Despite I Spit on Your Grave being over forty years old, it’s probably fair to say that having lead actress Camille Keaton’s name attached to a project is always going to appeal to certain audiences. It’s a fact undoubtedly not lost on the director of Cry For The Bad Man, Sam Farmer, and nor on Meir Zarchi, the director of a direct sequel to ISOYG which, strangely, also came out last year. However, Keaton’s kudos is not enough by itself, and her presence on camera does not mean the film can dispense with all of the other going concerns.
Cry For The Bad Man shows its hand immediately, as we see Keaton’s character – Marsha Kane – cleaning up blood and gore at her home. We move forward by six months: Marsha is still at the house, living alone, but one night there’s a noise outside and the house is approached by three brothers – good old boys Wayne, Derek and Billy MacMohan, who try to intimidate Marsha into selling the house, claiming her late husband had already all but agreed a deal. Marsha refuses, so they threaten to return the following evening to collect on a signed contract. Marsha makes a faint attempt to seek help from the local police, but no dice. Only her grown daughter Helen (Karen Konzen) shows any real concern. She prepares for the worst.
We hear the brothers, over a game of cards, discussing their plans for the night ahead. It seems that Wayne (Scott Peeler) is the key mover and shaker here; the other two are less than keen on terrorising a woman for the sake of it, but Wayne claims that he’s unafraid – a sentiment clearly shared by Mrs Kane. And so, the rather simple set-up for a showdown is set: determined to get their contract signed, the three brothers head back to the estate after midnight, where they find Mrs Kane ready with a panoply of firearms.
In many respects, Cry For The Bad Man is business as usual. A lone female, an isolated location, a number of male aggressors laying siege to it because they can, uninterrupted. However, fundamental things have had to change; Marsha’s vulnerability is heavily signposted as relating to her age here, a big shift away from any intimation of vulnerability through sexuality. It’s mentioned in the script numerous times, just in case there was any doubt. Otherwise, the male aggressors are represented as your standard, fairly two-dimensional, unreconstructed types, though the overblown performances on display here do look rather jarring against a modern, crisp shooting film where the use of light and shade can’t disguise the fact that this is brand-new. It’s something which, say, Rob Zombie understands when he makes his homage-style exploitation films (though of course with a far, far bigger budget). Cry For The Bad Man in some respects seems like an exploitation homage, but against a new backdrop, where some of the aesthetics and styles clash with one another unhelpfully.
Whilst obviously not intended to be a deep and meaningful movie, there’s some slight intimation of a bigger conspiracy at play in terms of land rights in the town but, mostly, that doesn’t lead anywhere. The film largely functions simply as a vehicle for Camille Keaton, who is held in shot staring down a shotgun for what feels like a large swathe of the one hour ten minute running time. She seems to enjoy this, and so far as there’s a good way to point a shotgun on film, she looks fine. There’s little genuine sense of a threat to her though; she’s the star. She’s also in her seventies, so for all the script’s bluster about how she’ll be easy prey because of her age, little comes of this on screen. Add to this some (I assume) unintentional humour – such as a First Aid kit which can be used against shotgun blasts and one which can magically hurl itself up stairs and into shot without being asked for – and the film suffers heavily under a weight of, firstly, its stasis (with little happening) and secondly, its tonal issues, making the viewer want to laugh or disengage at moments which are probably not intended to make us feel such a way.
Cry For The Bad Man has a few components in place which are functional enough, and there are a few fun developments along for the ride, but as nice as it is to see Camille Keaton on screen, the film lacks clout. It isn’t about to break Camille Keaton’s reputation, but it’s not going to do anything to embellish it, either.
Cry For The Bad Man is available On Demand and DVD now.
Whether or not a horror film festival takes place online in our ‘new normal’, it’s good to have a film to close the day which knows how to play for laughs and, let’s be fair, make very few demands on us as an audience. So, when the director of Chestersberg, Jamie McKeller, introduced his film as “absolutely ridiculous”, it seemed like just the ticket. I do believe the first spoken word of dialogue in the film is “Battenberg?” That actually tells you a great deal, I think…
Channelling something of Alex Chandon’s Inbred (2011) in terms of style and sense of humour, this film is framed as a mockumentary. We’re told that when Chester Mapleforth (Andy Love) came into a vast amount of money, he decided to establish the village of Chestersberg as an independent state – an idyllic corner of Yorkshire where murder is absolutely legal. A spot of light murder busts stress, avoids a life hemmed in by bureaucracy and improves quality of life. The village residents enjoy it too; in fact, the village is oversubscribed. Chester is ready to tell his story now, so he (more or less) guarantees a film crew that they won’t be murdered while they document life in the town. Various community members, and would-be community members speak to camera about their roles.
For thoroughness, the crew also speak to those that would wish to get rid of Chestersberg altogether: DI Matthews (Alexander King) and his boss DCI Waits (Andrew Lee Potts) have been keeping an eye on the village for some time now, desperate to exploit some error or oversight and get rid of the project for good. Not a bit of it, so far as Chester’s concerned: he wants to expand. But there is the small issue of a traitor in the ranks…and rival villages all vying for ownership over the idea…oh, and this year’s MurderFest, which is always an unmitigated disaster…
To describe the whole ‘murder is legal’ idea on paper, it’s tough to avoid comparisons with the basic plot of The Purge; this just goes to show how completely differently things can be done, even whilst having some basic plot points in common. Chestersberg has very much opted for the ‘splatstick’ approach, missing no opportunities for a gushing neck wound or a lopped limb. Deliberately campy and OTT, with an array of practical FX, people into gore for gore’s sake will be very much at home here. When not scattering the cornfields with limbs, Chestersberg indulges in rather a lot of puerile humour too and, to be fair, most of the jokes land – though some of the throwaway lines are actually the funniest, in my book. The presence of Martin Clapham, a would-be Chestersbergian who can never quite make the grade, made me laugh every time and put me in mind of Peter Jackson’s gross-out-fest Bad Taste in places – in style, as well as content. This is, though, archetypal Yorkshire, and North Yorkshire at that. This means a backdrop of farmland, the streets of York, village greens, and proper tea. Tea gets mentioned a lot in this film, perhaps more than in any other horror film I’ve seen so far. As a preface to a violent death, I suppose you could do worse than a brew.
Whilst there is some sense of this being a stretch as a feature-length, by which I mean the sheer number of gushing necks over the running time, there are enough laugh-out-loud moments and a strange sort of rough charm to Chestersberg to keep things entertaining; yeah, it’s deliberately daft, there’s no grand agenda and it’s overlaid with cartoonish gore throughout, so if you are happy to see all of this play out for laughs, then there’s more than enough to be entertained by in Chestersberg. There’s also someone playing a kazoo in a bin, which is something I find very difficult to argue with.
Chesterberg played as part of the Soho Horror Festival’s ‘SoHome’ virtual fest. For more information, check out @SohoHorrorFest on Twitter.
Explorations of mental illness – particularly fractured selves – are not new in horror, but as they go there’s nothing quite like Every Time I Die. It’s a discomfiting watch which splices intense depictions of mental breakdown with supernatural elements, reaching towards a new mythos of life and death. The resulting film is eerie and difficult to predict – something which is a boon, in and of itself.
Starting with a traumatic, but seemingly instantly-forgotten dream, Sam (Drew Fonteiro) is clearly a troubled young man. Waking alongside a woman called Mia (Melissa Macedo), it seems that their relationship is a non-starter; not only can she not leave quick enough, but we soon see why – she is meeting her husband, Tyler, who is returning from a tour of duty. So that’s Sam’s home life; his challenging day job as a paramedic clearly adds additional strain, though his co-worker Jay (Marc Menchaca) is there to support him. Having clearly got through a lot of problems of his own via his own blend of mordant philosophy and medication, Jay does know something of Sam’s feelings of alienation, though for Sam bouts of lost time are growing more and more frequent. Meanwhile, memories of the loss of someone close to him seem to be rising to the surface, adding to his feelings of dislocation and confusion.
What could add exponentially to all of this? Well, how about a weekend at a lakeside retreat with Jay, Jay’s wife Poppy (Michelle Macedo), and Popppy’s sister Mia, and her husband? After Jay talks him into what was only ever a very bad idea, Sam’s time at the lake reveals for everyone the intensity of his issues, so he decides to leave early; however, an altercation at the roadside leads to a sudden, shocking escalation of events. Where a story seems to end, it instead segues into something else, leading onward into a spiralling, overall effective and changeable sequence of developments. There’s a strong, often unpleasant sense of unreality here: time moves erratically, gaps and blackouts alienate the audience just as much as they do Sam, and it’s impossible not to feel for Sam, who comes across as an authentically vulnerable, haunted man, trying to piece himself together whilst also coming to terms with his past. As different characters move to the fore, their plausibility (and the plausibility of the situation suggested to us) is universally strong, which is no mean feat given the direction the plot takes.
Overall, Every Time I Die has a rather languid, sombre tone, which makes the occasional, rapid changes of pace and action genuinely unsettling, jerking the viewer into a sense of alarm. The character of Tyler is fundamental in all of this; he’s an impressively odious, self-serving character whose jealousies and issues precipitate chaos and risk for everyone else. If Sam is an easy character to empathise with, then Tyler Fleming’s performance places him as an excellent antagonist. But there is far more to this film, with its interesting handling of the notions of life and death, ideas of consciousness and personhood interwoven into the narrative (but not unquestioningly presented as a boon; in this film, knowing everything can itself be terrifying). There are some genuine moments of dread here, as well as some redemption by the time we come to the film’s ending.
Whilst the film does feel a little protracted in places, it’s largely successful at what it sets out to do. My resounding feeling having watched the film was that it’s an uncomfortable watch, overarchingly sad, but with interesting ideas, a genuine sense of unsettling mystery and a stylish way of allowing those ideas to play out.
Every Time I Die played as part of the Soho Horror Festival’s ‘SoHome’ virtual fest. For more details, check out @SohoHorrorFest on Twitter.
Ten years has passed very quickly in the world of independent filmmaking: in that time, there have been a lot of great films, a lot of not-so-great films, and none (to my mind) which have had so much as a fraction of the impact of A Serbian Film (Srpski film).
It was a film, like many others, made on a shoestring, one which made minimal profit, but in terms of a reputation – well. Through shockingly explicit content which was widely known about before the film’s arrival onto the festival circuit, A Serbian Film generated immense buzz, first screening at SXSW in March 2010 before becoming the common denominator in a series of panics, denunciations and cancellations, followed almost inevitably by outright bans. In many respects, for those already used to shocking content, it became the film to see; as word spread and infiltrated even the mainstream (which it did, if only a little) it built up and up until it was something of a folk tale, or a ‘double dare you’, one to get through, rather than to earnestly enjoy.
In the UK, some hesitant planned screenings, including at London’s FrightFest that summer, were pulled under increasing local and national pressure. By the time the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) got hold of the film later in the year, it was shorn of a massive four minutes and eleven seconds before it was deemed suitable for viewing. In many respects, this is no surprise: that scene was never going to trip past the censors unchecked. Yet in other respects, the BBFC’s itchy trigger finger led to scenes being cut for things I certainly hadn’t seen in them; their vigorous pursuit of certain ideas about sexualisation got the better of them here. Meanwhile, as the BBFC were and are vigilant for the merest insinuation of impropriety, we now have a social media platform like Twitter (new and untested then; established to the point of being tawdry now) which has people openly declaring their sexual interest in minors, joining ‘communities’ and performing some agile mental gymnastics to assert that they ain’t so bad, really. Funny old world. A lot has changed in a decade, it seems.
“This whole nation is a victim…”
So what led to the creation of such a divisive film? ‘Torture porn’ had been bandied around as a term for some time by then, but never was the phrase interpreted so literally as here. Director and screenwriter Srdjan Spasojevic could easily have said quite simply that this was the film he wanted to make, and if he pushed the envelop somewhat then, so what? This was never the starting point, though. The much-vaunted rationale behind A Serbian Film was that it was a ‘political’ film. Spasojevic has said that his film was born of anger; it’s also the very antithesis of the kind of film you are supposed to make in Serbia, a country he characterises as being spoon-fed sentimentality and trope. There’s also a sense that, as Serbian cinema is so often funded from overseas, Spasojevic’s distaste for this lack of home-grown film inspired him to make a specifically Serbian film which laid waste to the norm. Well, didn’t it just. In a neat piece of parity, A Serbian Film made its own name abroad; in fact, it was months before the film actually screened in Serbia itself and even then, audiences were utterly bemused as they thought that films presented events as they should be, rather than simply as they are. If this is so, then no wonder they found A Serbian Film difficult to place…
So, okay: the film was born of rage and dissatisfaction with convention; mainstream cinema is bland, and the usual funding streams are riddled with agreed, fashionable social mores. Thing is, that could just as easily be a charge levelled at UK and US cinema, on the whole. I’m no expert on French, German or other European countries’ cinema scenes, but I wouldn’t mind betting it’s a similar picture. Imagining alternatives to the mainstream has always led viewers to more minor genres, films whose own content would very likely disqualify them from widespread approval and promotion. It’s been the benefit and the bane of horror cinema for years. All the same, though, neither US nor European cinema has ever gone as far as A Serbian Film in terms of content, despite coming from the same place, of wanting that alternative to the jaded and the saccharine. And why not?
Something else which has long been doing the rounds, again as promulgated by Spasojevic, is the idea that A Serbian Film is a ‘political allegory’, and thus it can justify its graphic narrative along those lines. Akin to another political allegory movie, GyörgyPálfi’s Taxidermia (2006), it’s perhaps telling that the political allegory on offer depends to such a large extent on gross-out moments. My initial response to arthouse-porn-film-as-allegory was sceptical; ten years on, it’s sceptical still. I just don’t think some of the justifications match up with the choices of content, like you can pass off child rape by simply saying ‘it’s symbolic’. But, in the interests of balance, there are allusions in the film to Serbia’s standing in the world after the Yugoslav wars: Maria responds to the mention of filmmaker Vukmir by saying ‘he sounds like one of our guys from the Hague [war crimes] tribunal’. Vukmir himself justifies his project by saying Serbians can live and suffer vicariously through seeing it; Spasojevic has said that he sees his film as an equivalent to American cinema post-Vietnam, a means of exploring national trauma. Perhaps. Ask any number of film fans, and they’ll have a different idea on A Serbian Film and the efficacy of its political subtext. But whether a potent allegory or simply an exercise in pure nastiness, the film thrived chiefly on its notoriety: it’s a decidedly dismal film – artistically dismal even – where a decent enough man is hammered repeatedly into the ground by circumstances beyond his control. Only he and Maria seem in any way palatable; everyone else is the film is a caricature or a monster, or both. A Serbian Film was clearly designed to press buttons and it did so, so successfully that it broke through into mainstream media coverage, with British newspaper The Independent rhetorically asking if A Serbian Film is ‘the nastiest film ever made?’
“That’s the cinema – that’s film.”
My suspicion is that, in common with Pascal Laughier after the success of Martyrs (2008), there was simply nowhere else for Spasojevic to go after A Serbian Film. When you have gone that far, in your debut film no less, then where’s left? How do you follow that up? If you attempt to push things even more, then for one, you’d struggle; it’s also likely that you’d increasingly irritate audiences who might feel that they were simply being dragged through atrocities yet again for the sake of it. But if you radically dial down your approach and your style, then you could just as easily alienate people attracted to your extremity in the first place. It’s a tough one, and this is just one facet of the trials and tribulations impacting upon filmmakers in the current climate.
Ten years on, it’s interesting that the film is still so neatly divisive: Rotten Tomatoes has it at 2.5 stars out of five, whilst IMDb currently rates it 5.1 out of ten. It’s pretty much straight down the middle. A Serbian Film evidently isn’t a film which you have mild opinions on, certainly, and including such content is always a hell of a gamble with prospective audiences, a love or hate scenario. Risk and reputation intersect in this film. However, if (as I suspected) A Serbian Film was in some ways intended to be a calling card of some kind, a name-making film which made everyone sit up and pay attention, then it turns out that I was wrong. I had thought that, even were A Serbian Film to haemorrhage money, which it apparently did, it would nonetheless get everyone talking about Spasojevic; once indie film had lit up, the filmmaker’s notoriety would assure him a glittering career. And yet, in the decade since, there’s only one directorial credit to his name – an underwhelming entry in the ABCs of Death (2012). Perhaps Serbia is an prescriptive place to make films and is completely sewn up, just like the director said. There is a project currently in pre-production however, currently linked to Unearthed Films in the US. Titled ‘Whereout’, it’s described as a horror Western: little else is out there at the time of writing, but it would be interesting to see Spasojevic back at it, as regardless of your opinions on A Serbian Film, it’s by no means a badly-made film. It is a shame that he hasn’t worked in the past eight years whilst people with far less talent go on cranking films out, year after year after year…
I suppose that, whatever your feelings about A Serbian Film and whether or not those feelings have changed over the intervening decade, the fact that it persists and is so well-remembered by the majority of people who have seen it says something for its merits, after all. Alongside films like The Human Centipede and Martyrs before it – although these films are clearly hugely different from one another – A Serbian Film represents something about horror at that time, when a desire to escalate the brutality seemed to take hold of the scene for a while. As with all things, the wave has since rolled back; there’s less emphasis on shock and ordeal now, at least to those levels, but the unremitting pursuit of the ugly did lead to some interesting, memorable cinema. I do think that A Serbian Film is both of those things, wherever it might be on the axis between style and substance, and I’m sure it will continue to be talked about for some time to come.
It was rather difficult to know what to expect from a rather unprepossessing title like The Shed; it doesn’t give a great deal away, does it? I half-wondered whether it was going to be a straight-up horror comedy, but in actual fact, this is a surprisingly sober tale of teen angst, where the horror elements are often kept on the down-low – at least, until the final act comes around. Whilst there are moments of dark humour, these are few and far between. Horror comedy, this ain’t. It’s typically rather more subtle than that.
The film starts with a man getting stalked through some woodland by a vampiric creature (and we’re talking ghoul, rather than aristocrat here). The man, terrified, struggles to defend himself, but it’s too late: he gets ‘the bite’, and we all know what that means. However, in what’s perhaps a nod to Nosferatu the Vampyre, the creature has misjudged the dawn and – when the sun hits him – burns up. The now decidedly sun-averse victim escapes and flees the forest, running for the nearest shelter: this just so happens to be a garden shed alongside a nearby house.
Inside the house, teenager Stanley (Jay Jay Warren) is just as averse to the daylight, but largely because dreams of his now-deceased parents quickly dissolve and all is apparently not well at home. Living with his somewhat deranged grandfather, who is quick to remind him that he’s the only adult standing between Stanley and a return to juvenile hall, Stan also has to contend with bullying schoolmates (supporting the great cinematic tradition of representing the American high school system as a semi-feral hellscape). Sure, Stan has a best friend – the equally put-upon Dommer (Cody Kostro) – and a somewhat estranged girlfriend called Roxy (Sofia Happonen), but Stan’s life is represented as pretty precarious.
It’s not long before Stanley notices something amiss about the shed, though. Assuming a would-be burglar is hiding out in there, he sends his dog in to check it out; this isn’t a winning move, and the predictable happens. Seeing that this is no ordinary intruder by any stretch of the imagination, he has the issue of trying to work out what to do for the best. In some respects, as Dommer points out, this creature has the potential to do them a few favours; in others, it’s a burden and such a damaged boy is not best-equipped to deal with it.
Now, there are some plot puzzlers here: you may well find yourself wondering why Stanley doesn’t do a few fairly obvious things to rid himself of the creature in the shed, given he does do other, scaled back versions of them. In other respects, there are unanswered questions and it would be interesting to know more about the particular version of vampire lore used here, as some of the things which happen don’t quite ‘fit’ with received wisdom on cinematic vampires. However, in other respects, this film gets a lot out of what is, in many respects, a very simple idea. Mainly, this hangs together because Jay Jay Warren does a good job, and it’s hard not to warm somewhat to Stanley as this all progresses; he is a sympathetic character who keeps his performance fairly low key. Overall, The Shed knows how to handle its economical idea, and doesn’t take the most obvious paths through its plot – either a gore fest, or playing for laughs. This shows that there is some consideration here for keeping things more character-driven and understated, with ‘the shed’ itself often on the periphery of the goings-on. Actually, in a few respects it reminded me of Deadgirl (2008): two disadvantaged teens, a mysterious creature and a means of escaping from their dreadful day-to-day lives via that situation.
The Shed does slow to a crawl in places, before a final act which is far more rich in horror aspects (right down to a couple of mostly harmless clichés) but all in all, these minor misgivings aside, The Shed is fairly well-pitched and executed, a largely diverting and in places rather original coming-of-age horror.
Signature Entertainment presents The Shed on Digital HD from May 11th.
The phrase ‘Southern Gothic’ – as evoked in the press materials for Union Bridge (2019) – is both wonderfully evocative and a big promise to fulfil, for any project. With its associations with ominous, heady Southern locales, flawed individuals and sinister subtexts, it clearly offers great potential for any movie. Union Bridge certainly takes a share in some of that potential, though its emphasis on atmosphere over explication may alienate some viewers. Underpinned by mood rather than narrative, this is a minimal, oft-times perplexing but nonetheless striking film.
In an isolated Maryland town – the Union Bridge of the title – prodigal son Will (Scott Friend) has returned, after a long absence living ‘in the city’ has left him feeling burned out. He returns home to his mother’s house – a mother whose key focus is to rehabilitate her son’s belief in his family name. For whatever reason, she’s displeased with the associations his father brought to the Shipe family before his death. She expects better of Will – and indeed, it seems as though this is a prominent local family, factory owners with a hand – at least historically – in politics. Will clearly has a lot to live up to.
Being home again is, for the most part, what he would expect with friendly, if constrained reunions with people from his past. However, one family in particular seems to have a lot more going on. Will initially passes his old schoolfriend Nick Taylor as he arrives back in town: Nick (Alex Breaux) is seen carrying tools, seems distracted, and as Will finds out, he has been going to a location on the outskirts of the town to dig ‘for gold’ on a nightly basis, after having visions of buried Confederate treasure. The audience see more – that there is some sinister connection with the Civil War-era, where plans were once made between ancestors of the Taylors and Shipes to commit a crime, a crime which led to betrayal and secrets.
As the days go on, Will gets more involved with the Taylors, becoming romantically involved with cousin Mary (Emma Duncan) – a sensitive soul who has taken to some kind of Wicca-lite to help her deal with troubling visions and dreams of her own. There is clearly something lurking in the history of this place, and soon Will, too, finds himself drawn to whatever must be hidden underneath the ground, seeking closure from something he barely understands himself.
One of the unusual things about Union Bridge is that the human drama unfolding at its heart is frequently dwarfed by the natural world which surrounds it. It’s almost as if, no matter how crucial Will’s journey of self-discovery is to him, it’s only a small facet of life at large. There’s a sense of of people and their drama adrift in an impassive landscape, their stories playing out as just small fragments of much larger stories. The film is artfully shot, with lots of aerial shots and static shots, emphasised by lots of natural light – although the factory stands out like a beacon, overshadowing everything in the town, even the cemetery. As for the characters themselves, there’s very little dialogue. In fact, people’s conversations are sometimes muted altogether against the rest of the soundtrack, adding to the impression that human endeavour is very minor in the grand scheme of things. The ground beneath them seems to be a fundamentally important thing here: characters are left for dead in the soil, or carry it under their fingernails, or recline on it, or have it on their clothes. It is a fixation for several characters – Nick, and then Will, though other characters take an interest in it, too.
However, the way in which the film dwarfs its central characters’ preoccupations and strips back the amount of exposition on offer makes the film very plot-lite, and this will almost certainly divide the audience come the end of the film. Atmosphere is a tricky thing to generate in a low-budget movie: director/writer/producer Brian Levin has certainly achieved it here, but whether through intent or by happy accident, it has meant that the aesthetics overwhelm any narrative development, with the film taking a very attractive, but nonetheless convoluted route to its close. For me, some more integration of the Civil War era storyline would have brought things together in a more satisfying way. Overall, however, I did enjoy the experience of watching this film, and – particularly given the director’s previous writing credits are almost exclusively zany comedies – this is an interesting example of brooding melancholy.
Union Bridge arrives on DVD & VOD platforms on May 19th 2020.
Vivarium (2019) has the kind of incessant, weighty atmosphere which sticks with you; it riffs on the horrors of anonymous suburbia, taking the idea of the family and the joys of the property ladder to a hideous extreme. To accomplish this, it opts not to give the audience all the answers, something which has apparently been a source of frustration for some viewers. I can appreciate that; a little, just a little more explication would have been welcome here. However, overall this is a very engrossing film which accomplishes a great deal.
Gemma (Imogen Poots) and boyfriend Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are a young couple looking to buy their first place together. To this end, they pop in on an estate agent in town and meet the decidedly strange Martin (Jonathan Aris). Martin tells them about a new development, called Yonder, out on the edge of town. He offers to take them there for a look; they agree, and follow him there in their vehicle. Yet, just after showing them around Number Nine – one house among many absolutely identical ‘new builds’ – Martin disappears. Tom and Gemma try to leave themselves, but Yonder is a maze, and try as they might, they keep on rolling up outside the house they’ve been to see. They run out of fuel and have no option but to stay overnight in the house.
The next day, there’s been a delivery – food and basic toiletries. Then, another box arrives, containing a baby boy. ‘Raise the child – get released’ is the instruction printed on the box. As luck would have it, there’s already a nursery in the house – blue for a boy too – but it’s quickly clear that this nameless child is no ordinary child (or at least, he’s somewhat worse than other children). He grows at an abnormal rate. He emulates Gemma and Tom, but does not seem to understand human emotion. He screams until his basic needs, such as for food, are met. Gemma has grudgingly accepted her role in all of this, whereas Tom has retreated into himself, spending his days digging in the garden for what he thinks must be a way out. He wants to abandon care of the child, to see if this will draw out whoever it is that’s watching and controlling them, but something in Gemma makes her defend him. After all, perhaps if they successfully raise the boy, they’ll be able to go home. Life becomes a surreal routine.
The boy (Senan Jenkins) is, if I may, an effectively creepy little fucker; he disappears off on his own regularly, and seems to be in contact with whoever it is that’s behind it all. He returns one day clutching a book which is printed in some unfathomable language, and he obsessively watches the strange, monochrome patterns which pass for TV programmes in this place. Gemma tries to find out more about him, but she’s unable to; he has the mastery of the place, whereas she can’t ever keep up. Eventually, though, as the boy grows, she has to take desperate measures.
Do we discover what is going on here? Nope, not as such; the film’s key strength is in its strange, unsettling symbolism, and from the moment we see a cuckoo pushing a chick out of a nest at the beginning, that symbolism is pretty blatant: the grim anonymity of suburban life, the monotony of child-rearing and the impact on people who opt into all this. The notion that, after raising the boy there could be the opportunity for ‘release’ is an idea which is also explored, as what form this ‘release’ could take is disputed. The grinding tedium and hard work which Gemma and Tom are faced with here is also very unsettling, the environs oddly menacing. The sense of isolation here is effectively-wrought, and the fact that the child clearly knows a lot more than he’s letting on keeps the audience on the same level as Gemma (primarily), as it’s she that the child leans on most, exploiting her maternal instinct in order to thrive. It’s just as bleak when the child needs her no longer.
Some intriguing developments in the final act of the film beg far more questions than they ever answer: the film feels somewhere between Under the Skin and Paperhouse, sacrificing the expected denouement to pose one final question. However, overall the film is an effective, aesthetically-rich horror yarn, and I quite enjoyed the sensation of being dwarfed by whatever the hell is going on here. Definitely a winning choice for these days of social distancing.
At last, we have up-to-date evidence that it’s perfectly possible to make a new version of a classic story that neither tinkers unnecessarily, nor departs entirely from the tone and content which made the story so good in the first place. Leigh Whannell’s take on the H G Wells story of The Invisible Man retains the paranoia and uncertainty which runs through the 1897 tale, and certainly keeps the spite and unreason of the invisible antagonist, but by re-positioning it in the 21st Century and exploring an all-too-real subject via its central conceit, the result is an intense, fraught and almost panic-inducing story. I’m recommending it, with the proviso that the level of stress it caused was at times quite unbearable.
Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) has all of the outward appearance of wealth and comfort, one of many, many disruptions which the film offers up from the earliest scenes. It is quickly revealed to be a gilded cage, and she is planning to leave her partner, Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen); that this needs to take place in the early hours, after drugging him, tells us neatly that he is someone to be feared. She successfully gets out after the film’s first watch-through-hands sequence, hitching a pre-arranged lift with her sister to a safe house, the home of her friend James (Aldis Lodge) but the impact of her trauma upon her has been extreme. She is damaged; she fears that Adrian will come for her, and she is too scared to leave the house.
Perversely, news of Adrian’s suicide a few days later offers Cecilia the chance to start rebuilding her life; so successfully does Moss enact being a deeply damaged abuse sufferer, that you can have no qualms about celebrating the relief she so clearly feels at the news that Adrian cannot hurt her again. Remembering her in his will, Adrian leaves her the proceeds of his lucrative specialism in optics, but there are conditions, as stipulated by his brother Tom – the nominated executor of his estate. If these things seem too good to be true, then truly, they are. Cecilia begins to hear things, see things which do not make sense. She interprets this as showing that in some as-yet inexplicable way Adrian has not left her; her loved ones interpret this as evidence that she is struggling to cope. The evidence begins to mount: just enough to make her doubt her own mind at first, the silent, mounting assaults on her strengthen and change, soon impacting upon others around her.
Cecilia’s battle to make people believe what she is telling them is, again, testament to Elisabeth Moss’s performance throughout this film; in less capable hands, a woman deliberating on or indeed struggling with an unseen assailant could be utterly flat, even laughable, but it’s not so here. Essentially acting her way through a sci-fi spin on gaslighting, she is deeply sympathetic and plausible, and the decision to frame this as a woman leaving a partner – and what that partner is willing to do to punish this ‘crime’ – is an inspired one. That said, anyone who has been in an abusive relationship, go forewarned; this is not easy viewing. The means may be extraordinary, but the behaviour (and the fallout) is disturbingly feasible.
Whannell takes other interesting decisions along the way, and another aspect of the film which worked very well was in what it doesn’t do; the audience is invited to become as uncertain as Cecilia. The camera will pan around and hold on a scene in which nothing is happening; whether or not someone is there, we cannot know. It’s also intriguing that Whannell dispenses with the original story’s garrulous invisible man, where Griffin narrates his own story, makes requests, makes threats and ultimately holds sway over his unwitting host via language. In 2020, our invisible man is almost mute. This adds a great deal to the sense of risk, of never ‘knowing’ what is there. Layered over all of this is an incredible, ominous Benjamin Wallfisch score whereby the music suggests threats which happen – or don’t. Aurally similar to some of his work on Blade Runner 2049, the heavy, atonal soundscape is absolutely integral in the design of all this tension.
The Invisible Man shows us a person being broken down into component parts, before, slowly, composing herself from scratch. Not everyone will enjoy the redemptive moments but, for my part, I thought it all worked well, a needed leveller after an almost unendurable, escalating sense of threat and powerlessness. It’s absolutely the best thing Whannell has ever done.
Takashi Miike’s output is so expansive that I am in no ways caught up with his recent films; in fact, I reckon the last one I might have seen was about nine years ago. Now with over one hundred credits to his name, you could essentially get a part-time job for a few months just to play catch up; that said, if you’ve seen even a few of his, then you know that a few themes are pretty likely. Yakuza, gangs who are not Yakuza, rites of passage, bent cops, ultraviolence…they’re not always there, but they’re often enough there. First Love (2019) is furthermore described in its press materials as ‘Tarantino-esque’; whatever you think of Tarantino as a man, it’s probably fair that he’s become eponymous at this point, but to what extent is First Love reminiscent of Tarantino?
Well, obvious links to True Romance aside, there’s some Venn-diagram style overlap between the two directors, perhaps especially given that each is a fan of the other’s work. First Love has that emphasis on the interplay between gangland and normal folks; there’s some of the same kind of black comedy in there, and visually this Takashi Miike film is a lot more muted -almost Tarantino-retro in aspect – compared to many of his better-known projects. But they’re not identical; I seriously doubt that Tarantino would ever feature a ghost in underpants…
We are introduced to an array of characters; of chief interest there’s Leo, a boxer, whose slowly-rising career is scuppered when he discovers he has a brain tumour; there’s Kasu, a local Yakuza who’s sick of the Chinese muscling in on the local drug trade, wanting instead to steal a large amount of the supply before making himself scarce; there’s also ‘Monica’, a drug addict whose father (actually, he of the underpants and added spectrality) sold her into prostitution over debts. A great deal of time is taken over it, but essentially the collision course between these people – and their surrounding people, given the gang elements – seems set, as both Leo and Monica end up in the frame when double deals start to go badly wrong. ‘Wrong place, wrong time’ impacts rather heavily on them.
For all the promise of violence and the presence of regular topics, though, First Love spends the greater amount of its running time being quite subtle; I’d go so far as to say slow, and moments of violence which occur during the first two thirds (or so) are not front and centre the way they typically are, or perhaps, were. Even an early decapitation takes place quietly off-screen. Things do of course heat up as various gangs and interests clash in the final act, and gangster moll Julie (Becky) is an enjoyable, grunting, yelling, violent foil to all of the more understated content. Then again, there are issues in moving from a slower, often subdued film into the ever-anticipated grisly sequence; how well that works, or feels like some kind of genre obligation, is down to the viewer. Perhaps expectation is this film’s greatest enemy.
Another issue here would seem to be the ‘star-crossed lovers’ motif which, despite the film’s 108 minutes, feels rather thin and underdeveloped. The cast isn’t at issue; although Monica/Yuri is played by a new actress (Sakurako Konishi), Leo (Masataka Kubota) has some serious Takashi pedigree, and more could have been made of their time together. There was no sense of overarching sympathy or investment in them; I wonder if there were simply too many characters in this film altogether.
For all that, First Love isn’t a bad film, in many respects. It has a good cast, it’s well shot, lit and scored, and it’s all competent enough with a number of enjoyable scenes and developments. It simply lacks the spark to be memorable, a film of disparate parts which trundles through its subject matter without any real verve. It’s a shame, but then if you make as many damn films as Takashi Miike, can they all be great?
First Love (2019) was released by Signature Entertainment on 14th February 2020.
Sometimes it feels as though icons of the films we hold dear are leaving us at such a rate, that we couldn’t meaningfully pay tribute to them all. However, it would be completely remiss not to talk about the loss of director Stuart Gordon today, a skilled and frankly underappreciated director who has a hand in numerous classics of the horror genre.
Gordon was a man who appreciated horror in all its versatility and potential, and never disavowed his work in the genre – which is something which fans loved him for, because there can, at times, be a tendency for directors to move away from their horror cinema, as if it was somehow the bottom rung of the ladder. Not so Stuart Gordon, as dismissive of those people as any of us, saying, “there are always people who think that horror movies are just kind of one half-step away from porno to begin with.” He is associated, for me, with his lurid and novel interpretations of Lovecraft; sure, Lovecraft might have written more extensively about the unnameable and the unknowable, but Lovecraftian lore was certainly rather less abstract and rather more overt in Gordon’s visions. His interpretations played with ideas of the monstrous, making them graphic, colourful and even comic, if you like your humour pitch-black.
One of his earliest works – Re-Animator in 1985 – was one of the first videos I ever saw-but-shouldn’t-have-seen, albeit a few years later; it’s a calling-card for what could be done (and hadn’t yet been done) with, in this case, a minor Lovecraft story, which he transformed into a science-gone-awry body horror, underpinned by the brilliant casting of Jeffrey Combs as Dr Herbert West. Combs played West utterly deadpan and in earnest: it worked, and theirs was thereafter a partnership which worked brilliantly and continued for many years, across other horror films now recognised as classics of their body-melding or genre-splicing kind – anything from From Beyond (1986) to The Pit and the Pendulum (1991), a historical horror epic which took the Poe title and rendered something rather more from it than the tale offered, being a brilliant, but minimalist yarn about the psychological impact of torture.
Gordon never exclusively worked in horror and racked up a list of modest successes in other genres from sci-fi to family-friendly TV during his career, but I suppose for me his film Dagon in 2001 not only marked a welcome return to horror, but to Lovecraft too – something which happpily continued with the Masters of Horror series some years later. Re-locating The Shadow Over Innsmouth to the Spanish coast (Dagon is a Lovecraft story, but not the one actually used here) Dagon is unashamedly one of my favourite films; yes, it’s true that the CGI hasn’t aged particularly well, but the script, the cast of largely unknowns who made the film their own, and a fantastic reworking of the Lovecraftian themes of death, destiny and the grotesque potential of the slumbering old gods is given unique, enjoyable treatment here.
And I think that’s key – Stuart Gordon’s films are well-directed and interestingly-written, but they’re always entertaining. His films aren’t exercises in directorial experimentation or criticism for their own sake. They’re made for audiences to enjoy. It’s something else we can be grateful for, as we mark the loss of a singular talent and a director who deserved far more praise and recognition than he received.
Having been very lucky indeed to have attended FrightFest Glasgow – even more so, given the current ban on cinemas and gatherings – I decided to stretch my luck a little more by asking Adam Stovall, director of the deeply humane and immersive indie film A Ghost Waits, if he could spare a little time to answer some of my questions. I asked about the writing process, any inspiration behind the film and the shooting of A Ghost Waits itself. The result is a great, detailed interview with loads of insight, which I’m very happy to feature here. Many thanks to Adam for his time.
Okay Adam – first question – tell us a little about the inspiration for A Ghost Waits. What was the creative process of writing this film like?
I’ve been writing screenplays for twenty years, and the process is never the same. The only thing that remains fairly constant is that I don’t really start working on a script until I think the story doesn’t work, as I then have a puzzle to solve. It’s just so much easier to not write than to write, if a story has already been told then I’d rather just pop some popcorn and watch that.
That being said, this one was completely new to me. MacLeod and I had spent a year trying to make another film, but we couldn’t raise enough money. I went home to Northern Kentucky to figure out what was next, and while I was there my friends Brian and Jenn sat me down and had me play a video game called P.T. It’s a first-person puzzle game in a haunted house, designed by Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima. Very atmospheric. So I was playing that and I had my friends laughing, and it occurred to me that there might be a movie in someone like me having to deal with a haunted house. As I was playing with that idea, I read a webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, where a man asked a woman what she thought was the most American movie and she answered “Ghostbusters. Here’s a movie where you have demonstrable proof of an afterlife, but the whole movie is about growing a small business and navigating bureaucracy.” I thought, “That’s hilarious…and I want to see that movie.” So I wrote it!
P.T. (Kojima, del Toro)
One of the investors we met while trying to make the other movie remained very excited to make something. He was talking to a mutual friend one day and asked if they knew what I was up to. “I think Adam just had an idea about a weird haunted house movie,” our friend told him. So he and I got on the phone and I talked him through the story as I saw it, and he said he’d invest half our (admittedly small) budget. My Mom put in the other half, and suddenly I had a budget…and a script to start.
I knew it would be largely confined to one location, as that’s a good way to keep the budget down. I also knew the cast would be minimal, especially in terms of speaking roles. With those logistical concerns in mind, I set to thinking about ghost stories. One thing I love about genre storytelling is that it allows for a more operatic style, but your metaphor has to be strong. My first thought was that usually ghosts have unfinished business that’s keeping them here, and the idea of a handyman being presented with the largest task of his life — helping a spirit resolve their unfinished business — was exciting to me. In the original ending, Jack helps Muriel finish her business and then she leaves, because everyone leaves Jack. But that didn’t feel right. I was in Austin for Christmas 2015, and my first night there I hung out with my friend Matt. He had three movies for us to watch, but after the first one I told him I was working on a script and could maybe use his help with it. He had the idea for an All About Eve dynamic, which created the character Rosie. This created a context which could bond Jack and Muriel, and that led to the ending as it is now.
In summer 2015 I’d seen a show called “Hundred Days” which The Bengsons were workshopping in Cincinnati. The song which ends the film, “Years Go By”, is in that show. I was out with my then-girlfriend one night, and in the middle of a conversation I had the image of the garage with the song playing under it. I ran home that night and wrote the ending, and that’s when I knew I had a movie.
Of course, it changed a lot throughout the entire process. We wrapped principal photography in August 2016, and I started cutting together the assembly – which was 1:50 and not good. But the ending worked! So it was just about getting to the ending quicker. Eventually, scenes started to take shape and the edit became less not good, and eventually the film was strong enough to tell that from minute 34 on we were good, but we hadn’t earned our way there over the previous 33. We didn’t have money to bring anyone else back, so MacLeod and I reconvened on our own and figured out how to make those 33 minutes work. This worked, but it didn’t fix everything. The dreams still didn’t work, but I refused to scrap the idea because the first two dreams set up the third one at the end. So we talked through what the point of the dreams should be, and settled on what’s there now. The second dream was actually the last thing shot in the movie. We had to film it at 7:00am on a Sunday morning before he flew back to Los Angeles.
And finally we were happy with the film.
Were any other films (or art and literature, for that matter) an influence on you?
The aforementioned video game and webcomic were the chief influences on the story. I have a rule that you should never remind the audience they could be watching a better movie, so I try to avoid homage and that sort of thing. That said, we did absolutely steal one scene from another film…and no one has caught it yet.
In a more general sense, I would say the biggest influences on my writing are music, Charlie Kaufman, and the film Marty. Someone once told me, “Film is an emotional medium. You can give your audience all the information in the world, but if you don’t give them a reason to care, it’s all for naught.” Music is all emotion for me, and my brain is basically a hard drive filled with every song I’ve ever heard and they’re all on shuffle. So as I’m working on an idea, some songs will usually start to bubble up and attach to it, and that shows me the direction in which to head.
Kaufman once said that he considers most films to be dead, in that it doesn’t change or move. His goal is to create a story that feels alive, in that it changes upon your experience of it. That stuck with me, as did the experience of watching Marty. I had just seen a very good rom-com where the characters bonded almost exclusively through pop culture, and then here was a movie about two adults meeting and connecting through frank discussion of their insecurities and desperate hope. It felt so much more timeless to me, and I have aimed for that ever since.
You mentioned during your FrightFest interview that your lead actor, MacLeod Andrews, improvised some of his lines during his scenes. How important to you was it to retain that kind of organic performance on screen, given how important the character of Jack was to the film as a whole?
I wrote Jack expressly for MacLeod – to the extent that had he said no, the movie would simply not exist.
We’ve been friends for a few years now, and have been wanting to make a movie together that entire time. Once this became a reality, he was very involved at every stage of writing. The character is based on myself, but it’s for him. I think MacLeod actually did a great job sticking to what was on the page, but our collaboration is very much a two-way street. We trust each other, and we speak a shared language. I cannot count how many times I’d text or email him a weird idea for the movie, and he’d respond “How does this serve the story?” and I would say “But it’s funny and weird and okay fine you’re right.” But then sometimes I’d come up with something weird and funny and he’d say, “Actually that works.”
The toilet scene is the biggest improvisation in the film. The phone call was scripted, and indeed we shot it during principal photography, but it didn’t work and so I cut it. During the editing process, we realized that we really did need the information it imparted, so during pickups we dug back in and figured out how to make it work. I cut a bunch of dialogue and we ran it a few times, and then MacLeod said “I have an idea. Let the camera run.” And then he made the toilet talk, and I had to walk away because I was laughing so hard.
For those unaware, in addition to the films MacLeod has made, he works mostly as an audio book narrator. Between those two things, he pretty much lives in story, so his instincts are amazingly sharp. He gives the best notes, too. I’m just really, really lucky to have such a staggeringly talented friend.
Your female lead, playing the ghost character of Muriel (Natalie Walker) seems to have a difficult task in that she has to enact being very detached, before showing some aspects of something else creeping through which gradually re-humanises her, but not in a sentimental or a really overt way. Was this challenging? How did you decide to manage this from the point of view of a director, and Walker as an actor?
This will surprise no one, but casting is ridiculously hard. It’s the process of looking for someone who is 100% right for a character, and the chasm between 99% and 100% is everything. Talent and discipline can get you to 99%, but it’s instinct that carries you the rest of the way.
I had written Muriel for another actor, a friend of mine, but she was cast on a TV show and was unavailable. I recast the part with a local actor in Cincinnati, but we had to reschedule and she wasn’t available for the new dates. So I went back to my desk, opened up my laptop, and cleared my mind.
I had been following Natalie on Twitter for a while, so I knew she was hilarious and brilliant. Then one night I thought, “Oh wait, she’s an actor too! I should check out her work!” I couldn’t find anything online, so I emailed her and told her about the project and offered to send her the script, which she took me up on. She liked the script, so we talked and she taped an audition, and the next day we connected on FaceTime and I offered her the role. I just had a feeling in my gut that she’d be great. She has so much vibrancy, it reminded of Robin Williams. I suspected that putting her in a role that demanded she sublimate that energy might produce similar results.
Once we were on set, it was a very small crew so I had a million jobs and was constantly running around, which left little time to sit and talk with her and MacLeod. I don’t know how general this advice can be, but in my experience casting actors with theatre background helps immensely as they’re accustomed to really digging into the script and crafting something of their own.
So much of directing is just maintaining a perspective and a sensibility. As both writer and director, and given how personal this story was, both of those things were in my bones. I quickly learned that whenever they had a question about something, I should just be honest and speak from the heart.
Did you have any misgivings about how you were going to end the film, or was this always the ending you envisaged? (I’m wary of spoilers here and I will ensure none creep in…)
I didn’t, no. I understand why some are concerned by it, or worry that it could be in poor taste. But it’s honest, and I don’t shy away from talking about the subject. Roger Ebert once said that film is a machine that generates empathy. I think if people open their hearts to what’s happening, they’ll understand that it’s not prescribing anything, but rather empathizing with a taboo.
And finally, the film seemed high on people’s lists after the Glasgow FrightFest screening – mine included. I was wondering, what would you feel was the highest praise someone has given, or could give to your film?
The best thing that could be said, was said after the premiere. People were effusive in their praise overall, but several of them told me about their own struggles with mental health, and that the film made them feel seen and heard. I have struggled with depression and suicidal ideation my entire life, and at my lowest I’ve never had the words to ask for help…but movies were always there.
At my lowest, invariably a film would come into my life that made me feel less alone, and I would make it to tomorrow. I wanted to make something that would do that for someone else, and to know that I accomplished that goal means everything to me.
