Category: Film Review

Justin Dix’s Blood Vessel

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

What’s something you can find on a nazi warship that’s worse than nazis themselves? Well a group of allied castaways find out exactly what when they drift into the path of a deserted one in Blood Vessel (amazing title) a super fun, super old school, kinda low budget but enthusiastic B horror flick that I really enjoyed. As a stranded life raft from a torpedoed sub approaches a giant derelict boat, the survivors are seemingly saved until they board the craft, find it curiously deserted and discover what is lurking deep below deck, waiting to hunt them. It seems the nazis were transporting several caskets from Romania containing immortal creatures known as Strigoi, which are basically vampires with a lot more snazzy magic powers backed up by a lot more specific backstory lore. The minute these things wake up it’s game on as they discover these new people in their vicinity and begin to viciously take them out. The allied group is a surprisingly varied bunch including a cowardly Brit, an enthusiast Aussie, an American battle surgeon and an Eastern European badass who has survived all kinds of gnarly stuff and has the scars to prove it. They are all very well acted, written and have distinct, unique anthropological personas and angles which isn’t something you find in every horror flick about a bunch of folks who are essentially cannon fodder for vampires. The creatures themselves are very cool, designed with practical prosthetic effects, all exaggerated ears, accentuated fangs and acted with snarling vivacity by those under all that awesome makeup. What’s more is they aren’t just an animalistic horde either, they’re an ancient, evil aristocratic family complete with a young daughter Strigoi who is just as deadly as mom and dad, it’s a cool family dynamic. There’s gory showdowns, subtle sociopolitical banter amongst the human characters, well drawn arcs and loads of spooky, smoky, eerie abandoned boat atmosphere full of beautifully saturated Argento-esque lighting and gorgeous frames filled with gothic eye candy. A solid horror, streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Nia DeCosta’s Candyman

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Urban legends have a way of living on decades after the actual events that inspired them, like ghosts of the past doomed to linger as long as the collective human consciousness remembers what happened, and spreads it by word of mouth. The original 1992 Candyman film is a minted horror classic that has only gotten better with age and still holds up in every respect to this day, a terrifying supernatural parable that covers classism, racism, the power of myth and the passing on of stories in a ritualistic fashion. So how does Nia DeCosta’s Candyman, a ‘spiritual’ sequel and decades later follow up compare to its inspiration? Well naturally it’s not quite as good, but it was never going to be, and it was also never going to be the exact same thing because the world has changed and along with it so has the grim Chicago project housing neighbourhood of Cabrini Green, once a derelict death trap and now a hilariously partially gentrified (we see a rundown laundromat sitting snug right next to an artisanal ‘roastery’) overrun with art world types, the horrors that befell it over twenty years ago now almost forgotten. Not quite though, as we see struggling artist Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) catch wind of the Candyman events, now little more than a campfire story, and decide to investigate further in order to gain inspiration during an artistic dry spell where his successful girlfriend (Teyonah Parris) is supporting him financially. Naturally the more he learns the more his life unravels and pretty soon people are saying those magic words five times into mirrors and being viciously murdered by Candyman, albeit a different incarnation than Tony Todd’s iconic and darkly tragic Daniel Robitaille. He’s called Sherman Fields this time (played excellently by Michael Hargrove) and I gotta hand it to the guy, he’s pretty damn scary, in less baroque, theatrical fashion than Todd and instead a more animalistic, unstable way. The idea here is that Robitaille pioneered the dark necromancy that keeps the Candyman legend alive but there are also others, each with an appropriately unfortunate backstory, who fill the position. It’s a neat expansion into the mythos even if Todd himself gets sadly little to do here. The callbacks to the first are integrated well enough into this version of today so that it feels psychically linked to it without having outright sequel syndrome, which I suppose is what they mean by ‘spiritual sequel.’ Nia Decosta is a filmmaker to watch out for, she meticulously blocks actors and stages the killing scenes in ingeniously innovative ways using space, movement and reflection for some truly trippy and original sequences invoking settings like mirrored elevators, high rise apartments, high school washrooms and cavernous holes in dilapidated drywall. There’s also some beautiful shadow puppetry that fills in for flashbacks instead of ripping actual footage right from the 1992 version, which adds an elemental flourish and a terrific musical score by Robert Aiki Aubrey Love that echoes Phillip Glass’s achingly gorgeous original composition without aping it. There’s even some startlingly gruesome body horror thrown in that breaks new prosthetic ground and is… quite something to look at, or look away from depending on your tolerance. It ain’t the 1992 version and let’s face it, nothing will be. But it’s hell of a good horror film and a damn fine shoutout to a classic that’s in its own time capsule now, it illustrates how myth, legend and superstition live on no matter who forgets, dark forces like that have a way of finding their way home to the hallowed grounds where they were birthed, and this incarnation of Candyman is every bit as chilling and atmospheric as the first, albeit in different, fresh ways.

-Nate Hill

Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’m not sure exactly happened with The Black Dahlia but it’s like the recipe was there, it was on time and legible and whoever was in charge of whipping up the ingredients into something coherent, be it editor or producer or Brian DePalma himself, was simply having an off day. In telling the story of two hard-boiled LAPD detectives (Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett, both giving good performances that deserve a much better film) who are assigned to the infamous murder of Elizabeth Short (here played by Mia Kirshner in flashbacks), the filmmakers seem more intent on sidetracking into a useless love triangle between the two cops and a former prostitute (Scarlett Johannsson) as well as numerous political, high society and other cluttered subplot threads that don’t feel like they need to be there. Hartnett gets tangled up with a weird femme fatale (Hilary Swank trying on an accent that fails spectacularly) from a super rich and super shady aristocratic family and it’s here where the film, based on a fiction novel, tries its best to tell the made-up story of what really happened to this girl, kind of like that Johnny Depp Jack The Ripper film only nowhere near as gripping, atmospheric or well told of a story. There’s so much going on I just threw my hands up in frustration at one point and resigned myself to bailing on the story and simply spending most of the two hours playing I-Spy with all the familiar faces in the supporting cast, and it’s here I can say something truly positive about the film. I miss the days when big budget Hollywood flicks had epic, sprawling supporting casts full of awesome people on roll call, even if they’re only around for a swift cameo or couple cool quick scenes. Here we get appearances from many including Kevin Dunn, Mike Starr, Rose McGowan, Troy Evans, Richard Brake, Rachel Miner, Patrick Fischler, Gregg Henry, Ian McNeice, singer K.D. Lang, DePalma himself and more. The great British actress Fiona Shaw (Aunt Petunia in Harry Potter) almost saves the entire film with a deranged extended cameo as Swank’s deeply unstable mother, her performance is so intensely off the wall and bizarrely compelling she seems like she walked in from a David Lynch film, she’s basically the liveliest spark the film has to offer. There is one particular death scene that is also quite memorable and almost more gruesome than the Dahlia murder itself, you’ll know when you see it. I just couldn’t get wrapped up in this thing though, the story is all over the place, feels disingenuous at the core of its script and is just a giant mess, no other way to put it. Great cast though, at least there’s that.

-Nate Hill

DARK STAR (D. John Carpenter, 1974)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

It’s curious how little Dark Star is discussed in the canon of John Carpenter. It’s also puzzling given its rather large contribution to the sci-fi boom of the late 70’s that resulted in Star Wars in 1977 and Alien two years after that. Both franchises continue to dominate the market almost 40 years later and Carpenter has never been hotter as he’s successfully parlayed his iconic status into successful second careers in music and comic books.

In recalling the time between the heady and serious 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the more fantastical and forgiving world of Star Wars, it’s hard to think of any other title that perfectly bridged the two. Even in 1970, George Lucas would sear the sci-fi genre by releasing a dark, grim vision of the future with THX 1138, cementing his preferred sensibilities in the more sobering and academic and less in the pulpy adventures of Buck Rogers, something he admiringly mocks in the opening moments of the film. As the promise of the 60’s deteriorated and a public wanting more escapist fare, Lucas regressively stumbled backwards, awash in the nostalgia bug he picked up when escaping the realities of 1973 with American Graffiti. What he landed in, though, was Star Wars, a far sunnier vision of sci-fi that was bronzed with the American Western and Japanese Samurai films that informed Lucas’s creative mind.

So 1977 got space via the grand adventure films of Akira Kurosawa and 1974 got, according to Carpenter, “Waiting For Godot in Space.” Not only is that an apt description of the movie, it also is a dead-on example for the type of mindset that the defeatist and exhausted American movie-going public was in in 1974.

At the time of Dark Star’s creation and eventual theatrical release, Stanley Kubrick was still at the top of his game. Though his most recent film, 1971’s A Clockwork Orange (yet another sterile, grim look at the future), had been met with an alarming amount of controversy and wasn’t exactly embraced by all (Roger Ebert wasn’t all that hot on it), Kubrick’s reputation was still riding high from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a game changing mind-blower that still rendered him exciting and mysterious. And even though the worst of the Cold War’s nuclear fears were behind them, America still held Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove in high regard but, at only 10 years old, as a slightly older, yet still contemporary film.

Co-written by Carpenter and fellow UCLA alum Dan O’Bannon, Dark Star utilized the vision and satirical sensibilities of Kubrick’s freshest and exciting works as the foundation for a yarn about the crushing boredom and claustrophobia that is shared among the crew of a star cruiser, charged with destroying unstable planets. And, honestly, it’s totally fair to treat Dark Star as a true collaboration between Carpenter and O’Bannon as the latter’s contributions turn Carpenter’s budgetary shortcuts into imaginative miracles. Co-writer O’Bannon, later co-writer of the screenplay for Alien and computer animator for Star Wars, leads a crew including Bill Taylor (The Thing, Blade Runner), Jim Danforth (Flesh Gordon, Twilight Zone: The Movie), Bill Cobb (Star Wars, Alien), Gregory Jein (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture), and John Walsh (2010). Perhaps only 1970’s Equinox, another backyard project that was stewarded to a theatrical release by Jack Harris, would prove to be as potent a mix for future sci-fi professionals, matching Danforth and future Star Wars alum, Dennis Muren.

And like Equinox before it and the surprisingly enduring Flesh Gordon, released the same year as Dark Star, the low-budget effects are more than worth the price of admission. Though it lacks the absolutely amazing stop-motion animation of those two films, Dark Star mixes models and animation with ingeniously crafted production design; muffin tins, beach balls, 8-track tapes, ice cube trays, styrofoam packing are all utilized to surprisingly brilliant effect.

But while the innards are dressed by O’Bannon’s gadgets and his clever gags, the visual flow and sound design are all Carpenter’s which makes his presence as equally towering as that of O’Bannon’s. The classical visual compositions and the gently fluid camera crawls all recall certain specific moments that would appear later in Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982). And Carpenter’s score is, if not one of his best, one of his more underrated; a menacing, droning wave of bad, electronic vibes that seems to elevate the film when its on the soundtrack.

Dark Star is also an excuse for Carpenter to indulge his inner Howard Hawks for the first time as he serves up a story that, however comic, is populated by Men in Extreme Situations. The interaction between the characters is interestingly humorous in the same fashion that the blunt dullness found in the uncomfortable silences of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) is what makes that whole endeavor so hilarious.

As a story, there’s not too much to Dark Star. It’s a barely cohesive string of set pieces that build the framework of something that looks like a movie. And like both Equinox and Flesh Gordon, there’s not too much in the filler that sticks these moments together. But Dark Star is like raw, uncut magic. From Carpenter’s direction to the impressive number of special effect pros that sprang from it, Dark Star is like watching a wonderfully entertaining visual resume. Funny, liberating, and fueled on sheer energetic talent, little wonder that the galaxy far, far away that was created from Dark Star’s potent elements was such a phenomenon in 1977.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

Netflix’s Brand New Cherry Flavour

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It’s always neat when a major streaming service takes a devilish gamble on something completely deranged and ‘out there’ for their original shows, and Netflix’s Brand New Cherry Flavour is about as WTF as you can accessibly produce without going into full fledged David Lynch surreal arthouse realms. It’s based on a book by a dude called Todd Grimson who I’m not familiar with but the creator/show-runner is Nick Antosca who is responsible for my favourite horror tv show of all time Channel Zero (which can be seen on Shudder) so it’s safe to say his creative output here is also a unique, otherworldly game changer. This tells the story of Lisa Nova (Rosa Salazar, the Battle Angel in Alita), a film student who has brought her horror short to LA in hopes of signing a feature deal, which starts by garnering the interest of fast talking, knowledgeable, well connected producing guru Lou Burke (Eric Lange). Unfortunately, as is often the case with Hollywood bigwigs, Lou is a sociopathic, sleazy piece of shit who not only comes onto her and gets petty when she rejects his advances but then steals her short film for his own purposes and even assaults her. What to do? Well, you could sell your soul to a weird cat worshipping witch deity in exchange for revenge most foul. I wouldn’t recommend it but in this case Lisa is a bit naive and doesn’t heed the obvious warning bells when she’s approached by mysterious Boro (Catherine Keener), who promises her retribution in return for a vaguely Faustian bargain. Well after neglecting to read the fine print Lisa finds her life and that of everyone around her turn into a full on hellish supernatural nightmare complete with flesh eating zombies, inter dimensional hallucinations, angry phantasms, peyote induced mania, pissed off Latino mob hitmen, hiccups, extreme violence at every turn and a strange affliction where every so often she’ll dry heave and vomit up a newborn kitten, and I mean that in the lost literal, explicit way possible, she straight up chundies little tiny demonic white cats covered in barf and it’s nasty af. But that’s what you get when you tangle with a mischievous witch I suppose. Catherine Keener hasn’t had a role this great in years and she’s a diabolical wonder as Boro, the least trustworthy being you’ve ever met, full of quips, quotes and scathing verbal roasts with the bizarre black magic to back her talk up, it’s truly a wondrous villain performance that she has a lot of fun with. This isn’t necessarily the most… succinct or airtight vision and it’s sometimes feels like paint just hurled at a canvas there are so many elements at play, especially in the back half of the season. But oh, what elements they are. This is dark, fucked up, no-chill storytelling with some of the blackest humour imaginable, laughs that catch in your throat on the way up like a barfed kitten and some of the most acidic, punchy, sizzling writing I’ve ever heard, full of impossibly colourful language and brimming with delicious, often very niche Hollywood references. It’s messy but it’s a beautiful goddamn mess and has so much jaw dropping, unbelievable content that I was transported along for the ride that resembles something like Mulholland Dr tossed together with Cronenberg, Raimi’s Evil Dead films with a dash of Entourage and something even intangible thrown in for good bloody measure. Be careful with this one if you’re content sensitive because it’s… punishingly perverse, overbearingly intense and unforgivingly willing got plumb the dark, demented depths of the collective storytelling psyche and puke up whatever it finds onto the screen. Like a kitten, or a self removed eyeball, cannibalistic zombies, metre long tapeworms pulled slowly out of human eye sockets, those are all but a taste. Buckle up.

-Nate Hill

THE RUSS MEYER FILES: FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

In the opening seconds of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Russ Meyer marries sex and violence by employing a stern narration that explicitly welds the two together over the visual of the ever multiplying, squiggly optical soundtrack that quickly fills the frame like a hostile takeover. The narration warns the audience that you’ll never know where that mix of pleasure and pain will turn up but that, among other locations, it COULD happen in a go-go club.

And that’s absolutely goddamn right because the go-go club in question is the place of vocation for Varla (Tura Santana), Rosie (Haji), and Billie (Lori Williams), a group of pneumatic, ass-kicking thrill seekers who roam the edges of the California desert and look for kicks in a manner so cavalier that they might as well be going antiquing. If this sounds a little familiar it’s because it is as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is basically Motorpsycho! but with females in hot rods instead of dudes on bikes. But the question isn’t whether this is a copy job or not. Hell, even Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock explicitly remade their own pictures. The question is whether or not the formula is bettered by the update. And, like the celluloid equivalent of Ms. Pac Man, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a marked improvement on an already enjoyable foundation.

There’s a bit more to Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! than there was to Motorpsycho! as Varla and company not only find lethal kicks in the California wasteland in the guise of Tommy (Ray Barlow) and Linda (Sue Bernard), two all-American kids who run afoul of the group. They also find a crippled degenerate (Stuart Lancaster) who lives on a piece of dusty property, lording over a hunk of money he received after a railroad accident. His heart twisted with misanthropy and misogyny, he is assisted by his hulking, simpleminded son known as The Vegetable (Dennis Busch) and Kirk (Paul Trinka), his more sophisticated, well-read, and saner progeny. All of these combustible elements explode in the final reel as the film tacks close to Meyer’s precedence of directing ultra violent climaxes, delivering on the promise in the opening narration and then some.

Though Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was a financial failure and ended Meyer’s gothic period (and, sadly, was also the last film he shot in black and white), saying time has been kind to it would be a grand understatement. While the financial success of Motorpsycho! was the impetus for making Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, who the hell even talks about Motorpsycho! these days except for Meyer fanatics? Conversely, the image of the trio of Varla, Rosie, and Billie emblazons the front of many a t-shirt and poster and their cinematic legacy seeps into the DNA characters running all the way up to and beyond Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof from 2007.

Wasp-waisted, Porsche-driving Tura Santana reigns supreme as the black souled Varla, an amoral animal who doesn’t much deliver her dialogue as she does whip it. She’s equal parts turn on and terror as a high-octane, hedonistic creature that swings every which way as long as it’s pushing the envelope of getting her rocks off. “Whatever you want,” she purrs to the man she’s seducing out of his fortune, “I’m your cup to fill.” Wielding dictatorial control of the group, Varla turns on everyone who displeases her whether they are friend or foe. When Billie breaks free of the caravan and decides to go for a swim all by her lonesome, she gets beaten for the infraction by Rosie at Varla’s command, the latter leering at the two of them as they wrestle in a wet and sandy tangle. She assets dominance in a dangerous and impromptu game of chicken with her two friends across the salt flats and when she is later in danger of losing a timed race against a mid-level square, she simply runs him off the track, beats him to death, and kidnaps his bubble-headed girlfriend. Varla is simply not to be fucked with. As she snarls “I never try anything. I just do it. I don’t beat clocks, just people,” she sounds more like the Jedi school teacher I’d rather have than that dull-ass Yoda.

By contrast, Rosie is tough as leather but still has something of a tender heart when it comes to her feelings for Varla evidenced by the sad jealousy that masks her face as Varla rolls in the hay with a mark showing a knowingly bitter and heart-sinking ring of truth to it. And Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was, in fact, the first of Meyer’s films to introduce lesbian relationships into his ever-expanding encyclopedia of sexual progress that was as sociological as it was personal. And even though he didn’t craft the most positive role model on the planet, the bisexual Varla has since become a symbol of tough, feminine independence and her plain-spoken, unvarnished honesty is admirable even if it would be a total HR nightmare in any other world.

But even though she’s soft for Varla, Rosie is anything but everywhere else. As played by the amazing Haji, Rosie’s ersatz, overblown “shutta up your mouth” accent is 15/10 hilarious and she gets one of the greatest lines of the film when she speaks incredulously at the mention of a soft drink by ensuring Linda understands that Rosie and the gals “don’t like nothin’ a-soft.” The rest of the cast, most especially Lori Williams and Meyer stalwart Stuart Lancaster, deliver their performances with gusto, spitting each bit of astonishing dialogue with glee and slowly elevating everything until its fever pitch climax which earns its feminist praise by giving even its weakest character the most satisfying deliverance.

Russ directs, edits, co-produces, and gets story credit for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but the absolutely incredible screenplay was written by Jack Moran, one-time child actor who popped up as the prospector/narrator in Meyer’s Wild Gals of the Naked West and would go on to appear in Common Law Cabin along with penning the deliciously quotable Good Morning and Goodbye and Finders Keepers…Lovers Weepers, ranking Moran only second to Roger Ebert as Meyer’s greatest third-party scribbler. And in keeping uniform with Meyer’s usual compositions, Walter Schenk’s amazing camerawork is kept at tits and ass level but always on the uptilt to exude the strength of the characters while putting a big bright spotlight on their physical attributes (especially in the case of Varla and Rosie). In a lot of ways, this is still a roughie but, quite unusually, the women are the ones to inflict almost all of the violence. And, like Motorpsycho!, this is the rare Meyer film that contains no nudity.

Capped off with the awesome title tune by the Bostweeds, Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill! was a breakthrough for Meyer even if if didn’t seem like it at the time. This was mostly evident as he entered his soap opera phase with lead women who were still randy, ribald, and ready for action but a little more demur than the nihilistic Varla and who are trapped in worlds and circumstances she’d simply karate her way out of. Varla was the first of the Meyer heroines of whom it was asked if she were woman or animal and perhaps the public just wasn’t ready for it at the time. But Meyer would work his courage up to grace the screen with another in just three years time and, at that time, they’d be ready. Boy, would they EVER…

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

Dave Made A Maze

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Dave Made A Maze, and then someone made a movie about him making a maze, and now it’s on Shudder. Is it any god? Well… kinda. It’s certainly incredibly creative, artistically impressive and visually something else, I’ll give it that. It’s literally about a girl (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) who gets home one day to find that her boyfriend Dave (Nick Thune) has built a massive cardboard labyrinth in the middle of their living room, and subsequently gotten lost within it. How has he gotten lost, you may ask? Well I wasn’t exaggerating when I said the thing is massive; on the outside it looks like a ten by ten square foot art project that a cat could comfortably cavort about it, but the minute you go inside it becomes an endless maze of hallways, vicious booby traps and confusing tunnels. “It’s bigger than it looks from out there” he yells from inside, and warns her not to come in. Soon she invites a bunch of people over to see this thing including a few of his friends, a pesky documentary crew and a random homeless dude who she thinks is a maze expert (“I said I know *cardboard*” he informs her, clearing up the misunderstanding). Pretty soon all of them follow Dave into this thing and find themselves just as lost as he is, and eventually they start to get killed by the frequent booby traps. So what is this maze, how was Dave able to make it this way and what is the film trying to say? Well, that’s where it lost me a bit, because as visually creative and unbelievably gorgeous looking as this maze is, the tone of the film has this sort of… faux Wes Anderson-y, wannabe Michel Gondry-esque attitude that just started to irk me pretty quick, like a deliberate, forced ‘quaint n’ quirky’ vibe that the actors just aren’t able to sustain for more than a few minutes. What’s more, it attempts this sad millennial set of themes where Dave built this thing because he never was able to finish a project properly, he’s always working jobs he hates and he’s ‘still getting money from his parents at age 30’ when he’s got a perfectly cool little apartment and seems to have found the time to have built a giant magical maze. It’s just a whiny angle and not a good look for the film overall. Those frustrations aside I did really, really enjoy the artistic vision of the maze, it’s blessedly CGI-free and is a wonder of infinite cardboard panels, trippy swivelling walls and origami creatures that come to life and a big mean Minotaur that chases them around. The tone of the acting and attempted subtext may have exasperated me, but they should be very proud of the artistic achievements they’ve crafted onscreen, one could almost watch this with the sound off and be just as transported.

-Nate Hill

Canadian greatness: Phillip Borsos’ The Grey Fox

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Famed Canadian outlaw Bill Miner might have been the most soft spoken, polite, counterintuitive criminal in the annals of history and the late great Richard Farnsworth plays him as such with his trademark clear eyed, honest voiced, pure hearted charisma in Phillip Borsos’s The Grey Fox, a film of stunning quality, wonder and grandeur both great and small. Miner spent the early part of his life as a career criminal with a penchant for politeness and after a three decade stint in San Quentin, he meandered north to Kamloops, BC to reconnect with his estranged sister and start a new life. His old ways find him once again though and soon he carves out a new legacy as a notorious train robber and once again his life takes a turn for the adventurous. He falls back into this groove simply out of habit I suppose, and because he feels he isn’t meant for much else. He meets and romances early feminist artist Kate Flynn (Jackie Burroughs), mentors his dim witted partner in crime Shorty (Wayne Robson), does the odd shady rustling work for local magistrate and crime kingpin Jack Budd (Ken Pogue) and is pursued by an eerily placid Pinkerton detective (Gary Reineke). Farnsworth makes this character sing, he was a stuntman turned actor who was just born with a natural gift and lit up the screen with impeccable emotional truth and vivid vitality anywhere he appeared, and this (along with his beautiful work in David Lynch’s The Straight Story) may be the finest work of his career. He makes Bill a quiet, sweet, compassionate and honest man, the absolute antithesis of what we’ve been told a lifelong criminal must be like, he’s always the most comforting presence in the room, is a natural leader and trailblazer and his scenes of tenderness and love with Burroughs are blessedly open-hearted and kind. The film was shot in and around some keystone British Columbia locations that don’t often get to play themselves in cinema (American studios can’t just shoot in their own locations, they’ve always got to rip off ours with no due credit) including Kamloops itself, Cheakamus Canyon, Fort Steele, Lillooet, Cranbrook, Pemberton and of course Vancouver. This adds a rugged, authentic realism and elemental grace to Bill’s story as Farnsworth and his cast-mates wander about in the wild Pacific Northwest realm, captured wonderfully in its early days by cinematographer and set designers alike. The score intertwines with traditional Celtic melodies for a unique musical/visual experience as well, especially in a hypnotic opening sequence where a steam train makes its way around the bend of a mountain pass as the credits lope alongside it. From that gorgeous opening crawl until the final melancholic few moments where another train goes by, this time in the other direction and for a different reason, this is a mesmerizing experience, anchored by Farnsworth’s angelic, note-perfect character work and everything else mentioned above. Available for rental on iTunes for 99c.

-Nate Hill

The MacManus Brothers’ The Block Island Sound

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Aliens are up there and they’re messing with us… or are they down below, in the waters of the ocean? The MacManus Brothers’ The Block Island Sound is a fascinating, atmospheric and frequently terrifying glimpse of life in a small fishing town on the Rhode Island coast as inhabitants grapple with a mysterious, threatening, possibly extraterrestrial or cryptozoological force that slowly encroaches on them in increasingly horrifying ways. One fisherman (Chris Sheffield) has already seen his father (Neville Archambault) fall victim to these things and now finds himself coming down with strange symptoms: sleepwalking, blackouts, bizarre hallucinations, dark thoughts and the most severe case of tinnitus I’ve ever seen. He struggles to protect his family from whatever is out there and what it’s doing to him as he can no longer trust his own actions or impulses, especially around his young niece (Matilda Lawler, excellent) whose safety he fears for. This is a slow burn, ambiguous SciFi horror story that takes its time; you never see what’s out there beyond esoteric hints and chilling sounds behind the perpetually overcast coastal skies and the flint grey waters of the sea below. It’s always the threat of what’s out there that is scarier than the thing itself seen in full, and the filmmakers know this, taking full advantage of the ‘less is more’ mantra. Acting is all superior quality, there are a few sequences that drag and could have been tightened up a bit but overall this is a slick, nasty, spine chilling otherworldly horror that hits the spot. It even achieves a moment of pure greatness right at the very end when a character provides thought provoking narration that will make you completely rethink the nature of alien abductions themselves. Good stuff.

-Nate Hill

Don Bluth’s The Secret Of Nimh

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I remember reading the book Mrs. Frisby & The Rats Of Nimh as a child and being utterly transported by Robert C. O’Brien’s prose and storytelling. I think it’s the duty of any filmmaker adapting a literary work to do three things; 1) keep the spirit, themes and intention of the sacred source material on hand and implement it accordingly, 2) present a great deal of their own artistic and personal flourishes wherever they can and 3) utterly transport their audience to the world they are both adapting and further exploring. In the case of Don Bluth’s The Secret Of Nimh he has outdone himself by keeping the dark, often threatening beats of the book intact while offering up a dazzling galaxy of unbelievably gorgeous still-frame animation tableaus for equally stunning animated animals in motion to inhabit and tell this unique story. Mrs. Frisby (Elizabeth Hartman) is a widowed field mouse living in a vast and dangerous farmyard realm with her wee mousie children, one of whom is very ill. Every year when the farmer comes to plow the fields, all the woodland creatures are violently displaced in an apocalyptic ritual they refer to as ‘moving day.’ Because of her youngest child’s illness, moving day would be especially torturous for them this year and so she sets out on a mythical quest to find a better life for her family, a quest that puts her in contact with many other animals in the realm including friendly crow Jeremiah (Dom DeLuise), a spooky old great horned owl (John Carradine), the vicious and predatory farmer’s cat and a troupe of scheming rats, some trustworthy and others treacherous. This is a dark, prophetic, devilishly imaginative story that isn’t just children’s nursery rhymes but gets intense, introspective and downright menacing, I can see how this would scare the ever-loving soul out of young kids. Bluth’s animation is the real star here and every breathtaking backdrop is gorgeously hand painted, detailed and atmospheric tapestry of swirling colour, borderline abstract shapes and boldly audacious expressionism. The animals are vividly drawn with a touch of the surreal and the images and sound on display are dreamlike wonders of artistic creation. The world feels frightening, full of wonder, lived-in and soaked in ambience whether it’s overgrown forest thickets, arcing wheatgrass meadows, cluttered farmyard dwellings and even a brief trip to a nocturnal cityscape in a hellish flashback that holds the key to the story’s central mystery. This film is an unbelievable artistic achievement and benchmark in the medium of animation.

-Nate Hill