Outcast: (2010. dir: Colm McCarthy) A fascinating story (with very good actors, including Kate Dickie and James Nesbitt) about a war of magicks between Irish gypsies in Edinburgh. It allows sufficient ambiguity to power the "alleg'ree", but you never feel the filmmakers are cheating by not knowing the answers to their own questions. It is set in a modern slum, a world of some ugliness emphasized both by the palette of browns and oranges used and by the abuse of the camera, which never, poor thing, gets set down to do its work properly. I suppose all the fancy camera-tricks were meant to flash up the low-budget aspects, and it's not the worst cinematography I've ever seen, but I'm taking up a collection to send this guy a tripod anyway.
Because of the strangeness of it, its boldness of story, that and the quality of the acting, I recommend it in spite of its flaws.
the Wicker Tree: (2011. dir: Robin Hardy) I was so looking forward to it, and it is so beyond dreadful. Looking back, who can put a finger exactly on what it was that made the original Wicker Man great? It is very nearly stuck in low-budget camp, and yet it survives as a true classic of horror filmmaking. This one is not fit to hold its elfen boots. This one is like some hippie renaissance faire gone awry. This one is crap.
Where is the tension? There is none. The first held us in its grip because our innocent wayfarer placed himself out of the best intentions in a place of increasing eeriness which began to tighten around him vice-like until he was crushed by it. This one places a pair of rather incredible innocents (a newly Born Again Texan couple: she is a famous country singer, recently shed of her previously sluttish image and now squeaky clean, he is a charming cowboy who still drinks without guilt but has sworn chastity until marriage) in a grim situation which we all understand from the outset, and the tension is supposed to come of watching them rise into the horror of comprehension, but it doesn't. The initial misstep is that they are there not to solve a crime but to bring souls to Jesus, a mission that is treated by both filmmaker and nouveau-Summerislanders (reset in the Scottish village of Tressock) with a sort of amused pity from the get-go, and so we are discouraged from relating to these already barely tenable lead characters.
Because we go in with pre-knowledge of its destination, the movie's best hope, really, is to charm us with the pleasure of the company of those natives, and this the script does not allow. The characters are loosely and blandly written, and so the gorey set-pieces do not touch us in that visceral place for which they are aiming. Honeysuckle Weeks's pale and thin hetaira is beggared in comparison with Britt Ekland and the dance which inspired a thousand wet-dreams, the plot is convoluted without being particularly interesting, Christopher Lee is in it for maybe thirty seconds (part of an inane flashback), and we, Hardy's Once-Hopeful Audience, are left adrift in an ever-expanding wake of disappointment.
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