Tag Archives: Hope Madden

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Did Nazi That Coming

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Sisu

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Is there anything in all the world more satisfying than watching Nazis die? Perhaps not.

Jalmari Helander, the genius behind 2010’s exceptional holiday horror Rare Exports, squeezes a lovechild from Leone and Peckinpah by way of Tarantino (natch). The result, Sisu, a kind of WWII-era Scandinavian John Wick.

That sounds borrowed, but it doesn’t feel borrowed. It feels stylized but never derivative.

Rare Exports star Jorma Tommila plays Aatami Korpi. Korpi used to be a soldier. He left that – and his reputation as a “one man death squad” – behind, instead roaming Lapland with his dog and his horse in search of peace and gold.

After finding one, the other becomes even more elusive.

The Nazis, their loss imminent, are leaving scorched earth behind as they move across Lapland. Their paths cross Korpi’s. It doesn’t go well for the Nazis.

Helander’s confident vision meshes majestically with the cinematography of Kjell Lagerroos, capturing the lonesome beauty of Lapland in one minute, the next minute bursting with the frenetic energy and viscera of action. The stunt choreography and editing in the dizzying array of carnage-laden set pieces are breathtaking. Knives, guns, fisticuffs, tank fire, regular fire, land mines, a hanging, airplanes – a seemingly endless string of magnificently crafted violent action keeps the pace breathless.

Speaking of breath, there’s an underwater sequence that’s a real gem. And a great deal of Sisu’s success is in the novelty of its action. We’ve seen about 11 hours of John Wick by now. It’s hard to do something new.

But Helander manages. Composers Juri Seppä and Tuomas Wäinölä also assist in lifting the heights of this spectacle, and it becomes as beautiful a celebration of bloodletting as we’ve seen for some time.

And though a final confrontation between Korpi and the ruthless SS Commander tracking him (Aksel Hennie) is never in doubt, it takes on a greater significance thanks to Helander’s clearly-drawn stakes. The Nazi is looking to buy his redemption, while Korpi sees the chance to finally escape his past.

Vengeance? Oh, that’s here, too, for both Korpi and some POWs who smugly warn their German captors of what is coming. They say the Finnish word for what the wandering stranger is does not translate, but that he is no ordinary traveler.

And the film is no ordinary travelogue. Clocking in at just 91 minutes, Sisu is perfectly lean, relentlessly mean, and consistently satisfying at every blood-soaked turn.

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Art & Craft

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Showing Up

by Hope Madden

Visual poet of the day-to-day Kelly Reichardt returns to screens this weekend with a look at art as well as craft in her dramedy, Showing Up.

Michelle Williams is Lizzy, a sculptor who’s not getting enough done for her upcoming show. It’s a small show in a small gallery not exactly downtown, but it’s a show and she’s got a lot of work left to do.

So does Jo (Hong Chau, one of three 2023 Oscar nominees in the cast!), Lizzy’s neighbor and landlord. In fact, Jo has two shows coming up, so who knows when she’ll be able to fix Lizzy’s water heater?

And just like that, Reichardt leaches the glamour from the art world, dropping us instead into a place far from glitzy but bewilderingly human.

Williams is characteristically amazing, her performance as much a piece of physical acting as verbal. You know Lizzy by looking at her, at the way she stands, the way she responds to requests for coffee or work, the way she reacts to compliments about her work, the way she sighs. Williams’s performance is as much in what she does not say as what she does, and the honesty in that performance generates most of the film’s comic moments.

Chau knocks it out of the park yet again, and like Williams, she presents the character of Jo as much in her physical action as in her dialog. The chemistry between the two is truly amazing, simultaneously combative and accepting, or maybe just resigned to each other.

Reichardt’s phenomenal cast does not stop there: Judd Hirsch (irascible and hilarious), John Magaro (sad with an undercurrent of potential danger), Andre Benjamin (chilling), Maryann Plunkett (frustrated) and Amanda Plummer (weird, naturally).

As is so often the case, the environment itself is its own character, every gorgeously mundane detail filmed in Reichardt’s go-to 16mm film. She and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt once again find the grace and beauty in the spots everyone else ignores.

Like Nicole Holofcener and Claire Denis, Reichardt invests her attention in the small moments rather than delivering a tidy, obvious structure. The result feels messy, like life, with lengths of anxiety and unease punctuated by small triumphs.

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Black Magic Woman

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The Love Witch

by Hope Madden

Anna Biller, everybody. Holy shit.

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.

 

Fright Club

Fright Club: Frightful Patients

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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.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Evil Dead Rise, Beau Is Afraid, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant & More

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Evil Dead Rise, Beau Is Afraid, The Covenant, Chevalier, Ghosted, Little Richard I Am Everything, To Catch a Killer, Gringa, Help Me

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Big City Nights

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Evil Dead Rise

by Hope Madden

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.

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War Horse, Revisited

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To Catch a Killer

by Hope Madden

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.

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Ari, Are You OK? Are You OK, Ari?

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Beau Is Afraid

by Hope Madden

Is Ari Aster all right?

Asking as a fan who is starting to think Hereditary 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.

Outtakes

An Exercise in Degradation

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Beleth Station

by Hope Madden

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.