Tag: Thriller

Álex de la Iglesia’s Perdita Durango

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Even if I told you to picture a Mexican version of Natural Born Killers starring Rosie Perez and Javier Bardem with shades of voodoo mysticism, tons of pulpy brutal violence, transgressive taboo vibes and shades of From Dusk Till Dawn it wouldn’t prepare you for the visual audacity and narrative viscera that is Álex de la Iglesia’s Perdita Durango, a scrappy mid 90’s bit of cult nihilism based on a book by Barry Gifford. Gifford, you may recall, also wrote the book that David Lynch based Wild At Heart on so many of the same characters appear here for a kind of fascinating “Lynch/Gifford extended universe” vibe. Rosie Perez is Perdita Durango, a vivacious wayward outlaw girl who hooks up with Bardem’s Romeo, a psychopathic, voodoo practicing criminal who has been hired by evil crime kingpin Marcelo ‘Crazy Eyes’ Santos (Don Stroud) to facilitate the black market delivery of stolen human fetuses for cosmetic industry (I swear I’m not making the shit up). The two of them hook up along the way and get up to all sorts of lurid shenanigans including kidnapping a teenage couple (Harley Cross & Aimee Graham), raping them both and forcing them to tag along on their bloodthirsty swath of carnage and mayhem across Texas and the Mexico border. James Gandolfini shows up as a dogged DEA agent hellbent on stopping them and nailing Santos, and he hilariously gets hit by multiple speeding vehicles only to keep on truckin with a neck brace, then a leg brace and so on. There are also scattershot appearances from musician Screamin Jay Hawkins, filmmaker Alex Cox and a young Demien Bechir as a Vegas crime kingpin who meets a spectacularly gory end at the hands of Bardem. He is unbelievable as Romeo, I didn’t think I’d ever see a film where he has a more ridiculous haircut than his mop in No Country For Old Men but it happened, he looks like a an angry tumblr maven with his hyper cropped bangs here, and he tears into the role with a kind of unhinged ferocity and rambunctiousness I haven’t seen before in his mostly restrained career so far. Perez is like a Latin Harley Quinn as Perdita, all pissed off fury and sudden violent sexual energy in a total tour de force. This film won’t be for everyone: it’s incredibly subversive and deranged, there are explicitly shown instances of human sacrifice, rape, child abuse and domestic violence, not to mention the overall dose of supremely bloody gun violence and just a generaly lurid, deliberately unsavoury tone that stems from Gifford’s often shockingly tasteless yet somehow captivating work. But it’s a lot of fun too, there’s heaps of hilariously subtle dark comedy thrown in, a ballistic firestorm of a soundtrack, a host of deliriously over the top performances from the excellent cast and all manner of bizarre, arbitrary, surreal and eclectic sideshow-freak elements that make this an eccentric trip to hell with two demented individuals who you can’t decide whether to run from in horror or party with as they’re that much fun.

-Nate Hill

Rachel Talalay’s Ghost In The Machine

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

What if like, a serial killer committed suicide, but not before making sure that his soul would be uploaded into a computer server through some pseudo hacker wizardry, leaving his essence free to roam throughout entire systems of data and machine control, manipulating everyday household items into deadly weapons of murder? It sounds ridiculous and it is but it’s also a lot of fun, an old forgotten cyber horror flick called Ghost In The Machine. Now, obvious comparisons might be made to another 90’s cyberpunk SciFi/horror called Virtuosity with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe but besides having a way lower budget, scrappy feel to it, this film is about a serial killer who was already human and then died and went into cyberspace vs the other way round. The killer here (played by Ted Marcoux) is just a nondescript, nasty piece of work dubbed the “address book killer” for his arbitrary, imagination deficient mode of picking victims. One night he deliberately totals his car off a cliff and kicks the bucket, only to resurface in cyberspace to hunt a young mother (Karen Allen) and her kid using everything from toasters, home entertainment systems, crash test dummy courses and basically anything electronic he can posses using his weird supernatural hacker magic. Their only hope is a super hacker of their own, (played by Chris Mulkey aka Hank from Twin Peaks) a good natured dude who once embezzled a million bucks from the IRS and gave it back to the people. This is fairly lowbrow, schlocker type entertainment with really, really cheesy 90’s virtual reality effects in the vein of something like The Lawnmower Man, but it has a certain viciousness and violent edge that I appreciated. Several murder scenes are pretty jaw dropping including one where the killer turns the entire interior living room of a dude’s house into an irradiated microwave zone and lets him literally fry to death, or an instance of electricity induced spontaneous combustion that is genuinely jarring in its sudden gruesomeness. Rachel Talalay the director also did the criminally underrated cult classic Tank Girl so she has a flair for the bizarre punk sensibilities that come across here. If you like retro SciFi goofiness, grisly slasher aesthetics and just a cheesy, lovably VHS feel, you’ll get a kick here.

-Nate Hill

Robert Zemeckis’s The Witches

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Robert Zemeckis is a perfect director to tackle one of Roald Dahl’s books; he’s got an inspired mastery over cutting edge CGI, a talent for dynamic visual storytelling and a genuine sense of the macabre, this willingness to be honest about the darker aspects of real life and include them in a story geared towards children, which is an attribute that he directly shares with Dahl himself. His crack at The Witches is an admirable, mostly successful, visually stunning and opulently stylish bit of devilish fun and although obvious comparison will be made not only to Dahl’s book (which simply cannot be topped) but also to Nicolas Roeg’s brilliant 1990 take on it. Zemeckis definitely takes the more playful route and while still injecting palpable dread and menace into the proceedings, his version isn’t quite the prosthetic soaked nightmare Roeg offered. The setting here is switched up from the UK to Deep South Alabama where a young boy and his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) encounter a coven of nasty real life witches holding a convention at a swanky bayou hotel. Anyone who has read the book knows that these witches are all about murdering children in frighteningly inventive ways and are led by the preening, aristocratic and supremely evil Grand High Witch, here played by Anne Hathaway in a performance that has to be seen to be believed. In the book the character is mean enough, in the 90’s version Anjelica Huston gave her a kind of.. ‘dark empress socialite’ vibe but Hathaway just grabs the script in her jaws like a dog and runs off with it. Sporting snowy blonde hair, a jittery Norwegian accent and mandible modifications that would make the vampires in Blade 2 shudder, she devours scenery, steals every scene and annunciates every syllable with the force of a snake sinking its fangs into someone. She truly makes this character hers, it’s the most impressive work I’ve ever seen from her as an actress and is by and far the best thing about the film. Even Stanley Tucci, who is usually the life of the party in any film, stands back in restraint as the hotel’s fussy manager and gives Anne a wide berth for her typhoon of a performance to unfold. The special effects are wondrous creations and I can’t figure out why anyone would bitch about the CGI on display here (it’s always inevitable I suppose) because it looks and feels incredibly tactile and terrifying. Zemeckis takes liberties with the witch anatomy that Dahl never dreamed of but they are righteous departures in style that make sense and add to the mythology nicely. Chris Rock narrates the film vivaciously as an older version of the young boy, and I never thought I’d say it but he has an uncannily perfect way with Dahl’s passages that had me wishing for a ‘The Witches audiobook as read by Chris Rock.’ My only one complaint is that it feels too slight in the latter half and I would have appreciated more of a runtime, but what they do give us really is a treat. Solid, comprehensive storytelling from Zemeckis, audaciously beautiful costume design, a gem of a score from Alan Silvestri and one unbelievable banshee howl encore performance from Hathaway who is truly having a blast.

-Nate Hill

Adam Wingard’s Home Sick

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Adam Wingard has become something of a household name lately, blasting on scene with his vicious shocker You’re Next, thrilling audiences with his retro cult specimen The Guest and solidifying his presence as a filmmaker to be reckoned with by scoring the reins to Godzilla Vs. Kong, the dude is a top dog who is here to stay. Many aren’t aware of his debut film though, and fair enough because it’s about as low budget, under the radar and avant-garde as horror can be but it’s so, so worth watching to triangulate the evolution of a fascinating artist from the murkiest pits of lo-fi, Grindhouse schlock to the loftiest echelons of Hollywood high gloss. It’s called Home Sick, he made it on a shoestring budget back in the mid 2000’s and it’s an absolutely diabolical treat, but only if you can stomach some truly jarring moments of gore and have one demented sense of humour with the capacity for.. let’s just say… abstract thought. Low budget, practical effects driven schlockers like these are a dime a dozen, but this one is worth it’s weight in gold simply for going that extra mile to make it memorable and stand out from the cheaply drawn masses. It starts out slow, with an eerie opening credit musical jingle and animated sequence that could suggest all kinds of horrors to come. We meet a group of friends in the Deep South going through the motions of partying and quarreling. Tiffany Shepis does a wonderfully nutty little riff on her scream queen shtick who likes to rail cocaine at her graveyard janitor job and swing a mop around with gale force. Anywho, this weird little troupe is kicking back one night, when into the apartment walks a very ill adjusted stranger named Mr. Suitcase (the legendary Bill Moseley), and sits down on the couch like he owns the place. He’s chipper, charming and affable to a terrifying level, as he opens up his suitcase full of razor blades that he calls “gifts”. He asks them all to pick one person in their life they hate and want to wish dead, slicing a nasty gash on his forearm for each answer. The hilarious lot deadpan member of the group (Forrest Pitts, in a priceless performance of comedic eccentricities) foolishly blurts out that he wishes everyone in the room dead, and then the real fun begins. A giant masked killer begins stalking and killing pretty much every character around in ways so brutal your balls will shrink into your pancreas. Seriously, it’s like they sat down in a boardroom and systematically came up with every squirm inducing way to inflict violence on a human body, and gave their results to the storyboard artist and effects team. It all comes to a chaotic, deranged finale when they take refuge with Uncle Johnnie (the late great Tom Towles, always brilliant) a gun toting chili enthusiast. That’s where the film comes off the rails, but it’s seemingly deliberate and actually quite hilarious, as everyone pretty much goes certifiably bananas and loses the plot all at once like feral kindergarten class in overdrive. There’s some thought and care put into the writing, and as such the characters, however odd or over the top, seem like real people, albeit some strange and undesirable folks. The film oozes unsettling atmosphere right from the get-go, fervent in its aggressively weird sense of style and never taking the conventional route that most horrors end up with. Like I said, if your sense of humour has an affinity for the bizarre, demented and off the wall (think David Lynch meets Tim & Eric meets The Evil Dead meets John Waters), you’re gonna love this little gem. On top of being a laugh riot, it’s just freaky enough to earn it’s horror classification, something which many films in the genre just can’t claim. As to why it’s called HomeSick, though? Couldn’t tell you, and there’s no reference to it the entire time. Perhaps it’s called that for the folks that will be thoroughly repelled and repulsed, those who watch it expecting a run of the mill, cookie cutter slasher and feel uncomfortable with the oddness, getting “home sick” for their safer horror fare. As for me, I’m right at home up the weird end of the alley, and love this type of thing and it’s one hell of a fascinating debut for any director to start out with.

-Nate Hill

Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani’s Let The Corpses Tan

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Whenever contemporary filmmakers attempt a homage to cinematic styles, tones and artistic mechanics of bygone eras in cinema it’s very easy to tell whether they know their shit and have captured their intended aesthetic or missed the mark. Every culture and era of the medium has their own unique and distinct flavour woven into every aspect of the artistic process, and any pastiche is just going to be a delicate undertaking. In the case of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Let The Corpses Tan they have done an impeccable job of emulating this kind of… 60’s/70’s Italian pulp/murder/spaghetti/cop/splatter/action vibe that’s so specific to that time and region I can’t even properly describe how… unmistakable the palette is. It’s like Italian genre cinema went to sleep one night and this film is a window into into its REM cycle. On a remote, sun drenched island in the Mediterranean (shot in beautiful Corsica), a gang of murderous thieves spearheaded by a vicious femme fatale (Romanian cult icon Elina Löwensohn) hide out in the crumbling ruins of a Hellenic ghost town, harbouring a stolen trove of gold bullion. As they languidly await some vague deadline, others approach including a gaggle of unfortunate civilians and two intrepid motorbike cops, whose arrival heralds the furious, bloody, beautiful extended gun battle that becomes the film’s centrepiece. That’s all for plot really, but trust me it’s all you need, this film is all style, aesthetics and nightmarish visual poetry and contains some of the most outright striking imagery, editing and production I’ve ever seen in cinema. The weapons are all gorgeously retro and have this… ‘Spaghetti SteamPunk’ mechanical anatomy, the violence has a Giallo singed, pop art bloodiness to it, and the editing is some of the most painstakingly detailed work I’ve ever seen. Closeups on craggy faces, hyper-quick zooms, pans, jump cuts and jarring chops that are so off the wall, intense and unconventional they nearly give the viewer a heart murmur in the best way possible. Amidst the gunplay that although supremely stylish is very down to earth there is also this wonderful flourish of shocking surrealism woven into the story, as we see a mysterious, Venus-esque maiden appearing occasionally surrounded by tantalizing, erotically charged symbolism, gunshots explode into otherworldly blasts of coloured paint and all manner of dreamlike cutaways, hyper-stylized mysticism and enough bright colours and sunshine to get a rave going. Absolutely astonishing film, highly recommended.

-Nate Hill

Steve Miner’s Warlock

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Steve Miner’s Warlock is billed as a horror film but it looks, feels and works better as a sort of time travel adventure deal. There are elements of horror, and the sequel (which I’ll review next) definitely dabbles in horror more hardcore but this is a rollicking, spirited jaunt from 1600’s New England through space and time to 1990’s L.A. as a hyperactive witch hunter (Richard E. Grant) pursued a dangerous supernatural sorcerer (Julian Sands) before he can collect enough dark magic to unleash the apocalypse or… something. It doesn’t matter what your specifics are when your effects, journey and overall atmosphere are this much fun. Sands is mercurial, devilish and relentless as the Warlock and he carefully walks a tightrope between being an unstoppable, faceless force of evil like some horror boogeymen and having his own unique charisma and panache, like others. Grant is ridiculously fun as the initially boorish, then gradually likeable and by the third act downright adorable witch hunter, sporting a coat right out of The Revenant and a mullet that Chuck Norris would be jealous of. Also he’s called “Giles Redferne,” which might be the coolest name ever in cinema, and he sure lives up to it. He meets a bubbly 90’s valley girl who has no interest joining forces with him until the Warlock puts a nasty aging spell on her and then, well, you can imagine. The effects are naturally of the 90’s variety but they have their own kitschy charm, especially during a hilariously shocking sequence where Sands literally kills a child and uses its blood for a flying potion so he can become a cruise missile and engage Redferne in a raucous highway car/flying Warlock chase. This is a fun one with elements of horror, dark comedy and swashbuckling tinged adventure all at play.

-Nate Hill

No One Lives

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite as… efficient a serial killer as Luke Evans in No One Lives, an absolutely mental, ruthlessly gory, completely unhinged shocker with enough torque in its hood to short circuit your TV. It’s one of those stories where a group of very bad people accidentally enter the orbit of someone much, much worse and live to deeply regret being so careless. In this case the bad people are a roving gang of backwater criminals led by Lee Tergesen, but they’re not a biker gang or anything specific they’re just like… a gang, like the Warriors or something which I found hilarious for some reason. Anyway they unwittingly piss off Luke Evans’s seemingly benign ‘Driver’, who turns out to be an impossibly cunning, deviously psychotic and *very* experienced mass murderer and he has now decided that they are all gonna die. Every. Last. One. It’s not so much a game of survival as it is a total massacre of fish in barrel and we see him dispatch them all in some truly unsettling and bloody ways that involve everything from an industrial wood shredder (it’s not a wood ‘chipper’, the only applicable description of this fucking giant thing is ‘shredder’) to a lethal harpoon gun pulley system to a grisly variation on the ‘Leo hiding in a horse carcass’ moment from The Revenant. Amidst the mayhem and splatter the film even finds time for some genuinely twisted victim/aggressor psychology involving a former captive of his played by the lovely and always slightly unnerving Adelaide Clemens, who comes across like a shellshocked Michelle Williams. The two have a perverse, Stockholm Syndrome laced former dynamic that is eerie and very well acted by both. Evans usually shows up in polished, rollicking Hollywood high budget fantasy and whatnot but it’s very refreshing to see him roll up his sleeves and dive headlong into something knowingly lurid and deliriously pulpy, he has a ton of fun as basically the Jason Bourne of serial killers and I could totally see the character returning for a sequel or two. It’s decidedly lo-fi, B horror stuff and very in your face gruesome but Japanese director Ryûhei Kitamura keeps the momentum surging at a breathless pace, the gore and action nearly nonstop and the schlocky, Midnite tone evenly dispersed throughout for a wicked wild ride.

-Nate Hill

Aneesh Chaganty’s Run

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Sarah Paulsen can be pretty damn scary when she wants to be and casting directors have taken full advantage of her talents, placing her in some truly unsettling roles where she somehow always manages to find humanity in the monstrosity. Aneesh Chaganty’s Run is a diabolically calibrated shocker that sees the actress in one of her more disturbing turns yet as a new mother who, as we see in an atmospheric prologue, loses her newborn child two hours after it’s born and appears devastated. Fast forward a decade and a half and we see her living in relative tranquility with a disabled daughter (Kiera Allen) and a good teaching job. She loves her kid very much and takes care of her multiple serious medical conditions until the daughter sees some cracks in the seams and realizes that mommie dearest might not be who she says she is and may be downright dangerous. This leads to a series of excruciatingly suspenseful scenes of the kid trying to break free, figure out what’s going on and how she’s being lied to and Paulsen furiously trying to keep her close, and very much in the dark. Director Chaganty also did the sensational 2018 thriller Searching with John Cho and that film was almost entirely restricted to the realm of digital social media screens and phone/tablet interfaces and somehow managed to be as exciting and propulsive as can be. This film obviously has less limitations and takes place out and about in the real world but the same nerve wracking momentum and crackling energy are present the entire time, so it stands to reason that this guy is a filmmaker to keep a close eye on as far as thrillers go. The ending was a bit.. demented for me and although deliciously and darkly serendipitous, felt a tad strange but everything that comes before is top tier thriller material, with Paulsen firing on all certifiably deranged cylinders.

-Nate Hill

Las Tinieblas: The Darkness

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

The Darkness was a weird one, even by my standards, but I somewhat enjoyed its particular brand of bizarre, despite feeling that the film overall seems a bit… incomplete. It’s a Spanish horror film, but one of those ones that seems to shirk the conventions of sub-genre and aspires to be something completely unique. Somewhere in a perpetually fog enshrouded, seemingly post apocalyptic wilderness, a paranoid fellow (Brontis Jodorowsky, son of legendary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky) lives in a small cabin with his three grandchildren, in constant fear. He claims that if they go outside a mysterious ‘beast’ will come for them, and makes them wear gas masks if they set one foot outside for food or water, for fear of some vague toxicity in the air. Indoors doesn’t seem all that much better though because he’s kind of an unstable whack job who has an extremely unsettling collection of puppets he brings out, plus his rules and phobias just come across as… nuts. Soon the eldest grandchild, who bears the brunt of his antics, gets suspicious and it puts a tense saga of attempted escape and surreal, dreamlike imagery into motion. This is an arthouse film through and through, a style that I love but sometimes they get too loose, unstructured and neglect to tell a story that has any kind of discernible substance to it beyond just.. weird stuff happening. There are some absolutely striking visual terrors on display including aforementioned puppets, who are terrifyingly lifelike and a strange, split second glimpse at some kind of monster who may or may not be there for real, and the atmosphere is a smothering auditory tarpaulin of palpable unease that hangs over everything as does the eternal Silent Hill-esque fog. The film looks and sounds amazing and is very immersive from an atmospheric standpoint, it just needs more: a smidge more tangible exposition, a longer runtime to flesh things out and some more character to development to make it the full package. An almost great film.

-Nate Hill

White Noise

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

I’ll start with the Thomas Edison quite that this film opens with because I just love it:

“Nobody knows whether our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere, but if we can evolve an instrument so delicate to be manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life such an instrument ought to record something.”

I’m not sure what film critics were watching back in 2005 that caused such a knee jerk reaction of overall negativity, but the White Noise I saw was a chillingly effective, moodily atmospheric and very well done horror with a solid lead performance from Michael Keaton and one hell of a central premise. I mean it’s a bit low key, favouring hovering room tone and slow paced suspense over frenzied thrills or jarring shocks but that tends to be what I gravitate towards in horror anyways, so here we are. Keaton plays a Canadian construction CEO in Vancouver whose recently pregnant wife (Chandra West) doesn’t come home one night. A few days pass and her body is found near her crashed car, vaulted over a seawall gorge. As he begins mourning her, a mysterious gentleman (Ian McNeice) approaches him and claims that she has been contacting him via a phenomenon known as EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon in which the spirits of the dead can speak out across the gulf between worlds using electronic equipment, in this case a VHS recording system and a screen full of the titular white noise. Keaton is skeptical at first but it soon becomes clear that this is very real and with the help of another grieving woman (the great Deborah Kara Unger) he sets out to communicate with his wife and discern whatever message she has for him. Problem is, the VHS system is an open receiver and she isn’t the only spirit out there who can hear or talk, which sets the conflict in motion. I won’t say more but it’s a tense, brooding thriller and the Vancouver setting provides that classic rainy day, chilly PNW feel while much of the action is shot through these muted blue grey filters and accompanied by unnerving, otherworldly cues from the score by Claude Foisy. The scenes of communication over the VHS equipment are the film’s strongest attribute and fill the visual auditory realm of the film with a stark, creepy sensory dreamscape of fuzzy movement, shadows around the corner and wailing souls crying out from the abyss. Like I said, I’m really not sure what the issues were with this film from a critical standpoint other than the fact that they play fast and loose with plot a bit, but even then there’s a clear answer and resolute final act, while overall they focus on atmosphere and tone, which is my jam anyways. Great film.

-Nate Hill