You can't have a festival of this type without something from Takashi Miike. Actually, you should generally be able to scare up two or three films by Miike, the man is so prolific. I still haven't watched my DVD of The Great Yokai War yet, so this was my first exposure to "Takashi Miike, family filmmaker", and I liked what I saw. I kind of wish the Festival had scheduled it for an earlier hour and advertised it to families a bit - I would have loved to see how genuine kids reacted to it.
For those unfamiliar with Takashi Miike, him directing a family comedy is roughly equivalent to executives at Warner Brothers getting together and saying "you know who would be a great director for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? David Cronenberg!"
Although, now that I think about it - that needs to happen anyway.
Zebraman
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
Zebraman actually came out before The Great Yokai War in Japan, although the latter made it to America first. So let the record show that Takashi Miike did have some practice making family films before that better-known one. Though more modestly budgeted, Zebraman is still a bunch of fun, with an injection of crazy that would delight kids it their parents would let them anywhere near it.
Sho Aikawa stars as Shin'ichi Ichikawa, the second-grade supervisor at a medium-sized elementary school. No-one at the school respects him, to the point where the kids are beating up his son. His teenage daughter Midori (Yui Ichikawa) is seeing a much older man. It would probably only be worse if they knew he spent his evenings cosplaying in a papier-mache costume based upon the hero of his favorite 1970s superhero show, Zebraman (which, as if to illustrate how pathetic Shin'ichi is, was canceled after a handful of episodes. The sad thing is, the city is actually in need of a superhero. Midori's boyfriend has a second life as crab-masked villain, and there are enough slimy green aliens lurking underneath the school's gymnasium that the government has dispatched a team to investigate.
The line between playing a superhero story straight and doing parody is hard to find in the best of cases; Miike and writer Kankuro Kudo spend most of their time on the spoofy side, but play it straight enough to earn a bit of suspense. Their pastiche of 1970s sentai programs seems pretty close to spot-on, both in clips and a dream sequence where Shin'ichi fantasizes about the mother of one of his students as "Zebranurse". Affection can come across as disdain when filmmakers try to precisely replicate something that might not hold up to a more critical eye, but they generally find the right mix. The trick, apparently, is that it's okay to initially mock Shin'ichi for dressing up in a stupid costume by having him get his butt kicked early, but the somewhat corny good-intentioned messages of the genre are to be embraced rather than mocked.
Because Miike's name is attached to the movie, I don't know how many kids this winds up playing to outside Japan - the folks who would pick up a foreign family adventure know his reputation. Of course, I don't know who its target audience was over there, or whether it was aimed for the teen and older crowd. If it were remade in the US, Crab-man probably wouldn't be seducing sixteen-year-old girls, and I really doubt that the fungus that has Koen Kondo's military investigator scratching his junk would still be around; they might also tone down the violence with the possessed kids. A lot of the other kid-friendly stuff is done without the slightest hint of irony, though. Kids love green slime, and the CGI for the aliens is almost cute. The hero and the kids who love him are perfectly pure of heart. Some of the details are wonderfully silly, like Shin'ichi's "bedhead" (his hair grows into a zebra's mane when his zebra-sense detects that it's time to save the day!). And the final big action scene is just gloriously over the top.
Sho Aikawa is a lot of fun as the Shin'ichi. He embraces the dorkiness of the character in all its forms - the teacher no-one respects, the loser in a homemade costume, the guy who discovers it's all real but ridiculous. Koen Kondo is similarly fun as the man investigating the apparent alien activity, since he always seems to expect that job would be a little cooler and high-budget, and alternates between trying to elevate it, being disappointed, and finally just giving in to the fact that he's in a low-budget-sci-fi world (but without winking at the audience).
It's great fun, even if the goofiness has a bit more in the way of claws than its American equivalents. Still, it's not too nasty for anyone old enough to read the subtitles, and grown-ups shouldn't find it too terribly juvenile, either.
Also at HBS.
Showing posts with label Boston Fantastic Film Festival 2007. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boston Fantastic Film Festival 2007. Show all posts
Friday, November 02, 2007
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Boston Fantastic Film Festival: Cherry Valley
Ugh. I hate punting festival films, but I just could not come up with a thing to say about The District!. I think I drifted off once during it - it was the middle of a four-movie day after staying up late to watch a ballgame on delay the night before. It was also one of those deals where the comedy was coming from such an unfamiliar place as to just not register with me.
Still, The District! was far from bad; it just kind of got blotted out by being between Exiled and Cherry Valley (and Zebraman). Cherry Valley is one I think is going to fall through the cracks unfairly; it's something that seems like it would have mainstream appeal, but it's tough to imagine studios taking a chance on it. Maybe the Sci-Fi channel would pick it up. I think it would be neat to see how well it fit into the After Dark Horrorfest; that's the sort of event where a larger audience may give it a chance.
Cherry Valley
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
Cherry Valley is undeniably amateur hour, which is part of its appeal. Even if it had the intention of being anything other than sincere, the budget isn't there for much in the way of fakery. That lack of pretense won't necessarily convince anyone that the houses of Cherry Valley, New York is actually haunted, but it might just do a better job of sending a thrill up the spine than its fictional counterparts.
The movie starts with a supposedly haunted house owned by Jeremiah Newton; three of his students at NYU (including director Patrick Steward) go up there to check it out - setting up cameras, tape recorders for EVP, all that good stuff. They may detect something - after all, staying overnight in an unfamiliar house after a long drive and being primed with stories will certainly put you in a receptive mood - and do some follow-up with people in the town. What they find out is that while not many locals have heard of a ghost in Jeremiah's house, many have stories about their own house, of that of their neighbors. Further research leads Steward & company to learn about an eighteenth-century massacre, and a group of "devil worshipers" who used a place on the outskirts of town in the 1970s.
It's probably not too much of a spoiler to say that the filmmakers don't capture indisputable proof of the supernatural on-screen, but even skeptics might find themselves suitably impressed by the sheer volume of stories they dig up. The stories told on screen come from a variety of people, from teens to seniors, men and women, small-towners and college-educated outsiders, so there's not enough of a common thread that a significant chunk can be dismissed all at once. They are much more believable than the expert on the paranormal interviewed, who clai that the existence of ghosts doesn't contradict Einstein. I question the messenger, at least, as I strongly suspect that someone who understands special relativity might not suggest that you can only see ghosts under light that is not electromagnetic in nature (despite electromagnetism being light is).
Like most documentaries, Cherry Valley comes together in the editing room. It's one of the best-cut movies I've seen in a while; no interview segment seems to go on too long, and the jumps between them are smooth. The "haunted house" bits last just long enough for the audience to be right with the guys on screen in terms of freaking out without sucking the sense of danger out.
Where there's no good footage, Steward makes do with some simple, but generally effective, animation. It's something he maybe goes to a little too much toward the end, especially since the leans on the music more in those scenes. It works some at the moment, but a couple minutes later you recognize that the filmmakers have just pushed a button, rather than letting the audience scare themselves by just taking what's on-screen seriously. And as creepy as the scenes in the abandoned houses are, there are some moments that just play as goofy, like when they're on the trail to one of the houses and one guy's allergy to ragweed is revealed as if they'd just seen a real ghost.
As silly as that moment is, it's also charming, showing the would-be paranormal investigators as regular folks. It's not a perfect movie, but I'd like to see a distributor take a chance on it; it would make for a fun Halloween release and better schedule-filler than a lot of fictional ghost stories.
Also at HBS.
Still, The District! was far from bad; it just kind of got blotted out by being between Exiled and Cherry Valley (and Zebraman). Cherry Valley is one I think is going to fall through the cracks unfairly; it's something that seems like it would have mainstream appeal, but it's tough to imagine studios taking a chance on it. Maybe the Sci-Fi channel would pick it up. I think it would be neat to see how well it fit into the After Dark Horrorfest; that's the sort of event where a larger audience may give it a chance.
Cherry Valley
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
Cherry Valley is undeniably amateur hour, which is part of its appeal. Even if it had the intention of being anything other than sincere, the budget isn't there for much in the way of fakery. That lack of pretense won't necessarily convince anyone that the houses of Cherry Valley, New York is actually haunted, but it might just do a better job of sending a thrill up the spine than its fictional counterparts.
The movie starts with a supposedly haunted house owned by Jeremiah Newton; three of his students at NYU (including director Patrick Steward) go up there to check it out - setting up cameras, tape recorders for EVP, all that good stuff. They may detect something - after all, staying overnight in an unfamiliar house after a long drive and being primed with stories will certainly put you in a receptive mood - and do some follow-up with people in the town. What they find out is that while not many locals have heard of a ghost in Jeremiah's house, many have stories about their own house, of that of their neighbors. Further research leads Steward & company to learn about an eighteenth-century massacre, and a group of "devil worshipers" who used a place on the outskirts of town in the 1970s.
It's probably not too much of a spoiler to say that the filmmakers don't capture indisputable proof of the supernatural on-screen, but even skeptics might find themselves suitably impressed by the sheer volume of stories they dig up. The stories told on screen come from a variety of people, from teens to seniors, men and women, small-towners and college-educated outsiders, so there's not enough of a common thread that a significant chunk can be dismissed all at once. They are much more believable than the expert on the paranormal interviewed, who clai that the existence of ghosts doesn't contradict Einstein. I question the messenger, at least, as I strongly suspect that someone who understands special relativity might not suggest that you can only see ghosts under light that is not electromagnetic in nature (despite electromagnetism being light is).
Like most documentaries, Cherry Valley comes together in the editing room. It's one of the best-cut movies I've seen in a while; no interview segment seems to go on too long, and the jumps between them are smooth. The "haunted house" bits last just long enough for the audience to be right with the guys on screen in terms of freaking out without sucking the sense of danger out.
Where there's no good footage, Steward makes do with some simple, but generally effective, animation. It's something he maybe goes to a little too much toward the end, especially since the leans on the music more in those scenes. It works some at the moment, but a couple minutes later you recognize that the filmmakers have just pushed a button, rather than letting the audience scare themselves by just taking what's on-screen seriously. And as creepy as the scenes in the abandoned houses are, there are some moments that just play as goofy, like when they're on the trail to one of the houses and one guy's allergy to ragweed is revealed as if they'd just seen a real ghost.
As silly as that moment is, it's also charming, showing the would-be paranormal investigators as regular folks. It's not a perfect movie, but I'd like to see a distributor take a chance on it; it would make for a fun Halloween release and better schedule-filler than a lot of fictional ghost stories.
Also at HBS.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Boston Fantastic Film Festival: Exiled
Exiled was easily the best of the festival, even with The Signal playing. I was glad to see it used as the week's Eye Opener because of the Sox game on Monday - I'd be able to watch the end of the game off the DVR after The Vampire Lovers without staying up until 3am - but also because... Well, one of the reasons I like the Eye Opener is because it makes me watch movies I would probably not go out of my way to see and maybe learn something, but once in a while, it's nice to be the guy who can name a couple of Johnnie To movies, compare his style to John Woo's, and generally enjoy a well-choreographed gunfight while the people who love the Canadian independent films are in unfamiliar territory.
And, as much as there was a lot of talk about it being a male-bonding story and what it said about how this kind of man in this sort of hierarchical organization has a hard time making decisions for himself and the way China insists movies which show police corruption be set before the HK/Macao handover... They are really good gunfights. Action scenes in a lot of American movies can be so bad that many people might not realize how good what To does is, but compare what To does here with, say, Paul Greengrass in The Bourne Ultimatum or Michael Bay in Transformers; where To gives us a genuine thrill from showing what's going on, the guys doing the big American action films seem to be trying to hide that they're not as good at their jobs as To.
Anyway, Exiled opens next week (2 November 2008) at the Brattle and runs for a week. There's a good chance it's the best action
Exiled (Fong Juk)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye Opener / Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
Johnnie To is one of Hong Kong's busiest directors; by the time you've finished one of his movies, it seems like he's already got another one out. They're generally pretty good, too, but Exiled is something special. It's one of the really great action flicks, the type that others all too often don't even aspire to be.
It starts with two pairs of men visiting an apartment in Macau, just before the handover to China. Blaze (Anthony Wong) and his partner Fat (Suet Lam), then Tai (Francis Ng) and his partner Cat (Roy Cheung) both ask for Wo; the woman who answer says she's never heard of him. They wait. Blaze has been sent to kill Wo; Tai has come to protect him. When Wo (Nick Cheung) does arrive, there's the expected shootout; what's maybe unexpected is that afterward, they put down their guns, help Wo and his wife Jin (Josie Ho) move in, and share a meal. Then they hash out a plan - they'll go to Jeff (Cheung Siu-fai), find one last job for Wo to do, and see that his family gets the money. Of course, "one last job" is movie talk for "things go terribly wrong".
Johnnie To has been making Hong Kong action movies for a long time, and was one of the biggest names to stay stay there when the likes of John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Corey Yuen opted to try their luck in Hollywood when the UK returned the territory to China. This film is a departure for him, not in terms of subject matter - he has made a ton of crime flicks - but style. To is one of those directors that generally doesn't call attention to himself with stylish flourishes but can certainly tell a story as well as anybody else. That invisibility goes out the window with Exiled, and not just because the gunfights have the the loving slow-motion shots and rain of shell casings one would expect from a John Woo movie. To is making something very close to a western here, and a spaghetti western at that. The world often seems empty aside from the bad men confronting each other, and setting the story in Macau rather than Hong Kong lets him take advantage of the Mediterranean architecture of the former Portuguese territory. To even permits himself to get meta for a second - in a moment when the band of outlaws is discussing an escape to Europe around a campfire, one pipes up that he "doesn't know English, but [he does] know Italian."
He's not just engaging in genre pastiche, either. Like To's other crime films that have made it over here, Exiled does a fine job of setting up its story and background quickly, emphasizing the humanity and relationships of its cast of gangster characters, without trying to get the audience to believe that these are admirable people or casting them as romantic outlaws - they're crooks, and though on one hand they're just guys with a nasty job, they also deserve what is coming to them (whether immediately like Wo or down the road). The action is top-notch, with at least four gunfights in the running for best of the year (and a fifth which isn't bad at all). Even if To had opted to shoot in his usual understated style, this would have been a top-tier action movie.
The closest thing to a misstep occurs somewhere around the middle; the aftermath of the second and third gunfights could very well mark the end of the movie, and for a while it's not obvious why the credits haven't rolled yet. What comes after solidifies the Western feel of the movie, as the survivors find themselves outside of the modern city - in the desert, even - with what had seemed like a throwaway comment earlier assuming more importance. Josie Ho's Jin also takes on a more prominent role. In some ways, it's this second half that makes Exiled especially interesting - there have been plenty of stories told about two teams with opposing goals but little personal animosity, but seldom do they spend as much time on the effects of the sacrifices generally reserved for the final act. The closeness of the handover is a constant undercurrent, and while it likely won't reverberate quite so directly for people outside Hong Kong and Macau, the uncertainty of what will change and what will stay the same with new people in charge will be familiar to many.
The film is well-acted, too. Though you might expect Nick Cheung to be the star as Wo, it's Anthony Wong who has the meatiest role. He, of course, has the biggest conflicting loyalties, ordered to kill a long-time friend, but rather than playing Blaze as obviously tortured, Wong makes him resigned: he's trying to be nice about it, and make it work out as well as it possibly can for everyone, but his boss just won't step aside and let things run smoothly. Nick Cheung is quite likable as Wo; he gives the impression of having known the score from the beginning. He gets us to believe that Wo has accepted the necessity of his own murder in order for his wife and newborn son to have a normal life, although he would still really like to live. Simon Yam has a delicious "guest star" role as the crime boss who wants Wo dead. Josie Ho makes Jin an intriguing character in her own right, while always seeming just nervous enough to remind us that these criminal types aren't normal, and that most people should be afraid of them. Everyone else fills their roles almost perfectly.
Johnnie To is one of the world's most reliable action storytellers, so Exiled being good is pretty much expected. This is a master at his peak, well worth a look even if your tastes don't normally lean toward the Asian action.
Also at HBS.
And, as much as there was a lot of talk about it being a male-bonding story and what it said about how this kind of man in this sort of hierarchical organization has a hard time making decisions for himself and the way China insists movies which show police corruption be set before the HK/Macao handover... They are really good gunfights. Action scenes in a lot of American movies can be so bad that many people might not realize how good what To does is, but compare what To does here with, say, Paul Greengrass in The Bourne Ultimatum or Michael Bay in Transformers; where To gives us a genuine thrill from showing what's going on, the guys doing the big American action films seem to be trying to hide that they're not as good at their jobs as To.
Anyway, Exiled opens next week (2 November 2008) at the Brattle and runs for a week. There's a good chance it's the best action
Exiled (Fong Juk)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye Opener / Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
Johnnie To is one of Hong Kong's busiest directors; by the time you've finished one of his movies, it seems like he's already got another one out. They're generally pretty good, too, but Exiled is something special. It's one of the really great action flicks, the type that others all too often don't even aspire to be.
It starts with two pairs of men visiting an apartment in Macau, just before the handover to China. Blaze (Anthony Wong) and his partner Fat (Suet Lam), then Tai (Francis Ng) and his partner Cat (Roy Cheung) both ask for Wo; the woman who answer says she's never heard of him. They wait. Blaze has been sent to kill Wo; Tai has come to protect him. When Wo (Nick Cheung) does arrive, there's the expected shootout; what's maybe unexpected is that afterward, they put down their guns, help Wo and his wife Jin (Josie Ho) move in, and share a meal. Then they hash out a plan - they'll go to Jeff (Cheung Siu-fai), find one last job for Wo to do, and see that his family gets the money. Of course, "one last job" is movie talk for "things go terribly wrong".
Johnnie To has been making Hong Kong action movies for a long time, and was one of the biggest names to stay stay there when the likes of John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Corey Yuen opted to try their luck in Hollywood when the UK returned the territory to China. This film is a departure for him, not in terms of subject matter - he has made a ton of crime flicks - but style. To is one of those directors that generally doesn't call attention to himself with stylish flourishes but can certainly tell a story as well as anybody else. That invisibility goes out the window with Exiled, and not just because the gunfights have the the loving slow-motion shots and rain of shell casings one would expect from a John Woo movie. To is making something very close to a western here, and a spaghetti western at that. The world often seems empty aside from the bad men confronting each other, and setting the story in Macau rather than Hong Kong lets him take advantage of the Mediterranean architecture of the former Portuguese territory. To even permits himself to get meta for a second - in a moment when the band of outlaws is discussing an escape to Europe around a campfire, one pipes up that he "doesn't know English, but [he does] know Italian."
He's not just engaging in genre pastiche, either. Like To's other crime films that have made it over here, Exiled does a fine job of setting up its story and background quickly, emphasizing the humanity and relationships of its cast of gangster characters, without trying to get the audience to believe that these are admirable people or casting them as romantic outlaws - they're crooks, and though on one hand they're just guys with a nasty job, they also deserve what is coming to them (whether immediately like Wo or down the road). The action is top-notch, with at least four gunfights in the running for best of the year (and a fifth which isn't bad at all). Even if To had opted to shoot in his usual understated style, this would have been a top-tier action movie.
The closest thing to a misstep occurs somewhere around the middle; the aftermath of the second and third gunfights could very well mark the end of the movie, and for a while it's not obvious why the credits haven't rolled yet. What comes after solidifies the Western feel of the movie, as the survivors find themselves outside of the modern city - in the desert, even - with what had seemed like a throwaway comment earlier assuming more importance. Josie Ho's Jin also takes on a more prominent role. In some ways, it's this second half that makes Exiled especially interesting - there have been plenty of stories told about two teams with opposing goals but little personal animosity, but seldom do they spend as much time on the effects of the sacrifices generally reserved for the final act. The closeness of the handover is a constant undercurrent, and while it likely won't reverberate quite so directly for people outside Hong Kong and Macau, the uncertainty of what will change and what will stay the same with new people in charge will be familiar to many.
The film is well-acted, too. Though you might expect Nick Cheung to be the star as Wo, it's Anthony Wong who has the meatiest role. He, of course, has the biggest conflicting loyalties, ordered to kill a long-time friend, but rather than playing Blaze as obviously tortured, Wong makes him resigned: he's trying to be nice about it, and make it work out as well as it possibly can for everyone, but his boss just won't step aside and let things run smoothly. Nick Cheung is quite likable as Wo; he gives the impression of having known the score from the beginning. He gets us to believe that Wo has accepted the necessity of his own murder in order for his wife and newborn son to have a normal life, although he would still really like to live. Simon Yam has a delicious "guest star" role as the crime boss who wants Wo dead. Josie Ho makes Jin an intriguing character in her own right, while always seeming just nervous enough to remind us that these criminal types aren't normal, and that most people should be afraid of them. Everyone else fills their roles almost perfectly.
Johnnie To is one of the world's most reliable action storytellers, so Exiled being good is pretty much expected. This is a master at his peak, well worth a look even if your tastes don't normally lean toward the Asian action.
Also at HBS.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Boston Fantastic Film Festival: Murder Party
Murder Party is another movie that played Fantasia after I'd returned to Cambridge, although I think it may actually have run the last Friday or Saturday I was in Montreal, too. At any rate, it wasn't one I was terribly broken up about missing at the time. Here, it sort of got swallowed by Game 2 of the ALCS, whose eleventh inning was a horror show of its own.
I hope that this isn't really typical of Fantasia's second half; I see from their website that they'll be running 3 July - 20 July in 2008. I don't much want to miss the Fourth in Boston, but the tail end of Fantasia often seems to include a lot of less-exciting things. But I guess I can worry about that next summer.
Murder Party
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
In comedy terms, what is an easier target than young artists who think they're more revolutionary and clever than they really are? Nothing's immediately leaping to mind, and, the jokes made about them tend to be funnier than the ones made about other easy targets. I'm not sure that's exactly what this movie needs, but it's amusing nonetheless.
We don't meet the art-school types right away; first up is Christopher Hawley (Chris Sharp) renting some crappy horror movies for Halloween. On the way home, he happens upon an invitation to a "murder party". He whips up a crappy cardboard costume and takes the train out to the edge of town. What he soon finds is that he has not been invited to a murder mystery, but an abandoned warehouse where five art students are competing for the approval for Alexander (Sydney Barnett), who has a $300,000 grant for the one with the best idea for making their guest's murder a work of art. Even before Alexander shows up with his drug dealer Zycho (Bill Tangradi), things begin to go wrong; a little truth serum and competition later, and things start to get really strange.
One thing that filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier doesn't do is make Christopher into a simple straight man. Sharp plays Christopher as oddly calm amid the chaos, and more a sad, lonely loser than a regular guy. He doesn't come across as clever enough to play his captors against each other, but he's alert enough to make a break for it when they start getting at each other's throats on their own. And as weird and amoral as his captors are, they're just as freaked out by Alexander and Zycho as Christopher is by them. It doesn't quite make them sympathetic, but it does set up the possibility of shifting alliances later on. It's a neat little set-up.
The execution could be a bit better. It doesn't particularly drag or come off as poorly done, but I kept expecting it to be a bit more... something. Maybe more funny, maybe more tense, maybe gorier. The movie just seems to be biding its time in the middle, separating the initial surprises from the action and splatter of the end. A few of the characters blur together, and the folks brought in toward the end to increase the body count make that much of an impression. There's plenty of black comedy, but it doesn't really go for the throat like it could.
Things to perk up when people start dying en masse. Christopher finally gets out of the chair he's chained to and does something, and the characters get to run around a little. The splatter effects are done pretty well, and the movie finally gets to be cruelly funny in a way it hadn't been since Christopher first arrived at the warehouse (the extension cord is the comedy gift that keeps on giving). This is probably what Saulnier and his Lab of Madness partners were looking to do, and they do seem to be having a good time as they finally get to cut loose.
A lot of movies in this genre are like that - fifteen minutes of bloody mayhem and an hour or so of story/padding to feature length. Murder Party is actually better at it than most - maybe not so well done as to win over people who aren't already fans of silly low-budget horror, but I can easily see it getting cheers from those who are.
Also at HBS.
I hope that this isn't really typical of Fantasia's second half; I see from their website that they'll be running 3 July - 20 July in 2008. I don't much want to miss the Fourth in Boston, but the tail end of Fantasia often seems to include a lot of less-exciting things. But I guess I can worry about that next summer.
Murder Party
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 13 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
In comedy terms, what is an easier target than young artists who think they're more revolutionary and clever than they really are? Nothing's immediately leaping to mind, and, the jokes made about them tend to be funnier than the ones made about other easy targets. I'm not sure that's exactly what this movie needs, but it's amusing nonetheless.
We don't meet the art-school types right away; first up is Christopher Hawley (Chris Sharp) renting some crappy horror movies for Halloween. On the way home, he happens upon an invitation to a "murder party". He whips up a crappy cardboard costume and takes the train out to the edge of town. What he soon finds is that he has not been invited to a murder mystery, but an abandoned warehouse where five art students are competing for the approval for Alexander (Sydney Barnett), who has a $300,000 grant for the one with the best idea for making their guest's murder a work of art. Even before Alexander shows up with his drug dealer Zycho (Bill Tangradi), things begin to go wrong; a little truth serum and competition later, and things start to get really strange.
One thing that filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier doesn't do is make Christopher into a simple straight man. Sharp plays Christopher as oddly calm amid the chaos, and more a sad, lonely loser than a regular guy. He doesn't come across as clever enough to play his captors against each other, but he's alert enough to make a break for it when they start getting at each other's throats on their own. And as weird and amoral as his captors are, they're just as freaked out by Alexander and Zycho as Christopher is by them. It doesn't quite make them sympathetic, but it does set up the possibility of shifting alliances later on. It's a neat little set-up.
The execution could be a bit better. It doesn't particularly drag or come off as poorly done, but I kept expecting it to be a bit more... something. Maybe more funny, maybe more tense, maybe gorier. The movie just seems to be biding its time in the middle, separating the initial surprises from the action and splatter of the end. A few of the characters blur together, and the folks brought in toward the end to increase the body count make that much of an impression. There's plenty of black comedy, but it doesn't really go for the throat like it could.
Things to perk up when people start dying en masse. Christopher finally gets out of the chair he's chained to and does something, and the characters get to run around a little. The splatter effects are done pretty well, and the movie finally gets to be cruelly funny in a way it hadn't been since Christopher first arrived at the warehouse (the extension cord is the comedy gift that keeps on giving). This is probably what Saulnier and his Lab of Madness partners were looking to do, and they do seem to be having a good time as they finally get to cut loose.
A lot of movies in this genre are like that - fifteen minutes of bloody mayhem and an hour or so of story/padding to feature length. Murder Party is actually better at it than most - maybe not so well done as to win over people who aren't already fans of silly low-budget horror, but I can easily see it getting cheers from those who are.
Also at HBS.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Boston Fantastic Film Festival: Mercy
Brattle Theater creative director Ned Hinkle chose Mercy for the Sunday Eye-Opener program that the Brattle and Chlotrudis Society co-present in part because he felt it was something of a failure, but that the way it failed and what it was striving for might make for interesting discussion. It's not a bad idea to occasionally screen what you know is a bad film in a series like that, although I think he might have been surprised by how much we as a group did not like it.
One thing that I found interesting, considering how part of Chlotrudis's charter is about watching films actively, is how much people seemed to have trouble articulating why they didn't like Mercy. A couple got in good lines about how little they liked the film, but specific details why were a little harder to come by.
Which is interesting, when you compare it to the popular perceptions of the art-film-loving crowd - that they/we enjoy tearing things down but never have anything good to say. This screening was just one example of how the opposite frequently seems to be true more often.
Mercy
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival / Sunday Eye-Opener)
When Martin Landau was promoting Ed Wood, he was asked a question about what it was like to do a movie about the worst director in history. He corrected the interviewer, saying that the worst thing a movie could be is boring, and Wood never made a boring movie. I haven't seen nearly enough of Mercy director Patrick Roddy's work to say whether or not it's typical, but he has certainly made at least one boring movie.
Gary Shannon plays the title character, John Mercy, out of prison on parole after twenty-five years and an apparently changed man. His parole officer (Charles McNeely III) doesn't really believe in John's reformation, and expects to see him back in jail soon. He's given a nondescript job and a nondescript hotel room, told that any screw-ups there or drug or alcohol use or missed appointments will send him back to jail. He meets Eve (Shelley Farrell), a nice-enough seeming girl, while having a club soda at the local bar, but initially keeps his distance. He doesn't really know what to make of the outside world.
Once the situation is set up, Roddy and company spend a good chunk of time demonstrating just how isolating and repetitive John's life is, and it's one of those situations where the filmmaker maybe does his job a little too well. There's a montage that seems to take forever of John sleeping in his spartan hotel room, going to work, operating a machine press, walking back through an alleyway filled with prostitutes and a street preacher, siting at the bar, and repeat, although it probably only takes ten minutes or so in reality. The audience gets the point, sure enough, but there's going to be a fair-sized chunk of that audience who wind up just checking out completely, even when things do start moving.
In fact, the first time John appeared on screen with his hand bandaged, I cursed myself for having apparently fallen asleep and missed the part of the movie where, finally, something happened. That was not the case, though - these are mysterious off-screen injuries. That's where the horror/suspense part of the movie comes in - is it Eve who injured him? The ghost, presumably of the girl whom he killed all those years ago, that he sometimes sees though no-one else does? Someone or something else? Trouble is, even if you're still interested, the movie doesn't really seem to be. There's never a very strong feeling of suspense or even mounting dread. Roddy does do a pretty good job going for the gross-out later, though.
To give Roddy his due, he's got some skills with the camera. He's going for a noir feel, and the crisp black-and-white photography is quite nice. He's also done a fine job with locations and production design to evoke the feel of the era. His artsier choices - dubbing animal noises over the poor/homeless people in the street, using almost no extras in other scenes - may work better for others than it did for me. Garry Shannon gives a pretty nice understated performance as John, although Shelley Farrell isn't so solid as Eve (as the screening's host mentioned in the discussion, it takes a better actress to play a bad actress well).
The idea is that Mercy is only superficially a thriller, though underneath it's a film about isolation and alienation. Unfortunately, the surface isn't very thrilling, and what's underneath isn't so clever as it tries to be.
One thing that I found interesting, considering how part of Chlotrudis's charter is about watching films actively, is how much people seemed to have trouble articulating why they didn't like Mercy. A couple got in good lines about how little they liked the film, but specific details why were a little harder to come by.
Which is interesting, when you compare it to the popular perceptions of the art-film-loving crowd - that they/we enjoy tearing things down but never have anything good to say. This screening was just one example of how the opposite frequently seems to be true more often.
Mercy
* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 7 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival / Sunday Eye-Opener)
When Martin Landau was promoting Ed Wood, he was asked a question about what it was like to do a movie about the worst director in history. He corrected the interviewer, saying that the worst thing a movie could be is boring, and Wood never made a boring movie. I haven't seen nearly enough of Mercy director Patrick Roddy's work to say whether or not it's typical, but he has certainly made at least one boring movie.
Gary Shannon plays the title character, John Mercy, out of prison on parole after twenty-five years and an apparently changed man. His parole officer (Charles McNeely III) doesn't really believe in John's reformation, and expects to see him back in jail soon. He's given a nondescript job and a nondescript hotel room, told that any screw-ups there or drug or alcohol use or missed appointments will send him back to jail. He meets Eve (Shelley Farrell), a nice-enough seeming girl, while having a club soda at the local bar, but initially keeps his distance. He doesn't really know what to make of the outside world.
Once the situation is set up, Roddy and company spend a good chunk of time demonstrating just how isolating and repetitive John's life is, and it's one of those situations where the filmmaker maybe does his job a little too well. There's a montage that seems to take forever of John sleeping in his spartan hotel room, going to work, operating a machine press, walking back through an alleyway filled with prostitutes and a street preacher, siting at the bar, and repeat, although it probably only takes ten minutes or so in reality. The audience gets the point, sure enough, but there's going to be a fair-sized chunk of that audience who wind up just checking out completely, even when things do start moving.
In fact, the first time John appeared on screen with his hand bandaged, I cursed myself for having apparently fallen asleep and missed the part of the movie where, finally, something happened. That was not the case, though - these are mysterious off-screen injuries. That's where the horror/suspense part of the movie comes in - is it Eve who injured him? The ghost, presumably of the girl whom he killed all those years ago, that he sometimes sees though no-one else does? Someone or something else? Trouble is, even if you're still interested, the movie doesn't really seem to be. There's never a very strong feeling of suspense or even mounting dread. Roddy does do a pretty good job going for the gross-out later, though.
To give Roddy his due, he's got some skills with the camera. He's going for a noir feel, and the crisp black-and-white photography is quite nice. He's also done a fine job with locations and production design to evoke the feel of the era. His artsier choices - dubbing animal noises over the poor/homeless people in the street, using almost no extras in other scenes - may work better for others than it did for me. Garry Shannon gives a pretty nice understated performance as John, although Shelley Farrell isn't so solid as Eve (as the screening's host mentioned in the discussion, it takes a better actress to play a bad actress well).
The idea is that Mercy is only superficially a thriller, though underneath it's a film about isolation and alienation. Unfortunately, the surface isn't very thrilling, and what's underneath isn't so clever as it tries to be.
Boston Fantastic Film Festival: The Devil Dared Me To
I "missed" this one at Fantasia - it wasn't one I was really super-excited to see anyway, but I would probably have gone if the schedule lined up right. The program made it out to sound like a Jackass movie, only with the stunts worked into a rudimentary plot. It's not that, really, although there probably are some real bits in there - for example, I wouldn't be shocked if Bonnie Soper and Chris Stapp did set their costumes on fire in a certain scene. I've never really been a fan of the "injury as entertainment" thing. There's a line between being impressed by Jackie Chan's willingness to do his own stunts or take hits in order to create a well-choreographed fight scene and seeking out people crashing into a wall in order to crash into a wall, at least for me.
No, this is more an "extreme slapstick" comedy, a Farrelly Brothers sort of thing without the heart so prominently displayed on its sleeve. Nothing wrong with that, really, although it's not my usual thing. So while I can recognize that Chris Stapp and Matt Heath are pretty good at their chosen genre, I stop well short of falling in love with it.
The Devil Dared Me To
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
The Devil Dared Me To is a moron movie. It is about finding reckless idiots being on the receiving end of injury, mayhem, embarrassment, and death funny. If that's not your thing under any circumstances, then this is where you and this movie part ways.
The central moron is Randy Cambell (Chris Stapp), the latest in a long line of New Zealand daredevil-stuntmen. As a kid, his father was killed in a stunt gone wrong, and he lost his aunt in one performed by the South Island's most popular stuntman, Dick Johansonson (Matt Heath). Years later, he dreams of being the first to jump the (fifteen-mile) strait between the North and South Islands, but in the meantime he's working for Johansonson, trying to impress childhood sweetheart Tracy "Tragedy" Jones (Bonnie Soper). Johansonson is jealous of Cambell's growing popularity, and sets out to sabotage him.
Stapp and Heath are part a well-known comedy team in New Zealand ("Back of the Y"); they co-write the film with Stapp directing, and I gather from a few of the clips that run during the credits that this is basically their schtick - over-the-top, cartoony violence complete with gushing blood and severed limbs. They are pretty good at it, basically making things work by basically playing loss of limb as if it's no big deal. Yes, they do lean a little too heavily on the shock value of a guy gushing blood a few times, but they do have a little more than that up their sleeves: They know that carnage happen after it had seemed safe is funnier than just dropping a car on someone, or that treating a bomb in a car like a prank rather than attempted murder can be funny with the right character. I especially love the shot of a dumpster with "Broken Glass and Used Syringes ONLY"; that shot is funnier than the actual glass and syringes can possibly be.
Though Stapp is playing the film's main character, Heath gets most of the really good bits. "Dick Johansonson" is just a funny name to begin with, and Heath plays him with arrogant obliviousness. The entire cast of characters is idiots, but Dick is also a mean-spirited wuss, so it's that much funnier when bad things happen to him. Stapp's Cambell, of course, is so basically trusting and friendly that his escaping unscathed is nearly as funny. Andrew Beattie steals almost every scene he's in as "Big Jim" Watson. Big Jim is Dick's mechanic, the father of Randy's best friend, and as over-the-top as anybody else in the movie, constantly feeding his beer gut, barely hiding his contempt for his employer, and cursing a blue streak whether he's talking to to his co-worker or ten-year-olds. He also has truly magnificent facial hair.
The gags are delivered with the all subtlety of a sledgehammer to the nuts, which can get old fairly quickly; fortunately the movie is only about an hour and twenty minutes long. More importantly for a movie with this sort of sadistic sense of humor, it doesn't hold on to any single gag long enough for a sour taste to develop. This is double important because I figure only about one in three are actually funny; and that's a situation where the mean but not-funny ones can turn the audience against the film. The film also looks and feels properly cheap, both because it describes the South Island sheep-farming towns where it starts as the arse-end of the world and because it's going for a bit of a campy feel.
One thing that strikes me as odd: "Back of the Y" was described as being a Jackass-like group, and a few of the clips at the end showed them taking real hits and more believable stunts. There's not a whole lot of that in The Devil Dared Me To; it's kind of fantastical. That's not really bad, but it seems a little strange to so consciously become a parody of yourselves like this. Maybe native New Zealanders can clarify this for me. I also hear that there are plenty of jokes in there that are less funny the further you get from NZ, although to the film's benefit (as far as being enjoyable for the rest of us), there aren't many moments that puzzled this outsider.
To a certain extent, none of this really matters; movies about stupid people doing stupid things are almost always movies where "it's the sort of thing you like if you like that sort of thing". If you like this sort of extreme slapstick, there's a good chance you'll enjoy this movie.
Also at HBS.
No, this is more an "extreme slapstick" comedy, a Farrelly Brothers sort of thing without the heart so prominently displayed on its sleeve. Nothing wrong with that, really, although it's not my usual thing. So while I can recognize that Chris Stapp and Matt Heath are pretty good at their chosen genre, I stop well short of falling in love with it.
The Devil Dared Me To
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 12 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
The Devil Dared Me To is a moron movie. It is about finding reckless idiots being on the receiving end of injury, mayhem, embarrassment, and death funny. If that's not your thing under any circumstances, then this is where you and this movie part ways.
The central moron is Randy Cambell (Chris Stapp), the latest in a long line of New Zealand daredevil-stuntmen. As a kid, his father was killed in a stunt gone wrong, and he lost his aunt in one performed by the South Island's most popular stuntman, Dick Johansonson (Matt Heath). Years later, he dreams of being the first to jump the (fifteen-mile) strait between the North and South Islands, but in the meantime he's working for Johansonson, trying to impress childhood sweetheart Tracy "Tragedy" Jones (Bonnie Soper). Johansonson is jealous of Cambell's growing popularity, and sets out to sabotage him.
Stapp and Heath are part a well-known comedy team in New Zealand ("Back of the Y"); they co-write the film with Stapp directing, and I gather from a few of the clips that run during the credits that this is basically their schtick - over-the-top, cartoony violence complete with gushing blood and severed limbs. They are pretty good at it, basically making things work by basically playing loss of limb as if it's no big deal. Yes, they do lean a little too heavily on the shock value of a guy gushing blood a few times, but they do have a little more than that up their sleeves: They know that carnage happen after it had seemed safe is funnier than just dropping a car on someone, or that treating a bomb in a car like a prank rather than attempted murder can be funny with the right character. I especially love the shot of a dumpster with "Broken Glass and Used Syringes ONLY"; that shot is funnier than the actual glass and syringes can possibly be.
Though Stapp is playing the film's main character, Heath gets most of the really good bits. "Dick Johansonson" is just a funny name to begin with, and Heath plays him with arrogant obliviousness. The entire cast of characters is idiots, but Dick is also a mean-spirited wuss, so it's that much funnier when bad things happen to him. Stapp's Cambell, of course, is so basically trusting and friendly that his escaping unscathed is nearly as funny. Andrew Beattie steals almost every scene he's in as "Big Jim" Watson. Big Jim is Dick's mechanic, the father of Randy's best friend, and as over-the-top as anybody else in the movie, constantly feeding his beer gut, barely hiding his contempt for his employer, and cursing a blue streak whether he's talking to to his co-worker or ten-year-olds. He also has truly magnificent facial hair.
The gags are delivered with the all subtlety of a sledgehammer to the nuts, which can get old fairly quickly; fortunately the movie is only about an hour and twenty minutes long. More importantly for a movie with this sort of sadistic sense of humor, it doesn't hold on to any single gag long enough for a sour taste to develop. This is double important because I figure only about one in three are actually funny; and that's a situation where the mean but not-funny ones can turn the audience against the film. The film also looks and feels properly cheap, both because it describes the South Island sheep-farming towns where it starts as the arse-end of the world and because it's going for a bit of a campy feel.
One thing that strikes me as odd: "Back of the Y" was described as being a Jackass-like group, and a few of the clips at the end showed them taking real hits and more believable stunts. There's not a whole lot of that in The Devil Dared Me To; it's kind of fantastical. That's not really bad, but it seems a little strange to so consciously become a parody of yourselves like this. Maybe native New Zealanders can clarify this for me. I also hear that there are plenty of jokes in there that are less funny the further you get from NZ, although to the film's benefit (as far as being enjoyable for the rest of us), there aren't many moments that puzzled this outsider.
To a certain extent, none of this really matters; movies about stupid people doing stupid things are almost always movies where "it's the sort of thing you like if you like that sort of thing". If you like this sort of extreme slapstick, there's a good chance you'll enjoy this movie.
Also at HBS.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Boston Fantastic Film Festival: Trapped Ashes
I love the BFFF (not to be confused with the BFF). Sure, it causes a pronounced lack of sleep when it conflicts with a Red Sox playoff series - my plan tonight is to record ALCS Game 1 on the ReplayTV, start watching it when I get home at around 9:15 after watching The Devil Dared Me To (since I can push The District! to a Sox-free Sunday showing rather than sticking around for the 9:30 show) - but Ned likes a lot of the same sorts of movies as I do, and this year especially has a knack for booking stuff that I wanted to see at Fantasia but couldn't make. Trapped Ashes, The Devil Dared Me To, Murder Party, Zebraman, and Exiled all fit into that category this year (I did see The Signal there, but I certainly don't mind giving other folks the chance to see it).
I have to admit, I was kind of hoping we'd get some guests for Trapped Ashes; Joe Dante has been listed as part of the festival's steering committee in previous years and I figured that might translate to him coming to Boston to introduce this film. Didn't happen, and I suspect the turnout might have been better if the festival's opening film hadn't run Thursday at 10pm. I wonder if it was bumped to accommodate the screening of The Darjeeling Limited with Anderson & Schwartzmann at 7pm (sadly, 5pm was not early enough to leave Waltham to see this one).
So, first night a bit disappointing, but I'm looking forward to The Devil Dared Me To tonight. And Go Sox!
Trapped Ashes
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
It's got to be somewhat disappointing to be in writer Dennis Bartok's position: You write an screenplay for an anthology film that's got four pretty decent ideas for horror stories in it. You land the likes of Ken Russell and Monte Hellman to direct segments, and Joe Dante to do the framing sequences. The unknown actors you cast really aren't bad. And yet, when it gets put together, it's not that good. And if Bartok isn't disappointed, the audience certainly is.
The set-up has an elderly tour guide (Henry Gibson) giving six people the VIP tour of "Ultra Studios", reluctantly showing them the house where the (fictional) classic horror film Hysteria was shot. They wind up trapped in the room where that movie's characters told each other horror stories, and suggests that maybe, if they tell their own scary stories, they'll be let out. It's as silly as it sounds and Dante takes a while setting it up, but the house is a fun set, albeit overdone (Dante is a bit prone to over-indulging in pastiche).
The first of the stories is "The Girl With the Golden Breasts", directed by Ken Russell. It's about Phoebe (Rachel Veltri), a would-be actress whose fortunes change after she gets the latest in breast implants - human tissue taken from organ donors. Except... those wouldn't have nipples that bite and suck blood, would they? As with most of Bartok's stories, it's not really a bad idea, and I kind of like Veltri in it. I think Russell errs in being a little too casual with the material; even if he didn't want to take the straight-out horror route of David Cronenberg's Rabid, this is material for dark, pitch-black comedy, but Russell and Bartok go for weak, name-dropping parody and "isn't this weird?" rather than actual scares or really clever satire.
Next up is Sean S. Cunningham (the original Friday the Thirteenth) with "Jibaku". Julia (Lara Harris), the wife of American architect Henry (Scott Lowell) at a convention in Japan, meets a handsome man (Yoshinori Hiruma) in front of a strange painting, only to later find him hanging outside a temple. He's still in her dreams, though, and when she disappears a few nights later, the head monk (Ryo Ishibashi) tells Henry that he must enter a scary cave and place a piece of paper with a spell written on it into her mouth to save her. Cunningham gets some nifty atmospherics with the changing painting, and the switch to animation for some shots inside the cave is actually pretty creepy, but there's something oddly inauthentic about his jaunt into J-horror, despite actually shooting some in Japan rather than British Columbia and the presence of genre favorite Ishibashi - everything feels too much like a soundstage, everybody who speaks English does so without an accent. There also doesn't seem to be much about Henry and Julia that's special, and they just go through the motions here; there's never a sense of urgency or importance to what they're doing.
"Stanley's Girlfriend" is the first thing Monte Hellman (best known for Two Lane Blacktop) has directed in over fifteen years. His protagonist Leo (John Saxon) has also not made a film in a long time, and tells us how, as a younger man (Tahmoh Penikett), he met a fellow filmmaker by the name of Stanley (Tygh Rynyan) with whom he became fast friends until he also met Nina (Amelia Cooke), who transfers her affections to him when Stanley leaves for New York and Europe to shoot a movie, never to return. Leo can't seem to get any work done, though, and he doesn't have much idea why until Stanley bequeaths him a package forty years later. The film is well shot, and the revelation of one of the character's identity is a bit of a kick, but honestly? Nothing happens. Film fans may find the details clever in the end, but Hellman and Bartok don't do much to make lethargy particularly frightening.
Oddly, it's rookie director John Gaeta (most of his credits are doing special effects) who delivers the best segment. "My Twin, The Worm" has Michele-Barbara Pelletier playing a dual role, as present-day narrator Nathalie and her mother Martine, who contracted a tapeworm at about the same time she became pregnant, and since the treatment for tapeworms would also cause a miscarriage, must put up with both growing within her, even as this odd prenatal situation is having a peculiar effect on Nathalie, which comes to light when we see her as a child who goes to live with her father and stepmother after her mother's nervous breakdown. Gaeta's got a head start, in that the premise of his story is kind of discomfiting even before anything overtly supernatural happens, and the setting (French immigrants with a California vineyard) is just off-kilter enough to seem out of time. Then he's got Matrya Fedor as young Nathalie, and in just a couple parts, she's demonstrated a knack for playing scary kids without making them seem unearthly or like little adults (all the scarier because it implies that that kind of amorality is part of every child's nature).
The movie's ready to send us out on a high note with that, but unfortunately it brings us back to Joe Dante's framing device, which not only wastes Henry Gibson and a blink-and-you'll-miss-him Dick Miller cameo (Robert Picardo, apparently, was unavailable), but doesn't deliver the inevitable twist on horror tales that leave their narrators alive as well as one might like. Like much of the movie, it's kind of limp, which is frustrating, because Dante should be able to do better.
That's what the whole movie is - segments that aren't quite as good as they could or should be individually, and while none of those segments would be crippling with better neighbors, together they add up to a big disappointment.
Also at eFilmCritic.
I have to admit, I was kind of hoping we'd get some guests for Trapped Ashes; Joe Dante has been listed as part of the festival's steering committee in previous years and I figured that might translate to him coming to Boston to introduce this film. Didn't happen, and I suspect the turnout might have been better if the festival's opening film hadn't run Thursday at 10pm. I wonder if it was bumped to accommodate the screening of The Darjeeling Limited with Anderson & Schwartzmann at 7pm (sadly, 5pm was not early enough to leave Waltham to see this one).
So, first night a bit disappointing, but I'm looking forward to The Devil Dared Me To tonight. And Go Sox!
Trapped Ashes
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 October 2007 at the Brattle Theatre (Boston Fantastic Film Festival)
It's got to be somewhat disappointing to be in writer Dennis Bartok's position: You write an screenplay for an anthology film that's got four pretty decent ideas for horror stories in it. You land the likes of Ken Russell and Monte Hellman to direct segments, and Joe Dante to do the framing sequences. The unknown actors you cast really aren't bad. And yet, when it gets put together, it's not that good. And if Bartok isn't disappointed, the audience certainly is.
The set-up has an elderly tour guide (Henry Gibson) giving six people the VIP tour of "Ultra Studios", reluctantly showing them the house where the (fictional) classic horror film Hysteria was shot. They wind up trapped in the room where that movie's characters told each other horror stories, and suggests that maybe, if they tell their own scary stories, they'll be let out. It's as silly as it sounds and Dante takes a while setting it up, but the house is a fun set, albeit overdone (Dante is a bit prone to over-indulging in pastiche).
The first of the stories is "The Girl With the Golden Breasts", directed by Ken Russell. It's about Phoebe (Rachel Veltri), a would-be actress whose fortunes change after she gets the latest in breast implants - human tissue taken from organ donors. Except... those wouldn't have nipples that bite and suck blood, would they? As with most of Bartok's stories, it's not really a bad idea, and I kind of like Veltri in it. I think Russell errs in being a little too casual with the material; even if he didn't want to take the straight-out horror route of David Cronenberg's Rabid, this is material for dark, pitch-black comedy, but Russell and Bartok go for weak, name-dropping parody and "isn't this weird?" rather than actual scares or really clever satire.
Next up is Sean S. Cunningham (the original Friday the Thirteenth) with "Jibaku". Julia (Lara Harris), the wife of American architect Henry (Scott Lowell) at a convention in Japan, meets a handsome man (Yoshinori Hiruma) in front of a strange painting, only to later find him hanging outside a temple. He's still in her dreams, though, and when she disappears a few nights later, the head monk (Ryo Ishibashi) tells Henry that he must enter a scary cave and place a piece of paper with a spell written on it into her mouth to save her. Cunningham gets some nifty atmospherics with the changing painting, and the switch to animation for some shots inside the cave is actually pretty creepy, but there's something oddly inauthentic about his jaunt into J-horror, despite actually shooting some in Japan rather than British Columbia and the presence of genre favorite Ishibashi - everything feels too much like a soundstage, everybody who speaks English does so without an accent. There also doesn't seem to be much about Henry and Julia that's special, and they just go through the motions here; there's never a sense of urgency or importance to what they're doing.
"Stanley's Girlfriend" is the first thing Monte Hellman (best known for Two Lane Blacktop) has directed in over fifteen years. His protagonist Leo (John Saxon) has also not made a film in a long time, and tells us how, as a younger man (Tahmoh Penikett), he met a fellow filmmaker by the name of Stanley (Tygh Rynyan) with whom he became fast friends until he also met Nina (Amelia Cooke), who transfers her affections to him when Stanley leaves for New York and Europe to shoot a movie, never to return. Leo can't seem to get any work done, though, and he doesn't have much idea why until Stanley bequeaths him a package forty years later. The film is well shot, and the revelation of one of the character's identity is a bit of a kick, but honestly? Nothing happens. Film fans may find the details clever in the end, but Hellman and Bartok don't do much to make lethargy particularly frightening.
Oddly, it's rookie director John Gaeta (most of his credits are doing special effects) who delivers the best segment. "My Twin, The Worm" has Michele-Barbara Pelletier playing a dual role, as present-day narrator Nathalie and her mother Martine, who contracted a tapeworm at about the same time she became pregnant, and since the treatment for tapeworms would also cause a miscarriage, must put up with both growing within her, even as this odd prenatal situation is having a peculiar effect on Nathalie, which comes to light when we see her as a child who goes to live with her father and stepmother after her mother's nervous breakdown. Gaeta's got a head start, in that the premise of his story is kind of discomfiting even before anything overtly supernatural happens, and the setting (French immigrants with a California vineyard) is just off-kilter enough to seem out of time. Then he's got Matrya Fedor as young Nathalie, and in just a couple parts, she's demonstrated a knack for playing scary kids without making them seem unearthly or like little adults (all the scarier because it implies that that kind of amorality is part of every child's nature).
The movie's ready to send us out on a high note with that, but unfortunately it brings us back to Joe Dante's framing device, which not only wastes Henry Gibson and a blink-and-you'll-miss-him Dick Miller cameo (Robert Picardo, apparently, was unavailable), but doesn't deliver the inevitable twist on horror tales that leave their narrators alive as well as one might like. Like much of the movie, it's kind of limp, which is frustrating, because Dante should be able to do better.
That's what the whole movie is - segments that aren't quite as good as they could or should be individually, and while none of those segments would be crippling with better neighbors, together they add up to a big disappointment.
Also at eFilmCritic.
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