Tag: movie

Tom Provost’s The Presence

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The Presence is one of those horror films that sets itself up so perfectly, so evocatively and effectively drew me in so well in the first act that it was profoundly frustrating when the rest of the film kind of loses its way, to some degree anyway. Sometimes simplicity is key and films start off with a setting and aesthetic so pure and distilled they don’t realize their story would just be more powerful if they stuck with that instead of shoehorned over-complication that muddies up an otherwise pristine experience. The first third of this film sees a haunted looking Mira Sorvino as an unnamed woman at a cabin by a lake (cue some lovely Oregon scenery), on solo vacation to wrestle with some personal demons. From the first few frames we learn there is in fact a ghost also in this cabin and about the grounds, a mute and mostly still figure played by the gaunt, angular presence of Shane West, who we remember as the boyfriend in A Walk To Remember. There’s a hushed, hypnotic aura as Mira goes about her chores around the cabin in silence, sleeps alone and wanders the grounds of the island seemingly both searching and at rest, while West’s pale-faced spectre observes her in sentinel stillness from various spots. Then all of a sudden her boyfriend (Justin Kirk) arrives from the city and, like a vacuum, all the atmosphere is sucked out of the frame as a level of dialogue ridden dramatic heft shoves its way into an otherwise unique experience. There is tension between them almost immediately as the ghost continues to observe, she is clearly not excited to have him around and he presses a marriage proposal on her that seems rushed to her. Then as if that whole angle wasn’t enough clutter, another strange supernatural being shows up personified by Scottish actor Tony Curran as some kind of demon who influences both Mira and the ghost while wearing a black suit that seems jarringly out of place amidst the otherwise earthen, elemental tone and the whole thing just speeds up way too fast. There’s also a subplot involving a vaguely sinister shopkeeper (Muse Watson) who delivers supplies to the island by boat, and this ongoing romantic tension that permeates the atmosphere. One aspect I did find fascinating was that Mira’s character was sexually abused by her father as a child and part of her journey out to this childhood property is to confront the memory and trauma of that. But why all this Faustian narrative diarrhea that feels forced into the script somehow? The opening act is SO effective, so eerie and well wrought, why couldn’t we have just coexisted with her and the ghost and the trees for 90 minutes as she grapples with her traumas among a peaceful yet unnerving nature environment? This is all of course just my reaction to the film and some may have gotten a kick out of the ‘whispering demon’ angle but to me it felt like a crippling element to an otherwise engaging and immersive setting and premise. Shame, because the first third is really something worth watching, right up until the boyfriend shows up and the dialogue starts.

-Nate Hill

THE TOBE HOOPER FILES: EGGSHELLS (1969)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Opening on a flock of birds gathered in a great tree against the orange Texas sky right before they launch themselves out and flutter away, Tobe Hooper’s Eggshells announces itself is a movie about transitions. From the leaving of the nest to the building of the nest and everything in between which even includes, according to my wife’s observation during a recent late-night screening, a bird-like mating ritual played out with colorful balloons, Eggshells experimentally flits from one episode to the next, weaving a somewhat familiar but uniquely envisioned, impressionistic tapestry of a transitional generation navigating an America in similar flux.

While the film is a free-floating examination of four different couples on either side of the line of unionized domesticity, the crux of the story concerns Mahlon (Mahlon Forman), a young girl who has left her dusty Texas home to the University of Texas in Austin. There, she engages and moves in with David (David Noll), Amy (Amy Lester), Toes (Kim Henkel), and Ron (Ron Barnhart), a group of hippies who live together in a house that becomes possessed by a spirit which enters the house and resides in the basement.

This being 1969 and an independent movie beholden to no oversight, Hooper, working as director, co-producer, writer, special effects supervisor, and camera operator/cinematographer, employs a great deal of cinematic masturbation to get his story across. This is not a complaint, mind you, as most all of it is very clever and some of it pretty awe-inspiring. But the film is very experimental and surreal, ditching traditional narrative for sensory engaging visuals which helps it work wonders in retrospect. If Hooper would have been more concrete and straightforward in some of what he’s trying to say here, it may come off now as quaint or, worse, stupid. But by keeping it experimental at heart and execution, the film challenges the audience to work for it just a little bit and he keeps just enough of it opaque so it will be forever mysterious and charming.

Right from the outset, Hooper aims to show Texas as a place that’s engaged and Austin as a place that’s progressive, inserting a shot of the clock tower where Charles Whitman created much wreckage to reclaim it for the good. If the aim of the Allman Brothers was to show the relaxed and integrated virtues of The New South, Hooper wanted to do something similar for Texas through cinema. In an montage featuring the student war march which is mostly smiles and handshakes with the cops, Hooper preaches an infectious brand of optimistic peace and continues to leak goodwill throughout the rest of the film even if the film subtly deals with the natural tension that occurs with major shifts in life.

What’s kind of astonishing is that although this film only tangentially touches the paranormal as to render that portion of the film forgettable, the movie’s aesthetic is 100% the same as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hooper’s sophomore film that would come five years later. As in that film, Hooper’s ability to articulate the seasonal specificity of that part of the country is utter magic. The heat waves, the thick humidity, and the dusty, dead clumps of vegetation at the feet of still-brilliant green trees are instantly familiar to the region and Hooper’s love for old architecture and victorian-style homes, always hinting at something “else” hidden within, are also palpable.

Hooper likewise captures a natural mood and cadence between his characters that feels so true that it’s almost heartwarming, achieving a kind of southwest Cassavetes vibe in his moments in which the players naturally bounce off of one another with he kind of halting and overlapping thoughts that occur during normal conversation. This also means that Eggshells bears direct resemblance, and was no doubt an influence of sorts, on Slacker, Richard Linklater’s 1990 ode to college town denizens, as the ever shifting points of view and overlapping narrative style shrinks Linklater’s portrait of the whole town of Austin down to the residents of one house where Amy and David hold court while shiftless roommates like Toes and Ron seem to exist in different phases of maturation.

But what of the spirit mentioned before and what does it mean? With what’s given in the narrative coupled with Hooper’s well-done and economical in-camera special effects, it seems to guide the characters into a certain kind of enlightenment like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a filmwhich most definitely was an influence on a young Tobe Hooper. And, for certain, the road forward to which it points is a wonderful one even if there is a natural resistance in taking it. The ending suggests that time is up for these folks as we’re headed into a new frontier so they move into spiritual form to influence the next generation. But as the yin to Poltergeist’s yang, Eggshells is the canary in the coal mine as it subtlety warns these free-minded characters who are beginning a new life of pseudo-conformity to avoid getting too comfortable. For a complete submerging of those ideals that makes them unique just might come back to haunt them later.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

Overlooked, ahead of its time and incredibly important: Ash Baron Cohen’s Bang

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

What if an ordinary everyday citizen, in this case a woman of colour, found themselves in the role of a police officer for one day, through an extraordinary set of circumstances? Bang is a staggeringly good guerrilla indie film from the mid 90’s that is not only criminally under seen, it feels a hundred times more relevant and important than it already was back then. Filmed off the cuff on about the lowest budget one can have for a feature and without permits or proper sanctions with locations all over LA, it’s a scrappy passion project that contains the sort of class/race and gender commentary, character work, quirky humour and subversive social introspection of a cult classic that has yet to find the audience it deserves, even almost twenty years after its release. Japanese American actress Darling Narita plays an aspiring actress who has fallen on some very hard times. The morning we meet her she’s evicted from her apartment, sexually assaulted by a nasty film producer who tries to take advantage of her at an audition and arrested by a motorcycle cop for something she didn’t do. After the cop tries to assault her as well she grabs his gun, turns it on him, steals his uniform and his bike and wanders around LA in the guise of the law, not as some kind of vindictive crusade but more because she really didn’t know what else to do in that situation, and one thing leads to another after she is simply pushed too far. Her perspective behind the badge reflects how many different factions of society view the police ranging from reverence to fear to abject hatred, and as the day gets longer, stranger, funnier and sadder we somehow cultivate steadfast belief that this station could really be playing out somewhere, helped by the candid, immersive and often heavily improvised nature of the script and a beautifully compiled soundtrack of reggae and ska music. Narita is wonderful in the role and I’m sad she didn’t go on to do much more. She makes this girl angry, scared, vulnerable, empowered, complex and somehow so self assured yet so utterly lost in the space of one day’s time. The great character actor Peter Greene stars alongside her as a hopelessly loopy homeless man who is her friend, companion and sidekick. Greene usually plays villains as a rule and is way against type here as a manic oddball who also has a tragic history with the police and an affecting backstory, the two make a mismatched but perfect pair to share these wild misadventures and together they encounter all sorts of people including other cops, drug dealers, vatos and a prostitute played by a very young Lucy Liu. This is an important film in many regards, it’s not only an exciting, brilliantly acted piece of gonzo filmmaking with a beating heart and something to say, it’s an arresting and incendiary indictment of power dynamics including and up to the relationship between cops and civilians but extends further into the exploitative and abusive nature of Hollywood and inherent sexism within that industry and society itself, the marginalization and neglect of lower class communities overall, the way mentally ill people (Greene’s brain damaged character ducks stereotype and becomes something *real*) are tossed to the wayside and dehumanized and how one woman uses what she’s confronted to fight back for herself and others who need help and attention, even if it’s just for one day. These are heavy, difficult and multitudinous themes for one zero budget guerrilla indie film to tackle but it has been proved time and time again that you don’t need millions of dollars and shiny effects to tell and important and lasting story, all you need is the story itself, and those willing to tell it well. Director Ash, stars Narita, Greene and the whole cast and anyone who crewed this no doubt challenging, at times illegal production should be very proud because the result is something emotionally and philosophically galvanizing, strikingly ahead of its time and altogether remarkable. Available here and there on DVD, and hopefully streaming at some point soon, I’d love to spread as much awareness and exposure to this wonderful film as I can with the resources and network I have.

-Nate Hill

THE JACK HILL FILES: PIT STOP (1969)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

After toiling on more Roger Corman-produced stitch jobs in which he directed additional footage that was subsequently pasted onto existing projects, writer/director Jack Hill set his sights on the exploitation-friendly world of stock car racing with the 1967-shot, 1969-released Pit Stop (originally titled The Winner). Dressed in juvenile delinquent clothing and featuring the delivered-on promise of insane figure-8 track racing, the film explores much deeper themes of competition, sportsmanship, greed, and disillusionment and contains what is probably Sid Haig’s greatest and most nuanced performance of his life. And in a brief career of highly entertaining and smart genre films, Pit Stop gives the rest of Jack Hill’s oeuvre a run for its money.

Any simpler and the plot of Pit Stop would unfold itself. Hot shot Palmdale drag racer Rick Bowman (Richard Davalos) falls in with local L.A. car-enthusiast stakehorse Grant Willard (Brian Donlevy) who introduces him to the world of figure-8 racing where he tangles with charismatic Hawk Sidney (Sid Haig) and others as he climbs the professional ladder.

From that description, you couldn’t drag me to the theater to see Pit Stop even if you were paying and throwing in five pre-rolls in the bargain. When one’s favorite film regarding car culture is David Cronenberg’s Crash, you know that there is little interest to be had in checkered flags or intake manifolds. But the standard story of the novice who works his way up through the ranks is bejeweled by the attention to detail, the smart casting choices, the strongly drawn characters, and the punchy, no-nonsense dialogue all of which breathe such a life into the film and makes it all impossible to resist. I mean, “Is there any place left in this world where there aren’t any old beer cans?” is a line that is so poetic that it makes you forget you’re watching that was something that was supposed to play on a double bill in a drive-in.

In terms of the looks of the picture, Hill balances crisp and clean dramatic compositions with a great deal of documentary-style, on-the-ground footage of the figure-8 racing which is such a disorienting spectacle of twisted metal and dust that it becomes clear that keeping your bearings while racing on one of these tracks is of the most utmost importance. With the aid of cinematographer Austin McKinney, Hill is also able to pull off a lot of great filler moments like the montage of Rick working among the wrecks in the junkyard. What could be standard is elevated to high art in creative shots showing Rick scouring the yard for pieces while bouncing off hardtops and hoods as if he’s skipping over a bunch of crowded stones in a riverbed or when he climbs a mountain of junk silhouetted against a setting California sun. But magic is most especially generated in a sequence that documents an off-track gathering of dune buggies and ATV’s as they crawl through the high desert, defying gravity as they emerge from the natural, yawning divots in the sand-packed landscape all of which is set to a pulsating, rocking good score by The Daily Flash and John Fridge.

The performances by Brian Donlevy and Richard Davolos are both very good, but special mention has to be given to Sid Haig and Ellen Burstyn (here credited as Ellen McRae). Going from arrogant cock-of-the-walk to sympathetic minor-hero, Haig brings equal amount of swagger, energy, and heavy-lidded pathos to a role that could have been forgettable in a lesser actor’s hands. As Ellen McLeod, the wife, business partner, and assistant mechanic of racer Ed McLeod, Burstyn’s balance of frustrated spouse and professional functionary is done with deft, sympathetic execution that adds multiple dimensions to an otherwise rote and throwaway role. And Beverly Washburn, back from Jack Hill’s remarkable Spider Baby, is both soulful and bubbly as a button-cute, pixie-cut hanger-on.

As stated before, Pit Stop would hardly be memorable if it was all about the text. What makes it soar is the brooding and sobering subtext some of which is found early on in the junk man’s speech to Rick about how the racer makes the short money and generally ends up in a wrecked body while the lion’s share of the dough goes into the pocket of the promoter/manager. This is the kind of wisdom that can be extrapolated to virtually any vocation in which one’s body is used as a kind of currency for the wealthier folks pulling the strings above. And in fact Brian Donlevy’s Grant Willard is a true snake and one who makes no bones about it. He’s a man who has a piece of so much action on the race track that he can pit driver against driver in the hopes that one of his cars wins and that the crashes in the intersection on his track are gruesome enough to generate crowds. Racers like Rick and Hawk are just chattel.

It’s only at the end do we see that Rick understood that brutal truth all along and just didn’t care. For in Pit Stop, winning is an ugly thing that is awarded only when one gives up their soul and spirit just for the simple pleasure of being first. For every ten audience members that would gasp when this inevitability plays out in the film’s final two minutes, there is probably one who fully understands why the movie plays it this way and nods in agreement as Rick and Grant drive off from the wreckage they’ve left behind.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

THE DAVID ROBERT MITCHELL FILES: IT FOLLOWS (2014)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

David Robert Mitchell returns to the Detroit suburbs that were cruised by the young hopefuls that made up the cast of his charming debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover. But where a hot summer day lazily rolled through twilight and into a magical nightscape in that film, the tree-lined streets are now rusted with the yellow and orange brushes of autumn and they are inhabited by something quite sinister in It Follows, Mitchell’s second feature. Far from succumbing to a case of the sophomore slump, Mitchell elevates his universe of latchkey kids to edge-of-fall mystery hounds where the inevitable and natural slide into adulthood is an equal thing of beautiful mystery and abject terror.

Like The Myth of the American Sleepover before it, It Follows takes place in a world where the adults are just kind of around; they numbly day-drink and gossip across a formica table while the kids watch bad horror films or play Old Maid on the porch, sipping a cocktail mixed from their folks’ stolen booze and generic soda. The lack of parental supervision is exemplified by a week-old sandwich and juice that sits and festers in the room of our traumatized heroine as she hunkers down and tries to figure out how to survive. Claire Sloma, who portrayed incoming freshman Maggie in The Myth of the American Sleepover, pops up in a tiny moment as she shares a cigarette with the hot boy from across the street making It Follows the dark flip of Sleepover as it explores, with no small amount of horror, the dark journey of maturation.

When the film begins, we’re plopped into a homage of nostalgia porn as Detroit, Michigan does an amazing Pasadena-as-Haddonfield and we almost immediately witness a troubled teen named Annie, clad in a ridiculous ensemble of 80’s sleepwear and heels, flee a house right out of A Nightmare on Elm Street as she is fearfully running from… something. While this is unfolding in front of our eyes, it’s almost impossible to hear Disasterpeace’s minimalist, synth-driven, propulsive soundtrack and not recall the musical scores of John Carpenter or Charles Bernstein. Annie drives to the shores of Lake Michigan where she doesn’t last past dawn and ends up a perfectly posed beach corpse having befallen a terrible and malignant force nobody but she and a handful of others can see.

The opening meditation on the last swim of the season for Jay (Maika Monroe) our protagonist is a loaded metaphor as the kids all seem in that nebulous time where one by one, they lose their virginity and move toward adulthood, an inevitable horror they will never outrun. Jay is dating Hugh (Jake Weary) a boy from another school with whom she’s considering going all the way for the first time. And in clocking the rites of passage, fucking in a car among the urban decay of Detroit is what passes for parking in this day and age as Mitchell is deliberately expands his geographical universe as a metaphor for maturation; your neighborhood may be your world but there are a lot of scary things in that neighborhood on the other side of town. The further one travels away from the neighborhood, the more twisted and immoral and confusing things become.

“Imagine how cool that would be to have your whole life ahead of you,” says a 21 year old Hugh, speaking like he’s on the other side of the divide and, in this world, he is. For he will later deflower Jay and will pass the curse on to her; sexual activity being the stark tipping point between victim and innocent. Once the rules of the game are set up, the film mostly becomes an exercise in pure cinema in which more is shown and not told, leaving the audience to puzzle out how the differing embodiments of the lurking figure factor into the terror and the psyche of its victims. Simple, yet effective, stylistic choices right out of the John Carpenter playbook such as its drab suburban setting evoking a new kind of neighborhood folk tale where bold, center-framed compositions rule the day and negative space is utilized to an astonishing level.

And the more I examine It Follows, the more my eye catches the forever friend-zoned Paul (Kier Gilchrist) and can’t be sure if he’s not something of a sub-villain in the piece. Operating from a place where his motivations are kinda suspect and maybe a little less selflessly heroic, his nitwit idea utilized during the Scooby Doo’d climax in a derelict pool backfires so spectacularly and with such a quickness that, in the film’s beautifully clever denouement, Jay is correct in fucking him right into Troublesville.

Aside from the excellent performances from the young cast, much should be said about Mitchell’s attention to the kind of detail that barely even registers as detail. Check out the subtleties within the frame that don’t call attention to the fact that there is also a class struggle that is occurring in this nightmare scenario. Chain-linked fences and above-ground pools where the bottoms have become besotted with leaves and the standard, half-moon window cutouts on the garages clash with the rolling lushness of Hugh’s neighborhood. An uptight rich bro who lies in a neatly trimmed house that backs up to a bucolic soccer field, it becomes more than aware that Hugh has picked Jay to pass along this curse because, to him, she’s south side trash. Later, we’ll see a character travel below his station and to the outer boundaries of town where two prostitutes stand among the landscape that looks like a war zone. No matter how old we are, we seem to want to always drop our troubles onto poorer people.

It Follows is very smart about what it’s doing. Folding the natural angst into a horror framework is as old as movies itself so rare is the one that finds a way to explore its themes as cleanly and carefully as this. It’s a top to bottom examination of the invisible line into adulthood everyone must cross where boundless pleasures certainly await but that also comes equipped with a countdown clock; an emblematic place in everyone’s life where, as one character says, the city begins and the suburbs ends.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: BEYOND THERAPY (1987)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Beyond Therapy is bad. And I don’t mean that it’s a weaker Robert Altman effort or that it’s bad of kind. I mean to say that it’s a bad movie that I could scarcely dislike more even if it had been written and directed by Henry Jaglom, a major/minor talent I love and cherish as much as I do getting paper cuts on my balls. Whatever pleasant vibes may radiate off of the film’s innocuous and airy promotional artwork that hints at a comedy of manners among a star-studded cast is a goddamn pack of rotten lies.

The last in Altman’s feature adaptations of stage plays, Beyond Therapy is a story about, I think, sexual fluidity, self-acceptance, and the (disproven) utter worthlessness of therapy. I say “I think” not because I don’t know; it’s just that Altman’s busy style and overlapping dialogue does a grave disservice to the film and it barely registers as anything other than a cacophonous vortex of shouting, goofy accents, performative emoting, and Julie Hagerty.

Disguising itself as a polyamorous and pansexual Woody Allen comedy, Robert Altman’s Beyond Therapy avoids amusing like the plague in favor of buying unfunny by the barrel and spraying the whole movie with it. Adapted from co-writer Christopher Durang’s off-Broadway play, Beyond Therapy concerns itself with Bruce (Jeff Goldblum) a bisexual who meets Prudence (Julie Hagerty) after she answers a magazine ad Bruce has placed much to the chagrin of his live-in boyfriend, Bob (Christopher Guest) and his mother (Geneviève Page). Most of this chaos plays out in a French restaurant in which mirrored deceptions and partner swapping seems to be happening on the margins and also in the offices of Charlotte (Glenda Jackson) and Stuart (Tom Conti), two therapists who treat Bruce and Prudence, respectively, and, coincidentally, sneak off to have sex with each other at twenty after the hour.

Beyond Therapy feels like it’s being helpful as this kind of subject matter (in America, at least) was something that, in 1987, was still mostly assigned to very serious dramas and was considered pretty provocative but, alas, it’s ultimately too confused to work retrospectively. I mean, the idea that Jeff Goldblum’s fluidity somehow throws the world off of its sexual axis is borderline insulting, even for a farce such as this. In fact, this is a film in which the whole idea of bisexuality is a foreign one; as if it resides in a world governed by its extremes. If it’s trying to state the fact that most everyone lies somewhere between the polar extremes on the sexual spectrum (which in 1987 would have been classified more as an “argument”), it’s not doing it in a particularly good or charming way. And where the film ends on a positive and healthy note where everyone more or less celebrates their most honest and open sexual desires replete with straight and gay couplings (and at least one ménage a trois), Altman wheezes his way to the finish line feeling far too out of shape to even attempt to get into the mix, let alone direct it.

One of the problems with Beyond Therapy is the film’s frenetic pace which flattens out any real enjoyment of it. The cramped set of the French restaurant overstuffed with peripheral characters feels so constricted that Altman’s usually graceful choreography is off by two beats as visual gags don’t register and anything that might come off as clever is completely crushed and has the life choked out of it. Altman loved the French and it’s not difficult to understand why given their undying love for him and his work. But his comedies with French twists feel cold in a way that, if you’re not on Altman’s specific wavelength about the French and French culture, it’ll all seem like inside baseball and hard to gauge. What I do know is that much of it is not funny. And, on the whole, Beyond Therapy feels more like a French farce about sexually neurotic New Yorkers than it does an American film dealing with sexual hang-ups. I guess that tracks since this film was shot in Paris masquerading as New York.

This is a situation in which I think 90% of the cast is wonderful, just not when they’re occupying the same screen space with this material. Jeff Goldblum is very good as he delivers his usual dexterous brand of frazzle but Christopher Guest is utterly wonderful, providing the prototype for Zack Galifianakis’s twin brother Seth from Between Two Ferns. Julie Hagerty, on the other hand, is a ball of nervous energy who, despite being incredible in Lost in America and Airplane, is forced to play a character who is mostly shrill, unappealing, and doesn’t get enough water thrown on her during the course of the film. Glenda Jackson is great but she’s lost in the material which does her a great disservice, and Tom Conti is mildly amusing as the malapropism-prone therapist who actually revels in his tendency to ejaculate prematurely and who feels that sex that lasts longer than five minutes is unnatural.

If not for his bit in the opera-omnibus Aria (which, frankly, is just ok), 1987 would have represented Altman’s career nadir. He retreated back into the world of television and would not be seen in the cinemas again for another five years. Of course, he would continue to deliver masterworks on the small screen and his comeback in the multiplexes would prove to be one of the most confounding, against-the-odds stories in Hollywood history. But those triumphs should be shared for another day and should get no closer than five thousand yards of Beyond Therapy, a film only preferable to A Perfect Couple due to the sense that, at the conclusion of the former, everyone is moving in a healthier direction and is doing so with a complete lack of live performances from Keepin’ ‘Em Off the Streets.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I didn’t really know what to think of Lisey’s Story for the first two episodes or so because it’s so disarmingly, otherworldly strange and surreal, but as the story unfolds in an almost subconscious vernacular, step by step I found my footing and it has become likely my favourite Stephen King adaptation ever undertaken. I think it’s the closest we’re ever gonna get to an ‘arthouse’ King story, and the sheer audacity and bizarro world sensibility of it might be why it’s not being received too well, but make no mistake, this is gorgeous top shelf stuff. The story, told in bold expressionistic strokes, tells of the core relationship between Lisey (Julianne Moore) and her deceased husband Scott Landon (Clive Owen), a famous writer and deeply troubled man who left a series of clues for her before passing that will lead her on a journey to the heart of his unfinished literary work and protect her from deranged homicidal stalker Jim Dooley (Dane DeHaan) who seeks to find his hidden manuscripts. That all sounds very straightforward but the creators opt to tell this story in deep, dense flashbacks, musical cues that take prescience over dialogue and an arresting, dreamlike visual palette that takes over for exposition. In Scott’s books he tells of another dimension called Boo’Ya Moon, a realm of the dead and half-dead that’s full of alien beauty and home to a terrifying monster called the Long Boy. This sort of exotic astral plane proves to be very real and integral in both putting Scott’s spirit to rest and killing Dooley, who becomes quite the force to reckon with for Lisey and her two sisters (Jennifer Jason Leigh & Joan Allen). Moore is fantastic as Lisey, full of emotional intuition and charisma, while Owen has never been better and his level of commitment and intensity to a role that is cast way, way against his usual type is staggering, I have never seen him so raw and vulnerable. There are frequent flashbacks to his horrifying childhood where he struggles to deal with his half mad Viet Nam vet father who is so mentally far gone he can barely get a sentence out. The dad is played by an unrecognizable Michael Pitt who manages to be despicable, relatable, pathetic, chilling and heartbreaking in the same notes, it’s a mad dog, candid performance you don’t usually see in mainstream stuff and he should win all of the awards. The show is just unlike anything I’ve ever seen, from the strikingly intense, almost David Lynch style work from the actors to the stunning mystical dreamscape of Boo’Ya Moon to the languid, formless narrative that’s free of peripherals or structure to the deep, haunting emotional core to the sweet, innocent and life affirming romance between Lisey and Scott to the wonderfully atmospheric, spine chilling score by ‘Clark’, this is just grand, unique storytelling that sweeps you away into its world. You have to be willing to go though, and I think that’s why so many people recoiled at this. Many were likely expecting an accessible, routine King adaptation firmly planted in the ground like we usually see wrought of his work, but this is simply something from another world altogether, it’s one that you feel your way through in images and impression rather than dialogue and drama. If you’re ready for that, I’d highly recommend it. Don’t listen to the hate out there, it’s truly, truly extraordinary stuff.

-Nate Hill

Netflix’s Blood Red Sky

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

You’ve heard of Snakes On A Plane now get ready for Vampires on a plane! Real talk though the new Netflix horror hybrid Blood Red Sky is a lot better, more vicious and effectively made than most gimmicky, chimera-like efforts of its kind. A sort of German American Scottish coproduction that seamlessly blends actors/accents from all three countries, it tells of a young German mother (Peri Baumeister, a dead ringer for Noomi Rapace) who finds herself and her son on a transatlantic flight that has been hijacked by multinational terrorists hellbent on crashing the plane in London and killing everyone onboard. There’s just one slight variable these assholes didn’t figure on: this girl is in fact a vampire, and not a slow, dramatic Dracula vampire either, she’s one of those sleek, terrifying, hyper-vigilant, high strung 30 Days Of Night Vampires, which when you consider the finite, constrained area of a plane interior, is just a nightmare waiting to happen. The big cheese terrorist is a sociopathic mercenary played excellently by Dominic Purcell but the real villain is a German maniac (Alexander Scheer) from his ranks that goes rogue, starts maliciously murdering hostages and is just downright nasty, if there was a German production of Batman he would land the Joker role for sure. The fights, chases, gore and intensity here are so well staged you barely get a moment to breathe and there’s genuine high-level suspense that had me on edge. What helps achieve that is that even amidst all the snarling, throat ripping, bloodletting and pandemonium and even under all that slick vampire makeup, actress Baumeister manages to give her performance a genuine maternal instinct and palpable pathos in caring for her son and protecting him from danger, she basically gives a multilayered, deeply effective performance as both a human being and a pissed off vampire. The film is built around a totally ridiculous premise and they could have made this just the cheesiest thing, but instead they’ve played the situation dead straight and approached this script with the very serious notion of “what IF a vampire found herself on a plane at the same time as a gang of evil terrorists,” and the result is something immersive, beautifully made, spectacularly violent and, in some scenes, surprisingly poignant. Highly recommended, streaming on Netflix now.

-Nate Hill

PIRANHA (1978) – D. JOE DANTE

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

A quick note on Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. It changed everything. Literally. Star Wars may have really moved the furniture around two years later but Jaws did something to American culture that was so unique and so strong, our annual pining for summer releases is a residual effect that has bored into our filmgoing DNA. And, as it turned out, there really was no big trick to turning summer films into machines that printed money. You just had to pump a decent budget into what was once seen as drive-in fare and, poof, you’d spun literal gold.

And this is not to take anything away from Spielberg’s masterpiece as Jaws is truly a brilliantly made film adapted from Peter Benchley’s piece of pure upmarket junk. But this kind of mass embrace of what was once kind of niche spelled trouble for folks like producer/director Roger Corman who had created a whole personality out of cheap action pictures and low-budget horror flicks. If this kind of stuff somehow rose out of the drive-ins and grindhouses and was embraced by the masses, it would crowd Corman out of the market.

Fortuitously for Corman, the success of Jaws created something that was right in his wheelhouse; namely: the Jaws-rip off. Jaws was basically manna from heaven for cheap exploitation directors both in America and every other country that had a film industry. Even Universal waded into the waters of the numbered sequel, then a still-novel notion that was only four years old, to rip itself off in 1978 with the enjoyable Jaws 2.

So, of course, Roger Corman had to mine the material to stake a claim in a territory he had homesteaded and, in fact, he mined the material a few times. But the first and most successful of his Jaws-inspired productions was 1978’s Piranha. Directed by one-time Corman editor Joe Dante who, along with Allan Arkush, had previously co-directed Hollywood Boulevard for Corman, Piranha was not only a major financial success for Corman’s New World Pictures, it’s easily the best of the pictures inspired by Spielberg’s original.

What makes Dante’s film feel fresh instead of point-by-point retread (looking at you, William Girdler’s Grizzly) is that it announces its willingness to let the audience in its self-awareness from the beginning. After pulling off a clever Citizen Kane reference, Dante and screenwriter John Sayles invite the audience to throw rotten fruit at the stupidity of the characters in the film’s pre-credit sequence. Decent questions like “Who will ever know we were here?” and “What if this is some kind of sewage treatment facility?” don’t get satisfactory answers before both characters are in waters that we’re sure are filled with piranha (pronounced piraña by more than one character in the film) because, well, it’s the title of the movie. Dumb on the characters’ part? You bet. Are Dante and Sayles cognizant of how ridiculous it is? For certain.

The other remarkable thing about Piranha is just how much movie is packed into 93 minutes. Weird creatures, gore, nudity, boat explosions, water skiing, mean-spirited yet satisfying devouring of children and lake enthusiasts, car chases, Pino Donnagio’s lush score that sounds like a bunch of unused cues from Carrie, and a jailbreak are just a few of the delicious attractions packed into the casing that threatens to burst at the seams. And all of this is before we even get to the cast. While Bradford Dillman and Heather Menzies are very good and play well off of each other in the lead roles, it’s Corman regulars Dick Miller and Paul Bartel who bring the house down as, respectively, a sleazy developer and a dictatorial camp counselor, while Belinda Balaski, who still continues to pop up in Dante’s projects, absolutely shines in a sympathetic role. Veterans Keenan Wynn, Kevin McCarthy, Barbara Steele, and Richard Deacon round out the majority of the supporting cast and are all incredibly game, treating the material with a delicate balance of the straight faced and the tongue-in-cheek.

While Joe Dante would never become a household name like Steven Spielberg, he would go on to create an impressive body of work throughout the 80’s and 90’s that is mostly ripe for reassessment. Beyond his cinematic achievements, he has proven to be an indispensable curator and tireless champion for a kind of cinema that is in a sundowning decline. With his Trailers From Hell website to his Movies That Made Me podcast, Dante emerges as a figure whose film knowledge and enthusiasm for same is pitched somewhere between the enthralling academia of Martin Scorsese and the beautiful junkyard of Quentin Tarantino. As the old gives way to the new and genre cinema goes through inevitable changes and the type of film that guys like Dante truly adored, it’s nice to know that there are things out there like Piranha that serve as landmarks to a glorious time in modern film history, even if those times are becoming longer in the rear view mirror with each passing day.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

THE RUSS MEYER FILES: LORNA (1964)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Where Russ Meyer’s previous features had generally begun with soft, laconic shots of nature that were coupled with a booming bowl full of earnest, corn-filled narration, Lorna’s mobile, ghost train opening shot promises to transport us to a place we’ve never been before. And, for sure, we eventually roll up to a man clad in black (credited as “The Man of God”) who stands in the middle of the road and immediately breaks the fourth wall, warning us of sin and judgement. The nudie cuties, it seems, were just the soft preliminaries. For when we’re eventually waved on by our ominous stranger and begin moving further down the road of iniquity, we’ve fully graduated into the real world of Russ Meyer. Welcome to Lorna, a film in which the titular character was promised as being “TOO MUCH FOR ONE MAN!” on its promotional one-sheet.

Envisioned and quickly written by Meyer and James Griffith (who also plays the ominous Man in Black), Lorna was Meyer’s first attempt at a true narrative where he would be calling all the shots. Fanny Hill, Meyer’s debut outside the confines of the nudie cutie, was such a miserable experience that he traded in that film’s costume-laden period decor for the starkness of Nowheresville, America. And where Fanny Hill had a mid-size cast that mostly had little to do, Meyer strips Lorna down to a world populated by ten people.

Lorna was the first in a long string of tongue-in-cheek morality plays constructed by Meyer in order so soft-peddle his cantilevered beauties. However, Lorna really plays it smart with those moral angles. The film begins as a standard roughie in the row houses of the backwater California town of Locke where Luther (Hal Hopper) and Jonah (Doc Scortt) stalk a drunken women named Ruthie (Althea Currier) to her house. There, their twisted sexuality is put on full display as Ruthie is beaten and raped by Luther while Jonah leers through a window. Down the river apiece, Lorna (Lorna Maitland) is a deadpan saint to her well-meaning but weak sauce husband, Jim (James Rucker) who is studying to becomes a CPA while working down at the salt mines with Luther and Jonah, the former forever chiding Jim about Lorna and her supposed infidelities which barely conceal his lustful coveting of her.

In truth, Lorna and Jim are fundamentally decent folks who, for no greater sin than being normal, flawed humans, get more misery heaped upon them than they probably deserve. Jim might be a wet mop whose cocksmanship isn’t anything to write home about, but he really isn’t a bad guy and he truly loves and cares for Lorna. And Lorna isn’t a bad woman, either. Treated like a thing on a pedestal, which she doesn’t necessarily object to, Lorna argues that perhaps this attitude can be taken a bit too far and that there is a decent-size chasm between being respected and being handled like a porcelain doll. And being stuck in a fishing shack with absolutely nothing to do all day and nobody around for miles, it’s not hard to fault Lorna when, after another disappointing night in bed with Jim, she goes out to onto the dock and more or less wishes upon a star to be whisked away toward a more exciting life, shown in a dazzling montage of neon burlesque over a much happier, undulating Lorna Maitland.

When an escaped convict stumbles his way through the marshes and eventually happens upon Lorna, he sexually assaults her which leads to a kind of physical deliverance for her. This is sort of a narrative blunder where the arcane convention of the “struggling woman who gives in to the passion” is taken to the outer limits of taste and decorum. While a certain contingency of more seasoned generations recognizes this kind of coded filmic language when they see it and mostly give it a pass, it’s hard to fault the reactions to those for whom the origins of this convention have been buried under layers and layers of film history, especially to those who aren’t familiar with the context of the roughie. But in Lorna, however ill-advised it seems in retrospect, I’m not totally convinced that this device isn’t executed for the benefit of Lorna’s character as she both takes control over the situation (thereby drawing a contrast to the earlier character of Ruthie), and achieves a long-needed sense of sexual release with the convict.

Whatever complications are apparent in the tact of sexualizing rape, Lorna mostly gets away with it due to the uncommon skill of Meyer as a filmmaker and his knack for throwing his characters into a blender and upending any preconceived notions about them. For like in a very sly play, everything in Lorna gets turned upside down in its second half, proving the liquidity inherent in quick-shifting morality. While it’s loaded to make it look like the ones who are punished are the ones who upend their marriage vows, Lorna actually dies for everyone’s sins. Would her relationship with the convict been different if Jim would have shown her the kind of care for her and their one year anniversary as he should have? And what does one make of Luther’s tearful breakdown at the end of the film as he finds some sort of redemption (if not complete absolution) when, not 70 minutes earlier, we watched him beat a woman senseless? As articulated in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, “It’s a strange world.”

But above all, Lorna was a way for Meyer to strut his stuff as director, producer, co-writer, editor, and photographer. Forever innovative, Meyer finds a clever way to reduce the strip teases of Europe in the Raw down to the restless Lorna, hot and bothered while her husband toils away at his studies in the another room, writhing around in their bed while bathed by chiaroscuro lighting. And Lorna, if nothing else, is economical. Lorna’s flashbacks are presented by heat waves over static shots of a running brook and Dutch angles of the church in which they’re married. Meyer also gets a lot of story by employing nothing more than a POV camera as a prison break is pulled off on a Saturday afternoon by grabbing a few pickup shots here and there and throwing an alarm sound effect over them. And if this were mere sexploitation, the beauty in the carefully designed and thought-out match cuts wouldn’t roll over the audience like a pleasant breeze. Nor would the hotted up climax, replete with axes and hooks, work like absolute gangbusters if not for Meyer’s skill as an editor.

In terms of casting, Lorna Maitland creates quite the mold as the first of Meyer’s superstars, defining the Meyer female outside of the nudie cuties as strong, highly libidinous, and yearning for her own identity. Special mention, too, should go to Hal Hopper who is just terrific as Luther and also co-wrote the film’s catchy theme song. If I were to find out that Hopper was a slobbering, high-wire nut job in real life (he wasn’t), I would not hesitate to believe it to be true as he literally embodies the kind of ghastly creep one spends most of their life avoiding.

Lorna was definitely a page-turner and game-changer for Meyer and laid a foundation upon which he could begin to build his very singular cinematic universe populated by decent people doing the best they can while toiling about in a judgmental, hostile, and unforgiving world littered with violence, betrayal, and poisoned passions. It also gave the world a heroine in whom a salacious promise of being too much for one man was entirely conditional on the broke-dick dude in question.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain