Wes Anderson with a Black Mass fetish and a feminist point of view, Biller wrote/directed/produced/edited/set-designed/costume-designed/music-supervised the seductive sorcery headtrip The Love Witch.
Elaine (Samantha Robinson – demented perfection) needs a change of scenery. Driving her red convertible up the seacoast highway toward a new life in northern California, her troubles – and her mysteriously dead ex-husband – are behind her. Surely, with her smart eyeshades and magic potions, she’ll find true love.
Shot in dreamy 35mm and produced in lurid Technicolor, the film achieves a retro aesthetic unparalleled in modern cinema. And yet, a mid-film cell phone and third act DNA evidence pulls you from the hip Sixties spell of burlesque shows and tea rooms – but don’t mistake this for anachronism. Instead, it fits perfectly into a narrative that sees a deranged lunatic embrace archaic gender roles with the rage of one already ruined by them.
Enough cannot be said for Biller’s imagination for detail – from the contents of a “witch bottle” to the retro look of every actor, the era-evoking flatness in line delivery to the excruciating art adorning Elaine’s walls.
The orgy of colors, textures and dessert treats signifies the sensual madness eating away at poor, narcissistic Elaine.
Biller’s casting sense is as keen. Every actor not only fully embraces the weirdness of Biller’s spell, but each looks like they just walked out of a Sears Roebuck catalog circa 1968.
Expect a loose confection of a plot, as Elaine molds herself into the ideal sex toy, winning and then tiring of her trophies. This allows Biller to simultaneously reaffirm and reverse gender roles with appropriately wicked humor.
Biller pulls thematically from her 2007 film Viva, but her epic knowledge of the sexual revolution era Black Magic Woman flicks (Oh, there are plenty: Mephisto’s Waltz, Season of the Witch, The Velvet Vampire) and her clear growth in her craft help The Love Witch exceed all expectations.
There is something scary about hospitals, especially the old, abandoned ones and those creepy, windowless floors! But what about the patients? We take a look – limiting our discussion to actual patients in actual facilities, not involuntary patients in homes, garages and storage units (although that turned out to be quite a list, so maybe later…)
5. Patrick: Patrick (1978)
One of a number of underappreciated Aussie horror flicks of the Seventies, Patrick is the first pairing of director Richard Franklin and writer Everett de Roche. The two would make a number of solid genre flicks together, but it was probably the popularity of this film that sparked the Ozploitation craze.
Here, big-eyed Robert Thompson is an unblinking catatonic in a Melbourne hospital. Though nothing’s going on in his body and eyelids (honestly, the fact that he never blinks and no one give him eyedrops might generate more unease than anything else in the movie!), his mind is very busy. Especially now that he’s keen on nurse Kathie (Susan Penhaligon).
Thompson owns the screen, regardless of his state, and effortlessly creates dread. Franklin ups the ante with some elevator claustrophobia and the general tension of being in a hospital. This is a low budget indie and suffers a bit from sprawl, but when Patrick turns his head and scares his new nurse. I still jump.
4. Mary Hobbes: Session 9 (2001)
Nyctophobia, dissociative identity disorder, creepy tapes, an abandoned asylum – the pieces are there for a spooky horror movie. Credit writer/director Brad Anderson for swimming familiar waters and yet managing a fresh, memorable and disturbing film.
Gordon (Peter Mullan) needs some cash – and some sleep. Troubles at home aside, he’s having problems getting his latest assignment completed on time. With just a skeleton crew and an unreasonable turnaround time, Gordon has to remove the asbestos from the long-abandoned Danvers Lunatic Asylum.
He sneaks away a lot to call his wife and listen to these therapy tapes he’s found. Meanwhile, a couple of his guys are bickering over a shared girlfriend, another one’s a pothead, and then there’s Gordon’s sweet, mulleted nephew Jeff (Brendan Sexton III), who’s afraid of the dark.
Atmosphere is everything in this film. Performances are outstanding and Anderson has some seriously scary moments in store. Oh, poor Jeff.
3. Elvis Presley: Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
Who wants to see Bruce Campbell play Elvis Presley?! We do.
Director Don Coscarelli (Phantasm) brings Joe R. Lansdale’s short story to the screen to depict the horror and sadness of aging, although its done with such humor that the film is impossible not to love.
Elvis never died, he swapped places with an impersonator who died and ever since then he’s been stuck living someone else’s life. And now he’s in this low-rent old folks home where his only real friend is a guy who believes he’s JFK (Ossie Davis). Obviously, when they realize that the recent spate of patient deaths is due to a mummy sucking the life from people through their assholes, who’d believe these knuckleheads?
The script is great and Coscarelli knows exactly how to make the most of budgetary limitations. The entire cast soars, but Campbell and Davis have such incredible chemistry that the film delivers not just laughs, message, and some scares but genuine tenderness.
2. Nola Carvath: The Brood (1979)
Dr. Hal Ragland – the unsettlingly sultry Oliver Reed – is a psychiatrist leading the frontier in psychoplasmics. His patients work through their pent-up rage by turning it into physical manifestations. Some folks’ rage turns into ugly little pustules, for example. Or, for wide-eyed Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), rage might turn into bloodthirsty, puffy coated spawn. This is Cronenberg’s reimagining of procreation, and it is characteristically foul.
Cronenberg wrote the film during his own ugly divorce and custody battle. He created a fantasy nightmare rooted firmly in the rage, despair, and the betrayal that comes from watching someone who once loved you turn into someone who seems determined to harm you.
Cronenberg is the king of corporeal horror, and The Brood is among the best of the filmmaker’s early, strictly genre work. Reed and Eggar are both unseemly perfection in their respective roles. Eggar uses her huge eyes to emphasize both her former loveliness and her current dangerous insanity, while Reed is just weird in that patented Oliver Reed way.
1. Patient X: The Exorcist III (1990)
You can absolutely never outdo Friedkin’s original masterpiece, but William Peter Blatty – who wrote the novel The Exorcist – takes a nice stab with the third installment.
Who is this secret Patient X? Or, who’s controlling him? Kinderman (played in this film with much gusto by George C. Scott) will live through a nightmare to figure it out. Jason Miller makes a heartbreaking return, but honestly, Blatty has so much fun with the rest of the patients, the film offers constant, weird terror.
Deadites hit the big city in Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, the latest instalment in the old Sam Raimi demon possession franchise. As was true with its predecessors, blood will rain, viscera will spew, chainsaws will bite, and the dead will most definitely rise. Just don’t expect any jokes this time around.
We open, as usual, on a cabin. Despite the top-notch title sequence, though, this episode will not be a cabin-in-the-woods horror. Cronin, who’s credited with the script as well, takes the Necronomicon and all its secrets into an urban high rise to see what hell he can raise.
Beth (Lily Sullivan) has some troubling news and wants to lay low with her sister’s family for a bit. But her sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) is about to have some real troubles of her own because an earthquake opened a hole from the parking garage to a vault beneath the building. That vault held a book and some vinyl.
Lessons we should all have learned by now:
Don’t play unknown albums backwards.
Don’t read from flesh bound books.
Stay out of elevators. I know this one is pretty inconvenient, but honestly, it’s for the best.
Cronin (The Hole in the Ground) tosses in some loving homages to the Raimi films. Who doesn’t love a demon POV shot?! In fact, he uses disorienting angels and shots throughout the film to beautifully bewildering effect. A fisheye-of-death through a peephole is just one of the film’s many horrifying highlights.
Sutherland takes the most abuse as devoted mother turned chief Deadite, a role her lanky, angular frame is ideally suited to. She’s terrifying, but the most disturbing idea at play in this sequel is that children are fair game.
Cronin’s vision offers none of the slapstick, Three Stooges-esque humor of Raimi’s original trilogy. In fact, it leans far closer to the tone of Fede Alvarez’s underappreciated 2013 genre treasure, Evil Dead. And while this installment’s nods to the iconography of the original set is wonderful, Evil Dead Rise also recalls [Rec] and Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves: Communion and even a little bit of Kubrick’s The Shining, Carpenter’s The Thing (or maybe Yuzna’s Society) – all exceptional horrors and worthy inspiration.
It’s also fun that Evil Dead Rise boasts an altogether new storyline, since so many films in the franchise are reworkings of earlier episodes. That storyline is somewhat slight, but what the film lacks in depth it makes up for with inspired visuals, solid casting, and so much blood.
To Catch a Killer is a title that begs to be forgotten, bland and obvious and broad as it is. The film is about a disgruntled and underappreciated cop with the skills to get inside the mind of a killer, skills that are being nurtured by a grizzled detective who sees potential.
So far so yawn.
And yet, filmmaker Damián Szifron’s thriller is weirdly compelling.
His visuals are on point. Fireworks, cop cars, aerial shots, sudden impact – clarity in presentation tells us what is going on long before any actor speaks.
Those actors don’t hurt. Shailene Woodley delivers an un-showy but emotionally raw central performance as a beat cop quietly desperate for a meaningful challenge.
She’s aided by Ben Mendelsohn as the beleaguered senior investigator. While Det. Lammark doesn’t offer Mendelsohn the opportunities for pathos that allowed him to create iconic characters in Slow West, Mississippi Grind, Killing Them Softly, Animal Kingdom and more, the veteran finds enough humanity to make the detective memorable.
Politics, sycophancy, scapegoating and bad decisions cripple the investigation, giving Szifron and co-writer Jonathan Wakeham a chance to impress with their script as well. No broad strokes, the script indicts media, greed, cowardice, sexism, and capitalism in turn and finds reason to empathize with the least likable characters.
Still, it follows the beats you expect from a film called To Catch a Killer about an unsung but brilliant cop finding her legs as an investigator. The film can never fully escape that dull familiarity.
The film is solidly built on understated performances, and it makes viable points. But it can’t quite stick the landing.
When her mom dies, rather than live with her grandparents, Marge (Jess Gabor) decides to track down her long-lost dad (Steve Zahn) in Mexico in directors Marny Eng and E. J. Foerster’s film, Gringa.
It makes sense that our narrator would choose to find a dad she doesn’t know rather than live with her mother’s parents. The little we see of them shows they’re too critical, nothing like Marge’s supportive mother.
This is one of the film’s strengths – we’re able to glean a lot of information about Marge, her mother, and her grandparents during the film’s first fifteen minutes.
The other strength is the actors. Each is captivating on screen, particularly Gabor. She is a relatable, sympathetic young woman who fails to fit in. She copes with her depression by binging, her bulimia telegraphed early to help us understand this complicated young woman.
Unfortunately, Patrick Hasburgh’s script tries to be too many things at once, and none of the issues raised are given the weight they deserve. If the film had struck the right comedic balance, this could be overlooked, but because there is a seriousness to the tone, these difficult issues come across as shallow.
Alcoholism and bulimia are treated as switches a person can turn on or off at will. Marge’s problems are apparently solved by a month-long trip to Mexico with a near-perfect father. The fact that he left Marge and her mother when Marge was two is too easily forgiven, and when the climax comes, it’s predictable and uninspired.
This is also a sports movie, bringing all the tropes you would expect. Unlike her team at home in California, Marge – the gringa – quickly fits in with her soccer teammates in Mexico. They’re initial reluctance to have her on their team is quickly replaced by appreciation when she helps them win a critical game. Several montages take the place of moments that would have been better represented with honest dialogue.
Yet, the movie has its moments. Zahn is charming, as are several members of the supporting cast. Gabor is easy to root for; you want her and her dad to find their way. But the film is a patchwork of too many ideas and tones to effectively hook the audience. You might be carried along by what works, but it’s more likely you’ll disappointed by what doesn’t.
Asking as a fan who is starting to thinkHereditary was autobiographical.
Aster’s new 3-hour self-indulgent opus Beau Is Afraid revisits the scene of his 7-minute 2011 short film Beau, in which a middle-aged man loses his keys and is delayed in his plan to visit his mother.
For his exponentially longer feature, Aster employs the inarguably brilliant Joaquin Phoenix.
Phoenix is Beau Isaac Wasserman from Wasserton and he is living a nightmare of undiluted Freudian scope. Things seem fine as we open on his session with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson, slyly hilarious), who prescribes some new meds. But Beau’s walk back to his apartment is a descent into Escape from New York territory. Escalating tension leads to a naked, corpse-leaping, maniac-fleeing car accident that lands Beau in the highly medicated home of Roger (Nathan Lane, an absolute treat) and Grace (Amy Ryan, always welcome).
But he needs to get to his mom’s house.
Aster generates much of the same kind of primal, ceaseless tension of the Safdies’ Uncut Gems or Aronofsky’s Mother. But he embraces the absurdity of it all in a way the others did not. At times, his film is astonishingly beautiful. There’s a surreal theatricality to the middle portion that’s stunning, but even the comparatively mundane scenes are shot gorgeously.
And as odd as they are, performances throughout are great. Patti LuPone, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Zoe Lister-Jones, Armen Nahapetian, Hayley Squires, Richard Kind, Julian Richlings and a barely glimpsed but nonetheless memorable Bill Hader all add intrigue as they populate Beau’s increasingly desperate and blisteringly imaginative quest to get to his mom’s place.
But damn, it is long. And it asks a lot. Beau Is Afraid is essentially a 3-hour string of traumatic dream sequences, beautiful but shapeless, leading to something out of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. And if Hereditary triggered your mother issues, for the love of God, do not see Beau Is Afraid.
The similarities between Aster’s 2018 horror are legion: the house, the attic, the physically beaten son, a headless body – you’re almost waiting for Mona (LuPone) to deliver the line “I am your mother!”
All told, Beau Is Afraid is a fascinating, gorgeously realized vision and I don’t think you’re going to like it. I can’t say I liked it. I admire it, am stunned by it, and kind of want to see it again. Maybe I do like it, I can’t tell.
One thing I know for sure, Aster is still working some shit out.
I imagine a lot of people have thought about getting out of a bad marriage and wondered, What’s the worst that could happen?
Those people should talk to Samantha Kolesnik and Bryan Smith. Or maybe they shouldn’t. The duo’s unusual A-side/B-side horror tale Beleth Station is like a premise wrapped in a dare that really digs into What’s the worst that could happen?
Both writers take the same set of characters, same basic idea of being trapped in a dying town off the Pennsylvania highway, and then each sees how bad it can get.
Kolesnik’s take, A Night to Remember, comes first, following Krista and Nick as they flee Krista’s stultifying marriage. They find themselves in need of roadside assistance in an isolated stretch – a common enough beat in horror, but one that Kolesnik takes in depraved and alarming directions. What follows is an experiment in degradation.
There is a deep hopelessness in this story, a kind of grim poetry that’s so beautifully written you commit to the long, bleak, terrifying haul. You will want to look away, but Kolesnik’s prose compels you.
Both stories explore the primal terror of helplessness, each wallowing in the evil that men do, each almost mocking the naivete of faith in the human condition. Still, they are vastly different tales. Smith’s The Gauntlet feels more cinematic, like Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs meets Stephen King’s The Running Man.
Conspiracy, brutality, revolution all fuel a tale that drops you in the middle of the action and never lets up. Two desperate pairs – young townies dying for escape, new lovers lured in from the outside – commit increasingly horrendous acts to garner freedom.
For Smith, the question isn’t how bad can it get as much as how far will you go, and what will you be when it’s over? He has a flair for both imagery and pace that makes The Gauntlet all but impossible to stop reading.
The synopsis for writer/director Akorede Alli’s Ran Mi Lowo describes a film about a young lady, Yemisi (Omowunmi Dada), in high school within Nigeria who is tasked with solving a mystery. That mystery? Exactly who is sexually assaulting her fellow female students, including her best friend, and threatening their lives if they expose who he is to anyone. Nearly all of the victims quit school shortly after their assault, with some committing suicide…or were they murdered?
Yemisi believes that the perpetrator has a connection to the school, but the administrator won’t take her concerns seriously. But who is doing it? Is it the lecherous gatekeeper who constantly hits on the female students as they arrive every morning? Is it one of the male teachers? And if it is one of the teachers, would anyone even believe Yemisi (or the victims) without hard evidence? After all, they’re respectable members of the community and how often do people actually believe women in these circumstances? If they won’t believe them, then what is Yemisi to do?
If you’re thinking that this Nigerian film is a hard-hitting drama…you’re wrong! As deathly serious as all of the above sounds, Ran Mi Lowo couldn’t be further from awards season-style brutal dramatic fare. In fact, its closest cinematic cousin is that of the ‘70s Italian thriller, aka the giallo!
Many of the classic gialli hallmarks are on display here. There’s the protagonist with a connection to the arts, as Yemisi wants to be an investigative journalist. She’s surrounded by an overly-horny cast of characters. There are occasional swirling camera movements and POV shots. We’re also presented with weird dolls, strange subplots with no direct connection to the main story, and even the director’s own hands being those that commit onscreen murder. Speaking of the the festishistic fiend, once revealed they even give an appropriately-twitchy psychotic performance and lay out a traumatic backstory befitting the subgenre.
This is not to say that Akorede Alli entirely nails the subgenre. The writing falls flat at times and while gialli fans can appreciate superfluous subplots and (intentional or not) wonky subtitles, those aren’t exactly the best things to copy from the decades-old subgenre. Still, it’s a surprising and intriguing debut from Alli. One worth seeing for those who appreciate wilder foreign genre fare.
