Review: WEAPONS

One night, at 2.17 in the morning, all but one of a primary school class get out of bed, go out the front door and run into the dark with their arms arched like wings. The community, in a show of communal reason, blame the teacher who is dismissed from her position and turns to vodka for assistance. She's as haunted as anyone and feels the kind of guilt that cannot be assuaged philosophically. Meanwhile, in a series of chapters that cover the same time period in the ensuing days, a cop, a homeless addict, a parent and the school principal, all make their way through the mystery of the disappearance. And then things start coming together.

Zach Cregger gave the world in 2022 the wrong-footing and heart-winning Barbarian whose sudden shifts and rug pulls revealed all of the skills of his comedian beginnings to expose his love of comedy's obverse, horror. Weapons is what his fellow Americans call his sophomore effort and it reminded me, if only in how the differences between debut and follow-up appear, of the Philippou brothers' second feature Bring Her Back. In both cases there is an intensification of elements key to the first outings and a downturn on the humour. Both are subtler than their predecessors but also nastier.

The creepiness of missing children has been an infrequently recalled trope in horror cinema and the first title Weapons reminds me of is The Brotherhood of Satan with its small town aridity and eeriness. We also get a kind of Pennywise in the figure of Gladys. By the time you meet her you'll understand why I say that, so it's not a spoiler. Shallow comparisons aside, though, the ruling mood here is the uncanny, things that almost make sense stop short of it set free the dogs of menace.

Casting here is as fine as Barbarian with the young female lead of the hour Julia Garner as the strong woman rendered fragile by the circumstances and the atmosphere of resentment and hatred around her. She doesn't miss a beat. Josh Brolin as his usual welcome lug with a heart. Amy Madigan renders her every breath unnerving. If each of these weren't offering the best they had the twisted tale would unravel about half way as the artifice begins to show. They do what all good performances do in delicate plotting, distract with organic warmth. One thing demanding mention here is the aid that Cregger's tracking camera gives with the sense of queasiness (at one point making the skeletal junkie figure tower and demoralise). A solid directorial strategy.

As the plot and its matter appear more clearly, with some unnecessary clarification in the narration, we are taken home to a conclusion that, for all its supernature, makes sense. While I was continually engaged over the long two and a half hour running time, I did begin to miss the persistent restraint of the horror behind the horror in Barbarian. That said, I'd much rather watch this than almost anything currently offered by MIFF this year. Yes, that's a hobby horse but it's still true.

Viewing notes: I went to see this at Hoyts in the morning and al was dandy until a small group of  wagging teenagers sat to one side near the front, kicked their shoes off and started talking. I turned and glared at them until I got their attention, a small wave from one of them who nodded when I put a finger to my lips. Their droning mumble lowered to whispers. It rose again as the soundtrack volume swelled and then didn't subside until I glared again. As the credits rolled and the lights came up. I caught the eye of one of them and asked why he had to talk all the way through. I almost instantly regretted it as he responded as though I was a teacher with a kind of feeble excuse that they had been whispering. I reminded him that I had heard them and added that I paid for a ticket to see and hear the film and not him. No reply. I saw them looking for an unofficial exit as the rest of us filed out. I went out into the light of day wishing I'd used the truancy card but then reasoned that it wouldn't have had much of an effect. You go in the morning of a week day and this happens.

Review: VIDEOHEAVEN

Can you remember the last time you went to a video shop as part of your domestic routine? The weekend night you weren't going out or the movie marathon you organised with your friends, or maybe on a whim a mid-week catchup with something you missed at the cinema? It really was a while back, wasn't it? You might have forgotten your local one. Mine was a place called Video Busters and had a massive floor space and a big expansive range from the latest hits to obscure continental gore fests. In 2012, I was housebound with a leg in a cast and in two months, while I was recovering, the entire block that housed that shop, the chemist and the medical clinic had all been redeveloped. The shop did re-emerge further down the road and kept up the ice cream and snacks it had been selling to keep things afloat. But a lot of the stock was on sale. I picked up a few Asian horror titles I didn't know and pretty much left it there in the street to end its life. It had gone by the close of the year.

This film is not the documentary I had assumed it would be but a deep diving essay into the market, the cultural phenomenon and the social space of the video shop through its decades long history. Instead of talking head recollections from former owners and staff, we get the flinty tones of Maya Hawke talking us through an epic three hour examination.

At first, to allow us an appreciation of it scale, we are treated to a compact history of the technology and its rapid commodification that affected both cinema attendance and tv habits to install itself as a constant rival to previous standard business. One thing that such a stretching vista omits is how a flop at the cinema could be a durable hit on home video. That surprised me.

Otherwise, the chaptered sections begin to specialise. Aspects like the social arena of the spaces and its depiction in movies and TV shows, the figure of the video store clerk in feature films as toxic cinephilic gatekeeper, the language of cinematic taste in rom coms, and the depiction of the business in popular culture as it waned against the tide of convenience offered by streaming services. Carpeted by TV and movie clips that expand from instant illustrations to a series of deep dives, the arc describes the passing of an institution by cultural change from the ground up, just as TV and home video itself had. 

I watched this as a MIFF stream on ACMI 3 and intended to slice it into digestible pieces but, after some initial resistance as I got used to the chalk and talk approach, I just let it absorb me whole with its subtle but mesmeric repetition and massive supply of quotes. Depictions of video shops in fiction were far more prevalent than I recall and chosen to provide solidity to the discourse. Instead of the nostalgic to-cameras I was worried about, I was engaged to compulsion by this revisit to a thing that folk of my age down to millennials will remember as a dependable part of the weekly roll. While, I didn't wander, check the phone or interrupt the stream for too long, I know I missed quite a few points and might well seek this on physical media to cover everything that slipped by. I know it's ironic but it suits.

Viewing notes: As I'm not buying into the stress of MIFF this year, I'm choosing very few things to see and was happy to stream this through the ACMI3 app. This looked and proved essential. I am glad I didn't have to put up with the distractions of contemporary festival audiences for three hours in a cinema but enjoyed this in the cloister of my lounge room. I'd recommend that approach.

Review: 40 ACRES

After an agrarian apocalypse, the most precious thing is arable land. North America has become a land of self sufficient farms. So you are going to get raiders, invaders, post-urban imperialists to move in and take over. We open as the Freeman family's place is getting taken. The rough and ready land pirates move through the thin grain crop. They are surrounded in the thick by eerie whistles. In a matter of minutes, they are all lethally dispatched. C'est la vie.

The entirety of the first and second acts are spent on character and family development and it takes on the distinct feel of a literary adaptation: deep characterisation, back story, leisurely pacing, chapter titles. Then a detail is revealed and everything breaks. This makes for a riveting final act but at the time it occurred to me how forgiving we are of a pedestrian beginning when act 3 is action packed.

And then, as the credits rolled and I and my companion stood and made our way out, it occurred to me that when the action is so heavily concentrated at the business end, how eager we will overlook the ease of the falling final action. Anyone who has done their thinking about narrative structure will consider these statements naïve singsong but I've seldom seen a film where I was so keenly watching my own responses.

That is not to say that this film is too formulaic but when it does enter genre territory it becomes very obedient of it and the narrative beats are palpable. This is eased by the performances which are robust across the board, particularly Danielle Deadwyler as the military-trained earth mother, and Kataem O'Connor as the son and heir trying to work out what kind of person he needs to be for a future as raggedly promised as this one.

There is more made of descendance as a theme, here, than I would have expected. The Freemans came from post-Civil War slaves who moved north across the Canadian border to shake the stigma of bonded ownership. The companion family is native north  American, retaining language and cultural traditions. The encroaching antagonists are weighted to the historically likely northern Europeans. These last seem like the forced but doomed people who have chosen the way of the spoiler that I won't be revealing.

This is where the film does start working for its living and the stakes produced by those issues come into life/death levels. While I can't be recommending 40 Acres as a post apocalyptic scenario I will suggest that its thematic overlay does have merit and the cast do some solid bearing. There are a few too many flaws due to genre-service but, really, it's not the end of the world.

Viewing notes: I saw this as a plus one in an advanced screening at Cinema Nova. A very fine spirited time. On general release in Australia from August 14 2025.

PEEPING TOM @ 65

We watch as a sex worker gets killed by a client, almost entirely through the crosshairs of a camera viewfinder. Through the same crosshairs we watch the police investigation the next morning. The camera operator is Mark Lewis, young, fresh faced and lethal. He shoots porn above a newsagents as a moonlighting job but mostly pulls focus on feature films. He lives in a large terrace house in London which he partially lets to tenants. He has little to do with them, preferring to stay upstairs watching his home movies. 

One night he pauses at the window of the mother/daughter pair on the ground floor. There's a party going on for young, sweet Helen and they notice him gazing in a little too long. Helen is curious and catches him on the stair, offering a slice of cake. She follows him upstairs and asks about his camera. Of course she wants to see something. He shows her a series of experiment films his biologist father took of the young Mark which go from charming to unnerving in seconds. Ok, that's where he got it from. Helen is scooped back by one of her party guests and leaves, disturbed but intrigued.

Reading all that, you might have come to the conclusion that this is an early serial killer film like M or its fellow 1960 horror Psycho. That's true enough when you consider the onscreen murders in the film itself and the implied bulk of previous crimes canned away on celluloid in Mark's attic, but most of the running time is actually taken up with a romance. It's a strange and unsettling romance but a romance all the same. 

Casting is key, here. Carl Boehm as Mark, is supposedly a Londoner. The actor makes no attempt at disguising his Teutonic accent. Powell, no slouch at maximising the value of his casts, appears to have encouraged this, and not just for giving his lead actor a comfortable base. No explanation is given for Boehm's voice which could be a prototype for every Kraftwerk album ever made and this affords it an unease that the posher English voice Mark Lewis might be expected to affect. It is there to unnerve an audience who had had the time to learn of the horrifying extent that the Nazi scientists took their experiments. His grown up Peter Lorre cooing sounded of the laboratory and the death camp; nothing homely, nothing warm.

Anna Massey as Helen has escaped from a Cliff Richard movie into a London that hasn't yet started its '60s swing. She is less pure than unformed and eager to find definition, even by the side of a soft voiced monster. She is not turned off by Mark's private cinema of his father's cruelty but enticed by its results. It's unknowing rather than naivete that drives her to pursue him, persuading him to leave his now-organic camera behind on a dinner date. She sees him stop and linger near a necking couple and reach for the mechanism but just pulls him away, as though she is flicking away the cigarette of a compulsive smoker. We have seen her courted by far more eligible specimens in the same residential crew but it is the other that attracts her. This does lead to a confrontation, as it must within the era's ethics but she has followed it to that point through fascination.

Necessary mention must be given to Helen's hard-arse mother played by Maxine Audley. Embittered and toughly cynical, she suspects Mark of horrors and confronts him about his compulsive behaviour. Her blindness prohibits her from being either horrified by his record or seduced by it. She warns him away from her daughter, knowing, with or without evidence, that he is beyond redemption. She knows him through his sound, thudding on the floor above, the projector ticking away. With the teen romances of the '50s fading, this difficult morsel of love and violence was a good decade before its time. You could look ahead to Badlands, Taxi Driver or Natural Born Killers but you'd still not find as dark and deep a pairing as Helen and Mark but there it was.

Peeping Tom was savaged by critics and left alone by audiences on release and sank into obscurity for decades until corners of the now obsolete late night movies on TV allowed it some air. Michael Powell's career was finished in the UK and found himself thrown back to the fate of criminal pariahs by getting transported to Australia where he made films as celebrated as They're a Weird Mob and as winced at as the dodgy Age of Consent. It wasn't until the '80s that Martin Scorsese took up the champion token and arranged for the restoration of the likes of Red Shoes, Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and, finally, the strangest one, Peeping Tom.

I knew about this film from an article in a magazine about a rare cinema screening of it. I needed to see it but there was no way. A friend, much later, lent me his TV tape of it and I was hooked. This is a film not to love but to acknowledge. If you get to know Powell's stunning work with long time collaborator Emeric Pressburger you might resist this on first look but the aesthetic, the use of colour and the strange mix of the urban merry England and dark fantasy carry over. As a marker for a junction in crime fiction cinema, add this to the same year's Psycho for context and watch the time line as the rest of the world caught up. 

Viewing notes: I first saw this as a dub from TV then as a DVD, then Criterion's Blu-Ray and finally Studio Canal's stunning 4K which is currently available in Australia (including a Blu-Ray disc) at a moderate price. 

PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES @ 60 (Mild spoilers)

A pair of exploration ships respond to a distress beacon while in deep space. As they approach the planet and prepare to land the crews suddenly start beating each other up. Captain of the Gallio Markary, manages to control himself and breaks up the fights and the crew return to normal, reporting feelings of being manipulated. The landing goes well and the atmosphere and gravity are hospitable. Locating the other ship, they find the crew, including Markary's brother, dead and an essential piece of equipment intentionally damaged. Once buried, the remaining crew, set about finding the source of the beacon, now considering it an act of hostility. Could it have come from the crashed ship with the giant skeletons over there? Guess not. They aren't stranded but they also might not be themselves, effectively binding them to the planet. Things to do.

Mario Bava's 1965 eerie sci-fi is a triumph of artistry and vision over meagre means. Bava had already put in some serious service by inventing the giallo crime thriller and answered Hammer with a continental version of gothic horror in films that remain impressive. The Bava name stretches back to his father, a cinematographer from the early silent era, and forward to his son Lamberto, himself no slouch in giallo and horror in the '70s and '80s. Planet comes near the mid point and, as we'll see, reaches into the past and future.

One of the persistent issues with this film is that 1979's Alien ripped it off. You'll get that with the giant skeleton in the old crashed ship and the false beacon by themselves. You could go further. The twin phallic engines of the Gallio and its genital front door (made more labial under H.R. Geiger's design) as well as the ribbed interiors and jagged, misty landscapes. What's missing is the physical alien, the xenomorph that becomes the plot of Ridley Scott's film. That's not really a massive steal.

What we do get is much more like John Carpenter's 1982 re-adaptation of The Thing where the alien could be anybody. It's actually a little scarier. The crew are effectively parasitised by an ethereal consciousness that intends to travel inside the crew back home and transform the planet into a colony. They've all but destroyed their own planet, which should tell you a little about their character. But this is not Star Trek (which hadn't been broadcast at the time), it's a space opera by the writer-director of Blood and Black Lace; Markary and his dwindling company aren't interested in civilising the insidious colonisers but shaking them off and fleeing the scene. That, after a little gore unusual for its era, is what they set about doing.

The mention of Star Trek there might have set off some images. Yes, this very cheaply made movie was shot on sets that could have been from a '60s TV show. Bava joked that the landscapes were made out of a couple of plastic rocks reused over and over. But that's false modesty. There are many shots that involve optical illusions that Bava's father used in the early years of cinema. So, yes, the space ship in the credit sequence looks like a bath toy against some starry wrapping paper but as soon as the ship lands and the scene changes to an alien world things lift dramatically. One of the durable techniques is to shoot a mirror reflecting a miniature set, with a cutout through which cast members can be seen performing. It is more seamless that the dioptric shot in Jaws of bad hat Harry and the beach, within the aesthetic, it looks realistic. Bava uses this for interiors, as well, rendering the ship gigantic. The ringed entrance to the crashed alien ship is a marvel of forced perspective. The gore effects might surprise you.

The score is solidly electronic but not the weird and wonderful symphony of Forbidden Planet (itself a wonder) but a low key moody series of drones and growls. If anything, I could have wished for a lot more of it (although it occurred to me, when watching it for this blog, that it must have been a slog getting what sounds we did get in the first place: see also Delia Derbyshire's work for the BBC). It's not just a theremin and a few kazoos. John Carpenter almost certainly saw this film near its release and would have cause to recall the sounds of its atmosphere.

That said, Planet of the Vampires drags Bava's '60s rap sheet with its slow pacing through some fairly obvious revelations and the stiffness of the international cast who were speaking their lines in their own languages. Post-sound was normal practice for Italian cinema well past this point and the resulting Babels of on-set voices was never considered a hurdle. This was the first time I chose to watch it in Italian with subtitles and preferred the experience to hearing the strangled dubs (even though the Italian is also a dub). But I'd still recommend the curious sci-fi fan or cinephile seeking it out for the atmosphere building and wow-factor of the resourcefulness on display. Bava's space horror, for all its creakiness, remains a treasure.

Viewing notes: I've had this on a non-anamorphic DVD and a slightly better Blu-Ray but I watched it most recently on Radiance's stunning boxed Blu-Ray with a squeaky clean remastering. The thing looks a little too good when coming up against some of the model work and effects but most of what is on screen is a notch above what you'd see in the remastered Star Trek and so quite easily adjusted to. There is a possiblity of a 4K but I can't see it doing all that much more than here (then again, I've said that a lot). This might have once been available locally but not at time of writing, so the only way of getting it (not on streaming either) is to shell out for a physical copy. The box set I bought is prohibitive for taking a punt so ebay for a DVD might be the go. Sorry I can't be more help.

THE GOONIES @ 40

A local bad guy escapes from prison. Across town, a group of friends gather at one of their houses to help prepare for the move due to the imminent buy-out from the local real estate money grubbers. The Goonies from the Goon Docks, they stumble on an adventure which could get them out of the move. It leads them to the bad guy's lair. When the bad guy finds out about the Goonies' treasure map, things collide and the adventure just won't quit. Through old houses, waterslides, caves rigged with traps, and an old pirate ship and a cast from the sidelines of a Spielberg movie, this is everything that a mid-'80s American movie needs to be.

While characters are clearly defined with text book keynotes and the world building is of the magical suburban that was sold to audiences from the Spielberg stable and its imitators, we are treated to a plot that works a treat and moves at a clip. If you have seen Stranger Things but not The Goonies you might be struck with an odd deja vu. You might also notice that this PG rated piece with its hard on jokes and sex references got away with that. If anything the rating system has become more protective of the sensibilities of the under fifteens. Then again, with a cast dominated by that group, for whom else was this movie made?

Answer: for the family night at the movies and then the home video night. John Hughes had already nailed the teen and young adult date night market, Spielberg's concerns went straight to the audience that got into everything else he'd made or oversaw. The Goonies is a kids Raiders of the Lost Ark. It won't have the goofy Nazis but it can have the kind of baddies that would later appear in the likes of Home Alone. You don't get a single Indy Jones but why would you need him when each of the kids has his or her own quest?

The difference between just squeezing it down to essentials and making a movie that the kids want to see again and again is a director who can bring some serious mainstream muscle to the project, so that it never gets too cute. Richard Donner did the prestige TV to big screen journey like Frankenheimer or Lumet, only Donner kept at the big movie side of things, hitting huge with The Omen and Superman. Reigning in the cutesy tendencies of a Spielberg story that were allowed too much bloom in things like Gremlins, was part of the assignment for him. What we get from this is a non-stop fun ride with some acceptable life lessons for the little 'uns along the way.

As much love as this movie gets from Gen Xers with nostalgia, there is an elephant hanging around in the corner. The Goonies fulfilled the need for a second bite at the Indy Jones cherry but it was also doing service for the lack of a property that was claimed so hard that it was in development and negotiation purgatory for a time beyond the patience of the great marketeers of the Spielberg stable. The TV mini-series of IT would not get to screens until five years after The Goonies but the book was burning a hole in the yearning of its fans. Concentrating on the kids adventure theme allowed the team to avoid too close comparisons and any copyright headaches while churning out yet another rollercoaster ride on film. 

As rides go, it's a good one. Donner, clearly appreciating the bigger budget, pulls out some dazzling set direction and complicated camera moves along with a host of practical effects which work without needing an apology. However, for me, this is like Christmas, wondrous as a child but meaningless without kids of my own. I didn't bother with it as a new cinema release at the time as Spielberg and co. had long worn out their welcome for me. I saw it on TV in the '90s and then for this on streaming. It did kick better on the recent revisit. It's a film for an appetite; if yours doesn't crave it, you'll never pick it up but if it does, you'll be eating warmth.

Viewing notes: The Goonies is available on DVD and 4K through retailers but currently streamed through SBS on Demand. 

TEEN WOLF @ 40

Scott sucks at basketball. When we first meet him he fails his shot at the hoop in front of his schoolmates. The other thing that's happening is his body is changing. He yanks straggles of hair from his chest, his nose can detect a liverwurst sandwich through a layer of socks in his friend's locker and his ears are going pointy. Sent in to buy a keg of beer a a liquor store he scares the old guy behind the counter into selling it to his underage self. Then one night there's a full moon and he finally goes full werewolf and his father comes to him in his own werewolf form and tells him they need to talk.

At first, he keeps this from everyone as he's a teenager and self conscious but, a few accidental moments later, everyone soon knows and in a bizarre twist, he is accepted as a werewolf. His game improves and he is finally getting the attention of the alpha chick. So, as long as he's ok with it, he's a lycanthrope daywalker who's come into his body and style. Well, the alpha chick has a sporty alpha boyfriend whose jealousy is growing faster than the hair on Scott's body. Also, his childhood friend with the tomboy name of Boof is becoming much more than that. And he still sucks at basketball. And now everyone wants him to be the werewolf all the time. This is going to take some working out.

Rod Daniel's amiable teen comedy takes the nebbish coming of age tale a step into magical realism with a more absurdist tinge than anything related to horror. The insistence on Scott's life tests in his basketball skills is a continuing undercurrent that feels warm rather than cute and his growing negotiation with Boof feels natural rather than the brittleness that a John Hughes would have made it. In fact, in its own way, Teen Wolf is an effective counter to Hughes's self-important teenage epics. Not as much as Heathers would prove to be but in its developing celebration of teamwork rather than peer-enforced conformity earns it a lot of points.

Michael J. Fox, still high on his Alex role in the hit com Family Ties and a smash in the recent Back to the Future is perfect casting for Scott. Credibly good looking and affectless, his charisma seems effortless next to most of the cast of stock characters. Jerry Levine slots into the kind of identikit Ferris whacky guy who surfs car roofs and comes up with publicity and money making schemes. Seldom has a high schooler looked so thirty something. Lorie Griffin as alpha Pamela shows promise but is written so flat that all she has to do is look pretty and be casually bitchy. Susan Ursitti as Boof is the only younger cast member that meets Fox on his own level. Her quiet persistence and nuanced longing are masked with the kind of day-to-day relaxed face that her character does a little too well. Of the adults, James Hampton plays a lightly whacky werewolf dad to Scott which offers both gravitas and era-typical bizarreness to a comedy parent.

For a score we get a dominance of what Americans still think of as '80s music with a kind of Neanderthal take on yacht rock broken up by sugary electronics. That's the way you had to sell it at the time, even after some promising looks away like the Risky Business score (mind you, that was Tangerine Dream). What are you gunna do, it works for the party and prom scenes.

Teen movies from this context are dominated by John Hughes whose pontificating style imposed itself on everything not touched by the Spielberg stable. This is what makes a film like Teen Wolf feel so light. The ersatz Ferris Bueller, Stiles feels like a loser without the Bueller sociopathy and when Scott does his more gynmastic turn surfing on the car roof it feels more ho hum than it should. Instead of light I got the sense that this, like everything in the same vein, had to pass the Hughes test to get funded. There is unrealised seriousness here that might have broken it out. It would be years until Heathers and decades until the power of Ginger Snaps but who's complaining, Teen Wolf was a world wide hit which is what it was meant to be, it just happened to have been made at a time when looking away from the assembly line just felt too dangerous.