Change Your Image
john-souray
Reviews
Offspring (2009)
Butchered by the censor?
I was going to say that this film was lazy and incompetent independent film-making at its worst. I keep trying to make this point; low budgets needn't matter, and we don't mind the cheap special effects and the limited sets if the film is made with passion and conviction. It doesn't cost anything to get the plot right; just imagination and attention to detail. But that's exactly what this film seems to lack.
An update of the Scottish Sawney Beane legend and transplanting to Maine and the Canadian coast, it has some promising ideas and a couple of effective sequences, but it fails to establish them or develop them properly. What's with the lighthouse keeper? We get a glimpse of a newspaper clipping while the opening credits roll, and one of the characters makes a brief reference during the film, but this history deserved telling properly, even if only narrated by one of the characters, and could have added real mythic power to the plot. But it appears the film-makers just couldn't be bothered.
And then 76 minutes later, barely achieving the minimum respectable length for a feature film, it comes to an abrupt end, with several characters and plot lines unresolved. Please no, don't tell me you're leaving the door open for a sequel. (Adopt appropriate gravelly voice: Offspring 2 – the new generation!) In between, there's a load of confused stumbling around in night-time woods or on stretches of beach that look nothing like the earlier panoramic daytime shots we had of the coastline.
I was going to say all this, but then I glanced up at the technical information in this IMDb entry. 100 minutes, it says. A hundred! But my UK rented copy was only 76 minutes; both the sleeve and the DVD timer confirm it. That's a quarter of the film gone! No wonder the plot seems sketchy, and you can't follow what's happening.
It is entirely incomprehensible. It carries a UK 18 certificate, which is the most serious apart from the 18Rs that can only be bought from licensed sex shops, and I don't imagine they have anything in them that can't be seen for free on the internet. What on earth can the UK censors have found that required 24 minutes of cuts? If it really was originally 100 mins I frankly don't see what the point of releasing the film like this is. At the very least, this review stands as a warning to UK viewers; check the length. If it's the 76 minute version I saw, I'm certainly not recommending it.
Edit: Barely a couple of weeks after posting this, I read in my newspaper that "The Serbian Film" had received between four and five minutes of cuts at the hands of the UK censor, and that this made it the most cut UK film for sixteen years. If that's so, then I was wrong to blame the cut from 100 to 76 minutes on the censor. This makes it all the more baffling. Why would you voluntarily cut your own film to such a skimpy dog's dinner? In any case, it doesn't change my recommendation (or lack of it): just the attribution of blame.
Dangerous Worry Dolls (2008)
Bad moon rising
As another reviewer has suggested, it's not worth wasting too much time telling you "this movie sucks". What do you need to know? Cheap, unconvincing sets. Perfunctory acting. Barely coherent plot full of red herrings and non sequiturs. Doesn't last a minute longer than the minimum they can get away with.
This is what? A women's prison? And they have not cells, but dormitories? Through which the male warders stroll while the girls lounge on their beds in their underwear? Even the notoriously cheap Australian soap, Prisoner Cell Block H, had a go at cells, even if the cardboard walls did wobble when people bumped into them.
But what's the point complaining? It's a Charles Band film. That tells you everything you need to know.
Almost everything, but there are still a couple of points worth making. It may be bad, like all Band Full Moon productions, but it's still nowhere near as mind-sappingly awful as something from The Asylum Team. I'm not sure why, but I think it may be because there still survives a sense that someone is trying to entertain you by telling a story, whereas in Asylum mockbusters the cynical and exploitative contempt for the audience has long overshadowed any vestigial vision or artistic purpose.
And there's at least one good scene in it. Well, not good, necessarily, but promising. Eva (Jessica Morris, who, fair dos, actually has a creditable go at making something of her part) is being disciplined by the sadistic (natch) warden/matron (Deb Snyder). So as not to leave any incriminating evidence, the warden produces an old electric shock machine, a wonderfully hokey piece of equipment seemingly stolen from the laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein, full of unnecessary coils and valves. As the warden administers increasingly violent shocks, Eva first laughs ("ooh! - that tickles") then shouts out her defiance and contempt ("you're going to have to do better than that!"). There's a genuine, exhilarating demonic power to all this. If only the scene was properly resolved, instead of cutting away and then returning later to a tableau of the aftermath.
And that's what's so frustrating about cheap films like this. With just a little bit of effort, a little bit of care and attention to detail, that spark of creativity could have been fanned into something worthwhile. Not great, necessarily, but challenging, provocative, or even bitterly funny. At the end of the day, it's not the cheap sets or Ed Wood special effects or amateur acting that does for films like this. They actually don't matter; you only notice them because for so much of the time there's nothing else to notice. No, what does for these films is the laziness, the negligence, the numbing lack of ambition. It's the script and plot that lets them down, and they cost next to nothing. Just spend a bit of time thinking through those plot strands, and find a resolution that ties them together. Dialogue rusty? Get a second pair of ears to work through it. Concentrate on a couple of key sequences (in this film, that'll be the electric shock machine, and the waste disposal unit) and take a bit of time and care getting them right.
But that's the film that might have been. This one, I'm afraid, is not worth wasting your time or money on. Well, probably not. I got my copy from a pound shop. That's a British recession-driven thrift store: everything a pound or less (about a dollar fifty). At that price, I'm not really angry. It gave me a wry smile or two, and added to my knowledge and understanding of Z-grade horror films. But don't pay a penny more.
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)
A little bit shocking....
"Is this the sickest film ever made?" demands the Sun, the British Murdoch tabloid, in a thrillingly prurient tone, and gloatingly quoted on the DVD sleeve.
Well, probably not, no. And that's part of the problem. It's neither as bad nor as brilliant a film as the 1-star or 10-star reviews would have you believe. It's as though, having had such a disgusting idea, so pleased was writer/director Six and his team with his own transgressive naughtiness that he couldn't be bothered to think any further to develop anything approaching a plot or a character study.
If you've read anything at all about this film, you can't help but know what to expect. And that's what you get, no more and no less. We get a standard car breaks down in the dark woods - increasingly frantic search for help - finally finding an isolated home - horror film cliché introduction; a mad scientist who announces what he wants to do; he then does it, and ....er .... that's more or less it. There's an attempt at a sort of bleak ending, though it doesn't really work. I mean, if two detectives go to the trouble of getting a search warrant, and then fail to return to the office, how long do you think it will be before (a) somebody notices and (b) works out exactly where to start looking?
(Incidentally: that house in the woods. I recently wrote a very disobliging review here of the awful "House of the Devil", and sneered at, amongst other things, the Addams family architecture. The set here in this film by contrast is one of the best things about it: impeccable modern German/Scandinavian minimalist styling, and seldom lit with anything less than brilliant clarity. All those budget horror film "cinematographers" with their interminable sequences in blurred gloom should study this and think very hard about what they see.)
The residual power of this film is due not to the work of the Director or the same man's script, but rather to a bravura piece of pantomime villainy by the anorexic-looking Dieter Laser. This is not a name I recognise, though looking at his track record, he clearly will be known to German viewers, and some English-speaking cable viewers. I understand that Laser himself contributed to the development of the character; if so, we can't be sure who wrote what, but in any case it is a fantastic performance. Asked if he is married (his two female guests are undoubtedly nervously trying to check out how risky he may be) he replies simply and shockingly that he doesn't like people. The bleak and cynical delivery of this nihilistic misanthropy is brilliant, but the script just doesn't give him enough to work with.
We needed more of this. We get a hint that this man really is or was a brilliant surgeon. So what happened? What brought him to this madness? This doesn't need to be a convincing psychological study; pantomime will do. But the story needs, deserves even, better than this mechanical and perfunctory plotting.
"100% medically accurate", chortles the publicity for this film, a claim about as credible as the "based on true events" nonsense that contaminates so many cheap shockers. I notice that Mr Six is now tagging his sequel as "100% medically inaccurate", so he's probably realised how risible this is, but I'm afraid the damage is done.
Shocked, or sickened? Yes, a bit, but only a bit, and not as much as you were hoping, Mr Six. To tell the truth, after seeing the film I'm no more shocked than I was when I first read about it. You're going to have to try a bit harder next time; perhaps some new ideas, too, and not just a re-run of the ones you've already had?
The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)
Drivel
There is a non-fiction book entitled "The men who stare at goats" by the journalist Jon Ronson. Ronson has an autobiographical style, meaning he appears as a character in his own books as the interviewer, and he describes here his attempts to track down the retired members of a former experimental army team of psychic warriors. It's well worth a read, though I understand that some people can find Ronson's sometimes faux naif style a bit grating.
This is not a film of that book, and the central journalist character is not a portrayal of Ronson. Apart from the title, it borrows a few ideas from the book, and just makes the rest up. The book's upstairs, but I can't be bothered to go up and check every episode. To give an indication, though, everything that takes place in the Middle East (i.e. the core plot of the film) is made up. There is some discussion of Al-Qaeda and Iraq, but the context for that is Abu Ghraib and the humiliation and torture of civilians, a different (and nastier) world altogether to the depoliticised and decontextualised sub-MASH larks of Kevin Spacey's desert base.
I was going to make this review an impassioned defence of Ronson's integrity, and sympathise with him for the mutilation of his book. But then I found an interview in which he seems perfectly happy with the film, proud even. Who am I therefore to complain that they've catastrophically misunderstood the point of the book? But I still say it's drivel.
While I'd have been happy to sit through a straight documentary, with archive footage and filmed interviews and talking heads, I don't really object to the film-makers' loss of nerve and decision to liven the story up with some fiction. It's just that if that's what you're going to do, it ought to be a lot better than this aimless, characterless, virtually plot less mess. If you're going to make it up, you ought at least to make up something interesting and worthwhile.
Because here's the terrible truth. There's no such thing as psychic powers. No really; they don't exist. If they did, we'd know, and there wouldn't be any argument. People can't walk through walls. People can't kill animals by the power of thought. People can't "remote view" and find things hundreds of miles away just by thinking about them. Had any of these things worked, the army would still be working on them.
The real story here was a desperately sad one about the dimensions of human folly and yearning, and also a story about frustrated and distorted idealism, because the bizarre attempt to develop a kinder and more sensitive (!) form of imperialist warfare was founded in the genuine disquiet and disgust borne from the Vietnam experience.
But this is not the film of that story.
The House of the Devil (2009)
Rosemary's Baby meets The Devil Rides Out, remade by Allan Smithee
The film opens with the now almost obligatory and usually credulous "based on true events
" message. Actually, in this case, the events are not only "true", but "unexplained" too! I'm not going to explore the idiocy of that statement here, because I don't want to have to introduce spoiler warnings, but as stunned viewers watch the final credits unreel ("
is that it?...!!") they might want to ask themselves exactly what verifiable but unexplained events could possibly have given rise to the preceding narrative reconstruction.
But that's not all. "During the 1980s", the film-makers tell us in the same opening statement, "over 70% of American adults believed in the existence of abusive Satanic cults".
It continues: "Another 30% rationalized the lack of evidence due to government cover ups
".
If you haven't got it yet, just re-read those statements now. "Over 70%.....another 30%". Still don't get it? Well then, this may be the film for you, especially if you've always wondered why people laugh so much at the amplifiers with volume controls that turn up to 11 in the rockumentary "Spinal Tap". For the rest of you though, those that can count with or without the use of your fingers (think 10 per cent a finger), then this insult to the intelligence, deliberate or not (I tend to think not, just lazy and neglectful) is pretty indicative of what you can expect over the next 90 minutes or so.
In the same year as this was released, director Ti West also gave us the dismal "Cabin Fever 2". Not the least of the problems with that piece of trash was that it ran completely out of ideas about fifteen minutes before the end, and apparently out of money to pay any actors not much later. West adopts the opposite solution here, keeping all his ideas for the end, and filling the first 70 minutes of the film with almost nothing at all (one short and momentarily startling sequence aside).
This is not, as the film's admirers would have you believe, babbling on about what a great 80s pastiche or homage this is, a matter of a slow and relentless accumulation of dread, building to a revelatory climax. It is a matter of nothing happening at all, at great length, followed by twenty minutes of unconvincing and almost entirely unconnected mayhem.
The house itself was clearly designed by the Addams family architect on a dull day, which invites ridicule from the outset. It would be nice to see some film-maker exploring the genuinely creepy potential in art deco, or 50s Americana. Still, you have to work with what you've got. In which case, don't destroy whatever mood of unease you've built up by treating us very loudly to the contents of the teenage heroine's Walkman, which turns out to be disappointingly old-before-her-time adult-orientated rock, and to which she bops in a silly girly way around the house. (Watch out for that vase! Oh, too late
..but never mind, it's not important. No really, it isn't important; you forget to finish clearing it up, but nobody notices.) At one point, we discover something potentially very unsettling. This happens as the heroine prowls around the house, and the camera moves behind a locked door. But while we, the audience, see what's there, the heroine doesn't. So what's the point in that? We already knew there was something creepy, not least because of the title of the film we've just paid to watch. It's not as though we were under the illusion we were watching the sequel to the Sound of Music, where the exiled von Trapp family hire a babysitter. We're supposed to be watching the heroine become increasingly uneasy; it's her that has to see things, not us. And as a final insult, what we see behind that door turns out to be a total irrelevance. It plays no further part in the film, and has only the vaguest connection to what eventually happens. Still, I suppose we were warned; after all, these are "unexplained" events.
The "conspiracy" that drives this film just doesn't work. I'm not going into the details here because it would involve pointless spoilers, but the basic premise is given right here in the IMDb plot summary. They said they wanted a babysitter, what they really want is someone to take part in a Satanic ritual. Just for a second, put yourself in the Satanists' place. Is this how you'd go about it? Leaving it to luck that a babysitter will turn up at the very last minute, then leaving her alone in the house with the phone number of a pizza delivery firm? It's just
..just
.titanically stupid.
I could carry on piling up the absurdities, but I'm running out of my 1000 words. This is a terrible film, just terrible, and for the most part tedious with it. It's not a pastiche, or homage; it's just an incompetent Z-movie. As with Cabin Fever 2, Mr West appears to be able to organise some PR hype around himself. Don't fall for it.
Taste of Flesh (2008)
Unwatchable
I wouldn't normally review a film I've only seen half of. My first reaction to this was in my summary title: "Unwatchable". It appears I'm not alone in thinking this, because so far nobody else has reviewed it at all. Until then, half will have to do.
I actually take films very seriously. However bad a film is, I feel a kind of obligation to the director at least to sit through it to the end. So it's very rare for me actually to abandon a film half way through. Sometimes, late at night, I doze off; but even then, I usually think "I must give that another go some time", though of course sometimes I never get round to it. So I didn't just switch this off. I fast-forwarded to see if anything was going to change. Nothing did.
Why is this film unwatchable? It isn't unwatchable because it's frightening, or harrowing, or "transgressive". It's unwatchable because of the sheer blistering incompetence of the film-makers.
The film is all blurred and out of focus, and so poorly lit that even in supposed daylight (though most of it takes place in one of those zero-budget abandoned warehouse sets that has no natural light anyway), the characters' faces are frequently entirely obscured in shadow. Not that that makes a lot of difference, as the cast's acting skills are rudimentary to say the least. Half the time (well, a quarter! - I'm extrapolating....) you can't even work out what's going on.
Someone with more technical knowledge than me could probably tell you what equipment they shot it on. I haven't a clue. All I know is I get ten times better results from my own home camcorder played back through my TV, shot without any lighting including at night and in caves and with no skill on my part whatsoever. It's just a bog standard high street-bought camcorder, except that it's HD, but then I think most are nowadays.
I don't understand how this can happen. I don't understand how anyone could not look at the very first rushes and not say "look, we need to start again with better equipment". The final bitter joke is that in the credits this film boasts a "Director of Cinematography". Normally one would say reflexively "don't give up the day job", but on this occasion, I wouldn't be convinced even that was appropriate. They'd probably need to be trained even to flip burgers.
And that's just thinking about the silly little boys who made this film. What about the distribution company, who presumably saw this, transferred it to DVD, and packaged it and marketed it? These, I'm assuming, were adults. Why did this just not go straight in the trash bin?
What's the film about? Oh, you know, nasty juvenile misogynist torture porn, but done without even any skill or conviction. True enough, I should have known better even at the bargain bin price I paid for this, but even on zero budget, it might be possible to say something worthwhile about the psychopathology of misogyny or the dynamics of resistance, but you won't find it in this film. Bizarrely, even if this is your sort of "thing" (and if so, I'm not sure I want to meet you, and especially I don't want to shake your hand) it's unlikely to do the job for you.
There are bad films and bad films, and for many different reasons. I often think it's the big budget mainstream disasters that are the worst films of all because so many more resources (money, talent) have been squandered. But of its sort, this is certainly a candidate for one of the worst films ever made. Not heroically bad. Not hilariously bad. Just incompetently, unwatchably bad, and grubby with it.
Now you know why nobody else has reviewed it.
Män som hatar kvinnor (2009)
Epic in length only
The copy of this I rented has the presentation of a feature film, but I think it may have been edited from a Swedish television series adapting a trilogy of novels, of which this is the first. This version is a little over two and a half hours, but the IMDb notes that there is a fuller three hour version which I'm guessing might have been the original TV presentation. What was in that extra half hour? It might contain material that answers some of the criticisms I make below, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.
The basic plot is that an investigative journalist, smarting from losing a libel case brought by a corrupt businessman, and facing a jail sentence (for libel? They must do things differently in Sweden), is hired by a wealthy businessman impressed with his integrity to investigate the disappearance, decades earlier, of his niece. The businessman is convinced (for reasons that are not entirely clear) that she must have been murdered by a member of his family (note that this is a very old-fashioned family-based capitalist enterprise, on the Buddenbrooks model).
With over two and half hours to explore, one might hope for some real plot and character development and some fine dramatic scenes, but the drama is almost entirely dead. Here are some of the things we don't get (I could list more, but am avoiding spoilers):
We get very little idea what the family enterprise actually is. There's a photo of a ship;are they shipbuilders, perhaps? Or are they just exporting goods?
Though the family are mostly gathered on the island, and the investigator assembles a handy photographic family tree, we scarcely get to meet most of them, even less witness any dramatic interplay between them. I remember one scene only in which the family actually get together to attempt to deter the investigator.
We have been assured by the patriarch that the family are greedy, grasping,selfish vipers, but we are treated to none of the dramatic or satirical fun that might come from this.
Though the island has great symbolic significance, it has no cinematic presence at all. The bridge that we are assured is the only way on or off the island might just as well be a bridge across a river for all the difference it makes.There is little sense of remoteness, isolation or confinement.
There is a dark undercurrent of previous Nazi involvement. But this is just stated baldly, as a fact. We get very little idea of what this meant or even really when it was. During the war? Neo-nazi revivalism? Both? And apart from the fact that we can take it as given that Nazis are nasty people, there is no attempt to explore how this actually affects their actions and beliefs.
More simply, what we have here is the Swedish equivalent of an English country house murder, basically dealing with the rich and privileged, and with the cast of suspects conveniently assembled in a single location. But instead of the detective teasing out the solution by interrogating the suspects, playing them off against each other, and catching them out, all we get is seemingly endless shots of the investigator or his computer-whiz sidekick tap-tap-tapping away on their laptops (Apple Macs, if you must know, and heaven knows you get long enough to admire the speed and smoothness of the software).
Look, I know that the Internet and cheap computing has brought about a revolution in thinking and behaving and that film-makers are struggling to come to terms with it, but let me propose a general working rule for film-makers. Computers are not dramatically interesting.
It's like voice-over. You can get away with it a bit, and sometimes it can even enhance a film; but if you find yourself relying on the voice-over, then chances are you've gone wrong. You're failing to tell the story properly in the medium of cinema, and if it's just a straight narration, your audience would be better off reading a book. So it is with computers and internet investigations. You can have a secondary character who's a computer expert, or you can have one episode of intensive computer use if the plot absolutely requires it. But if you find that the whole drama relies on it, or worse, that you have to fill all your screen-time showing it, then you can be sure you've gone badly wrong. Your audience would be better off surfing the net themselves, or composing electronic music, or photoshopping their snapshots, or playing games.
What was that? Oh, yes, the sidekick. Well, that's the woman "with the dragon tattoo", though why she has it I still don't know. It's just the title of the film. She's a young lesbian punk, though hilariously, as in every middle-aged liberal man's fantasy, the investigator succeeds in "turning" her just by the sheer non-sexist force of his personality. Oddly enough, she has her own sub-plot, involving a corrupt "probate guardian" (I think that's a subtitle mistranslation for parole or probation officer), which is much more interesting than the main story, but over rather quickly. This I think, properly scripted, would have made a much more rewarding film of about the standard 90 minute length.
And the libel case comes back at the very end, though bizarrely it seems to have nothing to do with the main story. True enough, life's generally not like that, and not everything is connected, but it is characteristic of the scriptwriter's complete absence of any sense of drama that this opportunity to create some dramatic unity is muffed.
The flashes of sexual violence, just about acceptably presented as would befit a television programme, are nothing more than a desperate attempt to inject some artificial edginess into this ditchwater dull plodding drama.
Shutter Island (2010)
Losing the plot
This could have been a good film, a great one even. The ingredients are all here. An imaginative director, wonderful location and sets, actors that are never less than competent and sometimes a lot better (I was particularly struck by Ruffalo, an actor I've not previously taken notice of). There is a promising premise – an Alcatraz of Hannibal Lecters, the island asylum where they send everyone that nobody else wants or can cope with. And potentially great themes; the excesses of American psychiatry in the early fifties, the disputes between the advocates of surgery, the advocates of medication, and the advocates of therapy. And something even darker still, something touching on the character of evil (or what we call evil) itself. Can someone be driven mad simply by witnessing too much? But the film bungles it, horribly. And it's not too hard to work out why. The script just isn't good enough. Actually, not even the script; the plot is not good enough. To be fair, I may have been in a good mood, and the film engaged my attention throughout. It's only afterwards, thinking about what you've just seen, that it all starts to come apart.
I think I can do this without spoilers. The basic premise is on the DVD sleeve. DiCaprio plays a US marshal (with his sidekick Ruffalo) who is called in to investigate the disappearance of a patient (which ought to be impossible). The procedural development I found, though stolid, gripping; and the creeping realisation that there is more here than meets the eye was well handled and well timed.
But what is really going on here? Several theories are discussed, and the truth when it finally emerges is certainly a twist of sorts, though it may well be one that the viewer has already thought of. (No prizes here. Night Shyamalam has a lot to answer for. Not every twist has to be like the one in the Sixth Sense. Sometimes, the most enjoyable and effective twist is the one that the viewer can work out, because it's the one that flatters the viewer's intelligence). But whatever sort of twist this is, it has to work. It has to make sense; and in this film, it doesn't.
It is another of those preposterous conspiracies that only work in fiction. The plot appears to work, in that it makes sense of the puzzles that precede it, and seems consistent enough with everything that has happened. But you realise, turning it over in your mind, that from the point of view of the conspirators, it is a completely mad plot. There is much too much that could go wrong, at every stage.
There are plenty of examples of this absurdity in the other reviews, some with spoilers, some without. Some I'd spotted for myself, others I ruefully recognised, and they all contributed to this sense of everything unravelling, of the whole plot falling apart in your hands. I will just add one myself: The film opens with a pallid DiCaprio sea-sick in the heads of the ferry taking him and his assistant to the island. My question (which will make sense to those who've seen the film, but will seem odd to those that haven't) is: what was DiCaprio doing five minutes before? More importantly, what was he thinking? That isn't a stupid question, either, as we subsequently learn quite a lot about what he is thinking, mostly in dreams and memories. DiCaprio discovers, patting his pockets, that he's lost his cigarettes, and accepts one from his assistant. Think, man! Where could you have left them? The realisation dawns on you that this whole conspiracy is a trick played not on or by DiCaprio on or by other characters. It is a trick played by the director on you, the viewer.
And with that, the film falls apart. We know that amongst the memories haunting DiCaprio are the fact that he was part of the contingent that liberated Dachau. The mentally ill (or "defective") were though fewer as disgraceful a part of Nazi extermination programmes as the Jews, and there are clear parallels that could be drawn here with the American programme of psychosurgery (though note that the island asylum's staff includes – I won't say who – representatives of the humanitarian as well as surgical and pharmaceutical wings of psychiatry). But this film, a shoddily assembled comic book plot, just cheapens and demeans these historical resonances.
It leaves me feeling quite angry. The film must have cost tens of millions . As my opening remarks say, the talent and the resources are all there. It's just so lazy, so slapdash. Is there no quality control? There's forty, fifty amateur critics or more on this site, each of whom could have told the producers and director what was going wrong. How could this mess get made?
The Lovely Bones (2009)
Comic book spirituality for the me generation
I haven't read the book, and on the basis of this film, I'm not sufficiently intrigued to want to, though I was puzzled leafing through a copy in a bookshop. Its admirers had led me to think that one of the problems with this film was that it couldn't hope, in just 130 minutes, to capture the richness of incident and character development in the book. I had in mind, therefore, a substantial doorstop of a novel, and was a bit surprised to find it ran to barely 300 pages, in a medium font with generous spacing. Not a doorstop at all. More what Stephen King knocks off over a weekend and calls a short story.
Still, I'm not here to criticise the book, and I wouldn't normally bother with the film either, feeling it just wasn't my sort of thing and that I'd nothing useful to add. But there is something about the tone of some of the reviews here – mostly those approving and giving nine/ten stars – that is just so provocative. The allegation, made several times (though I won't quote anyone as it's not the function of IMDb to take up individual disputes), is that those of us who didn't like it are lacking some component of emotional intelligence, unable to relate to an adult plot that deals with feelings and character, and that we can only enjoy films full of explosions or fights or gore. It's an insufferably smug, patronising view, and I have to try to rebut it.
The problem with this film is not that we don't understand emotions. Rather we understand them only too well, and we can see this film's sentimentalised view of the world for what it is. At best, cloyingly kitsch; at worst, poisonously selfish and narcissistic.
Let me give an example. The young woman, Susie, who dies, had a boyfriend, Ray. Well, a boyfriend of sorts. We don't find out anything about him. Intriguingly, his surname is Singh. Is he a Sikh? Who knows; we know nothing about his background, his parents, his outlook, his hopes or ambitions. Cinematically, he's just a pretty boy. The two characters exchange no more than a few words, snatched by the visual cliché of the high school "lockers in a corridor", at which they set up a tentative date (which death will prevent).
This is not Romeo and Juliet, not Abelard and Heloise; Tristan and Isolde did not have a tryst in a shopping mall. This is basically a teenage crush, fuelled mostly by rampant hormones. Yet we're supposed to believe that this is a grand love affair which echoes down the dimensions and transcends the grave.
There's a rather creepy sideline to this. The grandmother Lynn (Susan Sarandon playing I take it the wise old crone archetype), has a ghastly conversation with Susie in which she wants to know whether Susie's kissed him yet (I think I'm right in believing that at this stage she hasn't even spoken to him). I mean, I'm a tolerant, liberal sort of a person, and I certainly wouldn't want a young person's sexual development clouded with guilt and repression. But for heaven's sake, she's only 14. It's one thing to take a permissive attitude, quite another to egg her on.
But this kiss is important, as we shall find out. In a barely disguised metaphor of virginity, a myth is being created about your "first kiss". The aunt dreamily reminisces that nothing subsequently ever quite equals it.
This comes to a head at the end of the film. There is a secondary, rather intriguing character called Ruth, a semi-outsider who, despite being fey, appears to have some intelligence and insight, and who strikes up a friendship with the forlorn Ray. This in itself is very strange; it's as though the author or scriptwriter had created this character to fulfil some important plot function, but then thought better of it, yet not bothered to cut out the character. You think, at the end, that this character is going to execute some crucial plot revelation, having seen Susie's ghost in circumstances that might be expected to tell her something important, but instead she just faints and drops out of further consideration.
Ray rushes over, concerned at his friend's/lover's (we don't know for sure) collapse, and in affection kisses her on the lips, only to discover (to his apparent delight) that it is Susie that he is kissing.
Well, I'm sorry. Call me pedantic, emotionally stunted, whatever you like. But excuse me for worrying; what about poor old Ruth? What about her happiness? What about her "emotional journey", and her "closure" and "healing", and all the other self-regarding psychobabble spouted by the me generation? What about her chances of forging a relationship with Ray? Gone. She now knows, for sure, that she will only ever be second best to his real love. She doesn't even get her kiss - it's stolen from her by a ghost. And once stolen, remember, it's gone for good, or so we're led to believe.
It's actually despicable. This is having your emotional cake and eating it. It attempts to deliver some sort of mature message about "letting go", but actually what it really says is that even in death, you can have it all, and at no matter what cost to anyone else. This is the real objection that some of us have to this film. Not that it tackles emotions like grief, but that it does so in a crass, sentimentalised, and profoundly selfish way.
I should give this film a few more stars - the two young women, McIver and Ronan, do well, as of course does Carolyn Dando playing Ruth, and Tucci is as reliable as ever - but I think they'll enjoy success anyway. This is a high budget production by a leading director, and it needs to be judged by the severest standards.
Parasomnia (2008)
Creepy
This film is very creepy indeed. Unfortunately, not for the reasons the film makers would hope.
There's a mastermind serial killer too, but he's not what's creepy either. He's just your standard comic book villain, a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Freddie Kruger, though with nothing particularly fresh to add to either. Incidentally, for even the vilest and most reprehensible of criminals, can they be detained chained in a stress position, on their feet, arms outstretched 24 hours a day week in week out? I suppose in the world that gave us Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, anything's possible.
No, what's really creepy about this film is the central character, Danny. This unappealing young man, aided and abetted it's true by some ludicrously lax security arrangements and a doctor entirely careless of any notion of professional ethics or patient confidentiality, wanders into the hospital room occupied by what can only be described as a highly vulnerable and defenceless young woman, and on the basis of nothing whatsoever (her chronic sleeping precludes from being able to give anything like informed consent) imagines himself to have some sort of special relationship with her.
Seemingly within days, he has arrogated to himself the right to abduct her, believing (completely falsely, as we discover) that he is better able to care for her than anyone else, and within minutes of getting her back to his apartment, is sexually molesting her though she is (again due to her sleepiness) entirely unable to consent or resist.
Our suspicions as to why he would feel this connection are pretty soon confirmed. He is of course more or less unable to form any mature adult friendships, let alone sexual relationships, so instead falls back on this essentially infantilised woman, who because of her permanent sleeping has a mental age corresponding to a lived experience of only a few years. The scene where she discovers ice cream is particularly cringe-making, and the coyly knowing look she gives him when he gloatingly says he'll have to clean her up again causes a particular shudder of horror. But again, I'm afraid, not that shudder of horror the film makers were hoping for, but a much more straightforward spasm of revulsion. We can all see clearly what's on the end of our forks here - it's the paedophile's perfect dream of innocence, sexual compliance and utter dependence. Horrible, horrible, horrible.
What else have we got in this mish mash? Twisted dreamscapes not quite as good as del Toro. The compulsory "You need to go to the police" argument, where the lead character always has a reason for not doing so even though it's the only sensible course of action. The automaton sequence, much praised in the comments here, though completely and utterly pointless ("It serves no function!", as Sigourney Weaver memorably protested in Galaxy Quest) and looking to me just like the Abominable Doctor Phibes rehashed in one of the Saw derivatives.
Jeffrey Combs does his best though, so a star for that, and a couple more because you have to keep lower rankings for films that are even worse than this, and in general this is well-shot and competently performed.
Flyboys (2006)
Unintentional hilarity
I try not to review a film if I've got nothing to add to what's already been said, and the very many bad reviews here are practically all spot-on. Many of them were written by people who clearly know a lot more than me both about the relevant history and the practicalities of early aviation, and while I appreciate their explanations of the many absurdities in this film, I would point out that even if you're not an expert, it still just feels all wrong, from the swarms of supersonic triplanes to the offensive stereotyped ideas about the prevalence of brothels (full of jolies mademoiselles) in France; you can't even crash your plane without landing in the back garden of one.
But there are some belly-laughs as well. Many of them are explored in hilarious detail in these reviews, but I do want to talk about one that I haven't seen mentioned here (apologies if I've missed it) and which had me crying tears of helpless joy, callous swine that I am.
I can't be bothered to replay the film and get the dialogue down pat, so you'll just have to accept my paraphrase. Towards the end, as the squadron sets off on a final heroic mission, a character turns up who has lost his hand. (How? Well, I won't spoil the pleasure of finding out for yourself, though there are plenty of other reviewers hinting at the explanation here, and it is in truth probably the most ludicrous sequence in the entire film, by quite a distance actually). Anyway, he smartly salutes the squadron leader (with the other hand, natch) and says "Permission to fly, sir". The leader (our nominal hero) looks down sceptically at the amputated forearm, to which the airman has attached a marvellous pantomime prosthetic hook. "Just something I knocked up in the machine shop, sir. I know I can fly: I've been practising". "Very well," says the leader, politely failing to point out that the artificial arm is a good six inches longer than the real one, "but if I think you're not up to it, I'm ordering you straight back to base".
We now see the squadron, ten or twelve planes, bouncing across the grassy airfield, and taking off in perfect informal formation....all except one. One plane, at the back of the pack, is lagging behind and struggles to get airborne at all. The camera pov switches to the cockpit, and we see our one-handed friend struggling to get his hook around the joystick. Which engaged sympathetic viewer can resist at this point the impulse to shout at the screen, "Use your other hand, you fool!" ? Certainly not me.
Finally the plane struggles off the ground, barely clearing the perimeter hedge, and bravely sets off in pursuit of the main pack.
Unfortunately, comic gold though this is, the film just can't maintain this level of inspiration. Too often, it's just plain limp, or embarrassing. Two stars: one, because everything gets one, and the second for these all too brief flashes of comic genius (another one, of interest to British viewers, is the casting as the French adjutant of an actor who looks just like the gendarme in the British-made French resistance sitcom, Allo Allo); but overall this is just one colossally bad film. Not heroically bad, not perversely or madly bad; just bad.
Scrapbook (2000)
What sort of a failure is this?
I wanted to see this, because I like to see films that push at the boundaries, and because it got a surprisingly good review from the DVD Delirium Guide (Vol 2). That review describes the film as "ferocious and highly accomplished", praises the actors' "impassioned, uncomfortably convincing performances", and claims that "Scrapbook is hardly your standard exercise in prurient sadism".
As such, it is at odds with most of the reviews here, and I fear that on this occasion it's the contributors to IMDb who have got it right. Whatever else it is, this film is not "highly accomplished". For example, in its summary of the plot, DVD Delirium explains that "Clara begins to closely analyze the scrapbook, devising a way to prolong her life, explore the mind of her captor, and perhaps even escape." Oh, that's what she was doing, was she? All we, the viewers, see is her leafing through the pages of the scrapbook. Unfortunately, neither the scriptwriter nor the director have any of the intelligence or dramatic sense needed to bring this internal struggle to life. She looks at the book, she pretends to submit to his demands, lulls him into a position of vulnerability, then strikes. The existence of that eponymous scrapbook is irrelevant; she could have devised that strategy even without it, in addition to which I tend to agree with the reviewer here who points out that Ms Haack looks physically well able to take care of a neurotic clumsy beanpole like her captor at much earlier stages in the film.
Other dramatic or psychological opportunities are missed or bungled. For example, the visit by the neighbour could have been an excellent exercise in wracking up tension as he slowly realises that something is not quite right here. Instead he gets one quick look at the photos on the wall, then bang! wallop! it's all, implausibly, over. Similarly, some of the psychological elements in the captor's rants are promising, hinting at his need for control, but the script can't maintain this with any consistency or develop it meaningfully. Even the filmic device of seeing the abuse in the shower through the camcorder the captor sets up is fumbled: who sets up the camera through which we see the camcorder being set up? But if this film is not quite the triumph DVD Delirium claims, what is it? A bold experiment that overreaches its ambition? Or a tawdry piece of torture porn? I was in two minds for a bit. Heaven knows, life's too short to listen to whole commentaries, but I listened to the first few minutes, and they all - director, producer, actress - sound very earnest. There's all sorts of talk about trust, and we learn how lots of the scenes were improvised (as though Mike Leigh was making a horror film!), though not, as is carefully explained, the notorious unfaked urination sequence. Just a week before seeing this, I had by coincidence seen Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend, a famous film that had passed me by, and about a third of the way into Scrapbook there was a sequence that reminded me completely of what Godard was trying to do. The camera takes a long leisurely pan around an empty room and back (the victim is hiding in the cupboard) while from the other side of the locked door the captor recounts a particularly scabrous anecdote of an encounter with a hooker.
But what finally made up my mind was not the film itself, but the extras. I have already mentioned the shower scene, in which the stoical Ms Haack is tied in the shower with her arms over her head, stripped full frontal and abused; well, in case you didn't get enough of that, the DVD thoughtfully provides an extended uncut version of just this scene, conveniently packaged up as a little ten minute short, shorn of any plot or context. Just long enough for... well I think we all know what it's long enough for.
It looks to me like the director's production company was involved in putting together this DVD package. It's at moments like this that we can see (to paraphrase Burroughs) exactly what's on the end of our forks. The director may come on strong as though he was making a cutting edge piece of provocative film-making, and may even have succeeded in persuading himself that's what he was doing. But by their deeds shall ye know them, as it were; when it comes down to it, what they were really making was a sleazy piece of exploitative porn, and barely consensual at that.
Incidentally, this is a review of the 95 minute Region 1 version. The British version is much shorter, I believe, by well over ten minutes. I'm not quite sure what to advise. It's easy to guess at what's missing, but the film doesn't really deserve seeing at either length. But if you must see it, then I think you must see it at its fuller length. Shorn of its shocks, the film would be both nasty and boring I suspect; if you're going to see it at all, you should at least give yourself the opportunity of learning something useful about the psychopathology of bad film-making.
Películas para no dormir: Regreso a Moira (2006)
An unexpected triumph
As of the date of writing this, the boxed set of 6 Spanish horror films "
to keep you awake" of which this is a part is selling for silly collectors' prices in the UK, whereas the Region 1 copy I recently got from the USA came out of the bargain bin. And how pleased I am I took a gamble on it, as each and every one of the shortish (75 min) films (TV programmes?) has proved a real treat. They're not necessarily uniformly successful, but they're beautifully filmed, convincingly performed, and each brings real intelligence and no little originality to its execution. As a whole, the series bears comparison with the American "Masters of Horror", and I think betters them, though it's a little unfair to say that as with only six episodes there's less opportunity to mis-fire. Still, overall, I can't overstate my recommendation to any horror fan looking for some rewarding alternative to the current relentless diet of zombies, torture and teenagers-going-to-a-remote-cabin-in-an-SUV.
Equally, though, there's no doubt in my mind that this episode is the standout. At heart this is a fairly straightforward ghost story (and there are even echoes of Peter Straub's "Ghost Story" in the plot device of old men reminiscing about a femme fatale of their adolescence), but the elements are orchestrated with real skill, and the "twist" (derided by one reviewer here as "making no sense" oh, but believe me, it makes very terrible sense indeed) came as a real shock to me, no less for being delivered with perfect timing, by which I mean I realised what the old man (Tomas) was going to see in the window just a split second before he actually saw it, but no sooner. Beyond the immediate rewards of actually watching it though a creepy accumulation of authentic dread, just enough real shocks, and full-on gore barely glimpsed the film continues to haunt the imagination and it is only in retrospect that its full dreadful implications become clear. Though in my mind this film sits alongside "The Devil's Backbone" , Del Toro's film for all its political and historical complexity ends up with an almost cornily (but charmingly so) traditional ghost, and the final message is a profoundly humanistic one of love and simple courage. No such redemptive hope enlivens "Spectre", however, the devastating nihilism of which only becomes fully clear as you contemplate afterwards the ramifications of the terrible events portrayed. There is a wrong, or possibly several wrongs, at the heart of this drama, and the younger Tomas perpetrates an act of betrayal both ugly and banal, the consequences of which are truly terrible. But has he, or indeed any of the characters in the film since nobody emerges happy, or successful actually erred to the extent of deserving the appalling comprehensive undoing that comes to him and them? And to what extent is Tomas even responsible; arguably, his betrayal was only the convenient trigger for what was inevitably to follow. The awful, anti-humanist, irrationalist thought occurs that actually he was doomed before the film even began. At the opening of Dante's Inferno, Dante finds himself lost "I took a turn in a dark wood" - but can't think where he went wrong, and so it is with Tomas, whose steps we try to retrace with mounting bewilderment. He was only a schoolchild! But as Tomas's lover hauntingly says to him "I am the weaver of your destiny
". These thoughts and speculations are profoundly shocking to those of us who hope to believe in the power of rationality and the possibility of human progress.
I apologise for talking in these oblique terms, but I am hoping to pique the reader's interest and make them want to see this film without having to introduce a spoiler warning.
As a sub-species of the horror film, the ghost story is particularly difficult to carry off. Perhaps it's because whereas the written word can evoke the darkest imaginings of the reader's nightmares, the literal camera can only really portray them, and inevitably ends up with a Caspar-like banality. I'm trying to tick great filmed ghost stories off on my fingers, and I fear just one hand will do (with perhaps the other hand for ones I only know by reputation, like Kwaidan). There's Devil's Backbone, Robert Wise's The Haunting, Don't Look Now (though as with the Devil's Backbone, this is not the ghost you were first thinking of). What else? Possibly Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape, though that is filmed and performed in an early 70s TV style that is now distractingly dated. Curse (or Night) of the Demon? True, that was from a tale by M.R.James, but it's not really a proper ghost story. One of the greatest ghost stories written post WW2 is Elizabeth Jane Howard's "Three Miles Up", but that received a dismally inappropriate British TV treatment, as clunkily and uncomprehendingly literal-minded as the lamentable remake of The Haunting. We can argue about the details of what is and isn't on the list, but my recommendation is clear. This little gem is a real find, and sits deservedly in this very exclusive company.
Blackout (2008)
Is the UK version heavily cut?
As I write this, IMDb gives just one running time: Germany, 120 mins. But the version I've just seen, rented in London from a branch of the well-known chain, runs at just 81 mins (both the DVD machine and a glance at the mantelpiece confirm it). Can this be right? Was there really 40 mins, a third of the original film, cut from it? Even with this much cut, this UK version still carries the full 18 certificate; what on earth can there have been in this missing footage? Still, taking what I saw at face value, this was a very well-timed, concise and claustrophobic little shocker. I'm not quite sure what the purpose of a film like this, and in other reviews I've taken moral exception to misogynistic violence gloatingly filmed, but I found this both convincing and, and its penultimate minutes, viscerally frightening, and in the end, perhaps that authentic terror is all the justification that's needed.
I don't think I need to introduce spoilers here (even though the film doesn't really rely on twists as such, even though a couple of false trails are laid), so I'll just say vaguely that the gradual disintegration and revelation of character is well handled and paced by the scriptwriter and effectively portrayed by all three main actors. Being a lover of epic films, I'd normally be wanting to find that 2 hour version straight away, but on this occasion I just don't how it could improve on this tight little gem. There's nothing needs adding. But I'd be interested to see any reviewers here explicitly discussing the fuller cut.
I'm with the few reviewers here who express bewilderment at the comparatively low rating on IMDb, and who found this a rewarding little surprise. This is promising work by Castaneda (who I see was also responsible for the equally under-rated KM31) and writer Dougherty. I'm looking forward to seeing more by either or both of them.
In Bruges (2008)
Cynical and derivative
I wasn't going to review this, but a recent rash of award nominations together with encouragement from people like Barry Norman (the UK film critic) provokes it. A characteristically attractive central performance by Brendan Gleeson (too good for this material) and at least competent performances by Farrell and Fiennes conceal the profound moral emptiness and cynicism at the heart of this film, which blatantly attempts to assemble the components of a cult hit. Add a dash of Tarantino dialogue, the comic cinematic dwarf from "Living in Oblivion", the psychopathic geezer-gangster from Sexy Beast; even the title is probably a steal (though in different circumstances it could have been quite a funny one; American readers should know that there is a satirical magazine in the UK called Private Eye, a bit like your "Onion", and in Private Eye there is a running joke about an imaginary film called "They flew to Bruges", which successfully captures everything about the sort of worthy and desperately unglamorous black-and-white 1950s war film that you might doze off to on a Sunday afternoon's telly).
But look: it takes more than adding a few effs and jeffs to the dialogue to make you Tarantino. You have to have an ear for real speech to make this work. All we get here is just pointless foul-mouthedness, but with not one memorable or quotable line in the whole thing. Compare this to, for example, Armando Ianucci's "The thick of it" (A TV political satire), where a character hovering in a doorway is told to "Come the f*** in or f*** the f*** off"; now that's funny, creative swearing. In "In Bruges" it's just depressing and relentless. Still, the director and producers are enormously proud of their potty-mouths, as they devote a whole DVD extra to counting the instances. "Oh, grow up", is the only response I can muster.
These three central characters are two hit men and their psycho boss. Gleeson's character can remain appealing enough as we are told little enough about the hard realities of his background, but Farrell (the ostensible lead, with whom we are supposed to sympathise), is on the run in Bruges (this isn't a spoiler as it's clear early on) because of a "hit" that's gone wrong, resulting in the death of an innocent child (a choirboy, no less). Still, any moral qualms one might have about rooting for these dangerous sociopaths can be conveniently be put to one side because the "hit" that went wrong was on a priest who had been interfering with children. A paedo! So that's alright then; never mind that their more normal business is enforcing with violence the trades of prostitution and protection and drugs, not to mention narcissistic concepts of "respect"; he was attempting to shoot a paedo, so the collateral killing of a child is just another comic blunder.
As for the denouement, which I don't need (and can't be bothered)to introduce spoiler warnings for: preposterous, just preposterous. If the contrived ending had introduced some moral shape (even if just a subversive or nihilistic one) to the proceedings, there might have been some redemptive power. Instead, all it does is just emphasise the cynical way in which the ingredients, including the calculated taunting of imagined "political correctness", have been mixed together. Not to mention their sheer implausibility.
Not clever, not funny, not original, not satirical, not cutting-edge or black comedy, not even realistic; just a nasty taste in the mouth.
Caligola (1979)
Cut and uncut versions
There is available in the UK often in bargain bins a heavily cut version, though still rated 18, coming in at just under 100 minutes, losing an hour from the "cinema release" listed here at 156.
That cut version I saw years ago on British television (where it may have had further seconds shaved off). But now, with the wonders of international mail order and multi-region DVD players, I've seen it uncut. How does it compare? First reaction; astonishment that they rescued 98 minutes of material both broadcast-able yet retaining some narrative coherence. The sex and nudity is so pervasive. Even where characters are explaining critical plot developments as with the young Caligula's talk with Tiberius there's things going on behind them. And though the sex generally has some point, some of the nudity is hilariously irrelevant. Where increasingly deranged Caligula launches a play-acting invasion on an imaginary Britain, the attacking troops are bafflingly nude (and splendid chaps they all seem to be too, hundreds of them). Earlier in the film, as Caligula makes his way to his audience with Tiberius, we pass a road-mending gang also in the nude. Why? This isn't a matter of prudery, just prudence. I know the Roman Empire was more casual than we are nowadays about health and safety in the workplace, but with all those pickaxes and shards of rock flying around, a little bit of elementary protection for a worker's dangly bits would have been just commonsense.
What about the sex? I don't watch porn films as such, but I've got access to the internet and I've seen modern films like Empire of the Senses, Nine Songs, and Baise-moi. I was all ready to adopt a bored indifference. But by the end, I have to admit I was a bit shaken. There's just so much of it, both relentlessly through the film, and simultaneously. It's that last point more than anything that counts. Alright, you can tell I've never been invited to an orgy. But while no single act portrayed represents anything that hasn't been seen on screen before, I wasn't expecting quite so much of it, all in the same room and at the same time. I can't pretend I wasn't impressed.
But what was the point of it? Some people here compare it to Pasolini's Salo, and I think that's instructive. I'm not sure Salo is a good film, but its moral and political purpose is clear, which is to chart the corruption of fascism. It achieves its effects by a gradual escalation of depravity reaching a shattering conclusion. Whether successful or not, it certainly disturbs and haunts the imagination. The defence of Caligula, presumably, works similarly; it is a portrayal of decadence and corruption and the political forms accompanying it. But if so, it simply doesn't work; for two reasons, I think.
Firstly (a fault it shares with Salo) it is too hermetic, and doesn't explain enough about the social and political background against which this depravity takes place. Secondly, it is just too relentless. For example, towards the end, we see Caligula deliberately insulting and humiliating the senators by prostituting their wives in a specially built state brothel, which is a key event in crystallising the coup against Caligula. But the outrage is unconvincing. The wives themselves don't seem to mind, approaching their duties, largely oral on this occasion, with no more nor less enthusiasm than anything else they've done. "Oh, come on", the viewer protests, "you're all at it all the time anyway; how does this make it any worse?". And sure enough, the senators on hand seem merely peeved rather than outraged.
The film fails too as a personal portrayal of the corruption of Caligula. Here Caligula is corrupt from the outset, despised and suspected by the honourable Nerva, and admiringly described by the dying Tiberius as a "viper nurtured in the bosom of Rome". There is no sense of any process of undermining early ideals or even innocence; his behaviour just gradually gets even more and more transgressive. It isn't helped by a performance by Malcolm McDowell (who I've frequently admired elsewhere) that seems to come straight from "Carry On Caligula". His humiliation of Proculus and his bride-to-be ought to be seriously disturbing, but instead just comes on like a pantomime villain.
Is the film a spectacle (other than as an orgy)? Allegedly it cost some $15 million dollars but one can only imagine that most of that was spent on persuading enormous numbers of extras to "do it" on camera. The sets are astonishingly stage-bound, many scenes opening with the same establishing shot with a flat ornate backdrop (niches, marble panels etc.) and the furniture and props laid out left-to-right in front of it. You can almost see the imaginary proscenium arch framing it. Most of the film takes place indoors, yet there is no sense of space or layout in the buildings involved; just a succession of stage sets. When the characters started to enter and leave rooms by ducking behind curtains, I laughed out loud, as I was simply reminded of an Ed Wood spaceship. The outdoor shots fail to open the film out in any way either. The arena of the grisly beheading machine is particularly claustrophobic, bound by the same four-square geometry that ties so many other scenes to the strict dimensions of the screen.
Am I glad I saw the full length version? Yes, but then I'm always interested in seeing the extremes of film-making. Is this film successful? No; a monstrous folly. Is it porn? Of course; just because it represents a failed genre attempting to import porn into mainstream cinema doesn't mean it isn't porn. Good porn? You'll have to ask the man in the dirty mac; I'd guess only intermittently.
But it deserves a few stars just for the sheer bravado of its folly.
The Greenskeeper (2002)
Beware cut version
IMDb lists this as 90 minutes, but the version I saw on a British DVD (in a boxed set of individually unsellable horror films) barely got to 77 minutes. Was it cut? Since the boxed set had an 18 rating anyway (strictest in the UK apart from porn films) it's hard to know what the motivation for cutting it could be. Like censors anywhere, those in the UK can be a bit crotchety, but policies are pretty liberal nowadays and it's hard to believe that they could have found thirteen minutes' worth of cuts that needed to be made.
Well, cut or not, what was this like? The last few minutes and especially a silly and gruesome joke about a lawn sprinkler just start to hint at a comic inventiveness that is miserably lacking from the rest of the film. Other than that, the reviews of the various people here who "hated it" look pretty accurate to me, and they were probably seeing a longer film. British viewers, check out the box. If it says 77 minutes, I certainly can't recommend this.
H6: Diario de un asesino (2005)
Nasty and pointless
(Only minor spoilers except as noted).
I've enjoyed a lot of Spanish cinema recently; both the actual Spanish cinema of people like Almodovar, and the Latin American cinema of directors like del Toro, whose superb "Devil's Backbone", set in Civil War Spain, was the finest horror film of the last decade. It's no surprise, then, that this film is both well-made, well-acted, and manages to sustain that distinctively different Spanish atmosphere. But it's also as nasty and pointless a film as one could hope not to have to see.
What actually is the purpose of all this? We have no real idea what caused the creepy central character to embark on his killing spree, despite the fact that large amounts of narrative voice-over are drawn directly from his own narcissistic journal. In a routinely unpleasant opening sequence, set more than a decade earlier, we see the central character killing his girlfriend in a rage of jealousy and control-freakery ("
if I can't have you nobody can
."). Oddly enough, that is perhaps one of the best sequences in the film, but it has no discernible relation to his subsequent killing spree, which appears completely different in both motivation and execution. What happened to him in jail to cause this change? We have no idea, though we do later discover, as an absurd sort of afterthought, that he obtained a law degree while imprisoned.
In Britain, in several of our notorious "serial killer" or "sex killer" cases, the terrible question arises; what about the wife? Did she know, or suspect what was going on? This is a question that this film could have asked, and indeed the wife does begin to emerge as one of the more intriguing characters. But banally, the answer to the question is quite clearly: "No, she didn't". Even when a dramatic opportunity like this is presented on a plate, the film still manages to bungle it. All we actually get, sketched perfunctorily out at the end, is her slightly amoral preparedness to cash in on the proceeds after the event. Compare this to the awful revelatory moment in Ten Rillington Place, where Christie's wife says "you know what I mean
." thereby sealing her own fate and allowing us an appalled glimpse into unimaginable chasms of suppressed knowledge and horror.
(Major spoiler in this paragraph). In the meantime, we are supposed to believe that the killer himself is a criminal mastermind who comprehensively outwits the police, thereby securing the briefest of incarcerations in a mental hospital before being released so that he can kill again. How exactly did he achieve this? The plot gets extremely sketchy at this point; something to do with deliberately leaving certain clues for the police; but how this all works or why, or how the subsequent court case actually proceeds, remains a mystery.
I actually don't believe serial killers are like this. The Silence of the Lambs may be comic book stuff, but Lecter aside it gets its serial killers right. They are deeply disturbed, deeply dysfunctional, deeply inadequate people; not the creepily charming mastermind presented here (closely related to the equally implausible suave killer of The Last Horror Movie, or indeed even Man Bites Dog, though it appears not to have been noticed that that was a satire).
This film has little suspense, and bungles what little intrigue the plot might have generated. It has nothing useful to say about the motivations of serial killers, either generally, or in the specific cultural milieu of Spain. This is nothing more than a poorly plotted excuse to show some pretty misogynistic violence to women. And oddly, what makes that violence even more repulsive is a certain prissy failure of nerve even in how it is presented. The soft core character of what is actually shown just makes it seem even more repellently titillatory. Just one explicit shot, properly timed, would have been infinitely more shocking, and would have rendered all the rest completely unnecessary, freeing up more film time to flesh out the gaping holes in plot and characterisation. Instead we just get endless shots of young women vulnerably spreadeagled on a table in their pretty but slightly revealing underwear. Very, very creepy. I'm sorry to be rude; I love horror films, and can tolerate even the most extreme, to the extent even of worrying my partner. But I think anyone who finds this film good, or interesting, even I'd find myself edging away from. The purpose of a horror film is to scare you; this is just lascivious.
It leaves a very bad taste in the mouth indeed. I have to give this film more than one star just because it's competently executed, but morally it deserves none at all and should never have been made.
The Outer Limits: The Sixth Finger (1963)
Parallel universes
If you didn't see The Outer Limits at the time, then watching them now is an odd experience. It lacks quite the quirky charm of the Twilight Zone, but it still capable of taking you by surprise with unexpected flashes of imagination. A lot of it is embarrassing, or just plain boring, though none of it is ever as bad as the worst science fiction B movies of that time, and certainly the strong casts reliably outperform the limp scripts. I won't comment particularly on the several very strongly favourable comments here. I think they are all tinged with a wash of nostalgia. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's actually very interesting to see, but it's unlikely to persuade anyone coming to this episode for the first time in the twenty first century. I still revere The Prisoner, but I wouldn't dream of recommending it to a new audience now.
But what makes this episode in particular stand out, and be worthy of a special recommendation, especially to British viewers, is the quite astonishing portrayal of what seems to be a Yorkshire, or possibly, Welsh mining village. It is as though the opening chapters of Sons & Lovers (D.H.Lawrence) had been re-imagined in the world of The Darling Buds of May (H.E.Bates). What would that mean for an American reader? What about On The Waterfront re-imagined with the characters and setting of Tobacco Road? It is that grotesque.
There is no sign of a pit, and the village is more or less a rural idyll, but there are random roving working class types, extremely grimy, and ever ready to subject any available maiden to a bit of sexual harassment (hey-nonny-no) while knocking off the odd traditional shanty on the button concertina. It defies all rational analysis, and has to be seen to be believed.
And the voice of the young woman (Constance Cavendish) behind the counter in the village shop must surely be a candidate for one of the most bizarre screen accents of all time, in which Welsh, Gestapo, Asian and robotic elements are perpetually at war with each other. I recently laughed at an American survey of Dick van Dyke's career which said that though his "Cockney accent in Mary Poppins was notoriously bad, nevertheless he remained popular in the UK". No, no, no; there's no nevertheless to it. It's because his Cockney accent was so bad that we all love him. We British are a bit strange like that; we admire incompetence in all its forms. But by these standards, Constance Cavendish should have been an international megastar. Whatever became of her? Unmissable.
Half Light (2006)
Stolen moments
I didn't enjoy this, but perhaps I was in a bad mood. Right from the start, though, it got on my nerves. In the opening scenes, we discover a youngish professional couple at home, and it becomes obvious they work in the arts. Various everyday domestic events take place, while their young child plays outside with a talking Action Man figure near a body of water. And then, guess what? Discovering the drowned body of the child, a parent lets out a howl of grief......
What film am I watching? Don't Look Now, of course, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Except that isn't: it's Half Light, with Demi Moore, and some bloke off the telly.
But I'm sorry to have to tell the Director, Craig Rosenberg: Nicholas Roeg, you're not.
And so the film goes on, a bit of this and a bit of that, a bit of Les Diaboliques, a bit more of Don't Look Now (fey psychic women), a bit of the Shining (writer's block), a bit of the Wicker Man, and none of it quite as good as the original.
And I'm sorry, but while I'm being rude - the music. Composer: Brett Rosenberg. Wouldn't be a relative of yours, would he? All this terrible, oppressive, wistful plinky-plonky noodling on the piano. A hint about the music: if you want to create a supernatural effect with music (i.e. a tape recorder that switches itself on) then if you have to shut the soundtrack up specially so this can happen, you need to consider the possibility that you might be overdoing the soundtrack in the first place. Or worse, your audience might find find itself wondering whether the music is really supernatural at all, or just your relative at it again. Listen: some of the scariest moments in film take place in absolute silence.
And the plot doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I can't really say why without introducing spoilers, but in very general terms, it's one of those complex conspiracies that implausibly depend on everything happening just so. If you look at it all from the point of view of the villains, there's just too many things that could go wrong. I mean, what would have happened if she'd asked the policeman about the lighthouse on her first walk into the village? (That question will make sense if you see the film). Things don't go wrong, of course, or not until the authors want them too, because the authors haven't really thought it through from that point of view: their only intent is to attempt to deceive the audience. And we know it; you have failed to weave the magic spell that ever lets us forget it.
And I'm sorry, for me that opening rip-off, whether cynical plagiarism or just incompetent homage, meant I could never even get started.
Hostel (2005)
Pointlessly nasty
I love horror films, and though obviously I'm going to put films like the Devil's Backbone and the (original) Haunting at the top of my list, films with some character and meaningful plotting and subtlety, I'm not above enjoying a bit of mindless gore either, what Stephen King called "the gross-out".
But this film left me feeling dirty. It's just plain nasty. Two thirds the way through, there's a scene SPOILER COMING UP where the hero rescues a woman who's being tortured with a blowtorch. Her eye is hanging down her cheek, and our hero has to snip it off with a pair of scissors. I put the DVD on pause and went to make a cup of coffee to recover. "No", I thought, "that's not clever. That's just taking the p***."
The strangest thing about all this is the involvement of (as producer) Quentin Tarantino and (as actor and mentor) Takashi Miike. Those two between them have directed two of the most memorably nasty scenes in cinema history the torture scenes in Reservoir Dogs and Audition respectively. It's worth pausing a moment to consider why those scenes are great, because they are everything this film is not. In Reservoir Dogs, the worst thing never actually happens. Slicing off an ear is bad enough, but it's not the most terrible thing, and all it does is establish that the psychopathic torturer is capable of anything. Everything after that is all in the audience's imagination; it's all in the thinking of what might happen. The torture in Audition is even more explicit, of course, shockingly so, and first bad things happen, then even worse ones. But it's timed perfectly, and it has a real moral purpose. The hero has done wrong, there's no doubt about it, but surely, we ask ourselves, not so as to deserve this.
No such intelligence or artistry or simple technical skill informs anything in this film. Not at all. There's nothing in the script or characterisation to make us care about these people in any way, and though the Director makes a sort of half-hearted attempt to build up some tension and creepiness, he just abandons the effort after about half an hour as though saying "Right, that's enough nonsense for an intro, now let's get on with the torture".
So incompetently is this done that we're presented with our first glimpses of the torture chamber from the point of view of the victim looking through a hole in the hood over their face. Any possibility that we might feel some empathetic fear here is rather spoiled by the fact that we don't actually know whose eyes we're looking through. We can make a good guess, and it turns out that probably our first guess is the right one, though it could have been one of several people. But this isn't clever or skillful: it's just lazy and incompetent.
The worst of it all though is that these aren't bumbling but enthusiastic amateurs. They're smart, experienced filmmakers. If they were amateurs, you might award them some credit for breaking out of the usual dismal "re-making my favourite scenes from the Evil Dead/Blair Witch" mode. But these people are clever, and don't they just know it.
This is what is finally hard to take, the sense of being patronised by these fools, who hold our intelligence in such disrespect that they think all they have to do is gross us out and we'll be amazed.
Here's an odd little trivial detail which I don't think anyone's noticed. Having arrived at the hostel and having fallen prey to the siren seductresses who lurk there, our two heroes enjoy a sexual encounter with them (not so much soft-core as parental guidance). This is accompanied by some exotic music, the first few bars (I was going to say snatch, but that somehow didn't seem appropriate) of which are a quote, too accurate not to be deliberate, from Britt Eklund's dance in the Wicker Man.
Yeah, clever. But not clever enough. Don't patronise me. First, make a decent film. Then you can set about dazzling me with your witty allusive references and homages.
Oh, and I'm not surprised there are protests here from Slovakians. I've never been there, though it's one of many places in Eastern Europe and the Balkans I'd love to see (one of the better musical choices in the soundtrack was a little hint of Smetana as we look over the river running through the city), but even without knowing the country, I can tell this is just a crass insult, almost racist in its generalised offensiveness and sublimely adolescent dismissal of the morals, intelligence, and integrity of an entire nation.
I'm being harsh. I think Eli Roth could make a good film. But first, he has to face up to what a bad one he's made here.
The Wicker Man (1973)
Misunderstandings
*** May contain spoilers, but I'll try not to *** I can't believe how many people misunderstand the Wicker Man. Does everyone fall asleep half way through? There are hundreds of comments here, and obviously I can't check every one (well I can, but I can't be bothered), but all the ones I've looked at get it wrong.
The religion in the Wicker Man; it isn't particularly pagan, it isn't druidic, it isn't pre-Christian, and it isn't Ancient British. It's made up. Lord Summerisle explains this quite clearly half way through, when he tells Howie how his grandfather established the community, but that something was missing, so he introduced this artificial religion as an exercise in social engineering.
This isn't just accidental either. It's critical to understanding the appalling ending, where Howie warns Summerisle that this awful sacrifice better work, or else he'll be next. Hence the haunted expression on Summerisle's face, because he knows Howie is right, and because he also knows that the religion is made up, and it's just a load of old tosh. And that makes the horror even worse for Howie, because he knows that there is nothing he can do, and that at least one participant knows it's a charade, but will go through with it anyway.
I've given this film 8 stars, which for me is high praise, and though I didn't think much of it when I first saw it (when it was first released) it grows in my estimation every time I see it. It's certainly much more intelligent than even its fans appear to give it credit for.
There's a message for contemporary Britain here. Britain is going through a crisis of xenophobia and racism because of imagined problems with immigration. There are a number of idiots around who claim that we need to rediscover a sense of national identity and rediscover our Britishness (or, in some versions, our Englishness), and crucially, they also claim that such nationalism can be benign and non-racist. They need to watch the Wicker Man and think about it very hard. This invention of a set of ideas to fulfill a perceived social need is exactly what Lord Summerisle's grandfather did, and look what a Frankenstein's monster he created.
The final irony in all this is that there is a British singer songwriter called Billy Bragg, a leftwinger who witters on about rediscovering or reclaiming Britishness or Englishness just as I've described. But this same Billy Bragg has also derided the Wicker Man for presenting a travesty of pagan religion. Yes, Billy. Of course it's a travesty. It's meant to be. Go back and watch it again, and this time pay attention. They're talking about you.