Spring Part 2: People Are Strange

As we move closer to the end of spring and the closing off with a summer season I thought we might diverge from the primaveran concerns of love and reproduction to notions of other fruition. This could be the strange literal afterlife of The Rapture, the vanity spinning hilariously out of control in Death Becomes Her or the big overcast dread of Kairo. And more. Your chair!

DEATH BECOMES HER

While it can be self-consciously cute at times this black comedy is continually funny with a range of performance styles which work for rather than against it. Streep and Hawn prove fiery combatants and Bruce Willis is cast against type at a time in his career when he would dare such a thing. Watch out for Sydney Pollack who only gets one scene but it's bloody funny and he steals it.


THE RAPTURE (USA 1991)

Sharon goes from spicing up her dull workaday world with nightly hedonism to born-again zealotry after she investigates an image seen in a tattoo that haunts her. This puts her on a rough outward spiral to something far more extreme than anything from her sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll days. But is a very literal apocalypse really happening around her or is she just caged in her own terrifying delusion?



KAIRO (Japan 2001)

Another apocalypse but this time one of of loneliness as a group of friends and then the rest of the world succumb to what would now be called a dark web room which brings them together with ghosts. These never go well, leaving the curious as black stains on walls where they have hanged themselves or even just explosions of ashes. Kyoshi Kurosawa has moved on from the horror films that made his name but they have a way of haunting all by themselves. I can't do better than one online critic who described Kairo (often translated as Pulse, but don't bother with the U.S. remake) thus: like The Omega Man directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.

DISTRICT 9 (South Africa 2009)

Sci-Fi satire as an alien invasion has long settled into being more of a refugee crisis, drawing inter-species bigotry very poignantly set in contemporary South Africa. Adopting a mockumentary style, following a bureaucratic staffer who in taking the crew to the internment camp of the title comes upon some illegally synthesised fuel, the inspection of which leads to ironies both hilarious and horrifying. A brilliant idea served so well that any heaviness of hand is forgivable through its sheer panache.

BANSHEE CHAPTER (2013)

This one comes in under the radar and tries a few things that might have killed it. It has a character who stands in for Hunter S. Thompson who is played as close to cheap parody as possible but never crosses that line. It borrows from the found footage sub genre while never assuming it as a narrative device which allows us to forget about its evident low cost. What it does provide is a lot of resourceful invention and a deft touch with what makes a scene scary.


SATANIC (USA 2016)

A bunch o' young adults head to a music festival but get sidetracked by some dark tourist attractions in LA. Getting in too deep, they witness a ritual. They come upon one of the participants at the ritual who tells them, with the eerie confidence of a zealot, that Hell is a beautiful confusion. She then draws something on the wall and changes the course of every other life in the room. Now, this should not work at all; it seems constructed by genre brickbats and only meant to hold until the credits. But the cast and direction ensure that, once the obnoxiousness of the kids is ironed out, the jeopardy is mounting and the rules are not for the general public. The contrast between the sumptuous shots of the LA skyline and the grime of the life closer to the drain adds a kind of pathos and Hell, when it is entered is confusing but maybe not so beautiful. A bright young horror for today.