Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer 4K [18]

Dir: John McNaughton 

The Film 

For years, Henry was whispered about. It began screening at film festivals in 1986, but went unreleased in the US until 1990, largely because its producers were upset that they hadn't been given a more classical slasher film. In fact, director John McNaughton’s second film, The Borrower, would have beaten it to cinemas by two years, had its original distributor not closed. The problem for Henry wasn’t that it was bad, it was well-received by festival audiences and critics, but its subject and matter of fact, disturbing, presentation led to problems finding distribution and with the MPAA (to say nothing of the fights with the BBFC when it came to the UK). Before release, the film was apparently passed around industry circles on VHS, and in a way that’s still how it feels like it should be seen: a grubby artifact passed under the table. The fact it’s getting a 4K release seems almost antithetical to the movie it is.

McNaughton had made a couple of TV documentaries for producers Waleed and Malik Ali; profiles of gangsters composed of archive footage. When a planned series on wrestling fell apart, they simply offered him the same budget to make a film, stipulating only that it should be a horror movie. After being shown a segment of the TV show 20/20 about Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to around 300 murders (few, if any, of which it is now thought he actually committed), McNaughton determined that this would be the subject for his film. 

In many ways, though set and shot in Chicago, Henry is reminiscent of the New York set exploitation movies of the 70s. At a production level the circumstances are similar: it was shot on 16mm, without permits, for a shoestring budget, by a cast and crew who, almost to a man, were working on their first film. More than that though, it has a gritty street level feel that permeates the film. Everything, from the back alleys where Henry (Michael Rooker) and Otis (Tom Towles) kill their victims to the very walls of the apartment they share with Otis’s sister Becky (Tracy Arnold), seems streaked with the accumulated dirt of the city. 

There are, intentionally, exploitation elements to the film that serve to lull us, as an audience, into a sense of security. The most classical of these is the murder when Henry and Otis go to buy a TV. The stolen goods dealer who is showing them their options is a slob, more than that he’s rude, abrasive, and insulting. Throughout the scene we know he’s going to get his ‘comeuppance’ (never mind that he’s a much lesser offender here; rude, rather than a serial murderer), we’re anticipating it, and when it comes it goes to almost silly lengths. It’s a very traditional death. What it sets up, however, is the central and most disturbing, sequence in the film. 

Before the TV murder, Henry looks largely at the before and after of murder, whether it’s the series of tableaux of victims that opens the film, or Henry walking into the flat he shares with Otis with a very nice guitar. Asked where he got it he says “I picked it up”, but we’re privy to the context, we just haven’t seen the body of the hitch-hiker who was carrying it before. We see Henry stalk potential victims, spotting them in public and following in his car; locked in, but able to abandon any that don’t present an opportunity. Rooker’s nonchalance in these before and after moments is chilling. When we see killings play out, Henry is little more affected, at least by his own actions. Otis is another matter. If Henry is controlled and careful, picking his victims, varying his MO to avoid detection, Otis is all abandon, the two are equally destructive, but Henry has a line, a sexual one, that he won’t cross and is upset when Otis does. 

This is where the film’s most controversial, and most pivotal, scene comes in. Where Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (in either version) looks into camera and goads us to justify our relationship to the depiction of violence on screen, McNaughton does the same thing in a much more insidious way. As we see the terrorisation and killing of a whole family unfold on a TV screen, we understand that we’re watching back something Henry and Otis have filmed, but it’s only late in the sequence that McNaughton breaks and shows us that they too are watching, and that Otis then rewinds the sequence, and puts it in slow motion. The film doesn’t have to come out and say it, the implication is clear: you’re doing the same thing as these monsters. How do you feel about that? It’s a sequence that echoes through the audience’s relationship to not just this film, but the serial killer genre as a whole. 

Between killings, Henry, both film and to some degree character, is almost banal. Rooker looks like every blue-collar guy, you believe the sense that the film puts across that he’s in no danger of getting caught not because he’s particularly smart (certainly he has no forensic awareness) but because he’s someone you wouldn’t look twice at. Until the moment, he doesn’t appear dangerous. In this way, Henry’s outward ordinariness becomes terrifying. It perhaps this, along with the fact that she seems to have been conditioned to expect and accept the very worst from men, that draws Becky to Henry. Through her eyes, Henry’s psychopathy isn’t as troubling as it should be, because she sees it directed at protecting her from Otis and his incestuous advances. 

These are difficult characters to play; all damaged, two of them irredeemably evil. Becky is the innocent of the group, naively looking past Henry’s nature, even after he disconnectedly tells her how he killed his mother. Tracy Arnold’s performance is the overlooked gem of this film; she gives us Becky’s innate decency, but also the damage that has resulted from her tough life and in her looking for someone to trust anywhere she can, even in a psychopath. Rooker and Towles dive deep into their reprehensible characters, giving horribly compelling performances. Towles’ Otis is a pathetic monster, emboldened by Henry to the worst of his violent impulses, but driven by his own urges to sexual crimes. If not exactly star-making, Rooker’s performance certainly gave him a career, and it remains his finest work. The only sense we get of acting is the fact that we sometimes sense Henry first trying to appear normal, and the mask slipping for a moment. This is most notable in the sequence when he’s playing cards with Becky, the distance in his eyes and his answers showing the blankness of the monster beneath his facade of normalcy. It’s a terrifying piece of work. 

Henry is the kind of film that could only have been made under the circumstances that it was: tiny budget, full creative freedom, and the luck of some incredibly talented people coming together. It’s among the bleakest and most pitiless films ever made, and even though the confessions it’s based on turned out to be fabricated, the reality is that somebody did these things (or things very like them) and it’s probable that the person was just as outwardly ordinary and often was just as free to go on with their life as Henry is by the end of this film. The film itself is a horror masterpiece, but what’s truly frightening about it is that we can be sure there were, and are, many, many Henrys out there. 

★★★★★ 

The Disc and Extras 

In this new edition, Henry looks outstanding. Presented in native 4K from a new restoration, the film almost certainly looks better than it ever has. The print is free of blemishes and, while grain is present, it doesn’t swarm the picture. The detail is excellent, accentuating the down and dirty feel of the film. It’s perhaps not up with the very best 4K presentations, but that's down to the limitations of the source format rather than the quality of the work here. 

The extras package is beyond exhaustive. Two booklets collect several essays on the film and the complete storyboards. There are three commentaries, all featuring John McNaughton. I’ve not had time to listen to them yet, but based on his contributions elsewhere, I’m sure they’re all engaging, but I suspect there’s also going to be significant overlap. A collection of deleted scenes and outtakes is interesting. It’s a pity the sound has been lost, but McNaughton’s commentary fills in the gaps. A 2005 documentary, running 50 minutes, is a useful overview and, happily, features all the key people, including Tracy Arnold, who doesn’t seem to have commented on the film that often outside of this feature. 

Elsewhere are filmmakers appreciations of Henry, a documentary on killers with cameras in cinema, and video essays on the film’s history with both the MPAA and the BBFC. Interview features with McNaughton are provided from around the time of the film’s release in 1990 as well as in retrospect, from 1998 and 2016. Finally among the video extras is an interview with the designer of the film’s startling theatrical poster. It will take you several full days to work through all the content here. Take into account the package: a hard case with new poster art, as well as a double-sided poster and 6 postcards, and this must qualify as one of 2022’s most comprehensive and best releases. 

★★★★★

Texas Chainsaw Massacre [2022]

Dir: David Blue Garcia

Like many things, horror franchises move in cycles. Occasionally, individual films start trends, but further franchise entries tend to be trying to catch up with them. The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre wasn’t so much a trendsetter as something that the films that came in its wake—very much including most of the eight various sequels, remakes and reboots—tried and failed to recapture the lightning in a bottle feel of. Tobe Hooper’s film was a nightmare to make; the set and costumes reeked, the set wasn’t especially harmonious, Hooper was a real taskmaster, and the dinner sequence was a more than 24 hour shooting day purgatory. As well as the grain conferred by a low-budget 16mm shoot, the film has an air of madness about it; a feeling of a waking nightmare that bleeds into every frame. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022, on the other hand, is a glossy-looking Netflix movie.

TCM 2022 is also chasing a trend, for legacy sequels, and most prominently the template set by Halloween 2108. The plot isn’t well developed, but as far as I can figure out chefs/influencers Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore) have bought the entire, almost totally deserted, town of Harlowe, Texas, and are arriving there to set up (apparently with about seven minutes to spare) for a busload of investors to come in and lease space from them to turn it into a tourist hotspot. Along for the ride are Dante’s girlfriend Ruth (Nell Hudson) and Melody’s sister Lila (Elsie Fisher). Soon after arriving, they find the local orphanage is still occupied by an old woman and her adult ‘son’. No prizes for guessing who the son is. The only real background we get on any of the characters is that Lila is a survivor of a school shooting, and thus very uncomfortable when, stopping for gas, the group sees a man with a large gun strapped to his waist, Of course, he turns out to be their contractor in Harlowe, Richter (Moe Dunford). 

Despite the lack of much story, Texas Chainsaw Massacre does seem to want to say something. It’s as confused here as in other areas. It seems to be against Melody and Dante coming in and buying up the town, perhaps trying to criticise gentrification, but if that’s what it wants to do the commentary might be more effective if they were turfing out more than the last two people from what is otherwise a ghost town. It mocks social media a little but doesn’t show that it knows anything about influencer culture. We never see anything of Melody and Dante’s content, nor is it really explained why that content makes Harlowe a place they think they could do something with. You have to wonder just how popular they are because I’d question whether even someone with as powerful a following as Kim Kardashian could pull off what they seem to be attempting here. 

What throughline there is to the film’s attempt at a message seems weirdly right-wing. The  “You’re canceled” joke, which works no better here than in the trailer, is a lazy trope of right-leaning ‘wit’, but what is truly distasteful is the way the film plays Lila’s backstory. Lila’s journey is one of not just losing her fear of guns but re-embracing them in the wake of her traumatic experience. It leaves a horrible taste in the mouth and gives the whole film a reactionary feel that, while not quite as bad, recalls last year’s odious Run Hide Fight.

Terrible and badly communicated as all this is, I do realise that suspect politics won’t be the main thing that people are coming to Texas Chainsaw Massacre either to see or to criticise. At just 73 minutes pre-credits, the saw has to rev up pretty quickly this time, dispensing with character beats to favour set pieces. On the plus side, at least there’s no messing about in getting to the meat of the film. On the other hand, this haste undermines its interest as a legacy sequel. For as much as it got wrong David Gordon Green’s Halloween did at least devote considerable time to re-establishing and letting us understand where Laurie Strode had ended up. If those beats were there for Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouéré, doing a decent enough job subbing for the late Marilyn Burns) they have hit the cutting room floor. There’s no insight into what she’s been doing for 45 years or more and less (beyond ‘the film’s not long enough’) into why she doesn’t take several chances she has. There is really no reason for both Sally and these random kids to be in this story. If it’s to be a legacy sequel, then there is something to be made of a weary Sally following one last lead to finally destroy this monster. If you want Leatherface to kill Gen Z Tik Tok users… fine, I guess, but I’m not sure that’s the same movie, especially at this running time.

To give director David Blue Garcia some credit, he came into a difficult situation with this film, replacing the original directors with a week of production already completed. I’m not a fan of the look of the film overall, especially the teal and yellow palette that he and cinematographer Ricardo Diaz arrive at for the entirety of the third act, but there are a few memorable images here, most strikingly Leatherface rising from a field of dead sunflowers. While the original film famously implies almost all of its gore, it’s fair to say that the rest of the franchise has been defined by excess in that area, and you have to hand it to this iteration; it goes for broke and doles out some memorably bloody carnage. While the way the bus sequence starts is a disaster, there are also some brilliantly gross moments as Leatherface chops his way through to the fleeing Melody and Lila, and the showdown with Sally is equally brutal (so much so that a later moment is total nonsense).

Character, as mentioned, isn’t the film’s strong suit, and that’s a pity because with a more robust script I could imagine this cast working well. In the brief preamble, though the dialogue clunks, the dynamic is convincing enough, and Yarkin and Fisher both have strong Final Girl energy about them. The problem is that film lacks either the will or the space to develop them enough for that to be something we can really hang on to. 

Like most of the other Chainsaw films, this one is never scary. In this respect the original works because the atmosphere simply drips with oppressive terror, while in Hooper’s sequel that’s gone, but I like and care about Stretch and, to a degree, Lou enough to be worried about what happens to them. Neither of those things is present here. The gloss of the way it’s shot strips away any real atmosphere, and there’s no opportunity to know the characters enough to care whether they live or die, so it’s not scary. For some, the simple thrill of the gore and the pace at which the film comes at you may be satisfying enough. That can be a lot of fun, but when you’re attempting, for at least the third time, to directly follow up one of the most uniquely terrorising films ever made, this just doesn’t… ahem… cut it.

★½

24FPS @ Raindance: Where's Rose?

Dir: John Mathis

After 8-year-old Rose (Skyler Elyse Philpot) goes missing, she is quickly found. Once she comes home though, it seems that only her brother Eric (Ty Simpkins) can see that she is not the same little girl who disappeared from her bed just hours before.

Where’s Rose? doesn’t suffer from a lack of ideas. Combining domestic horror with shades of possession movies and folk horror elements, it’s covering a lot of bases in an 83 minute running time. John Mathis’ screenplay clearly sets its cards on the table from the start: Eric is the golden boy; handsome, off to college on a full athletic scholarship, close to his family, but things start to run off the rails as he becomes convinced that his sister is no longer what she appears. However, we see cracks in this perfect facade even before Rose goes missing, notably from the self-confidence audiobook he has on his headphones, and the frosty atmosphere between him and the girl next door, Jessica (Anneliese Judge).

These broad hints, and the film’s rather unambiguous approach to Rose’s changed character, are a good indication of the issues with the film. Mathis tips his hand too much, letting us be ahead of the film at every turn. When one particular revelatory sequence comes, it feels almost purposeless, because the story elements have already been tied together with the one image that leads into it. This undermines a lot of the film’s impact, which is unfortunate because otherwise there is plenty here to admire.

The performances are strong all round, with former child actor Simpkins making a strong argument for himself as a leading man going forward. His compassionate big brother character credibly develops into something more complex and nuanced, always holding something back. Skyler Elyse Philpot has some cliché things to play as the film leans into the beats of the possessed child movie. That said, she grounds Rose as a sweet, fantasy-prone, little girl early on, and is heartbreaking when we find what lies behind that fantasy. Anneliese Judge has less to do, and her role being so small means that just about every moment she’s on screen has to clue us in to some backstory (through implication rather than exposition). She gives us huge amounts of resonant character detail with just body language and the occasional line. The fact she ends up letting us know rather too much is down to how her character is used, and a testament to rather than a problem with her performance.

On a surely limited budget, Mathis sometimes makes the semi-rural setting seem almost idyllic to grow up in. However, the woods around the houses also feel menacing and oppressive as they come inside via prints on many of the fabrics in Eric and Rose’s parents’ home. He also gets some excellent practical effects in the film’s last sequence.

It’s frustrating that Where’s Rose? doesn’t quite come together. The ingredients are all there, and the ending will probably stick with you. If only it weren’t one you got to quite a while before the film does.

★★★

Where's Rose? is available on Curzon Home Cinema until Midnight on November 4th

2021 Catch Up: Mortal Kombat and Wrong Turn

Mortal Kombat [2021]

Dir: Simon McQuoid

When I was a kid, there was a series of TV adverts for a wood varnish called Ronseal. They were very simple, saying that the product “Does what it says on the tin”. Mortal Kombat is cinematic Ronseal. I don’t mean that as a bad thing.

The last Mortal Kombat game I played was probably the third; the series’ last 16 Bit venture, and I saw Paul WS Anderson’s 1995 film once, and have never felt the need to revisit it, so I am not at all versed in the lore, but the story here is perfectly accessible to newcomers. MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is at the tail end of his career, but after a fight he’s told by Jax (Mehcad Brooks) that  his dragon shaped birthmark means he has been chosen as one of the champions of Earth for the upcoming Mortal Kombat championship. However, Shang Tsung (Chin Han) has dispatched his fighters—including Sub Zero (Joe Taslim)—to kill as many of Earth’s champions as possible, to win the tournament before it can start.

It is an odd choice, with a game as packed with characters to choose from as this one (the latest edition has 32, discounting some characters from other franchises) to create an entirely new character to act as the audience surrogate. That said, Lewis Tan, like the rest of the actors here, does what he can with fairly basic material. Where character should be, Cole has a wife and daughter (Laura Brent and Matilda Kimber) to protect. This does provide a link to Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), whose family Sub Zero murders in the prologue, but there’s not much more there than a couple of walking plot devices. The rest of the writing is largely functional, though Kano’s constant f bomb heavy quips, and casual misogyny towards Sonya (Jessica McNamee) get to be wearing pretty quickly. That said, this is Mortal Kombat. I suspect there is a deeper and richer backstory that fans might want to see, but as a casual viewer, I’m not really looking for great emotional depth here… I just want to see some good, bloody, fights.

On an action level, Mortal Kombat delivers. The fight the fans want to see is between Sub Zero and Scorpion, and we get one of those at either end of the film. Joe Taslim, though almost always masked, makes for a pretty menacing villain—it helps that the costume design is more intricate and less primary coloured than in the previous films—and his throwdowns with Sanada are fast, furious, and brutal. There is a little overcutting but the sequences aren’t just a blur of fists and feet. Director Simon McQuoid pulls back fairly frequently to allow us to see sequences of martial arts and emphasises the right moments, particularly the solidly impressive effects used to realise Sub Zero’s powers (a dagger frozen out of his opponent’s blood is the film’s single coolest image)  If anything, the film has bigger editing problems in its dramatic scenes, which indicate large chunks having been cut out, than during its fights. Each fighter has their own style, with Ludi Lin and Max Huang as Liu Kang and Kung Lao much more graceful than the pure brute force of Kano (Josh Lawson) and Jax. Sonya Blade is a little underused, and it’s strange to have her not be one of the chosen fighters in the beginning. The subplot of the fighters having to discover their special abilities isn’t a bad idea, but it’s underexplored and few of those abilities have any connection to even the loose sense we have of who they are. On the other hand, the effects do generally look cool, and they aren’t overused to the point that they become what the fights revolve around.

Mortal Kombat is no masterpiece; the action has its moments, but it doesn’t get close to some of the best work being done in the genre right now, whether that’s the John Wick’s of the world, the films Taslim was making back in Indonesia or even some of Scott Adkins’ DTV work and the threadbare story and characters don’t give us a lot to invest in. What it is, though, is fun. It ticks the boxes it needs to tick, it’s solidly entertaining and at 109 minutes including credits it doesn’t outstay its welcome. In this case, I’m perfectly happy with a bit of Ronseal filmmaking.

★★★

Wrong Turn [2021] 

Dir: Mike P. Nelson

There is an inherent challenge with remakes. Stick closely to the original film and that’s all people will see and comment on; either it’s too close and you might as well not have bothered, or every little change will be nitpicked and compared to the previous film. On the other hand, if you depart wildly from what has gone before then all you’re perceived to be doing is cashing in on a title, without delivering on the promises inherent in it. Wrong Turn, whatever its other qualities, does genuinely do its best to square this vicious little circle.

It no doubt helps that I have no investment in Wrong Turn. I saw the 2003 film when it came out on DVD and, while I liked it well enough, probably haven’t watched it more than once more in the following 16 plus years. I’ve also never seen any of the sequels, so I can’t claim any affection for it as a franchise. That said, the first 40 minutes or so of this version (written by original screenwriter Alan McElroy) feel pretty familiar. A group of six friends (on a hiking trip this time, rather than being waylaid by a car accident) find themselves lost in the Virginia woods and having to survive when they are threatened by a family of sorts living in the forest. The details have changed somewhat—particularly with the addition of a framing story about Scott (Matthew Modine), the father of our lead, Jen (Charlotte Vega), looking for his daughter six weeks after she has dropped off the map—but the basic shape of the film is similar enough that it makes some sense as a remake. The second hour, however, is very different and seems to have divided fans of the original film.  

In its second half the film takes a sharp diversion from the backwoods slasher it’s been hinting it would be, turning more to folk and survival horror, though with a generous helping of gore. Bill Sage plays a patriarch who still leads a family of sorts that one could call inbred, but both the society and the individuals within it are very different from those in the original. I can see how this bait and switch could be seen as a negative for fans of the franchise, but credit to McElroy and director Mike P. Nelson for trying something very different from the original, if not so much in its own right.

The character writing isn’t the strong suit here. Bill Sage’s performance; more restrained than you might expect, and more effective for it, is the standout. He also gets the best material McElroy has to offer. Jen is a fairly bland lead/final girl, there’s a potentially interesting turn involving her boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley), but it happens out of the blue, with some development this element might have been much more effective. The friend group is filled out with the asshole (Dylan McTee as Adam), the brain (Emma Dumont as Milla) and a gay couple (Vardaan Arora and Adrian Favela as Gary and Luis). These performances, and Matthew Modine’s, are fine and a more diverse cast where that diversity is treated largely as a given rather than a plot point is welcome, but that’s not to say that any of the characters has much of a personality. Like the small plot turn with Darius, Jen’s switch to badass for the film’s final act isn’t very well developed, and there’s no reason that two or three minutes couldn’t be spent to build up her sudden Lara Croft level prowess with a bow and arrow.

Behind the camera, Mike P Nelson delivers what's needed. An early sequence with a tree trunk rolling down a hill is well-executed, and the violence is made to feel brutal without always dwelling on detail that might betray what was likely not the biggest of budgets. The aftermath, however, particularly a couple of wince-inducing caved-in heads, is appropriately nasty. Like the screenplay, the direction doesn’t do anything wildly original, but it at least subverts a few expectations an audience might have of this film, and supplies the ingredients demanded of it in a way that is somewhat filling, if not especially nutritious.

Overall, Wrong Turn 2021 is probably the beneficiary of my floor level expectations. It’s at least trying to do something new; sure, it’s just remixing a bunch of elements we’ve seen before, but it has chosen elements we wouldn’t expect from this series. In a lot of ways, it does exactly what it sets out to do; injecting new impetus into a franchise by bringing some different ideas and elements to it. With deeper characterisation and a bit more motivation for the way certain things proceed I might have gone for a higher grade, but this is a perfectly entertaining way for a horror fan to pass some time, no more, but certainly no less.

★★★

Frightfest 2021: Are We Monsters

Dir: Seb Cox

One of the best things about Frightfest is that it looks around for new talent within the genre. It’s often exciting to see young filmmakers taking old tropes within horror and fantasy in new directions. On the other hand, it can sometimes mean that those filmmakers don’t yet have the experience and resources to get all of their ideas up on the screen. For me, Are We Monsters is a case in point.

Maya (Charlotte Olivia) is a werewolf. Trying to understand her monstrous side, she reaches out to Luke (Jathis Sivanesan), who writes about mythical creatures on his blog. The two also meet Everett (co-writer John Black) and Connor (Stefan Chanyaem); brothers whose father taught them to kill werewolves. Through them, Maya learns some history behind her nature, and that even without silver bullets, she can be killed on the night of the blood moon.

The best aspects of Are We Monsters come from the backstory it invents for the creation of werewolves. In extremely expressive, scribbled, black and white animation, it lays out a story about how the god of the sun, wanting to contain man’s evil in a handful of beings, created werewolves, but that even this measure failed. It’s a genuinely different take on the legend, giving a more melancholy feel to the monster, and evocatively told in simple images. These scribbled designs, patterned after Maya’s sketches, also come into play in the look of the werewolf in the last few scenes of the film, and while they are low tech, they’re striking and not a little creepy.

Unfortunately, problems come to the fore in many other aspects of the film. Everything has a very homemade feel to it, so the shonky CGI is to be expected, but some of the design choices early on are baffling. When you think of a ‘werewolf’, there is definitely an image you have in your head; some kind of man/wolf hybrid, be it the more humanoid take of Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man; the much more animalistic look of the Underworld series, or something in between. None of them, though, look like the werewolves we see early on here, with their elongated necks and limbs they sometimes simply look laughable and so little like what we think of as a werewolf that for a long time, you simply have to wonder if Connor and Everett are using the term correctly. It’s a bizarre choice. This is why the animation in the third act works so much better; not only is it more connected to the character of Maya, it looks more like a werewolf.

The leading cast are not massively experienced and, Jathis Sivanesan apart, seem to be part of a building stock company that director Seb Cox has used for his shorts. There’s plenty to be said for working with friends, but the performances are often quite stiff. On the plus side, once their characters warm up to each other Sivanesan and Charlotte Olivia have some effective scenes together, especially as they begin to see the connections between their situations with, shall we say, blood-borne disorders (another interesting theme that feels pretty original in the genre). 

Despite the grade below and the flaws I’ve highlighted here, I don’t want this review to come off as a total slam on Are We Monsters. There are interesting ideas here; original thoughts in a subgenre that often struggles for them. There are also some great design choices. It’s significant, I think, that this is Seb Cox’ first feature following a lot of shorts. There is a brilliant animated short in here, with a live action feature wrapped around it that needs more money and, from the cast, more experience, to be executed to its best advantage. I want to see the next film Cox and his company make, because there’s a foundation here on which he can build something great. I hope he gets the opportunity.

★★

Frightfest 2021: Motherly

Dir: Craig David Wallace

It’s Beth’s (Tessa Kozma) 9th birthday, but she’s far from happy, spending it with her mother Kate (Lora Burke) in an isolated farmhouse, living in witness protection. Beth wants to see her father, but he’s in prison for the murder of one of his daughter’s friends. Late that night, Kate and Beth’s home is invaded by a couple bent on vengeance.

Home invasion films are often effective because of their claustrophobia; they tend to trap characters at odds with each other in a relatively confined space, drawing tension out from the feeling of being trapped with them. There are, despite a slightly wider canvas, aspects of this in Motherly, but it's notable that they begin before the home invasion aspect of the film starts. The house that Kate and Beth are stuck in is fairly spacious, it has a garden and a barn, but we still find them both feeling hemmed in by their space and the situation that has put them there. The tension between mother and daughter is felt right from the start, as a slightly bratty Beth is ungrateful for her birthday present and cake, and disobeys her mother by hiding in the barn. This feeling of being stuck in confinement with a difficult child is likely to be pretty familiar to parents, given the events of the last 18 months, and it builds the characters and their situation effectively before the real horror descends.

Lora Burke and Tessa Kozma both give committed and believable performances as the mother and daughter. Kate’s stress at financial worries, dealing with her daughter, and the fact that Beth doesn’t seem to entirely grasp why her father can’t be with them is palpable, but so, in the latter part of the film, is her absolute devotion to protecting her. For Kozma’s part, she makes Beth a realistically stroppy and perhaps traumatised, kid.

After an opening half-hour that largely lays character groundwork (also introducing us to Hal (Colin Paradine) Kate’s witness protection liaison, who she’s been sleeping with), the film moves into its home invasion section. Kristen MacCulloch and Nick Smyth have more emotion to play than the usual faceless bad guys we see in these films (notably, ironically, the ones Lora Burke came up against in 2020’s For The Sake of Vicious), and they bring real dimension to the parts.

However, there is one central element of the story that Craig David Wallace and his co-writer Ian Malone clearly want to keep as a big twist. Unfortunately, not only is it wildly obvious from the storytelling, but one particular shot choice relatively early on signposts it incredibly clearly. If you work that revelation out (and there’s little chance you won’t), the whole home invasion section—well directed and performed though it is—can feel rather redundant.

On the whole, Motherly is a solid debut film, but one that feels very much like a debut. Wallace is clearly adept at working with actors, drawing decent performances from his entire cast and his direction also often shows both style and impact; an understanding of the subgenre he’s working in. Where the film falls down is in the overly signposted screenplay, Wallace and Malone lay the themes in effectively enough, but they undermine themselves because by letting us see where everything is going to end up long before the film gets to that would-be shock they neuter the scares and the tension. It’s a shame because there’s real promise here, but the whole ends up rather less than the sum of its parts.

★★½

2021 Catch Up: Chloe Grace Moretz [Shadow in the Cloud and Tom & Jerry]

Shadow in the Cloud

Dir: Roseanne Liang

1942. Just as their mission is about to take off, the crew of an armed supply plane is joined by Maude (Chloe Grace Moretz), a female flyer with a mysterious package that has to be kept safe. Made to sit in the turret under the plane, without her package, Maude becomes trapped, and that’s before she spots a ‘gremlin’ on the wing and an enemy fighter in pursuit.

Shadow in the Cloud is, it’s fair to say, a lot. It tries to roll several genres; claustrophobic thriller, creature feature, wilfully ludicrous action movie together, while also folding in a big helping of social commentary, and do it all in 83 minutes including credits. That director and co-writer (unfortunately with Max Landis) Roseanne Liang manages it, and only occasionally drops one of the many balls she’s juggling, is pretty remarkable. As Maude gets on the plane, and while she is locked in the turret and communicating via the radio, the characters are understandably broadly drawn. It has to be said a lot of the dialogue, most of it unreconstructed sexism directed towards her, is interchangeable between them. However, the long scenes that are just Moretz trapped inside this tiny pod are extremely claustrophobic, especially once she’s trapped with the gremlin able to attack from the outside.

The creature feature aspects also work well. The design of the gremlin is fairly familiar; a bat-like monster with sharp claws, but it’s well-rendered for the most part and there’s a sense of its presence and of the pain it can inflict in the first attack scene. Later we get to see it more fully, and again it's impressive. The effects in the big fight are well done enough that, even with a small budget, we don’t have any sense of Moretz trying to punch an empty space where the CG will be filled in.

This is only Roseanne Liang’s second feature. Her first, 2011’s My Wedding and Other Secrets, sounds like a pretty conventional rom-com, but it has my attention both on the basis of this one and featuring the great Cheng Pei-pei. Shadow in the Cloud is a big swing, and Liang pulls together all the elements, wedding them to strong images. The use of red and green light is striking, especially when it’s used over close-ups that identify the plane’s crew as we first hear them on the radio. Married to the synth score by Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper and inspired choice of end credits song, it’s an aspect that identifies the film as looking back more to B-Movies of the 80s than strictly to its world war two setting. 

Chloe Moretz is clearly having a great time as Maude, especially in the third act as she embraces her first action role since Hit Girl. She continues to project the toughness and resourcefulness that has always been part of her screen persona (and that made her such a terrible fit as Carrie). That we have any emotional investment in the McGuffin, the big reveal of which doesn’t quite resonate as powerfully as it might if there were a little more setup behind it, but undeniably raises the stakes, is down to her investment in the role and in that rushed backstory. The fact she treats the material seriously grounds it just enough for there to be tension even as it ramps up the ludicrousness.

This turn into the third act is where Shadow in the Cloud might lose some people. But others will find as I did, its full embrace and recognition of its own ridiculousness, while not winking at us, an audacious turn into a third act that has some spectacular action for a film of this budget level. For all its silliness though, this last part of the film does also bring the film’s politics front and centre, the idea seems to be that Liang is showing Maude as a woman embracing but not limited by traditional roles; that she can do what the men on the crew do, even best them at it, but still be more than just a ‘badass female character’. It’s all wrapped up in the film’s triumphant final image.

As I’ve noted, Shadow in the Cloud is trying to do a lot in a short time, and sometimes that means it short changes some elements (the male characters are as lightly sketched as the backstory), but it also means that it is a relentless entertainment. You do, at a certain point—probably when an explosion catapults Maude back into the plane—have to just decide to go with it, but if you do, I can’t imagine you not having enormous fun with it.

★★★★

Tom & Jerry [2021]

Dir: Tim Story

Tom and Jerry cartoons might be the first piece of filmmaking, of media, that I remember really loving. The Hanna Barbera shorts may be simple in premise—cat chases mouse, slapstick violence ensues—but the endless invention of the gags and the malleability of the animation, stretching and squashing its characters into strange new shapes, gets incredible mileage out of it.

The problem with taking Tom and Jerry from seven minutes to over ninety is easy to see; there’s no plot, no characters to speak of, and an hour and a half is long time to spend just stringing together gags without any real connective tissue. The 1993 film didn’t manage to square this circle, and committed the sacrilege of having Tom and Jerry talking for most of the running time. This version gets closer, but still fumbles.

The film is set in the real world, but for the apparently accepted fact that all animals are animated. We pick up with Kayla (a game Chloe Grace Moretz), just fired from her delivery rider job, she manages to pass off another woman’s CV as her own and get a job at a fancy New York hotel helping to organise the wedding of famous couple Preeta and Ben (Pallavi Sharda and Colin Jost). When Jerry moves into the hotel, Kayla volunteers to get rid of him, with the help of Tom. This doesn’t seem like a bad hook on which to hang the film’s slapstick sequences, but far too much screen time is taken up not by Tom and Jerry (or even Kayla and the rest of the hotel staff, including Rob Delaney, Michael Peña, Jordan Bolger and Patsy Ferran) getting into physically impossible comedic scrapes but by a story about Preeta not wanting Ben to go so big with their wedding and not listening to her about it. This is a kids movie, so it’s hardly an issue how shallow this story is, and Sharda and Jost are perfectly fine in their parts, it’s just that nothing about it is either funny or interesting, and it keeps the film’s main attractions off-screen for long periods at a time.

When it is focused on the cat and mouse duel, Tom and Jerry captures the essence of the original shorts beautifully (down to referencing a lot of classic gags). The Rube Goldberg like practicalities of shooting the plates for the animation to go over must have been fun, because the real world mayhem appears largely practical, but stays faithful to cartoon physics. The animation isn’t always brilliantly integrated, but the style, a sort of pseudo-3D look that has the flavour of classic Tom and Jerry, but doesn’t feel entirely flat, works well once you adjust to it. 

The film’s first half-hour is easily its strongest passage, with pure slapstick routines like Tom and Jerry fighting while Tom is playing keyboards in the park and Tom trying to get into the hotel, walking across power lines with predictable results, capturing the energy and look of the shorts perfectly and scoring some big laughs. As the film runs on though, there is less focus on these sorts of sequences, and the laughs dissipate. 

The live-action segments, to be fair, do have a couple of gags that hit. Peña taking a joke Moretz makes about a fish being in charge of aquatic activities at the hotel literally is very funny, as is a throwaway line from one of the spectators watching Tom play in the park, and British actress Patsy Ferran has a weird energy as Joy the bell girl that made me laugh a few times. On the whole though, whenever the titular pair are off-screen, the film’s energy dips disastrously. Moretz, strangely, plays better off the animation than she does most of her human co-stars, especially Jordan Bolger, who I think is meant to be a love interest of sorts, but the chemistry is absent to the point that the intent isn’t even clear. This is a real problem when it’s her job to hold together the human story of the film, such as it is.

There are good things here, and moments in which Tim Story and his team capture exactly what made Tom and Jerry brilliant, but there is also a sense that part of what made them brilliant is also the reason they don’t work at this running time. The surrounding padding that has to be there to facilitate some sort of story is often dull, and the balance is off, with the pure slapstick making up perhaps only 20% of the screen-time. It’s a big improvement on the last Tom and Jerry film, but that only goes so far.

★★

Recent Viewing: Cutterhead / I Spit On Your Grave Deja Vu

Cutterhead

Dir: Rasmus Kloster Bro

A multi-national crew is cutting a new tunnel for the Copenhagen metro and Rie (Christine Sønderris) has been sent to take pictures of the workers and do puff piece interviews for a PR campaign. While she's watching Ivo (Kresimir Mikic) and Bharan (Samson Semere) change one of the cutters there is a fire in the tunnel and the three are trapped in the pressurized chamber that houses the cutterhead. With oxygen and water both running low, they try to decide if they should wait to be rescued or attempt to escape.

There is something almost inherently tense about a confined thriller like Cutterhead. The fears behind it are primal; claustrophobia, the idea that with each breath you are eating up an increasingly finite resource. In this case that is only added to by the literally as well a metaphorically high-pressure atmosphere, which means that even though the door can be opened, the physical effects of doing it quickly might debilitate the person chosen to leave the capsule. The first act establishes a quick but comfortable dynamic between the three characters, Rie may be doing her job, but she appears to be interested in the processes and to like the two guys, who we quickly establish are friends as well as co-workers. This, of course, is all strained by the situation.

This isn't the most eventful film, a lot of it involves the crew simply waiting to be rescued, but the little moments of levity, paranoia, and of betrayal are all well played and these small moments, as well as the sense of time passing and the space feeling ever smaller and more dangerous adds up to a growing, grinding, tension—think The Descent without monsters. Things do shift somewhat for the third act, though the thrills remain claustrophobic and intimate, with the last ten minutes, in particular, taking a dark direction, leading to a final scene that is tense and airless in an entirely different way to the rest of the film.

This isn't a showy feature debut from Rasmus Kloster Bro, but it does demonstrate an ability to take a limited set of ingredients and find a way to stretch their inherent heart in mouth qualities across the film's 84 minutes. If you're claustrophobic this will be a nightmare, but even if you aren't you're likely to feel Cutterhead gripping your nerves more and more as it runs on.

★★★½

I Spit On Your Grave Deja Vu

Dir: Meir Zarchi

Shot in 1976, first released in '78 and finding a wider audience in grindhouses and on video in the early 80s, I Spit On Your Grave has been notorious for four decades. Meir Zarchi's original film still stands as one of the most powerful and visceral rape-revenge films ever released. A sequel was first mooted in the mid 80s, but that film dropped the link to I Spit, and became Savage Vengeance. Between 2010 and 2015 a trilogy of increasingly terrible films, begun with a remake, was fairly successful in the direct to video market. It must have been that which finally got Zarchi the green light to make this, his first film since 1985's dreadful Don't Mess With My Sister.

You get the sense that Zarchi had a certain pent-up energy as a filmmaker. In his early 80s when making the film, and having not directed in almost 35 years, there is a feeling in the rampantly excessive 148 minute running time that he is simply using this one last opportunity to dump every idea he's had about this series of films since 1978 on to the screen. Unfortunately, most of those ideas involve copying his previous film very, very slowly, introducing overblown religiosity to the villains, and a broken timeline to tie the plot in with the original.

Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton) has just written a book about her ordeal and her vengeance. Taking a break from promotion, she's having lunch with her daughter Christy (Jamie Bernadette). In the car park after lunch, two 'fans' pull up and while Jennifer is signing her book, kidnap them both, setting off a chain of events that take Jennifer back to the events of the first film and end up with Christy fighting for her life and fighting back.

Things start as they mean to go on: slowly and with terrible dialogue. The original film is recapped in a laughably written radio call-in show with Jennifer responding to questions about her memoir (curiously it's not here that we discover that she was cleared by a jury of any crimes she committed in the vengeance section of the first film, which is a stretch). We also discover that Christy is the world's most in-demand model, and that she just turned down a million dollars to shave her head and pose topless for a magazine cover. This is all delivered in clunky lines by Keaton and an at this stage fairly wooden Bernadette.

Things get turned up to eleven once the kidnapping happens and we meet what is at first a gang of three, all related to Jennifer's tormentors from the first film, there is Johnny's wife Becky (Maria Olsen), Scotty (Jeremy Ferdman), who is the cousin of Andy and Kevin (Jonathan Peacy), who is Stanley's brother. Maria Olsen, in her mid 50s, is clearly too young to have been Johnny's wife (she's roughly the same age as Zarchi's kids, who make cameos to reprise their brief roles as Johnny's children). More puzzling is Scotty's assertion that he grew up around Andy when he was obviously born, given the film never indicates that it is set any other time than when it was shot, at least 10 years after the events of the first film. This, along with other revelations, makes the timeline very difficult to unpick. All three of these performances, along with that of Jim Tavaré as Herman (who we're told is Matthew's Dad, despite the fact he's several decades too young for that) are overplayed to the hilt, with Olsen and Peacy seeming to be in some kind of contest to see who can chomp more scenery.

This would be less of a problem had Zarchi not written a lot of drawn-out dialogue for the villainous characters, but the speeches go on and on, running over and over the same two ideas: that the relatives want 'justice' and that God is going to help them extract it from Jennifer and Christy. The fact that Camille Keaton, so great and unaffected in the first film, never manages to find that same performance is probably down to the writing as much as her work, but she is visibly unenthused and appears to know the dialogue isn't up to par (and that there is too much of it). Only when Jennifer is told to dig her own grave does Keaton find a moment with an ounce of the resonance the 1978 film had throughout. 

The structure of the film is clunky. Not only is it brutally overlong, but the pacing issue isn't simply that a scene here or there needs to be cut, it's that every moment is twice the length it needs to be. There was apparently a lot of back and forth about whether the 2010 I Spit On Your Grave should be a sequel or a remake. In some ways Deja Vu, as suggested by its subtitle, is an attempt to square that circle. The first 50 minutes or so are a direct sequel, then we move into a section which is a fairly close remake, with Christy in her Mother's role. The rape scene can't help but be upsetting and it is in this section that Jamie Bernadette's performance comes closest to matching Keaton's power in the original. As with that performance, it's probable that there isn't much acting involved here, there's a certain level at which what we're seeing is just what's happening and it's not easy to watch.

The third act moves into the vengeance phase. Again the film is fighting with itself over being a sequel or a remake. One revenge sequence directly mirrors a famous scene from the '78 film, which only diminishes this one, because the fact we've seen it before, the cartoony nature of the actor's performance up to that point, and the extended running time means it never captures the shock and horror of its antecedent. Zarchi tries to introduce some twists into the narrative in the last half hour of the film, but he only succeeds in adding more terrible monologues, hammy performances, and timeline confusion to the mix.

I Spit On Your Grave Deja Vu is more than a disappointment, while it's sometimes weirdly reverent of the first film, even to the point of the director reprising his cameo as a church organist, it also feels like its rejecting much of what it meant. It's almost a desecration. When characters repeatedly literally spit on the graves of deceased characters you can't help but feel it represents a certain aspect of its attitude to what has gone before. The original film is a grindhouse classic, but it's more than that, it's still a truly impactful and provocative work. Deja Vu never achieves that, Jamie Bernadette does what she can and, mainly in moments where she doesn't have to wrestle Zarchi's dialogue, has moments that impress. On the whole, though, the film is by turns too silly and too boring to even approach that kind of lasting power.

★

24FPS@LFF2020: Possessor

Dir: Brandon Cronenberg

Thanks to David and his 50-year career, the Cronenberg name is synonymous with body horror. Brandon Cronenberg is nothing if not proof that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. 2012's Antiviral was a confident debut that nevertheless co-opted both themes and a visual feel from his father's cinema. Possessor may hew even closer to one particular film of Cronenberg Sr's in its themes and ideas, but visually it sees Brandon moving on, keeping the spirit of the family name alive but finding his own identity in the process.

The concept sees Andrea Riseborough as Tasya Vos, an operative for a company that uses brain implants to allow its agents to take over the minds and bodies of real people and use them as vessels to carry out assassinations. Vos' latest assignment is a big one; use the body of Colin Tate (Christoper Abbott) to murder his girlfriend (Tuppence Middleton) and her father (Sean Bean), so that the father's company passes entirely into his son's control. However, something goes wrong, and Vos finds herself fighting Colin for control.

The basic idea of Possessor owes a great deal to eXistenZ and like that film this one never allowed me to feel entirely grounded in reality. We first meet Andrea Riseborough's Vos as she is extracted from a subject at the end of a mission and while she passes the test to see if she's suffered any adverse effect on her brain, the performance gives the sense that her answers are rotely remembered, not especially indicative of anything deeper. This is where the casting of Riseborough and her costume and make-up design is especially clever. She is almost a blank canvas; her features de-emphasized and pale, her hair white blonde and barely styled, and her every expression rehearsed (explicitly so when we see her returning home to her estranged husband and son). It's always as if she's nothing more than a vessel, something again echoed when we see the transfer process, a sequence that is like the opening of Ghost in the Shell run backward and forward through a hall of mirrors.  The nod to eXistenZ is even more explicitly made with the casting of Jennifer Jason Leigh as Riseborough's boss, Girder. While she's only a side character there might be an interesting reading in the idea that this is all just another game by Allegra Gellar.

If his father's filmography divides fairly neatly into horror of the body and of the mind, Possessor finds Brandon Cronenberg combining the two, mind control (or the loss of it, whichever of the leading characters you're talking about) has seldom been depicted as something so visceral. The splatter in this film is often grossly impressive in a way that recalls the best work of the likes of Tom Savini (I'm thinking of the teeth being ground up against a poker, or the literal eye-popping moment), but more interestingly than that, the effects are used to express the way the two consciousnesses inhabiting Colin's body are tearing at each other in pursuit of overall control. The moment we find ourselves inside his mind, an entity trying to rip itself apart, is an image that is not only incredible technically, it manages to boil the film down into a single essential image. Cronenberg also explores this duality in a sequence in which we see Riseborough, her face appearing to melt, just as in the story we wonder if her very presence is dissolving. It's perhaps a little on the nose, but it's a stunningly realized and compellingly weird visual metaphor.

The acting challenge this dynamic poses for Riseborough and Christopher Abbott is substantial. Riseborough, given how blank her character must be, has less to work with, but her detachment sells the toll that the work she does takes on Vos and her updates to Girder allow us to see the denial she's in about the process beginning to go wrong. Abbott, who has turned in some great performances in genre fare, notably Nicolas Pesce's Piercing, has a lot to play here, often he must embody Vos in Colin's body, but there are also passages in which he has to play a confused Colin, wondering if he's losing his mind and sequences that require him to flip between personae almost line by line. It's a complex piece of work and one Abbott carries off with impressive nuance, especially in the film's final, bizarre, confrontation.

Possessor is almost a bit much to take in on first viewing; a nightmare that cracks and refracts its characters and its visuals through familial influences as well as through its writer/director's own increasingly individual imagination. It's grotesque yet thoughtful, full of concerns about technology and identity, and I think it will take a few more viewings to fully unpick. The good news is that it's going to be fascinating to pick this movie's brain, even as it does yours.

★★★★

24FPS @ Glasgow Film Festival 2020: Blood Machines and Spookies

Blood Machines

Dir: Seth Ickerman

Synthwave hasn’t found a mainstream moment since the Drive soundtrack, but it has carved out quite a niche as an underground scene. Soaked in the influence of the 80s, and particularly of John Carpenter both as a musician and as a filmmaker. The music readily conjures sci-fi imagery even on a first listen and Carpenter Brut and their regular directorial collaborator Seth Ickerman trade heavily on all of those influences in this 50 minute hybrid of mid-length film and music video, which trades on the same imagery they have been employing in their previous videos.

The story, such as it is, finds two men (Anders Heinrichsen and Christian Erickson) in charge of a spaceship, they have just shot down an enemy ship and taken an enemy soldier (Elisa Laskowski) prisoner. Unbeknownst to them, the ship was alive. The ship’s essence becomes a beautiful woman and a galactic chase ensues.

The dialogue isn’t great and the acting (all in English) is a bit ropey, but Ickerman’s imagery - if overly heavy on gratuitous nudity - is striking, folding Carpenter Brut’s recurring motifs in fairly naturally and employing some excellent CGI for what can’t have been a large budget. Ultimately though, the score is the star. If you like synthwave and in particular Carpenter Brut’s brand of the genre, this will work for you, though you do have to wait a little longer than is ideal for the first time the music kicks into high gear.

At 50 minutes, this is overextended, and it’s hard not to wish the writing and acting had been more of a focus, because there’s the kernel of a decent short film here, even apart from the score. As an extended music video though, there’s plenty for fans to enjoy both visually and aurally. The third star below is strictly for those fans.

★★★

Spookies

Dir: Eugenie Joseph, Thomas Doran, Brendan Faulkner

There are auteurs in the horror and exploitation genres, but you do have to remember that the exploitation part of that equation sometimes applies off screen as much as it does on, and bottom line often takes precedence over a director’s vision. Spookies is definitely one of those cases. It began life as Twisted Souls, about a group of teenagers (played by unknowns, but for Charlotte Alexandra—here Charlotte Seeley—known to arthouse fans for Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales and Catherine Breillat’s controversial debut, A Real Young Girl) who are trapped in a house by a Warlock who wants to use them to raise his bride from the dead. Bolted on to this were new scenes with an entirely different cast and extra creature effects.

Spookies entirely bears out its messy origins. It’s hard to imagine that Twisted Souls would have been any good in itself. What remains of co directors Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran’s work is basically a boring version of the original Evil Dead. Their characters establish little presence, indeed they’re barely even stereotypes, and the acting is middling at best. The story doesn’t hang together in these sections, particularly frustrating is the fact that, for me at least, it never became clear why these kids needed to become victims in order for the Warlock to get his wife back (she’s walking around long before the bulk of the deaths occur). In story and character terms, the extra scenes directed by Eugenie Joseph add little besides running time, always feeling untethered from the rest of the film and making the storytelling even more confusing.

What Spookies does have going for it, in both of its constituent parts, is some enjoyable practical creature effects. Effects team members like Gabe Bartalos and John Dods went on to more notable work, Bartalos recently branching out as a director. The work here displays budgetary limitations, but the design is always excellent, even when it’s clear that articulation was limited (see the Grim Reaper puppet and the spider monster, among others). The effects can’t paper over all the cracks in the film, but they do make it lively enough to be fun if you’ve got a soft spot for slightly ropey 80s horror.

Spookies is what it is: a movie that appears to have been held together with sticky tape and good will. There’s a sense that the cast are having fun and the effects crew in particular are trying hard, the film doesn’t add up to very much, but at 85 minutes it’s worth catching just for the kind of practical effects we seldom see these days.

★★½

24FPS @ Glasgow Film Festival 2020: Tammy and the T-Rex [Gore Cut]

Dir: Stewart Raffill

Boy meets girl. Boy is beaten up by girl’s psycho ex. Boy is murdered by a mad scientist who transplants boy’s brain into an animatronic T-Rex. Boy/T-Rex goes on a bloody rampage, before finding his girlfriend and convincing her he’s her boyfriend. Girl and T-Rex go on the run together. [Sings] “Tale as old as time…”

A lot of questions went through my mind as I was watching Tammy and the T-Rex. The one that recurred most often was this: “Who was this made for?” Shot in this R Rated version, with some splattery but often inept effects, cut down to a PG-13 for its initial 1994 video release and now restored to its full ‘glory’, neither cut seems to have an answer for this question. For the most part, this is a teen comedy, but even the PG-13 material has a strange darkness to it, with Tammy’s (Denise Richards) ex stalking her and threatening both her and her new boyfriend Michael (Paul Walker) and the T-Rex murdering a whole lot of random people, albeit less graphically in the original version. In both cuts, despite the darkness of some of the story elements, the tone is pitched towards 8-year-olds, except when it’s not, like in the final scene, in which an underwear-clad Richards does a sexy dance number for reasons too astronomically idiotic to go into here And so, I ask again, who was this supposed to be for?

Tammy and the T-Rex (or Tanny and the Teenage T-Rex, as my screener’s titles had it, despite the fact Tammy’s name is always clearly pronounced with an M, not an N) is technically a bad movie. Richards does her level best, but she’s hamstrung by the terrible material and fails to display the kind of comic timing she would show a few years later in Drop Dead Gorgeous. She and Walker are a cute enough couple, and there’s a little chemistry there, but asking Richards to replicate that with an animatronic T-Rex was never going to work. That mission isn't helped by the T-Rex itself, and least of all by the hilariously cheap hands used every time it has to interact with something. 

Try as everyone might, there’s never a moment that gets past the essential ridiculousness of the premise. And yet, that’s why the film works at a certain level. The restored gore is largely rubbish, and actually the film might be even funnier without it, because clips of the PG-13 version are even more comically stilted as they cut around the blood and swearing. While Richards and Walker aren’t bad within the confines of the script, the same can’t be said of the cartoony performances of most of the rest of the cast. Chief offenders are Terry Kiser as the scientist who transplants Michael’s brain into the T-Rex, playing the role as if he’s in some sort of overacting Olympics and Theo Forsett as Tammy’s camp gay best friend Byron, who is the butt of one of the film’s more mean-spirited jokes, from the sheriff’s deputies who are presumably meant as comic relief. 

When it is trying to be funny, Tammy and the T-Rex largely misses the mark, but Ellen Dubin genuinely seems to be having a blast as Kiser’s sidekick, and scores a couple of laughs. The few gags that hit are pretty good (look for one when Tammy, Byron and the T-Rex are cornered by the cops late in the film) and the unintentional comedy does make up the dearth of honest laughter. 

Honestly, your reaction to the title of this film probably tells you whether you’ll enjoy it. Imagine a film called Tammy and the T-Rex. Imagine how silly, how cheap, how comically inept it could be. Imagine how weird, singular and engagingly bizarre it could be. Tammy and the T-Rex is both of those movies. It’s not good, but at this point, who on Earth is coming to it expecting it to be good? Sit down and marvel at the cinematic car crash unfolding in front of your eyes. You’ll be entertained, just probably not the way Stewart Raffill had hoped for.

★★½

The Grudge [2020] [15]

Dir: Nicolas Pesce

Horror moves in cycles. I really thought the Japanese ghost girl had been consigned to history, but here we are in 2020 and she’s back, once again in the form of a remake of Takashi Shimizu’s bafflingly popular Grudge series.

There are, to be fair, reasons for optimism. This is the third, and easily the highest-profile, film from director Nicolas Pesce. His first two—The Eyes of My Mother and Piercing—were each among the most visually striking horror films of the past five years, evidence of a genuinely exciting voice who, in Piercing, filtered Ryu Murakami's novel through Argento, but shot with a striking formalism and fashioned those influences into something perverse, funny, creepy and genuinely all its own. There is also the presence of British actress Andrea Riseborough; a performer of formidable natural gifts who should be a star, and might be but for her often terrible nose for screenplays. 

Riseborough plays Muldoon, a cop who, following the death of her husband, has recently moved to a small town with her young son. With her new partner Goodman (Demian Bichir) she is assigned to a dead body found in a car. Discovering that the body is that of a woman who went missing from a house where an entire family previously died violently, she goes to investigate. After she leaves the house she can’t shake the feeling that something has followed her.

Splitting his narrative into three strands, set in 2004, 2005 and 2006, Pesce has plenty of plot to unfold (much of it, in the 2006 story, told largely unbidden to Muldoon by a character we’ll simply call ‘Exposition Cop’), but that’s not to say that he finds any new ideas here. The stories don’t really join up. We get no sense of what initially brought the spirit from Japan to this house. Despite setting up a couple of interesting ideas around possible deaths, be it a couple’s (John Cho and Betty Gilpin) option to abort a baby that is likely to have birth defects or a long married couple (Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison) looking into assisted suicide for the cancer stricken wife, the writer/director does nothing to tie these ideas into the film’s threat. 

Pesce displays so little interest in the why of the ghostly presence that we never have any idea of what the scares mean. Is this a vengeful presence? If so what does its vengeance mean when taken out on the random people who happen to move into this house? Does the presence simply want the house to itself? This doesn’t seem like the answer, because the film implies that further victims are also tied to the house. These questions aren’t particularly novel or interesting, and nor are the prospective answers, but at least attempting to answer them would give the film something to be about.

As it is, Pesce works his way, seemingly wearily, through the playbook. Things go creak, things go boo, things grab at people from bathtubs full of dirty water, long haired girls stand menacingly with their hair over their faces. For the most part, the film looks drab. It has none of the sharp lines, inventive framing or stylistic verve of either of its director’s previous films. The last ten minutes bring a handful of shots, most notably some violence that looks like it’s out of a graphic novel, framed against a window with stained-glass detailing, that feel like they find Pesce firing on at least a few cylinders. Otherwise, this is the most complete subsuming I've seen for years of a promising director’s personality beneath the mediocrity of a project.

The supporting cast are, to their credit, trying. Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison are an interesting enough pairing and the basics of their backstory are touching enough that you wish that this couple could have been characters in a different movie, and John Cho and Betty Gilpin’s story has similar promise, one scene, of the two of them on the phone discussing whether to keep their baby suggests, like Shaye and Faison’s story, a more interesting film we could be watching. Unfortunately, both of these storylines are interrupted at regular intervals by rote jump scares, because this is a Grudge movie and the wheels of the Scare O Matic must turn.

The main storyline is the weakest section of the film. Riseborough and Bichir have no chemistry, build no relationship we can invest in, and both seem like deeply substandard cops (the plot point of Goodman having ‘investigated’ a previous case in the haunted house without ever entering it is risible). The investigation narrative goes nowhere, the flashbacks to the past of the house are never triggered by anything Muldoon or Goodman do. This is painfully lazy screenwriting, simply neglecting to do the most basic of jobs. This also applies to the depiction of Muldoon’s son (John J. Hansen), who is such an afterthought that the movie forgets about him for ages, then, to remind us he exists, inserts an otherwise purposeless scene of Muldoon bringing him to work, Goodman gives him 48 Hours to watch, then the scene ends. It does nothing within the narrative and doesn’t even have the excuse of being funny to fall back on. 

For me, the entire ghost girl sub-genre was always difficult to take seriously, and after Sion Sono’s wicked parody Exte (which also works as maybe the best and creepiest ghost girl film I’ve seen), it seems even more redundant. This umpteenth revisitation of The Grudge does nothing to change that. Sadly, the only thing of note it manages is tarnishing the reputation of one of horror’s most talented and promising young filmmakers.

★