Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

It’s a funny thing: whenever people are asked, or take it upon themselves to generate a ‘Best Of’ list like this one, the default response seems to be disappointment. This year doesn’t seem as good as last year, this year’s films have been disappointing, and so on and so forth – except that this reaction seems to occur every year, and good films are of course still being made all the time. Dig a little deeper, and it seems to me that each year is indeed much like the year which came before it, in that there are a always a range of movies, some good, some bad and some indifferent. Importantly, there’s always plenty to love. My issue this year hasn’t been so much with a dearth of films to enjoy, but with severe limitations on what I’ve been able to get to see. In fact, I’m fairly confident that a few films missing from my list would have made it on there, had circumstances been different.

But still – there has been much that I have enjoyed, so here’s five of my favourites from 2013.

5) The Purge

As someone all too familiar with getting to see brilliant, innovative indies which seem to sink without trace, let alone decent distribution, I’m often slightly suspicious of horrors which arrive on the scene as loud and proud as The Purge did, and I can only grasp at the politics which render one film the smash hit of the summer whilst another gets nowhere. That said, I liked The Purge. Whilst in its execution it wasn’t perfect, it had ideas and it wasn’t afraid to run with them, painting a picture of a deeply flawed, superficial America which could boast of plummeting crime rates because of the phenomenon of ‘the purge’, a period of one day per year where any criminality is not only legal, but encouraged. It’s an idea which has been examined elsewhere, sure, but The Purge had a good balance of plausibility and violent fantasy, doing what good dystopian films do; taking an element or elements which we recognise and allowing this to flourish into something unsettling through its possible proximity.

4) The Battery

Not everyone was sold on The Battery, and it’s entirely possible that seeing the film with a very enthusiastic festival audience may have coloured my reception to an extent (hey, nothing happens in a vacuum), but to me this is a real gem. The zombie has become the most ubiquitous horror archetype of our times, and when we live in a world which has seen its first zombie blockbuster in World War Z, it’s evident that there’s no stopping the shambling (or possible sprinting) dead in their tracks. However, The battery uses zombies more or less as a contextualising factor. They provide the pressure cooker which keeps two unlikely travelling companions together under duress, creating some brilliant, naturalistic, highly funny content along the way, and yeah, there’s even a dash of pathos before the end. Real-life friends Jeremy Gardner (playing Ben) and Adam Cronheim (Mickey) created this film from the ground up, with Gardner directing and writing the project too; it’s testament to the sort of commitment which the smaller players have to show, in order to get original content made, and it’s to their credit. You can check out my full review here.

3) The Seasoning House

On paper, The Seasoning House is everything I’d typically avoid in a film. Young girls being trafficked into prostitution? Torture, torment, human misery? These aren’t plot devices I’d seek out, least of all if this necessarily includes people being tied to chairs. However, I was dead wrong about The Seasoning House. Yes, it’s the darkest entry on this list, but as well as strong performances and the distinct, decidedly welcome impression that this topic was not chosen to be played out for exploitative or shocking reasons (though shocking it undoubtedly is), The Seasoning House is ultimately redemptive without being saccharin. It also tempers its viciousness with a certain dreamlike quality, as Deaf inmate of the ‘seasoning house’, Angel (the brilliant Rosie Day) moves between the crawlspaces and walls of the eponymous house, surpassing its capabilities as a prison, and ultimately surpassing the cruelties of its keepers as the loss of a friend causes her to take redemptive action. You can check out my full review here.

2) Mon Ami

There have been some truly brilliant horror-comedies in recent years – Some Guy Who Kills People and Tucker and Dale Vs Evil, to name just two – so much so, that it’s made me reconsider my standard opinion that horror-comedies typically fail both as horrors, then again as comedies. Still, it’s nice to be proved wrong sometimes, isn’t it? Mon Ami is one of those films which is sadly lacking the attention it so richly deserves, and I hope that more people get to see it, as it is note-perfect; ostensibly a buddy movie, this comedy of grisly errors moves from the sublime to the ridiculous as friends Teddy and Cal design the world’s stupidest get-rich-quick scheme, deciding in their wisdom to kidnap their boss’s daughter for a ransom. Yep. So that goes well. As their day goes from bad to worse, Teddy and Cal’s friendship is put through the wringer in a series of excruciating, laugh-out-loud ways. You can check out my full review here.

1) Jug Face

Last but certainly not least, we have a slab of Deep Southern Gothic in the form of Jug Face; Jug Face is, for me, the finest horror movie of 2013 bar none. Here we have a film which has the nous to develop, in a series of deft moves, its own horrific mythos. Although there are some Lovecraftian hints at play, HPL doesn’t quite have the monopoly on the unfathomable, unseeable and unknowable, and the entity or entities of ‘the pit’ function in a series of interesting ways; village elder, moral compass, and executioner, ‘the pit’ protects the tiny, isolated community which lives near to it, but at a price – and when a young girl named Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter) decides to try and cheat its will, she precipitates a disaster for herself and for her people. With stellar performances from the likes of Sean Bridgers, Larry Fessenden and Sean Young (devastating as the matriarchal monster Loriss), a palpable sense of dread matched only by the sense of stifling heat emanating from the screen and – finally – the courage to go out as bleakly as it came in, Jug Face is a superb piece of work. You can read my full review here. And just remember – the pit wants what it wants…

By Tristan Bishop

Editor’s note: as we come to the close of the year, keep an eye on Brutal As Hell for a run-down of our favourite movies of 2013. First up is Tristan, seeing the year out with a range of movies that feature parallel universes, human trafficking and some old school creepiness along the way…

1. John Dies At The End

Well, end of year lists can be a tricky business – I first saw John Dies… back in November 2012, but it’s only now coming out in the UK, and since it’s easily the most original and entertaining film I’ve seen in a few years then it’s very much worthy of top place here. Coming on like a collaboration between HP Lovecraft, Monty Python and a bathtub of potent LSD, JDATE is psychedelic, constantly inventive, and incredibly funny. Although the plot is heavily cut down from that of David Wong’s novel, the essence is perfectly captured, and the characters look and act exactly as many a reader has pictured them. Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep) has yet again pulled off miracles on a low budget. Do the film world a favour and go out and buy this – Then maybe Don can adapt the (even better) sequel, This Book Is Full Of Spiders. (See Ben’s review and Marc’s review.)

2. The Seasoning House

Paul Hyett’s film was quite the surprise – A dark, brutal fairy tale based around the trafficking of girls during the 90s Balkan conflict, The Seasoning House does sympathetic justice to the real life horrors it portrays whilst working as a thrilling ride too – a balancing act that few directors would be able to manage. That it is a first feature makes it even more impressive, although Hyett has been the go-to FX and make-up guy for pretty much every decent British genre piece from the past 15 years and has obviously been studying the directors’ craft with a keen eye. The visuals, and especially the sound design are absolutely first rate, and young British actress Rosie Day gives a revelatory performance as the deaf-mute heroine Angel. A must-see film for those who can stomach it. (See my review and Keri’s review.)

3. Kiss Of The Damned

Time for a bit of controversy – This film seems to divide horror fans something chronic, with one camp dismissive of the script and acting (many of the actors speak English as a second language), and others lapping up the old-school 70s Euro horror angle. As a fan of Jean Rollin and his ilk, I was overjoyed to find a modern vampire flick which took elements of recent vampire mythology (specifically True Blood with the themes of ‘mainstreaming’) and laced it with style and sex straight out of 1973. Xan Cassavetes (daughter of the legendary John Cassavetes and his muse Gena Rowlands) directs with an obvious love for the material, but the film is really stolen by Roxane Mesquida as a sexy, mischievous and downright dangerous vampire. If you’re into Rollin pictures you’ll dig this film’s languorous style and sexual tension. If not, you’ll likely find it a tiny bit dull. (Review soon.)

4. The Station/Blood Glacier

You may have seen the news last week that the Austrian creature feature which has been doing the festival rounds as The Station is to go under the much shlockier title of Blood Glacier. To be fair, the original title made me think of worthy Hungarian drama, but it’s preferable to the SyFy Original style of the new one, especially as the film behind it is such a delightful romp. Basically a re-imagining of The Thing, but with a wonderful creature conceit, it also gets major props for a decent script and interesting characters. It’s so rare to find a straight-up horror sci-fi film with genuine humour and human interest these days that this comes across as a real breath of fresh air. Make sure you see it. (Again, review soon.)

5. Dark Skies

I really wasn’t expecting much other than a diverting 97 minutes from this fairly mainstream sci-fi horror film. Yes, it’s highly derivative of Insidious and Poltergeist, but it’s also one of the most efficient horror films I’ve seen In recent years. Dispensing with gore and, surprisingly for the theme, laying off the CGI-overload button (even more surprising given director Scott Stewart’s previous work), it instead gives us slow-burn creepiness and a palpable sense of threat, plus one of the best endings to a film I have in recent memory. Dark Skies will probably come to be regarded as one of the best of the current haunted house cycle – even if it’s not ghosts you have to worry about…

By Keri O’Shea

Y’know, it’s a funny thing. For a genre which has always gone so firmly hand in hand with fantasy, there’s always been a small, but stubborn undercurrent to horror which obsesses over the antithesis of that fantasy – the portrayal of ‘real events’. Whether it’s rumours of real footage being hidden in movies, or outright bullshit projects like Snuff which seek to directly exploit this fascination, or even persistent rumours about certain Hollywood actors who were so convinced by the fantasy on their screens that they called the FBI, the threat of the real has hung on in there. Notions of crossover between the real and the imagined just refuse to go away, and maybe they never will. Well, back in the heyday of 60s and 70s exploitation cinema, when directors were up against fierce competition from one another and growing ever more determined to hit on an innovative format which would allow them to swap maximum outrage for maximum gain, a certain ‘documentary’ movie was made, and it’s one which has clung onto its reputation for savagery, come what may.

In many ways, the persistence of Faces of Death is remarkable. (Sure, the original film did well enough to spawn a small franchise, but it’s the first film in the series which people tend to remember, and scenes from this first one which people can still discuss.) And yet, compared to many contemporary shockumentaries of the day, Faces of Death is surprisingly amateurish. When Mondo Cane (literally, ‘A Dog’s World’) burst onto the underground movie scene back in 1962, it set the bar in terms of the format (and the tendency to fudge together fake footage wherever filmmakers Cavara, Prosperi and Jacopetti saw the need for it) but, say what you like, it was still a milestone in originality. So much so, that an entire tirade of similarly-styled movies followed in its wake, as well as a Mondo Cane 2 the following year; where the imitators differed from their source, however, was in their own focus. Mondo Cane achieves its slightly bewildering effect through interspersing the nasty with the silly; drunken antics take their place on-screen alongside a battery of deeply-unpleasant animal cruelty scenes, for example. Perhaps the nasty footage got people talking the most, because the films which followed tended to include more and more of it. And so, by the time we get to 1978, we’ve found a specific focus – death itself, and depictions of death (and only death) on the screen.

So why, exactly, has Faces of Death developed the lasting reputation for extremity, even when – for example – a later film like Traces of Death (1993) seems, to this writer at least, a lot nastier and a lot more unpleasantly credible? It’s something I’ve wondered about a lot as I come to write this piece. As far as it goes, personally, I’ve seen shockumentaries I find far more upsetting, and also shockumentaries I find far more interesting, if I can call it that (like Shocking Africa, for instance), but my first viewing of Faces of Death has still stuck with me like glue. It may well be that once a film’s reputation reaches critical mass, then most of its work is done, before you actually sit down to watch the thing. If you;re young and impressionable, that helps too. Add notoriety to anticipation and find a better, more far-reaching ad campaign than any money could buy, and that is still true in many cases even in our cynical, internet-savvy times. Hell, even today, people who have never been anywhere near a viewing of Faces of Death will recognise the title. But the film’s reputation can’t be completely explained away by the snowball effect.

For me, Faces of Death is still so well-known for the notable and often downright bizarre way in which it skirts the facetious and the unpalatable. For example, director and writer John Alan Schwartz (who, just as bizarrely, also wrote a few episodes of Knight Rider, which starred his old college roomie David Hasselhoff) must’ve known that the footage he was going to stitch together was going to be a real rag-tag affair, so he decided that he was going to give us a credible authority figure, to help generate the impression of an overarching structure. Or, ahem, perhaps not. The inclusion of Dr Francis B. Gröss (aww, come on!) as played by actor Michael Carr bequeaths to us one of the most dubious medical experts ever, and as such the voice-over which Carr provides throughout the film adds a great deal to the often perplexing, ‘should I be laughing or not?’ tone. The film forces you to waver between belief and disbelief, wry humour and outright disgust throughout.

So, you’re watching it, you’re transfixed by the dulcet tones of Dr Gröss as he explains the relevance of each sequence to the overarching theme of death…and, then what? Next, you might feel yourself assaulted by the barrage of images thrown at you, and made to reflect on their authenticity, or otherwise. This in itself can be quite a testing experience. A number of lurid scenes follow hot on the heels of the last, so that one moment you’re ostensibly peering into a cannibalistic Satanic orgy, the next at what really does look like a suicide (clue: it ain’t – more anon) and then at live animals being presented at table. To ask yourself if what you’re seeing is real, well, you have to really get a good look at it. If you realise that you have just witnessed something real, then it’s not the nicest of sensations, and it’s important to remember that, even though Faces of Death has had its claims of being 100% real conclusively quashed in the past three decades, a reasonable amount of it is real. So, even though you might be able to work out by yourself that they’re not really killing a monkey in that scene, and that’s an actress pretending to leap to her death in that scene, all the scenes are part of a fairly sickly entirety. The conceit overall is unpleasant, and cumulatively, shot through as it is with shards of black comedy, it still has the power to spit you out the other end feeling repelled. To demonstrate this feeling of being repelled with an example of my own, it’s worth mentioning at this juncture that Faces of Death has had, believe it or not, a long-lasting impact on my life, and I’m being perfectly serious here. I saw this film when I was fifteen years of age after tracking it down – as usual – on a hokey, thrice-copied VHS tape. The moment I was through with the slaughterhouse sequence which appears early on in the film I said to myself, ‘I am never eating meat again’. Nearly twenty years on, I never have. It’s only a movie, sure, but there we go, that’s what Faces of Death can do…

Thirty-five years after this movie emerged – turning a huge profit whilst spinning a huge yarn – it has maintained its cult reputation, regardless of the quality or quantity of films which have followed in its wake. In this day and age where shock value and saturation have hit a premium in the horror movie world, you can’t help but be a little impressed by that, even whilst acknowledging, even enjoying, the film’s flaws. And yet, despite its grand old age, Faces of Death feels in a few ways like a very modern movie. There are still those amongst us who seem to want to ponder the veracity of death footage, albeit in an online format now as opposed to analogue; that unholy marriage of attraction and repulsion is still an impulse for many. Faces of Death was also one of those films – not the first, sure, but an early example – which began the process of reducing the distance between the camera and captured footage. If you cottoned on to the fact that some of that footage was fake, then you could then understand that we had a cameraman pretending to be a real figure on the ground, and you just might be able to see where we have the odd example of that in modern horror cinema. The phrase ‘Based On Real Events’ has become a huge cliché, too, a further testament to the fact that select horror audiences (and directors) give credence to this kind of set-up.

Perhaps most of all, though, Faces of Death – with its proud reputation of being banned in a record number of countries – speaks volumes to us about the law of the forbidden in film. Tell a punter they can’t see something, and they will cross hot coals to do that very thing. Hell, deliberately put footage in your film which will automatically put it on the naughty step, and watch the demand for your film grow. Faces of Death might not be the most accomplished, or charming example of this truism, but it’s certainly one of the most memorable, and it looks like its disrepute will continue to hang on in there.

The zombie movie phenomenon which started with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead has wound up providing us with a very-extended family tree; we have official sequels, unofficial sequels, remakes, sequels to remakes, and possible add-ons to the original Dead trilogy universe which makes the recent I Spit On Your Grave remake-sequel tangle seem positively straightforward by comparison. So, although the Brian Yuzna-directed 1993 flick, ‘Return of the Living Dead III’ (ROTLD3 from here on in, if I may) has little in the way of a direct relationship to the 1967 classic, it’s definitely a distant cousin, going to the trouble of linking back to its predecessors in its opening scenes.

But a lot happened between ’67 and ’93, and ROTLD3 is, in many ways, the original zombie movie come full circle. In Night… we wound up with an entire array of ghouls laying siege to the living – they were the soulless, mindless creatures which set the benchmark for an entire genre, and which stumbled on fairly uninterruptedly until 28 Days Later, all ‘but they’re not zombies’ squabbling aside. In ROTLD3 however, we have a movie ready to ask intriguing questions. What if someone was ‘brought back’ straight after death? Would they really be ‘monsters’ straight away? And why would they change? ROTLD3, in classic, gleefully grisly Yuzna style, plays with these ideas, and asks things which have again by and large sunk back into the background, as zombie horror has, with a few notable exceptions, plumped for en masse walking dead once more. Now when those eyes snap open again, they’re already goners – it takes a matter of mere seconds for this to occur in many films, too, such as in World War Z, to pick a recent example. But ROTLD3 opts to do things very differently. It is a zombie flick about individual relationships, not the terror of the horde. As such, it remains an unusual zombie movie even now, and it was in so many ways ahead of its time in the early Nineties. I’d also argue that ROTLD3 takes the 2-4-5 Trioxin idea – used in a fun, cartoonish way in Return… – and develops it in a much more unsettling, disturbing way, looking more closely at what happens to a small number of people, two in particular. This close focus allows the film to go places that at the time, other films had not gone, and to consider things they had not.

The underhand behaviour of the military is of course a big part of Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 classic, especially in its own shock ending, but it’s how it affects a specific family which forms the bedrock of the plot in ROTLD3. Generation X-er Curt (J. Trevor Edmond) has a troubled relationship with his dad, whose military career consists of top-secret experimentation in ‘bio-warfare’ – carrying on from Return…in that it’s based on working with the chemical agent Trioxin, a substance which has the incidental effect of bringing the dead back to life to create the “weapons system of the future”. And, hey, why not use the reanimated dead as weapons, right? The way this all plays out in ROTLD3 feels weightier than it does in Return… – there’s less of the playfulness of characters like Tar Man, less of things like zombie ambushes and the like. Here we have a regimented system of operations and a Colonel who has a very messed-up relationship with his son, a son whose momentary decision to defy him and stay with girlfriend Julie precipitates the whole course of events which follows. And, in keeping with the quality over quantity approach of the film, we only get up close to a couple of the living dead here, but we see what happens to them in detail. For me, this makes everything more effective, from Steve Johnson’s excellent make-up SFX right through to the focus on characterisation, which looks at other disaffected, vulnerable people too, not just Curt, his girlfriend Julie and his father.

In amongst all of the gore and the body horror, of course, ROTLD3 stands out because it manages to place a sweet romantic relationship at its heart. Curt and Julie are disaffected kids, each lonely, each estranged from anything which would provide them with any structure, and so they cling to one another, especially when the spectre of being reassigned threatens to take Curt away. It’s a darkly comic, and a tragic, touch that what happens to Julie, shall we say, complicates matters. Not that she was a straightforward girl before her little accident, though: Julie had a dark side, a fascination with death, which leads her to keep replaying what she and Curt witness at the military buildings even when they’re in bed together. In an obvious nod to her death-obsessed alt-girl predecessor Trash, Julie ain’t all sweetness and light before things happen to her, but this only makes the end result more interesting, whilst still adding to, not taking away from, the love affair in the film. It’s this love affair which eventually holds sway over the plot, and adds a note of grotesque, but irrefutable pathos to proceedings. Whatever comes before, you can’t deny that ROTLD3’s ending is a bold move, even a touching one too, even if it comes out of chaos which has by this point harmed the innocent, as well as getting even with the wicked.

Julie (played brilliantly by Mindy Clarke) is one of the most recognisable zombies in horror cinema. She plays the split in her personality really well as she fights against the human munchies and realises that being dead isn’t actually all it’s cracked up to be, while at the same time, working an oddly aesthetically-pleasing look. There are a lot of influences to spot here. Whilst the debt of honour to Linnea Quigley is obviously there, Julie (and Curt) are kids of the Nineties, on their way to Seattle to enjoy the music scene before everything goes wrong for them. As well as grunge, though (check out the L7 poster on Curt’s bedroom wall) the S&M/goth influence is in there too, and it’s worth remembering that this film hit the stands at just the time when piercings were emerging into the mainstream from their old haunts of the fetish club and the tattoo convention. Julie takes something which would have been a tad more familiar than it was ten years before, say, and then hyper-extends it until it’s monstrous. And, hey, there’s a dash of Cenobite in there too, with the slashed fetish wear and symmetrical piercings, right? Funnily enough, Julie would look more at ease in the ranks of the Cenobites than some of those we were expected to accept in the previous year’s sequel Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (a Cenobite whose prime torture technique was burning people with a cigarette? Bitch, please). Julie is both meaner, more engaging, alive or dead, and never loses her humanity, which stops her from ever becoming truly repellent. Brian Yuzna has done some sterling work in his time, but Julie is by far one of his best creations.

It’s hard to believe that this film is twenty years old. It’s hard to believe that I first saw this as a young teenager, and thought that Julie was one of the coolest entities I’d seen since Pinhead. How time flies. Well, I think it holds up brilliantly to this day, and it’s a movie that, as a Yuzna fan, I find myself revisiting often, and always finding something to enjoy. Yuzna knows that you can go to new places with your characters in a horror film without sacrificing on the gore, and it’s why he’s one of the masters of body horror. I’ve read a lot of reviews of ROTLD3 as preparation for writing this retrospective, and one criticism which cones up again and again is that it lacks the ‘fun’ of Return of the Living Dead. I don’t think that’s necessarily true – there are bleakly comic sequences throughout the film – but ultimately, ROTLD3 is just a different beast, and it works so well because it is. By using grim, graphic horror ‘what if?’ ideas, Yuzna is able to do here what he does so well elsewhere: body horror offers the scope for an entertaining, compelling and often blood-curdling glimpse at the human condition. It means that you don’t need to scrimp on blood and guts, but you can use their presence to throw in oddball questions about what we are and why.

When you can successfully merge love, death, noteworthy aesthetics and plenty of gore into a captivating story, then I’d say you’re doing something right, and that is precisely why we can still talk about this horror movie today, when so many of the other cousins-twice-removed of the original Dead films which wound up making ROTLD3 possible have already sunk without trace, or perhaps worse, deliberately been forgotten. ROTLD3 was unafraid to take a few risks, the risks paid off, and it deserves its place in zombie horror history accordingly.