halloweenfest evening four: the tall man and sauna

*SPOILER ALERT*

the Tall Man: (2012. dir: Pascal Laugier) I’m going to give away the farm here, so don’t read this if you’re planning on watching the film. The important news is that if you're thinking Phantasm, look someplace else.

That disappointment aside, this has much to recommend it. The production values are superlative, Jessica Biel is fantastic in the lead and the supporting cast is every bit as good. I was attracted to it because of the Urban Legend aspect: a small, dying town in some picturesque mountains in Washington (although I think it’s really Canada) has a legend of a child-stealer known as The Tall Man. That turns out to be a red herring, but the plot-twists are eyebrow-raising and revealed with a spot-on sense of timing. At one point you actually think it’s going to turn into a Rosemary’s-Baby “the whole town worships Satan” thing, until two scenes later when that (and everything else you think you know about it) gets turned on its head again. That takes some doing. I also want to hand out some credit for the sound effects in the forest: she’s been chasing down a child-abductor, she’s wounded and resting, it’s night in the forest, and the sounds around her are great, just perfect.

Here's the catch: it’s not a horror film. Not for most of us, anyway, although I imagine much of it would be fairly disturbing for parents. Call it a horror film aimed specifically at mothers. It brings up all the dread questions, starting with the obvious: what if someone stole your child? then moving on into subtler forms of psychological torture: what if someone else is better equipped to raise your child? Is it not pure selfishness for you to keep hold of him?

An interesting point: there are no fathers in this movie, only mothers. I take it back: there’s one father, and he’s a mom’s lowlife boyfriend who’s knocked up her teenaged daughter. Every mother in it, even that last one, is depicted as strong in her way, which is one of the great virtues of the film. In fact, it has many virtues, but the question you end up with is… well, a little Mitt Romney, a little Dark-Knight-Rises-rich-folks-know-best. Do rich people, in fact, make better adoptive parents if the true biological parents are poor? To be fair, the movie agrees there are no simple answers, but it does leave you with an unpleasant taste in your mouth.

Sauna: (2008. dir: Antti-Jussi Annila) Stately, burnished Gewissengeist offering from Finland. Just before the turn of the 17th century and on the heels of a dreadful war, a joint embassage of Russian and Swedish ragtag soldiers and scholars, atheists all, travels through desolate land, demarcating the new boundary between their countries. As if the existential futility of that task needed bolstering, it gets it when we see they make peasants kiss a holy relic and swear by their souls that they will be subjects of the appropriate ruler.

A terrible crime is committed at the outset by two of the men, and it seems to curse them as they venture into a vast and unholy swamp at whose epicenter is an unholy sauna. (Apparently the sauna enjoys a far more central role in Swedish culture than our own, so the image must convey a heavier sense of dread in that colder, paler neck of the woods.) By the (very bitter) end, both countries are fighting to sign the malevolent place over to the other.

The film carries a poetic dignity alongside its filthy trudging and body-fluid creeps, unmistakably reminiscent of Aguirre, Wrath of God.

halloweenfest evening three: manson and cabin in the woods

Manson: (2009. dir: Neil Rawles) Every element of this real life monster movie is impressive. A documentary created for The History Channel, it has at its core filmed eyewitness interviews, most substantially with Linda Kasabian, who was on hand (although apparently not sanguinely involved) at both the Tate and LaBianca murders. The lighting, the camera work, the sound and music, and especially the acting in the reproductions, are charged and adroit. (The girls, of course, are way too pretty, but this is Hollywood, and, to be fair, the actor playing Tex Watson is too pretty, too.)

Adam Kenneth Wilson is upsettingly sexy as Manson, employing a southern drawl which may or may not be accurate (Manson was born in Ohio but raised partly in West Virginia), but is disarmingly soothing to the ear. Wilson also has the kind of chilling verisimilitude in playing violence that probably condemns him to a repeat of the career of Steve Railsback, who played Manson in the old Helter Skelter miniseries from the '70s, and, more recently but just as disturbingly, Ed Gein.

There's a scene where Tex, Linda, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins have just returned from the Tate house murders and are still sitting in the car. Charlie leans in the driver's window and asks each in turn, "You got any remorse?" After Linda dutifully and untruthfully answers no, he watches her, drumming his fingers on the door. It's a simple scene, and completely unnerving. The way the suspense builds up to Linda's planned escape is mesmeric.

There's a danger with this kind of true horror, as Trent Reznor found out after he purchased the Tate/Polanski house for its notoreity: in a 1997 Rolling Stone interview, he speaks of meeting Tate's sister, who asked him if he was exploiting her sister's death. Reznor realized there may have been truth in it, and moved out. Reliving the story all these years later, experiencing the horror of it in the same way one would a fictional horror, is it disrespectful?

the Cabin in the Woods: (2012. dir: Drew Goddard) Co-writers Drew Goddard (who wrote for both Buffy and Angel before penning Cloverfield) and Joss Whedon (who requires no introduction) have created a meta-fictional zombie movie which is so delightfully clever as to breathe new life into a weary-assed old genre. I wish, in fact, it were a television series instead of a film, to see where these two would go with it. Some old Joss-head favorites are on hand (Amy Acker, Tom Lenk, Fran Kranz) along with some more recent ones (Chris Hemsworth). It's funny, it's well acted, it takes the Evil Dead zombie cabin and explodes it into the realm of the Lovecraftian by way of the Orwellian. It's best to know as little as possible before you watch it; suffice to say that the idea is great, the execution is great, and wizened horror-film fans are in for a big party.

halloweenfest evening two: something wicked this way comes and dorian gray

Something Wicked This Way Comes: (1983. dir: Jack Clayton) It looks like it’s going to be about young boys and that troublesome passage into adolescence via the delicious metaphor of a malevolent, nocturnal carnival. Rather, it’s about the aging of men, and the sorrows and regrets of passing into middle years while feeling your choices are all behind you.

The atmosphere is lovely and autumnal, the carnival is dark and sumptuous, threatening and enticing in equal measure, but the story is ham-handed and allows its “alleg’ree” to stand in the way of our total immersion.

This movie was the first time I ever saw Jonathan Pryce, who is menacing indeed as the urbane and supernatural carnival ringleader, and it provided a much-appreciated first comeback for Pam Grier as the exotic embodiment of what Gabriel Garcia Marquez used to maddeningly call "the mangrove swamp" of female carnality.

The Carnival is a travelling Walpurgisnacht, and like all Walpurgisnacht feasts, this one's purpose is to ensnare souls, and souls are ensnared through weakness: in this case, the normal adult longing for lost prowess or beauty or opportunities. Children have a better chance, as they do not yet despair, but one of the boys in question is weak in his impatience for the onslaught of adulthood, and so makes himself easy prey for the crepuscular forces.

There are good, shiver-inducing pieces: at its epicenter, the carnival has a carousel which will age you or make you younger, depending on which way it turns, and the lightning rod salesman is a nice touch. It is a Disney film, so between Walt and Ray Bradbury, who wrote the novel, the aroma of nostalgia is pretty thick, but it works alongside the main theme to evoke the loss and regret and yearning.

I was disappointed with it in my youth when I saw it in the cinema, with its broadly-painted, one-stroke characters (the one-armed barkeep who longs for his days as a football hero, the portly barber who yearns for exotic women, the hatchet-faced librarian who once was a great beauty). The adults, as too often happens in movies ostensibly aimed at children (although I would argue this is really made for the masculine middle-age-crisis set), even the Jason Robards character, who is given much screen-time and whose soul is laid bare for us, seem simplified to exist almost solely in relation to the children, either as help-meets, tormentors, or as travelling moral lessons.

So I'm still disappointed with it. But if you keep your expectations low, you'll find small treasures abound in this movie's cobwebbed corners.

Dorian Gray: (2008. dir: Oliver Parker) A decent enough re-telling of one of the world's great horror stories. It's visually luscious in a way that would make Wilde happy, I think, and captures the sensuality without overdoing. It's well-acted and well-written, with the necessary padding (the novel itself is slim and, to its credit, leaves many details to the imagination) more than reasonably well done.

The trouble, and it's inherent in the story itself, is the same that one comes up against when filming Lovecraft: the titular portrait is itself the final shock, and while Wilde used our imaginations to bring it to life, what possible visual can give it sufficient shock value to evade anticlimax? Although the build-up in this one is just about perfect (a stunningly gorgeous portrait to start with, slowly growing hollow-eyed, festering and maggot-ridden), in the end it just looks like a picture of the Cryptmaster, and how scary is that?

Apart from that daunting obstacle, though, Dorian (Ben Barnes) is beautiful, Colin Firth is equal parts over-intellectual and too-much-debauched as the louche and ultimately conflicted Lord Henry (much more conflicted here than he is in the book, I think), Ben Chaplin is about perfect as the barely-closeted, magically gifted artist Basil Hallward, and the camera moves with lovely grace and ease between them. It lacks the heavy menace of the old black-and-white Gothic George Saunders version (and lacks Angela Lansbury, too, who is stunningly vulnerable as Sybil Vane), but it has a rather effective coda and final shot, making up for earlier disappointments.

westerns from a troubled decade: invitation to a gunfighter and the stalking moon

Invitation to a Gunfighter: (1964. dir: Richard Wilson) Man, I hate George Segal and his ham-fisted over-emoting. Yul Brynner, arrayed in his usual dignified stoicism, must be vaguely embarrassed every time they're onscreen together, watching Segal bend and grimace and furrow his massive brow.

I also hate what television drama did to Westerns in the early '60s, particularly to the writing and direction: all that talky, stagebound, psychobabbly melodrama. Thank the gods for the Italians, who saved the day before the decade was out. A guy rides into a town with no name and no heart, just a gun, a serape, a stubby cigar, a wide-brimmed hat and a steely-eyed gaze. By the time he rides out, everything has changed. Instead of psychobabble, there's tricksy mischief, and instead of melodrama, gunplay and explosions.

This, needless to say, was before the Italian influence took hold. Very much in spite of Yul Brynner's glorious presence, much of it is dull, most of it overwrought, and the ending is stupid. About five people in the cast were in Star Trek episodes, which never really bodes well for a Western, I've found.



The Stalking Moon: (1968. dir: Robert Mulligan) This, on the other hand, is ready for a remake. I guess, times being what they are, it'd have to be politically correcticized some, but it could easily be done. It's an old-school oater and it doesn't succumb to that confusion which took hold in the sixties, after which nobody knew how to portray violence or Indians or the cavalry or anything else. (Until, that is, the Italians saved the day.)

Gregory Peck is a retiring army scout who takes Eva Marie Saint and her son, longtime captives to an unnamed Indian tribe, under his wing when the boy's vicious warlord father comes after them. I found both leads a trifle disappointing, but to be fair, the whole thing is done mostly in medium long-shot, and that's a hard range in which to act effectively. That said, Robert Forster plays up a storm in the sexy-halfbreed-tracker-sidekick role, doing a sort of half-Charles Bronson, half-Paul Newman, all-James Dean impersonation. It's particularly great to see this now after just having watched the Descendants ("I'm going to hit you now." LOVE that guy.)

It's extraordinarily well written, with no more words than are needed. There are a few "huh?" moments in the story, but the momentum is such that it carries you through. At its best, it's grippingly suspenseful, with an unseen powerhouse of a killer on their trail and a small, stoical cast in claustrophobic circumstances surrounded by gorgeous scenery. I'd have preferred to see Charlton Heston in the lead, but Peck is no slouch, particularly in action scenes.

Seriously, I mean it. Someone should remake this.

retro '80s evening at the halloweenfest: beyond the black rainbow and night of the creeps

Beyond the Black Rainbow: (2010. dir: Panos Cosmatos) Here is no ordinary slasher film but a Night Sea-Journey, complete with Kurosawa-esque (Kiyoshi, not Akira) use of ambient noise to lull and enervate simultaneously, with fearlessly long, even shamelessly sluggish scenes, and dialogue which might seem tepid were it not delivered with such fierce virtuosity as Canadian actor Michael Rogers gives it. And it's got one lulu of a cinematic drug-trip in it: not as good as the 18-minute mega-vision from the uncut version of Jan Kounen's 2004 Blueberry, more modest than that, but still a cracking good sequence wielding a powerful metaphorical uppercut.

What's it all about, you ask? Call it an exploration into how a true theophany (or perhaps the terrifying banality of the real world following such a moment) can make a serial killer out of an innocent spiritual seeker. Anyway, that's what it was about for me. It's possible that any five viewers would give you five different answers. Part of its creep-factor is that it's set in the early '80s, complete with Reagan's anti-Russky scaremongering on the television in the background, but in a futuristic compound without windows or fresh air, so that time and the real world seem distant and virtually powerless entities.

If the ending is a disappointment, it's only because the story-telling until then has been so radically unexpected that the downshift towards "normal" is a little like coming down off some very fine Orange Sunshine.

Regardless: this first-time director has guts and vision both. Keep your eyes on him, and on Michael Rogers, who looks like Christian Bale in the Machinist and is riveting, without mis-step, as the spiritually malformed Dr. Nyle.

Night of the Creeps: (1986. dir: Fred Dekker) You could call it a classic of sorts. It's one of those early, good-humored pokes at the horror genre, more specifically the zombies-disrupt-the-prom variety ("The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they're dead"), with alien invasion and slasher tropes tossed in. Long-time horror pro Tom Atkins (the Fog, the Ninth Configuration)is outstanding as a chain-smoking, disillusioned cop scarred by having seen his estranged high-school sweetheart hacked to death with a long-handled axe and having subsequently tracked the psycho down, murdered and buried him.

The fun starts earlier than that, though, in the first minutes: we are onboard a very enjoyably cheesy alien spacecraft where there's apparently a mutiny underway. Through subtitles, we come to understand that one of the aliens is stealing a potentially lethal "experiment", trapped in a metal tube. Next we see of it, it's crash-landing near a teenage make-out spot sometime in the 1950s, and the seeds, as they say, are sown.

You wouldn't call it one of the best, not now, but it was one of the FIRST of the best, I'll wager. Now it feels a little slow and dorky, but it keeps a tone sufficiently light to buoy it up across the bumps.

snow white and the huntsman: a portrait of female rage

You see it for one thing: Charlize Theron as the Evil Queen. Because Charlize Theron is a master of her craft, marvellous to watch, her choices clean and intelligent, and her role as written is the most interesting in the part of the film. And, to be frank, even she gets a little kabuki with it before the end.

What Kristen Stewart has to offer as an actress is a tough vulerability, a sort of street-urchin stubbornness, and a very particularly modern-day honesty communicated through her own peculiar brand of petulant underplaying, all of which combine to make her a much-needed surrogate through whom girls of a certain age experience themselves. In fact, these qualities have made her a star amongst a particular demographic. That someone decided they would also make her a good fit to play Joan Jett was a solid inspiration, and that worked out rather well. That any human would think they made her a good fit to play the Female Embodiment of Purity and Innocence is baffling to the point of dementia.

Her bearing and body language make it impossible to buy her as anything but a 21st-century girl, and her innate toughness makes scenes like the one where she quiets a fierce bridge-troll through sheer force of Innocence and Purity (a scene which ought to have been utterly charming, since the CGI troll is so utterly charming in his response to her) frustrating, to say the least. More problematic is the great resurrection towards the end, where she rises from the dead to give an "Agincourt" speech which inflames the army of Good Guys to fight and die for her cause. What it needs is a Cate Blanchett, and Stewart, for all her amiability, has nowhere near the charisma to pull it off.

Much of the story is difficult to swallow, and not the parts you'd think. I, for one, have no problem with the idea that a magpie Snow had saved as a child returns to lead her through her prison-break and to a magical white horse which bears her to safety. That is exactly the kind of thing one expects in a fairy tale. What I DON'T buy is that after spending ten years locked without a moment's respite in a dungeon her muscle-tone is such that she can outrun, outride, and outswim an army to find her escape. Should her skin not be diseased with lack of sunlight, therefore nullifying any "beauty" issues the Evil Queen might be harboring? And, having spoken to almost no one in all those years, should she not be, if not a little gibberlingly mad (a la Amy Acker at the beginning of her role in Angel), at least completely socially inept? She walks out of that cell like she's only been in it a day or two. You scoff at my persnickity attitude, but consider how easily this all might have been solved: the Evil Queen is more than adept at magic, and might easily have placed Snow in a sort of Rumplestiltskin/Sleeping Beauty magical sleep from which she might awake with (magically) renewed vigor. I swear: good film-making is all in the details, and if you're making a fairy tale, put yourself into that fairy tale space, will you?

But let that pass. Although there is no discernible chemistry between Snow and her Huntsman, Chris Hemsworth, it turns out, is an utterly dependable actor. He owns the power of presence to play Thor, the droll humour to deliver the wisecracks up to his inevitably spectacular death in Cabin in the Woods, and now the easy confidence to slip, when it's demanded, into the scenery as Snow's strong-man sidekick. The dwarves, when they at last appear, turn out to be Eddie Marsan, Ian McShane, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones, Bob Hoskins and some other fellows I should probably recognize, all effectively CGIed into short, stocky miners. They're an enjoyable lot, without having all that much to do.

The fairy tale morphs as it goes on, kyping bits from the lives of Sleeping Beauty and Joan of Arc, and the coronation at the end is an almost embarrassingly underwhelming finale. Any common script-girl could tell you what this audience is interested in seeing is not Snow crowned queen, which we assume is inevitable, but Snow finding true love with her Huntsman, which is more problematic, royal entanglements being regulated as they are, and this we never see.

In the end, this story belongs to the Wicked Stepmother, who has been brilliantly embodied as the epitome of Female Rage at centuries of patriarchal oppression, and, more tellingly, centuries of secret female collusion with the enemy. The skewed, dishonest factor lodged near the heart of the movie is that, at loggerheads with the script, the film-maker secretly values Rage over Innocence, and so the character of Snow loses power in ambivalence while the Evil Queen is ultimately only defeated by her own self-loathing.