As colorful as a dream, Juan Diego Escobar Alzate’s feature
film debut Luz: The Flower of Evil looks like magic and brims with the
casual brutality of faith.
Set inside a religious community in the mountains of
Colombia, the film drops us into ongoing struggles with the group’s religious
leader, El Señor (Conrad Osorio). No one knows the devil as he does, he reminds
his daughter Laila (Andrea Esquivel).
She lives contentedly, devoutly, along with her two adopted
sisters. El Señor and the villagers consider the trio angels—just as they believe
the little boy chained up out back is the Messiah who will deliver the community
from its recent calamities.
Though never entirely detailed, the internal logic of the
film and the community is clear enough to feel simultaneously familiar and
horrifying. The way the filmmaker wrestles with what is and is not real, with
forgiveness and the morally ambiguous nature of man, and with our tendency to
blame God or the devil for our own shortcomings is frustrating and
intoxicating.
Alzate gets maximum impact for minimum budget thanks in
large part to Nicolas Caballero Arenas’s cinematography. His breathtaking visuals
add spooky richness, turning this Western of sorts into a beautiful, lyrical,
macabre Columbian folktale.
Lovely as it is, the film echoes of loss. The title itself conjures what is absent. As time wears on and the “angels” lose confidence in their father figure, remembered stories of the late mother figure Luz (Spanish for light) take the space for them that El Señor’s tales of God take for the rest of the community.
Luz: The Flower of Evil surprises as often as it relies on expectations to deliver its message. The film is more atmospheric than cautionary, its resolution a fitting end for characters’ whose own logic doesn’t likely reflect that of the audience. It is a vision, from its opening musical notes to its closing image, though, that marks a filmmaker worth discovering.
We haven’t been able to leave home in months, which means that home has kind of turned into its own horror show. For us, that’s Ohio, so we figured, why not celebrate?! In honor of our own home grown horror show, we dug into the best horror movies set right here in OH-IO!
5. Scream 2 (1997): Windsor College, OH
Updating his celebratory meta-analysis of genre clichés, Craven checked back in on Sydney Prescott (Neve Campell) and crew a couple years later, as the surviving members of the Woodsboro murders settled into a new semester in the little Ohio liberal arts school of Windsor College. The movie Stab, based on the horrors Sydney and posse survived (well, some didn’t survive) just two years ago is already out and screening on campus, but has it inspired copycat killers?
Craven, working again from a screenplay by Kevin Williamson, goes even more meta, using the film-within-a-film technique while simultaneously poking fun at horror sequel clichés in his own horror sequel.
And in the same way Scream subverted horror tropes while employing them to joyous results, the sequel – funny, tense, scary, smart, and fun – manages to find freshness by digging through what should be stale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG0oUO4mK4A&t=29s
4. Tragedy Girls (2017): Rosedale, OH
Heathers meets Scream in the savvy horror comedy that mines social media culture to truly entertaining effect.
Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) are looking for more followers to improve their brand, and they have been doing a lot of research to make their content more compelling. The Tragedy Girls plumb their small Ohio town’s surprising death toll with more insight than the local police seem to have. Where do they get their knowledge?
Provocative.
Hildebrand and Shipp (both X-Men; Hildebrand was the moody Negasonic in Deadpool while Shipp plays young Storm in the franchise proper) nail their characters’ natural narcissism. Is it just the expectedly shallow, self-centeredness of the teenage years, or are they sociopaths? Who can tell these days?
3. The Faculty (1998): Herrington, OH
The film exaggerates (one hopes) the social order of a typical
Ohio high school to propose that it wouldn’t be so terrible if all the teachers
and most of the students died violently, or at least underwent such a horrific
trauma that a revision of the social order became appealing.
Indeed, in this film, conformity equals a communicable disease.
Adults aren’t to be trusted; high school is a sadistic machine grinding us into
sausage; outcasts are the only true individuals and, therefore, the only people
worth saving. Director Robert Rodriguez pulls the thing off with panache, all
the while exploring the terrifying truth that we subject our children to a very
real and reinforced helplessness every school day.
Interestingly, the infected teachers and students don’t turn into
superficial, Stepford-style versions of themselves. For the most part, they
indeed become better, stronger, more self-actualized (ironically enough)
versions, which is interestingly creepy. It’s as if humanity – at least the
version of it we find in a typical American high school – really isn’t worth
saving.
2. Trick ‘r Treat (2007): Warren Valley, OH
Columbus, Ohio native Michael Dougherty outdid himself as writer/director of this anthology of interconnected Halloween shorts. Every brief tale set in sleepy Warren Valley, Ohio compels attention with sinister storytelling, the occasional wicked bit of humor and great performances, but it’s the look of the film that sets it far above the others of its ilk.
Dougherty takes the “scary” comic approach to the film—the kind you find in Creepshow and other Tales from the Crypt types—but nothing looks as macabrely gorgeous as this movie. The lighting, the color, the costumes and the way live action bleeds into the perfectly placed and articulated moments of graphic artwork—all of it creates a giddy holiday mood that benefits the film immeasurably.
Dylan Baker (returning to the uptight and evil bastard he perfected for his fearless performance in Happiness) leads a whip-smart cast that includes impressive turns from Brian Cox, Anna Pacquin, Leslie Bibb and Brett Kelly (Thurman Merman, everybody!).
And it’s all connected with that adorable menace, Sam. Perfect.
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): Springwood, OH
Teens in suburban Ohio share nightmares, and one by one, these teens are not waking up. Not that their disbelieving parents care. When Tina woke one night, her nightgown shredded by Freddie’s razor fingers, her super-classy mother admonished, “Tina, hon, you gotta cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dreamin’. One or the other.”
Depositing a boogieman in your dreams to create nightmares that will truly kill you was a genius concept by writer/director/Clevelander Craven because you can only stay awake for so long. It took everyone’s fear of nightmares to a more concrete level.
The film was sequeled to death, it suffers slightly from a low budget and even more from weak FX that date it, but it’s still an effective shocker. That face that stretches through the wall is cool, the stretched out arms behind Tina are still scary. The nightmare images are apt, and the hopscotch chant and the vision of Freddie himself were not only refreshingly original but wildly creepy.
“Lord knows where a person who ain’t saved might end up.”
Indeed. The constant fight to overcome the worst in ourselves lies at the heart of The Devil All the Time, director Antonio Campos’s darkly riveting realization of Donald Ray Pollock’s best-selling novel.
Bookended by the close of World War II and the escalation in Vietnam, the film connects the fates of various characters living in the small rural towns of Southern Ohio and West Virginia.
Arvin (Tom Holland), the son of a disturbed WWII vet (Bill Skarsgård), fights to protect his sister (Eliza Scanlen) while he ponders his future. Husband and wife serial killers (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough) look for hitchhikers to degrade, photograph and murder. A new small town preacher (Robert Pattinson) displays a special interest in the young girls of his congregation.
It’s a star studded affair—Mia Wasikowska, Haley Bennett and Sebastian Stan joining as well—but every actor blends into the woodsy atmosphere with a sense of unease that permeates the air. No stars here, all character actors in service of the film’s unsettling calling.
Pollock’s prose created a dizzyingly bleak landscape where Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy might meet to quietly ponder man’s inhumanity to man. Campos unlocks that world courtesy of Pollock himself, who narrates the film’s depravity with a backwoods folksiness that makes it all the more chilling.
As rays of light are constantly snuffed out by darkness, Campos (who also co-wrote the screenplay) uses Pollock’s voice and contrasting soundtrack song choices to create a perverse air of comfort.
Redemption is a slippery aim in and around Knockemstiff, Ohio, and grace is even harder to come by. With a heavier hand, this film would have been a savage beating or a backwoods horror of the most grotesque kind. Campos and his formidable ensemble deliver Pollock’s tale with enough understatement and integrity to cut deeply, unnerving your soul and leaving a well-earned scar.
Documentaries can be frustrating, especially political
documentaries. They warn you about coming disasters you hadn’t predicted, show
you the brutality and ugliness in parts of the world you hadn’t seen, reinforce
that ulcerous dread in your gut about humanity on the whole. You can basically
only hope they also show you a way out.
Mercifully, All In: The Fight for Democracy does
that. But first it upbraids your apathy about voting by detailing the harrowing
history of Americans who had to take a beating, even die, just to exercise that
right. Then it details the meticulously detailed strategy in place and being
executed right now to keep you from exercising your right, now that you understand
its value.
Filmmakers Lisa Cortes and Liz Garbus wisely anchor their
facts to Georgia’s gubernatorial race of 2018. The core storyline, narrated by the
Democratic candidate in that race, Stacey Abrams, is of that election’s rampant
and open-to-pubic-view suppression of Georgia votes. Abrams’s opponent, Brian
Kemp, had been an architect of voter suppression as Georgia’s Secretary of State:
closing polling places, purging voting rolls and instituting legislation that
made voting more difficult.
It was incredibly successful for him. Expect to see more of
it.
If that sounds cynical, it is. It’s also a major point of the film. But Cortes and Garbus (and Abrams) have a more idealistic goal, which is to point out something important to every American citizen regardless of party: Democracies only work when citizens decide what politicians do, not vice versa. When citizens vote, we can make the decisions. We can determine who is in office and what they need to fight for and against. And if they don’t do it? We can vote them out.
But we can only do that if we can actually vote, which is
why politicians who don’t want to do their jobs enacting the will of the people
work tirelessly to make it harder and harder for Americans to cast their
ballots.
The history is well told between effective speakers and
illustrative animations, but it’s the insidious nature of voter suppression and
its modern execution that is equal parts enlightening, terrifying and
frustrating.
So make a plan. Verify your polling location. Double check
that you are still on the rolls. (Ohio is especially guilty of stifling the
vote.) Vote early.
Hey, it’s been a pretty easy going year. Feel like a movie?
Well, first time feature filmmaker Rodd Rathjen has one for
you and you’re not going to like it, but you should watch it anyway. Buoyancy
shadows a 14-year-old Cambodian boy sold into slave labor on a Thai fishing
trawler.
I know, but stay with me.
In his feature debut behind the camera, Rathjen wisely
relies on naturalistic performances from mainly non-professional actors to
recreate the circumstances rather than dramatize them.
Sarm Heng is Chakra, a put upon adolescent bristling at the
limitations of his life. There’s the universal element of adolescent rebellion,
here tied to far more than angst. Chakra does manual labor rather than going to
school, and as kids in uniform whiz by him on bicycles, and cars on the nearby
highway come and go, his stagnancy and the back breaking monotony awaiting him
in adulthood press down on him.
He follows an opportunity to sneak away from home and get a
ride out of the country, where he’ll make real money working in a factory. It’s
OK if he doesn’t have the $500 fare to leave the country, he can work that off
in his first month.
That’s not how it actually works, and we spend the rest of
the film watching as Chaka’s realization comes to him in bits and pieces that
he will probably never leave this rickety fishing boat.
Rathjen’s film ends with sobering facts concerning the
modern slave trade in Southeast Asia, with as many as 200,000 boys and men
currently missing and believed to be held in bondage on fishing boats. The
filmmaker’s verité style helps us understand how this happens. There’s no boisterous
villain detailing the scheme, no, “Ha! You belong to me now!” No one tells you
you’re never being paid, never going home. You simply adjust to your
circumstances or you die.
There’s little dialog once Chakra leaves the boys in the
village behind, but Heng doesn’t need it. The evolution of this character hangs
on his face. It’s a remarkable performance, especially from a kid who’s never
acted before.
Heng gets an assist from two actors with some experience. An
utterly heartbreaking Mony Ros is the middle aged man who falls prey to the
scheme in the hopes of providing for his family. The camaraderie between these
two characters is powerful, and it’s a theme Rathjen mirrors in Chakra’s
relationship with the ship’s captain, played with menacing relish by Thenawut
Ketsaro.
What they create together is harrowing, but it’s also a brilliant piece of filmmaking that needs to be seen.
Aah, the woods. It is almost overwhelming in its defiance of
civilization, its sheer magnitude of just plain nature. Shakespeare set his
magic there, but a lot of horror filmmakers lean closer to Lars Von Trier’s
proclamation: Nature is Satan’s church.
Making his feature debut as both director and co-writer,
Minos Nikolakakis conjures a spooky fairy tale that makes much ado about nature.
Panos (Prometheus Aleifer), a city doctor looking for a
simpler, more isolated existence, moves to a remote Greek village to become the
town’s only (and apparently first) doctor. Winding through wooded, mountainous
roads on his way to his new home he nearly runs down a lovely young woman, who
promptly disappears back into the woods.
Once in the village, Panos discovers tight-lipped locals, superstition and boredom—all of which leads him on a quest to figure out who that girl in the woods might be.
It’s to Nikolakakis’s credit as a visual storyteller that so
many familiar elements still work to cast a spell. The film explains very
little. It sprinkles clues about, but relies on your familiarity with the way
folk tales work to lead you into an unusual take on the genre. There’s nothing
overstated or campy about Nikolakakis’s fairy tale trappings.
Aleifer’s understated charisma—his penetrating stare, his abiding
sadness—creates a strong center for the story. A melancholy mixture of logic
and longing, his bearing articulates the dizzying, frustrating mixture of
emotions and circumstances that trap Panos.
Anastasia Rafaella Konidi’s earthy version of the succubus
intrigues consistently. She vacillates between demanding and imploring, but
never feels genuinely sinister. And we’re never entirely sure whether the
doctor sees his plight in the woods as a dream or a nightmare, and that
shifting reality generates dizzying dread.
The film’s weakest element is the presence of co-writer John De Holland in the role of Panos’s protective half-brother, George. The performance is shaky enough that the first act suffers badly—the first impression is of a movie not worth your time.
Luckily De Holland has considerably less screen time through
the remainder of the film. Still, when George does appear intermittently he
punctures the spell Nikolakakis and the remainder of the cast has conjured and
it takes a while to recreate the mood.
The way the story resolves itself is a puzzle, and not an especially satisfying one. With Entwined, Nikolakakis boasts some impressive storytelling instincts, but there’s still room for growth.
The first tale of Mulan—a story that’s has been told
and retold for centuries—dates to an epic poem written more than 1500 years ago
in China. Back in 1998, Disney made its first attempt to capitalize on the girl
power message of the daughter who hides her identity to take her father’s place
in battle.
As part of the company’s live action re-imaginings of those
old animated films, Mulan comes back today.
Yifei Liu plays the young warrior in a version that takes
its material seriously. Don’t expect a wisecracking little dragon this
go-round. With the PG-13 rating and the multiple and violent battle sequences,
this one wasn’t made with the youngest fans in mind.
Director Niki Caro is not Asian, which makes her an unusual
and potentially inappropriate choice to helm a story so entrenched in Chinese
folklore. She hasn’t made as impressive a film as Mulan since her 2002
coming of age tale, Whale Rider, and it is no doubt on that film’s
account that the New Zealander got the call from Disney.
She certainly does justice to the message of empowerment, as
expected. What you might not expect given her previous films is her virtuosity
in filming beautiful, elegant and eye-popping action.
The fight choreography is wonderous, as are the gorgeous
vistas. Caro’s Mulan is a spectacle and it’s too bad it won’t be shared
across big screens.
There’s a simplicity to the storyline that allows Caro and
her cast to create wonder with the visuals, and Liu’s earnest portrayal suits
that aim. The screenplay remains true to the folktale’s message in spots where ’98
animated version betrayed its more conventional view of female power.
There are no songs and dances here, but there is magic nonetheless.
Countless movies over the years have pondered what it might feel
like to be immortal. Writer Jon Dabach, in four separate tales with one thread
in common, wonders what it would be like not to be able to die.
His film Immortal strings together these stories,
each one directed by a different person (Tom Colley, Danny Isaacs, Rob
Margolies and Dabach himself), each one depicting one person’s relationship
with deathlessness.
The composite contains a horror short, two thrillers and one
anguished romance.
Chelsea, starring the great Dylan Baker, offers a
somewhat overwritten first act. Baker is beloved old high school English
teacher Mr. Shagis, Chelsea (Lindsay Mushet) is the school’s star athlete, and
today’s lesson is symbolism.
Baker’s as nuanced and fascinating as always in a short that
starts things off with a solid smack.
Of the balance, Mary and Ted is most effective. Assisted
suicide advocates film a video of the longtime married couple played lovingly
by Robin Bartlett and Tony Todd. We, along with the crew, get to know them—their
love, their suffering—and then the crew leaves them to their task.
I feel like I want to send Dabach a thank you note for this
one, just to see Tony Todd this tender. The sub-baritone voiced horror icon (Candyman,
Night of the Living Dead) delicately wields emotion and heartbreak here
in a way we’ve certainly never seen from this actor. Bartlett offers an
outstanding counterpoint, the believable resignation in her delivery weighing down
every line.
A hit and run victim exacts precise revenge in Warren, which takes a particularly solitary view: So you just found out you can’t die. What do you do now? The absolute ordinariness, the down-to-earthiness of this one’s delivery—as well as the charmingly odd investigator—give it real appeal.
Even the one that feels most predictable takes a wildly
unpredictable turn—one the filmmakers do not shy away from capturing on film.
In each, there’s an element of discovery that punctuates the story. Dabach and
his team of directors capture a wide range of emotions and attitudes, but leave
the audience wondering just enough.
Immortal is essentially an anthology of short films, and in fact, the pieces do not intersect, nor do they clarify much. Instead, they offer four slices of life—well, slices of not death—and an intriguing look at what death means to us.
What were we looking for? Reboots/remakes that are superior to the original. There are more than you think. In the podcast, we run through eight horror reboots that are superior to the original, kick around another handful that are Even Stevens, and argue about several that could maybe go either way (depending on which one of us you’re talking to). So, you know, have a listen.
5. Dawn of the Dead
Zack Snyder would go on to success with vastly overrated movies, but his one truly fine piece of filmmaking updated Romero’s Dead sequel with the high octane horror. The result may be less cerebral and political than Romero’s original, but it is a thrill ride through hell and it is not to be missed.
The flick begins strong with one of the best “things seem fine but then they don’t” openings in film. And finally! A strong female lead (Sarah Polley). Polley’s beleaguered nurse Ana leads us through the aftermath of the dawn of the dead, fleeing her rabid husband and neighbors and winding up with a rag tag team of survivors hunkered down inside a mall.
In Romero’s version, themes of capitalism, greed, and mindless consumerism run through the narrative. Snyder, though affectionate to the source material, focuses more on survival, humanity, and thrills. (He also has a wickedly clever soundtrack.) It’s more visceral and more fun. His feature is gripping, breathlessly paced, well developed and genuinely terrifying.
4. Suspiria
Luca Guadagnino continues to be a master film craftsman. Much as he draped Call Me by Your Name in waves of dreamy romance, here he establishes a consistent mood of nightmarish goth. Macabre visions dart in and out like a video that will kill you in 7 days while sudden, extreme zooms, precise sound design and a vivid score from Thom Yorke help cement the homage to another era.
But even when this new Suspiria—a “cover version” of Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo classic—is tipping its hat, Guadagnino leaves no doubt he is making his own confident statement. The color scheme is intentionally muted, and you’ll find no men in this dance troupe, serving immediate notice that superficialities are not the endgame here.
3. The Ring/Ringu
Gore Verbinski’s film The Ring – thanks in large part to the creepy clever premise created by Koji Suzuki, who wrote the novel Ringu – is superior to its source material principally due to the imagination and edge of the fledgling director. Verbinski’s film is visually arresting, quietly atmospheric, and creepy as hell.
From cherubic image of plump cheeked innocence to a mess of ghastly flesh and disjointed bones climbing out of the well and into your life, the character of Samara is brilliantly created.
Hideo Nakata’s original was saddled with an unlikeable ex-husband and a screechy supernatural/psychic storyline that didn’t travel well. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger did a nice job of re-focusing the mystery.
Sure, it amounts to an immediately dated musing on technology. (VHS? They went out with the powdered wig!) But still, there’s that last moment when wee Aidan (a weirdly perfect David Dorfman) asks his mom, “What about the people we show it to? What happens to them?”
At this point we realize he means us, the audience.
We watched the tape! We’re screwed!
2. The Thing/The Thing From Another World
The 1951 original The Thing From Another World is a scifi classic, and every inch of it screams 1950s. The good guys are good, the monsters are monsters. Everything has its place. It’s reassuring.
John Carpenter’s remake upends all that with a thoroughly spectacular tale of icy isolation, contamination, and mutation.
A beard-tastic cast portrays a team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic who take in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in an isolated wasteland with barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.
This is an amped up body snatcher movie benefitting from some of Carpenter’s most cinema-fluent and crafty direction: wide shots when we need to see the vastness of the unruly wilds; tight shots to remind us of the close quarters with parasitic death inside.
The story remains taut beginning to end, and there’s rarely any telling just who is and who is not infected by the last reel. You’re as baffled and confined as the scientists.
1. The Fly
As endearing and fascinating as we find Kurt Neumann’s 1958 Vincent Price vehicle, it just doesn’t quite have the same impact once you’ve seen Jeff Goldblum peel off his fingernails.
Not because it’s gross—and it is gross AF—but because he’s fascinated by the process itself. It’s the scientist in him.
David Cronenberg knows how to properly make a mad scientist film, especially if that madness wreaks corporeal havoc. But it’s not just Cronenberg’s disturbed genius for images and ideas that makes The Fly fly; it’s the performance he draws from Goldblum.
Goldblum is an absolute gift to this film, so endearing in his pre-Brundlefly nerdiness. He’s the picture’s heartbeat, and it’s more than the fact that we like his character so much. The actor also performs heroically under all those prosthetics.
