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These Kids Today

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Beast Beast

by Brandon Thomas

Coming-of-age movies are hard. As we move into adulthood, humans tend to forget the confusing swirl of emotions teens experience day-to-day. That loss of awareness can make these kinds of movies feel phony and tone-deaf. With Beast Beast, writer/director Danny Madden crafts an emotionally authentic portrayal of young adults that’s a true standout.

Nito (Jose Angeles) is the new kid in town. The always tough move to a new school is softened for him when he meets Krista (Shirley Chen), a self-proclaimed theater brat. Nito is immediately smitten. As Krista and Nito spend more and more time together, Krista’s neighbor, Adam (Will Madden, Danny’s brother), is clumsily trying to get his firearms-centered YouTube channel off the ground. As the pressure from his parents to succeed mounts, Adam begins to lose the grip on his own emotional stability. 

Produced by Jim Cummings (Thunder Road, The Wolf of Snow Hollow), Beast Beast is a gripping look into the lives of three modern-day young people. While not having the darkly comedic overtones of Cummings’s work, Madden’s film strikes the same level of emotional honesty. Madden seamlessly captures the carefree joy of youth, while also acknowledging the fear, loneliness and confusion that the transition into adulthood can hold. 

The natural looseness of the cast is where the film truly shines. Chen and Angeles are captivating with their easy, immediate connection. Will Madden’s Adam is much more internalized and isolated. He captures Adam’s directionless existence by playing the character with a mixture of simmering panic and naivete. 

Beast Beast’s visual aesthetic stays grounded and unassuming. While never fully succumbing to that indie impulse of going entirely handheld, the camerawork stays fluid. It’s the kind of cinematography that doesn’t draw attention to itself until you get to one of those compositions that literally takes your breath away. 

Similarly, the score starts as a mixture of bells and an organ very much in need of tuning. But as the drama within the film intensifies, the score takes a more sinister turn and comes much more to the forefront. 

The film’s third act will likely split much of the audience. It’s not particularly easy to sit through, but does feel like the natural progression of the story. Nothing about the plot or character actions feel gratuitous or cheaply played. 

Fans of indie dramas will find a lot to celebrate in Beast Beast. By focusing so strongly on character, and throwing in a few nice twists and turns, these filmmakers have delivered one of the best films of 2021 so far. 


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Womb to Rent

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Together Together

by George Wolf

It takes a full two minutes to get a really good feeling about Together Together.

Writer/director Nikole Beckwith delivers witty, engaging dialogue from the jump, defining characters and setting the stakes in a beautifully organic manner. This is much more difficult than Beckwith and her two leads make it appear.

Matt (Ed Helms) is interviewing Anna (Patti Harrison) to be the surrogate mother who’ll deliver his child. Matt, a forty-something app developer, is single but wants to be a father. 26-year-old Anna needs the money and wouldn’t mind the healthy deposit in the bank of good karma.

So if you’re keeping score, the film boasts a fresh premise, crisp writing and likable personalities before you’ve sipped your beverage of choice. And as we follow Matt and Anna from first trimester to labor, Together Together is never less than warm, insightful and lovely.

With no romance and only a few laugh out loud moments (most of those delivered by Sufe Bradshaw’s sarcastic medical tech and Julio Torres as an over the top barista), you can’t really call this a rom-com. But even that seems to fit. Just like Matt and Anna, Beckwith (helming her second feature after 2015’s Stockholm, Pennsylvania) is proudly going her own way.

Helms adds important layers to his usual nerd persona, slowly revealing more detailed reasons why Matt is choosing to be a single father, and why Anna is challenging his perceptions on nearly everything.

Harrison, whose resume sports mainly TV and voice work, delivers a fantastically understated breakout performance. Anna is pleasantly frank and sarcastic, but guarded. She’s hiding some scars, and Harrison reveals them with ease and authenticity.

Beckwith fills nearly every frame with a tender empathy that has us pulling for this offbeat pair as a matter of course, making it that much easier for her to reach us. From surrogacy and masculinity to Woody Allen, Friends, and the proper use of tampons, the film drops its insight in ways that are consistently fresh.

There’s love and family and funny stuff here, and though none of it is quite the kind we’re used to seeing, all of it is wonderfully real. Together Together is a delivery that somehow feels comfortable and unique, both overdue and right on time.

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Full Moon Fever

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Bloodthirsty

by George Wolf

For a while, less can be more in a monster movie (i.e. Jaws). Still, diving into a werewolf flick without the budget for showy CGI or well-crafted practicals is ambitious.

While Dog Soldiers proved you can make an impression without breaking the bank, so much of werewolf lore is about transformation – both the literal and the metaphorical – that as much as one layer falters, the other needs to stand that much stronger.

Unfortunately, Bloodthirsty is shaky on both grounds.

Pop singer Grey (Lauren Beatty) became a sensation with her first album, and now she’s feeling the pressure to produce a blockbuster follow-up. Grey is plagued by nightmarish hallucinations about turning into an animal, so her doctor (Michael Ironside in a distracting cameo) has upped her meds.

Plans for the second album look brighter when famed producer Vaughn Daniels (Greg Byrk) agrees to helm the project. He invites Grey and her girlfriend Charlie (Katherine King So) to stay at his lavish home/studio in the Canadian wilderness while they record, but Charlie is concerned about Vaughn’s unsavory past.

Grey isn’t, but things get weird as soon as Vaughn’s creepy housekeeper (Judith Buchan) shows the ladies to their room. Music isn’t the only reason Vaughn volunteered to work with Grey, and director Amelia Moses (Bleed With Me, which also starred Beatty) attempts a tone of Gothic seduction as the mystery unfolds.

But it’s not really much of a mystery. The script, from Wendy Hill-Tout and her daughter Lowell (who also contributes original songs) delivers pale imitations of the carnivorous temptations in Raw as their film builds to a reveal that is less than shocking.

Bloodthirsty is a werewolf film that never really feels like one, which has both up and down sides.

Ditching the focus on full moons for a lesbian artist at a creative crossroads has promise, but the characters lack the depth required for any effective metaphor to take root. Pair that with scant transformation scenes which impress more with sound than vision, and a horror fan’s thirst for blood will likely be left wanting.

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Thirst Like a Gang of Devils

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Boys from County Hell

by Hope Madden

Lend me ten pounds and I’ll buy you a drink.

That’s Eugene’s (Jack Rowan) line. He’s done working for his Dad (Nigel O ‘Neill), the meanest bastard ever to run a construction crew. Eugene’s happy to waste his youth drinking with his mates in The Stoker and ushering naive tourists to that pile of stones they come out to see – not that there’s really a vampire under there. Certainly not the one, true vampire that inspired Bram Stoker in the first place.

Right! So, many pints and backhoes and buddies later we find out whether ol’ Abhartach under those stones is a myth or not.

As writer/director Chris Baugh adapts his 2013 short into a fun, effective monster flick, he begins by tossing out vampire tradition. Ireland’s own Bram Stoker had written a piece of fiction, after all, and this is reality. The new mythology is a little muddier and more monstrous than Dracula, but never less than fun.

Baugh taps into the same kind of smalltown boredom that situates the nation’s most memorable monster movies, from Grabbers to Rawhead Rex. He does a lot with a small budget, suggesting the monster more than showing it until the final act, but there’s plenty of blood to make up for the subtlety.

A couple of veterans (O’Neill, as well as John Lynch, also on Shudder right now in Christopher Smith’s The Banishing) give the cast a strong backbone. A solid group of young ne’er do wells (Louise Harland, Michael Hough and Fra Fee joining Rowan) create a lived-in camaraderie. The charm and familiarity among the ensemble are undoubtedly the reasons the film works as well as it does.

Boys from County Hell is a horror/comedy, but it’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny. It’s actually a good deal more tender in its own endearingly bull-headed way, with a narrative more focused on the father/son dynamic than on coming of age or bloodshed. Baugh’s deep sense of these characters and this terrain benefit the relationship building and give the film a nice throughline.

This is a “what are you going to do with your life” film, and for some people, it takes a good, old-fashioned bloodletting to help them make up their minds.

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Fright Club: Best One-Watch Horror

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With this episode we hit the big 200, so we wanted to celebrate in the most masochistic way possible. No! We wanted a really great topic (George’s choice) and a really great guest – filmmaker and co-founder/programmer of Nightmares Film Festival, Jason Tostevin.

Together we talk through the very best horror movies we could not watch a second time no matter what.

5. A Serbian Film (2010)

This is not a movie we would recommend to basically anyone. That’s not to say it’s a bad film – it’s pretty well directed, acted, and written. It’s just that the co-writer/director Srdjan Spasojevic is trying to articulate the soul-deadening effects of surviving the depravity of war. The film title is no coincidence – the film is meant to reflect the reality of a nation so recently involved in among the most depraved, horrific, unimaginable acts of war. It’s as if he’s saying, after all that, what could still shock us?

Like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious 1975 effort Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom – also a depiction of the depravity left behind after war – A Serbian Film overwhelms you with horrifying imagery.

4. An American Crime (2007)

In 1966, Gertrude Baniszewski, along with three of her children and two neighbor boys, was convicted of what’s commonly considered to be the most heinous crime ever committed in the state of Indiana. The senior investigator described the prolonged abuse and murder of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens as the most sadistic case he’d investigated in his 35 years on the force.

In 2007, two films were released depicting the horror. The Jack Ketchum-penned The Girl Next Door found a larger audience, but co-writer/director Tommy O’Haver’s An American Crime is the far superior film.

Elliot Page offers a full, layered performance, making Sylvia a realistic character – someone you might have known in high school. Of course, that makes it even harder to stomach what becomes of her. The entire cast—an impressive ensemble—does stunning work, but the dark magic here is Catherine Keener. Giving one of the best performances of her already stellar career, Keener guarantees that it will be a long time before you recover from this movie.

3. The Painted Bird (2019)

If you paint the wings of a sparrow (or stitch a star to his jacket) the rest of the flock will no longer recognize him. The other birds will swarm and peck him until he plummets back to the earth. This is just one of the horrific lessons a young boy learns as he desperately searches for anywhere or anyone safe in war-torn Eastern Europe.

What follows is a brutal parade of the worst humanity has to offer. Domestic abuse, graphic violence, multiple instances of animal abuse and death, rape, child abuse and rape, and more. Then the war crimes start around hour three.

The Painted Bird is a test of endurance. It’s also a beautifully shot, well-performed, and incredibly moving piece of cinema. You simply have to be willing to go where it wants to take you. And all of those places are dark and darker.

2. Irreversible (2002)

French filmmaker/provocateur Gaspar Noe does not play well with his audience. Every film, no matter how brilliantly put together or gloriously filmed, is a feat in masochism to watch. Later efforts, like Enter the Void, spread the misery out for its full running time, but for Irreversible, he gave it to us in two horrifying scenes. While the head-bashing is tough viewing, the film centers on a rape scene that is all but impossible to watch.

Noe’s general MO is to punish you through sheer duration. The scenes last so long you feel like you cannot endure another minute, and this scene certainly does that. Not shot even momentarily for titillation, and boasting a devastatingly excellent performance from Monica Bellucci, it justifies its own horrific presence. There are other films with necessary and difficult rape scenes – Straw Dogs, I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer – but none is harder to stomach than this.

1. Nothing Bad Can Happen (2013)

This film is tough to watch, and the fact that it is based on a true story only makes the feat of endurance that much harder. But writer-director Katrin Gebbe mines this horrific tale for a peculiar point of view that suits it brilliantly and ensures that it is never simply a gratuitous wallowing in someone else’s suffering.

Tore (Julius Feldmeier) is an awkward teen in Germany. His best friend is Jesus. He means it. In fact, he’s so genuine and pure that when he lays his hands on stranded motorist Benno’s (Sascha Alexander Gersak) car, the engine starts.

Thus begins a relationship that devolves into a sociological exploration of button-pushing evil and submission to your own beliefs. Feldmeier is wondrous—so tender and vulnerable you will ache for him. Gersak is his equal in a role of burgeoning cruelty. The whole film has a, “you’re making me do this,” mentality that is hard to shake. It examines one particular nature of evil and does it so authentically as to leave you truly shaken.

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The Lady Is A Vamp

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Jakob’s Wife

by George Wolf

Her name is Anne Fedder. But Jakob’s Wife pretty much sums up the nearly invisible routine Anne (Barbara Crampton) is living.

Jakob Fedder (Larry Fessenden) is the well-known pastor of a small town church, and Anne is well known as his wife. Anne’s life seems to have only gotten smaller during her thirty-year marriage, and if pressed, she’d probably admit she wouldn’t mind a little shakeup.

A late-night meeting with old boyfriend Tom (Robert Rusler)? Intriguing, but his seduction skills got nuthin’ on The Master (Bonnie Aarrons, aka The Nun), who’s waiting on them both.

The next morning, Jakob gets the first clue that things will be changing.

“Did you make breakfast?” he asks.

Anne answers, “I’m not hungry.”

At least not for pancakes. After The Master’s touch, Anne is a brand new woman, sporting fresh hair and makeup, tight, low-cut dresses and provocative new appetites.

It’s no wonder this has been a passion project for Crampton (who’s also a producer), and she makes the extended feminist metaphor ring gloriously true.

Director/co-writer Travis Stevens (Girl on the Third Floor) wraps the bloodlusty tale in a fun retro vibe of ’80s low-budget practical, blood spurting gore, but it’s Crampton (and the chemistry with her fellow horror vet Fessenden) who truly elevates this beyond the standard vampire playbook.

To see a female character of this age experiencing a spiritual, philosophical and sexual awakening is alone refreshing, and Crampton (looking fantastic, by the way) makes Anne’s cautious embrace of her new ageless wonder an empowering – and even touching – journey.

Stevens revels in the B-movie underpinnings, stopping short of tackling any systemic issues inherent in a woman’s longtime restlessness. The focus stays intimate, and only on how Anne’s new freedom affects Jakob and their local community (which remains nameless, though filming was entirely in Mississippi).

But with Crampton and Fessenden so completely in their element, Jakob’s Wife is an irresistibly fun take on the bite of eternity. Here, it’s not about taking souls, it’s about empowering them. And once this lady is a vamp, we’re the lucky ones.

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Dramatic Art

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Reefa

by Brandon Thomas

Based on a true story, Jessica Kavana Dornbusch’s Reefa explores a short period in the life of street artist Israel “Reefa” Hernandez.

As the film opens, the Hernandez family is about to get what many immigrant families can only dream of: their Green Cards. Originally from Colombia, the Hernandezes are in the United States – Miami to be specific –  as asylum seekers. Young Israel Hernandez has a potent love of art, and has become quite a well-known graffiti artist around the city. As Israel begins to think more about his future away from Miami and his family, the complexities of life as a young immigrant make themselves more and more evident. 

Reefa is the kind of film that proudly wears its heart on its sleeve. This has both positive and negative sides to it. The movie is charming and gets a lot of mileage out of the fantastic chemistry between the actors playing the Hernandez family. The same can be said of the cabal of young people playing Israel’s friends. These are the kinds of scenes that don’t necessarily move the narrative forward, but they do allow the characters to come alive in a way that many melodramatic plot threads do not.

While the majority of Reefa is tonally light, there’s an overarching sense of dread that cannot be ignored: whether it’s the constant state of worry felt by Israel’s parents over their status as refugees or the threat of an overzealous police officer who lets his disdain for immigrants be known. You know tragedy is coming – you just don’t know how. 

The film occasionally dips its toe into After School Special territory. The real story of Israel Hernandez is compelling enough, and the more embellished aspects added to the film have a phony feel to them. The shoe-horned romance between Israel and a New York model, Frankie (Clara McGregor), lacks any spark. The eventual conflict that arises in their relationship only highlights many of the weaker story issues in the script. 

The performances are generally quite good with Tyler Dean Flores impressing as the titular character. Veteran character actor Jose Zuniga (Con Air, Alive) delivers in a small, but impactful, role as Israel’s demanding father. The rest of the cast doesn’t leave the same impression, but they do well with the material provided. 

While not the most successful film it could be, Reefa still ends up serving as a touching tribute to a young man taken too soon.

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Love Letter to a Genre

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Sensation

by Phil Garrett

Martin Grof’s Sensation is a low-tech science fiction mystery/thriller that pulls together familiar plotlines and devices including a protagonist with a mysterious family history, people with superhuman abilities, research facilities, unknown threats, and the dynamic of the real world vs. the dream world. The film feels more than inspired by films such as Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Tenet, along with the superhuman sub-sub-genre.

The plot centers around Andrew (Eugene Simons, Game of Thrones), a young man with no knowledge of his family history, including his father’s identity. Andrew is drawn into a patchwork mystery after a strange and confrontational meeting with Dr. Marinus (Alastair G. Cumming), who delivers Andrew’s DNA test results. He is then followed by mysterious men in matching gray hats who disappear from the film as quickly as they appear. Marinus confronts him and explains that Andrew’s life is in danger and only by joining a secret research program to explore his superhuman sensory powers will he be safe.

Safe from whom? Good question. The veil of vagueness seems to be part of Grof’s attempt to build tension, but it plays as a trope in the boldest of terms, whether through familiar scenarios or bald dialogue that could be delivered by characters in any similar movie. 

Andrew heads off to a secret research facility in the remote English countryside at an appropriately gothic manor estate. There he meets the “enigmatic” Nadia (Emily Wyatt, the Rise of the Footsoldier franchise) who runs the program. We’re introduced to the research group, all of whom have different super-senses like Andrew, all drawn together for special training to learn, focus and sharpen their abilities, and all in danger from unknown forces.

Sound familiar? The double-secret secret of their powers? They can “receive information” via their senses, which is highly valued by, you guessed it, that vaguely defined threat.

The film weaves its way through scenes and sequences that, again, seem more than inspired by other films, delivered with that mix of vagueness and baldness we’ve become familiar with. The dramatic action plays out fairly flatly with huge exposition dumps dropped in at just the right time. The story heads down a spiral of interwoven plots and subplots that are not fully baked, culminating in a protracted final act that tries hard to be inventive but feels like a different movie altogether.

Story aside, the cinematography visual style – ranging from foreboding interiors of the manor house to the sharp, vibrant streets of London – is well put together and effective for the low-tech nature of the film, often elevating the storytelling. The score is impressive but sometimes used as a crutch for dramatic tension. Eugene Simons and the ensemble should be given credit for their work in trying to bring some emotional truth to the film.

Hard-core genre fans may be interested in this exploration of familiar territory, but overall, Sensation plays like a love letter to a genre, and ends up a fractured, amalgamated narrative that works hard to be entertaining and intriguing but doesn’t quite get there.

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Into the Woods

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In the Earth

by Hope Madden

If there’s one Ben Wheatley film people don’t seem to like, it’s 2013’s A Field in England. That film feels a lot like an experiment made with limited resources about strained friendship and hallucinogenic substances.

Wheatley’s latest, In the Earth, is a lockdown film—a kind of experiment made with limited resources about strained friendships and hallucinogenic substances. Wait, wait—it works better this time!

Made during and ostensibly about the pandemic, Wheatley’s film finds more terror in avoiding the virus than other lockdown films have found dealing directly with it. We open, Romero-like, with hazmat suits and government facilities, but that makes way pretty quickly to a dreamlike—one might even say enchanted—trek into the woods.

Scientist Martin (Joel Fry, Yesterday) joins park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia, Midsommar) in an infection-free zone of forest to make a 2-day trip on foot into the depths of the woods. They are here to check in on a scientist (Hayley Squires, In Fabric) who’s been incommunicado. But we all know that you should never go into the woods no matter the reason.

Honestly.

In its best moments, the film feels a bit like the director shaking off the style-over-substance films he’s made lately. (I’m looking at you, Rebecca.) Instead, he leans toward the genre-bending, lower-budget thrillers like those that got him noticed in the first place: Down Terrace, Sightseers, and especially Kill List.

And, yes, A Field in England.

In the Earth blends ecological terror, pagan ritual horror and Lovecraftian SciFi into a dreamlike episode. Performances are wonderful, and when Wheatley gets gritty, watch out. (Oh, Martin and his poor foot!)

Fry’s energy in the film is so thoroughly honest. Martin is not really outdoorsy, he’s a little butt hurt about something, and he’s probably not that used to human company. And thus, his character is entirely articulated before he even speaks.

Torchia’s grounded, handy performance makes a perfect counterbalance, which prepares us for the two wildcards (played brilliantly by Reece Shearsmith and Squires).

It’s expert casting within top-notch visual storytelling. It’s also a bit exasperating, especially its closing moments. The drug-fueled mayhem and madness work to an extent, but also feel a bit like a narrative cheat.

For longtime Wheatley fans, In the Earth feels like a return to form – or at least a step in that direction. It delivers a couple of good wallops, too.

It’s no Kill List, though.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?