halloweenfest evening five: werewolf hunter and pig hunt

*SPOILER ALERT, both films*

Werewolf Hunter: (2004. dir: Paco Plaza) Julian Sands was always a strange actor, right from the start. (Go back to Room With a View and revisit his initial declaration of love to Miss Lucy Honeychurch, the one in the parlor over the piano while he's wearing his tennis whites: it is the strangest unburdening of the heart that you will ever witness, and not due to the writing, solely to the delivery. It's all extreme grimaces and distancing glances to the side. It should not have worked, and yet somehow it's managed to charm us all over all these many years.) Most of the good parts of this movie are good because he is good in it, playing a serial killer with an unblinking confidence which sidesteps the bluster of arrogance to suggest a man with an unshakable calling in life, without backpedalling into doubt or remorse.

There is good camera-work, and a gorgeous scene with a runaway wagon on fire at night. This is the story of the first known captured serial killer in history (in Spain in the late 1800s), and how the werewolf metaphor played out in him. The movie uses it fruitfully, with wolf-traps and one really amazing wolf-to-man shift, complete with birthing caul and snapping bones.

Because the female lead (escaped victim leading the chase in her spunky thirst for vengeance) is not a very interesting character, and because she feels absurdly anachronistic (would the police of the time really have let her ride along as one of them? would she, a virgin, really have insisted her first lover give her an orgasm before she'll let him take her?), the film sags during the times we are away from him and following her. And, of course, mediocre films being what they are, we know that it will end with him at the end of her blade in a lovers' embrace. Ho hum.

In between, there are strange meanderings about the werewolf's accomplice, a man who witnessed the Wolfman slaughtering his wife and became a sort of apprentice, then turned on him and began shooting silver bullets (and missing). It's all vague and wandery, then there's a short trial and an acquittal on grounds on insanity, with a professor using acupuncture as the latest scientific method for... well, everything, apparently.

In short, the best part is the first, when we get to know the Wolfman in his chosen milieu, making soap out of human fat and seducing beautiful women to their various demises. That part (ominously, right?) makes sense, whereas the response of the world to the crimes once uncovered is muddled and unconvincing.

Pig Hunt: (2008. dir: James Isaac) This movie is way too violent for my taste, but even I recognize it carries a certain redolence of awesomeness. Untested young soldiers (plus one tag-along girlfriend and one tenderfoot with a sweet old dog) venture into the backwoods of Deliverance to hunt the godzilla of hogs. You see how you have to admire the unadulterated moxie of the thing?

The production values are far finer than you'd expect on such a film, and the soundtrack by Les Claypool jets off into real brilliance, only stumbling into stupidity towards the end, with vocal samples interfering with the movie. (But Primus records were always a melange of genius and stupid, weren't they?)

Various morals are set forward in this film:

1. When malevolent rednecks and sinister hippies come to blows, the hippies, it turns out, can hold their own.

2. Even if your political stance is anti-violent, it pays to be able to shoot straight if you're going to follow your boyfriend into the Deliverance backwoods. (The corollary: just because a guy is wearing camo and talking big doesn't mean he'll be able to shoot straight.)

3. Worshipping (and providing food for) Hogzilla is sooner or later going to come back to -- forgive the pun -- bite you in the ass.

There are more. (Like, if you're wounded and unable to walk in the Deliverance-backwoods and your friends say, "We'll be right back," you need some new friends. Except that you won't be able to have any because you, mi compadre, are a red-shirt, and doomed, doomed, doomed.) But I'll stop there.

Let's be honest: there are some movies that you know, from the moment you pick up the box in the video store, whether or not you'll like them. This is one of those.