V/H/S

 Saw V/H/S, a horror anthology film.  The frame-story of the film is that a bunch of Harmony Korine-like douchebags/thieves are hired to steal an important VHS tape from an old weird guy's house.  There, they find a whole bunch of tapes however and so they sit down to view them.  We then get to see these little skits played out on home movies.  It's an okay premise.

The film has a throw-back-y feel.  It was made in 2012 but is interested in the horrors that hand-held, VHS cameras can produce.  Many of the cameras in the skits of digital ones: hidden cameras embedded in a pair of glasses, or little, remote-control-sized grey boxes, glimpsed in the characters' hands.  The film is trying for the chilling feel of finding something fucked up in an unassuming, second-hand VHS tape.  Untraceable, obsolete, mysterious.  There's a market for these kinds of films: true-crime-scene photography and the infamous Faces of Death series.  It would be strange and terrible to find and watch one of these without realizing what it was.  This horror is sort of remote for anyone who doesn't scour Salvation Armies and such for tapes however.

So the films themselves are okay.  Each one has to contrive a way that this wound up on tape, so there's a variety of hokey home-movies, or spy cams or what have you.  Ironically, although in theory this should result in a more realistic plot, it winds up feeling more contrived to me than if they'd just had a standard, omniscient, eye of the audience.  On top of this, the characters are almost always squawking, squealing, obnoxious adults acting as teens might.  I think only one or two characters came off like people I'd want to spend time with.  I feel this is an unfortunate side-effect of the film being made in Hollywood.  Of course the types of people to film themselves obsessively would be attention-hungry, douchey idiots.

The film is not that scary.  There's a few things in it that are unsettling, but in the cold light of day I can't remember of any.  Because the shorts are so short, they have to set up the payoff and the ironic twist early.  You can kind of tell right off that the fortune-telling machine is magical, that the guy they almost hit on the highway will come back to bite them.  The characters for the most part are such jackasses however that it's hard for me to care much about their survival.

I really feel the film is a more accessible version of Harmony Korine's work.  His films have the feel of finding something inscrutable, sinister, violent, something that was shot by indifferent and possibly murderous teenagers one boring afternoon.  This film is more slick and processed, but that's sort of the very opposite feeling you want.  This was a tightrope walk that I think the film failed: to make the film slick and marketable but also look like something your creepy cousin just found.

The Babadook

 Saw The Babadook, a psychological horror film about a single mother who is being haunted by an evil spirit.  The woman is a mousy, quiet little woman and her husband died while driving her to the hospital to give birth to their son.  Their son, now, is a rude, booby-trap-making, attention-hungry, screaming little hellion who seems to be possessed himself.  He's the source of this famous meme:

It's really a pity too because this scene is very ominous and not meant to be funny I think.

Most good horror films are actually about real-word problems however, and in this case it is that the son is such a difficult handful that the mother does not know if she loves him or not.  We see how his behavioral problems make her difficult life more miserable and how keenly lonely she is and how the boy keeps her frustrated and single.  That's also why I liked the resolution of the final showdown with the Babadook (spoilers here - highlight to read:) he continues to live in their basement with the dead  father's things.  The mother's resentment against the son is terrible, but it's not really something that can actually be killed or exorcised entirely.  The best we can do is subdue it, and learn to live with it.

The film is highly stylized.  The horror is psychodrama, so there's not a ton of viscera or jump scares.  The woman's house is painted in dark blue shades (very on-the-nose symbolism there) and is so dark and gloomy that it looks like a Tim Burton claymation set.  The colors of the film are very tightly controlled, with most things being oppressive shades of grey or wan pastels.  This lends a picture-book kind of surreality to the film which I think suits it nicely.  I wasn't able to get really into the film, so I feel it's not terribly scary, but it's tense and oppressive and depressing and in the end, isn't all of that the real horror?

Desperate Living

Saw Desperate Living, a zany John Waters film about a hysterical housewife who is on the run after murdering her husband.  She winds up in Mortville, a filthy shanty-town ruled by a fat, stupid, ugly Queen Carlotta.  There's transexuals and creative sexual practices and filthiness and casual lesbianism.  It's a romp!

The film is very typical of John Waters.  This film clearly had more money spent on it than Multiple Maniacs or any other early Waters film, but still everything is very cheap and tawdry-looking on purpose.  As an example: the house where most of the action takes place seems to be assembled mostly from plywood and billboard scraps.  More tawdriness: you see many breasts and a few penises.  It's all quite provocative stuff, especially for the 70s.  Heck, even to this day, you still very seldom see a wiener in a film.

John Waters is a man who likes filth and bad taste.  This enjoyment of "unmentionable" things is far far better than the usual, stuffy intolerance for those things (mental illness, drug usage, sex work, etc) but the celebration of the bad is just the flip-side of condemning it - we're still designating things as bad, we just like them now.  Homosexuality, for example, is treated with the same sinister adoration as necrophilia.  The film is fairly fun however, in the end, and we never really mine the full depths of human cruelty.

If you've seen a John Waters film before, you'll know what to expect.  This is an exemplar of the Watery art.

Lorenzo's Oil

Saw Lorenzo's Oil, a fairly dismal film by George Miller, the guy who directed the Mad Max movies.  It was about a mother, father, and son family where the son has a rare, degenerative brain disorder.  Because this disease is rare, not much is known about it.  Thus, it is up to the parents to heroically do their own research and try to come up with therapies for the child.  The film is fairly miserable and based on a true story.

It's fairly sad to see this poor boy turn into a screaming, barely mobile, emaciated shadow of his former self.  It's a sort of horror movie in itself: a child dying for no reason and with no way to prevent it.  The mother and father are heroic and saintly, suffering endlessly for the sake of this boy.  Interestingly, they involve other people in their misery.  There's a small parade of nurses who are fired for believing the boy should be allowed to die, or for believing that his brain is already dead, or that the mother and father are ghoulishly torturing themselves.  The fight is against all odds, and some level of self-destructive mania is involved.

The film also plays very differently in this age of Covid and anti-vaxxers.  The doctors are generally indifferent and haughty, ignoring the pleas of the parents in the name of scientific objectivity.  They are frustrating and unhelpful, but plucky parents doing their own research in defiance of Big Medicine feels very different nowadays.  There's a very moving scene where the father points out to the mother that trusting in the doctors is the same as giving up their own responsibility towards the welfare of their son.  This is true, and inspires them to do their own dive into the literature, but it could also have driven them to crystals or astrology or god-knows-what.

Also, the final nurse in the nurse-parade is an African teenager who the young boy knew in childhood.  This teen will not disobey the dictates of the parents and will not express concern for their welfare.  The film is based on a true story, so I assume that this actually happened, and was perhaps not so problematic in real life, but it looks bad, man.  The film was made in the 90s and depicts events in the early 80s when universal black enfranchisement was only 10 years old.  I feel uncomfortable questions would be asked about the main characters today.

The most absurd bit of this movie however is the father's ridiculous Italian accent.  He sounds like a fussy maître d', gibbering to research librarians "I neeed pay-a-pers on C-24!  Not a-C-12!!"  It's pretty silly.

Anyway, the film is okay.  It's uplifting in a sort of Erin Brockovich kind of way.  It's terribly sad at the start, but once it crystallizes into a race against the clock for a cure, it gets nice and gripping, full of frustrating lows and delirious highs.  Not amazing, but it has its moments.  An okay film.

9/11

Saw 9/11, a documentary about the first responders to the world trade centers on 9/11.  It uses footage shot by these two French brothers who were filming a documentary about a fireman becoming A Man during fireman training.  The irony is of course that they sought to capture some event in the life of a single person but they instead caught a pivotal event in the lives of many Americans that had broad, rippling effects throughout the world.  Its fairly moving.

The film was made in 2002 while the fallout of the event was still unfolding.  The Patriot act had just been passed and if I'm remembering right, Bush and Colin Powell were talking about WMDs.  So, the film wisely focuses in on the specific firefighters and men who were first on the scene, recounting their harrowing adventure trying to save who they could, fleeing from the collapsing buildings, and then returning to search for body parts.  To them, the subsequent crowds of cheering New Yorkers calling them heroes seem incongruous and mistaken.  How can they be heroes?  They did only what they could and not enough.

It's interesting to listen to these firefighters talk about their feelings of guilt at surviving, of gratitude that they made it out okay, but already the nationalism that would be used to justify the Iraq war was showing up: there's much zooming in on flags at half mast and the American flag is draped over everything.  I feel nowadays that the event has been fully co-opted into a nationalistic symbol which makes it hard to just feel bad for these firemen and for the folks trapped in the towers.  Glenn Beck would start a "9-12 project" in 2009 to re-capture the feeling of shared grief and collective healing that folks felt in the immediate aftermath, but of course the second "principal" of this project is "I believe in God and He is the center of my life."  The first one is "America is good."

Anyway, the footage is interesting to see - there's a sense of immediacy to it.  You get the sense of the chaos of the event, with everyone running around and rumors spreading, stragglers emerging from dust clouds, confusion everywhere.  The film is very focused on the humans involved.  The political machinery is present but on the TVs playing in the background (and a brief glimpse of Giuliani being hustled through the streets by a gang of suited men) but the struggles of the firemen are foremost.  It would be a good film to show high-school students, to give them a sense of the reality of the event.  It made me feel mixed emotions however: the tragedy of the event, the toll it took on the firemen, the poignant knowledge of what all of this would be used to justify.

Ready or Not

 Saw Ready or Not, a silly little dark comedy/thriller about a pretty little blonde woman marrying into a rich, crazy, murderous family.  During weddings they apparently sometimes play murder-based games.  It's all explained in the trailer.  The film was okay, but not really as fun as I'd hoped.  It was light on puzzles, logic, and intrigue and heavy on torture porn.  Not that it's all that bloody, just there's a lot of poor blonde girl suffering and not a lot of gamesmanship.

The film is darkly comical in parts.  One of the murderous family members keeps accidentally killing people and it's always sudden and funny and outrageous.  There's some understated and almost too-real humor in the kids who are gleefully on-board with all the murder.  The film never really stays funny though.  There's some annoying on-star-type guy who refuses to help her because she's swearing.  This is supposed to be funny but I found it just frustrating.  Similarly, other goofy stuff just annoyed me.

The husband also annoyed me.  He explains that he never told her (his wife) about this tradition because if he had she wouldn't have married him.  Huge warning flag right there.  First: that's her decision to make and second: that's pretty manipulative.  What other half-truths and omissions have you passed in the name of capturing her, dude?  He bugged me.

Anyway, the film is alright.  I was expecting something more like Knives Out but this was less interested in typing loose ends than just watch this girl scrape up her back on an iron fence.  There's some class criticism going on, but it's not very serious (it starts and ends with an ironic "rich people are different.")  It's not a miserable slog however and with better expectations, I think I would have had an alright time, but alas here I am all disappointed that the film didn't live up to the one in my head.

What We Do in the Shadows

 Saw What We Do in the Shadows, a mockumentary about four vampire dudes sharing a house in New Zealand.  It's a comedy where the humor derives from understatement and reality getting in the way of cinematic notions, highfalutin language giving way to 'er's and 'you know's.  The plot is that a new, young guy is inducted into the vampire household and has to uneasily fit in.  He can't quite get the hang of flying and butts heads with the previous youngest.  But the real point is to just keep the film moving along, as the vampires bicker over chores and house rules and clubs.  I liked it.

One of the best characters (used sparingly) is the eldest vampire, a bald, ugly, Nosferatu-like guy who stares uncomprehending at them as they ask him to tidy up the bones around his coffin, blinking like a lizard as they explain that this human coming over is really cool and a really nice guy so he probably shouldn't eat him, if that's okay, you know?  I loved all that.

The film was apparently made into a show and it's not hard to see why - it has the airy, floating feel of something that could amiably ramble on forever, having little adventures and dealing with police, and internet auctions, and ex-girlfriends.  There's vague world-building hints of a group of zombies and werewolves, all similarly befuddled and apathetic.  It's a nice little amble of a movie.

Shanghai Surprise

 Saw Shanghai Surprise (thanks, Lea!)  It was a strange little throwback of a movie.  Set in the 30s in Shanghai, it seems to have been written then as well.  The plot is a fairly frothy MacGuffin-chase in an exotic locale starring a roguish, down-on-his-luck tie salesman and an uptight missionary girl.  They visit unspeakable opium dens, and rub shoulders with the hoi polloi at night clubs.  This is the bread and butter of Humphrey Bogart, but alas this film stars Sean Penn (the Shia LaBeouf of the 80s) and Madonna who does what she can but is very much a sexy, hot mess crammed into a tight-laced role.  The film is fast, full of double-crosses, feels about 30 years too late and fairly racist.

The film is clearly shot on location without much effort to age the locale, which adds another layer of strangeness.  Beautiful, crumbling slums and neon lights peak in the background as Asian actors do their level best with lines that have them referring to themselves in the third person and using mystic euphemisms to talk about tits ("twin pagodas.")  The racial attitudes are also sadly retrograde.

There's a weird hand-based theme in the film.  The main villain has his hands blown off fairly early and replaces them with what looks like two gigantic porcelain hands.  Madonna's missionary lady works for the helping hands mission, one lady is tortured by having her fingernails removed, and one gangster agrees to divulge information only in exchange for the American secret to the Knuckle-ball pitch.  This last bit of handy-business underscores, again, how very outdated this film feels.  Why is this gangster obsessing over baseball pitched?  Why does Sean Penn just happen to be a good ball player?  Why are there no good baseball players in Shanghai??

The plot of the film is okay, but I have a hard time getting excited about an opium/jewel/sacred treasure hunt.  There's supposed to be a slow-burn romance between Penn and Madonna but it's so foregone (look at her!) that it feels inevitable, not a will-they-or-wont-they situation but a when-will-they-finally-get-around-to-it kind of thing.

A strange film, seemingly transported from the 50s or so.  It does nothing to update the script for modern (even by 80s standards) racial sensibilities.  There's no good Asian characters, only variably reliable ones.  In the beginning, Penn tells Madonna to get on a rickshaw.  She balks at this, feeling like it's dehumanizing.  By the end of the film though, this fig-leaf has blown away and she's jumping on  and off rickshaws like no tomorrow, as Sean casually flips a coin for them to scramble over.  Not an outright unwatchable film, but yeesh.

Mandy

 Saw Mandy (thanks, Lea!)   It was a dark, psychedelic horror film in the vein of Last House on the Left.  It follows a husband and wife who are terrorized by and then revenge themselves on a group of Charles-Manson-family-style cultists.  The film is full of rich reds and blacks, as colorful as Suspiria, and yet as morbid and bombastic as a Carpenter Brut album.  Heavy guitar grumbles and drum beats feature heavily in the film.  The good guys are grungy, beardy, lumberjacks and the villains are leather-clad psychotic bikers.  It's a hell of a trip!

I liked the film.  It's so over the top and serious and great.  It lavishes attention on paintings of tigers and ladies such as might be air-brushed on the side of vans, characters read intensely from self-serious high fantasy books, and the lingering strangeness of the drug-fueled 60s hovers in the background.  The film is set in the 80s and seems to have preserved the fears of that time: drugs, dungeons and dragons, religious cults.

In addition to the horror on display, there's a Lynchian northern strangeness to it, an Adult Swim-style manic weirdness.  At one point the protagonist visits a Timothy Leary-style LSD chemist/priest.  The lights turn on to the sounds of a xylophone being struck.  It's so strange.

The main character is played by Nicholas Cage.  He's being over the top and shouty and crazy but boy howdy does that man commit to his roles and here the over-serious near-insane intensity plays to his strengths.  He seems like a person who exists in a world of drugs, wizards, magic, and swords.  His wife is played by a very creepy-looking woman who is heavily evoking Shelly Duval in the The Shining for me.

Anyway it's a good movie.  Very visually pleasing and morbid and fun.  The obsession with the fears of the 80s is not so fun for me, but nothing's perfect I guess.

Dark Shadows

Saw Dark Shadows, the Tim Burton revival of a late 60s vampire soap opera (?) that I'd never heard of before.  It's the usual gothical thing: big spooky houses full of trap doors and secret passages, vampires and magic juxtaposed with modern ticky-tack, Johnny Depp.  The film predates the strange retro-camp-horror craze of 2016 (see and also) and is set in the 70s, rather than the 80s, but it still more or less works.

The film follows Barnabas Collins, a vampire, who escapes from his coffin in 1970s America.  He sets about trying to revive his family fortunes which have been devastated by time and by an evil witch who first cursed Barnabas with vampirism.  The film is mostly a fish-out-of-water comedy about Barnabas navigating modern times.  It reminds me strongly of of a more sympathetic Mr Burns, marveling at female doctors and watching a lava lamp with loathing fascination.  I was wondering how far they'd take this.  I haven't studied it, but I'm pretty sure it was more acceptable to hit people in the olden times (just look at how many dames get slapped in noir films and Victorian literature is full of masters cuffing servants.)  Things do get kind of physical in a climactic fight, but Tim wants us to like Barnabas too much to have him really butt up against modern mores.

Anyway, the film is a little vague to me.  It's interesting but not very pointed.  Like a lot of Burton films, it's kind of an aesthetic romp, reveling in dramatic blacks and deep primary colors (red features heavily!) There's no broader commentary which is sort of disappointing since, in these modern times, the "witches" of New England are more figures of pathos and reclamation than terror.  At the end of the film though, the witch-lady's skin crackles like porcelain and I really liked that.

The film is okay.  It reminded me a lot of the Addams Family and Crimson Peak.  The 70s aesthetic strongly evoked Wes Anderson, because he owns that muted, tidy look currently.  I was a little annoyed at how every damn woman wanted Barnabas's chalky body - like I say, he's more Mr Burns than Edward Cullen - but I guess that's Burton for you: he knows his audience (and their fantasies.)  It's a throwback film, more muted than Beetlejuice, but with the same manic whimsy and visual splendor.