Amphibious 3D (2011) - 2/4

I've always been fascinated by Yuzna's work. He always teeters on the brink of hackwork, using story-ideas that are disarmingly insipid. Yet, when you watch the films, you see he always takes a different approach than any other filmmaker would, and there's always something, some wealth of subconscious, buried in the play of creative gore effects and strange appetites. With Rottweiler (2004), he pushed the killer-dog movie about as far as it could logically go until the killer dog became an archetypal fiend, a sort of symbol of fate, like Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. Amphibious 3D, unfortunately, never does get pushed into the archetypal realms quite like Rottweiler does, but, as with any Yuzna film, it teases with more below the surface; and Amphibious is a good deal more subtle than most monsters-from-the-sea movies we've been seeing from SyFy, the Asylum, and several other b-movie filmmakers who hopped aboard that particular shark-filled train.

The plot, a fairly typical one, concerns a pretty female researcher interested in some scientific thing or other--it doesn't matter what--and chartering a boat from a charming local white guy. They uncover the prehistoric monster, which the researcher has no trouble identifying, and together slay the beast. In this case, the charming boat owner, fittingly named Jack Bowman, is Michael Pare and the researcher, with the pornstar name of Skylar Shane, is played by some TV actress from the Netherlands.

What makes Amphibious 3D stand out is not the 3D, but the remote Indonesian setting. Most of the action takes place on a fishing platform so far out to sea that you can't see the mainland. Here a part-time smuggler and full-time fishing-platform foreman manages his child slave labour. Some of the action does take place on an Indonesian island where a religious ritual, reminiscent of footage of voodoo rituals from Haiti, is taking place.

One of the children on the fishing platform is a dark, scrawny child sold by a witchdoctor. The other kids taunt him and call him something like 'voodoo boy.' The researcher, it turns out, lost a daughter on a scientific survey and now hallucinates her daughter in the island ritual, and finds a surrogate for her daughter in the weak boy on the fishing platform. It is in this material that the film's darker depths are to be found, with its play on maternity and on the mystique of a culture that threatens to devour the outsider.

Unfortunately, subconscious depths does not imply interesting action, in this case. Much of what happens on the fishing platform is boring, as we're just waiting for the monster action to begin. The character drama, the shallow interactions, is not good enough to sustain interest, even in these interesting locations.

Worthy of note, however, is the cool monster. I won't spoil what it is, but Yuzna uses real effects, as he always does, so that the monster is really, physically present with the actors. When someone sticks an axe in the creature's 'head', he really does that. Though little of the monster is seen until the end, the climax, for anyone who loves classic monster movies and creature effects, more than makes up for the scarcity until then.

Amphibious 3D is admittedly sub-par Yuzna. There are moments where it suggests the possibility of being a giant sea monster version of I Walked with a Zombie (1943), but it sadly never rises to being as clever and haunting as that film. It has a lot more going on in its depths, a perverse subconscious that bubbles up in the film's final, disturbing moment, than the likes of Two-Headed Shark (2012) or Mega-Python vs Gatoroid (2011), but it's never as much fun.

Forget Me Not (2009) - 2.5/4

After a mildly mysterious, but not particularly encouraging pre-title sequence, Forget Me Not introduces us to a menagerie of tedious high school seniors and their sad little lives of fucking and drinking. Quite nice camera movements are wasted on a student house party that looks like the student house parties you see in every high school comedy or drama since the '90s, with lots of attractive, half-naked teens drinking and writhing, "having fun". I don't make a point of describing this lifestyle in a deliberately contemptous tone because I was never invited to these parties, but because I think the director, and co-writer, Tyler Oliver, purposely sets up a 'normal' (as defined by movies) group of high school buddies to disarm us. Then he starts to screw with it--and that's when it gets fun.

In the middle of a round of "tell your first time" the responsible Final Girl character, Sandy, decides to tell her first kiss instead, which took place during The Game. "The Game!" everyone says, "let's play!" Their banal existences suddenly take on some meaning, a tinge of mystery. What is this bizarre game these bland people play? Well, they chant a creepy chant about ceasing to exist and going to hell, pronounce one person "The Ghost" and then the rest hide. The Ghost touches each one, making them ghosts, until there's only one non-ghost left. When they play this game again, a strange girl joins in. After she appears to commit suicide and then disappear, despite having won The Game, each participant starts disappearing in real life. The catch is that the only one who remembers the ghosted participant is the Final Girl. Everyone else forgets that person existed. The whole world changes, as though that person never existed.

Forget Me Not plays out as a fun metaphysical mystery, not unlike one of those episodes of Star Trek where they'd get trapped in a time loop or some godlike being's anus. And the drive to crack the mystery, the full solution to which Oliver manages to hold out of reach for a good while, is what kept me engaged. Even after the mystery is cracked, there are some metaphysical shenanigans that will keep the intellectually-engaged viewer interested. For instance, the pattern of The Game played in the first act dictates much of what will happen for the rest of the movie. What is the significance of that?

Of course, interest does not equal plausibility. One wonders just how a person can be erased from the time-space continuum. The most superficial answer provided is strongly inadequate. And the other possible answer, suggested by the final shots, isn't explored in quite enough detail, tantalizing as it is. As allegory, however, it presents an interested interplay of how individual lives vie to be remembered, how our lives are valuable after death mostly for the way we impact the living, whether a close friend or the whole world. Death is frightening, but being forgotten may be even worse. You have to do something worthwhile to be remembered. And when we watch the first ten minutes of the movie, we wonder how many of these young people will really deserve to be remembered, and how many will go the way of the third eunuch in the Court of Tiglath-Pilesar?

Forget Me Not does also contain some proper ghost-monster action that is not as successful as the rest of the film. For horror zonks, the gittery, fast-moving ghost-monster, with its 'crick'-'crick' body sounds and large-mouthed roar, will be mildly annoying, because we see this monster in every low-budget supernatural horror movie, sometimes even on youtube. Otherwise, they're fairly creepy creations out of which Oliver gets some good mileage. Forget Me Not has a good many creepy, spooky moments, the best of which are, naturally, of a more metaphysical variety.

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.

The Sleeper (2012) - 1.5/4

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

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

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

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

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