There is something cathartic in watching the brazenly wrong-headed Eddie Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) and her enabling bestie Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) of Absolutely Fabulous make bad decisions. This summer, they take their Bollinger, ciggies, Botox and bags of coke to the big screen. The result is Moderately Fabulous.
The British sitcom has enjoyed sporadic but popular runs on BBC since the early Nineties. Saunders – who also writes – pokes fun at celebrity culture while she and Lumley offer a master course in physical comedy, onscreen chemistry and unseemly humor.
Will the boozy duo’s quest for the swingin’ celebrity life ease as they sashay into their sixties? Of course not.
Eddie’s PR firm has fallen on hard times. Her champagne fridge is empty and her credit cards are “broken.” What she needs is one big client. Good luck! Kate Moss is between PR agents. If Eddie and Patsy can finagle a meeting at the upcoming fashion show without knocking Moss into the Thames and drowning her, setting off a social media frenzy, not to mention an all-out police manhunt, they’ll be back in the Bolly in no time.
Though the plot is almost painfully thin, padded with a veritable cameo-gasm (the highlight of which is a hilarious Jon Hamm), Saunders keeps the raucous one-liners flowing. And their wisdom is, as usual, spot on.
Tough night of boozing and pill popping? Freshen up with a little spritz of after birth.
Don’t think of family members as attachments. “They’re parasites, ticks, danglers.”
And the best advice yet: “Avoid the Jacuzzi – it’s a smoothy of old sperm.”
Yes, these are still the most delightfully horrible people in the world, and Ab Fab is at its best when it remembers this. Their generational issues are not meant to be resolved lovingly, wistful moments of regret are antithetical to their credo, and God knows no lesson should ever be learned.
Unfortunately, Saunders does not abide by these laws entirely. Director Mandie Fletcher can’t hide the threadbare script behind a runway’s worth of cameos, either. Like so many cinematic sit-com adaptations, Absolutely Fabulous would have played better on the telly. But thanks to Saunders and, in particular, the comedic genius of Lumley, you will laugh.
Writer/director Mickey Keating says his newest effort, Carnage Park, owes a debt to Sam Peckinpah and Peter Watkins – and their influence is certainly apparent, right down to the film’s title, cribbed from Watkins’s desert terror Punishment Park. Still, the film itself boils down to a poor man’s Wolf Creek as directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Actually, that sounds a lot better than it is.
It’s the California desert of 1978. Two armed men carrying a bullet wound, bag of cash and hostage flee a small town bank heist. They lose a trail of cops via a hidden, hilly dirt road.
Big mistake.
All the swagger, dusty boots and retro Seventies soundtrack in the world can’t shield Scorpion Joe (James Landry Hebert) and farm girl hostage Vivian (Ashley Bell) from the much larger danger they’ve just driven into.
Keating’s amassing quite a list and variety of indie horror films. His style is homage. Where Carnage Park aspires to the gritty look and desperate feel of the road pics of the indie American Seventies, last year’s Darling offered a stylish ode to both Kubrick and Polanski.
This approach need not feel derivative. Let’s be honest, Tarantino’s become among the most lauded and watched filmmakers of his generation by doing the exact same thing. The big difference is that QT’s take on all the cinema that has come before is filtered through his own lunatic genius, the final product becoming uniquely, fantastically his own.
There’s something more workmanlike, less inspired in what Keating does.
That’s not to say Carnage Park is an abject failure. A game cast keeps the film intriguing. Bell is deceptively savvy (aside from a few wildly idiotic mistakes, but let’s be honest, screenwriter Keating is to blame for those). Genre favorite Pat Healy chews some scenery, playing against type as the damaged Vietnam vet cliché, while Larry Fessenden (a regular and welcome contributor to Keating’s canon) shows up for a quick and gory moment or two.
But from the bleached out yellow of the scenery to nearly every set piece, Keating’s habit of lifting from other films takes on the feel of compulsion. Larceny, even: The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Reservoir Dogs – the list is bloody, hip and endless. And tired.
Keating has proven many strengths in his few years in filmmaking, but it is time for him to develop his own style.
Since Bonnie and Clyde and probably before, cinematic lovers on a bloody rampage have been entertaining and freaking out audiences the world over. Their escapades can be as grimly beautiful as Terrence Malick’s incandescent Badlands, or as bloody as – well, as the films we celebrate today. Dangerous lovers can really build a body count, as you’ll see here. Ain’t love grand?
5. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Here’s a bizarre idea for a musical: The barber upstairs kills his clients and the baker downstairs uses the bodies in her meat pies. Odd for a Broadway musical, yes, but for a Tim Burton film? That sounds a little more natural.
As in most of Burton’s best efforts, Sweeney Todd stars Johnny Depp in the title role. Depp is unmistakably fantastic – consumed, morose, twisted with vengeance – and he’s in fine voice, to boot.
Helena Bonham Carter – ever the perfect Goth girl – gives Mrs. Lovett a wicked survivor streak balanced by a tender, pining affection. The romance dream sequence is a riot, and so perfectly Burton-esque. The two actors offset each other brilliantly, while their onscreen duo deserves credit for efficiency, if nothing else.
With Burton’s help, Depp found another dark, bizarre anti-hero to showcase his considerable talent. With Depp’s help, Burton gorgeously, grotesquely realized another macabre fantasy.
4. Hellraiser (1987)
Hedonist Frank Cotton solves an ancient puzzle box, which summons the fearsome Cenobites, who literally tear Frank apart and leave his remains rotting in the floorboards of an old house. Years later, Frank’s brother Larry moves into that house with his teenage daughter Kirsty and his new wife Julia (Clare Higgins) – who, oh yeah, also happens to be Frank’s ex-lover.
A gash on Larry’s leg spills blood on the floor, which awakens the remains of Frank, who then requires more blood to complete his escape from the underworld. Julia, both repulsed and aroused by her old flame’s half-alive form, agrees to make sure more blood is soon spilled.
Though the Cenobites are the real, lasting terror in this film – and how cool were they! – the sexual chemistry between Julia and that bloody lump of Frank is never less than unsettling. Higgins makes the perfect evil stepmother while redefining the term blood lust.
3. Sightseers (2012)
From the guttural drone of the opening segment, this film announces itself as a dryly, darkly hilarious adventure. Frumpy Tina (Alice Lowe, perfection) needs a break from the smothering mum who blames her for their dog’s death. Against Mum’s wishes, Tina will take a road trip with her new beau, the equally frumpy Chris (Steve Oram, amazing).
The film is a wickedly fresh British take on a familiar theme. Oram and Lowe wrote the script, alongside director Ben Wheatley’s go-to scribe (and wife) Amy Jump. The result is so absurd and hilarious – few films have had so much fun with moral ambiguity.
Wheatley blends the dark comedy of his first film, Down Terrace, with the sense of the unexpected that elevated Kill List to create enormously entertaining homicidal madness. It helps that his cast could not be better, draining all the glamour of the road trip assassin couple trope without relying on that as a gimmick. There’s a deeply British weirdness to the proceedings, which are handled with bone-dry aplomb by all involved.
2. The Hunger (1983)
Tony Scott’s seductive vampire love story has a little bit of everything: slaughter, girl-on-girl action, ’80s synth/goth tunage, David Bowie. What more can you ask?
Actually the film’s kind of a sultry, dreamily erotic mess. Catharine Deneuve is the old world vampire Miriam, David Bowie is her lover. The two spend years – perhaps centuries – together seducing victims. But he suddenly begins aging, and she needs to find a replacement. Enter Susan Sarandon as a medical specialist in unusual blood diseases and a fine actress who’s not above smooching other girls.
Bowie and Deneuve are both so effortlessly cool and sexy that you can almost forgive them their nighttime savagery. You find out just how dangerous he is once he begins the rapid-aging process, but once you get a peek into Miriam’s attic you find that she’s been far more dangerous – to her lovers and everyone else – for a very long time.
1. Alleluia (2014)
In 2004, Belgian writer/director Fabrice Du Welz released the exquisite Calvaire, marking himself a unique artist worth watching. Ten years later he revisits the themes of that film – blind passion, bloody obsession, maddening loneliness – with his newest effort, Alleluia. Once again he enlists the help of an actor who clearly understands his vision.
Laurent Lucas plays Michel, a playboy conman who preys upon lonely women, seducing them and taking whatever cash he can get his hands on. That all changes once he makes a mark of Gloria (Lola Duenas).
Du Welz’s close camera and off angles exaggerate Lucas’s teeth, nose and height in ways that flirt with the grotesque. Likewise, the film dwells on Duenas’s bags and creases, heightening the sense of unseemliness surrounding the pair’s passion.
Duenas offers a performance of mad genius, always barely able to control the tantrum, elation, or desire in any situation. Her bursting passions often lead to carnage, but there’s a madcap love story beneath that blood spray that compels not just attention but, in a macabre way, affection. Alleluia is a film busting with desperation, jealousy, and the darkest kind of love.
What began as a project with the intended audience of two has rightly become a theatrical release because De Palma – a documentary on the polarizing filmmaker – can’t help but mesmerize.
Directors Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow lovingly roll camera while seasoned filmmaker Brian De Palma, now 75-years-old, walks us through his catalog. He shares anecdotes, talks candidly about successes and failures, and complains about the studio system. All of this is intriguing, but it’s the documentarians’ clear admiration for De Palma’s style, and the filmmaker’s charismatic presence as he articulates his craft, that make this film fascinating.
Baumbach and Paltrow juxtapose moments from De Palma’s films with images from other, related works – most predictably and illustratively, Hitchcock’s. While De Palma has never shied away from his obsession with Hitch, the doc allows him to expound on his both his fascination and his reasons and strategies for using the cinematic vocabulary Hitchcock created.
De Palma’s career has been scattershot at best, four decades littered with artistic peaks and valleys (Carlito’s Way versus Bonfire of the Vanities) as well as box office successes and flops (Mission: Impossible versus Casualties of War).
Movie buffs will love the candor and in-the-know stories from a man who came up with a bunch of scruffy new directors including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. De Palma passed the script for Taxi Driver on to his buddy Marty thinking it was more up his alley; meanwhile, he and Lucas auditioned for Carrie and Star Wars simultaneously – same actors, same auditions, same time.
But for true cinefiles, it’s his talk of technique that will compel. Why the long tracking shots? When and why do split screens work? What is he looking for in a score and how does he achieve it?
There are so many other topics picked at because, love him or hate him, De Palma is a director with such a quirky, brazen style that the potential for analysis is almost unending. The one topic he seems a bit too canny about concerns criticisms that his films are preoccupied with sexual violence against women, a topic he shrugs off. And though Baumbach and Paltrow slyly pair the filmmaker’s words with an image of an 18” drill bit, shot from between a man’s legs as it penetrates his nubile victim, they do not press De Palma with follow up questions. Disappointing.
But it’s a rare misstep in a film that manages to capture so much from De Palma as a film historian, a Hollywood insider, and an iconic American director and storyteller.
“Why are you troubled,” Jesus asked, “and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see — for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
Biblical quotes are a common, often effective way to open a horror film. Of course, they usually come from Revelation or contain some other wrath-of-God kind of sentiment. Don’t be fooled, though, because South Korean writer/director Hong-jin Na knows where he’s doing with his third genre-bending epic, The Wailing – even if you don’t.
Though the true meaning of this quote won’t take hold until the final act, it presents many questions. Is this film supernatural? Demonic? Or, given the corporeal nature of the quote, is it rooted in the human flesh?
Yes.
That’s what makes the quote so perfect. Na meshes everything together in this bucolic horror where superstition and religion blend. The film echoes with misery, as the title suggests. The filmmaker throws every grisly thing at you – zombies, pustules, demonic possession, police procedural, multiple homicides – and yet keeps it all slippery with overt comedy.
In rural Korea, lackadaisical police sergeant Jong-gu (Do-won Kwak) is baffled by the rash of ugly homicides striking the village. And they are ugly – not only because of their brutality, but because of the boil-covered state of each perpetrator.
Some locals blame toxic mushrooms, but others say it’s the work of that solitary foreigner (Jun Kunimura) who recently moved to the outskirts of town.
Backwater beliefs, small town hysteria, mob mentality – or is it? The filmmaker toys with your preconceived notions, partly by crafting Jong-gu – with the help of the dramatically agile Kwak – into an endearingly flawed hero. A comically bumbling cop, Jong-gu’s sudden appreciation of the seriousness of the situation only amplifies tensions because he – like the audience – is in over his head. As he puzzles through clues in an attempt to save his stricken daughter (an amazing Hwan-hee Kim), Na’s feats of misdirection come to an unbearable head.
The languid pace, which makes the most of DP Kyung-pyo Hong’s gorgeous photography, may feel like needless expansion, but it serves to let images and questions settle. It lets the misery soak in a bit.
If horror films reflect the hysteria and fear of the moviegoing public, then we, as a planet, are definitely afraid of our children – or of children in general. There are countless examples of murdering, mutant, bloodthirsty, demonic youngsters. Whether they are born monsters or have been claimed by the Dark One, whether they belong to roving bands of toughs or happen to be your own evil offspring, children seem to play upon our deepest fears. So let’s celebrate that today with a count down of the scariest children ever!
6. Let The Right One In (2008)
In 2008, Sweden’s Let the Right One In emerged as an original, stylish thriller – and the best vampire flicks in years. A spooky coming of age tale populated by outcasts in the bleakest environment, the film breaks hearts and bleeds victims in equal measure. Kare Hedebrant‘s Oskar, with his blond Prince Valiant haircut, falls innocently for the odd new girl (an outstanding Linda Leandersson) in his shabby apartment complex. Reluctantly, she returns his admiration, and a sweet and bloody romance buds.
As sudden acts of violence mar the snowy landscape, Oskar and Ali grow closer, providing each other a comfort no one else can. The film offers an ominous sense of dread, bleak isolation and brazen androgyny – as well as the best swimming pool scene perhaps ever. Intriguingly, though both children tend toward violence – murder, even – you never feel anything but empathy for them. The film is moving, bloody, lovely and terrifying in equal measure.
5. The Bad Seed (1956)
The minute delicate Christine’s (Nancy Kelly) husband leaves for his 4-week assignment in DC, their way-too-perfect daughter begins to betray some scary behavior. The creepy handyman Leroy (Henry Jones) has her figured out – he knows she’s not as perfect as she pretends.
You may be tempted to abandon the film in its first reel, feeling as if you know where the it’s going. You’ll be right, but there are two big reasons to stick it out. One is that Bad Seed did it first, and did it well, considering the conservative cinematic limitations of the Fifties.
Second, because director Mervyn LeRoy’s approach – not a single vile act appears onscreen – gives the picture an air of restraint and dignity while employing the perversity of individual imaginations to ramp up the creepiness.
Enough can’t be said about Patty McCormack. There’s surprising nuance in her manipulations, and the Oscar-nominated 9-year-old handles the role with both grace and menace.
4. Them (2006)
Brisk, effective and terrifying, Them is among the most impressive horror flicks to rely on the savagery of adolescent boredom as its central conceit.
Writers/directors/Frenchmen David Moreau and Xavier Palud offer a lean, unapologetic, tightly conceived thriller that never lets up.
A French film set in Romania, Them follows Lucas and Clementine, a young couple still moving into the big rattling old house where they’ll stay while they’re working abroad. It will be a shorter trip than they’d originally planned.
What the film offers in 77 minutes is relentless suspense. I’m not sure what else you want.
Creepy noises, hooded figures, sadistic children and the chaos that entails – Them sets up a fresh and mean cat and mouse game that pulls you in immediately and leaves you unsettled.
3. 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 is the king of corporeal horror, and The Brood is among the best of the filmmaker’s early, strictly genre work. Reed and Eggar both are 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.
But it’s the climactic image of procreation – of motherhood and childbirth – and the way the filmmaker and his leading lady subvert that life-giving moment, turning it into something beastly, that will stick with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVQkJJxjdIM
2. The Omen (1976)
Gregory Peck brought impenetrable gravitas to this film, making everything seem very serious and worthwhile. This could be no ordinary horror flick – not with Atticus Finch in the lead.
Peck plays Robert Thorn, a rising politician and best friend to the President of the United States. He agrees to a delivery room switcheroo when he’s told his own son perished during childbirth, but another baby born simultaneously was orphaned. He brings home the tot, his loving wife (Lee Remick) none the wiser.
Eventually she does develop a sixth sense about the cherubic little Damien, though.
This mid-Seventies gem is gloriously over-the-top with its self-serious approach to the coming of the antichrist. Richard Donner – who would go on to direct a couple Superman movies, a bunch of Lethal Weapons, as well as the Goonies – made a name for himself as a director with this bloated and deadly serious bible thumper.
The film’s sinister elements – Mrs. Baylock, that dog, and Jerry Goldsmith’s intensely creepy (and Oscar winning) score – combine with Peck’s elegant heroism to keep the film fascinating, but all would have been for naught except for Harvey Stephens’s impish perfection as Damien.
1. The Ring (2002)
Gore Verbinski’s film achieves one of those rare feats, ranking among the scarce few Hollywood remakes that surpasses the foreign born original, Japan’s unique paranormal nightmare Ringu.
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.
This is basically the story of bad mom/worse journalist Rachel (Naomi Watts) investigating the urban legend of a video tape that kills viewers exactly seven days after viewing.
The tape itself is the key. Had it held images less surreal, less Bunuel, the whole film would have collapsed. But the tape was freaky. And so were the blue-green grimaces on the dead! And that horse thing on the ferry!
And Samara.
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 is brilliantly created. (It’s actually a full grown man who climbs herky-jerky out of the TV.)
A young city girl wants to make a difference. She has no idea what she’s doing, and stirs up a lot of dust in a small rural community. Also there are dogs.
Sara Gold works for the United Animal Protection Agency (UAPA). The offices are pristine and corporate, mysterious for an agency which can’t afford to even pay the people manning its desks, but Sara is up for a “promotion” anyway and is ready to make a name for herself.
Sara is assigned to go undercover, posing as a second-year vet student and eager summer intern, at the Holloway family owned and operated dog breeder. There have been allegations of inhumane circumstances, and armed with a handful of wireless cameras, Sara is determined to get justice for the dogs she loves so much.
The strangest thing about The Dog Lover is that there really aren’t many dogs, not in the way you’d hope. While the opening credits are composed of various internet clips of people interacting with their beloved family pets, no one in the film seems to actually love dogs. Sara doesn’t seem to even know any herself. The Holloway family has a house dog, but no one is shown connecting with it.
Director Alex Ranarivelo spends a lot of time peering at big brown eyes through chain link. These shots are sure to tug at heart strings, but fail to create a real connection between any of the actors and their companions.
This puzzle has a lot of pieces that just don’t seem to fit. The struggling family dog breeding business also has horses, a very expensive animal to house. The only time a horse appears useful is when strapping young Will Holloway rides up, shot-gun in hand, to save Sara from threatening red-neck “backyard breeders.” Yes, he actually rides in on horseback.
A lot of work is spent undermining Sara at the outset. When she arrives at the small airport, Will suggests she might want to reconsider. “Reconsider what?” It’s her shirt that’s apparently offensive. Will explains that his father is very conservative. Sara is wearing a v-neck t-shirt.
When she joins the Holloway family for dinner on her first night, she declines an offer of chicken, explaining that she’s a vegetarian. The family reactions vary from disbelief to dismissal. The mother laughs that she was a vegetarian when she was in vet school too, but that she eventually “couldn’t resist.” When Sara hesitates to hold hands at prayer, the father asks gruffly “You aren’t an atheist, too?”
The Dog Lover promises to have heart, but never delivers. It settles somewhere close to Hallmark channel original. The plot isn’t much, the actors are middling to good, and there are some standard Americana shots, including a running herd of horses for good measure.
The film concludes with a warning message fading on a black screen. “Investigate before you donate.” Turns out, the animal protection agency were the bad guys all along, small town America reigns supreme, and the backyard breeders who were actually doing animals harm never get their comeuppance. Woof.
For a madcap family movie, The Secret Life of Pets raises some deeply disturbing questions. How much libido could fuel a romantic subplot when the lovers have been neutered? Why does “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” cue up during a drive into Manhattan? And exactly where is the autonomic system located on a sausage?
Alas, The Secret Life of Pets, directed by Chris Renaud and Yarrow Cheney (Despicable Me franchise veterans), answers none of these questions. Instead, the movie offers up a diverting animated comedy with plenty of action but little cohesion or earned emotion to back it up.
The plot, as much as it exists other than to fling a Bronx Zoo’s worth of animals across New York City set pieces, hints at a Toy Story-light conflict between earnest terrier Max (Louis C.K.) and the newly adopted Duke (Eric Stonestreet), a gruff Newfoundland with a sad past.
It’s fitting that Duke, a shaggy dog, gets the action going. Once he and Max find themselves captured by the only two animal control officers in a city of 8 million, the sole remaining tension is whether Max and Duke will learn to get along before or after a successful rescue effort, as led by Gidget the tougher-than-she-looks Pomeranian (Jenny Slate) and Chloe, a scene-stealing cat (Lake Bell).
The Secret Life of Pets features inspired physical comedy, in a Buster-Keaton-meets-future-theme-park-ride kind of way that turned the Minions into cash cows. But it’s Pixar without the pathos: the movie never misses a chance to ignore any avenue for genuine emotion, whether it’s Duke learning what happened to his former owner or the streetwise villain Snowball (Kevin Hart, playing to the back row) hinting at the dark desires that animals really harbor toward their fickle owners.
It’s the single-note drone of the movie’s action that makes the glimpses of what might have been all the more remarkable. An extended fantasy sequence in a Brooklyn sausage factory takes place for no reason other than setting up a song-and-dance number that’s a drugged-out tribute to edible body horror, complete with dancing hot dogs made rapturous by their imminent consumption. None of this advances the plot in any way, but it’s a rare delight in a movie mostly content to coast.
In the end, predators and prey make amends, Max and Duke are ready for a sequel and a reliable supporting cast have made their case for a spinoff. Not bad for a day’s work in New York. But the real secret is that our pets are very much like their human counterparts: they share our likes and dislikes, our strengths and our flaws, and — most of all — our willingness to settle for just good enough.
Back in 2012, Aubrey Plaza starred in an eccentric little SciFi adventure based on a Craigslist ad. Safety Not Guaranteed was a surprised (and welcome) hit, partly because of writer Derek Connelly’s fertile imagination, partly because of the genuinely bizarre ad: Wanted: Somebody to go back in time. This is no joke. You’ll get paid after. Bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have done this once before.
That is ripe.
Since then, two all-American bros took to Craigslist to get dates to a wedding they were forbidden to attend stag for fear they would harass all the female guests and become generally unruly. That particular ad has already been milked of every conceivable bit of interest, with TV spots AND a book. A book! And yet, Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien (writers behind the Neighbors franchise) have adapted the ad for the new film Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.
It also stars Plaza, alongside Anna Kendrick, Zac Efron and Adam Devine as the destination-wedding-bound foursome.
Jake Szymanski directs the raunchy comedy that pits two lovable losers trapped in their never ending adolescence against the equally immature but more scheming young women just looking for a free trip to Hawaii.
Efron and Plaza co-starred in the very-R comedy Dirty Grandpa earlier this year, with Devine and Kendrick sharing the screen in both Pitch Perfect films. The four of them are likeable and – to varying degrees – talented. They’d have to be comedic lightning bolts to get this off the ground, though.
With a plot this thin, the film has to lean too heavily on shock situations and over-the-top language to generate any energy. Expect moms to call sons “assholes,” sisters to bare some pelt, and Aubrey Plaza to demonstrate sexual technique using texting as the metaphor.
The cast offsets the raunch with character earnestness (except for Plaza, who’s all in), but the film always feels too slapped together to hold water and a bit to mean-spirited to merit more than a smile here and there.
The whole thing is so thin, so desperate for content, it’s as if some idiot based an entire screenplay on a 400 word Craigslist ad.
The year is half over already?! Well, hell. Suppose we should argue over the best the genre has had to offer thus far? Senior Filmmaking Correspondent Jason Tastevin joins us to debate whether 10 Cloverfield Lane is a horror film or not, whether The Witch is any good, and to count down the best in horror so far this year.
5. Southbound
“For all you lost souls racing down that long road to redemption…”
Successful anthology horror is difficult to pull off. Southbound manages to do so as it spins its diabolical tale, interlocking five stories of travelers on a particularly lonesome road.
The film opens strong as two bloodied passengers rush to a desolate gas station to clean up and take stock of their situation – a situation we’re given very few clues about. But the immediately menacing, we-know-something-you-don’t-know atmosphere inside that gas station sets us up for the nightmarish episode that will unravel.
What follows are pieces on similarly distressed wayfarers – a rock trio with a flat tire, a distracted driver, a brother searching desperately for his missing sister, a family on an ill-planned vacation, then back to the original bloodied pair heading for gas.
Rather than feeling like five shorts slapped together with a contrived framing device, the segments work as a group to inform a larger idea – together they help to define this particular and peculiar stretch of highway.
4. Nina Forever
Brothers Ben and Chris Blaine crafted their feature debut as a “fucked-up fairy tale.” The truth is, that tag line sells their bleakly comedic, emotionally relevant, disquietingly familiar film short. Though you may laugh, Nina Forever swims a wellspring of sadness.
Check out girl Holly (Abigail Hardingham, wonderful) falls hard for mopey, over-aged stock boy Rob (Cian Barry), who’s still suicidal over the motoring death of his longtime girlfriend Nina (Fiona O’Shaughnessy). Whenever the two living lovers hook up, Rob’s viscera-and-glass-shard-covered ex writhes her way into their embrace.
As an analogy for those awkward relationships you just can’t seem to let go of, Nina Forever excels in its amplification of all that is awkward and unruly. The filmmaking duo, who also write, avoid clichés and easy answers while their talented cast creates unpredictable and dimensional characters.
There is real depth and authenticity to a film that constantly surprises without really feeling contrived. Few seasoned directors handle tonal shifts with as much confidence as the Blaines in their feature debut.
3. Baskin
If you’ve ever wondered what hell might look like, first time feature director Can Evrenol has some ideas to share. They are vivid. You’ll swear they even have an odor.
Evrenol’s Baskin is a loose, dreamily structured descent into that netherworld in the company of a 5-man Turkish police unit. (Baskin is Turkish for “police raid.”) The serpentine sequencing of events evokes a dream logic that gives the film an inescapable atmosphere of dread. We are trapped along with this group of somewhat detestable, somewhat sympathetic men as they respond to a call for backup in an “off the map” nearby area. What they find is deeply disturbing.
Evrenol’s imagery is morbidly amazing. Much of it only glimpsed, most of it left unarticulated, but all of it becomes that much more disturbing for its lack of clarity.
There are moments when Baskin feels like a classier, more stylishly made Nightbreed, but there’s no camp factor here. Just a surreal exploration of the corruptibility of the human soul, and its final destination.
2. Green Room
The tragic loss of 27-year-old talent Anton Yelchin makes this one bittersweet. Young punk band the Ain’t Rights is in desperate need of a paying gig, even if it is at a rough private club for the “boots and braces” crowd (i.e. white power skinheads). Bass guitarist Pat (Yelchin) eschews social media promotion for the “time and aggression” of live shows, and when he accidentally witnesses a murder in the club’s makeshift green room, Pat and his band find plenty of both.
Along with concertgoer Amber (a terrific Imogen Poots), they’re held at gunpoint while the club manager (Macon Blair from Blue Ruin) fetches the mysterious Darcy (Patrick Stewart, gloriously grim) to sort things out. Though Darcy is full of calm reassurances, it quickly becomes clear the captives will have to fight for their lives.
As he did with Blue Ruin, writer/director Jeremy Saulnier plunges unprepared characters into a world of casual savagery, finding out just what they have to offer in a nasty backwoods standoff. It’s a path worn by Straw Dogs, Deliverance, and plenty more, but Saulnier again shows a knack for establishing his own thoughtful thumbprint. What Green Room lacks in depth, it makes up in commitment to genre.
Only a flirtation with contrivance keeps Green Room from classic status. It’s lean, mean, loud and grisly, and a ton of bloody fun.
1. The Witch (2015)
The unerring authenticity of The Witch makes it the most unnerving horror film in years.
Ideas of gender inequality, sexual awakening, slavish devotion to dogma, isolationism and radicalization roil beneath the surface of the film, yet the tale itself is deceptively simple. One family, fresh off the boat from England in 1630 and expelled from their puritanical village, sets up house and farm in a clearing near a wood.
As a series of grim catastrophes befalls the family, members turn on members with ever-heightening hysteria. The Witch creates an atmosphere of the most intimate and unpleasant tension, a sense of anxiety that builds relentlessly and traps you along with this helpless, miserable family.
As frenzy and paranoia feed on ignorance and helplessness, tensions balloon to bursting. You are trapped as they are trapped in this inescapable mess, where man’s overanxious attempt to purge himself absolutely of his capacity for sin only opens him up to the true evil lurking, as it always is, in the woods.
