Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Automata (2019)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

It’s been close to six years since I reviewed director Lawrie Brewster’s second feature film, the cryptozoological horror Lord of Tears; at the time, I was impressed with the film’s imagination and its sense of a reverence for classic horror fare, but found it a sometimes muddled film in which certain sequences should have been cut out completely. Having recently seen his newest film Automata (again scripted by close collaborator Sarah Daly) I have a strong sense of deja-vu. Automata is also bursting with ideas, and seems to be hearkening back to the glory days of the likes of Amicus. Its subject matter, indeed, is worthy of that studio, as well as certain others of the era, which I gather were influential on this production. However – and it’s a big however – the way in which the plot is developed and realised is nothing short of garbled, or even downright barmy.

The film begins with a period setting, which in itself is pretty bold on a budget: a band of 18th century soldiers transporting a mysterious trunk are ambushed by an army who wants whatever’s inside it. Many men soon afterwards lose their lives, but we never get to see the trunk’s contents for all that. Instead, we move to the current day. Historian Brendan Cole (Jamie Scott Gordon) is approached by a wealthy collector who wants his expertise on what’s been assumed a folk story about a clockwork doll known as ‘the Inferno Princess’. (This, we can assume, is what was in the trunk 300 years previously.) Cole has written extensively about the Princess, but he’s staggered by his would-be patron’s claim that he may have found the doll itself – intact, functional and needing only to be verified by an expert – i.e. him. Being offered a million pounds for the job, which will take a week, he can hardly refuse. He takes his grown-up stepdaughter Rose (Victoria Lucie) with him to the house in question, and begins to run his tests on the doll.

Of course, the doll has a mysterious power of its own, and begins to affect both Brendan and Rose. The Princess doesn’t really look like an automaton of the day, and it’s hard to get a sense that this is a clockwork effigy of a person without any SFX beyond cosmetics, but there are some neat aesthetics here. Gradually, Brendan and Rose are able to piece together the sad history of the doll; it’s an effigy of a noblewoman with a tragic story. Her likeness was captured at its most perfect, but it seems the relationship between the model and the automaton project was never an easy one and all sort of things went wrong along the way. As they gather the finer details, ghostly goings-on begin to overtake the house, and the influence of the doll – or Talia, the woman copied for the doll – threatens them both.

All of this would be perfectly fine, perfectly reasonable and enjoyable fodder for a horror yarn, and I always want to give credit where filmmakers come along with ideas for an original mythos of their own. Seriously, it would be very easy to make something perfectly saleable out of tried-and-tested ideas, but Brewster doesn’t do that. That’s worthy of respect. But it’s frustrating when these ideas are brought to the screen in ways which either don’t make sense, blow any sense of intrigue or mystique along the way by questionable handling, or worst of all, descend into farce. Whilst AIP etc. had elements of camp, they were more practised than they were hokey, and the dialogue tended towards melodrama. That worked perfectly for films like The Masque of the Red Death, and part of me wishes that was the approach taken here. Instead, during the screening, there was that sickly-awkward feeling whereby the audience slowly collapsed into laughter as the film progressed – all the time knowing that the cast and crew were sat in the same screening. Brewster and his team acknowledged the film’s elements of camp afterwards, and said that they were deliberate; some of them might have been, but I seriously doubt all of the lines sending people into meltdown were really meant to do so. This film is/was in desperate need of someone to say, ‘You can’t put that in, that sounds ridiculous.’ A camp classic this may well become, but I cannot believe it was all intended and – sorry – the script in places is utterly dire. It jeopardises everything else the film could have achieved and undoes the work being done elsewhere.

Sadly, there’s more. The relationship between Rose and Brendan – stepfather and stepdaughter, remember – is incredibly cringe-inducing, with flirtation, ass-slapping and even the beginnings of a sex scene, though thankfully things stop short – just. I’m not sure of the thinking behind this, and why this quite honestly couldn’t have just been an estranged couple with no deceased mother/partner thrown into the mix; the screenplay’s incestuous leanings add nothing here, except another layer of awkwardness. But I could maybe – maybe – forgive the script giving time to this, if I felt that I really understood what had happened in the plot by the end; sadly, the film feels like it ends multiple times, and scoots over key things that I felt I needed to know anyway. On the altar of atmosphere is much coherence sacrificed.

So it’s a frustrating experience, this film. Automata – is there some meaningful reason behind using the plural form in the title? I’m unsure – has ample ideas, a sense of where it comes from, great locations, clear potential and bags of ambition. Everything is set for a great, original British horror. But the performances, the stylistic decisions and most of all, how the plot tumbles out via a jaw-dropping script turns this potential into a bizarre skit, I’m sorry to say. Whilst there’s plenty of entertainment to be had in this film, I have a horrible feeling it’s through laughing at it, not with it.

Automata screened at Frightfest Glasgow on 2nd March 2019.

Black Circle (2018)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Horror films have often invoked different kinds of physical media as conduits or access points for dark forces, and given the significance of music in our culture, it’s little wonder that records have figured fairly highly over the years, particularly in decades gone past. There have been some great stories which feature records, or other kinds of music recordings; however, what you notice is that certain kinds of music typically feature, and heavy metal is usually high up on the list of culprits. Black Circle is refreshing in a number of ways, but key amongst these is how it takes that old, familiar idea of audio as a gateway to something dangerous, but flips it on its head. In this film, it’s not metal, but an old self-help recording which triggers something malevolent.

Using an array of (highly convincing) 70s TV advertisements to introduce the kind of self-help it means, the film introduces a very old idea, one ostensibly re-imagined here for Age of Aquarius thinkers. Mesmerism was one of the very earliest melds between rational, ‘scientific’ thinking and supernaturalism, and on the TV reels it’s depicted as just another facet of the mind expansion, self-knowledge and self-actualisation popular in the decade. This brings us onto a very special recording, put together by an institute of master mesmerists in Sweden in the 70s, intended to be played whilst the recipient sleeps. Listen to this record, so the spiel goes, and you will become your best self. Presumably not a huge hit at the time, the record must have then have sunk without trace, but a few copies remain – one of which finds its way into the modern day and the possession of a young woman called Isa (Erika Midfjäll).

When Isa’s younger sister Celeste (Felice Jankell) visits her after a period of estrangement, she finds Isa (Erika Midfjäll) a transformed woman. She has a new job, she’s smartly dressed and seems to have it together; Celeste, who is struggling to finish her degree and get by, is stunned. Isa tells her that it’s all because of a certain strange self-help LP she has inherited, and recommends Celeste to take it home to try herself. Doubtful, but definitely drawn to the prospect of a quick fix, Celeste agrees. And it seems to work for her, too. She wakes up having expunged all the negative traits which had been holding her back, just like the record said she would. Suddenly she can focus, she can plan and she is making great headway with her thesis. But, as we see, Isa’s own moment in the sun seems to have been short-lived. When we next encounter her, she’s not the confident young professional we saw at first. Celeste is soon to go the same way – things start to appear on the periphery of her vision, she’s troubled by strange dreams and a dreadful feeling of paranoia. Is something following her? How can she account for this strange feeling of being watched?

Once she’s able to track down her sister, who seems by now to have disappeared from her everyday routines completely, the girls decide they have to find help. They look for the mesmerist behind the record, Lena (Christina Lindberg), now an older woman no longer working for the institute, but someone who still very much believes in the power of the techniques, and in fact now recognises the troubling power behind the recording she made decades previously.

Firstly, Black Circle creates a fascinating universe out of a blend of esoterica, mysticism and new science, all ideas which were huge in the 60s and 70s; beyond this, though, it reaches back a lot further, playing with ideas about selfhood and identity which were current in 18th and 19th century literature and which have frequently gone underused in horror, at least in recent years. All of these threads are then drawn into the 21st century to yield an engrossing story. Taking a variant of hypnosis as a key plot point, it’s cohesive enough to build a very hypnotic atmosphere, with a brilliant original score pulsing through the film and underpinning the mood of the narrative. The ratcheting sense of jeopardy is nicely-handled, and the fine line between hallucination and something, shall we say, more solid is kept going; there’s an attached world of strange science-ritual which provides some heady, original scenes. The cast at the core of all this are perfectly convincing. It’s also a privilege to see 70s exploitation actress Christina Lindberg acting again here for the first time since the 1980s. Lindberg joked at the screening that she was always known as the ‘girl who never smiles’, and that’s at the heart of her role here – she’s a stern, authoritative and deeply knowledgeable character, and her inscrutability works: Lena is somewhat troubled, but focused on what she can do. The two backpackers who turn up are the only possible weak link here, as the justification for their initial appearance is rather thin, although to be fair, they do become more necessary as the plot moves on.

Financial constraints there might have been, but Black Circle is an impressive film which has made the absolute best of its key elements; the splicing of the 70s advertisements and info reels adds a great deal of atmosphere and everything is meticulously realised, whether meant to appear four decades old or contemporary. I’m unsurprised to see Pete Tombs of Mondo Macabro down as a producer, as he’s a guy who knows a thing or two about that 70s look they’ve captured here. But apart from the strengths of the story on a surface level, and even apart from its aesthetics, the film also conjures up some interesting anxieties about ‘living your best life’, something which is achingly modern and fraught, as well as a rich source for a horror story – as so well-realised in Black Circle.

Black Circle screened at FrightFest Glasgow on 1st March 2019.

Here Comes Hell (2019)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Have you ever sat through one of those Old Dark House style movies, where everyone speaks in RP and smokes continuously through ornate cigarette holders, and thought to yourself – this is fun, but wouldn’t it be glorious if the social niceties and subtly barbed comments gave way to something else entirely? We’ve had a few genre mash-ups in past years, starting with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now it seems that we’ve moved out of the 19th Century and into the 20th. So we come to Here Comes Hell, an Agatha Christie-style meeting of friends and strangers in a dilapidated manor house in the back of beyond which…goes elsewhere, shall we say, and has tremendous fun as it does.

The premise is simple (and recognisable) enough: Elizabeth (Jessica Webber) is off to a gathering with her ghastly fiancé Freddy; it seems that gay bachelor Victor – in the old sense of the word – has just bought not only a manor house, but one which had previously been owned by a notorious and conveniently dead occultist, Ichabod Quinn. Victor has planned some drinks, conversation, and then, obviously, trying to contact Ichabod Quinn’s spirit, but all in good time. First, there is the difficult dinner conversation to be had: Victor’s sister Christine (Margaret Clunie) has a few withering class-based put-downs to deliver, there’s a drawling, hangdog American millionaire called George Walker Jr (Tom Bailey) who goes to show that money doesn’t buy you happiness, and then of course there’s Madame Bellrose (Maureen Bennett), who’s along as the guest-appearing spirit medium they’ll need for the more nefarious goings-on.

The funny thing is, when Madame Bellrose successfully contacts Ichabod Crane, he doesn’t just fancy a quick catch-up. He’s more interested in completing the work which he started whilst on the other side of the veil – opening a hellmouth, and damning the whole world to destruction. Isn’t it always the way?

Things are a little slow to start, as many of the best of the old dark house (or ‘shit vintage dinner party’) films of the 1920s and 30s genuinely were, but hang on in there. Here Comes Hell makes the best of its budget and once we get to the séance, things escalate pretty rapidly. The team behind the film made the conscious decision to do as much in the way of practical effects as they could muster on an admittedly miniscule budget, so – even though the film itself is in black and white – the séance opens the floodgates, in a pretty literal way. Other reviewers have mentioned The Evil Dead and it’s a shame to feel I’m parroting this, but it’s difficult to think of another film which so closely fits the bill here, from the demented ‘Deadite’ style characters we eventually get right through to the first-person camera work being used. It’s pure homage, to my mind, but this is both engaging and very smart; one classic style segues very quickly and very brutally into another, and they both happen to be pretty well beloved of genre film fans. The team here also have a fair idea of just how much silliness they can get away with, which turns out to be ‘a lot’; I won’t say too much about one of the bizarre ‘mutations’ one of the characters suffer, but look out for it. Actually, scratch that – you can hardly miss it…

Yes, there are a few lapses in suitable hairstyles and accents – with the exception of Timothy Renouf as Freddy, who both sounds and looks as if someone’s airlifted him in from 1931 – but you can see that there has been research done here and that the cast/crew have tried to embody the kind of poise and dress of the era. To be fair, I feel that Here Comes Hell have created a more plausible early 20th century world than Borley Rectory did, and I appreciated the great shooting location used, which needed very little done to it. Green screen or any sort of post-production work is kept very much to a minimum. Here Comes Hell doesn’t seek to reinvent either of the genres it splices together, and it works around its constraints to do good work in the realms of pure entertainment. Some viewers might feel that black and white isn’t the obvious choice for a splatstick, but I think it’s more important in terms of setting up the first few acts, meaning the rest follows on fittingly.

I will say that this is definitely one of those films which derives a good share of appeal from a group viewing, so see it with others if you can. You may even get to see it on the big screen, in which case, definitely go for it: many of the best SFX sequences are tailor-made for group laughs. But in any case, it’s laudable to see something quite as prim and grisly by turns as Here Comes Hell, and it’s equally good to see something which is so happy being pure entertainment. The crew looked like they were having fun making it, which makes it all the easier to have fun watching it. There are no pretensions here.

Here Comes Hell screened at Frightfest Glasgow on 1st March 2019.

The Dead Center (2018)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Of late, there seem to have been a fair few films which focus on what happens to the human body in the interim period between death and burial – in particular, the inner workings of the morgue and the postmortem examiners who are employed there. More and more, too, horror audiences are interested in looking beyond the mundane, if grim realities of this period in people’s existences, with supernatural explorations of bodies figuring in several of the best recent films of this ilk; maybe this is because, for most of us, this deals in the doubly-hidden. The process of all things postmortem, and then the possibilities of what goes on beyond even that. This brings us to The Dead Center (2018), an ambitious horror story which weaves a few new elements in amongst some more familiar ideas in its own exploration of what happens beyond the slab.

Medical examiner Edward Graham (Bill Feehely) is called in to assist with the examination of an unnamed male suicide case. (And, considering males make up the vast majority of suicide cases it’s refreshing – if that’s the right word – to have this story about male bodies, not female.) However, before he can get to the corpse, it disappears. We see the abject terror and confusion in our John Doe as he finds himself revived, but for now, Graham has no idea where he is. Meanwhile, John Doe finds his way into a ward, where he’s soon thereafter dispatched to the local psychiatric hospital and placed under the care of Dr. Daniel Forrester (Shane Carruth). Forrester is a caring, if flawed individual who is under observation for some of his rather ad-hoc decisions on care. The presence of this intriguing new case only escalates these tensions.

So, his trip to the other side unknown to Dr. Forrester, he and his team start trying to work with this disoriented, often violent man. John Doe lurches from catatonic state to fury very readily, and conventional medicine does little to assuage these tendencies. But there’s more to it than that, and Forrester has begun to sense this; soon, those close to John Doe for any length of time are beginning to die. It now becomes a battle against time for Graham to track down his cadaver – identify him – but most importantly, work out what is going on with this enigma.

The Dead Center offers no real let-up, putting all of its characters through the wringer, but via this, the film provides good characterisation and some excellent performances all round. At heart, both of the professionals who become personally involved with the case want the best outcome for all those concerned, particularly John Doe himself (so far as they feel able to help him). It’s not easy to enact such changeable emotions as the key actors have to here, particularly perhaps in the case of Jeremy Childs as our John Doe, but he’s a formidable on-screen force.

I do feel that the film naturally falls into two halves, however, with a very slow-burn establishment of the plot motifs in the first half and a much louder, higher action resolution; in places, this means falling back on quick edits and strobe-y effects which are very different from the earlier style used. For me, the first half of the film is by far the strongest out of these, with the paranoia it kindles a key strength of the film overall. In fact, some of the flashier sequences towards the end could have been replaced by just a tiny bit more exposition, for my tastes, and I feel this would have balanced things out, but I did nonetheless feel engaged by the story throughout, and impressed by its sustained menace.

Although you can see how The Dead Center fits in with the small but significant sub-genre of toe-tagged horrors, such as Unrest (2006) and to some extent The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) , this is a well made film in its own right which definitely has its own way of suggesting something malevolent beyond the veil. That it doesn’t give us all of the answers is by no means a failing. This is a horror film – in the sense of horrific – through and through, a grim mystery which grows ever and ever nastier.

The Dead Center screened as part of Frightfest Glasgow on March 1st, 2019.

Level 16 (2018)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Even on first glance, something seems to be terribly wrong with the Vestalis Academy. Its premises are falling down and in disarray, save for the state-of-the-art CCTV everywhere, and although it’s ostensibly a boarding school for girls, the education they receive is all about feminine propriety; their treatment is clinical and brutal. Unless the girls can learn how to embody attributes such as obedience and cleanliness, they are told, they will never be selected for adoption by one of the prospective families waiting for them to graduate from the school. The girls, constantly separated and combined into new groups to prevent them from forming friendships, pin all of their hopes on this eventual escape. They don’t question why it takes so many years to get to the stage of being adopted. The Vestalis Academy is a terrible place, although they’re all encouraged to see it as a lifeline by the skeleton staff of the formidable Miss Brixil, the resident Dr Miro and a host of guards. They’ve never known anything different, but they long to know what’s outside those walls all the same.

Level 16 is the final stage and the girls are 16 years of age by the time they reach this floor of the Academy. Still borderline illiterate at this age – the education they receive doesn’t stretch to this kind of learning – there seems to be a new emphasis on biology, encouraging the girls to tend to their complexions and take daily vitamins – a kind of Handmaid’s Tale but with medicalisation rather than scripture. But one of the girls, Sophia (Celina Martin) remembers a new arrival into Rose Hall, one of the dedicated zones in Level 16; Vivien (Katie Douglas) helped her once on an earlier level and received punishment for it. So Sophia warns her, although Vivien is reluctant to listen at first: don’t take the vitamins. This is enough to stir some kind of suspicion in Vivien’s mind. The two girls begin to form something uncomfortably like a friendship. It seems that many of the things they thought they knew about the only homes they’ve ever known are false. What else could be going on behind the scenes?

Throughout, Level 16 is a formidably morose piece of cinema. There are moments of respite, largely stemming from the friendship which comes to exist between Vivien and Sophia, with a great performance from the young cast, but even so, the tension never de-escalates and the mood never lifts. To the end credits of this film, you can never fully believe that things are going to be okay, such is the weight of the feeling of conspiring forces here. Tonally, if it resembles anything at all it’s the weird-familiar, alienated world of Antiviral (2012), though made all the more galling here that it’s girls barely beyond childhood who are the key protagonists. And the crumbling, dimly-lit environment where they live is a key component in maintaining this mood.

The idea of traditional ‘feminine accomplishments’ come in for none too subtle critique here, with the quality of the girls’ education reduced down to keeping them, essentially, malleable and mute. Vivien’s faltering efforts to read the names of her peers may underline this with a particularly heavy hand, but it’s interesting to see how director Danishka Esterhazy shows us how completely the girls are disempowered by all of this. Throughout, they’re in information deficit and have to fight twice as hard to overcome the escalating horror of their surroundings. Later, this critique of femininity is linked to another aspect of typically feminine preoccupation in a particularly graphic manner, though to describe this here would spoiler, so I’ll just say that with this reveal the narrative arc is at its most strained – but, it’s more symbolic than completely plausible, perhaps, and still packs a punch (see also: morose tone, above). Certainly the horror aspects of this otherwise grim science fiction kick into a higher gear with this big reveal, though the scale of paranoia by this point is substantial anyway.

Level 16 is not a comfortable viewing experience and for some viewers it may be just too sombre, too plodding: its almost slo-mo cruelty demands a good deal from us as viewers. However, there’s a great deal to reward us too and a lot to unpack regarding big ideas of gender, culture and ethics. This is what sci-fi does best, after all – invite us to pick up some of the threads from its fantasy and see how they relate to our own world. And, ultimately, in the end this is a very pro-female film where two girls fight to transcend their limitations.

Level 16 screened as part of Glasgow Frightfest on March 1st 2019.

Digging up Mother: a Love Story by Doug Stanhope

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

I first got introduced to Doug Stanhope’s brand of comedy a few years ago with his skit on trying to ‘sleep sober’ and the ensuing carnival that kicks in when you try; as an insomniac, even if one who tends to be sober when attempting to sleep for reasons of silly day job, it struck a chord and I liked what I saw enough to look for more. Since then, he’s become one of my favourite comics, always with the right blend of the ascerbic and the brutally honest. I’d heard him speak about his mother Bonnie during his stage shows, but I was honestly unaware of what happened at the end of her life until I heard about the book. I was also completely unaware that Stanhope was such a talented writer. Digging up Mother is both Bonnie’s and Doug’s story (and you come out of the experience feeling as though you could, in some ways, be on first-name terms with them both).

The book begins where it ends, with Stanhope’s mother making the decision that she wasn’t going to just wait around for her terminal lung disease to kill her: instead, she decides to swallow as many pills as she has been able to stash away for just such an occasion, ditching sobriety for one last round of cocktails to wash them down. Her son and his girlfriend facilitate this, with Doug praising her courageousness for making this decision; so, yep, it’s worth knowing that the book begins with someone assisting a suicide. We don’t tend to discuss death very readily in our culture, electing for euphemism and platitudes, of which there are absolutely none here. Elements of this are, inevitably, shocking and surprising, but then the whole topic is met with a kind of warmth and unfussed levity, a desire to just tell the tale candidly, as a debt of honour to Mother’s memory. Out of this comes plenty of laughs, too, from Mother’s last words, even to Stanhope’s description of his own, standard-issue drinker’s confusion the morning after his mother’s suicide. But all of this is just a small part of his mother’s story and so the rest of the book comprises an autobiography – one which combines Doug’s story with his mother’s.

A great deal of the book is a kind of interrogation of what made Bonnie the woman she was, as if her son needs to suss this out to be able to make sense of it all and that makes for an often stark read, alongside all of the genuine love and warmth. The book never sugar-coats anything and it refuses to deal in language which prettifies. However, in other respects this is a regular memoir, going back to Doug’s childhood, the various jobs and city changes which happened along the way and eventually, how he made the leap into stand-up comedy (this always seems like a job without a standard career arc, but exposure to AA circle-meets, bar work and telesales are all there along the way and you can see some of those things impacting on Doug’s comedy act).

And it’s funny. It’s incredibly funny. The school psychiatrist episode is a high point, just as one example, but there are tonnes of things here that made me put the book down so I could belly-laugh. It’s not just the nature of the anecdotes, either, it’s the phrasing too. You can hear Stanhope’s voice throughout this book; he’s all about sending himself up as well as reflecting on his own behaviours down through the years, so a lot of the jokes are on him, but he also speaks really candidly about people who are in or have been in his life. The overall result is of a very honest, self-aware author who knows his craft. Nothing’s off limits. If you know his comedy work, then you’ll know what to expect here.

But perhaps what you get most of all is something you might not get from Stanhope on-stage ordinarily, and that’s a real and rare sense of a son’s love for his mother – a woman who he acknowledges as flawed in many respects, but perhaps that makes it all the more poignant. I didn’t expect the book to be as moving as it was, which is perhaps a bizarre thing to say when you know damn well it’s going to be about a death, but you get such a sense of the closeness between mother and son throughout the book and then the end, when it comes, is handled with the same detail and honesty. I think it’s very brave to applaud a woman’s bravery in ending her own life the way that Doug Stanhope does at the end of this book; people don’t tend to say it out loud, much less about their own parents. But this isn’t a conventional yarn or writer, and it is really a ‘love story’. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Juice Campbell vs Army of Dankness

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Now, far be it for us to make assumptions about the kinds of folks who visit this website, but it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to imagine that some of you might like to imbibe a cool beer as you watch your movies, be these brand new movies or the stone cold classics. So it’s therefore quite likely that you might like to know about a new beer which celebrates the one, the only Bruce Campbell and his role as Ash Williams – in particular, Ash’s attempts to thwart the Deadites once and for all in 1992’s Army of Darkness.

The resulting beer – which goes by the name of Juice Campbell vs The Army of Dankness (do you see what they did there?) has been developed and prepared by Brew York, a relatively young brewery which has so far invoked a fair few of the brewers’ pop culture interests to help shape their beers, so naturally, a love of all things Evil Dead has in due course led to this hard-hitting, resinous New England IPA, which comes in at a weighty 7.1% ABV. More than strong enough to make you feel like a primitive screwhead…

Juice Campbell vs The Army of Dankness is due for release on the 7th February at the Brew York premises on Walmgate, York, kicking off at 7pm. For a tenner, you get a chance to try a can of the beer, listen to a Meet the Brewer talk where the guys behind the brew get to talk about the ideas behind the beer, and a cool poster too. Oh, and there’s a screening of Army of Darkness to enjoy, quote, and basically enjoy as you enjoy a drink. Dryanuary is over; it’s time to get back on it, and this is a superb beer to see you on your way.

For more information on this, check out the event over at brewyork.co.uk. Not able to get to York for the event itself? Well, that’s a crying shame, but now that the brewery are able to deliver their beers around the UK, perhaps you can get a few in anyhow. Hail to the King!

Climax (2018)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A confession: I am not familiar with the work of director Gaspar Noé, despite his presence as a notorious, divisive figure in the cult cinema scene. The verdict on 2002’s Irreversible was so split amongst people whose opinions I trust that I’ve still never sought the film out, and as such I’ve never caught up with anything else of his, either. All of that has changed with Climax (2018), which I am led to believe is a fairly accessible film compared to Noé’s other work, and I’d agree that there’s nothing absolutely insurmountable here for a rookie, in terms of its style and content. However, having seen Climax, I think I do now understand what all the fuss is about. It showcases a sizeable talent, with a vivid and daring array of shooting styles, overlaid with music and a building atmosphere until the film’s intended nightmarish aspects are palpable. Clearly, from the very first moments, Noé is both aware of his own skills, and keen for his film to be a disruptive experience. This he certainly achieves.

The film begins – after a sequence of what would usually be end credits, something I understand that Noé usually does – with a series of audition tapes showing a number of hopeful twenty-somethings hoping to join a modern dance group. Here’s the first way in which the film disrupts; we are clearly led to believe, via the VCR used to play the audition tapes and the big box VHS cult and horror films framing the TV screen, that this film takes place somewhere in the mid-nineties. However, in other respects, our film feels bang up to date, even without the ubiquitous presence of smartphones. Everything else – clothes, hair, style – feels like it could have been captured just yesterday. Alongside the almost expected presence of on-screen chapter titles, the tendency to blot out too many obvious markers of modernity seems to be a contemporary obsession; perhaps this, in itself, marks a film out as brand new. Anyway, these bright young things who love to dance have evidently got the job, and they head to an isolated location to practice, where they spend three days.

Things seem to have gone well and the group has seemingly bonded very well, so that after a full run-through of their act (which even if you regard most dancing as a kind of well-pruned seizure still constitutes an extraordinary long take) it’s time to unwind. They decide to have a low-key party at the rehearsal location, with a little buffet and a punch bowl of sangria, and the dancers begin to pair off, discussing everything from drugs to sex to God, with the drink still flowing. Gradually, the banter seems to be giving way to more unfriendly vibes which are billowing beneath the surface – but the real clincher is when it becomes apparent to everyone that the sangria has been spiked with a hallucinogenic. Now fearful and rapidly becoming paranoid on their way to a complete psychedelic meltdown, reproach and anger begins to ripple. The rapidity with which the party turns into a nightmare is quite something, and – in a series of sequences which are quite unrehearsed and unscripted – people demonstrate just how nuts and irrational things can get, and the film strides quite boldly from naturalistic to histrionic. It really is a force of nature, incredibly immersive and well-crafted.

Noé’s notoriety stems in large part from the themes he has tackled thus far, but he’s as well-known for his exploratory camera work, and although many of his shots here are quite low-key, he also varies this with a broad range of different aspects here. Undertaking such things as following different actors on a rig, then swapping to actor’s-eye-view and back again, all contributes hugely to the overall atmosphere and showcases a meticulous eye for detail. Then, the camera may perform a switch from ground level to ceiling, shooting the host of (amateur actors and) tripping dancers from above. There doesn’t seem to be a shot or a sequence wasted; it all flows effortlessly, but nonetheless feels like something ornate is being crafted. If the film reminds me of anything else at all, it’s of some sort of unholy matrimony between Suspiria (dance as some sort of malign link and currency) and Aronofsky’s 2017 film mother! (chaos escalating from the ridiculous to the sublime, as well as threats to an innocent child). However, I’d say I enjoy Climax’s lunacy more than I did mother! – Climax has more of an enjoyable journey towards its own casually cruel, heady final fallout.

Climax is a jagged piece of filmmaking, showcasing incredibly acuity throughout its pared-down running time, including wherever this means that vagueness and confusion contribute to its overall effect. As much a feat as a feast, it concerns itself far more with impressions than linear storytelling with a neat beginning and end, although what it achieves is immersive enough to keep you gripped anyway. In essence, it’s a simple enough yarn, but made into an effective and lurid cinematic experience. Yeah, despite a few initial misgivings, I was pleasantly blown away by this film and I can see that Arrow are again the right people to showcase this release at its best. Fans of synth/dance music will adore the soundtrack, too.

Climax will be released by Arrow Films on 11th February 2019.

Dans Ma Peau (In My Skin): a Retrospective

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

It’s been nearly fifteen years since Dans ma Peau (2004) was released, duly taking its place in the canon of New French Extremity, and garnering a great deal of justifiable praise for its transgressive nature and clarity of vision. These features alone – both the film’s age and its reputation – give us good enough reason to revisit it now. However, looking back, I wonder if its inauguration as a Noughties French horror perhaps worked against some of its strengths. For the horror crowd enamoured of the blue-hued, unflinching gore of the decade, it perhaps seemed not quite a horror film; for those engaged by its domestic and personal themes, perhaps it was too much of a horror film.  But these genre-straddling films are often the most rewarding, even if difficult to categorise. Dans ma Peau is absolutely a film which has stayed in my mind – one of those rare birds where I’ve never found my recollection of the film reduced down to a gist memory. it is in so many respects a radical film, and now perhaps more than on my initial viewing, de Van’s tale bloody portrayal of mental breakdown feels like a story for our times.

The film follows Esther (also the director and writer, Marina de Van), an ambitious young woman seeking greater things – a better job, a better place to live – all the things you catch yourself saying you want, when you get to a certain point. When we first meet Esther, she’s in the throes of negotiating greater professional responsibility; it’s on her mind as she and her friend Sandrine (Léa Drucker) head to a house party. Esther, impressed by the size of the house, heads outside to check out the garden. Whilst she’s out there she stumbles and cuts her leg. Only later does she realise she’s bleeding – quite badly. This immediately distances her from her peers: she covers up the extent of the wound, saying nothing when people comment on the anonymous trail of blood through the house, and she only takes herself to A&E when the night is over anyway.

“Does this leg belong to you?”

Her interaction with the doctor tasked with stitching her up is indicative that something has seismically shifted in Esther’s psyche. She prevaricates about how painful the wound was at the time she received it, giving this as the excuse for not coming to the hospital sooner (we happen to know that the injury hurt when it happened). Her excuses don’t quite ring true with the doctor, who teasingly comments on her lack of ordinary sensation before bandaging her leg and sending her home. Esther, however, has started to re-evaluate her relationship with her own flesh and blood, pinching and pricking at her skin, investigating the leg wound with a strange fascination. There are clues as to why this may be the case. Her boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas, who reprises the body horror in Raw in 2016) takes even the barest glimpse of Esther’s leg as proof positive that she shouldn’t be allowed out to do things on her own without him; she needs to be looked after, he insinuates, thus breezily making a grab for her autonomy. He, on the other hand, has just been headhunted for a new job, and he makes it clear that he sets the agenda in their conversation (and, by extension, their lives). And there we have it, that little gem of doubt and revulsion that so many women feel in their relationships when, were they to speak in open revolt against such gaslighting, they’d be deemed ‘unreasonable’. Little wonder many turn their attentions inwards. Esther’s revolt just happens to be unspeakably graphic.

Pressure – at work and at home – now begins to manifest in (at first) managed, but no less savage sequences of self-harm for Esther. There’s a kind of urgent glee to her actions, a logic almost, which makes them understandable, even if you’d choose not to emulate them. Those close to her, like Sandrine, advocate more conventional means of control, such as pills, but as her career really seems to take off at last, Esther finds that the only way to make life bearable is to continue to exploit her new-found fascination with her body, hacking away at it and even part-consuming it. It is, of course, clear that this cannot continue, but Esther’s determination to balance her job and her self-treatment move forward together. It’s an uncomfortable, but a no less poignant thing to observe.

The France of the film is a fast-paced, rather fraught world that we could all probably recognise. Everyone seems stressed by their work, everyone wants more ‘recognition’ and everyone seems to be struggling to conceal their feelings of anxiety and professional ennui. When the ‘real’ is exposed – such as when Esther’s injury bleeds through a pair of expensive (borrowed) trousers during the poolside scene – misery and vulnerability ensue. People do not like being exposed as different, but they want recognition for being different. It’s the tightrope which many must walk. Outside of the office, the carefully-domineering Vincent is difficult to watch. Whatever germ of genuine concern he might have for Esther, it quickly translates into a need to police her body. The only way a miserable woman can be stopped from self-harm is, evidently, to physically prevent her doing so. His logic is, almost inevitably, part of the problem here. Esther, faced with these escalating situations, feels the need to shut down further. When she cuts herself, she performs the film’s only tender, loving scenes. The camera lingers on these; it’s macabre, but it’s a kind of affection which is absent elsewhere, and the contrast is clear. It’s also heartbreaking that so many of the avenues which seem to be open to Esther either seem lost to her, or self-sabotaged. The hallucinatory sequence at the restaurant, for instance, is a particularly dismal distillation of that feeling, “I don’t belong here”. Hence, you end up making sure that you don’t belong. This all takes place, ironically, as the white-collar dinner table conversation extols the supreme virtues of Paris over other European cities; sadly, Esther’s Paris has few virtues for her.

The thing is though, as far as Esther is concerned, once you can live one lie, you can live more than one. Not effectively, but you can. Esther is willing to perform great feats of concealment to excuse her physical condition; later, de Van’s series of split screens encapsulates Esther’s great divide between real self and unreal self. Only later do they conjoin and show us what Esther’s doing – a kind of performance art of mutilation, done on the quiet in a sequence of ever grubbier, anonymous hotel rooms. It’s in one of these rooms that we finally leave her, having thought at first that, even given her final physical condition (with large cuts and abrasions on her face, and at least one severed piece of skin which she wants to preserve) she is about to attempt to return to her job.

But we don’t see this happen. We’re left instead with Esther staring, motionless, down the camera, from the ‘green room’ we thought she’d left for good. Did she ever really leave the room – did she retreat? Or did she have to check in there again after the almost inevitable end of her pretences? Is she, in fact, finally free of the things which drove her to this behaviour in the first place, and back at the room as a free agent? Given her joyless expression, this seems unlikely. There’s little evidence of a redemptive ending here.

Dans ma Peau is a film which subverts expectations whilst offering surprisingly sensitive handling of mental turmoil and, although it hinges de rigeur upon a woman’s bloodied body, the agent of this violence is the woman herself, not some nameless, faceless assassin. Coming out of what we can call the ‘torture porn arc’, it’s interesting to note that here the unflinching, even fetishistic focus on bodily injuries comes to us as an individual’s attempts to cope with their life. Usually, people seek to flee injury. In this film, Esther flees towards it.  Her fate is ambiguous, sure, but the justifications for the on-screen violence here must stand alone. Dans ma Peau has a great deal to distinguish it from its peers. It also strikes me now as a film which has an awful lot to say about people’s lives, using its extreme violence to hold a mirror to the other things which people do to themselves in order to cope with the various screeds we live by. If not physically slashing at ourselves, what else do we do? And does it work?

Dans ma Peau a singularly uncomfortable film to watch, then, commanding sympathy whilst also repelling us. The violence is far more implied than shown, but Dans ma Peau still settles on the mind as a particularly nasty film. But ultimately, I think it affects me most as a deeply sad film, a film which I care about the protagonist and will always wonder about the end of the story. In that respect and to that extent, I don’t think anything approaching it has really followed in the past decade and a half.

 

 

 

 

Snowflake (2017)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The first clue that all is not well with friends (and fast food connoisseurs) Tan and Javid is that, as they leave a Berlin kebab restaurant which has apparently not passed muster, they have to step over a lot of dead bodies as they go. In a neat move, then, Snowflake establishes key elements in its modus operandi: naturalistic dialogue, strong links with the criminal underworld and a little dash of absurdity which works broadly well with all of the rest. But there’s more. Snowflake is, as a voiceover tells us briefly, a ‘true story’ – well, sort of a true story. It’s coming to us from a point in the near future, actually, and a Berlin where law and order has entirely broken down, so much so that people are left desperately trying to go about their day-to-day business as lunatics and hitmen run the streets. Tan and Javid belong to that world.

It seems at this point as though we’re going to segue into another story altogether – films over the past few years seem to love adding text titles to their different chapters, and we get a few here – but then we cut back unexpectedly to Tan and Javid. In a car they’ve just stolen, Javid finds an incomplete screenplay, stuffed down behind the passenger seat. As he glances through it, he realises something strange: everything he’s reading relates to the scene at the kebab restaurant; every word they exchanged is already right there, on the page. Disconcerted to say the least, the two men decide they have to find the guy whose car they stole, to ask him what the hell is going on. It turns out he’s a dentist (well, I mean, you can’t live on writing!) and he already knows off by heart every word they’re about to say. They take a copy of his updated draft and make a run for it; clearly, whatever is going on has enormous import for them.

Now that it’s clear to us that nothing is as it seems, we revert to the snippet of the new narrative which we glimpsed earlier on. In it, a young girl is looking for a way to avenge the murder of her parents, who were accidentally killed by some of the hitmen who run things in the city. The girl, Eliana, needs to exploit the family’s links to this criminal fraternity in order to make things happen her way. But there are yet other chapters, which are about to intersect with Javid and Tan’s script experience in a series of intriguing ways, as these two try to discern the relationship between screenplay and reality.

It’s always a risky business, making these kinds of films which have been described as ‘meta’: not for nothing did ‘meta’ become an insult fairly soon after it was first used to describe films which for instance step outside the universe of the narrative, suggesting other things at play and, to a certain extent at least, manipulating audience expectations. This approach can lead to great films, but it’s a divisive strategy which can backfire (and lob in some mumblecore elements, as here, to really take a gamble). Happily, Snowflake feels less like it’s aching to show off how self-aware it is and far more interested in telling a weird, unusual story, which helps it to make a success of this approach. There are many things to recommend it. To start with, this is a well-shot and aesthetically-pleasing film, but beyond its good looks it handles its many at first disparate elements with a wry, often subtle humour which works well, never seeming arrogant or smug. Snowflake is organically very funny, and there’s a sense of confident handling, of close control over where the film is going and how the audience might respond. Added in to that mix is some erudite commentary on the creative process – writer’s block, finding an ending, making the story work. Or, is it all about fate?

All of that said, and all of the film’s strengths duly noted, could Snowflake stand to lose some of its two-hour running time, without risking those strengths? Honestly, yes. Two hours is a very long time to juggle all the elements which Snowflake has, and in the last act, the film comes very close to losing some of the suspense and interest it has built up. Happily, this idea about when and how to end things feels like part of the joke/point/central idea about the screenplay anyway, which no doubt helps.

Snowflake is a challenging tale of revenge, counter-revenge and inevitability; punctuated with violence and lofty ideas in equal measure, it’s a film which needs careful following and may well not be for everybody. But, overall, for fans of crime thrillers which have ambitious twists, it’s time well spent, and a credit to the imaginations of directors Adolfo J. Kolmerer and William James, not to mention Arend Remmers – the real writer, only played by an actor in the film. It’s just another one of the ways in which Snowflake pushes the envelope!

Snowflake is available now via Artsploitation Films. 

 

 

Best TV of 2018: The Haunting of Hill House

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

This feature discusses the series in full and as such may contain spoilers.

Mike Flanagan gets it. He gets the power of horror, and he doesn’t seek to delegitimise that power by needlessly talking it up or talking it down; with his work adapting Stephen King, his films such as Oculus and (the rarely-mentioned, but superb) Absentia and now, his work directing and co-writing an innovative rendition of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, he’s successfully established himself as one of the most ambitious and sensitive directors currently working out there. Already, there is some discussion of a second season of The Haunting of Hill House, this year’s big TV horror hit and the subject of this feature. It’s difficult to envisage quite where this could go, or from what point, or indeed how, or if the ill-fated Crain family could be a part of this second season, but we know enough by now to know that whatever Mr Flanagan might turn his hand to would be worthwhile. Mike Flanagan gets it.

I saw the original film version of the Jackson novel many years ago: re-titled simply The Haunting, this 1963 film acts as an early, very effective mesh of psychological trauma and supernatural horror, an excellent working model for the 2018 series albeit that writers Flanagan and Averill’s go far further, reinventing characters, redistributing character names and taking the implied idea of fatality forward in a series of deft, traumatic, engrossing ways. In the series, the Crain family – father Hugh, mother Olivia, and children Stephen, Shirley, Theodora, Luke and Nell – are a family of hopeful fixer-uppers, hoping to renovate the vast, stately Hill House they get at a steal, turn it over at a good profit and then plough the profits into their ‘real’ home, their ‘forever home’.

This concept of putting down roots, usually an admirable, even humdrum modern ambition, is tacitly questioned and turned around in the series, working in tandem with Jackson’s/Flanagan and Averill’s personification of Hill House and asking the question: what if the house chooses you? The Crains are often referred to as a ‘meal’ for the house; it can’t bear to leave the meal unfinished, and it wants to digest them utterly, calling them back long after (most of) them escape. To what extent they are ever able to assert themselves against this demented, relentless drive is something I’m still digesting myself, and the series conclusion is still not completely settled. However you feel about its close may well impact upon any predictions you have for a further series.

The Haunting of Hill House does so much so well, it’s difficult to know where to start, but certainly its handling of characterisation is a high point. Things are gradual. You soon identify that many of the adults in the story are also the children in the story: running these time periods parallel both makes perfect sense, and adds to the slightly disorientating feelings encouraged by the narrative at every turn. It also begs many questions, and only slowly allows us to understand the justifications for the things these children go on to do with their lives – the childhood traumas that lead them to push against death, or psychic ability, or life in general.

The Crains are also made relatable by their eagerness to dismiss the ostensibly supernatural things they see in their adulthoods, with Stephen in particular making an artform and a living out of denying there were ever ghosts at Hill House, his work as an author stripping back the layers of what he views as mental instability and irrationality, nothing more. And yet, he still wrestles with what he still sees. Nell is particularly vulnerable, haunted by a ghost which seems only to target her, but even the cool-headed Shirley and Theo see their share of spectres. They also try to do what adults mostly do: they block them out, they shrug them off. They can’t be real. But if, as the series asserts from the beginning that “a ghost is a wish”, then this turns the ghosts into something closer to predictions, which makes it all more vivid and terrifying.

This comes to the fore with maximum effect in Episode 5, ‘The Bent Neck Lady’. Since childhood, Nell has been afflicted with a malevolent visitation at night – a woman, face obscured, with her neck fixed at an unnatural angle. With a child’s literalness, the so-named ‘bent-neck lady’ seems to appear only to Nell, terrifying the child and driving her out of her bedroom, only to follow her downstairs to appear to her again. We follow Nell into adulthood and the events which subsume her, her short-lived happiness dissolving as her old roommate begins appearing again. This episode neatly encapsulates many of The Haunting of Hill House’s strongest features: it links ideas about time being not linear, but episodic, fate being inescapable, and the house getting its way. Poor Nell only truly understands all of this in the last frames, with that horrific ‘clunk’ as one scene rolls back in time, then back again. It truly is a staggering piece of television. Episode 8: ‘Witness Marks’ is another stand-out component of the overall series for me, with its invitation to think again about what has been seen, and is therefore ‘real’. There’s a sense of things and people unravelling here, which for me generates the strongest feeling of inescapability and a sense that the house will get everything it wants. Many of the ghosts (again, are they indeed ghosts?) are fully lit, fleshly bodies in this episode; we are encouraged to doubt them, and to think back across things we may have accepted throughout the series, before doubting everything. In less subtle terms, this episode also contains a jump scare like no other: whilst I’m not ordinarily a fan of these, it disrupts brilliantly here. I don’t think I’ve ever screamed out loud like that at anything I’ve seen on a screen, but my god, it’s a powerful shock.

One of my only issues with the series stems from the fact that it does something else very well, only to retreat from it (at least by a few steps). The Haunting of Hill House raises the idea of death as a state of utter nothingness – a Choronzon-worthy level of emptiness. Theodora, who protects herself from ‘reading’ people with her hands by hiding them with gloves, attempts to read her sister, Nell, by touching her body. She feels absolutely nothing – just a void, a heavy, unspeakable nothingness which infects her too, and she agonises about whether her mother and sister are out there somewhere, filled with these sensations. Nell’s brother Luke, too, ‘feels’ Nell’s death in his limbs as a cold, painful, horrifying ache. However, the resolution to this story dissipates a lot of this promise of emptiness, a promise which seems to justify the army of ghosts staring dispassionately, or even maliciously at the living. What happens to this feted feeling of void? Although the story’s handling of grief is exploratory whilst also achingly grounded in reality, some of this was lost through the end episode’s touches of sentimentality and, yeah, even some elements of whimsy. The overriding last sensation is a long stretch from happily ever after, but it certainly doesn’t feel like the expected end point, either. I wasn’t sure what to think and feel as the door closed on the ‘awoken’ Crains, but it looked an awful lot like togetherness of a kind which jarred a little against the ratcheting scares of the preceding episodes.

Still, the conclusion of any good story is a risky moment. With its blend of sudden and subtle horrors, its hidden ghosts to trick the eye, and what after all amounts to a deeply-involving story of family and loss made doubly jagged by the manifestations around them, The Haunting of Hill House has been superb. I can easily anticipate watching the whole thing again, to doubtless pick up on things I missed the first time, and to test how effectively the scares get me all over again.

The Haunting of Hill House: 5 best scenes

5 – Nell in Stephen’s apartment

Stephen is irritated; he’s just arrived at his apartment to find he’s being robbed by his younger brother and drug addict, Luke. Saddened, he gives him some stuff to go and sell, and sends him on his way. Up in the apartment, he finds Luke’s twin sister Nell, looking confused. What, were you just going to stand there and let him rob me? Stephen asks.

Nell isn’t really there. But she is trying to tell him something…

4 – Bent-neck Lady – “No, no, no, no, no, no…”

Nell is not about to sleep in her bedroom, after being woken by the ghost of a lady who seems to be fixated on her. But as she sleeps on the couch downstairs, something alerts her. As she looks up, there’s the ‘bent neck lady’ again, floating parallel above her – as we realise as the camera pans around. She’s feebly trying to speak to Nell; what she says makes horrible sense later.

3 – The man with the cane

A ghost which primarily affects Luke during an episode in his childhood, this one really affected me; there’s something about the unnatural shape and size of the figure, its drifting limbs, and the silent errand it seems to be on (never take strange hats, I guess; the owners might come to retrieve them). The way this curious ghost ducks down to look at the hidden, terrified little boy when he hears him make a sound made my skin crawl.

2 – The thing in the cellar

Oh, Luke. Your subsequent drug use makes perfect sense, given some of the things which happened to you as a kid. This time, the twins are playing with the dumb waiter in the kitchen, which is electronically-operated (oh-oh). Luke, who wants to ride in the dumb waiter, finds himself in an unlit, cluttered cellar room that the family never knew existed. Something, disturbed at last, crawls eagerly towards him…

1 – Road trip

This scare worked perfectly because it was so unexpected; Shirley and Theo, on their way to Hill House, are quarrelling in an escalating and angry way, but it seems as if it’s only going to be about the human drama. You relax into the fight, you forget about the circumstances. And then, in a second, a grotesque face appears between them – an absolute, horrifying, unbeatable moment of utter terror. Well played, Hill House. Well played.