Friday, January 13, 2017

Monster Fest 2016.02: Autohead, A Dark Song, Beyond the Gates, Night gallery shorts, etc.

To what extent was I still on east-coast-of-North-America rather than east-coast-of-Australia time here? I zonked out for close to two complete features at the end of the day, to various levels of regret. Beyond the Gates at made enough of an impression of being a nifty horror movie that I would later rewatch it via VOD (maybe not the greatest idea), but I could not tell you anything about Dead Hands Dig Deep under the most effective combination of torture and hypnotherapy you can imagine. Kind of a shame, as the folks who came out for it really liked it - and it was a pretty impressive crowd for a documentary of an obscure American metal band in Australia. Then again, metal really travels sometimes; there’s a hard core that is fascinated by metal around the world. The filmmakers had some pretty crazy stories to tell, as well.

So did these guys:

Short filmmakers at Monster Fest

From left to right, you’ve got short film programmer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, “Secretions” director Goran Spoljaric, and “Tanglewood” director Jordan Prosser. Very friendly group of locals, and I regret that I don’t have a lot more to say about their individual films a month and a half later. Both were effusive about their casts and crews, with Prosser especially proud of the caliber of people that they got to go out in the woods to shoot.

Autohead

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #8 (Monster Fest 2016, DCP)

There are a few moments in documentary-style drama Autohead when somebody asks either the filmmakers or the subject just why they would be making a movie about this guy, and it would probably help matters a bit if they had some sort of ready answer. The most likely one is that they were looking for exactly the thing they got, a glimpse at something ugly and potentially dangerous, but there are only hints of that, although the "ugly and dangerous" part is well-done.

The subject of their documentary is Narayan, a Mumbai rickshaw cab driver who, in addition to the regular business of bringing random customers from point A to point B, has a regular enough customer in call girl Rupa to be referred to as her pimp, and a spots crush as well. He shares a single room with the less outgoing Mohan and two others who are currently visiting their home village. This is not exactly impressive to his visiting mother, and while he seems fairly relaxed in front of the cameras, that visit may have him a bit on edge.

The first scene of the film doesn't quite set the tone, but it points the audience in the general direction that things will go, with Rupa finding the idea of anyone doing a movie about Narayan bizarre - he's no Salman Khan, after all - and most of the gag at the moment being her half-flirting with the crew, implying that they would find he a much more interesting and glamorous subject. Her casually disdainful comments about Narayan quickly inform the portrait of the man, and it is a somewhat familiar one, the sort of guy who seldom refers to a woman as anything but "bitch" but takes her interest in him for granted. His problems aren't entirely with women; he often seems an indifferent cabbie who half-heartedly tries to run up his fares, but it's women that he most feels able to intimidate. He's hardly unique in this, as seemingly everyone in Mumbai tries to establish dominance in every confrontation, but he's the one who pushes it the farthest when he can and folds otherwise.

Full review on EFC.

"Max"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #8 (Monster Fest 2016, DCP)

"Max" is the sort of horror short where I'm not sure whether expanding it a bit would allow some sort of connecting mythology emerge or would just see filmmaker Ryan Paturzo-Polson glue more bits on, all of which could certainly be a part of its premise even if none seem absolutely essential. It's one of those things where there's no reason why the creepy shadow can't become a boy's imaginary friend and can't then see his pregnant mother as a target, but building a situation that can happen that way is easy - one makes one's own rules when telling supernatural stories, after all - one that feels like it must happen that way is a trickier thing.

This one does, at least, have a nice performance by Lee McClenaghan as the quite reasonably alarmed mother; it's not necessarily easy to build from being amiable (even if she is the serious one in the family) through increasing fright to the sort of panic that seems well-earned to the audience but excessive to her husband in just down minutes. She's the glue that holds a somewhat makeshift ghost story together when the rest is kind of random but decent pieces.

A Dark Song

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #8 (Monster Fest 2016, DCP)

Tales of the supernatural naturally tend to rely on a lot of hand-waving when it comes to details, both because their audiences often kind of want things to be able to come out of nowhere and because more detail will inevitably bump up against the audience's basic suspension of disbelief, because this stuff isn't real and each bit of explanation is a potential spot where the viewer no longer buys it. It's especially tricky when the movie needs an expert who can't really show his or her expertise beyond results, at least most of the time. That A Dark Song attempts to buck that trend, building a whole movie around the process and logic of working with the supernatural, would make it interesting even if it wasn't also a tense drama.

Sophia Howard (Catherine Walker) is not an expert on the supernatural herself, although she knows enough about what she plans to do to rent a house to certain specifications for a year in anticipation of the arrival of Joseph Solomon (Steve Oram), a modern-day Gnostic mystic who has, he says, attempted the rituals she is requesting three times, succeeding once. Her quest to once again hear her dead child's voice will not be easy - it will likely at least require six months of total commitment where neither can leave the house, with lessons on the Kabbalah and repeated rites filling their time. Not exactly an exciting sabbatical in concept, its very nature meaning that each is sharing space with a stubborn, demanding housemate, but Solomon warns of dire consequences of either crosses the salt line drawn around the building's perimeter.

Writer/director Liam Gavin needn't go into a whole lot of detail where all the magical details are concerned, although he peppers the film with enough that the audience will recognize the various fragments as things which have power - symbolic shapes, numbers which have meaning in their interactions, blood sacrifices, abstinence which turns one's focus inward. How accurately this reflects actual Gnosticism, I don't have the expertise to say, but even if it doesn't, there's something to be said for making it a sort of folklore stew, not aligned with any specific religious tradition, because for the purposes of this movie, magic has to be hard, something that requires extensive study and concentration, rather than working as a short cut. To go through with this requires a sort of mania, not a moment of transcendent emotion.

Full review on EFC.

"The Home"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #1 (Monster Fest 2016: Night Gallery Shorts, digital)

Apparently "The Home" is going to be expanded to feature length, and that sounds like pretty good news. At about eight minutes long, with some time taken to establish the setting, it seems like it has barely started to get going before its heroines have been overwhelmed. There is an awfully good supernatural siege movie to be made when you combine the snowy isolation of an Irish Catholic home for unwed pregnant women, the vulnerability and highly-motivated nature of the potential victims, some monsters who might look even better with a bigger visual effects budget, and a nice cast.

Indeed, it's the time for smaller moments that impresses me the most - there is not really a lot of time to get to know the cast of characters, and on a certain level not a lot of point, as some aren't going to be around very long at all, but there's a lived-in reality to the setting and a careful consideration of how arbitrary the disruption is that makes the whole thing work. That brevity isn't ideal, and not just because director L. Gustavo Cooper handles things well enough that I want to see more - things do feel rushed. But there's something impressively solid here, and I really do hope to see it built out.

"Det Sjunkne Kloster " ("The Sunken Convent")

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #1 (Monster Fest 2016: Night Gallery Shorts, digital)

Well, that was nasty.

It's interesting to see "The Sunken Convent" right after "The Home", because while the former seemed to use its eye for detail to build connections and draw the audience in, this one attempts to use detail to isolate and unnerve, focusing on a man (Claus Flygare) with peculiar and grotesque habits, mostly eschewing dialogue to highlight how unconnected he is. It's not quite so effective; while it certainly gets a reaction from even those not inclined to be squeamish, the details tend to be little more than side ornamentation for the story, which peters out a bit after one final bid on filmmaker Michael Panduro's part to be transgressive, with the act of transgression seeming like the point rather than a tool to push into challenging territory.

Sure, that final bit is some memorable nastiness, but it's just one more ugly thing in a line of them, rather than the awful culmination of what's come before.

"The Puppet Man"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #1 (Monster Fest 2016: Night Gallery Shorts, digital)

John Carpenter's late-career transformation into a touring musician, digging out the "Lost Themes" for movies he hasn't been able to make (he has only directed two featues in the twenty-first century), will likely seem peculiar to me no matter how many horror fans I know treating him like a rock star; it seems like a weird consolation prize, even as more folks are doing blatantly Carpenter-inspired material. I doubt these two trends can cross-pollinate more completely than here, where writer/director Jacqueline Castel goes for a Carpenter-style film using those Carpenter tracks as her score and with the man actually doing a cameo.

It's some pretty basic slasher stuff, with a group of college kids choosing the wrong bar to stop in - as in, the one with a freaky spree-killer in the back room. I have to admit, Johnny Scuotto's Puppet Man didn't really work the gimmick that well for me, but he's certainly an energetic slasher, with Bradley Bailey making a good front man, and while he and the ill-fated quartet of potential victims are occasionally kind of rough performance-wise, there's a genuine grindhouse nastiness to the movie that extends beyond the faux-grain and pastiche elements.

"Inferno"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #1 (Monster Fest 2016: Night Gallery Shorts, digital)

I'm not sure if it's fair to talk about a twist in "Inferno" as being obvious or predictable, although I sometimes feel like I should talk to a filmmaker friend or two about how much they consider the fact that these short films will likely be shown at genre film festivals or as part of horror blocks, and whether that challenges them to build things in such a way that audiences have to attack it with the understanding of how these things usually go firmly in mind. As soon as characters start using the same vague phrasing again and again, the "twist" becomes clear.

So writer/director Dionne Copland kind of has to play things in such a way that convinces us that it maybe won't go in the typical horror-short direction. A good chunk of that comes from having a very likable pair of leads: Lee Booker is charming as heck as Bambi, the girl working her first night at the strip club, not so naive as this character is usually played, with Dallas Petersen doing the same as Jason, the youngest of a group of fraternity brothers. Copland does a neat job, mostly following Bambi and the girls and having Jason and his group intersect with them at various points. As much as one knows where this is going to go, the easy appeal of these two makes it seem less inevitable.

Of course, Copland does wind up in the general direction expected, which isn't exactly disappointing, but maybe not quite as fun as it seemed like it could have gone. At times, it almost seems like Booker and Petersen made placeholders more entertaining than they were in the script, to the point where just hitting the expected beats isn't quite enough.

"Secretions"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #1 (Monster Fest 2016: Night Gallery Shorts, digital)

Wouldn't be a horror film festival if there wasn't something that basically makes me think "well, that was gross", would it. And "Secretions" is pretty gross.

It is, at least, not just gross; writer/director Goran Spoljaric lays out a simple, grim story and grinds through it fairly efficiently, with the imprisoned woman whose secretions are being harvested having a chance at revenge and taking it in mostly-satisfying fashion. It’s the kind of short that, at 13 minutes, probably has a little more time for things other than cruelty being met with cruelty than it uses, but taking that tack doesn’t hurt it much.

"Eveless"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #1 (Monster Fest 2016: Night Gallery Shorts, digital)

“Eveless”, meanwhile, is the kind of gross-out short I most enjoy seeing in this sort of block. Built around one guy who probably didn’t graduate an accredited medical school (Vin Kridakorn) doing a Caesarian Section on someone just as male (Greg Engbrecht), it sketches out an outlandish premise, serves up a fair amount of stuff that’s not for the squeamish, and has a sense of its own absurdity. Co-writer/director Antonio Padovan doesn’t make it particularly silly - there’s tension and danger to what’s going on - but he and co-writer Dolores Diaz and company don’t try to bludgeon the audience with what serious business this is, which is something very welcome in the middle of a block.

"The Man Who Caught a Mermaid"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #1 (Monster Fest 2016: Night Gallery Shorts, digital)

And lo, this short and I have circumnavigated the globe over the course of 2016, as I first saw it back in February at the Boston Sci-Fi Festival, despite it actually being made by Melburnians from Swinburne University, which was promoed before every movie at MonsterFest. Crazy that this, then, winds up being its Aussie premiere!

It’s still solidly in the “pretty decent” category, with a couple different directions it can go despite the horror block often making what’s going on a foregone conclusion. There’s plenty of lesser shorts to see twice in a year.

"The Past Inside the Present"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #8 (Monster Fest 2016, digital)

As pairings with Beyond the Gates go, you don’t get much better than “The Past Inside the Present”, a nifty animated short presented by Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix. It starts from grainy black-and-white footage of Betamax tapes, but then eventually has the camera zoom inside for a visit to a wonderfully trippy universe.

As someone who is no fan of nostalgia for moribund formats despite having a closet full of them - I’m generally okay right up until the point where it’s suggested that there is some sort of surperior magic to the thing that is less capable - I really like filmmaker James Siewert’s approach here. The grainy style evokes videotape in general, though the bits of impressive clarity suggest Beta in particular (the format was good enough to hang around in pro circles for some time), but diving inside presents a different landscape of imagination and possibility. It’s great fun to look at without being unrealistic about limitations or overly maudlin about how the world has moved on.

Which, admittedly, doesn’t quite describe the actual plot - lovers retreating into recorded memories rather than living in the present - quite so well, but that’s okay. It’s more a melancholy film than an angry or desperate one, and as such it makes sense for the audience to feel the pull of the past compared to the troubles of the present, or at least have that be what sticks with them.

Beyond the Gates

* * (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #8 (Monster Fest 2016, DCP)
Seen 5 January 2017 in Jay’s Latest Living Room (Monster Fest 2016 revisit, Amazon streaming)

Movies like Beyond the Gates are what happens when the enthusiasm many fans have for horror movies run hard into how difficult making an actual quality picture can be. Filmmaker Jackson Stewart has a better idea of where to start than most people building high-concept, low-budget gorefests do, but the sheer number of details that require money, some particular type of talent, and time overwhelms him and his crew to the point where a good start becomes a disappointing finish.

For instance, it’s a fine idea to play upon nostalgia that is both broadly understood and quirkily specific: Everybody of a certain age has fond memories of video rental shops, for instance, even if the one that brothers Gordon (Graham Skipper) and John (Chase Williamson) are packing up only stayed open nearly twenty-five years out of their father’s stubbornness. WIth him having vanished off the face of the Earth months ago, there’s nobody to keep it going. There’s a bit of truth in that idea - that this sort of place persists in a changing world on the back of dedicated eccentrics and will vanish once they do - that isn’t necessarily a main theme of the movie, but it’s a real thing that the audience will feel and empathize with. Fewer people particularly recall VHS board games, which involved snippets of video being used as part of play, but they wind up being just the right level of obscure, something all involved can recall vaguely, but which may require a bit of explanation, and also works as a thing that might have consumed the father, as strange hobbies do.

The main cast isn’t bad, either. Graham Skipper and Chase Williamson play the sort of separated siblings that many wouldn’t necessarily peg as related, not just in appearance but demeanor, with Skipper especially occasionally showing that awkward attitude where he wants to try to be closer but finds that the expectations of familial closeness leave him not quite sure what to do. It’s a nice contrast with Williamson’s John, whose relative comfort in his environment leaves him able to snap a bit more. Skipper also handles Gordon’s fear of his family’s self-destructive tendencies nicely, while, Brea Grant livens things up as the character’s girlfriend Margot. She often gets charged with pulling things forward with enthusiasm, and it’s a shame Steward and co-writer Stephen Scarlata don’t always have a great way to inject her into what is basically a brother movie. Barbara Crampton pops up as the “gamemaster” giving instruction on the tape, bringing a little unexpected tartness to various points.

Full review on EFC.

"What Happened to Her"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2016 in Lido Cinemas #8 (Monster Fest 2016, digital)

There are a lot of weird jobs in show business, and “What Happened to Her” looks at one of the more peculiar: Playing dead bodies. It’s somewhere between acting and modeling, requiring the performer to be treated like a prop and then further dehumanized as the rest of the cast talks about “her” as a thing in take after take. And, even compared to other jobs, nudity is often going to be required, often sprung on the actress at the last second.

It’s unnerving, although the narration from Danyi Deats (who has taken this job a number of times) tends to forcus more on things of a professional nature rather than an emotional one, talking about how the conditions stink and directors are demanding. At least, that’s what her words say; her voice gives an indication of how dehumanizing the whole thing can feel. Director Kristy Guevera-Flanagan lets her talk and shapes the monologue into something informative and intriguing, complementing it with archive footage of bodies being found in various episodes of Law & Order and other procedurals. It’s interesting that she chooses those scenes, by and large, rather than mixing them up with autopsies and the like: It’s arguably when the characters stop existing as people and become objects to the world at large, as opposed to just the murderer, but these are also scenes that generally take place in the first five minutes of the show and give a reason for the rest of it to happen - in short, though it’s a thankless job, it’s also one that the rest of the action can’t start without.

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