of 2009. Do yourself a favor and just discover it now for what it is

Hellgate (2011) - 2/4

Hellgate is a film about a man (Cary Elwes) who survives a car accident that kills his wife and son. From then on he can see ghosts. They can see him, too, and seem to want something from him. Fortunately, he lives in Thailand, where they have mystics coming out the wazoo, so he learns that he's fading from life and has to reclaim his soul from the world of the dead.

Hellgate's primary attraction to me was certainly the part about reclaiming his soul from the dead. What really sealed the deal, though--I can't lie--was the presence of both Cary Elwes and William Hurt. A lot of actors I used to count on, like Michael Madsen and Christian Slater, take any five minute role for top billing and sucker me into mediocre film experiences. Screw them, man! But Elwes and Hurt are still cool cats--or are they?

Structurally, Hellgate is an odd experience, almost like a few different films merged. The first half is a tasteless gruel of Asian ghost movie cliches, probably because this is a Thai co-production. Plaintive Asian ghosts shamble and beckon, trying to touch Elwes. They don't seem particularly scary or threatening. That's the major problem with this segment. It's just not scary, tense, or suspenseful; nor does 'seeing dead people' strike me as particularly interesting. Blame Shyamalan and Japan.

The second half of Hellgate is much more interesting. This is the section where Elwes ventures on a mystical journey courtesy a Thai mystic and an ex-patriate American (William Hurt). Leading up to the journey to the world of the dead, Hellgate has the mystical feel, if not the depth, of a film like Dragonfly. Once taken to the world of the dead, however, the film excels. The portrayals of this world and the ritual required to enter it are as creepy, strange, and inventive as they should be. I wished writer-director John Penney had gotten the film to the world of the dead much sooner, in fact, or at least showed the same level of invention in earlier parts of the film.

The overall experience of Hellgate is disjointed, held together only by the gradual unfurling of the characters. It has its charming moments, mostly involving William Hurt. But there's an awkwardness to the writing and direction that just never goes away. If you know what to expect, it's an adequate mystical adventure/horror film, only really worth watching for the final twenty minutes.

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.

Megan Is Missing (2012) - 2.5/4

Megan Is Missing may be the most warped, perverse piece of exploitation filmmaking to come out in a long time. Not because it is contains the rough, explicit sex of a Max Hardcore video—it doesn’t. Not because it contains the gore of a Rob Zombie movie—it doesn’t. Rather, it's because we have Max Hardcore videos, Rob Zombie movies, and everything in between—all readily available, and much of it mainstream—that we haven’t had a need for anything truly warped and perverse.

Until Michael Goi came along. With the lurid imagination of a pulpit-shaking preacher, Goi’s deeply repressed perversions emerge as fantasies about the depravity of modern teenage life and the hellish sufferings coming to those who partake. Ordinarily, the sexually repressed, in our modern world, are self-conscious enough to keep their twisted sexuality inside—if not their minds, at least their small circle of perverted discontents. Not Michael Goi. If he’s aware his imagination is not shared by others (or reality), he doesn’t show it.

Megan Is Missing begins by giving us a few days in the lives of two teenage girls, Megan and her best friend Amy, using ‘actual’ footage from their online chats and video blogs. Megan is popular and Amy is not. Megan goes to parties and Amy ordinarily does not. A pretty simple setup. But for Goi, Megan can’t just go to parties. She has to go to parties and blow every guy in the room while lesbian teens make out in the background. She has to tell surprisingly long, detailed stories about giving a well-endowed teen a blowjob when she was only ten. Amy, for her part, can’t just be a little shy or naïve, she has to be totally oblivious.

What’s troubling is how Goi imagines this. Thuggish teen boys are constantly ordering teen girls to suck their dicks. The girls don’t bat an eye. Totally normal stuff for Goi. He imagines teen girls, or even pre-teen girls, dutifully sucking dicks left and right. These things sometimes happen. But at the feverish level presented in Megan Is Missing, it simply doesn’t. Teenage boys, as douchey as they can be, don’t order every girl to suck their dicks. And if they do, they don’t get their dicks sucked, they get beat up by her boyfriend. Teenage girls are not all complete sluts who live for random dick-sucking, drugs, and alcohol. If it did, so be it. But it just doesn’t. Goi, undeterred by reality, imagines it does and with righteous indignation—not because it bothers him, but because it gives him a boner beneath his bible.

To be fair to Goi, he does set up a realistic psychology to take Megan and Amy through the film’s second half. As a girl who is used for sex since childhood, Megan is extremely adventurous and susceptible to the flattery and scams of internet predators. Of course, most teen girls are adventurous and susceptible to flattery and scams of internet predators. But I buy Megan’s story. Amy’s over-the-top naivety and self-loathing are similarly grounds for what happens in the remainder of the film, although it's less believable.

What happens next is Megan gets introduced to a teen boy online. He is, of course, an internet predator who quickly lures her into his trap. Amy tries to expose him, but just arouses his fury. She ends up, albeit unwillingly, in his hands as well.

This half of the film is where Goi’s repressed sexuality serves him well. He doesn’t just imagine the predator raping and killing the girls. Instead, the predator has to place Megan in a highly-degrading fetishistic setup. Amy is spared the extreme bondage, but is raped on camera for several minutes. Goi perhaps thought showing only her face would be tasteful, but it’s not. Focusing in on the pleading, squealing, crying, and finally assent to the situation is just what a deranged, sexual sadist would enjoy seeing. (The sadist, after all--the predator, not Goi--put the camera there.)

The big finale for Megan Is Missing is a seemingly interminable scene of the predator digging the girls a grave while Amy relentlessly pleads and bargains for her life. I found myself shouting, “Just bury her already!” As annoying as it was, I imagine Goi’s point was to show just how detached from empathy the killer must be. Wow, really? I would’ve never thought.

There is a degree of realism, for better or worse, to this last half of Megan Is Missing. Enough realism to earn the praise of Polly Klaas’s father. (Mr. Klaas’s letter can be found on the Megan Is Missing website.) A sexual sadist preying on teen girls certainly will be brutal and merciless. It’s uncomfortable to watch and to no real purpose other than exploitation. The extremely clumsy attempt at making the film entirely found-footage, which means we have to believe every cell phone conversation is recorded in video and stored on the phones, is Goi trying to show he's being 'realistic' rather than merely exploitational. Reality is so bent in doing so that it only exaggerates how much the recorded material is all Goi's creative choice--a choice clearly perverse, voyeuristic, sadistic, and exploitational. But this is Megan Is Missing at its best—unflinching, unself-conscious exploitation.

What I do, nevertheless, find worrying about the torture scenes is how Goi almost seems to be imagining a fitting hell for the transgressive Megan, one that is re-enacted in the body of her best friend for our education. These girls are being blamed for their stupidity. Their lives of revelry and dick-sucking, and their comfortable perusal of the internet, are attitudes that must be punished. If teens were kept in fear and trembling, the film suggests, they wouldn’t have to be raped and buried alive. A hard truth from the pulpit of Michael Goi.

Sinister (2012) - 3/4

Sinister is proof that you can take a handful of the Same Old Materials and, with some skilful weaving, produce a good, very creepy horror movie. With Sinister, you get unsettling 8mm footage of disturbing events, unsolved disappearances of several children, the horrific deaths of whole families, a mysterious killer, occult symbols, and a lone protagonist’s descent into the overwhelming depths of the mystery and the madness. Classic horror-thriller elements. Director Scott Derrickson, whose Hellraiser: Inferno I enjoyed more than most—I only wished it hadn't been forcibly made a Hellraiser movie—just puts them in the right order so that they work.

I wonder if the concept of ‘pace’ isn’t overused. Some of the best recent horror films don’t work by ‘pace.’ They work by rhythm. The Mothman Prophecies has an eerie rhythm—screw the pace. Sinister, likewise, has a rhythm. Ethan Hawke plays Ellison Oswalt, a true crime writer who finds the material for his next book in the eradication of a family save one missing child. When he moves his family to the very house of the crime, he finds a box of Super 8 footage in the attic that reveals the staggering extent of the crime(s) he’s investigating. Each of the crimes consists in the recorded murder of a whole family, except one child that always goes missing. They are dated about a decade apart. Oswalt watches a film each night. As unsettling film ends, a creepy event takes place in the house. This rhythm is repeated over and over.

The unnaturalness of this pattern can be distancing. You can predict, by the third time, that something will happen after he watches the film. Yet, the Super 8 footage is so compellingly disturbing that the subsequent scares remain effective. The rhythm pulls the viewer, much as Oswalt, onward into the disorienting horrors of the mystery.

The intrusion of the supernatural into the mystery is where Sinister begins to lose some of its potency. In a story as eerie and mysterious as Sinister, the otherworldly must be involved in some sense. But take, again, The Mothman Prophecies as an example of how the otherworldly can be eerily incorporated without overexplaining. You can skim the unnatural; you don’t have to cannonball into it. Derrickson cannonballs. Ghostly ballet and a mythological explanation for all that’s happened lead to the clever but disappointing climax.

Sinister's haunted rhythm is necessarily lost as Oswalt is forced by this trajectory into taking action, an inevitability in the conflict-resolution model but a disruption in a film like this. A potentially great horror film becomes a good one. The creepiness of the first half of Sinister nevertheless remains some of the best horror filmmaking of the past few years.

Rosewood Lane (2012) - 2.5/4

    Rosewood Lane is the latest film from Victor Salva. A vaguely supernatural thriller, it concerns the incessant harassment of a neighborhood by a teenaged paperboy. In particular, the paperboy becomes obsessed with Sonny Blake (Rose McGowan), a radio psychologist who has just moved into the house of her deceased father--who himself may have been murdered by the paperboy.

    Victor Salva is always a complex filmmaker to approach, and not entirely for good reasons. Due to his unfortunate past, in which he sexually abused the boy star of his first film, Clownhouse, there is a tendency to look for biography in his work that may not be there--or, worse, to dismiss or express disgust with his work because of that past. Salva, however, is an undeniably skilled craftsman in the tradition of Spielberg, Coppola, and Hitchcock. Anyone ignorant of his past can enjoy his horrors and thrillers for the entertainment value alone. Nevertheless, Salva does have a tendency to personalize his films, a tendency often obscured by either unpleasant misreadings or pure enjoyment of the films. To do justice to Rosewood Lane, I will consider both the film's craftsmanship and Salva's personal expression.

    Salva begins delivering the tension very early in the film. An elderly neighbor ominously warns Sonny against having anything to do with the paperboy. Salva compounds this advice with some eerie shots of the paperboy sitting stationary, on his bicycle, in the middle of the road, blocking the path of a moving truck. He's distant enough to be aloof from interaction, but the shots of him suggest he's watching and listening.

    Soon, the paperboy is knocking at Sonny's door, and she's starting to notice objects in her house subtly rearranged. This begins an alternately suspenseful and infuriating cat-and-mouse game. The paperboy's seemingly supernatural speed and slipperiness, and his mystifying obsession with Sonny, give Salva the material to create considerable tension. The boy's smugness and abilities, however, can be infuriating. Had Salva not written Sonny as such a strong and intelligent character, this infuriating quality would have been tedious. As it is, however, our frustration is one we share with Sonny.

    What ensues is really a power game to see who is going to dominate who. Sonny begins trying to reverse the cat-and-mouse roles by tracking down or chasing the paperboy. He manages to give her the slip each time with his apparently supernatural swiftness, even mocking her in some eerie setpieces. But she forces his hand to a final confrontation and a surprising conclusion.

    Salva enriches the material somewhat by Sonny a past haunted by childhood abuse. The features of the house Sonny used to avoid abuse--basement, heating vents--become the features the paperboy uses to hurt her. There is a somewhat psychoanalystic sense of the paperboy being Sonny's victimized past returning to victimize her, a sense probably not intended except to create more emotional tension, at which it succeeds. Mostly, however, it strengthens our conviction that Sonny is tough and unwilling to let herself be victimized.

    The character of the paperboy is, as noted, very dislikable. And his ability to outsmart or at least outrun everyone can create tedium. Sonny's aggressive nature mitigates this somewhat, because what we're really wanting is someone like her to 'teach him a lesson.' However, I think this is an instant where Salva's personal interests have triumphed somewhat over his craftsmanship.

    What we observe in Rosewood Lane is a handsome, underage boy trying to worm his way into an adult's home and life, a boy who deliberately takes pleasure in showing what power he can exercise over adults. When he sits in front of the moving truck, for instance, or when he moves objects in Sonny's home; just being in her home or even the mere act of listening to her conversations, are ways he exercises power. (Listening is a relatively common technique children use on adults, especially foster children who need to feel in control of their situation more than most children.)

    Knowing Salva's past as a convicted child molestor, it is difficult not to make something of this. But, in order not to be trite or glib, we have to be careful not to read in our own prejudices. The superficial reading would be that the film's dynamics represent a sort of allegory for Salva's own obsession. He struggles to lead a normal, respectable, and, due to his work, mildly public life, all the while he is victimized by this boy. The boy represents his own obsession with boys, and the boy's incredible sneaking powers shows how hard it is for Salva, how anywhere he turns the obsession may have slipped in unnoticed, much as how Jeepers Creepers II features a group of attractive, teenaged boys without shirts.

    While that would be a fairly accurate picture of how such sexual addictions work, and while that may even partially describe what Salva is expressing, I don't think it exhausts it. I think Salva's mind is more complex and his vision more ambiguous.

    The primary characteristic of the paperboy is his defiance, his need to express his own indomitability and his power over others. I don't think it's just the nature of addiction being allegorized in the narrative's action. I think, for the addict, the object of addiction is dominating and defiant. It exerts a power over the addict that he or she does not want it to do. This is true especially in one's fantasy life. And to pursue one's fantasies in the real world, as Sonny's pursuit of the paperboy, is doomed to failure.

    I don't want to suggest Salva is cast into turmoil every time he sees a boy, but I do think the narrative presents a case of victimization by a boy that is akin to what someone like Salva may sometimes feel. That Salva's film releases have routinely been protested by his victim, Nathan Forrest Winters, adds another element to the idea of boy as dominant and defiant.

     Reading more elements of the film into this sort of analysis would be possible. But I don't see the value in taking it any farther. Salva's films always seem torn between entertaining and expressing, and he always prefers to err on the side of entertainment. As he's quite good at creating suspenseful setpieces and his films have never yet failed to entertain me, I don't see a problem with that. Rosewood Lane is a suspenseful, fun film thanks to Salva's skill for thrills and McGowan's tough-but-vulnerable performance.

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.