Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Film Review: The Purge (2013)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Often times, the thing that makes or breaks a dystopian horror is its level of plausibility. Could we – honestly – foresee a scenario which at all resembles that which is depicted in our film? Is it all a little too close for comfort? It’s a fine line to walk though; too familiar, too everyday, and that note of alarm won’t be heard. Too improbable, and we won’t engage with it in the manner intended. The Purge, overall, manages to weave an effective dystopian yarn. At times, its plot is too heavily signposted – however, this isn’t enough to overpower a very interesting premise, which for the most part is explored entertainingly on-screen.

We find ourselves in an America which has, by all accounts, overcome some very dark days: economic depression, social breakdown and high levels of crime had blighted the country until the intervention of the so-called New Founding Fathers, who introduced radical social changes, the notion of ‘The Purge’ being one of them. This means that, from 7pm until 7am on one day of the year, all crime – including murder – is completely legal. The success of this policy has been widespread because now, crime is at an all-time low, the economy is strong and society is running as smoothly as a well-oiled machine. People can get all of their hatred and loathing out of their systems in one designated time-slot, and then, exorcised, they can go back to their lives. The Purge works.

The Purge also provides scope for entrepreneurship, satisfying that most fabled element of American life – the American Dream. James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) is a very successful home security system salesman; protecting others (or at least those rich enough to pay) has meant James Sandin is wealthy enough to provide his family with a lavish home in an affluent neighbourhood. We meet the Sandins on the night of The Purge, and together James, wife Mary (Lena Headey), tech-geek son Charlie (Max Burkholder) and inexplicably-Catholic-schoolgirl-uniform-clad daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane) are preparing to go into lock-down until it’s all over. However, when Charlie, who is ‘too young to understand’ the necessity of Purging, lets a terrified, fleeing man into their home, those hunting him come to reclaim their quarry. Moral dilemmas and mayhem ensue.

I had assumed, upon reading the basic premise for this film and the idea that the whole of America was free to partake in a day of violence, that it would play out as a pursuit through lawless streets, so I was surprised to find instead a home invasion movie (although, with another Purge movie already on its way, it’s certainly possible that the different angle could happen in future.) And, as home invasion movies go, this is actually a pretty good one, despite the fact that The Purge feels the need to oh-so clearly delineate several of its plot markers at the beginning (‘What’s that, son? You’ve built a remote-controlled video camera with night vision?’) and thus comes across as a teeny bit patronising in its initial stages. Once the screenplay feels assured that the audience knows what’s going on, though, it begins to play with some more sophisticated ideas. The briefest of TV bulletins here, a snippet of radio there is enough to set up the premise; at the time of writing, it’s hardly as if we need too much help to imagine a world struggling through economic meltdown and mass social protests, so the film is free to move into its fantasy of what could be done to put things right, without feeling the urge to break down its political meta-message into monosyllables, at least once it feels it has our full attention.

Of course, the idea that human violence can be isolated and compartmentalised into society-friendly outlets is not a new one. The Purge reminds me in a few ways of a science fiction story entitled ‘The Seventh Victim’ by Robert Scheckley; in Scheckley’s imagination, society has permitted those who wish to indulge in violence to sign up to become ‘assassins’; thus murder is legal, but only for those who choose to partake – and they are only allowed to kill other, designated assassins, thus making society safe for everyone else. The Purge mirrors this in several respects, including rendering down the violence itself to something quite minor when compared to the implications of legal murder overall. Although the film has some brief, very bloody interludes, this definitely ain’t The Raid on two storeys. The Purgers who arrive at the Sandin home – part Manson family, part finishing school drop-outs – emanate threat more than they act upon it. The decision to personify one of this group and to turn him into a spokesperson is in some ways an odd idea (why wear a mask you are so happy to remove?) but you can’t deny that Rhys Wakefield in this role has a certain psychopathic charm.

The Purge does have some issues in how it opts to defuse on-screen threats, and at times it settles into a mode whereby you know exactly how we will get from a scene of peril to one of vindication, which is unfortunate, as it is also capable of some effective about-face scenes. All told though, the film may have some questionable elements, but for the way it provides political commentary without preaching and generates tension – even if sometimes by familiar means – it remains a succinct, competent home invasion movie with an intriguing contextual story. It’ll be interesting to see where we go from here, since we already know that we will be going somewhere…

The Purge is in selected UK cinemas now and will be released in the US on 7th June 2013.

DVD Review: Dario Argento’s Dracula

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the direct antecedent of what is arguably the first horror film ever made, and in the best part of a century which has followed, it has remained a particularly fertile source for horror movie makers. By their very nature, the films which have followed have been variable; never, however, did I expect Dracula to manifest as a giant, cuddly CGI owl and make me laugh my gin through my nose. Dario Argento, sir – are you trolling us?

As the years roll on, I find it ever more difficult to accept any version of auteur theory where Dario Argento is concerned; sure, films like Suspiria and Tenebrae are savagely beautiful, innovative pieces of film, and nothing can take them away from us, but in later years – where Argento is ostensibly still in charge of proceedings only with more cash and more freedom – the quality of his output has generally declined. That said, I liked The Stendhal Syndrome a lot more than I expected, so hope sprang eternal that, however unfortunate the teaser trailer for Dracula seemed to be, it would be worth a watch. And I tried to enter into the spirit of things, I really did. It’s not that I simply want Argento to keep making films exactly like Suspiria; I don’t, and nor do I mind when a filmmaker changes their modus operandi – as long as what they go on to do actually works as a film, be it a scary film, or a charming film, or even a ‘so bad it’s good’ film. Sadly, Dario Argento’s Dracula is part Noah’s fucking Ark and part AA meeting, a huddle of slurring or disengaged actors wending their way through a random selection of vampiric beasties, bad fangs and sudden tits.

Sigh. Anyway, here’s the plot. We are, true to the novel, somewhere in the Carpathians; village girl Tania (Miriam Giovanelli) ignores her mother’s advice about locking up for the night and sneaks out for some hot Walpurgisnacht barn action with a married man (tsk!) before suffering an ignominious death by unbelievable owl/Dracula. Cue arrival of one Jonathan Harker (Unax Ugalde) to the village, a man from foreign parts who seems unlikely to understand the quaint local customs they have here, such as a group of men digging up the recently deceased Tania preparatory to staking her, allowing her to escape because they’re crap, and then brawling with one another. Still, Mr. Harker is in town for the happy occasion of starting a new job: he hopes to settle into his role as a librarian at Castle Dracula before wife Mina arrives, and he stops off to see their mutual friend Lucy (Asia Argento) before heading off for his first day.

It is literally minutes before Harker notices that Count Dracula – played by Liam Neeson Look-a-like Competition Winner Thomas Kretschmann – has no reflection. Oh, and Dracula’s ‘niece’ Tania, now a fixture at the castle since outwitting the witless village men, is a bit effing keen. Things go from bad to worse however when he gets ‘the bite’ and by the time Mina arrives in town, Jonathan is missing altogether. Will Mina recover him? Will Mina be safe? AND WHY THE FUCK IS THERE A SIX FOOT PRAYING MANTIS IN THIS?

It’s difficult to know what Argento must have been thinking of here, but possibly this is his attempt to render something akin to a Hammer Dracula film – the location, the costumes – only adding some characteristic profondo rosso into the mix because gore is cool and it always went down well in the Seventies, and then of course adding CGI, which, ahem, brings the film smack bang up to date. In fact, let’s have everything CGI. Want a wall in your film? Sure, you could film a boring fucking actual wall, even a few houses, or you could get them done up on one of them new-fangled computers! It’s the future. I’m not some rabid anti-CGI fangirl, by the way: I think that CGI when it is well-used is fine, but it works best when it conjures up the improbable, not the everyday, or if it must depict the everyday, you should hardly know it’s there. From the opening credits of this film, with the fake village fly-over putting me in mind of Atari ST adventure games from the late Eighties, I was dubious. When I saw that Argento had used real wolves but employed CGI for said village, I began to fear the worst, and I was right to do so. Every instance of CGI used in this film was jarring, pointless and stupid. It didn’t just take me out of the film, it made me want to take the film out of the player.

The CGI was a major player in the film’s laugh-out-loud moments throughout – the spider on its web which makes the Fulci tarantulas in The Beyond look positively believable, the werewolfpire attack, the owl, the mantis…but there are other things which made me laugh just as much, like the ‘You both look so happy!’ comment regarding Jonathan and Mina’s wedding portrait, as they’re there with faces like stone, and – sad to say – nearly all of the performances. Marta Gastini as Mina is one rare flash of competence here, whereas all of the other chief players seem embarrassed or stoned, even the great Rutger Hauer as a late-entrant Van Helsing. The appearance and aesthetic of Dracula is interesting at least, but not fully-developed thanks to unequal screen time and a poor script.

However, the absolute baffler here is what the hell has happened to Asia Argento in recent years. Perhaps her father has simply demanded too much of her during her acting career – he certainly seems to have a predilection for filming his own daughter’s tits which would get him on at least one special register here in the UK, let alone what he put her through in Stendhal – but it’s as if she is slowly atrophying. Her delivery has become…somehow stymied, occasionally even slurring. When she makes efforts to break out of that to enact Serious Things, it’s impossible to believe. It’s a bit of a worry.

Whilst it at least moves at a decent pace and doesn’t add insult to injury by lasting for much more than ninety minutes, it’s seriously difficult to say kind things about this film. Whilst you could get some mileage out of it during a group-viewing (i.e. take a shot every time it looks as if Asia has) it doesn’t go quite far enough to be utterly ludicrous. It has silly creatures but you know they’re not even there, it has a cast which should have been good but they look like they wish they weren’t there, and its cut ‘n’ shut Dracula plot is somewhere in the hinterland between earnestness and aimlessness. Let us hope against hope that this is the lowest ebb; if so, and provided someone hides all the computers from the director, then the only way from here, surely, is up.

Dracula di Dario Argento is available, if you must, from international sellers on Amazon.

“The Gentlest and Most Generous of Men”: The Friendship of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

What is it that defines the term ‘gentleman’? Without a doubt, it is a term which remains nebulous, and one which has changed throughout its history; you could also make the case that the term itself has lost much of its meaning in the modern day, but perhaps we can still say some things about it with a degree of certainty. Gentlemanly behaviour, I would argue, connotes decency, dignity and deference. A gentleman may have humble origins (the term seems to have lost much of its association with ancestry) but a noble character and actions; a gentleman would almost certainly behave according to a profound sense of propriety, and it is sad that the notion of a man acting according to this sense of propriety is seen by some as archaic, because surely it is anything but. However, whatever one’s social mores might dictate, there is something else I feel I need to add to the definition. The concept of the gent is, in so many ways, an ineffably English phenomenon. Oh, sure, you may find gentlemen in many traditions, cultures and places, but somehow, it seems most intricately bound up with ideas of Englishness – which is yet another concept which some people find easy to castigate in these cautious times.

In The Image of the English Gentleman in the Twentieth Century, author Christine Berberich quotes Sir Sidney Waterloo (himself an English gentleman) and his definition of the gent as ‘he who feels himself at ease in the presence of everyone and everything, and who makes everyone and everything feel at ease in his presence’; when I read this definition, I was struck by how much this reminded me of the great Peter Cushing, the man who is for me, the quintessential English gentleman. Cushing is a man about whom I have never heard or read a bad word. Anyone, anywhere who worked with him speaks fondly of him, of his manner and his conduct; and, immediately when I think of Cushing, I think of his dearest friend Christopher Lee, with whom he made a staggering twenty-two films over a period of thirty-five years. If Cushing was the quintessential English gent, then his friendship with Lee would seem to be the quintessential friendship between gentlemen; Cushing the more pacific character to Lee’s breviloquence, but together, a brilliantly-matched, deeply-attached amity.

And it was horror which initially forged this friendship – Hammer Horror, to be precise. Peter Cushing had initially eschewed a career as a surveyor – a dependable, respectable but ultimately unsatisfying job – and had become an actor instead. At this, he enjoyed modest, steadily-building success, appearing in theatre (including Broadway) before at last moving into cinema. Cushing and Lee appeared in the same film together as early as 1948, when they each took a role in Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, and again in a version of Moulin Rouge in 1952, but they still had not yet met. This was to change in 1957, when each was cast in Hammer’s first full-colour horror film, The Curse of Frankenstein, a film which was successful enough to open the floodgates of Kensington gore and establish a strong horror presence for the Hammer studio which would last well into the 1970s. Christopher Lee, however, was not overly pleased with his first impressions of the film he was about to shoot. Lee’s ambivalence (and sometimes downright dissatisfaction) with Hammer’s modus operandi would continue for as long as he worked with them, but nonetheless, the studio united him for the first time with the actor who would become his ‘dear fellow’.

In his autobiography, Christopher Lee recounts their first meeting, which took place on the set of The Curse of Frankenstein. “Our very first encounter began with me storming into his dressing-room and announcing in petulant tones, ‘I haven’t got any lines!’ He looked up, his mouth twitched, and he said drily, ‘You’re lucky. I’ve read the script.’ It was a typical wry comment. I soon found Peter was the great perfectionist, who learned not only his own lines but everybody else’s as well, but withal had a gentle humour which made it quite impossible for anybody to be pompous in his company.” Their friendship was born. It is ironic that, as their friendship grew, they tended to play on-screen adversaries, most notably of all Van Helsing and Dracula; the end sequence of Horror of Dracula (1958) is for me the ultimate Dracula scene committed to celluloid. Cushing himself reflected upon his role as Van Helsing: “To me, Van Helsing is the essence of good pitted against the essence of evil…I believe that the Dracula films have the same appeal as the old morality plays, with the struggle of good over evil, and good always triumphing in the end.” As Van Helsing looks peaceably through the day-lit, stained-glass windows after dispatching Dracula in what must have been a very physically tough scene to play, you can see what Cushing means when he said, “I suppose in a way it is possible that I was pre-ordained to play Van Helsing. For although I am not a religious man, I do try to live by Christian ethics and I believe in the truth as set forth in the New Testament. I can see so many of the elements of good and evil in life, and this seemed to give me added strength in my screen battles with the powers of darkness.”

However, the loss of Cushing’s beloved wife Helen in 1971 was to cast a pall of sadness over the remnant twenty years of his life; although he continued to work and always performed to the best of his abilities, his heart was never again in his work in the same way, and his friends, Lee included, understood this. It is a matter of great sadness though that what is probably his best-known mainstream role – in Star Wars – was to occur in those years after his greatest enjoyment in his career had passed. Lee was also to work his way into the mainstream, and now in his ninety-first year continues to work at a frenetic pace. Both men always remained in contact; on occasions they celebrated their consecutive birthdays on the 26th and 27th May together, whilst they often exchanged letters and gifts in the interim, with Lee commenting on the “entertaining letters and satirical verses” which he received from him. Yet however much he took pleasure in his friendships, Cushing was always honest about his state of mind following Helen’s demise. “She was my whole life and without her there is no meaning. I am simply killing time, so to speak, until that wonderful day when we are together again.”

And so he waited, and he worked, to fill the time. As another irony of both Cushing’s and Lee’s respective careers, neither of them were fans of the horror genre. Cushing, whilst always characteristically charmed and humbled by the letters he received regarding his horror roles was far more glad of the opportunities which genre film afforded him than he ever was a fan of the end product. In a 1985 interview, he said, “It gives me the most wonderful feeling. These dear people love me so much and want to see me. The astonishing thing is that when I made the “Frankenstein” and “Dracula” movies almost 30 years ago the young audiences who see me now weren’t even born yet. A new generation has grown up with my films. And the original audiences are still able to see me in new pictures. So, as long as these films are made I will have a life in this business – for which I’m eternally grateful.”

As the friends’ careers diverged somewhat, Cushing was to continue working as he battled prostate cancer; it was the illness which was eventually to end his life in 1994 when he was eighty-one years old, after a ten-year battle. Christopher Lee recounts of their last meeting in that year, “There was something a little bit different about Peter, waiting for the end: for twenty-three years since his beloved wife Helen died, his friends realised that he wouldn’t mind packing up on this earth to join her. Vincent [Price] once, in a phone call to me, asked, ‘Is he still expecting Helen to be there to greet him?’ And I said, ‘Looking forward to it.’ And Vincent said, ‘And what if she’s out?’ I said, ‘I shall tell him you said that, Vincent,’ and when I did, Peter laughed fit to dispatch him immediately on his journey. When he’d recovered he said, ‘Only Vincent could say such a thing, and only you could pass it on.'”

Peter Cushing was and is one of the most well-loved and well-known actors of his own generation and of those which have followed. It is also difficult to visualise Cushing – at least for me – without also visualising Christopher Lee. Perhaps the friendship between these two men – and its loss – speaks to us so keenly because it speaks to us of something else above and beyond itself. To return to Christine Berberich, whose book on the phenomenon of the gentleman we looked at at the start of this article, she suggests that the notion of the gentleman is at least partly bound up in the idea of nostalgia, of a past we miss. By looking to men like Cushing, we are looking to the past; in his loss, we see the end of a way of life, we see the demise of a certain value system, or a manner, or simply a way of doing things. But then, of course, we are also affected by the loss of Cushing as an individual, someone whom we did not know personally, but whose evident value system, and manner, and way of doing things we respected enough to mourn. This is not to denigrate the loss of those who did know him personally, however, and it is only fitting that his greatest friend have the final word in this regard. Lee – a man known for his honour and gravitas, but perhaps less for his emotionality, nonetheless had this to say. “At some point of your lives, every one of you will notice that you have in your life one person, one friend whom you love and care for very much. That person is so close to you that you are able to share some things only with him. For example, you can call that friend, and from the very first maniacal laugh or some other joke you will know who is at the other end of that line. We used to do that with him so often. And then when that person is gone, there will be nothing like that in your life ever again”.

But perhaps I might be permitted to add one note of positivity: as much as we mourn the loss of a great actor and a man who does not seem to have an equivalent in these times, we are also celebrating the centenary of Cushing’s birth. We can say that those of us who continue to adore seeing Peter Cushing – and of course Christopher Lee – on our screens have imbued them and their friendship with a particular kind of eternal life, as their warmth, honesty and integrity continue as a pleasure to observe.

Select Bibilography:

Berberich, Christine (2007) The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia (Ashgate Books).

Haining, Peter (1987) The Dracula Scrapbook (Chancellor Press).

Lee, Christopher (1977 [1998 edn.]) Tall, Dark and Gruesome (Vista Books).

DVD Review: Apartment 1303

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

As a general rule of thumb, I tend to avoid English language versions of J-horrors. Sure, the Far East has provided rich pickings for cautious filmmakers and those who fund them, but almost as soon as Ring happened, Japanese horror became a victim of its own success; no sooner had Sadako become the impromptu ambassador for a subsequent army of creepy kids with flowing locks, but the ubiquity of it all had begun to show, and by the time Hollywood got its greasy mitts on J-horror, horror fans already knew the ropes. It only made colossal cock-ups like Gore Verbinski’s remake feel all the more pointless and jarring. Still, Ring was – is – an excellent horror movie. The Grudge is a ripping yarn too, and in each case the remakes failed to capture the creepiness of the originals. So, then, why would you elect to remake a movie which is at best part of the horde of imitators spawned by the success of those two? This is a question I soon asked myself upon sitting down to watch Apartment 1303, an American spin on the lacklustre 2007 Japanese film of same title and – by and large – plot.

The plot runs thusly, anyway: Janet Slate (Julianne Michelle) has had quite enough of living with her domineering, difficult and frequently drunk mother (Rebecca de Mornay) and her sister Lara (Mischa Barton) for that matter, so when she goes to view an apartment, she likes it so much that she immediately signs a year-long lease. Uh-oh. Immediately, things aren’t right with this place. For starters, there’s a creepy little girl in the foyer (which would surely entitle you to some sort of rebate), the Super is a perv who offers her money off her rent if she will only pay him in kind, and of course there’s a long-haired ghostie in the apartment, though bucking the usual trend by having long fair hair. Things are so bad, that she even thinks about going home to Mom – but this isn’t to be after all, so she heads back to the apartment for a second night with boyfriend Mark (Corey Sevier) for a rather coy, underwear-on sex scene, just prior to being hurled out of the window by said ghostie. Boobs or GTFO, I guess…

Right. So it’s down to Lara to find out what really happened to Janet; she picks up on the subtle clues that this wasn’t an honest-to-goodness suicide by the fact that her dead sister calls her up and invites her over, so over she goes and, with Mark’s assistance, she begins to investigate the circumstances surrounding Room 1303.

Wow, this is messy. The jigsaw puzzle of actors and plot developments just…doesn’t fit together. Whilst some scenes are compelling and nicely-shot, they all seem sandwiched between poorly-acted scenes or plot lines which aren’t fully realised. People’s emotions don’t fit with what they’re experiencing. Motivations are hinted at but not expounded; perhaps director and (re-)writer Michael Taverna assumes we all know how J-horrors play out and why ghosts do what they do, so there’s little point in delineating anything. There is, though. You still have to try. I wasn’t clear on where an entire character went during this film, and after all when someone reads out all the exposition at the fifty-minute mark, it does tend to make the next thirty minutes or so which follow completely redundant. Julianne Michelle takes events rather oddly in her stride until it’s possibly decided that she’s a little too calm, so she then becomes instantly shrill and gets her make-up is smeared all over her face, as nothing declares mental turmoil in a lady like runny mascara. Mischa Barton, one of the big names attached to this project, fares rather better in her low-key, decidedly non-glam role as Lara, but then there isn’t a great deal for her to play around with. There are hints of some grand mental instability in her background, and she acts it out at certain points with not a little flair, but again, not much is made of it. It’s just a neat way of justifying a few things later in the script. As for Rebecca de Mornay, she is oddly compelling in the short time she spends on screen, but the OTT nature of her character edges her way into comedy value on more than one occasion.

Oh, sure, this is an attractive-looking film. I’ll say that for it. In contrast to many of the blue-filtered, washed-out colour palates trendy in horror cinema these days, Apartment 1303 is a vivid, even garishly-coloured movie, with the haunted space of the apartment perhaps the most colourful of all. Many shots have evidently been put together in a considered way (cinematographer Paul M. Sommers deserves a tip of the hat) and the plentiful city vistas used here are very nicely done indeed. It’s a shame, then, that this is a film and not a painting; when not trying to maintain motivation to see this through to the end, this looked great.

Ultimately, though, Apartment 1303 is proof positive that the well, Sadako’s or otherwise, is drying up. It’s also evidence that it’s not enough to ransack Japanese cinema for ghost stories; often, Oriental ghost stories translate badly to Western settings anyway, as we lack the tradition of, say, yūrei – vengeful ghosts being kept from the afterlife – chuck one into Detroit, and it might not make much sense. (Even hanging onto the Oriental-style screens for use in the apartment was pushing it a bit, as these aren’t commonplace in the West, but I guess they are just so handy for the creepy silhouette scenes.) Apartment 1303 is visually accomplished, effective here and there, but ultimately familiarly, fatally flawed. Might be time to leave Japan alone and write some original screenplays then, eh?

Apartment 1303 will be released by Koch Media on 3rd June 2013

Book Review: The Lucifer Glass by Frazer Lee

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Daniel Gates is what you would call a fixer – a man of ways and means, someone who works to acquire rare artefacts for people whose conventional methods have turned up nothing. He does this for a steep fee, of course, but he is good at what he does. When he successfully procures an unusual mirror for a wealthy client, he is given a second assignment thanks to this initial success; he is sent to Scotland, to exchange an ancient magical text for an incredibly rare whisky, but in so doing he is capitulated into a hitherto unknown world, peopled with dangerous entities and immeasurably dark forces…

Intended as the first in an upcoming series of books based around the character of Daniel Gates, The Lucifer Glass is an engaging introduction, with Gates showing the hallmarks of a promisingly solid character. Care is taken to establish him as a fleshed-out creation with a credible inner life, although – bearing in mind that there is much more yet to come in the series – you won’t receive all the answers here. As an example of this, one of his chief motivations in this part of the story is held back until close to the end of the book, and this further builds the impression that the character is intended for the longer game. The Lucifer Glass certainly does enough to encourage a reader to want to stay with the upcoming series; the balance between what it says and what it withholds is confidently-wrought.

The novella format seems exactly right for this tale, ideal for balancing the worldly against the otherworldly. There is a lot of action in the book (perhaps partly due to author Frazer Lee’s other work as a screenwriter and horror director, lots happens which is easy to visualise and follow) but there’s an economy to the writing style which matches well with the overall march of the plot; you can be evocative without requiring hundreds of pages. There’s an abundance of very sensual descriptive language here, by which I mean that all senses are catered for, with smell, touch, taste as important as sight or sound. This can be pleasant – the importance of the feel of cool water, or the scent of whisky, for instance – or it can be hideous, invoked during some deeply visceral scenes which are difficult to forget. I particularly winced at one description of the sensation of walking over scattered teeth…

Alongside these unsettling sequences, however, The Lucifer Glass displays a playfulness, unable to restrain itself from knowing nods towards horror and occult references. For instance, the wealthy client who sends Gates up North goes by the name of Master/Roth…recognise the ol’ demonic presence lurking in that one? There’s also fun to be had with a Crowley reference or two here and there. The mirror motif, though itself only part of the puzzle, is also a familiar one for lovers of occult horror, and I couldn’t help thinking of the Hammer House of Horror ‘Guardian of the Abyss’ episode during the first chapters. Essentially, The Lucifer Glass is aware of its status as part of an occult horror tradition and is open with that, doing plenty in its own right to forge in its own direction, but also wearing its heart on its sleeve.

Confident, collected and entertaining, The Lucifer Glass is a page-turner, and it will be very interesting to see where we go from here. As the first entrant in a new series, it promises great things indeed, and lovers of occult horror should take the chance to support the series from the get-go.

The Lucifer Glass will be released by Samhain Publishing on 4th June 2013

Dead By Dawn 2013 Review: Mon Ami (2012)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

By sheer coincidence, two of the films which I most enjoyed at this year’s Dead By Dawn festival are all about the subject of friendship, and how that friendship endures under, shall we say, a series of unfortunate events. The first of these is of course The Battery, which uses a zombie outbreak to frame its narrative and to drive hell into its two protagonists, with impressive results. There’s nothing so monstrous driving the action in the second buddy-movie-with-a-twist Mon Ami, however; what we have in this instance is the engine of pure human stupidity. We see the machinations of two best friends – Cal (Scott Wallis) and Teddy (Mike Kovac) seeking to improve their lot – and failing, in spectacular, bloody, blackly comedic style. The twist in this buddy movie is pure horror movie, and this comedy of errors wrings its laughs out of some pretty bleak subject matter; I was surprised at just what director Rob Grant was capable of rendering funny at several points during this film and I think this, in and of itself, is something to be applauded.

Mon Ami takes for its central premise the incontestable fact that although humanity is capable of the odd flourish, the odd game-changing spark of innovation, more often than not people’s great ideas are deeply fucking stupid. Cal and Teddy, lifelong friends who work a humdrum job selling hardware at the local store, are probably not best-placed to think up revolutionary ways to improve their lives tenfold, but it doesn’t stop them from having a go anyway, and therein lies their first mistake. To be fair, when not being ground into the dirt at work, Cal has very little else going for him, while his pal Teddy spends his down time being hen-pecked by his wife Liz, who keeps up her constant barrage of checking-up on him via mobile phone (and only appears in the movie during the final act, but boy, does she make up for lost time!) Still, all of Liz’s surveillance has missed its target, as it has failed to stop Cal and Teddy dreaming up the following: if they can kidnap Crystal, their boss’s lovely daughter and also their co-worker, then they can hold her to ransom. Their boss adores his daughter – of course he’ll be all too keen to pay up – and they won’t do anything to hurt her. Why has no one thought of this before? Hallelujah! They get everything ready – they know where to get her, where to keep her, and how to get their cash. They even invest in some masks. They’re good to go.

It essentially all goes wrong from that point where the abstract ‘What if we could?’ turns into a ‘What do we do now?’ – and not in the ways you might be expecting. The farce here is overblown, frequently grisly, and paced absolutely perfectly; Grant does such a good job of layering joke onto joke that, even allowing for the fact that I may have been slightly stir-crazy by this point in the festival thanks to a liquid diet/little sleep/even less daylight, I was helpless with laughter throughout. The barrage is made so effective by the genuine-seeming cluelessness of our lead guys as bad goes to worse. Cal and Teddy are completely unbelievable master-criminals and therefore brilliant as they gape, panic and bicker about their burgeoning situation, just as your average idiot would. And guess what? They’re not the only idiots at work here. As the story progresses they encounter adversaries who are just as dumb as they are. Just the right number of acts form the bedrock of this film; it knows when to move from the sublime to the ridiculous but equally, it knows when to stop.

One of my absolute bug-bears in modern horror movie-making is the over-reliance on torture porn tropes; these have established themselves rapidly and recognisably, they’ve spread like a virus through low-budget, low-brow filmmaking and boy, are they boring. All of that being said, torture tropes now have the potential to serve as a useful benchmark. Essentially, if I can watch a film which features someone being tied to a chair and I still enjoy it, then we have something rather rare to behold. Not only does Mon Ami fit this bill, but it does another thing: it derives a lot of its humour from playing with these tropes. So much of what goes wrong during Cal and Teddy’s escapades relates in some way to using the wrong hardware, shoddy appliances or the untimely arrivals of neighbours. Rather than depicting a regular domestic space which has been turned into a place of inescapable cruelty, Mon Ami has a regular domestic space which just can’t function properly as the den of iniquity Cal and Teddy need it to be, even if just for the short term. It doesn’t work, and if anything they come off worse for even daring to try. We come close to torture porn slapstick at times here – if you can forgive me for using that expression – and it’s absolutely hilarious.

Masses of action, just the right ratio of humorous to gory moments and no significant plot lines left dangling, Mon Ami is a pleasure. It’s a black comedy where one stupid decision is allowed to blossom into a catalogue of chaos, and as a crowd-pleaser it’s difficult to imagine a better movie. Again, here’s a film which will no doubt make it into my top 10 films of this year. Now, no one go getting any stupid ideas…

Dead By Dawn 2013 Review: The Battery (2012)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

It isn’t so unusual in cinema which deals with post-apocalyptic scenarios – whether the world has been destroyed by war, or zombies, or war which leads to zombies, or something else entirely – to see human friendships put under extraordinary pressure. As life goes to hell, relationships crumble, lifelong bonds are torn asunder, and cinema is there to explore what this must be like. You know what’s less common, though? A scenario where the world as we know it has come to an end, and the only survivors on screen…basically exasperate each other. They’re not at each other’s throats, they make do with the situation they’re in and they stick together, but boy, is it with gritted teeth. However, in any set-up like this, there’s space for development, and this is a film which delivers that in spades. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Battery – one of the most achingly-funny riffs on the zombie theme that I have ever had the pleasure to see.

Ben (director/writer Jeremy Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim) didn’t really know each other all that well before the walking dead put a dampener on things; sure, they played baseball together (hence ‘the battery’ – the pitcher and catcher – of the title) but they ‘didn’t really move in the same circles’. All of that has had to change, of course, and now they’re sorta stuck together. Just the two of them, they stay on the road, meandering their way through (refreshingly) rural spaces and never staying put for long. The funny thing is, Benny seems to be enjoying himself. Life has turned into one long summer vacation of camping, fishing and practising his catch. There’s the odd ghoul to dispatch, but out in the boonies it’s no where near as bad as you’d expect to get in a city. Yep, he can handle things as they are pretty well.

Mickey, though, isn’t taking it so well. He wants more out of life, and blocking out what’s going on around him with his headphones (including Benny’s relentless teasing) is only helping so much. So, when he picks up the voices of other survivors on a walkie-talkie he finds, he sees the chance to reach out and he can’t let it go. His wish for human contact sets the two guys on a certain path which puts an end to their long, hot summer vibe.

Let’s get one thing straight: a poorly-written version of this set-up would have sucked. No nice way to say it; it would have sucked. For the most part we have two characters doing all of the talking and occupying pretty much all of the screen time; this is no gore-fest either, with the zombies themselves usually acting as an underlying threat rather than a constant presence (and they certainly don’t fucking run). Without good writing, this would have been incredibly dull; as it stands, some of the best, funniest writing I’ve had the pleasure to experience renders this a truly engaging film. You’re instantly drawn into the world of the lead characters, feeling every atom of their frustrations and amusements as if you’re on the ground with them; this is surely helped by the fact that the two lead actors are also old friends in real life, so the chemistry is already there. This believable relationship allows the film to move into something else it does incredibly well, and that is to make the audience roar with laughter.

Humour in The Battery is sublime – the timing’s impeccable, the jokes all land, it’s subtle (well, mostly, apart from one scene so outrageous that the whole auditorium was in absolute pieces) and observational, having a lot more in common with pre-wanker Kevin Smith movies than (because the reference is always bound to come up somehow) Simon Pegg in terms of the style of the comedy here. That said, this isn’t just a straightforward comedy either, and again because it’s strongly-written, The Battery manages to do other things entirely come the time the credits roll. For one thing, the film makes some bold decisions. There’s a static sequence towards the end of the film where the cameras roll, if I’m remembering right, for eleven minutes; it reminded me of Night of the Living Dead in its claustrophobia, though of course that wasn’t a film where anyone described the groaning of the zombies as ‘soothing…like rain on a tin roof’. Still, I think it works because it adds a sense of ‘this is that people would do in a messed-up situation’, at least until they are absolutely compelled to do something else. And, after the wide open spaces of the rest of the film, this shows the guys coming full circle. I think it works.

So, it’s smart, funny and well-observed, but The Battery is also an unorthodox movie – not just an unorthodox zombie movie, but an unorthodox buddy movie too. It effectively merges the one to make the other; the zombie situation is almost contextual, but it’s the pressure cooker which creates a friendship. These two guys aren’t torn apart, they’re brought together; going from laugh out loud funny to poignant is a rare thing, but The Battery does it. On a shoestring budget ($6000) with a cast and crew of about five people, we find there’s still scope and perspective on the fringes of the zombie genre for brilliant storytelling. It’s not flashy and it’s not especially grisly, but The Battery is beautifully realised and innovative, and it will definitely be on my list of top films for 2013. If you don’t see it, I’m afraid we can’t be friends.

Dead By Dawn 2013 Review: Modus Anomali (2012)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

It’s a strange phenomenon when you think of it, but in recent years we have had such a glut of ordeal movies that we now require stronger, more numerous shocks in order that we may maintain interest in the proceedings. Otherwise, all we have is someone being tormented or tortured with very little scope for redress, or redress that, when it comes, doesn’t feel equivalent to all of the outrages perpetrated against the victim. Where is all this going, I wonder? Well, Modus Anomali goes at least part of the way towards developing an interesting overarching structure, providing a more sophisticated than usual justification for the events on screen. The only issue with this is that in some ways, that justification is a little hard to understand.

A man awakens, buried, somewhere in the Indonesian jungle. As if that wasn’t enough to ruin anyone’s day, he also finds himself amnesiac – he can’t remember who he is. Disorientated, frightened, he makes his way to the first dwelling-place he can find, and suddenly things go from bad to worse as he discovers a video camera rigged up and ready to go. The video shows him a woman being murdered, in the house where he now stands. It seems as though someone out there is playing with him, and he has to find out whom. His mobile phone contacts have all been deleted – though impressively and unlike most horror films, he can get a signal! – but he finds a wallet in his pocket and, slowly, he remembers his life. It seems that his children are out there somewhere and he has to find them before his pursuer does.

So far so familiar? We’re not short on people being terrorized in unfamiliar surroundings by apparently omnipotent aggressors, and writer/director Joko Anwar is surely aware of this, so perhaps this is why there’s no preamble and any characterisation we get is as a result of the largely non-verbal performance of Rio Dewanto, who communicates his panic and confusion well. The film kicks into high gear straight away, although in many respects it seems to be a quintessential ordeal horror (do we have quintessential ordeal horrors now? I would say we do). By that, I mean that the plot seems to exist only to maim, torment and antagonise the lead character – although it is considerably more unusual to have a lone male lead, and perhaps there’s something of a cultural difference in the way Anwar is happy to direct Dewanto running away in terror so often – it seems unlikely somehow that a male Western counterpart would be written to behave this way, although it’s the only reasonable reaction. In this, too, Modus Anomali goes that extra way towards striking out on its own and that is commendable.

However, just when you think you have settled into a comfortable viewing mode, the film turns on its head, moving into a second act which calls the first act and all of its events into question. I’ll say this for it – it’s an unexpected series of twists. Now, I do like a movie which makes me think. That is to be welcomed. It’s a fine line to walk though, this temptation to pull the rug from under the audience’s feet; in my case I still feel I want to know that the writer has a very clear and cogent idea of what the fuck just happened, even if I don’t. In Modus Anomali, it seems it all could hinge, after all, on a get out clause which is actually a rather overused trope in horror cinema (and no, thankfully I’m not talking about the ‘it was all a dream’ cop-out.) I said ‘seems’, though. I’m still not exactly sure. Do I feel that all would become clear on a second viewing? Hmm. I’m not exactly sure there either, and that breaks the spell of the achingly-tense build up to an extent.

There is much to applaud in Modus Anomali: I’ve mentioned the central performance, and that when brought into juxtaposition with some gorgeous framing and locations, it works very well. Dewanto is frequently the only thing on screen which is in clear focus, meaning that just as our lead finds his eyes start to play tricks on him, with inanimate objects momentarily looking like human figures, the audience is prey to the same thing. When this has happened to you several times in a few short moments, it goes a long way towards generating the fear and paranoia needed to fully participate in the lead character’s fate.

The lead character…Dewanto…why am I playing coy with naming our lead guy? Quite honestly, because it just doesn’t work. It’s part of the second major issue with Modus Anomali – electing to film it in bloody English. Do you know what the lead character’s name is – an Indonesian actor, mind you? John Evans. Okay, fine, so perhaps he has a Western name, you think. Yet he’s speaking in heavily-accented English, whilst other characters – all supposed to belong to the same family, mind you – variously speak very Americanised English or even seem to have been dubbed into English. It makes it very difficult to believe in the family unit on offer and it took me out of the film’s proceedings at times. I know that Anwar may have had his hand forced on this issue, finding that it’s still difficult to sell the rights to an Indonesian language movie, but frankly, this would have been so much better in the native language. People who shy away from films because of subtitles deserve to be horse-whipped for making things like this happen, seriously.

So, it’s a film with some stylistic and thematic issues, but Modus Anomali does deserve credit for trying to exceed the old torment – more torment – hidden reserves of strength – redemption formula so common to ordeal films of this kind. A movie which falls into two distinct parts, it supplies some food for thought as well as grisly violence; if you like either or both of these features, then you may well enjoy this one.

Dead By Dawn 2013 Review: Jug Face (2013)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

The idea of destiny – the inescapability of some event or course of action, come what may – is an ambiguous one at best, and on one distinct level, it is downright terrifying. If any way in which you try to exercise your personal volition is pointless, or worse still, messes with the order of things to the detriment of those around you, then perhaps you are damned to follow a path, rather than destined, and the very idea of agency itself becomes fraught with risk. When you meld this idea with a powerful tale of an isolated community, intrigue and the supernatural then you have all the elements in place for a compelling piece of storytelling – and so, we have Jug Face, a heat-hazed horror which draws you in from the get-go; the film’s plot is unafraid to be as ambiguous as the very ideas at its core and, more so, it is unafraid to be delightfully downbeat.

Through the simple, though ingenious animated opening credits we are introduced to a community which has long lived in the boonies of America’s Deep South (the film was actually shot in and around Tennessee). We garner hints of some arcane, genuinely Lovecraftian presence which has long made certain demands of the people living in its midst, as we see that the original settlers – originally pious and worshipful – have had their faith rocked by the arrival of smallpox, and the inability of Christianity to do a thing about it. A desperate citizen, his daughter now dying of the illness, walks into the woods to pray for guidance, kneeling at the side of a naturally-occurring pit in the earth; he feels driven to cast something in clay, and creates a face jug (an actual tradition in America’s Southern states) which bears a striking resemblance to the local minister. Desperate times call for desperate measures; the townspeople, believing they have received a sign, ritually kill the minister, allowing his blood to pour into the pit. Once they have done so, the smallpox clears up. Thus is signed a blood pact: the pit will protect them always – that is, just so long as they bring it the victim it chooses when it chooses. It does this by inspiring a seer amongst the community to cast a face jug of the intended sacrifice. How’s that for a creative premise?

This brings us right up to the present day and we meet our main character, Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter, also of The Woman). Ada lives under the domineering presence of her mother Loriss (the brilliant, menacing Sean Young) and father Sustin (Larry Fessenden) but even with them keeping an eye on her to stop her ‘transgressing’ before she can be joined to the local boy of their choosing, Ada has been fooling around – and this could land her in enough trouble, especially considering the boy in question, but it gets far worse when Ada visits her friend and the current seer Dawai (Sean Bridgers) and finds a new face jug bearing her image, which he made in a recent trance, although he hasn’t yet seen it himself. Does she feel like meekly submitting to her fate? Nope, so, panicked, she takes the jug, burying it in the woods. Has she been chosen because she has transgressed the codes of the community, or was her number going to be up anyway? This isn’t made clear – you may form your own opinions on that score – but what is certain is that she does not want to die, and decides to fight for her life. Her decision to rebel against a centuries-old system has bitter consequences.

Because let’s get one thing clear here: what this isn’t is a film about some deluded bunch of hillbillies living in the back of beyond and nursing deranged beliefs about some entity out in them there woods. Jug Face isn’t playing around and it doesn’t utilise any of the expected cop-outs; in some respects like Stuart Gordon’s Dagon in thematics, the supernatural being which is to be found in the pit is very, very real, and there are consequences in trying to thwart it. You might not see it (creature FX were mistakenly made ahead of the shoot but aren’t really visible in the movie, and the film is stronger for it) but it is there, and it knows. As for the community which has always kept its pact with this presence, they do live under brutal rules and their ways are strange, but it’s refreshing when a filmmaker can depict such often stereotyped people in a humane way, without feeling the need to make us think that they drink Coors and shop at Gap in order to get us to relate. They’re different, they’re inflexible and they’re frequently cruel, but writer/director Chad Crawford Kinkle has tempered their brutality with sympathy. Yes, the rules of their existence are harsh, but they’re necessary. The consequences to doing or being otherwise are just too great to be risked. I also liked the notion of the Something existing in a place as ostensibly mundane as a pit in the ground – although that idea, like the face jug motif itself, has its roots in history; many native peoples have worshipped caves, pools or other natural features as in some way divine, so it’s an idea ripe still ripe for use in a horror setting.

Ada, however, does risk those consequences: in keeping with the rest of the film’s cleverly-crafted characters, her decision to fight for her life is both eminently understandable and, as the film progresses and the pit fights for what it’s due, utterly mercenary. She’s no straightforward victim whatsoever, although at first it seems as though she’s lining up to be just that. I found myself moving through lots of different shades of feeling towards her character, vacillating between consideration and exasperation. Carter plays her role well, a doe-eyed innocent one minute, a shrewd manipulator the next. But ultimately, no matter how your empathy waxes and wanes, you of course understand why she wants to resist the pit’s claim on her. I guess what Jug Face does so very well is to show how human behaviour can be understandable and deeply flawed all at once, utilising its superb cast to really drive that lesson home. Sean Young is captivating as the matriarch who embodies the tough living and strict codes which hold her community together, and Fessenden, a gifted character actor, is a man who can add a few touches of humour to his hard-line presence on-screen. However, for me the strongest member of the cast has to be Bridgers as Dawai. If you were repulsed by his character in The Woman, then his role here couldn’t be more different. Only clever writing and acting could ever prevent a mentally-challenged, rural Southern character from becoming an insult; Tony Elwood managed to avert this in his criminally-underrated movie Cold Storage in 2009 with the character of Clive, and Chad Crawford Kinkle has definitely avoided any insult here. I was surprised by just how many moments of often much-needed levity Bridgers was able to achieve – maybe the film needs this pressure valve. In any case, Dawai is charming, likeable and very, very real.

Throughout, this is a gripping piece of story-telling, and the ending of this story is, as I reflect on it now, absolutely note-perfect, stopping the audience from getting into a cosy comfort zone to the last. When you consider that a film of this calibre was made on a shoestring budget in seventeen days, you could be forgiven for feeling that Hollywood today is a spent force when it comes to all the important things like vision, honesty and integrity. Jug Face plays around with some elements from familiar horror tales but updates them; it takes some real-life phenomena but creates with them. Look out for this title and look out for this director. Incredibly, this is Kinkle’s first feature film, and it promises great things yet to come.

Festival Report: Dead By Dawn Edinburgh 2013

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Well, let’s see: my body aches, I am having to wean myself back onto solid food after giving this up completely by early on Saturday and the sunlight hurts my eyes. Yep, it can only have been a horror movie festival which has wreaked such havoc upon my mortal frame. Horror fests are the new endurance tests (or at least, they are the way I do them) so I hope you’ll forgive me if this festival report is refracted through the aftermath of three days of excess…

Any festival which has been going for two decades must be doing something very right and in Dead By Dawn’s case – although I haven’t been attending for much of that time – one of the things that stands out is that you don’t tend to see the ‘big horrors’ of the year screening there. On occasion a film, indie or otherwise, will hit the scene and play every horror festival within a short period of time. Dead By Dawn doesn’t do that, so the films you see there are likely to be unusual choices. As for this year, the programming was absolutely stellar, easily the best I’ve seen there, and struck a good balance between classics like The Brood and a Frank Henenlotter double bill (more on this anon!) and strongly-written independents. Reviews of some of these will follow hot on the heels of this post, but it’s interesting that two of the very best of the films on offer – The Battery and Mon Ami – took the concept of the buddy movie and spliced it with horror elements so that in both of these films, we have male friendship being put through the wringer, but the end results – though both hysterically funny – are very different. It just goes to show how much variety and depth is still possible around ostensibly tried-and-tested themes and that organiser Adele is bloody good at spotting it.

Short films are, of course, also an important part of the picture. Amongst my favourites this year were La Ricetta (‘The Recipe’), where a little boy’s ‘lesson’ in food preparation turns into a nightmare where human and animal flesh become interchangeable. I also loved Graveyard Feeder, another pitch-perfect horror comedy starring one of the best working character actors today, Sean Bridgers, who is trying with limited success to stop a necromancer feastin’ on the inmates of the local cemetery – oh, and he’s working alongside his deceased pop, whose soul he has to save too. In execution, a sharp script and great acting push this into a different league, and it would be nice if this was the first excursion of many in this fictional universe. It was also superb to see Fist of Jesus – which we featured here at Brutal As Hell a few weeks ago – on the big screen, in an auditorium full of people who were in just the right frame of mind to receive the Good Word, and also to see zombies being dispatched with fish. This film also led to some creative thinking in the bar later on; why not other religious figures/body parts movies? We came up with a few…but you don’t want to hear about that. Moving on!

This year’s guest of honour was none other than Frank Henenlotter, king of body horror comedy. What a thoroughly lovely man, and a true old-school raconteur too: it was a lot of fun hearing him speak about the making of Basket Case and Brain Damage, which screened together on Friday night. Before we got to the films themselves, though, Frank was keen to get us in the right frame of mind to appreciate two films about sentient warped parasitic beings – this was achieved through the judicious application of a friend of Frank’s, a sideshow magician by the name of Albert Cadabra, who got us all in the mood by swallowing a lot of latex and hammering a fork into his face (which worked a treat) and via Dead By Dawn’s ‘dead pics’ competition. For anyone who isn’t aware, Mr. Henenlotter makes a habit and a hobby of photographing himself being, well, dead in a lot of different places, and the idea was that festival attendees could submit their own dead pics, with the prize for the winner being to have a dead pic taken with Frank himself. The winner, a man who appeared as a corpse in a photo with his kids happily playing around him, utterly deserved to win, though all the entries were good (being dead on stairwells seemed to be something of a theme – not sure why that was!). Then, the whole auditorium appeared in an en masse dead pic. Good, wholesome fun for all the family.

The festival also featured a presentation by House of Psychotic Women author Kier-La Janisse, a short story reading by author and filmmaker Frazer Lee, and the now-legendary Shit Films Amnesty, each film replete with notes giving lots of back story and excuses as to how the films ended up in people’s possession in the first place…

Sadly, real-world commitments meant I couldn’t hang around until the end of the festival, and so I missed out on seeing Evil Dead II on the big screen, which is an especial shame as I could have used a palate cleanser after seeing the remake recently – but, ahem, I think we’ve said our piece on that front already. Dead by Dawn’s 20th anniversary played out with style, the festival is a massive credit to Adele and her team and I hope there will be many more to come. I will need the next year to recover, though.

But as I’m doing that, let’s talk about some of the films I saw…

DEAD BY DAWN 20TH ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL TRAILER from Sketchbook Pictures on Vimeo.

DVD Review: The Lords of Salem

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

When the trailer for Lords of Salem premièred a few months back, I couldn’t help but be quietly optimistic. Oh, sure, Rob Zombie has made mistakes – and a lot of them. As much as House of 1,000 Corpses has its share of charms, the tapestry it weaves out of its many horror referents is just too obvious, too crude, too easy to unpick; I liked Devil’s Rejects a lot more, but it still has the capacity to make a girl wince with some of its odd oversights. (We’ll say nothing of Halloween here, okay?) Regardless, Lords of Salem was on its way and it promised tantalising hints of modern-day witchcraft; none of that love and light Christianity-with-garlands nonsense, but black magic. I was prepared to give the film a whirl simply for giving Ol’ Scratch his dues, getting him back into the limelight and on our screens by some other means than the boring possession of some confused kid with a limber spine and a potty mouth…

And actually, contrary to my usual style, this is not some wordy preamble which allows me to then launch into a lengthy sneer at the expense of the film I’m reviewing. I actually really liked Lords of Salem, a movie which indisputably has problems, but makes up for this with that rarest of commodities in modern horror – ideas.

The plot synopsis is thus: recovering heroin addict Heidi (of course played, albeit well, by Sheri Moon Zombie) is a DJ at a local Salem rock radio show. (Sadly this job doesn’t seem to pay very well – the poor woman can’t afford a functional pair of underpants, as we see in the very first scenes.) One day at work, a parcel arrives. It’s addressed to her personally, and it contains a vinyl record, a gift ‘from The Lords’. No other information is given. Assuming it’s another wannabe rock band, Heidi gives the record a spin after work. The recording – atonal, but somehow disturbing, evocative – has an odd effect on her, although her friend/co-worker Whitey gets no ill-effects. Assuming then it’s something to do with her rather than the record, she decides to enter it into the regular ‘Smash or Trash’ competition they’re due to run on the show the next day.

They duly do this – but the effect which the record has on the women of Salem is subtle, yet profound. As they listen, it’s as if they’ve been hypnotised. And as for Heidi, she is now unable to extricate herself from a sinister chain of events which soon begins to tighten around her…

First things first: as I mentioned above, it’s about time we went back to giving the Devil a bit of respect for such long-term involvement with the medium of cinema. Despite a long pedigree of silver screen appearances, things for Satan have gone into sharp decline, and he has to be worth a lot more than a vomiting schoolgirl here, an Al Pacino there. I’m also a big fan of what I like to think I first coined as Satansploitation, and to be fair to Rob Zombie, here he manages to make his own brand of occult goings-on both evocative and innovative. Sure, you can see the influences of other films in here (perhaps most surprising of all, I saw a few elements which reminded me strongly of the late Michael Winner’s massively-underrated movie The Sentinel) but the brand of devil-worship brought to the screen here has its own strengths in spades.

Make no mistake, the opening scenes of Lords of Salem had me gripped. Most coven scenes have traditionally been an excuse to show nubile young flesh; perhaps aware that he is unveiling his wife’s buttocks on a semi-regular basis throughout the film and thus catering for nubile flesh in this respect, Mr. Zombie really doesn’t feel the need to stick to that protocol when shooting his own coven scenes. The film is all the more bold for it. We as a culture are terrified of unorthodox female flesh, and unorthodox ageing female flesh is even more shocking. We trust in cinema to protect us from it, but Rob Zombie’s witches – cruel, aged, deformed – want to harm, not heal, and they don’t care if we are looking at them. This is also why the seduction scene in The Shining is so repellent; we simply do not see women who look like this, let alone ascribe any agency to them, malevolent or otherwise. (Neither is this the only time that The Shining sprang to mind as I watched Lords of Salem, come to mention another obvious influence.) Meg Foster as the maniacal head witch Margaret Morgan delivers a chilling performance here and speaks her lines with malignant conviction, whilst Zombie toys with age-old religious ideas about women being conduits of evil, drawing upon this notion throughout.

The use of the occult as a theme is then, for the most part, continued interestingly and thought-provokingly throughout the film. It’s evident that Rob Zombie knows his stuff in this respect, and he manages to weave together an altogether more sophisticated mesh of heavy metal music and horror (from the title’s font to the occupation of his leading lady, this is a film infused with heavy metal) than he has previously. Key to this balance between themes is the phenomenon of the record itself.

As a metal fan of some twenty years’ standing, I’m aware that the relationship between Satan and my musical genre of choice has been long and complex, but in using the mysterious record in the way he does Zombie is bringing a hell of a lot more to bear on the plot. Of course, he’s toying with the idea of metal as ‘the Devil’s music’, and with the frenetic idiocy, reaching its apex in the 1980s, which asserted that heavy metal records contained hidden or ‘backwards-masked’ Satanic messages believed to control or alter people’s behaviour. But I’d say there’s more to it even than that. The music on the record itself isn’t a song in any conventional sense – it brings to mind moral panics of centuries gone by, such as that surrounding the so-called ‘devil’s interval’, a chord banned by the Catholic Church, but the film also features the use use of sabbat music; this is an additional, rarely-explored aspect of the relationship between music and evil which I almost never see used on screen, so the way in which Zombie combines all of these ideas in his film via one, simple device is really something special. Again, the theme of the music itself lends the film some of its most engaging content, and these scenes furthermore did something which none of Zombie’s earlier work has ever done for me: they unnerved me. There’s some evidence of a new style of direction tucked away in The Lords of Salem; when he’s not going for scenes of excess, as he’s wont to do, it seems Rob Zombie knows how to do creepy, which is something I’d never have guessed. Some of the strongest scenes in the film are actually the quietest, and take place in quiet, chic urban spaces. He’s even toned down his colour palate in this film, and it works beautifully.

So much for the good points…

In all of his films to date, Rob Zombie has had a tendency to follow a promising set-up with a bewildering decision or two. (Again, we’re saying nothing of Halloween, which bucks this trend by being a bewildering decision in and of itself.) In Lords of Salem, there is far less of this, but nonetheless, I found myself forcibly taken out of the film on a few occasions by some excruciating lines of dialogue. I can only assume Zombie’s script editor is a) shy or b) Zombie himself, but let me explain my problem. I’ll be euphemistic; the use of the ‘c’ word is a fine art and, in the wrong hands, this still-powerful li’l noun can make someone seem like a kid who doesn’t know how to swear but wants to anyway. Back at the end of the 90s I went to see the re-release of The Exorcist: you know that bit where Regan asks, ‘Do you know what she did, your c***ing daughter?’ Well, if that shocked in the 70s, by the time the 90s had rolled around, people were rolling on the floor in helpless laughter. The same awkward c-word handling derails The Lords of Salem on occasion. it sounds weak because it doesn’t fit, and when you consider the enhanced subtlety of the film as a whole, it’s not helped by such jarring, silly lines, however droll their delivery. Is Rob Zombie teasing us? Maybe, but a bad script can more than finish off a film; it can make it ridiculous, and that goes for several lines with or without the ‘c’ word, and the scenes they’re in.

Another issue I have with The Lords of Salem relates to the ending of the movie. Far be it for me to spoiler what happens, but without saying what happens I can still discuss how it is presented – and again, it’s one of those odd directorial choices, a sudden reversion to type for Zombie which breaks through the atmosphere he has otherwise carefully developed. Why he decides to duck out of the film and into…well, into a Rob Zombie music video is unclear, but it does not fit in with the rest of the film and adds confusion, rather than colour. I’d have taken some more exposition – only a little would have done – and dropped the ephemeral guff with the goat.

All of these issues are significant, sure, but when it comes to the film overall I’d still say this: The Lords of Salem has its baffling moments, and it has its plain silly moments. Much of the best of the Satansploitation genre shares in these flaws. This does not change the fact that, for me, The Lords of Salem is in many places brutally effective, gripping and – in the true sense of the word – sinister. With a touch less of the dialogue and a tad more tale, I’d go so far as to say this would be a cult classic. As it stands, it’s certainly solid, has a great cast, and has enough imagination and atmosphere to make me genuinely curious to see what Rob Zombie will do with his next film. And, now, as opposed to how I felt in the dark times of the post-Halloween remakes, I again feel that he can achieve.

The Lords of Salem will be released to select UK cinemas on 22nd April 2013, then to Region 2 DVD on 29th April, from Momentum Pictures.