NOSFERATU @ 100

Real estate hot shot Tom Hutter, who looks like the grandfather of one of the members of Neu, is fired up by his boss Herr Knock, who looks like the grandson of Grunderhagen, the eyebrow troll, to get a signature from Count Orlock who art in Transylvania so he can move into the massive crumbling mansion across the road from Tom. At home, Tom's wife Ellen is playing with a kitten and intensifies that character note by rejecting the flowers that Tom brings her on the gorunds that he killed them by picking them. Oh well, there's still Transywarnia. No one wants to give him a coach ride when he gets there because Count Orlock so he only gets part of the way until the Count's carriage picks him up, driven by a barely disguised Count Orlock himself. At Casa Orlock, the Count wines and dines Tom and is all charm and terror until Tom cuts himself which sends the Count into a paroxysm of self restraint. Tom wakes with a couple of bite marks on his neck. Bloody mossies, eh?

If any of this reminds you of the plot of Dracula, it should. Early drafts of the screenplay were intended to be a direct adaptation of Bram Stoker's hit novel. While Dracula had long been adapted for the stage it hadn't yet been made as a film ... that had any market penetration (Google is your friend). There might have been a reason for that for, as soon as she found out that some Germans were trying to do just that Stoker's widow called out: That's mine. Well, it's Bram's but he said I could have it. So they made it with names and settings changed and it became Nosferatu which is Romanian (ish) for vampire/undead/fiend that broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Why Romanian? That's where Transylvania is, for real.

So, now that it's a hundred years old, is it any good? If you ask the woman at the screening Nova gave free for anyone who paid to see Shadow of a Vampire that night, it's laugh a minute. If you ask the guy who said, loudly, to her, "take your bloody Prozac, please," to massive applause, then he'll probably differ. If you're like the lady you probably need to be informed that the Earth was formed a fair while before your birth and many things took time to get to the state they are in today and maybe question what you actually get out of fiction. If you're like the lad, you might well find this among the most rewarding experiences you are likely to have of early cinema.

F.W. Murnau's film of Nosferatu is a triumph of invention, using the scant means available he and his gang created a film that is durably effective and will dazzle any mind that can appreciate the difficulties of conceiving of its physical effects (let alone getting them done). This was not the first horror film by many years but it was made when genre films were yet to find the traits that gave them that identity. The scene in which Ellen in Germany is so bonded with Thomas in Transylvania that she projects enough of her will to protect him from the Count who is poised to attack. It disturbs the overall logic but adds a real eeriness that suggests that this telling of the tale will go where it needs to.

Max Schreck (schreck means fright in German) gives as an otherworldly figure in the Count, his elongated face and bulging stare are almost more powerful an indication of his animalistic state than his stretched fingers and their claws. His movement is variously rat nimble and primate clumsy when not purely unnatural (due to early stop motion, and under cranking). He can vanish into the light of a room or appear to bleed from the shadows. He can be a shadow, climbing the silent stairs against the wall and reaching for the door of his victim. He is beyond our reason's control which is why, even now, when a still might bid us chortle at the extremity of his appearance, he can still command the screen as soon as you see him move.

Nosferatu lives in a world in which the genre it helped create rolls through many revolutions, going from the meagre to the lavish and, in revolt, back to the meagre when it needs to refresh. But Nosferatu is a constant. Having all the invention of a studio-indulged mega movie but all the subversion of a game-changer made in a cellar. Looking at it now feels like watching something not just from the dawn of cinema but the dawn of time: it's hard antiquity gives us the sense of peering through time at the impossibly recorded past. I don't mean that it's old or even that it's timeless despite that; I mean that it can be viewed in disregard for either of those things. It's laggy here and too fleeting there, the performances are uneven and its technological hurdle (by being silent) can daunt most of us but, once we're there in front of it, being filled by its images we are where the best of cinema takes us: somewhere else. Imagine, if you sit before it, that you are seeing it fresh, a century ago, this freakish thing that grips you in the dark and might never end. The world outside the cinema will be forever changed when you step back into it. Imagine all movies had that charm. Recall that they don't. That's why Nosferatu is still crazy.

THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC @ 45

The Exorcist was released when the '70s were three years in and this sequel came out when there were three years to go. Between the two points the triumph of New Hollywood had fulfilled its early promises, brought auteurism into a mainstream the richer for it. So, while the first one was less considered for its directorial by-line than its sequel. The reason to bring this up is that William Friedkin's dud-free '70s was declared in retrospect while the hit and miss John Boorman got a poster credit over the title. And yet it's the one that is so commonly reviled as garbage that it has come to form a void between the first and the heavily compromised but well regarded Exorcist III (directed by the writer of the source novel)

Richard Burton plays Father Lamont who is introduced confronting a demon in possession of a local woman considered by her village to be a healer. It spooks him and links him to the first film's Father Merrin whose case he gets to investigate by order of a cardinal who wants Lamont to clear Merrin's name of the suspicion of heresy and possible satanism. Really? Ok, off we go to New York where Fr Lamont catches up with a teenage Regan whose being treated by Nurse Ratchet in a mental health centre that is all glass panes and perspective-challenging angles which is just the place you want to be when your psyche is feeling a little vulnerable. Ok, not Nurse Ratchet, just Louise Fletcher who has mind-meld throb machine to tune a pair of scones into unison. Cue overlay of scenes of the younger Regan as the divil from the first one. But, just like the girl at the beginning, Regan finds that the other side of a touch of Satan is the power of healing. She brings an autistic patient into smooth eloquence just by going into the room and chewin' the fat. And --

Ok, you get the idea. This is an attempted expansion of the themes in the first one toward the realm of the mystical. And just as Lucio Fulci took the religion-stripped Dawn of the Dead to make his sneaky sequel Zombie that poured all that religion back in because it was easier that way, so John Boorman took the high tension, anti-gothic The Exorcist of William Friedkin and pumped all the ooky booky bullshit in where it hadn't been. Boorman who rightly impressed with Point Blank and Deliverance also drew winces of pure yuck with goofy garbage like Zardoz. He would, after Ex2 go on to make the entertaining but toxically silly Excalibur. The problem is not all his but this execution which brought the cinema walls down with screaming laughter where the first just had the screams is never helped by his diveting from the hard realist tension of the first (which makes the unreality of it scarier) to find an ecstasy of  divine bubblegum.

Just as culpable, here, was what happened in those four years that separated the first from the second. On the one hand while noir became as heavy as Taxi Driver and satire as Swiftian as Network, horror reinvested in ghouls 'n' beasties. The realist look and feel that Friedkin gave the genre with The Exorcist was maintained but the tales just went back to the basics, a kind of theatre restaurant without the jokes. Now, I'll admit to loving fare like Carrie or The Omen but when their hokey fenokey credulity for magic encourages Boorman to make a horror sequel that tries to be deeper than it should be things get unsustainable. Bigger budget, less risk, more piffle. Perhaps the best that can be said for the excesses of The Exorcist II is that necessitated the lean and relentlessly mean Halloween the year after, made for what they paid the extras in Ex2 and celebrated for evermore as a milestone.

I tend to be easy on sequels. They can be fun, especially when you dive in young and satiate with massive doses of world building and all the best things in cinema. But there are some that don't play nicely and this is one. It doesn't play nicely because it is conceived and executed aloof from its genre. Friedkin didn't do that, he wanted it new but he wanted it horror; Boorman seems to think he can rescue the story from all that gutter genre stuff but then doesn't seem to feel it when he falls flat on his face in the attempt. I'm ranting. I think I wanted to be surprised and find some value that the memory of the silliness masked. What I found was like a prototype of the kind of thing that currently goes under the bullshit term elevated horror. I cannot say less than that.

EVENT HORIZON @ 25

Hyper technological ship the Event Horizon disappeared on its first mission but has mysteriously reappeared in the exact coordinates it vanished from. It's silent. Are the crew still there? It would make some seriously boastable salvage. A veteran crew set off in retrieval with the physics wizz designer in tow because you never know when you'll need to explain something baffling. Two months later they're on the doorstep to Neptune and there's the big beasty in orbit. They hook up and board it and then everything goes to hell. Well, it's kind of already been there so this is more like a traveller's slide show of hell. Then, let's see who gets out.

That is the plot and the problem of Event Horizon. An impressive premise turns into an action movie in a gothic setting. Yeah, so what's my problem? My problem is that, while it's nice to watch and the suspense works every time, the really interesting bits are abandoned half way through the second act and it settles into a by the numbers actioner. The notion of what happens when a ship with a gravity drive goes interdimensional and comes back alive is flattened of its science fiction and gives way to a horror tale that needs its good art direction to stop it feeling routine.

It's not the cast's fault. Sam Neill does a great line in understated villain. Laurence Fishburne, only a few years before iconic status as Morpheus, gives great gravitas with a troubled moral centre. Everyone else does their job well. It's not the look or sound. A spaceship as a gothic cathedral works a treat and scene after scene impresses with scale and invention. It's none of the parts of a feature film that might let it down but the weight of expensive suits on the creatives to beat or at least match the threat of an unfathomable monster.

Event Horizon was intended to be released before the looming Titanic took all the money from everyone in the world. Not only was it rushed it was tampered with at every stage post production until everything that explained everything but the most basic of plots was surgically amputated by the money people. You can still see some of the surrealistic gore in flashes but these images were part of longer scenes that would drive the dread into solid horror. Scenes and or dialogue that gave purpose to the rookie testing the black hole were excised for being wordy or adding running time, turning the scene into something as stupid as the alien petting scene in Prometheus. What might well have become a forbidding classic of the form ended as an occasionally scary, jobbing sci-fi  actioner.

The film has had an igloo of cultism built around it because of what was cut; images from long destroyed footage that no one outside of a very few insiders. See also David Lynch's Dune for this. If cults based on the invisible remind you too uncomfortably of the world's religions consider only that the forbidden can lure like nothing in the realm of evidence. 

Back on Lynch, as part of a promo for his own remaster of Eraserhead, he hooked a number from the boxset package to his then commercial website that unlocked a cut scene from the film, in good quality. The scene did nothing for the overall scheme of the film but was good to see and fit the dcirector's aesthetic perfectly. But that was it. Once the link (and then then the site) was gone it was there no more. Then again, the remaining cut of Eraserhead is the official one and it's steadfastly beyond genre, considered timelessly weird without the need of more. 

Event Horizon's routine execution feels deprived of what promised to be the real substance, the forbidden and the severe. We glimpse in fractions of seconds images that might have made us look through our fingers. We miss what we never had and can never have. What we do have is a more than passable film which borrows its best from Alien and its least fulfilled from Solaris (and a lot from Hellraiser) that we can put on at any time under chit chat and a glass of wine. That's better than I can say of anything by Wes Anderson.

Review: PETITE MAMAN

Nelly, eight, is introduced helping an old lady with a crossword. After getting one of the clues right, they embrace and she bids the lady farewell. She moves through the corridor of the aged care home, saying goodbye to others before finding the room where her mother is clearing her own mother's personal effects. Then they, with Nelly's dad in his van, drive out to the departed grandmere's maison in the woods to start work making it fit for sale. There are doors wallpapered over and other sins of renovation that need attention. 

Meanwhile, Nelly has the beautiful autumnal woods to play in. One day, she goes out and meets another girl her own age who takes her to the fort she is building with fallen branches. When it starts to rain too much for fun, Marion, the new girl, takes Nelly back to her place. At first, it's fun but it's odd. Finally it lands as Nelly realises that Marion's house is identical to her grandmother's. Freaked, she begs off. Intrigued, she promises to come back and play some more. She has just met her own mother as a girl.

But has she? She has been listening to stories of her mother's childhood in that area. Her mother has also departed, feeling the weight of her grief and the memories of the location. Her father remains but affably bats back Nelly's requests for old family stories. Nelly falls back on a wealth of child imagination. It might well be that Marion is a desperate hallucination. But even that gets stressed.

Petite Maman is the latest feature film by Celine Siamma whose mind and talent brought us Portrait of a Lady on Fire (and a few others I need to see). This means that the almost Dardenne Brothers plainness of the opening scenes was almost inevitably going to be stirred by some serious invention. That's what dependably happens here. The really impressive thing is that Siamma maintains the kitchen sink flatness of the presentation even as the narrative travels down paths whimsical and worrying. 

Apart from one scene there isn't even a score. We are seeing something like the origin episode of a bedtime story where, like the best of them, we must ourselves do much to fill in what's happening. Siamma's expert hand at detail is essential here. In an early scene, Nelly is playfully eating a crunchy snack by rapidly crunching her teeth into it as she pushes it into her mouth, the way you might feed a log into a woodchipper. Later in the same scene we see her mother, driving, from the side, get fed the same snacks from behind as Nelly's tiny disembodied hands reach for her mother's mouth. We know that Nelly is playful, imaginative and can charm her mother with found materials. From there it's not such a long journey to her conjuring her own mother as a playmate in the enchanting woods.

There is a lot of plot that I won't reveal as it carries the weightier themes of the film and needs seeing the film to appreciate. However, I will say that the sense that I was being gently lowered into some profundities about parent/child relationships with both the darker concerns of the former and the unbridled invention of the latter. I can't end until I also appreciate the performances of real life twins Josephing and Gabrielle Sanz in the central roles: they are as intense and free-minded as real children and remind us who have minds like old desk calendars that Nietzsche lamented how we forget the seriousness of child's play. 

I mentioned the lack of music, didn't I/ Well, I did say almost. Towards the end, one of the final acts of friendship between the girls happens on a lake with a rowboat and an extraordinary structure. The song begins like a throwback to great British synth pop but soon blooms into a choral and electronic piece that conveys so much joy that it needled at my tearducts.  If you see it at the cinema, you get this music again (with a sly lyric runner on the lower left screen). Please sit all the way through it. No, funny outtakes or teasers, just a piece of music you will need to properly digest this strange and eerie feast.

1982@40: THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW

After an ominous monochrome prologue involving a doctor, new mother and the fate of her baby we zip forward to the early '80s which was in colour and meet a group of uni students who are getting ready for an end of term party against the proclamation of the house mother, Mrs Slater. As the future matrons of those United States, they prank the old gal and inadvertently kill her. With bon ton finesse the kids get their stories straight and wrap the body in a carpet and heave it into the disused pool. Not everyone's happy about it but PARTAY! So, they pile back into the house and get ready for a night of tertiary level boogie. The sun goes down and the boys arrive, the bottles flick open and it's on. But is Mrs Slater still in the pool?

While this might describe every second teen slasher you've ever seen. Depending on what you've seen of certain Canadian/US and older French thrillers you can pick two main elements that drive the plot. I'm not naming them here as the titles alone could conceivably be spoilers. So, if you're expecting a parade of fatalities at the hand of a mysterious (but is it?) killer and then maybe a few twists along the way, then this is the movie for you. 

By 1982 the teen slasher was established. Final girls, and masked othered killers converged upon each other as the body count ticked by. Because the audience and the onscreen targets were indistinguishable, the market was, for the time being, guaranteed. So, why bother doing anything differently? Well, there's always the possibility that something special about yours might help you break into the emergent market of  Michael Keaton vehicles just in time for the Tom Hanks explosion. If that happens here, that strive for respectability, it has to do with writer/director Mark Rosman's apprenticeship on the sets of '70s name director Brian de Palma. 

De Palma had established a profile reviving Hitchcockian suspense (to the point of outright lifting whole scenes) and while you might not be able to instantly declare something as one of his you wouldn't be surprised to learn of it afterwards. His most divergent from the Hitchcock template was Carrie which remains a legit horror classic. Outside of that, with de Palma you got gloss with everything looking Hollywood rather than gritty. If you know Hitch's '50s and '60s colour films, imagine them updated by ten years. Well, that's what Sorority Row looks and feels like: soft golden '80s light, youth culture about five years out of date (dig that The Cars with Tom Petty party band), and a few twists you don't care about but at least move the plot along. Oh, forgot, and a final scene that screams sequel (just not loudly enough in this case, though there was a remake decades later just to use the title). 

If you were to program a Halloween marathon of '80s slashers, this would serve as a pallet cleanser between stone cold Carpenter or F13 entries or as a companion to other twisty turny ones like Happy Birthday to Me or April Fool's Day. Ands that's the problem. Seeing it again, I registered it as ok but could stretch that no further. Among the sub generic fare there are the screamingly gory, the outright disturbing, the trove of checklist-ticking assembly line pieces and a few outliers like My Bloody Valentine or Slumber Party Massacre. Some can still turn my stomach and others feel like favourite albums and then there are Sorority Rows which play like a stretch of hits and memories radio that you don't mind at all.

The House on Sorotity Row is available on Tubi

Review: CENSOR

Enid is a censor working at the BBFC during the video nasties era of the mid '80s. When one of the films she has passed for release is linked to a murder she finds she has been exposed through a leak to public attention, resulting in a barrage of angry phone calls and a gutter press campaign. As if that weren't enough, her parents have officially declared her sister, missing since childhood, dead. Big deal? Enid has lived with a lifelong guilt that she might have been the cause of the girl's abduction. An encounter with a notorious producer of video nasties and the viewing of one of his nastier videos triggers a confabulation that he, too, might have something to do with the disappearance. So, off she goes on a quest into territory that might not even be real. 

Censor is one of a small number of films that ask questions about cinema by putting their characters directly in the path of its power. Similar territory was covered in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio wherein a part of the production team of an ultra violent horror film undergoes a strange personal transformation. Enid's passage from a controller of extreme culture to a potential victim of it might be seen as the kind of ironic turn that the Twilight Zone was built on but there's a creeping theme on show here. As Enid's prim appearance gets progressively shabbier and the film's pallet toward the gaudier of '80s the notion of control shifts from the censor to the film producers and finally (without spoilers) to those who might keep the circle spinning by opposing the production. This ranges from some black humour kills to the appearance of a VCR remote in Enid's hand at a point of severe stress. Finally, the utopianism that both sides of the censorship debate would claim coalesce in a radio news broadcast that is as creepy as a musical box tune in an old horror movie.

Niamh Algar (who kept reminding me of Samantha Morton) gives us an Enid who seems starched up until you see her at work, calmly noting acts of extreme gore and making recommendations. When the parts of her professionalism begin to crumble her performance sails into the kind of personal disintegration more typical of a Cronenberg character like in Videodrome or Dead Ringers and Algar's intensity transmits the same kind of anxiety in us. It's a turn remarkable for its subtlety until the end when it needs to explode which it does.

On that, Censor steers carefully away from giving in to its McGuffin too early. Those expecting a kind of horror satire with a lot of ironic violence will be disappointed; writer/director Prano Bailey Bond has mercifully avoided the temptation to make a video nasty hiding under cultural commentary. What we have is much more engaging; cinema that asks questions about cinema while being accomplished cinema.

Censor is currently available through Prime (it didn't get a cinema release in Australia)