THE PRODUCERS @ 55

Max Bialystock's days as a hot shot Broadway producer are long gone. These days, he seduces little old dowagers, puts on shows that flop off Broadway and pockets the difference. One day Leo the accountant comes to do the books and is bullied into getting creative with the numbers but realises that more could be made from a guaranteed flop than a hit, as long as the investment campaign was ambitious/crooked enough. Max flashes dollar signs and seduces Leo into partnership. At the end of a caffeinated slog they find the perfect flop, a romping musical called Springtime for Hitler. The fact that I just laughed when I typed that title is why this movie works today.

The basic story of its development was that Mel Brooks thought The Producers up as a Broadway show, then more realistically plotted it as a novel and then finally as a movie. More recently, it has become a Broadway show again which is a hit wherever it goes and in a magical realist turn became a second movie. This story holds fast through all of its incarnations and is never not funny. For me, though, nothing has outdone this 1968 film.

That has to do with writing that's sharp as a tack, bold ideas and characters that might almost play themselves were it not for the explosive talents on screen. Zero Mostel thunders as Max, using his girthy physicality and ear splitting bellow. He is a pirate of Manhattan, ruled by his senses and insatiable appetites. And this was the film that turned up and coming dramatic actor into the Gene Wilder of sudden screaming hysterics which served him for the rest of his career. That might seem to sell him short but the Gene Wilder persona gave him a passport to audiences who could not tire of his terrifying comic chops. This brought the darkness essential to the colourful Willy Wonka and got him through the cute pairings with Richard Pryor later in the '70s. Mostel and Wilder teamed up again for the American Film Theatre's Rhinoceros to great effect.

But no subsequent outing ever quite topped the opening of The Producers where the nebbish Leo is driven to inconsolable hysterics by the roaring bear of Max. Wilder takes Leo's breathless agony so close to breaking into fantasy that our own anxiety in the viewing of it has no recourse but to laugh even louder. There's a scene in You Can't Take it With You where Jimmy Stewart is explaining to Jean Arthur how his scream travels through his body, getting tighter and tighter until she's the one who screams. That's as close as I can get to a precedent to Wilder's megaton of panic. Nothing else in film comedy comes close. And this is before we get to its cause.

Zero Mostel's Max needs only seconds to understand how to play Leo. While it does take a lot f trial and error to turn it off, by the time he tries a smile and finds it effective you know he's sorted the deal with the accountant. There are two phases of this. First, he pleas with Leo to cook the books, tightening the tension until he moves right into Leo's ear and screams, "HELP!" And then the more extended seduction of the professional in the office and beyond it to greater Manhattan, infecting Leo with his moreish lust for the good life. It's hard to imagine why this twin assault of character realisations could work until you see it happen. It's in the experience itself which is why the opening twenty minutes of this film always feels fresh.

But then the gags keep coming. Kenneth Mars' Franz Liebkind, author of Springtime for Hitler, shows his ineptitude in concealing his loyalty to the crushed Nazi legacy. ("He's wearing a German helmet!" Leo scream-whispers to Max on seeing Franz for the first time.)  He knows he shouldn't be open about it in his adopted New York but the slightest of triggers take him right back to the Swastika beer steins. Can we still laugh at a joke Nazi? We have seen the neo version hook themselves on to protests about anything in the past few years, raising their profile as they lift their hands in the armpit inspection salute. Their public violence seems only to have been encouraged by the attention. However, Brooks knew well that few things are funnier in politics than powerless tyrants, the roaring mice of history. He's not defusing the gravity of Nazism, more saying, "Yeah, well who won?"

Roger De Bris is the flamboyant disaster of directors is played with glee by Christopher Hewitt. His personal assistant, Carmen Ghia (yes, just like the car), is more openly gay and this is the source of humour. De Bris enters his first scene in a tight fitting ball gown which he completes with a permy looking wig. The banter between the two is brittle camp, bitchy and intimidating. While we are clearly meant to identify with Max and Leo's discomfort, I feel that the portrayals survive well, not as definitive examples of gay men but two bound companions in the theatre world who know each other just a little too well, gay or not. What stereotyping there was in 1968 can be safely disposed of today. The scene will still be funny.

How about Ulla, then, the Swedish P.A. apparently hired from the yellow pages of the sex trade? Fresh out of Uni when my humour bypass was still in effect, this was a stumbling block for me. The point here is not that she's an archetypical dumb blonde but that Max's grasping response to his ill gotten wealth is to expose his pitiable vanity by all but buying a beautiful, young woman he doesn't even have to speak to. She's a trophy and, if that was ever a point of audience to Max empathy that moment is long past.

Where the creaks really show and persistently, though, is in the actor chosen by the team to play Hitler. He wanders in, expecting to audition for a hippy musical. After hours of show songs (delivered in a dizzying montage) Laurence St Dubois, or LSD, brings his band on to do something more up to date. The song is so good it could be a Doors parody, escalating from love power to, "hey world, you stink!" The problem is not the datedness of the music or even attitude; any Zillenial groover could do as much and in and add some tasty ambiguity. It's the reactions from the crew whose wide eyed gapes are shown in still shots (this also happens in the production scenes and I still don't quite get it). It's scarcely credible that theatre types in the Age of Aquarius would be so gobsmacked (of course, it's the imagined audience's response that's being evoked but still). Today, you might have someone make self harm a feature of the audition piece but then the further you go along that way the harder you'd have to work to bring it back to comedy.

The shocks work better when the curtain goes up and we see the opening number. This is still incredible, from the Nazi dancing, the Miss Pretzel and Miss Beer, the ship guns puffing off toward the audience to the big finish where the chorus line circles in formation as a  huge swastika. "Springtime for Hitler and Germany. Winter for Poland and France." The twist this leads to (no spoilers, I don't care how old it is) is a surprisingly relaxing one but then we get the real finale which carries us back to the opening punch.

Mel Brooks didn't always reach this standard afterwards. Everything that followed had its moments and Young Frankenstein approaches equity as a whole film. But if none of those other titles made it out of the gate The Producers would stand as a moment of genius whose electric punch of an opening is maintained continually and reinforced with charges of equal power right through to the risky success of actually showing the stage show and pushing it repeatedly. If it hadn't done that we might have seen it if we set the auld VCR for a 3a.m. appearance back when they did that. It bothers me that the more recent musical might block people from discovering this shorter, deeper and funnier original but I'm confident that any who do make the journey past will find its treasure.

Review: POOR THINGS

Godwin Baxter, in a way both Dr Frankenstein and his creature, lives in his London mansion surrounded by a herd of hybrid animals like a goose dog and a dog chicken. Also, present, and learning slightly by the day is Bella, a young woman resurrected to become both herself and her child (not spoiling how). Into this odd arrangement comes the spark of the first act in the form of Duncan Wederburn who spirits Bella away from her cloistered realm and into a kind of Grand Tour of Europe. If you're thinking fairytale keep thinking it but maybe ramp up the R rating to include scenes of a sexual nature, lots of them. Duncan is a kind of prince but he is a prince from magical realism so he has both educative intentions and the libido of a rabbit. But as we see Bella's enlightenment emerge in bursts and starts we can only count the scenes until all of this explodes.

Yorgos Lanthimos' apparent whimsy is a tightly woven tapestry. In a version of the world that stands somewhere between steampunk and Dr Seuss but has real cities like London or Lisbon in it, the master of Greek Weirdcore has pushed his already rich and strange vision into one that recalls Universal horror of the 30s (with fisheye lenses) and the startling colour of the touring scenes. That said, he's not just throwing everything he's already done at the screen. 

This feels as studied and deliberate as The Favourite with its Vermeer pallet and the switch between sex and violence between characters. As we travel with Bella through her self discovery, only peripherally aided by Duncan, Godwin (mostly referred to by her as God) and fellow travellers, we get a strong sense of Voltaire's story Candide in which an innocent is dealt blow after blow of learning experiences except that instead of the constant optimist Pangloss we get the raging narcissistic cynic. But Bella's development, from puerile ego driven by id toward wholeness, is textured and frequently worrisome.

This film lands on the shoulders of Emma Stone. She presents a convincing human monster with her emerging posh accent sounding nurtured rather than cultured and a halting walk that is somewhere between a wind-up toy and Elsa Lanchester's birdlike flitting in Bride of Frankenstein. Under her lengthening mane of void-black hair her bug eyes absorb universes. It's feat of performance, allowing her staggered speech development credibility to the point where the first few complete sentences feel weighted by danger as they are uttered, allowing us to both worry and marvel at her at once.

Mark Ruffalo struggles with his accent but so comically that it might as well be the results of his character's own affectations. His journey is toward entropy, disintegrating steadily and shows a similar commitment to Stone's (but hers blows everyone offscreen). Willem Dafoe, under stitches and prosthetics, yet delivers a decaying sagacity that doesn't quite understand the cruelty he has inflicted with his wonders. He adopts a soft Celtic burr which gives him a paternal presence with a creepy edge. Margaret Qualley's role is a brief one but she demonstrates a flair for silent comedy. Her Sanctuary partner Christopher Abbot has a lot less trouble with his accent than Ruffalo but his must be right for the sadistic Alfie to work. It's a hell of a cast.

Lanthimos is using a commissioned music score for the first time and it makes strong use of motif to suggest Bella's increasing sophistication as well as quirky stabs of instruments electronically detuning. Considering previous outings like the sourced cues in The Favourite, I wonder how heavily he leaned on Jerskin Fendrix.

This is one of those films where the auteur calling the shots has long been comfortable with his sense of adventure he no longer cares if it's boundary pushing or not as long as it works. It does tell a story in linear fashion but it will still sit wrong with a lot of people who might be expecting a quirk-fest or a star vehicle. It is a supercharged fable, continually entertaining but thought provoking and it is a hell of a way to end my cinema year with a bang. Like your flavours on the rich side? Get a ticket to this and don't wait for streaming; sit down in the dark with people you don't know and let it flow in.

Review: DREAM SCENARIO

Paul Matthews, a flubby, aging academic who has been promising the world and himself that he'll write that book, begins appearing in people's dreams. It could be a family member (like the first scene of the film) or a total stranger. He keeps getting accosted by people who tell him of the dreams but one detail is increasingly disturbing him: he just appears, playing no part, neither saving nor antagonising the dreamer. Even in other peoples' dreams, he's flavourless and ineffectual. At first, this turns into a benign fame. His students want selfies with him and an online publishing/advertising firm are very keen. But this is an extended fable and that fame must turn into infamy which it does, quickly and punitively.

The apparently effortless fame of the online world and the post-truth culture hauls Paul so swiftly that he has no time to adjust to it let alone use it to his advantage. Even when his relative innocence is tested the occasion is ruined with a kind of sexual whiplash. When this is followed by a moment of fury (unrelated) the shift happens. This is where it might have got sidetracked into settling for a cheap shot at cancel culture and stayed where it was (after all, those who seek to cancel him have nothing but hallucinated actions to base their condemnation). But the film's insistence on developing Paul's predicament and character mercifully take us well beyond this.

I thought of a few things while watching this film. The first is how much more eloquent the thoughts on the influence of dream states this tale is than Christopher Nolan's Inception. Where that movie really only ends up being a  multilevel labyrinth game, this feels more solid and consequential. I also kept thinking of the short satire Muskrat Fun for Everyone by Stan Dryer. This short fiction which appeared in Playboy begins as a man's curiosity over a shady personal ad leads him into eventual public execration despite his having done nothing he is accused of. The cancel culture notes here seem clever at first as the case against Paul is due entirely to acts others have dreamed, hallucinations. However, the jokes about getting him in line with the likes of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are much funnier. The cancellation is just a tool here, not the basis of the story. That rests with Paul and his relation to the crazy world around him and his own lifelong acquiescence. (I also need to mention, here, the direct sourcing of an old piece of internet folklore.)

There are many riches of contemporary satire on display here like the company offering a technology that allows them to enter dreams (with appropriate safeguards) to advertise and the notion of "dreamfluencers" as well as young entrepreneurs who blend genuine enthusiasm with conscience-free greed. But Dream Scenario sheds its satirical skin by the third act and heads for something more profound and IRL. After the tribulation, Paul has a way back to discover and what it will cost. The warmth to this journey (wherever it leads) lifts this story well above those whose motivations fall more to base ridicule (e.g The Menu, The Hunt, the irredeemable Triangle of Sadness). I won't spoil the ending of this film but can say that the telescoping of some of its elements is textbook but heavily satisfying. And that's before the very last moment.

A strong cast plays well but in this story the shoulders that bear it are those of Nicholas Cage. Cage began in his uncle Francis' movies and travelled to arthouse roles before establishing himself as a buff action hero ready to compromise any reputation he had already won with image-busting weirdness. He has come to publicly acknowledge this and have fun with it. However, he has still a few hard pebbles set aside like his unlovely portrayal of the alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas, studied neurosis of a ficitonalised real author Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, the smellable feral revenger in Pig and now the dowdy no-one here. He's already done his WTF performances and can star in movies that only require he show fury with a grin. Then there's this. He fits into the vision of a cinematic world of a young (i.e. not yet forty) auteur who continues to explore the strange thing that truth has become. Cage gives us a solid core so that Dream Scenario never gets twee or cute, that its laughs are loud and its appeals to the heart are strong.

MY 2023

A year of contrasts with a statistically correct big middle section. The ones I put in the middle are not films I necessarily dislike, I enjoyed most of them. It's just that they didn't have that extra element that took them higher. Similarly, the ones in the top list are not necessarily impeccable: they just all had that element, whatever it was. And the ones at the bottom are more likely disappointments than outright stinkers. This is because, as an amateur critic, I pay for my cinema tickets and tend not to pay to hate watch anything. It's most likely that I'll outright rail against things I've taken a chance on at MIFF as there's usually less or no hype about them and it's hard to tell in advance whether they're worth my time (this is an acceptable gamble with festivals, though). These aren't all the movies I saw this year, just the ones I wanted to comment on.

TOP

TALK TO ME - Now this is how you get away with a possession story after decades of Exorcist knockoffs (which continue into the new century). Making the danger of it drug-like was inspired and it still gives beyond that innovation. Outstanding. Film of the year.

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN -  Takes the cute Irish tale and turns it into an eviscerating fable of friendship. Extraordinary.

WOMEN TALKING -  Women who have been barred from education have to establish the language to use in order to make one of three cases in response to a local crime. Does what it says on the tin but what it says on the tin is extraordinary.

EMILY THE CRIMINAL - In which deadpan comic champ Aubrey Plaza loses herself in a thankless character role and comes out intact and more. 

PEARL - If Mia Goth was the one to watch in several small roles she bursts through the screen in this afterthought sequel that outdoes its original. Can't wait for Maxxxine.

INFINITY POOL - Oops, Mia Goth again, this time in a thrill kill cult (or are they?) finding a violence high in a fable like magical arrangement. Cronenberg Jr fell close to the tree.

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL -  Australian made but with American sensibility, this works a treat in pushing the post Nixon America into the post Exorcist culture. A delight.

BOTTOMS -  Funniest film of the year as gay teens start a fight club to lure their cheerleader crushes. It works but that's only the beginning. Funniest film of the year.

GODZILLA MINUS ONE -  From the gleaming Toho logo to the end credits, this proves that only a drop of originality is needed to lift a remake into the lofty realm of its original. Thrilling in its execution and sobering in its anti-war message.

PAST LIVES - Minimalist tale that takes a little too long to get to its quietly devastating final zinger but that is so strong that the dragginess in the middle feels like waiting rather than boredom.

WALK UP - Another Hong Sang-soo mini wonder of personal histories and the effects of impulsive decisions.

DREAM SCENARIO - A fable of fame for the social media aeon that fleshes out its satire with real warmth. A kind of Being John Malkovich for next week. Stellar turn by Nic Cage.

POOR THINGS - Lanthimos extends his already rich psychosocial pallet with this magical realist trek. Outstanding performance by Emma Stone.

MIDDLE

BARBIE - Great fun with satirical punch and a warm hearted message. I kept wanting more cultural pushback in Barbie's trek to self-actualisation but then, the satire and big numbers kept me laughing too hard to care much. Maybe a trim here and there.

OPPENHEIMER - First hour of three wasted in a needless "previously on Buffy" sequence and then an overlong vindication sequence with a spectacular story of the atomic bomb retelling in the middle. Nolan makes the package bigger than the product again.

SANCTUARY - Clever powerplay two hander gets bogged in its own process in the second act. The final moments redeem this but the drag lingers in the memory after the credits roll.

BROKER - Heart rending but satisfying road movie about how the idea of family can transcend blood ties.

EGO: THE MICHAEL GUDINSKY STORY - A decent enough document of a cultural giant that tends to glide over the more troubling aspects and deeds. That said I'd watch it again if it came up on streaming.

FOE  - Black Mirror episode stretched too far but redeemed by good performances.

THE ROYAL HOTEL - Well wrought scenes of toxic masculinity served positively with nuance but lacks a second act to render the finale as powerful as it should feel.  

YOU'LL NEVER FIND ME - Overlong reveal of the situation drags a good tight and atmospheric two hander.

MONOLITH - Thoroughly enjoyable fable of who gets to control the narrative with clever use of humanity's darker urges accelerated by communication technology.

FORBIDDEN PLAY - By the numbers J-horror revisit by the genre's inventor is perhaps one notch above okay.

IMMERSION - A coodabeen from another J-horror master moves too sluggishly to fulfil its promises.

BEAU IS AFRAID -  I liked this a lot better than everyone I talked to who saw it. It is self-indulgent and overlong but does make sense for anyone with the patience to think it through.

OF AN AGE - Decorous love story doesn't outstay its welcome. Perhaps a little overserious.

TAR - Great star turn by Cate Blanchett in a tale that works well but lacks power in the delivery of its narrative cataclysm.

M3GAN - Fun but feels too slight, even for its more general rating.

KNOCK AT THE CABIN - The twist is there's no twist. It's ok.

SCREAM VI - Some good sequences but the adherence to the rules is long overstretched by now. 

TOTALLY KILLER - Back to Friday the 13th. 

GODLESS: THE EASTFIELD EXORCISM - Kept wanting this one to explore the differences between the supernatural and scientific side. It does come down on one over the other but by that time it feels less powerful than it might have. That said, very good performances and production.

BOTTOM

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS - Hot shot Swedish auteur seeks to dazzle with a diminishing stock of tricks which amount to the insertion of disruptive motifs. It's a windscreen wiper, it's a lift door closing, it's a cleaner's trolley bashing against a wall, it's a wave bashing against the beached lifeboat, it's ... it's any other damned thing available that distracts an audience from the low substance count on screen. Bullshit from start to finish.

THE BOOGEYMAN - By the numbers conventional Stephen King adaptation from the guy who innovatively used the zoom meeting as a horror setting during COVID. I hope he gets trusted to do something more original next.

EVIL DEAD RISE - Great effects showreel with a few bones thrown to the franchise. It's ok.

IT LIVES INSIDE - Potentially strong monster entry dilutes its cultural assimilation theme until it's just a boogeyman figure scaring people.

THE MENU - If you're going for satire, try respecting your audience's intelligence. Could done iwth a massive edit of every obvious statement in it. Then again, you might not have a movie left. Smug rubbish.

THANKSGIVING - By the numbers '80s-style slasher set in the present does what it says on the tin. I will struggle to remember it.

DRACULA THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER - Over-conventional and unscary waste of a good idea.

IT'S A WONDERFUL KNIFE - Soft and over-conventional waste of a good title.

ASTEROID CITY - Didn't bother but put it here, anyway.

Review: BOTTOMS

PJ and Josie, two girls at the bottom of the school social ladder (being both gay and untalented) resolve to break their outsider status by forming a fight club with the pretence of empowering the female contingent of the student body but the aim of getting with the cheerleaders. The big game is coming up and the approach of the Huntington school football team is heralded with Hate Week style propaganda and mythology of ultraviolence. School life is revving up. Even more that PJ and Josie's ploy works and cheerleaders do turn up for the fight club training. Partly, this is due to the inadvertent untruth that the pair are fresh out of Juvie with grim records.

If this makes you think of the quirkier or edgier high school comedies like Booksmart or Heathers you're close but not quite there. Bottoms is reminiscent of those and more but its tougher cartoony approach takes it way out of that area. While it observes the three act arc of conventional narrative it also allows an unsettling imbalance to thrive which ensures that as soon as something gets too familiar there will be something to pull the rug on it. 

This is a school run by a principal whose stake in the team quarterback lies somewhere between an eye for future funding and pagan idolatry, and the football teams only wear their football gear. In warning the school on the PA about the advent of the feared Huntington team he gets a girl to deliver a testimony about how she was cornered by a Huntington player one night. The account is delivered flat, like an alpha girl getting out of detention and ends with, "and now I'm fucked!" Characters react with identical complex lines that would be impossible in real life but they also respond to other situations realistically and without wisecracks. The sense that the chaos is only just likely to rebalance itself is palpable. 

However, this keeps the cuteness in check with grimmer moods and material. In a script that has more throwaway one-liners than a week of Tina Fey's dreams there is a surprising level of sobering material on abuse and even rape. As a film that is undeniably a black comedy it keeps the easy charm of girls playing tough vulnerable to bruising. In a South Park way, the final act triumph (not saying how) serves both the satire-lover's thirst for punchy retribution and the comedy audience's need for brightness.

Good writing needs good playing. Rachel Sennot and Ay Edeberi as PJ and Josie respectively provide a core of two life long friends with real chemistry. If you saw Sennot in Bodies Bodies Bodies, she's even faster talking and more solidly grotesque here. Ruby Cruz as an uncharacteristically developed quirky character kept reminding me of Meg Tilly whom she resembles physically but also behaviourally. Nicholas Galitzine as the team QB surprises with his miasmic mix of machismo and prissy self-absorption. Really, the whole cast brings it.

With new things to say within the niche but well loved sub-genre and a very deft hand that steers between light and tough nimbly, Bottoms is one of the very best comedies I've seen in years. It's dizzying but committed. How dizzying, how committed? Well, I was a young adult in the early '80s and hated the Song Total Eclipse of the Heart more than any other musical statement of the time. It's used here in a way that is belly laugh funny and also culturally vengeful. Bottoms is a film of extremes and contrasting extremes. It is a chaos given form by the most moreish icing you've tasted since childhood. Dig the fuck in!

Review: GODZILLA MINUS ONE

Koichi cheats death by landing his kamikaze plane at an island maintenance base instead of the side of an American ship. The ground crew don't have a lot of time for recriminations over this as what they at first take to be a new Yankee weapon reveals itself to be the massive roaring reptile that the locals call Godzilla. Everyone is hurled about like rags and all but Koichi and the chief of the crew who knows the pilot's secret.

Back in the wreckage of Tokyo Koichi fails to find his family whose house is entirely at street level but gets involved with a young woman who has just saved a baby from a bomb site. Back at her place the story morphs into the kind of people first neo-realism Japanese cinema was good at after the war. Time passes and the pair, still not officially married, get jobs that help them climb out of their slough. She commutes to Ginza for an office job. He gets good hazard pay cleaning up American mines in the ocean. He has nightmares of the monster from the island, they haunt him like his war guilt. They are about to come true right where he lives.

Japanese cinema took decades to address its war history and the spectre of the atomic bomb bled into the least expected places like samurai movies or folk horror like Onibaba where distant clouds from battles or despoiled cities filled the medieval skies. In 1954 Ishiro Honda made Godzilla which directly dealt with the bomb and its effects, giving birth to a mythology where science in the service of warfare brought forth monsters the size of city blocks. The pushback against the monster is through an equally terrifying weapon developed during the war in Japan. The film, monster movie or not, examines the ethics of this and the emotional darkness of its potential use. The inventor needs rescue from depression, skulking in his home, hiding his face. The war and its cataclysmic finale was to keep rumbling in the cinema.

Godzilla Minus One's title refers to Japan being returned to zero by the war and plunged into the negative by Godzilla, brought forth by the war. The central notion haunting characters is how the war has left them, particularly those for whom there has bee no resolution, Like Koichi the kamikze. Godzilla's natural nuclear weaponry adds a heavy despair to the spectacle of its city-demolishing walk. That nightmarishly gigantic spectre of Hiroshima is there to return for as long as the monster can roam. Koichi getting speckled with splats of black rain while Godzilla bashes his city, is heartrending.

But this is a Kaiju movie and knows it. The humbler family scenes to begin with have their resonance and keep the stakes in our recall but Kaiju movies demand spectacle and we get just that. The huge spikes rising from the waves like a forest of shark dorsal fins are a terror. The sight of the monster rising from the waters and suckerpunching warships is powerful and thrilling. The city scenes of destruction will test your sense of vertigo as train cars are hurled through the air (one of which has a major character holding on to a rail too far above the ground to witness easily.

Gareth Edwards' 2014 U.S. reboot was a thrill, as well. I saw it in 3D and it played as you might imagine, with the action leaving everything else behind. There is a moment in it where Ken Watanabe calls the monster Gojira. Less than a minute later, one of the military types around him turn that into Godzilla and we never hear the Japanese pronunciation again. Godzilla Minus One doesn't need the translation. Nor does it need the transport to a comfort point of familiar Western settings. A Japan exhausted by war is asked to exhaust itself all over again. And as we look upon the wreckage of the bombed cities and then those devastated by monstrosity we cannot fail to recall the look of the vision leading news video for the past few years in Kiev and now Gaza City. Godzilla Minus One did not have to have those in mind when it went into production, it only had to remember the urgency of the original and repeat its plea for the people of the Earth to end the war, whichever one it happens to be, all war, finished, silence, birdsong. It is fitting that Gareth Edwards said after a screening of this film, "this is what a Godzilla movie should be like." Too bloody true.

Review: THE ROYAL HOTEL

Hannah and Liz, two American backpackers in Australia, run out of money and have to work locally. The only gig they are offered is as bar staff at a pub in the back of Bourke. It's a mining area so, the agent tells them, they will need to put up with a bit of male attention. From EDM parties on boats on Sydney Harbour they travel to the diesel and dust of nowhere where their instructions are brusque and without a lot of  form, meaning they'll need to learn as they go and it's easy to make a faux pas and cause brooding offence. But hey, it's money.

Then again, what's money? An extended sequence of the two women working at the bar is like something from the final act of Mother! But for the counter, the seethe of toxic masculinity on the other side would consume them and they get busy picking up every unwritten rule that presents itself. Between this and the lack of sympathy from their supposedly protective employers the night feels punitive and endless. Upstairs (and then on the counter of the bar) the two departing British packers show nothing but debauched hulls, regaining life only on the way out. This is only night one.

Kitty Green's fiction adaptation of the documentary Hotel Coolgardie does not repeat all the interpersonal atrocities of the source material. This time there is more examination of nuance, the ambiguity that transform a character from shy benignity to gorilla-like violence, from effortless charm to mounting threat. The interplay between the various locals and the women runs a gamut rather than describe a constant pushback. This prevents the film as a whole of falling into flat allegory. The differences between Hannah and Liz alone prevent that but the trouble taken to seek the vulnerability behind the brutality (where plausible: sometimes there's just brutality) keeps things edgy and realistic.

Aside from that there's not a lot of plot to The Royal Hotel. A few strands of narrative involving Liz and Hannah's various responses to the culture around them to open things up but the rest is a series of incidents within the hellish dark khaki brown interior of the pub sessions. Then again, the plot is best served by sparseness; it's the issue more than the fable of it that matters here. The scene of their first night serving is epic and interminable but it shows exhaustion without being exhausting. This is because it reveals fascinating truths about a culture of men forced by lucrative but agonising work to ease the toll on their nerves through a deteriorating restraint and galloping sense of licence.

Jessica Herwick shows the most flamboyant chops as the more outgoing Liz, frequently troubling in her proximity to ugly danger. Julia Garner keeps a sober iciness as defence but even this can be moulded by the more skilled advances of one of the younger men. Hugo Weaving is almost unrecognisable as the shifty and chaotic owner Billy. Ursula Yovich's Carol strikes poignant notes as his wife and the wisdom to control where she can and give up and run when she can't, fight or flight as a lifestyle.

Is The Royal Hotel an update on Wake in Fright? Not really. That was a man in a world of men stripped of his civilisation to the point where that quality might well have been more of an affectation than a cultured state. Liz and Hannah are barred from this by their gender and its value by that similar world of men. If there is a need to defend themselves against anything it is less the earlier film's corrosive sheen of mateship than a continuous threat of sexual assault. What it does share with Wake in Fright is the confronting reality of a culture that doesn't simply have a dark side but is busy obscuring such a thing. Recent public campaigns to render the wide brown land a better and more inclusive place, regardless of their success, have told us as much. The Royal Hotel is not a cover version of Wake in Fright, the pair of films are companion pieces which might easily swap time periods without too much change. If you don't find that confronting in itself you need to see the newer film and rewatch the older one. 

Review: THANKSGIVING

After a Black Friday sale stampede goes horribly wrong, people are left variously dead or seriously injured, engendering a mass of motivation. A year later, the group of teen friends at the centre of the tragedy find themselves being picked off in an elaborate grand guignol dinner setting/murder scene. Race against time, need to unmask the killer and end him. Kills, kills, lots of kills. Roll credits. What do you want, it's a self-avowed teen slasher?

Eli Roth made a trailer for a non-existent film called Thanksgiving. It's part of the double act Grindhouse movie with a mini feature from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez who directed a story each. You can find the trailer on YouTube. It is meant to look like a trailer from an old VHS rental with video glitches, gluey visuals and audio and a subterranean voiceover making words like "terror" sound like solid artefacts emerging from deep within their being. It's a funny piece but also reflects Roth's nasty side and willingness to go that one step further within genre boundaries. His latest offering is the feature length version of that trailer.

With some changes. The original was meant to look like it was from the mid 1980s which sealed it into a cube of pastiche. The feature is set in the twenty-first ce3ntury. This allows Roth to dispense with a truckload of period cuteness so he can concentrate on making a slasher for today. Some of the more elaborate kills are ported to the movie and in one case the version in the trailer is far more extreme. But that's the strange thing about this outing, it works very hard to create a standard genre piece, solid enough but not what you might expect of its writer/director.

Eli Roth made his name with horror movies that were highly derivative but more extreme than their influences. Cabin Fever gets a lot yuckier than Evil Dead or The Curse. Hostel goes so far further than the serial killer movies of its previous decade that it infamously drew the term torture porn into use in a review. Roth's all but self-avowed reputation for nastiness precedes him and leads us to expect a level of violent misanthropy. The more recent Knock Knock promised to turn the tables on the frat-boy sensibilities he'd been accused of but it was so self-consciously responsive to the criticism it came across as absurdly contrived. So, here we are at a point where he can bounce back with a realisation of the idea in the faux trailer that would not only fulfil its brutality but extend it. And we get an assembly line slasher.

What should we expect, though? For all the boundary pushing of Roth's earlier career there has been very little follow through. His more recent involvement in more scholarly pursuits like the History of Horror have served to soften his image but none of this should be enough to compel him to change his approach, especially in a sub-genre he clearly delights in (go and take a look at that Grindhouse trailer again). Even if he were to do that he supplies us with the basics: group of teen friends with some internal tensions, a series of thanksgiving and retail related kills, a good handful of suspects with strong motives and a pace that, if it lags here and there, always gets back into gear. All those elements fall into place with some fun punning dialogue and a snappy third act twist. And when it's over we feel we've seen something that has done its job. Curiously for a film maker who has been good at turning derivative material into something that feels fresh, a late scene completely lifts a brooding twist from a recent thriller. It feels as though he had to include the final sub-generic note somehow. 

I suppose I just wanted a little more tension and strain in a newly made slasher. If Eli Roth can't bring something new to the table that is not already being done by the restlessly resurrecting Scream franchise than why bother? It gets those Grindhouse trailer kills into serviced housing but now they have narrative context and aren't that scary anymore, we can't just imagine them finished the way we wanted now. But finish might be what this is all about, polish and form for the old standards. 

I wonder if a studiously recreated '80s video version brazenly projected in a modern cinema might not have appeared more daring with more obsolete ethics on savage display. What an opportunity for cultural commentary that would be, and how far beyond Knock Knock it might go. Eli Roth has to pay his bills like anyone else and the era of daring auteurs dazzling at ground level in the old arthouses is a memory that has long faded. It's set up for a sequel and so it should be and now there's a new Halloween costume for trick or treaters. Let's not judge this harshly, cinema has always had a commercial core, but by the same token let's remember that we don't have to reward what we reserve judgement on. If something reaches the OK barrier, let it, sometimes OK will have to do.

Review: SANCTUARY

Young heir to rich hotel business, Hal, orders room service when there's a knock at the door. It's a perfectly presented corporate woman with a briefcase. Hal's father has just died and the young patrician is about to ascend to the CEO position by inheritance. Rebecca is here to finalise matters and begins with a questionnaire which gets increasingly invasive. When he demurs over a difficult one, Rebecca turns harder. So hard, in fact, that he interjects that she has gone off script. 

She regroups and resumes but the questions just get tougher. Hal gives up, exploding over the breaches. Rebecca pushes back and gives him a humiliating task which he does in apparent relief. Frequent glimpses of the script reveal that even these breaches are scripted. While he is down on the bathroom floor, cleaning around the toilet she joins him on the floor, assuaging him with platitudes. Later, when they enjoying some very spiffy post-session nosh and a martini each, Hal wistfully says he'll miss these appointments. She asks what he means. Well, he's going to be a CEO. He can't be known as a Sub if he wants to be a hardarse business leader. Rebecca is not pleased. She is not pleased initially from the surprise of it and increasingly from a sense of betrayal and callous use. Her displeasure balloons in the plus hotel room and takes on new facets and characters until Hal has to manage some push back of his own.

From this point more plot reveals would only turn into spoilers. This high energy two hander of dominance and struggle, of business intimate to corporate, takes dizzying turn after turn, revealing weakness in the dom and strength in the sub whose intellect and deluxe articulation make for a sharp and compelling ninety-six minutes. Despite the lushness of the setting, this premise of a constantly shifting dialogue is under continual threat of collapse, point and counterpoint can get exhausting rapidly and twists will need to be ironclad if they are to pass an audience on high alert.

There are lags in the middle, expectable in this setup but the reason that it regathers strength again and again to the solidly wonderful finale goes beyond the writing, already accomplished and muscular. It's all about a pair of performers who are made for their roles. Christopher Abbott, though young, is a veteran of difficult parts in films like Piercing and Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor in which he plays a man hosting a cybernetic puppeteer, cowering into himself or bursting out with the fury of an assassin grown too fond of her work (it's a complicated piece). Hal lets him do something very similar as he variously breaks his role in the professional relationship but must at times retreat hastily to the shell of the submissive. His vocal work alone, whether in howling pain or fury, might be enough but the interplay is also intensely physical.

That's where counterpart Margaret Qualley comes in. Andie McDowell's daughter, Qualley might get nailed up as a nepo kid but for some impressive stripes earned in things like the weirdo apocalypse series Leftovers. Luminously beautiful, she shows a tough readiness to subvert expectations and come out growling with force. Alternatively, she sculpts lines hard with threat in a gentle croon. Also, she brings her dancing training to the role with some impressive movement. Her character's professional insistence on a contact-free liaison is kept through the wildest pas de deux. If it breaks we know it's serious.

I could see audiences falling away at some points where the writer wants to introduce a complication that he has not earned. This happens more than once and can overpower the best that the performers can muster but some patience will reward the viewer when the pieces of the extraordinary final moments fall into place and feel as though they had been falling from the opening. Is this a BDSM rom com or a message of gloom for the future of business? You could really take it either way but to do that you will need to keep with it and suffer a little. That is in line with Rebecca's profession and Hal's kink and maybe, our own lives which might be simmering under masks of such invention. Try it out for yourself.

Viewing notes: Because of its short run at Nova I had to miss this at the cinema during October as it doesn't qualify as horror. I found it for rent on Prime (at post-cinema run prices so it won't break the bank). Also available on Apple TV and Google Movies.

31 Nights o' Horror: HALLOWEEN @ 45

Young Michael Myers slashes his older sister on Halloween night in 1963. In 1978 he's back, breaking out of maximum security, with a fanatical shrink on his trail, and heading back home for more slashing. Meanwhile, a trio of girlfriends plan their Halloween babysitting with a mix of teenage earnings and sex in locations classier than the backseats of cars. Michael's hijacked government car crawls over the map of small Haddonfield, Illinois, like a serpent, noticing the children and the girls. Happy Halloween! The trick, as the original poster had it, is to stay alive.

This was not the first slasher. That argument starts sounding like what was the first punk record very quickly. Nevertheless, it's worth nodding to a few formative titles. Peeping Tom had a serial killer using an unusual weapon tied to his mental state. Psycho swapped parents for its killer's drive but kept it deadly. Black Christmas had the killer make crazy phone calls to terrorise young students before doing them in by a variety of ghastly means. And then John Carpenter, at the dawn of a career that had already produced a smartly funny sci-fi and keen update on a western siege at an outer suburban cop shop, thought this up. Originally titled The Babysitter murders because the '70s, Halloween had significant traits that were used in the decade to come and beyond it like moulded parts.

In a decade busily attempting to remake The Exorcist as horror moved to the better budgeted mainstream, plain old murder might have seemed passe as the feature of a movie. Carpenter and writing partner Debra Hill had to think small budget and spare means and found a series of killings by a perp without apparent motive of the kind of people who would be paying to see the movie. They hung it on a popular holiday, already rich in macabre iconography, made the bad guy look like a deranged, overgrown trick or treater like the charges under the care of the babysitting teens so there seemed to be no escape from him. That's why he just walks.

Why should he run? He's the boogeyman, he can take his time. Not only that, sometimes he doesn't move at all. There he is in the distance, his white and featureless mask glowing in the autumn afternoon. Standing firm among sheets flapping on a clothesline; there one glance, gone the next. Even when he drives it's slow, the pace of assurance. In the screenplay he bears the name Michael Myers but in directions and descriptions he is known as The Shape. The Shape, expressionless, form without substance, a ghost with a kitchen knife, strolling through your neighbourhood. Later imitators tried a tweak here and there but everything just came back to the mask and the silence.

But for this to work you need victims to care about. The kids might seem bratty but at least one of them really does see the boogeyman through the loungeroom window and isn't believed when we know he's telling the truth. We've already seen him bullied at school. We've even seen him saved from them by The Shape with what feels like affinity. When the shot through Myers' car windows following little Tommy turns the corner with the boy as the creepy theme music plays, it's hard to tell if the boogeyman is feeling protecting or menacing.

We are not allowed to forget Michael's power, craft or violence because Dr Loomis reminds us of it in almost every scene he's in, railing against the man in language less like a psychiatrist than a holy rolling witch burning preacher. Donald Pleasance, one-man lynch mob, who carries a revolver in the patient-retrieval mission he is one, leaks his fear and awe: when seeing a mauled corpse of a dog he murmurs, "he got hungry". In a well turned moment he begins casually describing Myers as a patient which finishes with, "he had the blackest eyes ... the devil's eyes". This would stick out as histrionic bombast in a demonic possession movie but Loomis is not a priest and Michael is not Pazuzu, the fact that the profession has been driven to these terms gives us pause. Pleasance's crisp nasal transatlantic keeps us wary of The Shape that quietly appears through rear windows and the shade of the footpath trees.

And then it is the girls we care about. Whether it's the wisecracking sarcasm of Annie or the goofy Linda with her constant interjection, "totally", we are soon to view them as victims and, for all the venereal larking of their talk and the fragile triviality of their concerns we get to know them just well enough for us to want them to emerge safely from a night that rasps with blades and tightens like garottes.

Finally, it's Laurie. Laurie Strode is the bookish virgin with the sensible attitude. She's so good at school that she can give an articulate answer to a literary question in class just after she's seen the creepy car across the road stop where it shouldn't. The sassy duo of Annie and Linda tease her but it's gentle, the sense that they value her company deeply for her stability and gravity is strong. Debra Hill's teen dialogue is a hit, here, letting this kind of information through the perky, quirky cascade. Laurie with her autumnal brown shades and low-styled hair carries her own power even if she doesn't know it yet. Between the three of them, she is the only one who can see Michael in his overalls and white mask, standing out among the lawns and hedges of the tree lined neighbourhoods. She saw the car while in class, the distant figure on the footpath and then among the sheets of the clothesline, there then not there, but witnessed. Their bond is clear and sealed.

This theme of  a bond between final girl and killer became a frequent resort in the genre that this film started. It's own sequel did this and was taken by parts of every franchise that followed. Mostly, it's a quasi supernatural element to cast in among the scares and occasionally it's there to bump the tension by suggesting links along moral lines. In Halloween it is a kind of presage of the confrontation to come, the spectre of the worst thing that could happen and the desperate real-time scramble for courage in the dark.

Too often, teen slashers have been dismissed as puritanical for killing off the players of premarital sex. In later sub-genre entries this is unarguably the case (Friday the 13th made it the base motivation for the violence). Of seven kills in the film, only two are sex related (I'm not counting one which is only indrect) and two are animals. But the charge goes deeper than body counts, suggesting that slashers generically punish teen sex. Sometimes, yes, but not here, and actually not in most of them. Separate for the moment, the killer and the film that features the killings. As one of the Faculty of Horror cohosts said perfectly well (but I have to paraphrase): the film is radical, the killer is puritanical.

Back to Laurie, for a moment, her gravity is given life by the debuting daughter of an already famous screen victim of slashing, Jamie Lee Curtis. Just as Janet Leigh's Marion Crane was famously stabbed in a frenzy, JLC's Laurie will be up against a monster who has appeared as a spectre but made the leap into the brutal third dimension to come unstoppably at her. And then it's flight or fight. And think of it: she lets slip her crush in the car with Annie and her barrier in realising it has nothing to do with sexual ethics, it's just shyness. If she could overcome that, according to the death-fuck commentators, she'd be slasher meat. Well, she is anyway so what does that say? On the other hand, Jamie Lee Curtis' iconic and resonant turn as the nebbish who surprises herself with her own action, is tested to the point of annihilation and stands up to it. Halloween is the story of her breakthrough, not someone knocking off horny teens. Jamie Lee Curtis' performance from passive to solid pragmatic pushback cast the mold.

No appreciation for this source point can be signed off without mentioning the music. Carpenter couldn't afford a Hollywood composer and so fell back on to his own resources and wrote and played it himself in partnership with Alan Howarth. That had already happened in Dark Star and more impressively with Assault on Precinct 13 (whose theme was good enough for triphop legend Tricky to lift wholesale). The Halloween theme is set in the uneasy time signature of 5/4. Instead of counting to four and looping it, try adding one to each loop. If you don't add another to normalise it you'll run into trouble in a hurry.  Add to that a simple figure that played with the fifth and flattened sixth of a scale while subverting that in the bass and you have something concentrated and intense. And, guess what, it's a real theme, it goes well beyond the credits and accompanies Michael on his escapes, street crawls and lurking throughout the movie. There are other music cues but the continuous use of the dididi dididi didi didi tinkling piano and growling synthesised bass grabs us by the neck and pulls us in. Clearly influenced by Tubular Bells after its use in The Exorcist all but dictated what horror movie music should sound like (try, also, Goblin's scores for Deep Red and Suspiria) Carpenter's music for this film was another notch on its influence weapon.

A recent watch also brought to light something more generational but still significant do do with music. When Annie and Laurie are driving through the streets to their babysitting gigs the song (Don't Fear) the Reaper comes on the radio. From the mid '80s needle drop bonanza to the current day this moment would end with the song exploding from its tinny radio sound into a massive blooming blast taking it from the world of the movie into our own. But here, it's just a song on the radio. If you catch it under the dialogue it feels like a warm wink.

Seeing this at the drive-in in 1979 (Townsville: we didn't always get them on time) I was wowed by the thrill and the immersion (yes, even with those tinny metal speakers) but it's the rewatches since that have impressed this film on me. On tv here, on crumbly old VHS there, through to the one I most recently put on, the incredible 4K with Dolby Vision and Atmos, this lean and mean ninety minutes can be repeated like a favourite album. Many shared viewing experiences through that time I recall one more than any other. A woman I was courting said she wanted to see something scary so I put this on. By the finale's white knuckle tension, she was curled in a ball at the other end of the couch. This is after showing her Suspiria and the Exorcist. Yes, you can look at the incredibly resurrecting murder machine coming back to life from repeated deathblows as cliché but you need to recall that this is where that cliche was just a narrative decision, not a trope. If you let tightly-constructed horror cinema in, relax and let it work, the catharsis of it will exhilarate you. And that's the game of the name.

Viewing notes: as said above, I watched the recent Scream Factory 4K release of Halloween. Dolby Vision image is deep and dynamic. Dolby Atmos audio is immersive. I watched it on Halloween night. An old '70s slasher still compelling? "It was doing very well last night!"

 

Review: FOE

Young married couple Hen and Junior live on their lapsed farm in a near future when water is more precious than cobalt and people are being encouraged to move off world. A stranger knocks on their door and tells them that Junior is to be conscripted into the space program. The pair was already drifting and now with enforced separation they are compelled to reassess their situation. Later, the stranger returns and lets them know that Junior will be replaced by an AI version of Junior. Huh?

If their shared introspection before took them into depths unaccounted for, now they are going to need  some serious shared experience to get to the furthest depths of their lives, what they mean and what each is to the other. And then it gets complicated.

That's as plotty as I'll get in this review. There are twists here and some of them are backward-folding and I'm just not going to navigate that. this film is about asking what we want from our lives. Hen and Junior examine what made them a couple. As they variously resist and welcome the solid changes that face them they are left with more questions than answers. If the conclusion doesn't make you think about every single longer term relationship you've had then you need to go back and watch it again. It will please some greatly and probably disgust others. This only glances at the notion of possession, it blossoms into much more of a life definition tale. That's where it gets dangerous.

Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, bearing the burden of almost all of the screen time, convince us of a couple whose bonds are held in great fragility, as physical as vocal. Their interplay frequently approaches dancing. At the film's best, this is a pas de deux of tension, of rediscovery, of attraction and revulsion. Aaron Pierre who is far sexier than anyone from a government agency ever could be, plays up his jazzy suavity, frequently crossing lines that increasingly look like tests. This is a story where sensuality comes with a grimace.

It reminded me strongly of a film that, while it tackles a different subject, commits to its odd narrative to the point where a sudden leap into a mental reframing is essential to keep watching. This doesn't have to be a violent shift, just an acknowledgement of the change and a readiness to return. Denis Villeneuve's similarly titled Enemy, uses a doppelganger figure and the spectre of spiders where Foe keeps it tidier with an AI clone but the pair of films both keep their focus on life choices and the workings of notions like love and bonding. The difference is that Enemy, for all its abstractions and looseness of connection between the real and the allegorical, is a tightly told story. Foe isn't. If I were being mean I'd say that Foe was Enemy as remade by Terrence Malik. But I'm not inclined to risk revealing things about Foe or damning it with a cheap quip, so I won't.

Foe is too long. The scenes of its conclusion are concise and eloquently stated in cinematic form but we are given too much repetition of information with too little nuance to distinguish one iteration from the next. This works well if the scenes of shared adventure are considered a dance but the film doesn't quite commit to that. To say it's too long, though, is not to call it boring, only that it lacks economy with its points. This might be a problem of the source material: the film was being adapted before it was published and the author of the novel was a writing partner. It's hard to say. What I can say is that by the time I got to the credits I was not surprised by the conclusion but nor was I robbed by it. Recalling the good bits, the same way Hen and Junior do with their own history, I felt it found its justice where others would definitely not.

31 Nights o' Horror: IMMERSION

VR hotshots gather on an island to develop new tech and find that the place is haunted by a very nasty on-eyed ghost. The village has a bus service and school along with a very few other residents which renders it silent and eerie. One of the women in the team is there to seek the fate of her father who disappeared (in a prologue) when his virtual self ventured too close to a Shinto gate a few metres off the beach. A woman also met the same mysterious end on the same day. A local mystic confirms this and cautions the wizkids off. They're wizkids, though, and they track down the VR recordings of the two missing presumed dead people to see what they can find. This unleashes a further blurring of the space between the technology and the supernatural forces that threaten to get rid of everybody they can find.

I'm leaving details out and not just spoilers. This is the latest foray into the nature of memory and place by J-Horror source-point Takashi Shimizu who brought us Ju-On (The Grudge) and all its descendants. While much of the flow of ideas and the confrontation between spirit and gigabyte can get detailed, he reins back the action to give us time to digest. That's necessary and for some it might make this a slow slog of a film. However, the patient will be rewarded with a low key and effective essay on the memory of folklore and locality, the the hard recorded recall of information systems. The two sides increasingly overlap and the notion of an inevitability to this, that they are attracting each other to form a potentially catalysmic union is where the scares of this horror story lie.

A few jump scares here and there approach tokenism and the vision of the waterlogged one-eyed ghost will appear unsurprising to anyone who has paid attention to J-Horror over the decades (including all the influenced cinema from other cultures). To me this is about using the iconography to explore the idea. We can feel comfortable in the familiarity of the ghoulish figure, so, when we see her interact with the reality blurring tech so that the lab's floorboards flood with seawater and people in underwater struggles glitch out of the scenes. One of the significant points revealed about the characters and how they plug into the world around them is a port of Kyoshi Kurosawa's terrifying Pulse which describes an apocalypse of isolation.

I've said very little about those characters and performances. They are all perfectly fine but they are at all times subject to the great fable, the two giants of human life - folklore to explain it and technology to enhance it - are the greater characters and, through a constantly stimulating visual environment we watch as their subjects interact. In the end we have a fulfilment ... of sorts and a meeting of potential ... of sorts. It's not a screamfest, it's a worry. That's why it works.

Viewing notes: I saw this as part of the Japanese Film Festival at the Kino in Melbourne. A terrific screening marred at the start by the oafs behind me who didn't understand that everyone could hear them murmuring and devauling the ticket price paid by everyone around them. For a short moment, it felt like they settled but a minute later the chief murmurer started up. I turned and looked straight at him long enough to make him shut up for the  rest of the running time. Gotta let these social troglodytes in on cinema etiquette.

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #5: BEETLEJUICE @ 35

Young Adam and Barbara Maitland find themselves rendered as ghosts after a car accident. The world outside the door for them is a weird and hostile environment, somewhere between a moon of Saturn and a Tex Avery cartoon. Before they can quite settle into the new reality a small family of New Yorkers moves into the place, threatening to strip the house into the kind of affected monstrosity that plays better in Manhattan than here in Connecticut. The Maitlands have found a book left for them by unseen forces, a manual the recently deceased. It's wordy and dry and difficult to read but they come across an ad in it for an entity who offers a kind of extermination service to get rid of the new living pests. This manifests on the attic televsion as a home-made late night style commercial. The guy really wants to be seen. Should they?

Tim Burton's second feature came cool on the heels of his debut Pee Wee's Big Adventure from three years previous. While that had been a marginal hit at best it still made an impression for its quirky story, the star's uber quirky performance and Burton's own family friendly bizarreness in design and direction. He was a fit for Beetlejuice but that didn't come up until Burton had rejected a pile of mid-'80s drivel that was going for the John Hughes quirky teen dollar. But Beetlejuice felt bespoke. There was so much opportunity for building a world that teetered on the edge between cartoons and reality that it would have felt irresistable.

And that's how it looks and feels. The house is the sole quirk free element in this conflict between a couple who would vanish in sunlight from blandness if they weren't made interesting by being ghosts and a family of three members constantly at odds with each other. The bickering alone might write itself, just add Burton's trick or treat aesthetic, Danny Elfman's musical gymnastics and you've got an iconic hit.

I first saw this on video just after its release and while I enjoyed the ghost train look and the satirical city vs country caricatures I felt it lacking. The fresh Winona Ryder as the first goth in mainstream cinema and her own big break was pretty captivating and her counterpoint, Catherine O'Hara's Delia, created a perfectly balanced tension. Jeffery Jones was as seemingly effortless in his anxiety as he had been rarely imperial previously in Amadeus. The strangely flavourless Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis cannot quite break out of the flatness of their written parts, even when literally pulling grotesque faces in the afterlife. Glen Shadix as the urbane schemer Otho is magnetic until his function takes over and he is left with mechanics alone.

That leaves Michael Keaton in the title role, a manic, fluid voiced spinning top of a character whose malevolence is barely masked by his charm. While it's not true to say that he is the sole reason for watching the film, he owns each second he is on screen and many while he's off. But when he is off, having been introduced, he is the only thing we want to see. Without him the drag of the second act is laid too bare and is inescapable. By the time of the pre-climactic scene when we should be held by the sight of a terrible supernatural sentence passed on to the Maitlands we just keep looping between an agonisingly slow effects development and a wondrous and unbelievable reception of it by its witnesses. The race to risk the thing that would reverse this feels interminable.

After this, an epilogue scene which should be darkly warm ends up cute. If you like cuteness you'll dig this end. If cuteness makes you as nauseated as does me you might have to look away. I should point out here that this impression is more from my first viewing than my more recent one. More recently, I was easily able to look around Burton's clumsy mishandling of the pace of the climax and the goofy ending recognise a little more of the shifts that had occurred in the household, why the Maitlands were finally made substantial and the joy of the final moments. 

Tim Burton's career from this high and his follow up Edward Scissorhands plateaued for a decade before making a grinding decline in the 2000s. Has his public abandoned the persistence of an old sure thing? Is Burton just another victim of a great shift to day-long comics universe films that deliver their own fantasy without the depth of his humour? Wes Anderson's authorial outings get public guernsies each time but the sense is that it's because he doesn't get more ambitious and plays to an audience that never gets sick of the flavour? Burton's triumphs have always needed writing that he doesn't appear capable of providing himself and his look and feel no longer cut it outside of imitators keeping to the limits of music videos. If he were to return it might need more Big Eyes or Ed Wood style departures but that would mean less Tim Burton. Watching Beetlejuice almost make it across the line into durability was a difficult watch for such an easy toned film and it just made me wonder if those few exceptions that revealed his skills without the goofy art direction were only glimpses into where he would go if he wanted to hide. Otherwise we could just put this on again and sing along. It is quite catchy. 

31 Nights o' Horror Selections #4: THE EXORCIST @ 50

Movie star Chris McNeil thought this was just another gig on location, a student revolt movie set in DC. When her young daughter Regan begins to act weirdly and then violently and then the furniture in her room starts flying around while she's hacking art her genitals with a crucifix, Chris thinks it's time for desperate measures. She's already been to the priciest doctors she can find and they're all drawing blanks. One of them suggests Christian exorcism as a kind of autosuggestive cure and, against the wall, she relents. She meets with a priest whose relationship with his own faith is draining from him but whose professionalism as a psychiatrist draws him into the case. He meets Regan, expecting a mixed up kid but finding a real demon. His universe is shaking for change.

William Friedkin's compressed epic of faith began with the kind of tension that could make or break the project: an atheist director adapting the source novel of a committed Christian. What worked in its favour was that Friedkin approached it the same way he'd done with the previous film The French Connection, blur the line between fiction cinema and documentary practice and see what happens. He was working from a novel by a razor sharp wit who had a artisanal way with dialogue. Between them, the creative tension birthed one of the most durable horror films in cinema history. That durability is as much due to what it doesn't do as to what it added. Until the climactic scenes of spiritual melee, the film is of generic bombast. This was the era of AIP and Hammer and, while they did fine work stretching genre, they came within not a cooee of The Exorcist's power which dared to frighten by appearing to report rather than offering a ride on a ghost train.

The prologue scene in Iraq establishes this. Father Merrin's discovery of the demonic carving is played with what feels like a lifetime of gravity but only the subtlest of emotive signalling. Instead of a big BAM BAM BAM moment, we get the clinks and clanks of the hammering workers, the silence of a museum and then the understated violence of his confrontation with the demonic statue. We don't have the details but we do have the mood. When we crossfade to Georgetown, USA and the house which will host the majority of the action, we start to feel on edge without any generic statement. Chris McNeil lies on her bed and goes through the next day's script when she hears a noise in the attic. She gets up and checks on her daughter who is sleeping but with blankets cast aside and the open window letting in a gale of icy autumn air. Something is wrong but everything looks normal. When things turn extraordinarily wrong, they still walk and talk around this normal house.

Over at the church, young and hunky Fr Damien Karras doesn't feel anything as he adminsters the eucharist and it troubles him. He visits his ailing, fragile mother in New York and it's a dark and poky apartment in a rough neighbourhood. Her fate, confused and pained in a public mental hospital, drags her son into subterranean guilt for not being there. Desecrations to the figures at his own church draw the attention of Detective Kinderman to Karras' twin expertise of psychiatry and Jesuit membership (their dialogue is muscular and earthily funny). When Chris meets him the scene, with the progressed narrative now turned frightening, is a grab at warmth in a frozen environment. 

These are not the usual terms to speak of horror movies. This film just doesn't play like anything before it made to scare its audiences, yet its sense of dread and the frankness of its depictions of the weird haunt us as we watch with a sense of failing control over what we are watching. There had been some notable left turns in the genre just prior to this film's production. Night of the Living Dead gave us a doom that had no conceptual handholds. Rosemary's Baby gave us an experience of paranoia that could bring us to screaming point. Neither of those are like the Exorcist, though, in that an insistence on the process of things not immediately related to the source of the horror. Regan's hospital examination is a blow by blow squirmfest. We probably don't need it for the story but to live through the child's ugly medical experience invests us more than the finest jumpscare could. And it's playing by your own rules that, if it works, gets you slap bang in the middle of influential icon territory. That's what happened here.

Add astute casting, mixing real priests in with fresh faces, career-making chances on lesser known actors and so on seal the deal. Max von Sydow, all of forty four when he made this, is so convincing as an eighty year old man (walking with the cautious step of one who knows how brittle his bones are) that I thought he was that old when I first saw the film (and then there's the makeup). Ellen Burstyn shot from a respectable lower tier career to front and centre of the younger character actors of the time with a performance of near unbearable stress retention. Jason Miller as Karras adds a day-to-day intensity to his own burdened world. Linda Blair only needs to convince us that she's a bright twelve year old girl but gives us more of the scarifying side of her possession than she usually gets credit for (there is a lot of audio and vision mixing which led to doubts about how complete her performance was). And so on. There's not a false note between them. By the final moments of turbulent action we are left wrenched by genuine catharsis.

So much has been written about this film's technical achievements that I'll keep that to a recommendation for reader's to follow up for themselves. The history of its production and reception are fascinating.

My own story begins in the early seventies when this film was notorious, wracked (and frankly supported) by rumours of genuine supernatural forces at play in its very celluloid. I'd heard so many of these that my impression was of a film made of shocking scenes, plotless and sensational. The only people I knew who had actually seen it were my parents whose discussion of it, measured and careful in front of me, yet vibed up as quietly terrifying. 

Finally, when I was old enough to see it legally, I watched the modified version on tv, cut to shreds with bowdlerised dialogue and not much more than an impression of why it deserved its reputation. But it was intriguing. This was as an undergraduate and at the dawn of home video. When I went back home for Christmas holidays it was the first thing I rented. That was when I understood the complex shifting of protagonists and how the alternations of perspective created the film's constant momentum. It was a wonder. This is at a time when I, and every other film student of my age, was ploughing through the new Hollywood of the '70s with its wealth of  cinematic challenges. 

The Exorcist reigned among them because it felt complete in ways that the others didn't quite. Part of the completion was this: as a lifelong atheist, I had no trouble folding myself into Karras' crisis of faith or his action at the climax. My understanding of the motivation for that action contained no need for it to be spiritual (whatever that means) but I had no trouble with anyone of credulous religious affliation who might take it more literally. You could watch it as Blatty the Christian writer or Friedkin the atheist director and the film would be unchanged.

I saw this at a cinema in Melbourne last night. It was (thankfully) the original 1973 cut so unhampered by pointless dragging extra scenes and embarrassing superimpositions of scary demon faces in shadows or cooker hoods. It was preceded by a wide ranging presentation on what had preceded the film, its aesthetics, casting, writing and so on. This caused stirs around me in the auditorium with one old goose behind me murmuring as though he were in his loungeroom waiting for the commercials to finish. 

There were other bursts of this kind during the screening, some clearly signalling aloofness or superiority to the film (then why buy tickets to it?) and others so baffling they felt pathological (the guy beside me who snorted at a scene change to Jason Miller jogging was a worry). But though this persisted through most of the scenes (except the hospital and finale, of course) the greater audience's refusal to indulge it was a great refreshment. This bullshit phenomenon seemed ot peak in the mid 2010s at similar retrospective screenings of classics, following a meme that offered licence to meet anything out of sorts with contemporary filmmaking or manners with ridicule. The laughter always sounded forced, a bird call of attempted sophistication (as though such casual snobbery was anything but oafish philistinism). Last night, though, the chortlers were contained to their small islands of influence and were never allowed to dominate. I fancy it was the younger members of the crowd who led the silent pushback (there was, in a show of hands, a surprising number of first timers there and they all looked under thirty). Just as the line accompanying this film has often had it, there is hope to be had.

Review: YOU'LL NEVER FIND ME

A remote flat roofed house in a thunderstorm. The man inside toys with a glass of whisky. A knock at the door. He's hostile, telling whoever it is to fuck off. The knocking persists and he cautiously opens the door. A young woman is outside, asking if he'll give her a lift or let her use his phone. Begrudgingly, he lets her in. He tells her he doesn't have a phone and his car is playing up so she's out of luck there but he does giver her a pocketful of coins for the payphone at the edge of the gated community. The phone is a hike away. Or she can have the couch. There is a slowly mounting sense of dread in the air. As the trust-establishing dialogue progresses and curiosity-stirring movements ensue we are taken on a strange trip between these two and what this encounter might turn out to mean.

This is a two hander. The third narrative force is the punishing weather which rages throughout the running time, turning down or up according to the action. The shooting style is a series of variations on shot reverse shot, kept mostly loose to avoid gimmickry, and we get the feeling that what begins as a kind of stiff dialogue transforms into more of an interview or even interrogation. If it is the latter (and it can feel like it) it stays shy of hard definition; there are no accusations or questions too leading but the persistent information-gathering nature of the back and forth is constant. The fourth narrative force is the  crafting of the dialogue itself which goes from alienatingly awkward to fluid and engaging, icy to burning.

Both Brendan Rock and Jordan Cowan have to hold this difficult gig aloft for a hair over ninety minutes and this is where flaws appear. This is less to do with their skills at emoting or emotional inertia than the scheme their performances must progress. The second act feels overlong, dawdling while the audience is busy guessing the end, which detracts from the explosive climax just enough to diminish its power from surprise. Nevertheless, if a film like this with its difficult brief commits only the sin of a draggy middle act, it's not doing so badly.

You'll Never Find Me is in a kind of limbo. It's the short film you feel needed to be longer to realise its potential. It's the feature that needs to be a little trimmer. However, its cinematic hand prevents it from feeling stagey and use of highly evocative exteriors and a developing motif from a different setting (which does let us know probably more than we should) build its world which might well not be the one we were introduced to. One of its strengths is a refusal to blatantly explain this and it ends on a note, in the dark, as its audience is, showing only what happened. That, finally, is what gives it its lift.

Viewing notes: I saw this as part of MIFF and ACMI's encore screenings (like last week's Monotlith. There was a brief introduction but Q and A with filmmakers afterwards which means no information on further distribution. As with Monolith, I would hope we see it in cinemas at some point and would happily see it on a streamer like Stan or Shudder.

Review: THE FORBIDDEN PLAY

Young Haruto tries growing a lizard from a jettisoned tail on his father's playful advice and it works. Naoto, his father, is improving the house he's just bound himself to by mortgage by making the garden workable for his wife Miyuki who smiles at the gesture before cuddling up to him and saying, "don't betray me again". That's because young up and coming documentarian Hiroko used to work in the same Tokyo salaryman pit where she was cornered by her horny boss but saved by Naoto who is considered unfaithful by Miyuki who shows that she can summon terrifying wraiths to torment anyone who troubles her. Then, there's an accident which claims Miyuki's life and leaves her son in a weird state. He pinches one of her corpse's fingertips to plant in the garden. Well, it worked for the lizard tail. All good? Great, strap in, there's more.

But that's all the plot you'll need for this review as it just keeps piling the supernatural tropes on until saturation if achieved somewhere in the second act. Is that so bad for a supernatural horror movie? Not at all, the reason we call them genre is that we expect things of them, sometimes to fine detail.The problem here, if there is one, is that this is not just the latest assembly line unit hammered out by the James Wan stable of ghost train boo-scares, it's the latest feature film from the man who can be said to have founded the still heavily influential J-Horror sub-genre. (I'm not getting into any bullshit discussions on the bounds of J-Horror as its prime examples from the late '90s to the early '00s are clearly identifiable and only slightly related to what came before and since. I hate the contention as much as the equal bullshit one of when punk rock started.) Hideo Nakata's Ringu is still the gold standard of J-Horror and here he is really just repeating something he's already done. If it was just this film, there wouldn't have been a J-Horror.

That's not to say it's bad. Yes, there are frequent overstated performances and we get information in dialogue that both we and the characters ought to know by then and the third act is a playing out rather than an explosive revelation, but, really, those are the kind of things that sell the tickets. I bought my own in absence of any fantasy that Nakata was going to pull another gamechanger from the ether, I knew what I was in for. Every box is ticked and then some (that wraith is scary) but ...

Well, put it this way: think of your favourite musical act. Now, imagine them taking a hard left, a massive and possibly suicidal swerve away from what you're used to. What do you think of them, now? Well, you've still got all the good stuff from before, so sit this one out and wait to see if they come to their senses for the next one. Apart from a tiny group in their fandom set, most will think this way. Lou Reed had one Metal Machine Music but then got back to songs and a refreshed career. In the '90s, Harry Connick Jr charmed millions with his retro crooner schtick but then killed all that off with one album of indigestible funk. Michael Buble started the same way but took baby steps and still keeps the wolves away. 

So, do we saddle Hideo Nakata with being the guy who made Ringu and started J-horror. Shouldn't we rejoice that he brings out cover versions of his own work which can never have the impact of the first few? Well, he tried. But he tried oddly. He made the sequel to the US travesty The Ring and it was bleh. He remade the Pang Brothers' masterful The Eye but, like The Ring 2, it just ended up as a conventional American horror. The later Chatroom was promising, abandoning the J-Horror tropes altogether and trying something out (it's worth a track-down, actually). So, he went west and swilled around with big American money with real effects budgets and guaranteed wider distribution; give the guy a break.

Well, I would except that the guy began with a lot. Just before Ringu came a taut erotic thriller Chaos which slashed at the time line as well as kept everyone guessing. Ringu started a seismic shift. And then, the effortlessly finer and deeper Dark Water. He wasn't just a good film tradie, he had vision and cinematic poetry. I don't begrudge anyone for chasing the good life even if it means letting their standards down, but it bothers me that when they try to spell the old magic they make flat cover versions of their own genius.

The Forbidden Play is a perfectly entertaining piece but there are things impossible to ignore about it that go beyond Nakata repeating himself that bother me. Adding a comedic element in the psychic character and his samurai-like sidekick is quite well managed but feels more like Takeshi Miike and his pragmatically bizarre genre-bending. But it's worse, while the movie looks all '90s and stuff it starts taking on the look and feel of those James Wan horrors I mentioned before. It's the sight of an iconoclast learning from the hack that gets to me. Well, I've still got all the old albums.

The Forbidden Play is currently screening as part of the Japanese Film Festival.