Aye, the chill thickens outside. The wind howls and the fire crackles. Let's make it though to spring with these warming (some chilling) treats about walking with the unknown. As always, some of these will pose a challenge for you to access but you will be glad of the trouble when you see them. On!
Phase IV (Saul Bass, USA, 1974)
A sci-horror about an organised army of ants might make you think schlock. Saul Bass's mid-70s tale is far closer to the kind of rethink of humanity that was just around the corner in David Cronenberg's mind. A biologist and a mathematician find themselves besieged in their research station by a horde of the social insects who take to building human-like structures that look somewhere between temple pillars and watchtowers. The world is about to change.
Catch Us If You Can (John Boorman, U.K., 1965)
What starts as a pardonable ripoff of Hard Day's Night soon starts developing a social conscience as Dave Clark makes off with a poster girl and their exploits are absorbed by the ad campaign she's supposed to have fled. Travelling through the ad industry, futile military destruction, proto hippies who ask the beat group leader if he has any heroin for them, a bickering middleaged couple into kinkiness and collection toward a final dejecting illusion, this just doesn't play out like the big loud shouting pop that the band were famous for. A clue might be found in the directorship of one John Boorman whose strange existential thriller Point Blank was less than two years away. Possibly the only British Invasion promo feature that felt like a U.K. film from the time. Not as complex as
Billy Liar or as wrenching as
A Kind of Loving it's still more grey-skied and kitchen sink than the usual fare. A Harder Day's Night? Maybe not but nor is it the
Zardoz of beat-group movies.
Scanners (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1981)
David Cronenberg's fifth film continues his fascination with society and science and the individuals who get caught between the two. Cameron Vale is a scanner which means he can read minds. His skill has left him dejected on skid row. Taken up by a scientist who wants to develop his skill but also pursued by a corporation that wants to exploit it, Cameron has to learn on the lam, knowing he must stop running, turn and face the strange. Cronenberg went from strength to strength in this initial phase of his career, keeping an eye on the body horror sub-genre he invented but with a mind to find greater depth in the telling of the tale and the characters that populate it.
Blancanieves (Pablo Berger, Spain, 2012)
Pablo Berger's retelling of Snow White rips the carpet from under our feet. It plays soundly on a daughter's distance from her father and grief for the mother who died as she was born. Her flight from the house dominated by her wicked stepmother lands her in a company of a novelty act of travelling bullfight clowns (seven, in fact, guess the average stature) and shows a great talent for the bullring herself. Before you worry about supporting bullfighting by watching this film stop now and just watch it (my reason would be a spoiler). The meltingly beautiful Macarena Garcia brings both a feisty youth and tragic gravity to the title role while her counterpart Maribel Verdu as the wicked Encarna finds the sexiness in her dark role but is not above its comedy. Oh, didn't I say? This 2012 film is a silent movie. There's a score but the dialogue and narration are entirely on intertitles. But the film barely needs them as Berger's scholarly hand knows its way around silent cinema. He was worried by cash-in accusations in light of the high profile The Artist but needn't have been. Blancanieves is every frame it's own film (closer, if anything, to something by Guy Maddin but even then ...) Please seek and watch. Light the fireplace if you have one but maybe pass on the apple bobbing.
The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, USA, 1999)
Three students head out to the woods on an assignment to make a documentary about a local legend. Whether it's forces beyond their ken or that they get as psychologically lost as they are physically is kept deliberately ambiguous. That is why this horror tale would work regardless of its production values. On that it added two things that put it right in the middle of hitsville in a year of strong imaginative cinema on big budgets. BWP was made on a couple of maxed credit cards and a lot of favours. This film didn't invent the form it took but it became a source point for what would soon be known as found footage movies. It was also backed up by an early viral marketing campaign which worked because we weren't familiar with the concept on newsgroups and the web. Multimedia was a slight thing online in 1999 but that lent a kind of stolen authenticity to the campaign theme that this was real footage. That worked even if you didn't believe it because the film (unlike most of its descendants) works like an origins episode of a campfire tale. Take this one on a 20th birthday spin for the end of winter.
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