DISTRICT 9 @ 15

After an alien mothership appears in the sky above Johannesburg, the insect-like inhabitants are taken in with a humanitarian perspective. Soon, their rehousing solution turns into a shanty town and a project to move them into more constrictive quarters, further away from sight is underway. At its head, the responsible department boss puts his son in law to see the transition through, with the idea that he might klutz it and disappear from family life altogether. The film picks up as Wikus starts his supervisory role with the zeal of the new boy, getting his hands smudged at the ghetto itself. He comes across a tube that has been developed by the aliens and panics when it splashes all over his face. That's what it takes. After a few tests he is told that he is transitioning to an alien.

Neill Blomkamp's 2009 action satire looks like it was made before the CGI was properly dried and suffers from more pacing problems than it should but it rings as true today as it did then, especially after a nine year run of bad government and a decay in the perception of helping the needy here in Australia. If the racial groups of South Africa could reconcile after over a century of eye popping oppression by one of the others, having a new other on the block just sends them down the same crushingly depressing path.

But District 9 has more on its plate than this ever repeating scenario. The aliens (called Prawns by the humans, and not pleasantly) have weapons genetically matched to their species. When they discover that Wikus can use them with his mutated arm the mission changes to harness the power of the new devastating guns and set to work on finding a path to military mutation. While this seemed like empty commerce as a target of satire in 2009, it feels all too horrifying now. The martinet soldier despatched to recapture the now escaped Wikus who has increasingly sided with the aliens, is a two dimensional bad guy but this is completely necessary for this plot. This is a character who would intentionally render himself without complicating sides to his own let alone an enemy.

Wikus' character journey from everyday bigot to committed anti-authoritarian fighter is largely made through his increasing acquaintance with the alien called Paul and Paul's son. Walk a mile, indeed. This might be deemed a little too sermon-like but Blomkamp's Peter Jackson like fervour for gore, action and sheer cheek add too much for that to stick. Sharlto Copely measures his performance into credible portions until his change feels natural and the meaning of the final shot gains its gravity.

Fiction doesn't change governments nor can it stop international aggression but if audiences can leave films like this, feeling as though they have shared a change of mind as it happened as they witnessed it, a gentle effect is legitimate as a greater one is untenable. When Tim Burton made Mars Attacks as a kind of cancelling tone to the oafish Independence Day he presented all he could, which is to say, he made a goofy comedy whose theme of tolerance was easily lost among the gags. District 9 is the better riposte. 

BLOOD SIMPLE @ 40

Bartender Ray is driving his boss's wife Abby home and their talk leads to revealing their attraction to each other. The photographs of their night in a motel are given to the boss Julian by the private detective he hired to straighten out his suspicions. When Ray shows up at the bar Julian, barely under control, warns him that Abby is playing him and they part in dark moods. Time for action, Julian calls the detective back and orders a hit. The chain is on and wound tight. The line on the poster read: The thriller is alive and well in Texas. Who knew what film noir meant in 1984?

Joel and Ethan Coen did and how.  Their debut feature did modest business at the cinema but was held up to the heavens by critics who recognised its taut construction, black humour, pace and characters as one for the future. And the Coens became a brand. By the end of the decade with the likes of Miller's Crossing and Fargo in the near future, citing the team as a favourite to people you didn't know outed you as one of the warmer cinephiles who did know what noir was but wouldn't correct you on details.

The Coens' cache was a rarity for film making teams, getting the auteur stamp early. A scene where the camera, moving along a bar and then lifts over the body of a collapsed drunk and back down again in this film is the kind of takeaway nugget that anyone could donate to a party conversation when new movies came up. It illustrated the kind of knowing humour reserved for the quietly adept in the previous decade and wasn't a spoiler. The Coens made their own cache, happily wearing cult status until their titles started paying for themselves and all that brand power starts. Just shy of the kind of rote admiration garnered by Stephen Spielberg, who peaked early and stayed there, the Coens added cool.

Cool is what Blood Simple bleeds. Instead of the by then old hat means of suggesting links to past genres and shooting in black and white (that would rise again in the '90s) the Coens chose the contemporary pallet of hard neon and soft light and thick colour like Michael Mann's decade-defining Thief from 1980. They knew they were making a noir and didn't want to distract their audiences from it, they wanted it to look like a noir if made in the mid '80s when it was. Apart from the diegetic Same Old Song played in the bar jukebox, the music is brooding and electronic, keeping a tight grip on the tension.

The cast was largely unknown but fit exactly into their roles to the extent that they appear both as essential components to the narrative but also the art direction. John Getz seems chiselled out of oak, a guy who falls into his gravity and never needs to do more than mumble, sexily macho. Frances McDormand's first film role shows her as a femme fatale who offsets natural beauty with Texan deadliness and practicality. She, of course, has gone the furthest of the cast from this faux ingenue to the potty mouthed harridan of her gleeful maturity. Dan Hedaya wasn't new to any size screen and keeps his constantly threatening emotional combustion barely under control. The least forgettable turn of them all, here, is M. Emmett Walsh as the detective with his gymnastic voice drawling around a stream of southern wisdom and his dodgem car physique. It's one of the decade's most durable performances.

The Coens don't rate their own debut highly. It displays their style, leanness of writing, and clarity of vision perfectly but it ranks low with them. Of course, when your rap sheet includes Fargo, Barton Fink, O Brother Where Art Thou among many bangers, they can afford to dump on a few (though there are still The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Intolerable Cruelty and more of those, of course. Nevertheless it was the expectation of more of the tension and white knuckle comedy that kept us lining up for the next one. When they broke through it was with that cool intact which kept them on the indy side of approval long after their budgets and returns moved them into the mainstream. Blood Simple didn't start American arthouse cinema but it did embolden the style of it for over a decade as the Hal Hartleys and Quentin Tarantinos rose in the following decade.

I saw this on second run after my move to Melbourne. A bunch of us went down to the Richmond Valhalla cinema on Victoria St. After the usual quirky sketches and quirkier trailers for upcoming indy movies, this spectacle came up and we thrilled to its almost overcompetent finish, the perfectly timed visual gags, the noir intrigue and gleeful abandon to the sharpening and polishing of crime genre tropes from the '40s. It's movies from this time that I'd see in places like the long departed Valhalla that match electronic scores with edible colour visual pallets and will forever give me shivers of nostalgia. Blood Simple, the lean, little neo-noir that threw in a fable about capitalism along with its bleak adventure and belly laughs, will always be near the centre of my affection for the '80s. That it's still good apart from that makes it the same as an old stone building, beautiful on the outside, dependable shelter on the inside.

RUN LOLA RUN @ 25

 

Lola Jaeger, 20 something and punky, gets a fevered call from her boyfriend Manni. He's a bagman for a local gangster and he's just finished a job. It went perfectly except for the part where he left the bag bursting with cash on the train. As the homeless guy who helped himself to it strides gleefully away, Manni calls Lola for any ideas at all to get 100K marks in twenty minutes to him before he crosses the road and holds up the supermarket. So, without a clear plan, Lola runs.

So begins the film that conquered the world in 1999, the year when little movies with big ideas beat the odds to carpet the cinematic world. Fight Club, The Matrix, South Park, Being John Malkovich, The Blair Witch Project, the list just stretches out, including this outlying comedy of anxiety from Germany whose big idea was an old one but with an execution as hip and up to date as could be had.

The O. Henry story Roads of Destiny tells of a traveller who chooses different directions on coming to a forked intersection that lead him to different fates made of the same elements. Lola's improvisations while physically on the run feature parallel routes where wildly differing fates await herself, Manni, and people she bumps into while running. From winning lotteries to dying lonely and overdosed, the effects of chance rule the universe. But for a single break in the scheme (hint: gun) Lola has no memory of running the course in other circumstances; this isn't the constant self-improvement of Groundhog Day but rather a blocked system whereby every different iteration of the single action is played without cross reference. That exception is thrown in as a cheeky wrong footing. There's another whereby a character Lola keeps meeting seems to be aware of the other run-throughs (sorry, these puns are compelled).

These different plays are, of course, for the benefit of the audience and we both warn Lola through gritted teeth to avoid this corner or not to run down there in gleeful futility. That we also are fed a massive amount of information about Lola's life and that of the people around her further fuels this effect of our feeling godlike in vision but with no control. That element is left with Lola herself and she doesn't always make the decisions she should. The story is punctuated by her own screams of frustration which rip out at different points in the play-throughs, reminding us of every single time that we felt ourselves caught in knots of malfunction or unwelcome surprise.

The young Franka Potente as Lola, whose squeezed out mop of dayglo hair, cargo pants and army boots were rendered iconic with a look that was a gift to poster art across language and cultural boundaries, holds the electric centre of the film. As the mixed media flashes around her from ugly home video grind to gleamingly perfect 35mm cinematography, she either runs at an Olympic pace or is frozen in rapid thought, as still as a figurine as time and the rest of the world move around her. The few moments of apparent calm where flashbacks to post-coital pillow talk are offered in infernal red light and feature trains of conversation that do not conclude. Manni's shocked chaos on the initial phone call reveals the worst that desperation will push forward. By the time Lola notices the casino our hearts sink but we're so invested we almost yell at her to enter. Add the constant pulse of the EDM electronic score which either throbs beneath the action or rises to a gurgling acceleration of it that  crosses over the frequently frenetic editing and you have a film guaranteed to surprise its viewers that it's only eighty minutes long.

In 1999, if your work made it into a scene from the Simpsons you had not only arrived but were probably influencing costume parties. As Lisa ran along the road to the strident gobbles of techno, everyone knew what those few seconds came from. Run Lola Run is remembered for its action rather than its dialogue but it has bucketloads of talk. Most of this is exposition but we're surprised with each new viewing that we forgot it. One thing that occurred to me this time, though, is technological. This film's events would only be hampered by mobile phones. The phones we see are no longer much in evidence anywhere, rotary diallers and booths. But hand-held communicators would remove Lola's invention, her readiness to meet the crises that pop up like a kinetic obstacle course throughout. This is not just about her superhuman sprint but how long a second is in a human brain. It's also about how fresh the contents of time capsules can appear to us. And fresh it remains.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST @ 65

Madison Avenue exec Roger Thornhill is abducted from a business meeting and taken to a country mansion where a sinister crew interrogates him, using a different name. Puzzled and miffed, he resists and then survives an attempt on his life. This is already action packed but from this point on, he's about to get thrown into Alfred Hitchcock's most kinetic thriller adventure. Along the way he is accidentally in the frame for the murder of a U.N. official and persistently mistaken for a secret service agent and takes time to fall into mutual fascination with the beautiful, urbane and young Eve Kendall. All that is well before the hour mark in this over two hour film.

It's hard to know what to say about this one as it joins Vertigo and Psycho as one of Hitchcock's most written about movies. I'll be keeping this on the shorter side as I'd be here all night otherwise. I did note, as I went through it again for this blog, that it was probably the first time since his WWII movie Saboteur that Hitch would cast his hero into such a thrill ride across the country. The two share a kind of patriotic touch point in this as North by Northwest with its Cold War connotations, makes much of the glorious post war affluence in the architecture of New York City and Mt Rushmore as poster sized adverts for the land of the free.

The casting is noteworthy. James Stewart pleaded with Hitchcock for the Thornhill role. Gregory Peck was also considered. Both men had been in Hitch's movies but the thriller auteur chose against them and banked on the intergenerational sexiness of Cary Grant. In a brief moment when Grant walks through a woman's bedroom and her tone changes from alarm to attraction and Grant wags a finger at her with a pronounced, "uh-uh," he's not only funny but believable. Neither alternative castings could have carried that off. It does ring a little naff, now, but only a little. Grant was in his mid-fifties but physically trim and had a face that aged beautifully. This still happens and the examples of it are easily listed.

The other thing that still happens is the romantic paring of older men with decades young women. Eva Marie Saint was over two decades younger than Grant at the time. Her character describes herself as being a decade younger still, broadening the age chasm. My assumption is that the goodwill of Grant's stardom covered what can only be obvious in widescreen Technicolor as it is, here. Also, Jessie Royce Landis who was a single year older than Grant, plays his mother. Personally, as I'm knowingly watching fiction, I tend to look past age gaps (especially since I know a fair few people younger than me who make more of them) but the Grant/Saint rift is only smoothed by a pair of committed performances.

Hitchcock's 1950s were mostly larger and more lavish productions than he'd been used to, with few exceptions. Here, he seems to gleefully flaunt the big bucks that MGM could still throw at its productions. The setpieces that mix soundstage and location like the crop duster chase, Mt Rushmore scenes, the exterior/interior U.N. building and so on survive the punishing clarity of 4K in a way that some recent films shot that way have not. The final act sequence with the modernist house and the monumental Mt Rushmore heads is given a nocturnal dark blue wash that feels so confidently contrived that we happily accept it.

But that's the thing about these big, bold Hitchcock epics from this time; they have more scope than normal thrillers but less substance than almost any musical. Hitch's famous trope of the McGuffin (an  object that primarily served plot motion) doesn't make an appearance until the third act and feels perfunctory. The triangle of Grant, Saint and the intimidatingly urbane James Mason as Van Damm makes us care more than anything else. There is nothing of the creepy psychology of Vertigo, the stark horror of Psycho or the unease of Marnie on screen, here. Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman just like the idea of dummy agents enough to dress it in a plot and cast Cary Grant and some big scenery. In this run of Hitchcock greats, North by Northwest feels like popcorn. But it is deluxe popcorn.

Viewing notes: I watched the recently released 4K, plain edition from Warners which looks astounding all the way through. A puzzling but not displeasing Dolby Atmos soundtrack is on by default which can overstate Bernard Hermann's blaring score but that's not a big issue. Some good extras like the writer's commentary and contemporary promo featuring Hitchcock himself also come recommended.

BANDE A PART @ 60

Franz and Arthur, young and aimless in Paris, add Odile who is in the English class who mentions that her Aunt's tenant has a pile of cash at the house. That turns into a scheme and the rest is hysteria. Well, it might be but this is a film from the early years of the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave in French cinema wherein the heavily American influenced movies of young directors on the rise were beaten out of shape in pursuit of the new. So, when we get to the botched robbery, it neither plays like a well oiled plan nor is a morally redemptive disaster, it just kind of falls into confusion and  heads into inconsequence.

Jean Luc Godard's seventh feature film finds him back in familiar bohemian Paris with bright young folk quoting Rimbaud, hanging out in cafes, staring through the fourth wall and even stopping the action to make points. Along the way, the robbery which would have been at the centre of an audience's attention, is blithely left in the background as the trio negotiates its life, affinities and so on. Sounds twee and precious? It isn't. Some of the dialogue strays into philosophy but there is a greater appeal to popular culture and the three effectively imagine themselves in the movie that we are watching.

While Godard did have serious points to make, having emerged from three much harder films about terrorism, war and fame's exploitation, this outing with its sprint through the Louvre, testing people's tolerance of silence on screen (the duration of which is just over half the claimed minute but feels interminable) and a parade of other conceits that might have ended up cute in the hands of another filmmaker. Godard is yet again showing his audience how fiction is fabricated, how actors are quoting and how the action centrepiece of a noir plot is both farcical and serious.

Anna Karina as the yet again self-illuminating centre provides us with a young woman willing to approach her life as a jam session. She leads an impromptu dance with the boys in a cafe which looks improvised but was choreographed that way. She brings the action to a halt by demonstrating the minute of silence. She struggles with the attentions of Arthur but admits her attraction early. Next to her complexity, the philosophy spouting romantic Franz seems like an overdressed lightweight and the puggish Arthur a directionless drifter. That means that when the robbery comes up, the mishaps are sometimes comic and sometimes grave, all in one extended scene (there are actually two attempts at the robbery but let's relax that for the point). When bumbling action is intruded upon by fatality, the transition suddenly feels natural. After all that whimsy and lightness, Godard has brought it together to give us a high stakes climax.

The film auteur's most popularly celebrated film is his debut feature A bout de souffle (Breathless) which is a playful noir. I much prefer this in the same vein for its confidence and the more assured use of that kind of play. I enjoy Breathless but I'm compelled by Bande a part. Godard had covered musicals in extraordinary fashion with Une femme est une femme, tough politics in Les carbiniers and Le petite soldat and self reflexive cinema production in Le mepris. His return to noir showed him stronger this time around the loop. This would continue until his political commitments drove the narrative out in preference for harder essays from 1966 on to the extent where he collectivised his film production and presented the results of his demolition of conventional cinema (at least for his own work, of course).

That made him a personal hero to me in my undergraduate years when I even started smoking lung ravaging French cigarettes and claiming a preference for the later, less watchable films (while always preferring the easier ones). It also exposed me to a world of ridiculing normies who thought they were being witty when launching attacks on any kind of cinema reset and how feeble the counter argument was and is. Godard's efforts in tearing convention to shreds influenced everything those folks celebrate about the New Hollywood of the '70s or Tarantino's self-avowedly derivative work (his production company name Band Apart is lifted from this movie). If you are familiar with Godard's early career but find it variously too cute or arcane, track this down. Of all the milestones and audacious taunts at convention, Bande a part remains the solid sweet spot. If you can't come out of this something like a sigh of pleasure don't investigate Godard any further, it won't be for you. If you are pleased by it, you have a world of endeavour before you, a lot of it tauntingly difficult but most of it worth every second. Start here.

Review: HERETIC

Two young Mormon conversion units knock on the door of the highly affable Mr Reed. He has signalled his interest in a visit and is up for a chat. It's raining hard at the doorstep but they tell him there needs to be a woman present if they are to come in. He says his wife is at home and, satisfied, they settle on his living room couch and begin discussing religion with the waft of blueberry pie coming in from the kitchen. Or is it? There are the usual awkward silences and looks that happen when strangers meet in unfamiliar settings. Then, Mr Reed asks about historical polygamy, the spectre of which still haunts the church, displaying a scholarly knowledge of Mormonism. Sisters Barnes and Paxton are initially impressed but begin noticing things are not quite right. There's a fair bit of detail about this in the trailer but I'll leave it blank here.

This is an A24 thriller. The company that brought you some remarkable genre cinema over the past decade and a bit but also the daggy oldie's term elevated horror, has been on the trail of expanding its brief toward the genre defying goal of good cinema. Mostly that's been seen to with great moments like Pearl. Then, there's this.

Heretic gets to work quickly, dropping Chekovian guns into every opening scene and guiding us with a gentle curve to the point where the weirdness pushes against a tightening tension that bursts in the second act only to be resolved for good or ill in the third. All of this is handled confidently by the film to the extent that nothing at all will surprise you about it. It's like watching the clock that you hear ticking throughout, it's going to keep on working.

Comparisons are odious but I can't sit here and not mention that Barbarian from a few years back managed to wrong foot its audiences near constantly, blowing initial expectations way out of proportion, yet brought everything back home. Heretic attempts this a few times but there is such a lack of tension throughout and the stakes keep getting punctured that the only thing to get on edge about it the theological proposition developing in the dialogue.

Hugh Grant's goofy Englishness pitted against the sinister scheme he's plotting should work better than it does but you just keep wanting to like him. The young women are presented in cliché form, one pious, the other worldly, but this runs into trouble quickly. One character, given advice by the other of how to handle the situation starts doing so in a writerly sudden character development; her change is like a swimmer sprouting fins to evade a shark. It soon feels like an overall essay about the nature of religion using a few nominated characters to mouth declarations and counter arguments. Even the potentially interesting theoretical hijacks feel like they were shouted into inclusion during an all night session in the writers' room over some brews and a lot of muscle relaxants. The whole thing ends up feeling like a challenge to make an a24 thriller based on an essay on belief. Here's a proposition: if you believe you will be surprised by this film's plot, you will be; if you don't believe that, you won't be. 

EYES WIDE SHUT @ 25

Well-heeled Manhattanite couple Bill and Alice go to a Christmas party thrown by their uber one-percenter friend Victor and there, in the boozy, soft light wooze, both are sexually tempted but both decline. Afterwards, sharing a post party joint, they get into an argument about potential infidelity which ends in Alice confessing that she was struck by the sight of a naval officer at a recent holiday they'd been on. Not just struck but after a single glance from him, she says she was ready to abandon her marriage for the stranger. Bill is so slammed by this that he sets off into the night looking for an opportunity to slake his jealousy by any means possible and ends up infiltrating a secret orgy of the great and famous where his life is threatened. He is saved by an interloper whose fate appears dreadfully sealed. Freed, he flees, determined to discover what happened.

Stanley Kubrick was by the time of this film's completion producing so few new films that each was given greater hype than the previous on their approach. Among the rumours sticking to this one was that it was a box office time server before the one he really wanted to make, A.I. Such rumours served to diminish Eyes Wide Shut as a secondary work made to finance a primary one. However, Kubrick had wanted to make an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream-Story) since the 1960s. It had gone through many different imaginings and castings until finally made in the 1990s. It was a primary work that Kubrick was highly pleased with. 

On the ground around me, people who professed to be lifelong fans of the director mostly expressed distaste for the movie, often exaggerating the lameness of the hyped orgy scene and considering the film a waste or their time as well as the effort it took to make. I was reminded of a lot of backlashes previously, against all kinds of things, other movies, music artists' new albums, novels and so on: Kubrick didn't make the movie they wanted so whatever this one was was angrily flushed. For my part I had been unconvinced of Kubrick's unquestioned genius but had seen something in this last one that fascinated me. To this day, I consider it one of his best and most rewatchable. This is not, I swear, my own contrariness, the film's themes of responses to jealousy feel hauntingly genuine to me, heightened by the high sheen of the visuals and gravity of the music. If I had to choose, I'd rather have this than Lolita, Barry Lyndon, or Full Metal Jacket.

Why? Well, expanding on my reason given just then, I think it's one of the most accurate treatments of sexual jealousy committed to screen. Not only does it hit the disproportionate responses between the couple but neither consummates their extra marital desire. It plays and feels more like a fable than the erotic thriller it's often touted to be.  Alice, however drunk she is, resists the charms of the Hungarian lecher at the party. Bill seems on the edge of following the two models who appear like a masturbatory fantasy from the golden light of the glitz. The couple's post-event discussion about each other's moments of temptation leads to the argument and Alice's confession. That confession, while it still haunts Alice, becomes a motif for Bill, recurring throughout his adulterous trek in a series of black and white vignettes, a scene that never happened for real but is what he imagines his wife imagined and desired. He is revenging himself against a passing thought (a resonant one but still just a thought). 

I don't think that this expresses male jealousy vs female, just the likelihood of a lack of balance between people intimately involved. This story invites you to revisit the often brutal ugliness of a moment of your own jealousy and, honest viewers who were more interested in what the film before them asked of them than in what temporary approval they might find by trashing the movie in front of others, will take away a confronting candour.

Is the orgy scene lame? Compare it to the New French Extremity and the daunting boundary pushing of erotic thrillers since and, sure, it seems very slight for the participants to care too much who knew about it. That point is better expressed in the conversation Bill has toward the end with Zigler which is more about class exclusion. The suggestion that any given modern city might be by powerful narcissists might not be news to anyone but the thought of it, when given a second or two, remains a shivery horror. As to Bill, wandering the rainbow coloured sets of a very clean Greenwich Village crawling with dirty minds, he for the moment can only see opportunities that he feels the force of his will alone bestow entitlements upon him. It's as powerful an allegory for the concentration of sexual arousal as any.

While the casting of the two leads had changed greatly over the decades as Kubrick returned to the thought of this adaptation, he really knocked it out of the park by choosing alpha celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Young, talented and beautiful, Cruise and Kidman were on screens as much as they were on the covers of celebrity mags at supermarket checkouts. They were characterised as a power couple without controversy. The opening scene depicting the pair getting ready to go to the party feels completely natural and, once established, we feel we are in the company of people we know at the same time as unreachable movie stars. Cruise plays up to his walking grin persona but is also put through such strain that this appears increasingly shallow. Kidman speaks mostly in hushed tones with elongated vowels takes Alice to a point of unquestionable authority. The film's final line is hers and she delivers it with the quiet but abrupt confidence that the whole film has begged: "fuck!"

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT @ 25

Heather, Josh and Mike, three film students head out to the country to win big in their coursework by making a documentary about a local legend. Picking up some local intel and colour with some interviews about the Blair witch and mass murderer Rustin Parr, they shoot some introductory footage in the town and then head into the woods for some more folkloric landmarks. The woods are a bigger deal than they expected and they are soon disorientated with night encroaching. "This is America," say Heather, "how lost can you actually be?" The implicit answer from the woods is, "hold my beer".

So begins the cultural moment that resounds these decades on and will only continue. Yes, the film makers really only planned on making a nifty little campfire tale that might light up a few festival screens and maybe have an afterlife on VHS. The formula is still applied; make a low budge horror and kick the door down to a film career. After Blair Witch, though, the starting point could be a lot closer to the earth. The technology that was less than a decade away used it as a source point. 

I have a clear memory of  a post to the newsgroup alt.horror in 1999 where I first saw this title. It was from someone who had been creeped out by the trailer. Just a post among many (it's probably still there) but, while we ol' stagers were used to thinly veiled spam, this just read as normal. Everyone who stopped by it in the feed searched for the title and found the trailer (pre-YouTube and embedding links). And we all brought back our impressions to the newsgroup as trusted posters. And we mentioned it to anyone we could interest. When the website appeared with its images of film cans as menu links and limited though excitingly usable video, it looked like the slick end of urban myth creation.

There is a persistent idea that the Haxan Films team designed the proto-viral campaign through their own punky resourcefulness but the real story is far more satisfying. There are millions of words written about the circumstances of this film's marketing alone and it gets too intricate for me to detail here but a summary should do. After the groundswell of whispers, electronic and actual, blew the title like a gale to its midnight screenings at the Sundance Film Festival where it showed to packed houses, the property was picked up by Artisan for many times more than its production costs and that astute corporate entity elected to pour money into the guerrilla style infiltration for the marketing. This included the extraordinary measure of wilfully distributing "bootleg" copies of an incomplete cut. The vapourware movie bled out of the modem and into the living room in the VHS haunted world of the late '90s. This is how I saw it. A friend of a friend who knew a bloke passed on an unlabelled cassette and we watched it, feeling part of the forbidden elite.

If you want to know about people thinking it was real by the time it was released in Australia in December 1999, the answer is few, if any. U.S. general release preceded it by five months and the internet had long been the e-land of the spoiler. But the flavour of it allowed a tinge of excitement, especially when getting into the cinema and passing the photocopied sign about the dangers of motion sickness.

Hype will always have antihype and people who complained of it being boring, uneventful, a ripoff or plain unscary flooded from the woodwork. For all their complaints about the way horror movies should look and play, the box office here extended the story in the rest of the world. It was a massive and persistent success. At a time when studios were pouring money into increasingly defanged horror movies, this tiny thing beat the lot of them. TS Eliot wasn't always right but he was when he suggested that any artistic revolution needs to be a return to the banal. There, amid the smellable mud and palpable exhaustion was a banality that felt like a nightmare.

That success was transformed from dollar returns to cultural absorption. While what came to be known as the Found Footage genre was slow to launch, the example of its marketing was heeded thereafter, with the ever more normalised internet open to a seemingly infinite spectrum of claims to veracity or more plainly effectiveness. As video recording and reproduction improved in quality, price and distribution, the no-budget feature became such an established norm that its aesthetics were adopted by the mainstream the same way that post punk eventually made it into Heinz soup commercials. Features shot on digital video and projected in cinemas warranted as little comment as anything shot on celluloid. The sense of video's veracity and immediacy became a trope. Now we are at the point where blockbusters are shot on the highest resolution video and look cleaner than film to the extent that some titles get algorithmic film grain imposed on to the digital image the same way that some dance CDs had sampled vinyl surface noise added.

When Found Footage did find its foothold in the late 2000s with Paranormal Activity, the sporadic titles that had appeared between that time and Blair Witch took on a pioneering status. Now, Found Footage is so routinely acceptable that it's just another kind of movie. Still, things penetrate: Rob Savage's lockdown/screenlife horror Host, presented as a single Zoom meeting made it to the screens of those living under the same conditions as the characters. It was a little over the twentieth anniversary but no one who had seen Blair Witch wasn't reminded of it.

So, after all this time and motion, does the Blair Witch Project still work? Yes, and to the same extent. Cut away the hype of real events, you can now watch it in the current climate of routine Found Footage cinema and it feels the same. Feels? For the most recent 312 Nights of Horror challenge (a horror movie per night for all of October) I decided to up the tally of FF titles from all sources. The Blair Witch phenotypes do not need description, they present themselves as markers to an audience that could count them off a list if they weren't so thoroughly expected.

It is scary. If you go into it with the intention of resisting it, ask yourself why you are borthering. If you are going to rate it for jump scares or the appearance of the title character, you should have paid more attention to the first ten minutes that told you in the plainest terms that this was not going to go that way (though many more recent FF films do). If you have ever been lost or felt powerless against distressing circumstances, you will understand this film and why it still scares its audiences. It was my delight to show it as a twentieth anniversary screening to a pair of friends around my vintage who just had not got around to seeing it. Winter 1999, I lit a fire in the hearth, put on comfy foods and wine and we watched, rendered silent when the end credits rolled. One of my guests turned to me and only had to say, "that was good."

Viewing notes: I waited months to do this one as that's how long it took for Second Sight's extraordinary restoration of the film to appear on Blu-Ray. Removing the incidentally imposed film grain on to the video footage rendered it flawed for its directors. Now, the video looks like video and the film like film. The cut is unchanged (though there is the slightly longer festival cut available). There is also a wealth of supplemental material. I know I sound like a shill but this is how a favourite movie should be treated, whatever it is. However, the film is available by subscription on both Stan and Netflix and rentable through pretty much all the others. Get ya some Found Footage.

Review: LEE

Lee Miller, transitioning from fashion model to photographer among the avantistas of Paris, keeps at the shutter bugging until she finds her level as a war correspondent going to the darker shadows of the human state. She narrates this from age to an interviewer and we have our frame. This can be done well like in Amadeus or woefully like in Chaplin. Lee does it with a difference.

The film is given the stellar performance of one of the contemporary greats in Kate Winslet's lead role and is supported by some serious skill in the surrounding cast. But then, the test of how reliant on the historical record the film should prove to be against how cinematic it prefers to be. There is a persistent evenness of pace here which allows the film as a whole to drag and it begins to feel like a dull movie made of good scenes, too reverent. The reverence hazards audience empathy as Miller as a character tests patience with capriciousness and frowning disapproval. It's not until a good halfway through that she, facing the spectacle of the liberated death camps, that her enforced humility allows us in.

This applies to the interview format. At first it plays like Chaplin with the enquirer feeding lines for quotable quotes. Amadeus solved this by having the narrator aggressively toy with the young priest to the point where Salieri's twisted memories become a weird version of the real story and implicate the priest as a witness, making the problem of veracity unsolvable. Lee plays it more like that and leaves the sting till last at which point what felt tired and generic biopic material becomes active narrative weight.

I'm getting all fustian here and not really describing the film itself as that's how the movie made me think as I was watching it. I felt like I was filing scenes away rather than enjoying them gather and take form. Throughout the running time there are moments of commentary on the status of women in art, in public life, in war, in history, and they are all worth our attention and are handled without condescension. It is not until, like everything else in this story, we hit the forcefulness of the war that they really find their power. The girl in the death camp who can only trust her fellow victims moves like a maltreated kitten. The woman publicly humiliated in a French village gives a piercing stare to Miller's lens which is shame incarnate.

So, yes, we are talking a timeline of moments more than a cohesive whole life and its big lesson. That, in the end, might well be the way of a better biopic. If you're not going to wildly fling a biography to the wall for fun and life lessons, maybe this is it: roll it out until you find the riff and then just play the riff. Doesn't sound like I liked it, does it? But I did.

HALLOWEEN

Halloween is once again upon us. Yes, the celebration of the spooky that folk of my vintage knew only from American kids tv shows has made it almost intact o'er the great black ocean and seems happy with its new surrounds and we it. I used to resist this but it's grown on me as it has coincided with my annual 31 nights of horror movies rituals which I do enjoy. At first this was one of the many diversions from lockdown in the terrible spring of '20 but I liked it well enough to look forward to in the second half of each year.

My personal list from this year can be found here. It changes every year but always ends with John Carpenter's 1978 classic for the ages, Halloween. As this is approaching I thought I might resurrect an older tradition with this here blog whereby I'd recommend movies for a marathon. This time, I'll pick a smaller range with the idea of watching just one on the night to whomever might be in the mood. All of these are available to streaming for free (though some have ads).

FOUND FOOTAGE 

SAVAGELAND: One of my favourite approaches to horror cinema of the current century for its edgy mix of veracity and the fantastic. The one I was most impressed with this year was Savageland. It's a mockumentary with a new trope for the found footage weaponry: photographs. It is the story of the accused in a case of mass murder whose photographs from the night the entire border hamlet he lived in were slaughtered. There is an extra layer of tension between the true crime format evoked and the photographs themselves which range from the eerie to the out and out horrifying. Compelling.

Tubitv.com (free with ads)

POSSESSION

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL: one of my favourites from last year's MIFF, this is a mocked up talk show from the '70s where the host tries to boost his ratings by including a real life exorcism for his audience. What emerges about his character is equal of the frights his possessed guest and might even exceed them. A well managed mix of satire, comedy and straight up horror.

Kanopy (free through a public library membership)

FOLK HORROR

LAMB: A bizarre magical realist tale involves a childless couple in a remote location adopting a strange lamb/human hybrid. You will not expect the ending.

SBS on Demand (free with ads)

SCI-FI HORROR

EVENT HORIZON: A crew takes a propulsion engineer out to Neptune where the spacecraft he designed has mysteriously reappeared after being lost for years. A great mix of pop Kubrick with a dash of Hellraiser and some nifty concepts and art direction.

SBS on Demand (free with ads)

OCCULT

TALK TO ME: One of the freshest horror movies to appear so far in the 21st is this home grown talismanic fable of grief and taken temptation. Teenage Sophie stretches a séance style game involving an embalmed hand that kicks the door between this life and the one beyond. Very slick but also grounded in verity as the teen characters act and sound their age. Miranda Otto has some great lines as the mum.

Kanopy (free through a public library membership)

There are many more but these are free to see and worth your time. Keep 'em screaming!

ALISON'S BIRTHDAY @ 45

Three private schoolgirls hold a seance. It's all fun and games until someone actually gets possessed, in this case by the deceased father of Alison who freaks out not a little. Things start flying off the wall, the window frames burst into the room and a big bookcase falls on the possessed girl, but not before she conveys Alison's father's warning about her nineteenth birthday. Cut to the eighteen plus Alison, working in a shop just before knockoff when she goes to meet her DJ boyfriend at the local radio station. They have a date with a thriller on tv and drinks at her place. While that's happening, her aunt calls and invites her, with more than a little emotional extortion, to have her impending nineteenth with them. She goes. Within two scenes, things are going strange and this birthday business is looking all dodge.

This home grown supernatural tale surprises from the off with dialogue that swings between witty and naturalistic. For the most part this goes for the performances, though they are less even across the cast. These do their best to make up for the soggy pacing and parts of the dialogue that are awkwardly expository. Local acting veterans Bunney Brooke and John Bluthal put in some real weight as the aunt and uncle which helps keep things based. The beautiful Joanne Samuels puts in a good turn as the titular Alison, an urbane mix of skepticism and curiosity and Lou Brown as boyfriend Peter fights well against some lines that should have been erased (usually because too obvious). 

As this is part of my 31 nights of horror and I only realised during the credits that it was made at an anniverary year, this write up will need to be speedy and brief. This was part of my folk horror box set All the Haunts be Ours and completes a generous Australian section. Movie like this don't get shown free to air anymore but some streamers might include it. Put it on if you still have the vim after the main movie at home. It's light but it has a serious and craftsmanly heart.

Viewing notes: Alison's Biirthday is on Stan and Prime with a subscription and sometimes appears on SBS on Demand. I wouldn't fork out the hundreds that my box set costs just for this one movie but it is a great set.

PHANTASM @ 45

Tommy gets lucky and takes his belle de jour to the graveyard for sex one night. When its her turn to penetrate she chooses a long sharp knife into the chest. Not quite the pillow talk he had in mind but he's beyond caring about that. Also, the woman has transformed in the space of a cut into a tall frowning man. When Tommy's brother Jody goes to the funeral with his friend Reggie, they talk about how weird Tommy's apparent suicide was before Jody goes into the bizarre black and white mausoleum where he's slammed on the shoulder by the tall man in the prologue. Younger-still brother Michael, who's been following Jody around, turns up on his trail bike and watches through binoculars as the Tall Man (as the figure came to be known in the franchise) effortlessly lifts a full casket into the back of a hearse. Ok that's all in the first ten minutes and I haven't mentioned the strange creatures who seem to be darting behind headstones or the Dune-like box o' ordeals that Michael is tested with at a local medium business.

This is the world of Phantasm built of strange details that seem left over from last night's whiskey flavoured writing session. It's also one of the most refreshingly original genre-bending films ever made. I said original and just above I also said that one of the details was like something from Dune. Writer/director Don Coscarelli knows you know that (and this is five years before Lynch's feature film made a big thing of it). Jody goes to a watering hole in the town called Dune Cantina. You might find some resemblance between the flying ball and the flying syringes in Dune but the similarity is slight and diverges as soon as the ball meets a head and drains the blood which it spits out a hole in its rear. That's the kind of thing Coscarelli was thinking up when he conceived of this film. He was on a phone call and played around with a Styrofoam cup, pushing through the bottom with a finger and watching as it moved apparently by itself. That's what I mean by original. A lot of what you see on screen here feels invented on the spot, spontaneous, regardless of how screenplays happen.

Apart from the impressive practical effects and atmospheres, the human story of the younger brother's sadness at Jody's intended departure for further adventures is an affecting one. The scene of Michael running after Jody as he rides a bike around the streets feels less literal than figurative, it's how Jody sees it and how Michael feels. And there is a suggestion that the weird happenings in the town that only this family appear to see, rise directly from this melancholy state. When you see what becomes of the brother from the prologue, the sting of the absence is made clear.

That aside, Phantasm is a fresh adventure with plenty of sci-fi ideas and horror scenes and a bad guy who joined the Jasons and Freddies of mainstream horror from the off. The fact that the blending of ambience between the green suburban streets and the stark gothic of the mausoleum feels so smooth is testament to why this film continues to work. This is an unofficial extension of the homely suburban leafiness of Halloween and a precursor of the Spielberg look of the decade to come but while the sex on show is not even mainstream explicit it is too clearly suggested to allow a G rating. This puts Phantasm in that strange margin where adult and young adult blend uneasily. Michael's grin at spying the sight of exposed breasts is knowing (just like Coscarelli's inclusion of it).

The other group I'd put Phantasm into is the margin of early home video and arthouse titles like Evil Dead or Tourist Trap, held together with gaffer tape but holding real originality. These travelled under even the parade of slashers and cheaper sci-fi and emerged decades later for delighted discovery. Phantasm, as aforesaid, found itself a franchise but it is this first think-it-and-throw-it-against-the-wall outing that still packs the punch.

Viewing notes: I watched this on the Well Go region A Blu-Ray which is very fine. If you are tempted to explore, you are currently limited to buying overseas or trying ebay. To my knowledge this film has not been released locally since the days of VHS (which is how I first saw it). 

Review: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Lydia Deetz has grown up to host a successful ghost hunting tv show but is starting to see her old foe appear in crowds like a stalker. Her mother Delia, not quite grown up but older, is a performance artist. Lydia's daughter Astrid is in the polar position that Lydia was with her mother so goth mum and straight daughter, now. The dad from the first one dies in a stop motion plane crash and the family heads back to Winter River where the old house is shrouded in black for the performative memorial. Lydia's modern fragile manager and close companion, sweet talks her into getting married on Halloween. Astrid quietly rides away on a bike and crashes through the fence of the introverted boy in town and they start talks. Meanwhile in the netherworld, Beetlejuice, now an afterlife bureaucrat, hears tell of his soul sucking ex ressurecting and coming after him. There's a lot of intertwining dependencies that will lead pretty much where you expect.

I wanted to spend some weighty time on that premise to convey how long it feels to sit through it before this film gets into gear, and that's leaving a lot out. The elongated first act plays like the first half hours of episodes one and two of this as a streaming mini series. It's not boring but you get the feeling that you'll be kept waiting. But there are rewards.

Catherine O'Hara turns on the quirk dependably. Wynona Ryder is believably an older Lydia. Justin Theroux enjoyably overplays his new age balderdash character. Tim Burton's magic shop aesthetic is turned on to gush and when the narrative begins to crank into action the movie feels a lot more like home. But you also start noticing things you probably shouldn't. While the original spent time on earning character empathy, this one does more toward recognition humour and leaves things at that depth. Then you get to Astrid's subplot which would make a better Tim Burton movie that this or most of his output since the '80s. At the centre of that is the increasingly magnetic Jenna Ortega who stands in for the audience's skepticism through her sassy adolescence. As in Wednesday, X (where she really gave charismatic Mia Goth a run for her money), Scream VI or Sabrina Carpenter's Taste video (please watch that) she owns the screen.

Otherwise, this is a rerun with less of the charm that came from the then novelty of Burton's goofy gothic style. There are many self referential moments to highlight the passage of time but there are too few new inventions to allow a claim of something more than nostalgia. This is Beetlejuice in the era of YouTube ghost hunters and experiencing live events through phone screens but the crowding of the canvas between these and the callbacks just make you realise you could have thought all this yourself from one viewing of the trailer. When the big song at the climax happens you think, "wow!" and then you think, "ok". So, Tim, good to see some updates but I heard you the first time.

RHINOCEROS @ 50

John, an aging bon vivant, chastises his younger friend Stanley for surrendering to a bad life that has driven him to drink. He is about to entice Stanley to grasp his own life when a cacophony outside drives everyone in the restaurant to the window to see a rhinoceros charging down the street. Later, at work, the wife of an absent staff member reports that the animals have not escaped from a zoo but that people, like her husband, are transforming into them. As she rides away on her newly pachydermal husband's back, life choices are being reassessed.

Eugene Ionesco's absurdist fable freedom from conformity and resistance to both is presented with big performances and a lot of stagey overreach. This would have rendered it unwatchable but for the casting of Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the second of only two pairings on screen. The first was in the deathless Mel Brooks debut The Producers. The relation between their characters in Rhinoceros is immediately reminiscent of that film, with Mostel's John bullying Wilder's Stanley about his life choices. After that opening, though, the dynamic differs when John faces his own transformation and the mood shifts quickly to panic and then pathos. It's worth noting that Mostel was repeating his role from the play's Broadway debut over a decade earlier. But that, while interesting, does not explain the staginess that can drag this film away from compulsion.

It wasn't a standalone production but part of a series of films commissioned by the short lived American Film Theatre project in an attempt to bring the media of film and theatre together by presenting cinematic versions of modern classic plays. I remember this coming to far off Townsville in the mid '70s as a subscription package which was expensive and gave off exclusivist vapours. I thought it sounded stuck up but I also loved the idea of it. Harold Pinter's The Homecoming was one of them and Pinter himself directed Simon Gray's Butley. This was not something I could easily convince my parents to invest in so I let it slide. Later, I saw Butley at Uni and the ABC played most of the titles in late night spots. I was gratified to discover how good they had been. The project was doomed as it tried to reinvent cinema into a more theatre-like deal with the subscriptions and came across as snobbish bullshit. Pity, though.

This is important in considering Rhinoceros as it goes a way toward explaining the staginess of a lot of the action and how most of it is done in sets with little of the freedom of movement that cinema production allows. While it doesn't feel like a filmed stage production the sets, particularly the apartment interiors are exploited for their claustrophobic pokiness. Director Tom O'Horgan came to the gig from his work on Broadway. While he does allow some breakout and is clever in his use of sound to suggest the rhinos on the streets, he does fall back on the kind of blocking that emphasises physical engineering over cinematic setups when bodies have to move together; we're seeing a movie but we're also seeing the cooking while we watch approach of live theatre. I imagine this was intentional but it can lower the tone even of this broadbrush satire.

But then we can easily fall back on the performances. Mostel and Wilder in the leads but also a bright Karen Black with her heyday energy, the character stalwart Joe Silver and the instant comedy figure of Don Calfa as the waiter. But these are the kind of things that while adding to the enjoyment of the film can also date it. I wonder if the final defiance would be done with such anger and futility as it is here. Is Ionesco's proposition about resistance readable in the post-truth realm? Maybe more than ever. Just, don't remake it, watch it, for all its antiquity, the way it is here. It's from when the truth about misdeeds at the top of American society could bring a Nixon down. It's worth the watch for that thought alone.

Rhinoceros is available through Kanopy which you should join now. Free, and through your local public library system(which you should also join now).

ONIBABA @ 60

Marsh reeds, shift in the wind. Somewhere in the whispering mass is a pit too deep to see all the way to the bottom. Soldiers are fighting in the reeds, a pair struggles to escape from the skirmish but the effort is so exhausting they collapse. Just as they seem to revive both are killed by spears. Two women appear and strip the soldiers of their armour and weapons, put the cache aside and drag the bodies to the pit and kick them in. Then they return to their slightly upgraded lean to, stuff rice into their mouths and fall to exhausted sleep. Another day.

This is the world of the story of the Onibaba, an expansion of an ancient Bhuddist cautionary fable about a mother trying to control her daughter by wearing a demonic disguise. Writer/director Kaneto Shindo starts well before that brief story and works to establish the mother and daughter (in law) and their rough subsistence life in the realm of the marsh. 

Into this carefully balanced life, coursing across the river like a crocodile, comes Hachi, heading home from the war he's deserted but without his friend Kichi, son to the older woman and husband to the younger (neither woman is named). He explains the savage chaos of the war and how he and Kichi were both trying to escape but Kichi didn't make it. The older woman judges him but the younger cannot shake Hachi's charm. 

A little wooing later and she's sneaking off at night for the first relief from her strained existence she's known for too long. Her mother in law twigs to this and approaches Hachi, even offering herself in the young woman's place. Hachi has, meanwhile, swapped his opportunistic lust for something more like love and wants to marry the younger (this doesn't play awkwardly on film and wouldn't here if the characters had been graced with names).

A little while later, something comes up and the mother in law comes upon the makings of a deterrent, a demonic mask, which she wears and appears as a terrifying spectre in the marshes, forcing her daughter in law to turn back in horror. This works until it doesn't: she can't take the mask off.

Kaneto Shindo was born and raised in Hiroshima. His military service ironically saved him from suffering the unimaginable hell of the atomic bomb. Not enough irony? Well, this old Hiroshiman died in 2012, making it to a month over a hundred years old. Whether it was a sense of the greatest luck in history or simply a life force energised by his own war experience, Shindo threw himself into the fashioning of fables for cinema, directing forty-eight of his own stories and writing two hundred and thirty-eight films for other directors. With masterpieces of the strange like Human, Ditch, Kuroneko up his sleeve, he easily joins the pantheon of post-occupation Japanese filmmaking. Onibaba is the central gem in his timeline.

Of that generation of  Japanese filmmakers, there is barely an example within a ten year radius that does not mention, however metaphorically, the spectacle and effect of the bombs. In Onibaba this is in Hachi's description of the war in open country and in Kyoto itself, hub of civilisation rendered chaotic and desperate. There is also the spectre of a distant cloud of smoke as though a whole city was on fire. The setting is medieval but the solemnity of the witnesses to this is profound and clearly indicating recent history.

What leads to this moment is the world-building of the endless tall grass in constant motion in the wind and the naturalistic performances and dialogue of the players. These people really seem to live there. Shindo took his crew to the marshes at Chiba where they lived and worked for almost the whole production. Even knowing how difficult this process was and seeing the depiction of the hand-to-mouth inhabitants, I still want to live there.

None of this makes it into the source fable. This was Shindo's solid imagination that gave his public, weary of tradition and authority, a version based on life-affirming sex in place of the piety of the temple of the original. The cool jazz tones of the score that burst into thunderous taiko drumming for the night sequences would have felt like a bow to liberation from the generation of militarism the culture had endured. The nudity and convincing sex scenes work to this end; less titillating than candid. Like a number of films by this Methuselah of the medium, Onibaba is a blend of its times and timelessness and a testament to the need to climb from the pits of history into the kind of light useful for making a living. Few knew that better than Kaneto Shindo.

Viewing notes: I saw this on Criterion's stunning Blu-Ray but that, or the U.K. Eureka edition (also fine). Otherwise, it might be up to finding it second hand, locally. It's one of those essential films from history that are very difficult to get to see.

Review: THE SUBSTANCE

You're in a fairy tale. You get magic a power.  It's yours to keep AS LONG AS YOU DO THIS ONE THING. You've heard the story. You knew it before you could read and it flowed into your ears through your mother's voice. You know that the story only works if you do that one thing. Inj later life it keeps you from walking in front of speeding cars but, who knows, for a chance at opioid bliss or a fortune from the pokies, that one risk might solve your problem. So, when faded Hollywood star Elizabeth Sprinkle gets a chance at a second youth, she jumps at it.

Writer/director Coralie Fargeat knows you know this about fables. Expects you to know it as you will be straining with everything you have to tell someone on the screen not to do that one thing. The point is not what happens up there but in how much she can play around with the elements and give us something to think about. Play she does and makes us live through some grimace-inducing squirmy and squelchy body horror until we are compelled to consider what her story is about beyond the template.

Fargeat is happy to be plain with her messaging. Perhaps that should be bold, not happy. The opening sequence shows a raw egg yolk producing another after an injection. Then we get a montage of Elizabeth celebrating her star on the walk of fame (after an intriguing scene of how they are constructed) which progresses through the years with signifiers like autumn leaves, snowfalls, tourists walking over it, murmuring guesses as to who she was, and some slob slipping his mega burger on to it. Cut to Elizabeth now, leading a troupe of tv dancers in her workout show. 

Afterwards, being forced into using the gents, she overhears the tv tycoon screaming into his phone about someone like her, past prime and past prime time. Soon after, he seems on the pop of firing her over lunch (never have prawns been less appetising) but, getting to an awkward bit, he flees the scene and kicks it down the road. Soon after (I'm leaving a lot out) she recovers from an auto crash and, during a creepy examination by a ethereally beautiful young male nurse, she is left with a usb stick upon which is branded The Substance. This leads to the situation you can get from watching the trailer in which her younger self seems to have taken over her gig with the workout show.

As this film does keep to its fairy tale lane, it might seem pointless to avoid spoilers but there are many on screen which I will not detail. The glee of this testing film lies in the articulated anger that Fargeat hurls at cultural standards of beauty that both recoil in disgust at women aging and harshly judge any attempt to reverse the process. The woman who brought us the searing Revenge has learned, like the heroine of that story, how to fashion assault weapons from the pieces of beauty culture. There are many white knuckle suspensions and even more eye popping body horror showcases. Before you cry Cronenberg, they all learn from that experience that each, even the most showy, must take its place in a storyline. The scenes can go longer than they should but nothing you see here does not advance the tale.

On Cronenberg, if you have seen a few of his early ones in order of their release you'll notice the improvement in them when he starts hiring stronger actors. Demi Moore's performance as Elizabeth will be called brave for her permission to be shown old. We do get closeups of porous cheeks, wrinkles and sags but the bravery we see is not in this candour (pushed by make up and prosthetics, btw) but in the acutely observed and expressed sustained rage of her character as she comes to understand the resonance of her decision and how the regime that made it feel necessary remains unmoved in the face of her disaster. It is brave because it is strong. 

Margaret Qualley gets the nepo baby taunt as the daughter of Andie McDowell but I've not known her to appear anything but committed to her roles (even when, in Poor Things, this is reduced to her getting hit in the head by basketballs). She emerges as Sue an apparent clone of the younger Elizabeth, a reset, ditching all the waste and keeping the good stuff. However, Qualley plays her for all the shallowness allowed her by her youth and beauty and a burgeoning rage from Elizabeth's experience to remind us where she's from.

Is Dennis Quaid's disgusting tv boss with his crassness and misogyny, a feminist's stereotype? He's more of a caricatured industry mover, holding nothing of value for longer than it sells, knowing that even his ugliness can be thrown around to herald his power. Quaid is having a ball with him. 

Finally, Fargeat is happy to pay tribute to the influences that led her to this point. These are not nudges and winks (as in the constant barrage of them in Alien Romulus) but marks of tribute. 2001 gets a moment in the climax as do The Elephant Man, Eraserhead and Society, among others. None of these distract even if you do recognise them, the power of the story roaring to its close overwhelms them as cute moments and we're carried along. One thing I found interesting about the score, now I think about it, is how strong the electronics were for almost the whole running time before it changed to an orchestral pallet towards the end. Just another detail on a ride that might make us scream while we're on it but will keep us thinking after the credits.

The Substance is currently on general release.

Review: MAXXXINE

Maxine Minx auditions for a horror movie role to exit the world of pornography. It's 1986 and Hollywood is discovering teenagers and what makes them buy tickets as Richard Ramirez is terrorising the city as The Night Stalker. Maxine gets the horror part about the same time as she proves she can handle herself in the nasty neighbourhoods. A pair of detectives trace connections between new murder victims and Maxine and approach her. They are worried because the new victims seem staged to look like The Night Stalker but differ too much, meaning there's another killer on the block. Maxine rebuffs them and sets about her rebirth as a legit actor. This leads to some enticing invitations from her colleagues but they keep coming back in pieces stuffed into luggage. Maybe she should have taken that cop's card, after all.

This is the third and final of a trilogy that became identified with roles played by Mia Goth in the first one, X. It was Goth who approached writer/director Ti West to flesh the Pearl character out while they were filming X in New Zealand under lockdown conditions. This led to her not only starring in Pearl but getting a co-writing credit for it. After this, it would have felt tidy to do as much for Maxine and maybe say a few things about Hollywood's odd 1980s.

After a bold and engaging opening act the middle progresses toward an expansion of Maxine's world and its relation to the murders and how they relate to her. But then, as the B plot about the murders rises in the mix it starts dragging, feeling complicated rather than intriguing. Then, while the finale is well staged and its significance clear, I was almost checking the time.

West is hit and miss for me. I do not share the admiration that his feature debut House of the Devil gets and while, The Innkeepers had a great premise it was let down by the conventionality of the ending. The Sacrament felt too literal in its treatment of a fictionalised historical event. X put me off with its sleazy phobia of age. Pearl, though, was a marvel, extending far beyond a vanity project for Mia Goth, it explored themes of frustration, isolation and delusion through the force of its star's performance and shaped up with a profound sense of completion. It's why I bothered with Maxxxine.

Goth plays Maxine faintly. It's underacting rather than stiffness and I wonder if that is to contrast with her wide ranging turn as Pearl. Maxine has survived the trauma of X and, while not a shut-in, is showing a hardened mien to a culture defined by its murderers and cinema of murderers. But Goth might be doing this too well as she can come across as flat in scenes where she might afford an emotion of two (as in the scene where she tells her friend she got the part). It does work in scenes of stress where it resembles personal armour. If there'd been more of those ...

While I appreciated seeing Maxine's further adventures, my favourite of the trio remains Pearl and while I'll always give Ti West a chance with a new title, this most recent of his gives me pause. There's an urgent comparison with another 21st century treatment of Hollywood's destruction of its human units but I refuse to name it. I only mention it here as its own complications of plot and character never overwhelm that theme. In Maxxxine The theme is so effectively buried that it must be stated out loud at the crucial exchange of the climax rather than left for the audience to mentally intone.  Maybe he should write with Mia again.

Viewing Notes: Maxxine is probably out of the cinemas now but can be hired through your favourite streamer (Prime has it as a 4K)

Review: IN A VIOLENT NATURE

A structure of some kind, too close to identify. Two young men talk about the massacre that the area is famous for. One of them notices that a pendant has been left on a pole and lifts it as they leave the scene. The pole begins to move. At first it's a slight irregular shake but soon it's swaying until a figure emerges from the deep leafy bed below, climbing out of a damp grave. Seen from behind, the man with clear head injuries walks through the woods without apparent aim. This is Johnny. We are soon to hear his backstory and witness how efficient and creative a killer he is.

This is generically slasher movie stuff with the exception that our focus is almost entirely on the killer. We follow him from kill to kill by night and day, moving through the terrain as the sounds of nature swell and the light falls pleasingly on the woods. We do see a standard campfire scene where the young adults learn Johnny's backstory and they are soon after attacked one by one.

What's different here is the point of view. While it's not literal, we mostly see Johnny from behind as he's trudging through the thicket, not what his eyes would be taking in, it is engaging. The device of following the killer instead of observing the machinery of the social play between the young folk the story boils the generic traits down to danger and process. Attention to process always engages me. David Hemmings darkroom techniques in Blow Up as he closes in on the terrifying detail of his photograph. Alain Delon forging his identification papers in Purple Noon. Matilda Lutz fashioning objects around her into weapons in Revenge. We see Johnny pause to listen and follow the sound to the victims. Our heavily limited acquaintance with them frees us of empathy and the kills are delivered with enough preface to allow a much more efficient context, affording them an incidental emotional punch. Johnny doesn't leap from the shadows, his victims move into focus.

The kills are inventive. The assumption of the mask is tidy. The ending adds a pause and gently steered dread. There is a final girl and she has one of the most compelling last scenes in all slasherdom. It has to do with the uncertainty of what her view might become. We get our answer but it is denied her. It is a moment suggesting the lack of closure that can intensify trauma and it is done in the confines of a 4X3 frame and the sounds of the forest. I cannot predict from this that a new wave of slashers is upon us, nor even that sequels from this one are on the cards, but here in tried old 2024 this movie offers refreshment for the genre fan and that's not something to take lightly.

Viewing notes: There was a very brief cinema life locally for this film but, as a Shudder original production it was posted on that streamer last night (Friday the 13th) which is where it will be hanging around for the foreseeable.

OFFICE SPACE @ 25

Peter hates his tech job but feels it is absorbing him into a future of pointless time serving. One day he is taken to a therapist who hypnotises him into relaxation and dies of a heart attack before he can snap Peter out of it. Peter gets up out of his chair and walks into a new life as the most dangerous figure in all workplaces, a person who doesn't put up with his boss's bullshit.

Mike Judge's hymn of hatred for white collar work's dehumanisation is an expansion of his Liquid Television cartoon series Milton, a compressed and bullied clerical worker who has been reduced to a constant stream of mumbles about burning the building down. Milton remains a character but could not carry a whole feature film. This might have been a parade of sketches about the ironies and absurdities of this smothered area of employment and, given Judge's wit, might have got a away with that. But there's just too much more to talk about, here.

The film begins showing Peter and his two friends at work, Samir and Michael, in separate vehicles in a traffic jam on the way to work. When Peter swing into the free moving lane beside his static one the new lane stops. This happens continuously. At one point he looks to the side of the road to see an old man using a Zimmer frame going faster than the traffic. That is pure adult cartoon material but it works because adult cartoon material at its best does not need the superpowers of animation to make a joke work. Judge also created Beavis and Butthead but, most substantially King of the Hill which I enjoyed for its realistic satire and courage in including warmth.

The office is a hive of cubicles, clicking with keyboards. A receptionist has a cloying melodic phone greeting that sounds like a recording. The boss, played with sickening smoothness by go-to screen creep Gary Cole, prefaces everything he says with phrases like "I'm going to go ahead and" which end with work day sentences like unpaid overtime or even just the word disagree. When the consultants come in to tidy up the spending (mostly by cutting staff) their language is a step beyond this, acts of gravity evened out by evasive, unctuous linguistic mutation. They are charmed by Peter's candour and lack of deference and mark him for promotion at the expense of Samir and Michael.

It is to Judge's credit that when the trio hatch a plot to eke a living through a money skimming software someone points out that it was the plot of Superman III. This isn't just a nerd badge, it testifies to the vanity of the scheme and the pride its authors feel. This is counterweighted by Peter's neighbour whose a big macho oaf who does come on strong and bullish but also has credible insights. The flair issue at the restaurant where Peter's love interest (Jennifer Aniston) works is straight out of King of the Hill b ut Judge is careful to show that even the service zombies that run the place also have a non work side. They've just figured it out even if Joanna is too aloof to notice.

If anything, Office Space suffers from a deflated third act. It's written well enough but like his other live action feature Idiocracy, the satirical statements and recognition humour are so well packed into the front end that the character arcs pale. There is a clear focus on the machinery of plotting and the conclusion is a satisfying one that includes both surprise and a hint of sadness that give it the feel of a well earned ending. While a rewatch will remind you of some mid point lagging (the romance is fine if not quite compelling) you will come away from the viewing thinking very well of it.

What does work is the capture of the treadmill of office work. The salaries are higher than on assembly lines and the staff often have an idea that their education has equipped them for a deserved smart casual life while in service to minor despots who get their ideas from management seminars and speak in stiflingly evasive language. The staff singing Happy Birthday to the boss as though it's a Russian funeral dirge and the petty-crime-style assault on the never-working printer at a remote location are still hilarious. But there lies the problem. Judge's later long running series Silicon Valley about software engineers in the tech business is an exercise in sustained satire that approaches genius. It is perfectly honed and strongly observed. It's also at the end of a lot more experience and shows. That said, Office Space gives enough for what it is, a fable of the world of work with massive relatability. Not bad for an early attempt.

BLACK CHRISTMAS @ 50 (some spoilers)

Some spoilers below. These are kept sparse but proved helpful in putting this film in context for the 

post-slasher audience.

A sorority house in a small university town is the target of a homicidal maniac who makes phone calls that swing between obscene and bone chilling. The women are in party mode, about to disperse for the festive season but the killer makes an early start, turning their fun uni years into a big bloody mess. In other news, Claire's father comes to town to meet her but has to declare her missing (there is another case of abduction and possible murder in the town). Jess is pregnant to music student Peter who wants a family at the same time that Jess wants a termination (of the relationship as well as the zygote). Carol singers are roaming the streets. It's gonna be a night.

Bob Clark's Ur slasher has had its profile raised since the '90s. DVD blew the film of dust from a wealth of retro titles and Black Christmas was rediscovered and heralded as a source point for the sub-genre. Clark had a couple of things on his side from the get go: he was  very good at atmospherics and he had no idea he was inventing the teen slasher so had no rules to observe. It's that last one that really gets the new fans engaged because it makes this old movie feel fresher than any of the '80s copycats of Halloween. You won't see any masks or signature weapons here and there are no teen sex scenes to mistake a killer's morality for a movie's. 

This can also work against it for a modern audience as it will feel a lot slower than expectations. The kills are there but not piled on. That the kill scenes are left undiscovered for considerable screen time and there is, at first, an unclear connection between the acts and the bizarre phone calls adds to the overall sense of dread in a slowburn rather than a crescendo of action. The citizen search party and what it finds blends into the dark winter atmosphere, itself thickened by the weariness of the scenes at the police station (John Saxon delivering a solid performance as a burdened sheriff). It's not a murder fest, more of a plagued house where youth has gone to be slaughtered.

The killer identifies himself as Billy (often whispering his name in the third person and often that in a voice like Mrs Bates from Psycho) but we see very little of him, unlike the gleefully visible baddies of Halloween and Friday the 13th sequels. He emerges from hiding places to kill with whatever is to hand, a plastic sheet, a glass figurine, a hook. Although you can piece one together from the phone calls, he appears without a backstory, he is just, in the old money, crazy and homicidal (remember, too, that not only slasher as a cinematic term had yet to be coined but "serial killer" wouldn't be in the common parlance for another decade) death bringer. His in-house phone usage (subject of some engaging practical exchange scenes) predates the big line from 1980's When a Stranger Calls and forms a terrifying plot development. The monster is in the house.

It was only in the last viewing for this blog that I realised where the brooding music came from. There's a kind of growling resonance to many of the scenes and at first it sounds electronic or at least electronically manipulated. The film itself tells you what it is in a scene in which Peter, after a tense and failed practical exam, attacks a grand piano with a stool. Every time he hits it the strings resonate with that very growl. Turn the volume down, remove the identifying transients (i.e. beginning of the notes) and bury it in reverb and you have an effect of atmosphere building that is both music and non-music. The only other music comes from the carol singers in the streets. There is no formal music score at all. As the forerunner of a genre that gloried in its effective music, this is a fascinating detail. Again, Clark had few rules to follow and worked, like his killer character, with what he found.

The cast of mostly young women are given an almost documentary naturalism to work with and it heightens the dread as they come across as real rather than eminently killable brats. The closest to that later stereotype is Margot Kidder's Barb, the sassy wisecracking drunk among the sorority who, alone, confronts the caller in an early scene, pranks the desk cop with a saucy alpha numeric phone number, and dies, unironically, in an ugly attack while sleeping. Mention must be made of Kier Dullea here. The star of 2001: A Space Odyssey plays Peter with an intensity rapidly burning out. He is so frighteningly convincing as the soon to be problematic ex that his role should come with a content warning. The final girl is the luminous Olivia Hussey, British, petite and happily sexually experienced to the point of getting pregnant and deciding against going to term. If there was ever a final girl who defied the stereotype it is she. Again, this was before the genre rules imposed by the Committee for Slasher Movies came into effect but it does illustrate something that I will again say in the words of podcaster Alex West (Faculty of Horror): the film is rad, it's the killer who's conservative!

Black Christmas joins Clark's best (along with Deathdream, Murder by Decree and A Christmas Story) in that it adds fresh features to established story types. It was not considered a slasher at the time but a dark and brooding murder mystery with a troublingly unhinged perp. Where precursors Peeping Tom's Mark and Psycho's Norman had the kind of definition that allowed them to be scary but kept that within bounds, Billy has nothing like that. The appearance of his eye seen in the gap between a door and its jamb strikes real fear: he might kill you just for looking. 

While the film's legacy is complicated by the birth of the generic slasher a few years later with Halloween, so that when stories of similar setting like The House on Sorority Row and Slumber Party Massacre (and even later with Scream 2) they took more from their immediate genre-mates than this origin tale. Nevertheless, the wood panelling and natural fibre mise en scene that seems to recreate the ads from glossy magazines of the time containing such brutality works effectively in a way that has not been achieved by its descendants. It sits best as its own thing, something to reach for after all the things it engendered are finished with, as an innovation of opportunity.

Viewing notes: I most recently watched this on the Shout Factory 4K edition which presents the grainy old photography in sumptuous Dolby Vision splendour. There are no local physical media versions. However, it's free (with ads) on Tubi.