*SPOILER ALERT*
the Purge: (2013. dir: James DeMonaco) A fascinating idea for a non-supernatural, slightly sci-fi horror film, no doubt inspired by "the Return of the Archons", itself a fascinating moment in the first season of the original Star Trek. In an alterna-America, the "new Founding Fathers" have cleansed the land of crime by designating a single twelve-hour period every year as "Purge Night", during which time cops and hospitals all close up shop and crime runs rampant and unpunished. Although it never reaches its potential, it's interesting enough to keep you watching. This is the kind of role I love for Lena Headey (I'm ambivalent about Cersei Lannister, both as written and as portrayed), beginning with mere elegance and expanding into a tough humanness, a journey reaching its sublime apotheosis with her morning announcement, "Sit down! I said nobody else is fucking dying tonight!" Also, it seems I no longer dislike Ethan Hawke, which I did, with some vehemence, for many years. (It was Reality Bites that did it. And that Hamlet? ye gods.)
Byzantium: (2012. dir: Neil Jordan) Jordan has a talent for fantasy. For all its oddness and flaws, my favorite film of his has always been the Company of Wolves. Here is a new vampire story, equal parts modern world and beautiful, mythological old world (or, more cynically, equal parts Let the Right One In and Interview with the Vampire). There are enduring images: the strange stone hut amidst the flowing waters where one meets one's doppelganger, one's death and resurrection into blood-drinking immortality, all in one instant, for example. The film owns an extreme pulsation of dark female sensuality, mostly due to Gemma Arterton and the love which the camera bears for her. The bad guys are a brotherhood of bloodsuckers who, for reasons both classist and sexist, spend centuries hunting after a mother-daughter vampire team (Arterton and Saoirse Ronan). Jonny Lee Miller, unforgettable as a different kind of vampire, a soldier and a cheat who loves placing innocent girls into whoredom and passes on his fatal syphilis as a means of revenge, throws himself with tireless relish into the hideousness. The similarity to Let the Right One In mostly shows up in the burgeoning relationship between the eternally-sixteen-year-old daughter and her pale, sickly, teenaged beau. I don't like the way Jordan does action scenes, but there aren't many of those, and the filming of the old world, and the ease of movement between old and new, suggesting the timelessness of vampire existence, is lovely.
the Grabbers: (2012. dir: Jon Wright) An Irish remake of Tremors (with a little Gremlins thrown in: witness the scene of the monster-cubs terrorising the bar), only the beasts come from outer space via the ocean and feed on human blood. Alcohol, it turns out, is toxic to them, and drunken hijinks ensue as a tiny island town tries to survive the night of rainstorm and monsters. Richard Coyle is here, and he is lovely, but the music is intrusive and the drunken Irish whimsy approaches John Ford levels, which is too rich by far for my blood. That, however, is a personal quirk, and there is much to be said for this eccentric capriccio.
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