Is it just me, or does the ‘found footage’ craze of the past fifteen years or so seem to have died back a little of late? This sub-genre seemed to dominate indie cinema for what seemed like forever, becoming infamous as a go-to model for those on a shoestring budget. Well, found footage films are still out there and they’re still being made, though to be fair, a Hungarian ‘horror comedy’ found footage is a new one on me. This would be A Guidebook to Killing your Ex, then, written and directed by József Gallai – a young filmmaker who has turned his hand to a range of fare so far in his career, from cryptids (the Mothman) to true crime, from spectres to Hungarian-language mumblecore. It’s fair to say that A Guidebook has far more in common with the latter than any of the former, and this fact may be of note to any prospective viewers.
The ‘Guidebook’ transpires to be something like a filmed tutorial, made by a ‘John Doe’ (Balázs Szitás) who explains that he’s going to be narrating his film in English to ensure it reaches the largest possible audience, as well as translating it wherever Hungarian crops up (one has to wonder if he spent a period of time at the end of every day subtitling his work thus far). The tutorial itself is just as the title suggests: Doe has planned that, 72 hours from the start of his film, he’ll be committing the murder of his ex girlfriend and her new partner. The film serves the purposes of being his sounding board, evidence of his preparations, his rationale, and so on. Along the way, we glean the reasons behind his prospective actions and thus gain something of a back story about his character.
Acting convincingly in a foreign language must be difficult, and the English spoken here – together with the performance overall – is of a reasonable standard, generating a plausible and distinctly non-glossy piece of characterisation. The vast share of the film focuses specifically on John Doe, with him filling the screen for most of the time, so a great deal hinges on this. There’s some generation of sympathy here along the way, as this man’s story comes out and you realise that a perfect storm of triggers has led him to this point. The film’s themes – which range through revenge, impressionability, isolation and emotional illiteracy – are given a low-key treatment, and many elements come across successfully. That all said, the crux of this story has been seen a million times, and I’m fairly sure I’m safe from allegations of spoilers when I say that the climax of the film centres around a murdered woman. It’s been done a million times, and utilising the abuse of a largely two-dimensional female character in this way washes a lot of the sympathy out of how I felt about John Doe by the end; his ex becomes a prop, while the film runs through the standard torture-and-murder motif it’s taken an hour to set up. It’s not meant to be ingratiating, of course, but it’s not particularly enlightening either.
The decision to use the found footage framing style makes sense here in many respects, though in common with many other films within this genre, there are a few head-scratching moments. These completed films (this one held in police files post-case) apparently pop up in the form we see them, which suggests (as above) that some sort of editing is going on before films are recovered or, perhaps, that those who find the films edit them into some sort of shape before they’re seen – in which case, the inclusion of things such as John Doe tucking into a meal are odd things to keep in. See also: someone speaking the immortal line “What is the camera for?” Maybe I’m alone in getting hung up on these points, but I think it’s interesting; standard, edited-by-omniscient-storyteller films don’t bring these issues with them. I mentioned that the film had much in common with the ‘mumblecore’ genre, too, and it would seem that lots of the dialogue is improvised – though Doe does look off camera from time to time rather than into it, which means, perhaps, that he is looking at cues. This improvised dialogue – which is reasonably sparky and engaging – is far easier to see as associated with mumblecore than it is to see the film as a whole as a comedy, or a straightforward horror for that matter. There are some absurd elements which veer towards humorous, and in terms of horror there is some slightly grisly footage, but overall, A Guidebook to Killing Your Ex feels a lot more like an experimental , dialogue-heavy film than either a horror or a comedy. Its refusal to sit comfortably in either of the bigger genres is to some extent a strength, but may mean it’s trickier for the film to find its audience.
So, A Guidebook to Killing Your Ex labours under several of the difficulties which have plagued this cheap, accessible but problematic framing device over the years, and it’s open about the fact (via the title) that a familiar kind of resolution is on its way – but it has some spirited dialogue and some decent ideas: it will be interesting to see what this barely-thirty year old director can turn his hand to next. As this is his fourth found footage film in just eight years, I have to say I’m hopeful of seeing a different approach in the future, and to see what he can do beyond these particular confines.
The very opening scenes of The Lodgers speak to the key themes of the film as a whole: a young woman, sitting alone by a lake at night, preoccupied by her thoughts, suddenly flees back to a dilapidated mansion house when she hears the clock striking midnight. This is the first, but not the last nod to the darker side of fairy stories; stories which the film references in abundance. Especial menace surrounds a trapdoor in the house, which bubbles and threatens with dark water as the girl returns; there are sinister forces at work here, and the girl is obviously terrified.
Meanwhile, an Irishman who has been away fighting for the British in World War One returns to the village, going home to his family business – the local grocers. This is Sean (Eugene Simon – best known as cousin Lancel from Game of Thrones, the Lannister who goes full Sparrow). His reappearance causes inevitable ripples of anger around town, coming as it does at a particularly heated time in Anglo-Irish relations; however, as his mother owns the only shop in the area, he soon meets the distinctly aloof Rachel, though his initial attraction to the girl is clear. Rachel, meanwhile, receives a letter from England which jeopardises her and her brother’s isolated existence in the house, and as her oppressive home life becomes even more unbearable, even terrifying, she no longer repels Sean’s attempts to help.
I think everyone must remember the first time they saw Dead Alive – or, to give it its UK title, Braindead, where it released in the spring of the same year (May). There are other titles in use, all of which show that distribution companies took the film very much in the spirit it was intended. As well as the expected variants on ‘braindead’, in Spain a line of dialogue from the film gives us the title, Your Mother Ate My Dog; in Brazil, they opted for Animal Hunger; Hungary, a literal nation, simply went for Corpse! (exclamation mark included). All in all, the variety of titles around the globe do a fair job of summing up the film’s plot and vibe.
It’s the 1950s, and a naturalist expedition into Skull Island, Sumatra (ring any bells?) to find a specimen of a rare species – a ‘rat monkey’ – ends in a bloody incident which can’t be patched up, not even with a bit of Dettol. These little buggers are dangerous, it seems, being the warped offspring of local monkeys and slave-ship rats, and only amputation (even of the head) can be used to treat their bites successfully. Lesson duly noted. Back home in New Zealand, overbearing mother Vera divides up her time between Wellington Ladies Welfare League duties and stopping her grown-up son Lionel from growing up any more than is strictly necessary. When he starts dating a local girl, Paquita, Lionel decides to take her for a lovely day at the zoo. Vera, who isn’t too keen on her son fraternising with an Experienced Girl like Paquita, goes along to spy on them. Our rat monkey friend is by now installed and on display, but when Vera gets too close to its cage, it sinks its teeth into her, ruining her dress into the bargain. It looks as if she’s won this round, as Lionel immediately escorts his injured mother home, but she soon falls sick. Really sick. And it seems as though whatever condition she’s picked up from the monkey, it’s contagious. Lionel is one of life’s copers, but he soon loses control of the situation, despite doing what he can to keep his mother (and some unwitting houseguests) ‘calm’. Except, oh, he makes a singular error, prompting the closing sequence to end all closing sequences…
More than this, Dead Alive is confident enough in itself to do a few new things with the idea of the zombie. Lionel has his hands full with the little house gathering he ends up with, but probably didn’t expect to have to contend with two of them falling for each other. The only people consummating anything in the film are corpses; weirder still, these corpses end up doting on a new arrival soon afterwards. Cinema had brought us monster offspring, but never clowning like this. Parenthood doesn’t exactly get an easy run in the film, at any point, and forging the guise of a happy family gives us one of the film’s most outrageous scenes. Baby Selwyn – with Lionel haplessly trying to look after him – gives us the best parody of the proud parental walk in the park, probably ever, especially when Lionel starts punching the little bleeder before shoving him in a duffle bag, under the astonished eye of a gathering of genteel looking women. “Hyperactive,” apparently. There’s still a shock value in having a character doing anything to ‘The Children’, even if one of them is a zombie, so this is another expectation Jackson plays fast and loose with, as well as showcasing Timothy Balme’s tremendous skills as a decent man on the edge of losing his mind. When I first saw the park sequence, I had to watch it again straight away. I wasn’t sure if I had really seen a man doing that with/to a pram. (I re-watched the sequence to write this feature, and yep, it’s still enough to make me cry laughing. I mean, how could you not?)
My relationship with the Hellraiser sequels is ambivalent at best, hostile at worst; as I’ve said previously, the first Hellraiser 
In the melee, there are some decent ideas here. The idea of an affinity between deviants and demons is of course nothing new, but exploring it in a modern, urban setting still has some promise, lending old Judeo-Christian ideas a grimy horror patina. The idea of being judged at the Pearly Gates is transformed into a demonic admin exercise here – it’s different, and it has potential. Although the presence of T&A doesn’t exactly fit in with the other monsters in this mythos, these scenes are book-ended with material which gets close to the dark, maggoty horror of the first two Hellraisers, and a few moments in the script display some love and knowledge of the source material, which at least shows that Tunnicliffe isn’t just winging it here. As for Pinhead himself, well – when he’s on screen, he’s…okay. He’s blank, rather than malevolent; his garb has obviously been simplified for reasons of expediency, but the make-up is reasonably good. We have to remember that Doug Bradley wasn’t exactly able to shine in his last few appearances in his hallmark role, either, so as far as the sequels go, Taylor does a reasonable job with what he has.
The Company of Wolves (1984) really is a force of nature – a vivid array of stories-within-stories which capture the insurrectionist tendencies of Angela Carter’s book, The Bloody Chamber, a collection of familiar fairy stories reworked into unfamiliar forms. The film brings several of Carter’s tales to the screen, albeit via a new, modern framing device, one which links the humdrum with the imaginative, showing ways in which these two states overlap and influence one another. Ambitious, aesthetically-pleasing and intricate, it’s a film which has a diehard fan base, but perhaps has always struggled to attain the audience – or the appreciation – it merits, coming as it does at the tail-end (pun noted) of a number of grisly werewolf flicks and a growing appetite for the gory, not the Gothic. But there’s much to reward the viewer in The Company of Wolves, and now – with James Gracey’s book about the film – it yields up more still in this observant and scrupulous study.
The book also offers detailed comment on the film’s use of symbolism, its impact on cinema and its legacy in film (the likes of Pan’s Labyrinth, for instance) and of course an engaging chapter on lycanthropy. This section of the book eventually brings us full circle, discussing the history of lycanthropic cinema, but before then we go back to the origins of the werewolf myth and its evolution through literature – noting that male and female lycanthropes have tended to receive very different treatments, something which has seeped into cinema, too.
How short can you – legitimately – make a cinematic scare? There are people who would say that a second is enough, but these people are probably discussing jump-cuts. Jump-cuts aren’t scary; jump-cuts are the equivalent of someone screaming BOO! into your ear to trigger a reflex reaction. Most people need – and expect – rather more than that – but the question remains – how short can a film possibly go?
I try to make it a point never to openly roast films just for the fun of it; whatever I say about a project, I try to ask myself whether I’d be happy to say it in front of the filmmaker themselves, and I try really hard to remember that real people out there might have poured a lot of effort into their movie. So, with that in mind, I did try to stick to this with regards The Curse of the Witch’s Doll (2017), and not only because I was the one who chose to watch this screener – I made the decision. So all told, in this case I would definitely say these things in front of the people responsible for this film, and it turns out to be physically impossible to talk about it without an air of exasperation bordering on a good roast. To do otherwise would be worse than dishonest. Alright, so let’s get on with it.
A missing child is meant to be a cataclysmic event in a person’s life, but no one in this film seems massively bothered. To be fair, I feel that the cast are making an effort with what they’ve been given, but they come across as self-conscious, and certainly not expressive of any great concern – not the mother, not the detectives who pop in once or twice and do little else, and not the landlord either. You could possibly argue that as ‘things aren’t what they seem’ (yes, the film attempts THAT plot twist) then this is reflected in the performances, but actually I don’t think so – I’m not prepared to do the work here to justify what I’ve watched. Add to this a script rammed with stock phrases like “we’re doing all we can” and a bewildering array of lighting and sound problems, and it’s devilishly hard to suspend your disbelief. Additional attempts to add dramatic interest by changing tack invariably fall flat, because it’s not possible to believe in anything up until the point of the plot shift anyway.
The ‘mockumentary’ format has been used to interesting effect over the years; note that I said ‘mockumentary’ rather than ‘found footage’, a sub-genre which usually conjures more questions than it can ever answer. There are some important distinctions between the two. Strawberry Flavored Plastic dodges the most typical question asked during found footage, which is ‘why are we/you filming?’ by positioning itself as a film about filmmaking, detailing what two filmmakers are willing to go through in order to see their unique angle through to a completed piece of work. In this, it’s reminiscent of a couple of older films – Man Bites Dog and Resurrecting The Street Walker perhaps, though far more subtle and psychological than either of these predecessors.
This is a slow-building film with ample philosophical elements: our killer spends a lot of screen time pondering the nature of his crimes, after being asked a range of questions by two young men eager to understand what motivates him. Noel is very much the key character here, thanks to an absorbing performance by Aidan Bristow; it’s oddly difficult not to warm to his character, although he is capable of terrible things. Perhaps there are some similarities with early seasons of Dexter here (the ‘unscratchable itch’ and the ‘dark passenger’ are similar ideas), albeit we are never made party to Noel’s internal thoughts in the same way – not if he doesn’t want us, via the film, to know about them. Noel manages to dominate Ellis and Errol’s lives even when he disappears for periods of time. However, despite Noel’s overall dominance of the screen time, the two naive but very driven filmmakers gradually emerge as characters in their own right, not just guys behind cameras. We see them beginning to appreciate the strange quandary they’ve brought upon themselves – and, via them, the film explores the pressures of filmmaking: when is it time to call time on a project? When must you call ‘cut’ for good? When does a good documentary end?
We’ve all heard of post-apocalyptic drama – literature, film and television which look at life after the End of the World as We Know It – and we can all name a few noteworthy examples, I’m sure. Well, the recent BBC series Hard Sun reinterprets this idea, giving us something rather different: ‘pre-apocalyptic drama’. It’s a new one on me. But, using this idea of a modern world poised on the edge of something catastrophic has – at least on paper – some bite. How would knowledge of some impending doom alter the behaviour of people waiting for it to come?
There are many strengths here: the attention to little details works well, with portentous graffiti warning of the ‘hard sun’ beginning to appear all over London. This is a neat touch, which adds to the increasing sense of something being wrong, if not openly discussed; London on the whole looks like an intimidating, alien space for most of the time it’s shown on camera. There’s a bit of mischief involved, too: some of the character names refer to folklore (Grace’s surname is Morrigan – Celtic goddess of death) and we even have a Herbert West in here for good measure, which fits quite well with his particular plot line. These may be entirely coincidental, I suppose, but it seems unlikely. As for the performances; I’ve read quite a lot of criticism of them, and yes, they tend towards being rather overblown (with the exception of Amuka-Bird, who is so calm and collected for the most part that a plot twist where she turned out to be AI wouldn’t have been too much of a leap). But, for most of the characters, the overblown style doesn’t seem to be so bad a fit, given the mode and the topic at hand. It’s all a bit like a London manga, more about spectacle than slow-burn, or indeed plot coherence.
Don’t Look Now is a strange and rather wonderful horror film: routinely featuring on ‘best films of all time’ lists, it clearly made (and continues to make) a resonant impression on viewers, whether those who saw it upon release or those who have come to it later. It’s this lasting appeal which has prompted some serious consideration in print in recent years, with this edition of the Devil’s Advocates series by author Jessica Gildersleeve marking an upcoming addition to the fold.
Perhaps the main body of the book and its arguments, however, is devoted to the film’s specific treatment of trauma; this certainly isn’t your standard book which devotes a chapter to the director, then a chapter to the key actors, and so on. In order to retain her chosen focus, Gildersleeve uses something she refers to as ‘contemporary trauma theory’, and it’s at this juncture that the book really hikes up its academic tone. Of course, the Devil’s Advocates series tends towards the scholarly, granted, but I do feel that, in comparison with 
This must be a boom time for dystopian sci-fi and horror; I cannot imagine why. Over the past few months I’ve received either information about upcoming projects or screener links for a range of dystopian cinema, whether films about worlds poisoned by tech, gripped by environmental havoc, or somewhere between the two. God knows, I haven’t even been able to get around them all. Even that fail-safe low-budget staple – the zombie – seems to have taken a back seat at this moment in time. Maybe this is just a trend, or maybe people are just sweating the small stuff, such as the US President using social media to goof around on the topic of nuclear annihilation. What a time to be alive! Still, I’m sure people aren’t using their films to play with some of their anxieties, because sci-fi and horror have never been used in such a way. Nope.
To judge by the information available on IMDb, Defective had a tough time on the budget front, eventually working with only half of what they’d pegged to get the film made. Unfortunately, the low budget is quite noticeable: for instance, the film isn’t slick, there is some slight echo in places, and there are obviously constraints on the setting/locations which, to an extent, detract from the believability of this version of the world, albeit if we do accept that this dystopia is not that far in the future. At times, there’s a disparity of threat: people can attack the metal-clad enforcers and every time, this seems to hurt them despite their armour. However, the shots used are generally good, even innovative in places (a sequence where people are pursued down a stairwell looks great, for instance) and the performances are decent. Had the film had an abundance of money to play around with, then, would it have been a completely different experience?