Detour

Saw Detour, a strange, pokey old film from 1945.  It's a fairly dismal story of a man who is hitchhiking to visit his girlfriend.  Along the way he runs into Vera, a controlling woman who gains leverage over him and holds him captive.  This happens halfway through the film, but the real meat of the film is this power struggle between Vera and the protagonist.  The film shows it age a bit but has the tight, miserable, gripping pace of a good noir.

The film is strange in many ways.  I postulate that it was first a radio play.  A lot of the film happens in narration and voice-over and via stagey one-sided phone calls.  The characters perform their roles well, but almost in short-hand, like their emotions never really reach their eyes.  The characters are also very un-nuanced.  The main character is Good and Hapless but that's all.  The film is ultimately a sort of fable about the struggles of this man so his blankness kind of plays to the films' favor.

The one exception to all of this is Vera, which is very unusual in a film this old, for a woman to have such a meaty role.  She is calculating and violent and a bit vulnerable and excellent.  She makes half-hopeful passes at the main character in one moment and then sourly threatens him in the next.  Their relationship is driven by her and she drives it right off a cliff.  She's a baddie but she's still powerful and a force of self-destruction to be reckoned with.  Indeed, such a powerful, dominant woman probably only got by the censors because she was a baddie.

Speaking of the censors, they are the cause of the ending which is so utterly implausible, I took it to be a dream sequence.  This film shows its age in a couple of ways (one of them being the Hayes code meddling of the censors) and also in regards the weird, formal acting, but it also contains some magnificently strange expressions (egs: "I didn't have a car, so it was me for the thumb." "... why he must have scads of dough!" I was totally tickled.)

The film is sort of dusty in a few ways but holds up well.  It's unrelentingly miserable but mesmerizingly so.  It's not just a wallow however. It works to build sympathy for the hapless main character and even for Vera in parts.  She's a bad egg, but once perhaps she wasn't so hard-boiled.

Pet Sematary (1989)

Saw Pet Sematary (1989)  It was a film about a couple who move from the city to rural New England for some reason.  Their new house is idyllic save for a nearby road where trucks barrel down the road with pet-murdering speed all day and night.  The film heavily foreshadows what's to come but is a sort of slow burn at first.  In the final half of it however, it kicks into high gear and truly comes alive.  The film is fairly goofy but has its moments.  It was recently remade and I can sort of see why: the special effects are a true hinderance to the film and a lot of the performances are fairly wooden.  Not a great film, but interesting in its own way.

Most horror films derive from real-world tragedy and this is no different.  The central tragedy here is that death comes before we're ready for it.  I'll try to be vague to avoid spoilers, but there's a scene late in the film where a man is cradling a dead body in a cemetery and (officially) nothing supernatural has happened yet.  He just can't let go.  This is pretty nightmarish on its own.  I mean, can you imagine?

The film has a nice, morbid grimness that reminds me of Hellraiser's baroque S&M horrors.  There's a stand-out performance from Fred Gwynne (Mr. Herman Munster himself!) as a folksy neighbor who is the perfect mix of absurd and sincere.  The family mother is also great as a Hitchcock blonde.  Clearly she's a transplant who has yet to take.  She's always over-dressed in smart blazers or flowing silks and there's a perfect scene where he stupid high-heels are sinking into the soil with each step she takes.  Less strong is the protagonist husband who is great at looking preoccupied and brooding but who is quite wooden every time he has to emote.  Then again, it may be the script's fault.  I have yet to see someone pull off the yelled "Nooooooo!" without looking goofy.  There's some iffy child acting as well, but we can only expect so much of children after all.

The film is okay.  There's some very strange acting and some strange, pointless sequences but there's also some great sequences and some ghoulish fun to be had.  It was sort of a wash.

Forbidden Games

Saw Forbidden Games, a French film which is a bit of a bummer.  It follows a young girl in WW2 who is taken in by a family of farmers after her own parents are killed in an air raid while fleeing Paris.  The film is shot from a child's-eye view, revolving mostly around the fast friendship which develops around her and the family's young son.  Their relationship is delicate and courtly and childish and completely ignored by the adults in favor of domestic squabbles and these squabbles themselves are completely overshadowed by the war itself.  Several times bombs light up the sky at night.

The children's adventures and games revolve mostly around death.  The young girl doesn't understand what has happened to her parents and becomes obsessed with the iconography and ceremony of death.  It reminds me of Spirit of the Beehive, but this one is more domestic, almost sit-com-ish in its premises and plot.  There's a very moving sequence where they are carrying many crosses and singing fearfully as a dogfight happens in the sky above them.  They are surrounded by death, drowned out by it.  The adults are carrying on feuds and going to church as though nothing were happening.  In their way, the kids are the only ones who seem to be actually reacting to death, even though their reaction is inappropriate.

The film is fairly sweet at times and seems to be settling into a sit-com groove of small-town romances and misunderstandings, but it ends on a fairly sour note.  It is trying to deal with the realities of lives lost and not just lost as in missing but also as in simply uprooted and misplaced, lost somewhere in transit.