We all know the late George A. Romero as the pioneer of the zombie in horror cinema – a cinematic monster which has sustained appropriate levels of longevity in modern culture. But there was far more to his career than that and he found far more ways to critique the society he lived in than just through zombie horror. One of his lesser-known titles is The Amusement Park (1975), a suitably sad and surreal exploration of ageing.
In the film, an elderly man (Lincoln Maazel – Martin) goes for what he assumes will be an ordinary day at the amusement park, only to find himself in the middle of a hellish nightmare. Amid the rollercoasters and chaotic crowds, he becomes increasingly disoriented and isolated; as the pain, tragedies and humiliations of ageing in America are played out before him…
Of all Romero’s films, The Amusement Park is one of the least well-known, by even his most ardent fans. However, via the Shudder Exclusive roster and Acorn Media International, it’s now up for release on 17th October 2022. If you missed its short stint on cinema release in 2019, or even if you made it, you can now purchase this special Blu-ray with a wealth of extra features including: a Michael Gornick audio commentary, a special feature – ‘Re-opening the Park’ – with Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, panel interviews, a special brochure and the film’s script. Better still, Warped Perspective has a Blu-ray to give away.
UK readers: if you would like to be in with a chance of winning, please email the site (keri[at]warped-perspective.com) with The Amusement Park as your email title. Include your name and postal address. The competition will be drawn on Friday 14th October at 18:00 GMT. (All personal information will be stored securely until the competition is over and then deleted.)
Investigations of haunted houses or places have been a horror staple since the inception of cinema. And, whilst in many cases (with some notable exceptions) the allegedly haunted house/place itself has remained unchanged, the means of investigation themselves have changed and developed as the years have passed. You could even argue that technological developments have revolutionised our ways of seeing altogether. In The Blair Witch Project (1999), a herald of this new kind of experience, ghostly phenomena are refracted through Heather’s video camera, which she is using for the purposes of making a student film; the camera offers some welcome distance, somehow, from the unreal horrors which she witnesses. We see what she sees, as she sees it: we are reliant on her as the intermediary, and we are limited by her experiences. It was a sign of things to come.
Well, step forward Deadstream (2022), which shows us, first and foremost, that things have come a long way since The Blair Witch Project. Deadstream recognises this line of progression, as its protagonist – livestreaming sensation Shawn Ruddy – is shown trying to hawk some merch which references Blair Witch’s own publicity slogan. But now, with smartphones, streaming platforms, editing software, multiple cameras, infrared settings, custom music and of course a live feed, the relationship between filmmaker and audience has been thoroughly revolutionised. This immediacy is very energising, bringing the film bang up to date as well as offering us a lively, multi-layered take on a classic horror movie trope.
Shawn (played by director and co-writer Joseph Winter) is an internet personality who’s been on an involuntary six-month hiatus after an unspecified fall from grace. It must have been bad: he lost all of his monetisation in the process, and so is determined to reclaim it with a comeback special. This entails a special livestream on his platform of choice, LivVid.TV, as he visits a haunted house, location as-yet secret. This place, not-at-all ominously known as Death Manor, comes with a suitably excessive back story: here, at the end of the 19th Century, a woman called Mildred took her own life in mysterious circumstances. Perfect! Shawn heads into the house to explore and monitor any paranormal activity. He vows to investigate any mysterious goings-on he hears, sees, or picks up on his pretty extensive array of kit: this is part of his shtick, something best described as competitive stupidity – which aims to keep his attention-span deprived followers on his stream for as long as possible. It’s his followers who, in-between keeping up an insulting stream of comments or declaring themselves bored, double-dare him to ‘provoke the spirits’.
Of course this all goes to hell in a film which is by turns creepy, grisly and Raimi-nasty, but it’s in how it gets there that Deadstream really shines. It gets the right things right: good location, effective twists, humour which is knowing but not eye-rolling, and a central performance which could conceivably all be part of an act, so used to performing for the camera does Shawn appear to be. Winter really captures something here; even if you don’t personally engage with livestreamers and Influencers yourself, you’re likely by now to have some idea what makes them successful, and high on that list is a kind of jovial artifice, amplified even beyond the artifice we’ve seen on TV for decades because self-made media personalities have to crow that little bit louder to get noticed. Shawn Ruddy is a very plausible figure for our cynical times, ‘working on himself’ but motivated by hard cash, apologising multiple times for his misdeeds but only believably so on a handful of those occasions. It’s very difficult to see a real person underneath that rock-solid veneer – until circumstances prevail, of course. This is like something Goffman could have come up with on the presentation of self, had he lived long enough to see what a good smartphone could do. For all that, Shawn isn’t wholly unlikeable, though. Even at his worst, he probably doesn’t deserve what he gets – he’s an idiot, but an idiot partly formed out of his ongoing interactions with millions of other idiots.
This dialogue with his followers is a genuinely interesting feature of the film, one which places it in the here-and-now and which will one day be as interesting a time capsule as Blair Witch is now, because surely we can’t be far away from a horror film made entirely in the Metaverse. Shawn’s ability to reflect on his film as it’s being made, and on the impact it might be having, is a very new phenomenon in its own right: he keeps in mind that he is crafting a piece of media, and he makes the most of the means at his disposal to make it as good a film as it can be; his preoccupation with different angles, cameras and of course custom soundtracks shows that. The ways in which he fights to keep control of his film reminds us that he is aware, at all times, that his relationship with his followers is an ongoing negotiation, and his struggle is as much to retain creative control as it is the rather more pressing need to stay alive. It’s also worth saying that Deadstream is able to dispense with some of the so-quickly hackneyed issues of the ‘found footage’ subgenre, the main one being ‘who edited this, and when?’ Here, we know. We are also done with grainy, unclear footage: this film is surprisingly bright, colourful and sharp throughout. Oh, to be a ghost hunter in the 2020s…
Whilst some of the in-script revelations towards the end of the film spell things out more than really necessary, on the whole, Deadstream is an engaging, richly-textured and often self-deprecating film which provides a sense of progression in horror, as well as paying tribute to films which have brought us to this point. It’s a lot of fun, and Shudder have done well to nab it.
Deadstream (2022) will be released on Shudder on 6th October, 2022.
With a title like Pig Killer, you know you’d be mad to expect a philosophical work, some light moral lessons or charming whimsy. That much is perfectly clear. What you may be less prepared for, though, is just how deliberately low the film aims. Wherever the ‘acceptable level’ is, it elects to nosedive past that, landing in a morass of body parts and blaring incidental music some distance further down.
Now, depending on your outlook, you may feel that this is a stirring recommendation; if so, have at it. Lots of people love their horror splattery and a certain kind of provocative; director and writer Chad Ferrin has you covered. For others, living through a period in time where dramatic explorations of the serial killer phenomenon have grown increasingly sensitive, well-written and (mostly) respectful, Pig Killer may well feel like a bizarre throwback. It is, after all, based loosely on the real story of Canadian serial killer, Willy Pickton: this marks it out as something other than a straight-up fantasy about a bad man who kills women. When the inspiration is perfectly real, when victims’ families may well be still alive, it will make it far more difficult to nod this stuff through – for many viewers, at least.
We start as we mean to go on, with a long sequence running through the opening credits of pigs tucking into human body parts, as an as-yet faceless man oversees. This is pig farmer Willy (Jake Busey) who later unwinds from all of this with a visit to a local bar. It seems he’s planning a big party, or a ‘piggy pow-wow’ and has printed out flyers for the occasion; it’s a last hurrah before he completes the sale on his land, it seems. After that, it’s off to the red light district to pick up an Asian stereotype and to murder her – then to have sex with her, with one of the film’s prosthetic penises appearing on camera for the occasion. (Or perhaps it’s the same prosthetic penis, passed around between several actors.) Anyway, as he does this, he stops seeing his victim and starts to see his mother in her place (played by Ginger Lynn). This use of flashback recurs regularly, filling in the back story of an unhappy childhood and its key events. It’s also a stock way of reaffirming Willy’s disturbed mental state; the notion, though, is a tried-and-tested one: abnormal experiences of sexuality have made him the man he is today.
It’s also made clear to us, via dialogue and cut scenes, that one of the other punters at the bar, a troubled young woman called Wendy (Kate Patel) and our pig farmer are going to cross paths. We know she’s already asked after the farmer; a friend fills her in on his dark reputation. We also know about the rumours that ‘women go free’ to these parties, and don’t all come out again. A lot hinges on the planned pow-wow then, which will go ahead come what may – despite the fact that talk of selling the farm kicks up a lot of dirt between Willy and his slightly more functional brother David (Lew Temple), who are reminded of their unhappy memories of the place.
It starts gratuitously, and so it can never be said that the film lulls its audience into a false sense of security, or indicates that it will be one thing and not another. It seems to be channelling a lot of those slightly mysterious VHS films you could stumble upon, back in the day, and only wonder at how in the hell anyone had managed to make something so apparently organically disturbing; there was a genuine sense of curiosity then, back when films could surface and disappear and there was no IMDb to lend context to what you had just watched. Things are different now, and even homage has to work carefully. To take this approach today suggests intent: it suggests that all of the film’s key elements – script, performances, scene selections, plot – have been chosen here in full knowledge of a few things, not least that the relationship between the real case and this film may raise eyebrows.
‘Cartoonish’ is a bold stylistic decision to go for then, given all of this, but this is a nonetheless a bizarrely cartoonish film, but one which feels neither genuinely challenging nor compelling, certainly not across two hours – which is far, far too long to sustain interest. The blaring background and incidental music drown out the dialogue a lot of the time, which doesn’t help. There are issues here, then. That’s not to say that Busey doesn’t give it his all, or that he isn’t supported well by the rest of the cast, who no doubt do exactly what they were directed to do. This isn’t a bad looking film, either, with a range of shots and some ingenious uses of practical SFX on a clear budget. It’s just that, overall, these kinds of two-dimensional rape and murder-fests feel dated; if ‘dated’ is the aim, then fine, but they still need more than this because even shock value is a far trickier customer today.
Pig Killer (2022) premiered at the Sydney Underground Festival and will continue its festival run through October.
David Temple is a journalist – well, a photojournalist, with a grisly specialism; he specialises in crime and accident photography, so there’s lots to do, especially in his resident city of London. The book starts on New Year’s Eve; David is unexpectedly called to dash out of the Knightsbridge pub where he’s drinking to photograph a bloody dive from a hotel balcony – whether a possible suicide, accident or even a murder, the resulting photos are newsworthy because the diver ‘might be famous’. He makes his way to the scene: it’s a film producer by the name of Rupert Wreath who is now a twisted wreck on the pavement, but after he has discharged his professional duties, David is fascinated by a woman whom he sees approaching Wreath’s body (a police cordon is not forthcoming here). The woman then quite nonchalantly exits the scene – barefoot – heading through the perpetual rain to a nearby hotel bar. Intrigued, David follows.
And thus begins Sick & Beautiful, an intricate, grisly and existential horror story about horror stories. The book does a lot: it’s a deliberation on the creative process, a blurring of boundaries between real life and imagined worlds and an often caustic, cynical picking-apart of fame and its trappings. But, threading through it all, this is an impressive piece of world-building in its own right, with moments of direct homage and reference to horror melding with new, graphic, alarming ideas. It’s London as only a Londoner – born or adopted – could know it, but it comes overlaid with a heady, nightmarish other London, and much more besides.
David approaches the strange woman – Rachel Garland – and they talk, a conversation which marks the beginning of a frenetic, frustrating connection between them. They first discuss the accident (accident?) and Rachel’s self-perceived role in it. A verbose, abstract conversationalist, the claims she makes about Wreath’s accident are outlandish, supernatural even: this would be alarming enough, perhaps, but David has had similar experiences to the ones she describes; this all feels fated somehow. In particular, he has dreamed of a similar figure to one she mentions: a ghostly man, distinctively dressed in a bowler hat, who seemed to be trying to communicate with him. David is a jaded figure, but he feels an irrevocable pull towards Rachel and the story of her life, seeing something significant in it. And of course, this journalist has always wanted to be a novelist; he believes he has now found his creative angle, his muse even. A new life – of one kind or another – beckons. But it comes at a cost: Rachel’s mysterious, horrifying visions begin to overtake his life too, eroding his memory and his own sense of self, criss-crossing between his waking and dreaming states. The ‘Paradise’ which soon overshadows his work on the book and consumes his thoughts is an ambiguous prospect: is it a place? A state of being? Or a curse?
This is a carefully-constructed book which sculpts its otherworldly atmosphere out of fantasy, nightmare, flashback and impression. Written in the first person, it is through the character of David – clever, damaged, ambitious and vulnerable – that we must unpack real from unreal, or else, drift along with the book’s slowly-unfolding lessons. Despite the different kind of narrative voice used, I couldn’t help but think of Steppenwolf in places: a man in existential crisis, a mysterious woman, a tantalising invitation to a semi-mythical and profoundly self-altering place, a painful search for meaning. This comes with some Clive Barker elements – surely we can use Barkerian as an adjective by now? – as Sick & Beautiful unleashes moments of pure, physical horror; peeling faces, lacerated torsos and glistening wounds. Being a London novel, it’s appropriate that the book comes with an array of compelling names – Wreaths, Garlands, Temples, even a Scythe – just as Dickens might have written, and the dark, glowering, rain-soaked London of the book doesn’t feel a million miles away from the literary London underworld of the Victorian era, either, save for the neon and the high-rises. These are all very literary characters, too: people use elaborate turns of phrase, or open with introspective, multi-clausal salvos which don’t ordinarily feature in polite conversation. Well, it depends who you talk to, of course. This is all entirely in keeping with the style of the book overall, as it’s beautifully written – elaborate but not gaudy – and a piece of artistic endeavour used to debate the idea of artistic endeavour.
David makes connections between life, death and entertainment throughout, not least by his self-reflective comments on the lot of an author. Crises have cinematic qualities; tragic real-life deaths turn into spectacles, like modern-day public executions; the narrative becomes a script which becomes a narrative again. In many ways the book within the book – also titled Sick & Beautiful – serves as an intermediary between life and art. Rachel, its inspiration, makes claims which could be real, or could be fake. She’s an actress, or so she says: what’s more open to debate is where the world of film breaks with the world around them. Knowledge of the horror genre, by the by, is everywhere here, with titles and scenes from well-known movies edging into the world of the book, punctuating it with a moment’s real-world respite. That’s author Jim Queen’s core audience here: the kind of people who could see a description of a scene from Braindead (1992) as a welcome reprieve. So of course, horror film fans would find a great deal to admire in this novel. Sick & Beautiful is vast and ambitious in scale, with a weaving, cyclical structure, dark flashes of humour and some sickly moments of pathos, too. It’s mesmerising, weird and provocative.
Everyone Will Burn (Y todos arderán) is a film of many modes: it moves from distressing content to bizarre, skittish black comedy, from historical curse to pastiche of small-town life. It divides up its rather abundant two-hour (or as near as damnit) running time between horror tropes and the self-indulgence of blasting a righteous hole right through an unfeeling, unsympathetic community. But above all else, it starts with one unpleasant, questionable scene which will almost certainly invite regular horror viewers to ponder one particular plot possibility. María José (Macarena Gómez) has endured years as a local pariah since the death of her son, and has finally decided to commit suicide: the film opens without her in shot, but her tortured breathing, as she gazes down from the ledge of a bridge, tells us that this decision is agony. She is suddenly disturbed by a child’s voice: a little girl approaches her, calling her ‘mama’.
It is such an outlandish event that María José climbs back down and tries to help the child, who is dirty, dishevelled, and unable to account for herself – her name, her parents, or what she is doing out there. The girl seems to have achondroplasia, which makes her frilly (if filthy) clothing a little hard to read, age-wise; still, a nervy, gabbling, still-living María José feels she has little choice but to drive back to town with her, where she plans to seek police support to reunite her with her parents. Well, the police end up coming to her for one reason and another, but the girl has strange abilities to get rid of anyone who stands in her ‘mother’s’ way. The only thing which matches this surreal and threatening situation is in how María José instantly adapts, taking the girl home. True, the girl – who eventually gives her name as Lucia (Sofía García) – won’t be readily countermanded, but the new normal lands strangely quickly.
María José does, of course, try to decipher what’s going on when she can, and even seeks spiritual guidance from local minister Father Abelino (Germán Torres) but consolation is not forthcoming in Rozas del Monte; he’s less interested in her personal plight and more interested in…a strange prophecy, natch, which declares that ‘two souls created under torment will become one’. This prophecy is noted in the opening credits, and accounts for many of the events which later follow. Unluckily for María José, her new surrogate family is at the centre of this – no doubt abetted by her outsider status, which has made her vulnerable to far more than local pranks and gossip. Little wonder that, after the initial shock, María José seems perfectly happy for Lucia to disrupt the norms of this dreadful town. However, other residents are readying themselves to restore order, at the cost of a long silence of necessity.
From the outset, the dynamic of the film feels warped, hovering between uncomfortable character study and – much as it sounds unlikely – a kind of bleak farce, inviting us to dislike Rozas del Monte’s small-town vibes and people as much as Lucia clearly does. We see significant things getting overlooked and petty things taking centre stage; it’s an age before we really get to the heart of what is unfolding here, so much time do we spend on pancake recipes, intra-female feuding and the dangers of the suburbs. Perhaps we do need that breathing space around some of the plot developments. It does feel, though, that the Catholic context which runs throughout the film can be partly lost on those who have limited knowledge about Catholicism, as much as we’re all well-prepped for devils and demons to rock up in horror films by now; some of the resolutions offered were, for this reviewer, a little hard to read. There’s a lot more to it here though, from investigating officers who pause to admire custom crucifixes to a priest who attends emergencies alongside the police – surely a step beyond the regular church duties – right through to the opening gambit about nuns, prophecy and prophecy-adjacent violence. The scriptures are both a beloved guide and counsel, and a portentous warning about bad things to come. People accept all of this as normal, because at least a large share of it probably is.
Macarena Gómez and Sofía García are a surprisingly tight duo here, with Gómez playing her part like a jangling, tightly-wound spring (albeit very stylishly dressed) and García – in what looks like her first acting credit, ever – successfully staying ambiguous, perhaps a force for evil, or perhaps a force for good; here to comfort a woman left with nothing or perhaps here to wreak havoc. Running throughout the film are insinuations, if we can call them that, about Lucia’s dwarfism, which are rather uncomfortable – she is referred to as monstrous, a ‘thing’ and worse, in ways which probably wouldn’t ordinarily survive the script edit, certainly in the UK or North America. But our sympathies eventually lie more and more with her, and certainly with María José, despite the issues which begin to affect the film. Things become unnecessarily protracted. Heavy with dialogue (and badly-bodged subtitles on the screener, which are awash with failed HTML tags), the film slows significantly around the ninety-minute mark and struggles to accommodate a raft of different elements. So Everyone Will Burn does lose its way, then struggles to bring everything together in meaningful terms; that being said, it does hold onto a few pleasing scenes, which it places well. Ultimately, the initial shifts in tone – compounded by the film’s length – stop it from being a straight-up success, but seeing Gómez doing her best Isabelle Adjani has its merits, whilst García is a great player throughout.
The North American debut of Everyone Will Burn (Y Todos Arderan) will take place at Fantastic Fest in Austin. For more information, please click here.
The mysteries surrounding Edgar Allan Poe’s life seem to make him as attractive a subject for a mystery yarn as anything he wrote about – which is particularly interesting, given his role in the development of the genre itself. The relationship between Poe’s art and Poe’s life is just too tantalising to ignore. The Raven (2012) blended Poe’s life and works in a fairly effective piece of horror, and a decade on, Raven’s Hollow (2022) has done much the same thing, with many of the same positives and negatives held in a similar balance.
The film starts with what looks like a fairy story scene (and not the only nod to a scene in The Beguiled) as a little girl gathering food in the woods has to flee from a malign something, which soon turns out to be no respecter of a locked and barred door. Perhaps the same malign force has something to do with the body of a young man, oddly strung up in the trees, which is discovered by a small group of military cadets travelling in the area. Edgar Poe (William Moseley), one of their number, insists on taking the body down and taking it home, reasoning that ‘home’ must be thereabouts. Just before expiring, the man had intoned the word ‘raven’ to Poe; there’s a small town nearby called Raven’s Hollow, which Poe suggests will surely take receipt of the man’s remains.
When the men arrive, the townspeople are reticent to say the least, though this may be due to the fact that they are already mid-way through a burial (and/or maybe aren’t all that used to strangers turning up carrying dead bodies). They claim not to know the young man at all. Poe, a sensitive and observant soul, disbelieves these claims and wants to know more about this place. Besides, it’s cold and getting dark: the men therefore decide to stay the night at the local inn. It’s an opportunity to ask more questions, which they do, though they find themselves laughing off the legend of a ‘raven’ which feeds on people; this creature is recently responsible for a small spate of deaths, it is claimed. They also discover that this folkloric creature is an old belief, far older than the settlement itself. Whatever their cynicism, strange events quickly do begin to overtake the men: even as different townsfolk emerge and recede as suspicious figures, risk and danger begin to impact upon the cadets and it seems they must solve the mystery in order to escape.
Step forward, Eddie Poe: never quite on the level with the other cadets, he holds a different viewpoint and seems open to different phenomena (this offers some justification for the isolated, troubled man he would become – Poe really was a cadet and really spent a few tumultuous years in the military). He is able to ask more pertinent questions and to gain the trust of several of the townspeople, even if for the short term: there are also hints that he is already rather more open to the kind of mythology or experiences which allegedly haunt Raven’s Hollow. The script here is very simple, though it does what it needs to do: it doles out its reveals rather carefully and in such a way that – with only a couple of brief lulls – the pace of the film holds fast, weaving together different strands of the mystery. There are some very gruesome set pieces, too, which have clearly been put together with some care.
As this takes place, there is a lot of period detail to enjoy: abundant mourning clothes, wine-coloured walls, dark wainscoting, tumbledown buildings and a consistent, pleasing sort of prim decay which characterises the film throughout. It’s far more Eggers than Corman; forget that very lurid latter kind of Poe adaptation, as that is not for here (and, as a result of all the natural low light and candlelight used, this is a very dark film overall). So aesthetically, the film is a delight – if you like that sort of thing. There are a few missteps as Raven’s Hollow moves along with its famous literary figure in tow, however. Whilst the simplicity of the script is notable, and certainly never makes Poe himself a particularly verbose figure, as may be expected, by the same token some of the chunks of exposition are a little too simple; a character gets a few minutes to fill in a raft of back-story, for example, which can feel rushed. Some of the lip service to Poe lore is a little clunky, too, even if you momentarily enjoy catching these moments as they go by.
Still, some minor reservations aside, this is a fairly enjoyable mystery story which makes Poe into an engaging character in that particular mystery. Moseley does something engaging with the role, Kate Dickie (in a supporting role here) is always dependable, and this is perhaps above all an interesting change of direction for director/writer Christopher Hatton, who has tended towards sci-fi and even a spot of kids’ animation in his other projects. No one can deny that segueing into a literary origins story like this shows a bit of versatility, or that taking on a canonical writer like Poe shows courage.
Raven’s Hollow (2022) will be released on 22nd September, 2022.
In Southold, New York in 1843 a young woman named Mary (Stefanie Scott) is being interrogated by the local authorities about what has happened in her family’s mansion house. The thing is, Mary is blindfolded and behind the blindfold there is blood trickling down her face, and as she starts to tell her story of how her matriarchal grandmother died and then what happened to the rest of her family, we get to see a tale of a family ruled by religious oppression, fear and other, more supernatural forces. But at the crux of it is Mary’s forbidden relationship with housemaid Eleanor (Isabelle Fuhrman), a love that Mary’s God-fearing family have tried to suppress by various punishments but to no avail, and as Mary reveals what went on in the house her own fate is made abundantly clear.
The Last Thing Mary Saw is perhaps one of the most authentically gloomy and atmospheric horror/drama movies of recent times, and let’s be honest, there have been quite a few to choose from. With that in mind the movie does fit neatly into the slow-burn period piece category made popular in the mainstream by titles such as The Witch and The Woman in Black, and it does feel a lot longer than its 85-minute running time, but writer/director Edoardo Vitaletti’s use of natural light and candles is impressively rendered, so much so that you do feel like you are watching a real-life event unfold from 1843, as opposed to a 21st century movie.
The other strengths are the performances from Stefanie Scott and Isabelle Fuhrman, whose forbidden love is entirely believable given that they do have a chemistry whenever they are onscreen together. Not necessarily a sexy chemistry, but something that says these are two people who belong together, who would flourish in an environment away from the tyranny of Mary’s family. Credit must also go to Judith Roberts as Mary’s grandmother, who is credited only as The Matriarch, which gives you a clue as to her character. Her presence is the evillest and gives the movie its supernatural edge, and if there were an award for most convincing and frightening old lady in a horror movie then The Matriarch is a sure contender.
But despite the strong production values – especially given the tight budget – and even stronger performances, The Last Thing Mary Saw never quite hits the spooky highs it teases during its first act, playing up the drama aspect more than the horror. Yes, horror movie fans will be drawn to this thanks to the dark and brooding setting, the occasional scenes of torture (kneeling on rice sounds extremely painful) and the Hammer Horror-style ending that finally rewards your patience, but there is a sense of restraint during the second act when the movie should have indulged a little more in its darker and more gruesome aspects to add an edge to the story that would have intensified the drama and made the journey a bit more satisfying. Instead, we get Rory Culkin turn up as a random stranger who may or may not have some knowledge about what is going on, try to steal some food, get his finger cut off and have a monologue about his facial scarring that doesn’t really play into anything other than the suggestion of the belief in evil. It could have been something, but the writing in this part of the movie is too vague to offer anything other than suggestion, and we already have enough of that thanks to scary grandmothers and secret lesbian lovers.
All of which makes The Last Thing Mary Saw a little underwhelming, especially on the first watch. However, once you realise that the horror aspects have been played down and you know what you are getting then repeated viewings are a little more fulfilling. There is something dark and potentially horrific pulsating at the heart of The Last Thing Mary Saw, and perhaps a bigger budget or another draft of the script may have brought that out, but as it stands, for a debut feature it does show promise for future endeavours, even if it is a little too unbalanced to truly deliver on its promise.
The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021) is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Acorn Media International on 19th September, 2022. To find out more about Chris Ward’s writing, please click here.
Dancer Faye (Roxy Bugler) lives an isolated existence in a remote cottage, where she is largely untroubled – at least, by other people. From the opening seconds, it’s clear that she has some unexplored trauma of some kind: even her dance moves and stretches quickly give way to tortured-seeming movements and gestures. Wild Bones (2022) charts the course of this trauma as it unfolds and develops, making several significant stops along the way; it is very much an experimental, and at times challenging, unreal kind of a journey.
One evening, Faye receives a phonecall from her estranged half-sister Alice (Mary Roubos), who informs her that their father’s estate is ready to be divided up. In other words, their father is officially dead, and they inherit his house: here’s the first clue that all is not as it should be, because Faye assumes that Alice has ‘spoken to dad’ somehow. In any case, this revelation prompts a reconnection of sorts between the two women. Alice comes to the house, accompanied by her partner? No, friend? – Gary (Tom Cray). It’s the depths of winter, and so – however unwittingly – Faye invites them both to stay awhile, making it clear that she is not comfortable with having guests. She remains distracted, awkward: the first conversation she has with Gary certainly has its painful moments. What does emerge, however, is the extent of the connection Faye had enjoyed with her late father. It still overshadows her life, and perhaps keeps her so detached from the rituals and habits of the day-to-day.
More to it than that? Certainly, her refusal to deal with the topic of the inheritance or any other family business suggests that she is more than just grieving her father’s loss; she is unable to hang onto memories reliably, and drifts into a dream state where those memories are painfully called into question. Alice tries to help her, encouraging her to deal with the new circumstances and to move on, but the (surprising) emergence of Gary as a new romantic partner for Faye seems to act as an additional trigger for her issues.
Given what has been said so far in this review, surely no one would be greatly surprised to find out that Wild Bones does not contain a neat, linear narrative arc, and is instead comprised of episodes and impressions – all of which hinge upon Faye and her dreams, preoccupations and anxieties. Sure, these episodes are connected by the same trauma, but play out quite differently: the whole film feels like an exercise in unwitting introspection. Faye herself is a kind of ghostly presence, hovering between the real and the unreal. For every conventional shot of her, there seems to be an echo – Faye painted in nightmarish colours, or refracted through different camera effects. As a means of bringing her internal feelings out into the external world, it looks very effective. Similarly, whilst presenting the on-screen nightmare has long held a particularly challenging appeal for filmmakers, when it’s done here, it’s done with nicely striking, visually rich scenes. Director Jack James is also very good at capturing that half-glimpsed, half-heard aspect of nightmares, where they blend with the waking world and blur with it, making you doubt what you have seen and/or heard. Other visual factors are just as compelling: Wild Bones is a lockdown baby, shot with a small cast in an isolated location, but even if there wasn’t an element of ‘needs must’ behind that, the wintry, remote location has a severe kind of glamour all its own. Conversely, the house interiors are warm and homely, with crackling fires to balance out the howling winds outside. It’s another sensual, often tactile film.
Perhaps the film’s clearest issue is just how audiences may define it: it doesn’t sit in any one genre, unless we plump for the very large catch-all category of ‘experimental film’. There are moments of horror, but they only punctuate the rest of the film; states of mind dominate over events; strange, hyperreal conversations provide only uncertain glimpses of a solid back-story. Like Malady, James’s first feature, Wild Bones broods over unconventional relationships, family losses and consequent anxieties. This is film as metaphysics, which can be a challenging, if intriguing watch.
Denkraum (2020), an independent film which operates very much in an experimental vein, differs from many experimental films in its choice of subject matter. The rather more expected deliberations on life, the universe and everything are refracted through a new kind of social media here: this is the ‘Denkraum’, or experimental space, of the title: Denkraum itself operates not just as a social network, but as a nightmare-filled space which goes one further than many existing social media platforms. Denkraum‘s levels of experimentation will not be for everyone because they never are, but if your tastes turn to more abstract, symbolic and deliberative material, then there is lots to admire in its almost painterly and progressive style.
Alex (Manuel Melluso) is obsessed with his ex partner, Alice: not only does she control his thoughts, but by way of some sort of unpleasant balance he uses his expertise in computers to monitor her life, albeit this makes his feelings of longing and anger worse than they might have otherwise been. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. In his pursuit of her, he has come up with the entirely new Denkraum platform, a video/textual platform, and seems to be in a position of power because of its special affordances. He watches Alice (Alba Barbullushi) on hedonistic nights out, reading text messages and keeping an eye on her friends. He continues to contact her too, though she begs him to forget her; he has the temerity to claim that his controlling behaviour is for her own good, but he does seem to try to move on, at least notionally.
However, fantasy and reality are, by this point, on a collision course. In much the same way that thieves always think people are trying to rob them and adulterers always worry that their partner will cheat on them, Alex starts to feel that he, too, is being monitored. He receives contact from ‘Jacob’, who not only knows what he’s been up to but evidently understands what makes Alex tick. Alex’s abortive forays into a life outside of Denkraum and Alice grow increasingly mixed up and hostile; Alex, already somewhat of a neurotic outsider, becomes increasingly paranoid.
This is only a loosely narrative piece of film – think an art-house Black Mirror with some shades of reality TV The Circle, at least in how the use of text, video and personae all meld together here. There are definitely nightmarish aspects throughout: Denkraum doesn’t simply offer a regular kind of platform for people to interact (admittedly all of those places can tend towards the nightmarish on occasion) but rather heads straight for people’s more hidden concerns, preoccupations and fears. Towards the end of the film, Denkraum also seems to suggest some of the ways that, in a social media-saturated world, we tend to give ourselves over to quasi-religious, even cultish behaviour too. As much as the film indulges itself in philosophical meanderings – some of which are, unfortunately, a little lost in translation, on a semantic or syntactical level – it is nonetheless quite busy, with text messages, images, and voiceover all overlapping. It also often segues from deliberations on life and love into tonally very different, explicit conversations (intercepted, or otherwise) on sex and sexuality. In short, for a film which runs for less than ninety minutes, there is rather a lot to take in.
It is, altogether, interesting to see social media get the experimental treatment, and first-time feature director Luca Paris has certainly not played it safe here: that deserves credit. He has also pulled together a visually appealing, crisp, colourful film, an enigmatic, modern spin on the old trope of ‘the nightmare’ – and an enigmatic performance from Melluso, who fits the role perfectly.
We’ll start this feature with a part-confession, but hopefully a relevant one. Speaking from the perspective of a Westerner to (by and large) other Westerners, here it is: many of us will hold, or at least recognise certain stereotypes about the Japanese character. If we take one of these at face value, we might acknowledge the idea of the Japanese having a clearly-defined sense of civic duty: we often regard them as scrupulous, well-mannered and hugely averse to conflict, preferring to openly follow social and cultural expectations. Remember the deep bows of humility in Cold Fish (2010), when Syamoto’s teenage daughter transgresses? That’s an example which leaps to mind. As it happens, Yoshiki Takahashi, the co-writer of Cold Fish, is the writer and director of Rageaholic (Gekido) 2022, a film which itself questions aspects of this urge to conform. In doing so, it takes that urge even further: whilst almost dystopian in places, it is by and large a social commentary which relies on fantasy elements to express some very real concerns. Sometimes darkly funny, sometimes hyper-violent, it certainly dispenses with the stereotype above; it’s a very angry film altogether.
The Japan of Rageaholic is more than just scrupulous – it is a full-on surveillance state, obsessed with enforcing all manner of rules. This is particularly noteworthy in the town of Fujimi. Fukama (Yôta Kawase) is a hard-bitten cop character – you know the type, long coat and perpetual cigarette – but he quite happily moonlights on the fringes of an underworld which isn’t officially meant to exist (the police chief has a framed article which congratulates her on ridding Fujimi of all yakuza elements). However, even if we assume that Fukama has been successfully holding duty and pleasure in balance, the balance is about to come to an end during one frantic night where his temper gets the better of him. He then undergoes mandatory psychiatric rehabilitation in the US (presumably in recognition of how the US is a world leader in promoting the power of therapy), spending three years in this foreign system.
On release, he is permitted to return to work under supervision, but he is alarmed to see that Fujimi has gone even further into the realms of zero tolerance in his absence. In fact, there seems to be very little of his old life left; in tracking down his old buddies, Fukama truly comes to understand the extent of these changes. Fujimi is dying: bars and businesses are closed, the streets are deserted and the only sound comes from a speaker, imploring people to obey the rules. It’s not bad advice, to be fair; anyone who transgresses can expect a visit from the Community Safety Patrol, now a kind of parallel police force which enjoys acting with complete impunity. These people may be clowns, but they’re powerful clowns, and what could be more terrifying?
Pardon the second reference to Cold Fish, but in common with Syamoto in that film, Fukama becomes a kind of everyman, for all his flaws: it would be overstating things to compare him too closely to Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971) but nonetheless, you find yourself rooting for him, hoping that there’s enough of his old cruelty in there to see him through an otherwise fraught, dangerous situation as the community turns its attentions to him. The film itself has a gritty, often lo-fi feel to it which is no doubt down to its comparatively small budget as much as a stylistic choice, but its lack of gloss works for it as much as, occasionally, against it: as much as some of the ultraviolent scenes are crying out to be dressed up, overall the film matches the world it examines, which is often an invisible world of poverty and outsidership. The film also takes aim at superficiality, such as in how it questions the redeployment of the word ‘community’ to mean anything from status, surveillance to all-out threat. It’s a similar idea to the ‘greater good’ espoused in Hot Fuzz (2007) – control dressed up as concern.
The world of the film is not intended to be more than a few steps along the line; accordingly, there’s a genuine sense of frustration about modern Japan here. It’s economical for the most part, but it’s a well-drawn drama which layers its social commentary with moments of grisly, cathartic content. There’s an element of ‘be careful what you wish for’ in Rageaholic.
Rageaholic (2022) is on cinematic release in Japan now: watch this space for further announcements.
I wonder if it’s the pandemic which has reminded us of our fear of the outdoors? Or did we always know? Regardless of where you stand on that question, the specific perils of climbing have appeared in a couple of films this year: The Ledge blended a dangerous climb with some dangerous pursuers, which kept things busy enough to generate some decent, plausible scares. Fall (2022) has no pursuers, but as the main characters are an absolute danger to themselves and others, this suffices. A film clearly intended for the big screen, and the bigger the screen the better, Fall is as exasperating as it is exhilarating; no, scrub that, it’s far more exasperating, but that does become part of the fun…after a while. In the meantime, you get to think about the horrors of being Very High Up, and these look pretty good on screen for those who enjoy (?) a good stomach-lurch or two.
We start with a kind of a prologue which, by coincidence, is almost exactly the same prologue used in The Ledge: a tragic climbing death and the fallout. We see three climbers ascending a sheer mountain face, which is going really well – right up until it isn’t. Well, that’s climbing. One year later, one of the survivors, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) is still taking the loss of her husband very badly: she’s pushing people away, refusing to hear reason (though it’s not until later in the film that you start to wonder if she’s physically capable of reason.) The choice before her is simple: keep drinking, or, link up with the other survivor, her friend Taylor (Virginia Gardner) and embark on a potentially suicidal climbing scheme, despite not having climbed anything for a year. Why doing some more climbing to get over a dreadful experience with climbing is the best course of action is beyond me – it’s like a kind of blockhead homeopathy – but here’s what they decide: to go and climb a remote 2000ft radio tower, with Taylor, who is an influencer, natch, filming their progress all the way. Sure thing! Sign me up!
The girls make their way to the tower where, if they were superstitious, their near deaths in a road traffic collision en route would have put them off, but nope, up they go – remarkably quickly, actually, so there’s not too much preamble before the dizzying heights begin to appear on screen. The girls are not privy to what the audience sees, however, in an array of macro scene set-ups worthy of the Final Destination series: rusty bolts, straining cables and failing structural elements neatly line up a series of unfortunate events which sees the girls both conquer the tower, and get stuck up there. What to do?
Look, this isn’t a cerebral piece of work. You knew that. You might not have known how far this was going to go, stupidity-wise, but the central idea was clear: two girls, with no appropriate clothing, with no clear idea what to do in a crisis, with no responsible adults on stand-by (with the exception of Taylor’s social media followers, who seem to miss the crisis because they’ve moved onto cat videos) have scaled an abandoned 2000ft structure in the middle of nowhere. Depending on the kind of viewer you are, you may: broadly sympathise with their plight; get mesmerised by the genuinely effective circling and panning shots; and/or despair of the writing, which tries to hurl in a dollop of sexy (the push-up bra becomes a character in its own right), a dash of tragic backstory, and an escalating sense of danger which largely stems from the sequence of events, ranging from eyebrow-raising to bloody unlikely to watch-through-hands stupid.
Still, the action sequences are pretty good and clearly have some budget behind them, with some effective and plausible sense of threat, even though the film has been re-edited to make it a PG-13 and so omits some of the expected pay-offs (and all of the f-bombs). The key idea here, though, is in the threat of harm rather than revealing it, so the relative bloodlessness is not a huge impediment. Sure, the plot strains and chafes along the way, but the spectacle does remain intact, using largely seamless edits. It’s at its best at its simplest, all told, though the temptation to add in some extra texture with some flashbacks and hidden twists is understandable.
It is physically impossible not to shout advice at the screen using language which would have been dubbed out of Fall, but with a certain amount of sanguinity, it remains an entertaining film – even if, in several places, probably not for the reasons director Scott Mann intended. There’s a lot of silliness in this spectacle, but once you accept this, you can enjoy this perplexing odyssey on its own terms.
Fall (2022) will close this year’s FrightFest, UK on Monday, 29th August. For more information, please click here.
