Vote Yes on Prop. More November Capsule Reviews!

Here are two.

The Alchemist Cookbook (d. Joel Potrykus) - In 2012, Joel Potrykus made his feature film debut with Ape, about a struggling stand-up comic, played by Joshua Burge, who gets angry a lot. I thought it was awful, and found his 2014 follow-up Buzzard, also starring Burge and angriness, to be not much better. These movies complete Potrykus's, I guess, "Animal Trilogy" which began with a short film called Coyote, which I haven't seen and which Wikipedia describes as a "minimalist werewolf film." There are tinges of horror in Ape (there's a devil figure, of sorts) which are jumped up a bit in Buzzard -- a major element of that movie involves Burge's character adding Freddy Krueger knife-claws to a Nintendo Power Glove, and eventually using it. That last bit might you some idea of where Potrykus's brain's at, decade-wise. In any case, both Ape and Buzzard are fundamentally juvenile in a way that suggests Potrykus believes that he's grown up, and one thing you do when you grow up is you make genre films that tear the guts out of "traditional" genre films and show what's really behind them.

Hence The Alchemist Cookbook, which is I suppose technically his first horror feature. It stars Ty Hickson as Sean, a young man recently released (escaped?) from prison, who is now hiding out in a trailer in the woods, where he conducts obscure experiments which seem to be equally scientific and occultic. Mostly alone save for his cat, he is occasionally visited by his old friend Cortez (Amari Cheatom), who brings Sean food, supplies for his experiments, and Sean's medication. The moment that Cortez realizes he forgot to pack that medication, the rest of the film that follows this moment has been explained to us.

The one positive I could find in Buzzard and Ape was Joshua Burge, who is, I think, very good in both, and once again the disaster of The Alchemist Cookbook can't be blamed on Hickson (or Cheatom, but Hickson's basically it for the whole show). But like Burge before him, Hickson has been burdened with a bunch of bullshit to do. In Buzzard, Potrykus films Burge eating spaghetti and meatballs for minutes on end, apparently to prove to his audience that he will put something like that into one of his movies. His weird and unamusing relationship to things that are ingested continues here: one scene holds on Hickson eating many Doritos in a row. A "funny" scene involves Cortez proving that the incorrect cat food he brought is fine by, now get this, I'm not kidding, this is just how crazy Potrykus is, eating it himself. (Because Cheatom was very clearly eating ordinary canned tuna, I had a tough time believing it was as rancid as Cheatom was told to pretend it was.) Another scene in which Hickson guzzles juice is foley-ed almost to death. Does Potrykus think it's funny or edgy to make it sound like instead of a man swallowing juice, a walrus is swallowing blended-up penguin? I can't imagine his motivation, but it seems to be his big move.

Eventually the "horror" (Sean thinks he's summoned a demon or whatever) asserts itself, or fails to do so, and the emotional climax is reached in a monologue delivered by Sean in which he imagines what his perfect world would be. It would involve things like unlimited Capri Suns and I think Cap'n Crunch, and he probably at some point mentioned Snarf from Thundercats. It's an embarrassing scene, and I can't imagine caring what Potrykus does next.

A Flash of Green (d. Victor Nuñez) - The crime writer John D. MacDonald wrote something in the neighborhood of 60 books in his lifetime (he was 70 when he died, so put those numbers together and have a long hard think about it all). Though he's best known for his series of novels about the noble houseboat detective Travis McGee, The majority of his books were written before he wrote The Deep Blue Good-by in 1964. "Prolific" may not even begin to cover this. Anyhow, among the three novels MacDonald published in 1962 was A Flash of Green, not a crime novel, but a social problem novel that uses certain criminal acts to drive the plot. I recently read this book, and while I'd count myself as a wary fan of MacDonald (I've read bad, I've read good), I found A Flash of Green to be close to disastrous. Using the conservation of nature as his theme (something MacDonald, a Floridian who was aghast at the relentless destruction of the natural world he'd grown up with, would build his novels upon throughout his career), the novel A Flash of Green is a series of speeches about ethics and feelings and explaining exactly what all the characters think at all times. The dialogue in this novel is relentlessly unconvincing, and often appalling, and, on top of that, usually telling the reader about things that happened, when the reader might have actually been given a first-hand look, had MacDonald not been so busy writing lines like (paraphrase, but not by much) "I fell in love glamorous lady called the newspaper game." (This leads to cynical thoughts about that newspaper game, if that helps at all.)

In 1984, the director Victor Nuñez adapted A Flash of Green as a film. Outside of festivals, its release to the public was as an episode of American Playhouse, which makes very little since to me (it was released on VHS, but no other form of home video since then), but there you go. Nuñez's career has always struck me as that of an honorable filmmaker who has always struggled. He had a brief period of semi-prominence in the 90s, with Ruby in Paradise, which more or less introduced Ashley Judd to the world, and Ulee's Gold, which briefly boosted Peter Fonda. But his adaptation of A Flash of Green may stand as his most interesting film. It's better than the novel, to begin with, by a lot, the casting is exquisite, and Nuñez, as the screenwriter, absolutely hacks to the bone all the shit MacDonald couldn't shut up about.

The basic story is, a bay in a small Florida town is being threatened by local businessmen and government who want to develop it. Kat Hubble (Blair Brown) is a prominent member of the group who strives to stop this, and she enlists the help of her late husband's best friend, reporter Jimmy Wing (Ed Harris). Unbeknownst to her, not only is Wing in love with her, but he's also in the pocket of Elmo Bliss (Richard Jordan), the man behind the development plan. Bliss has hired Wing to dig up dirt on the conservationist group so that he can blackmail them into backing off. Wing does his job.

Jimmy Wing is the most interesting part of the novel and the film, and casting Harris in the role was a masterstroke. The tortured, lustful, everyman cynicism that is the root of the character is also, arguably, the root of Harris's genius as an actor. Add to this Nuñez's minimalism, which is not so much at odds with MacDonald's maximalism as it is a force that completely dominates and reconfigures this story. Surprisingly, Nuñez adheres very closely to MacDonald's plot -- there's some combining of storylines and characters, but that's about it. Nuñez's great achievement as a writer here is how he slashes the dialogue, and turns MacDonald's endless moralizing into searching, hesitant, simple everyday language. The film is a wonderful transformation.

Capsule Reviews for November? Indeed So.

Here are reviews of things.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (d. Tobe Hooper) - Though I count myself among the many horror fans, and film lovers in general, who consider Hooper's original 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be one of the great masterpieces of the genre, and as an admirer of other Hooper films (I consider The Funhouse to be especially underrated), I have nevertheless been resistant to Hooper's 1986 sequel. In fact, prior to this past Friday, I'd tried to watch the film twice before and failed to get through it. My problem has always been, essentially, that amping up the comedy isn't something I thought The Texas Chainsaw Massacre especially needed. And while I realize that there is a lot of black humor in that first film, it's never been the thing that really appealed to me. In many cases, the jokes, such as they are, in that film played differently for me. If you ignore the joke Hooper and screenwriter Kim Henkel were going for in a given moment (which, and this may seem an odd thing to say, given that I've said I love the film, is easy enough to do because I don't really think the jokes are funny), the horror of that moment remains. And that's what works for me.

But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is beloved by many, so I had to finally bite the bullet. And I don't know what put me off those other times. Well, yes I do: the comedy, which is located much closer to the surface, in that it is right there on top of the surface, than it was in 1974, still didn't strike me as actually funny, or even interesting. Setting that aside, which I found surprisingly easy to do, as a mad, alarmingly graphic (far more so than the original, which fans will never stop telling others is actually surprisingly bloodless), brilliantly designed, and propulsively ruthless bit of slasher insanity. The plot (ripped off by Rob Zombie for his awful The Devil's Rejects) involves an obsessed cop named Enright (Dennis Hopper) hunting the family of cannibalistic killers we met in 1974 (with some changes, including a new actor, Bill Johnson, as Leatherface, and a new family member, Bill Moseley as Chop Top; only Jim Seidow, as Drayton, makes the transition from the first film to the sequel). The two murders that open the film are witnessed, in a sense, by a night-time DJ named Stretch (Caroline Williams, in a performance that struck me as potentially as exhausting to give as Marilyn Burns's in the original), who provides Enright's best lead in years, and becomes his, sort of, partner. And off we go, ending up in a very long sequence set in the family's phantasmagorically nightmarish underground lair of tunnels and skulls and skin and shadows.

Among the pleasures of the film is seeing Lou Perryman, who I know best from Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match, another major piece of Texas cinema (and whose fate in this film is both awful on its own terms, and even worse when you know Perryman's own terrible end), and also Hopper's performance, which is better and more committed than I, unfairly, would have expected him to bother shooting for in a film like this. By saying "like this" I'm accusing Hopper of a kind of snobbery I have no actual reason to believe he actually felt. Anyway, he's real good here, is what I'm saying. And that long last set-piece is, as I've suggested, one lunatic visual after another. Even if it recreates the original's climactic dinner scene more specifically than it probably should have, it makes up for that with other, different insanities. Personally, I consider this to be a film completely separate from the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To me, they're both just riffs on the same idea, with different tones and employing different styles. Both valid, both terrific.

Carnage Park (d. Mickey Keating) - The films of Quentin Tarantino have been enormously important to Mickey Keating. Which is weird, since judging by Carnage Park he hasn't bothered to think at all about any of them.

Masques (d. Claude Chabrol) - The above shot is unquestionably my favorite from Masques, Claude Chabrol's 1987 thriller about about a young mystery writer named Roland Wolf (Robin Renucci) who for whatever reason wants to write the authorized biography of the famous game show host Christian Legagneur (Philippe Noiret), and for a period of time is a guest in Legagneur's expansive estate, so that he may interview the older man for the book. During this time, Wolf meets Legagneur's servants, which include a mute chauffeur/chef named Max (Pierre-Francois Dumeniaud), a flirty masseuse (Bernadette Lafont), etc., and most importantly, Legagneur's goddaughter (her parents having died in a terrible car accident when she was a child) Catherine, played rather brilliantly by the luminous Anne Brochet, a young woman, we're told, who is recovering from a strange illness the treatment of which left her briefly paralyzed, and is now terribly nervous, afraid, panicky, and sensitive to light. That's her up above. As Roland's motives become perplexing to the audience -- when he's hanging out in his room on his first day at the estate, we see him unpack a gun and randomly say the name "Madeline" to his reflection in a mirror -- it becomes clear that whatever mystery is about to unravel before us, Catherine is the key to it all.

That shot (look up) isn't static, it's a camera move, and I don't want to spoil what it signifies to the viewer, but it is so elegantly done, so precise and smooth, artful at the same time it is utterly free of ostentation. Though I wouldn't rank Masques among Chabrol's greatest films (of those I've seen), I would not hesitate to cite this shot as evidence that Chabrol was a brilliant director (and Brochet a terrific actress), or even film itself as a uniquely powerful artform that can depict true human emotion in its most naked and simultaneously most subtle forms. If you know the film and think I'm overstating things, I understand. But sometimes these moments can be so thrilling that I can't help myself, and I imagine it's the same for you.

What's interesting to me is that as much as I enjoyed Masques (I enjoyed it a great deal), it's probably the lightest film of Charbol's that I've seen -- it ain't exactly Pleasure Party, for example. There's one completely goofball shot showing Wolf, alone in his room, after an encounter that has left him feeling either happy or smug (which one is up to you). He was getting ready for bed when the thing that occurred occurred, and he's wearing a gray shirt. That's all we've seen of his outfit, until the camera pulls back to reveal that he's wearing cartoonishly colorful boxer shorts. It's an odd choice, but one that indicates the level of playfulness Chabrol's trying to get at. And which he gets at. Masques isn't unserious, but it's fun, more than anything. It's playing around so much that I think it loses track of itself now and again (I don't know what the point was of a revelation about one character), but any missteps are small. And they're further dwarfed by an ending that actually sort of recalls Network, but with an even better stinger of a last line.

Venom (d. Piers Haggard) - Speaking of significant shots, how about this one? While not significant to Venom in the same way that the shot in Masques I wouldn't shut up about is to that film, the snake in the liquor cabinet rather neatly symbolizes one reason, perhaps the primary reason, that Venom is such a cult favorite. Which is that somebody at some point, or maybe several people working together, decided that the best way to get this suspense film about a group of ruthless criminals who kidnap the young son of a wealthy family, only to find themselves penned into that family's home not only by, eventually, the cops, but also by the presence of a deadly black mamba snake loose among them, was to cast a giant handful of the most psychopathic alcoholic hellraisers in motion picture history: Oliver Reed, Sterling Hayden, Nicol Williamson, and Klaus fucking Kinski all star in this crazy thing. Very early on in Haggard's commentary track for the Blue Underground disc, the director says that he took over from the original director (Tobe Hooper, as it happens) who, Haggard says, may have suffered a nervous breakdown during his time on the film, though he's not sure about that.

This was more or less all I knew about Venom before watching it, and what's unfortunate about this undeniably alarming and curious fact about its production is that it suggests the film probably isn't very good and is nothing more than a curiosity. But the truth, as I see it, is that Venom is actually a pretty terrific little film. Whatever drove Hooper back to the US (this being an English film) isn't on-screen. As unpleasant as it must have been to actually spend time with that quartet (my guess is that Hayden was, on average, the most palatable), they were each, to begin with, immensely talented actors who all showed up to, at least after Haggard called "Action", do the work they were paid to do. Reed in particular is pretty superb, as the dumbest, most cold-hearted of the criminals, while Kinski, as the boss, tamps down on his natural, and probably genuine, psychopathy to play the smart (but probably no less evil) one. Williamson is the cop on the case, and Hayden is the grandfather of the little boy who, with snake scientist or whatever Sarah Miles, are the people in the house trying to keep things from spiraling out of control, have the least showy roles among this cluster of madmen, but their performances are just as good, in their way (plus Michael Gough is in there too, and Susan George, as the criminal partner of Reed and Kinski).

The weirdest thing about Venom, really, is that it's almost a riff on Dog Day Afternoon, with Nicol Williamson in the Charles Durning role, and Klaus Kinski in Pacino's (I suppose this would mean that Oliver Reed is John Cazale's Sonny). But man, this thing plays like gangbusters, because Haggard, who off the top of my head I only know from The Blood on Satan's Claw (a good movie!), knows how to put together a damn movie. If the premise is goofy, no matter: Haggard and screenwriter Robert Carrington (and, in fairness, perhaps also author of the original novel Alan Scholefield) know how to make it plausible, immediate, and even frightening. And the whole film hinges, in truth, on the first death by snakebite. It's prolonged, because nobody realizes, at first, how serious being bitten by a black mamba actually is. But the character who was bitten is starting to get an idea. Though the character is quite unlikable, their death is horrifying (and beautifully acted). At that exact moment, if not before, Venom is on rails.

Fear of Fear (d. Rainer Werner Fassbinder) - Some time ago, and I honestly don't feel like linking to it, but some time ago I wrote, in another post collecting a handful of capsule reviews, about Francis Ford Coppola's Gardens of Stone, in which I said something to the effect of, Coppola has never considered any era of filmmaking style, from the earliest silents to whatever year he happens to be making a given film, out of date, or unavailable to him. It's not a matter of homage; it's a matter of exploration, curiosity, and a complete refutation of the idea that a mode or style is "dated" simply because some audiences are born later than others. The same, more or less, goes for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I say "more or less" perhaps out of ignorance -- the man made a jaw-dropping number of films in his short life, and I've seen a mere handful -- but not as a criticism: Fassbinder wanted to rescue melodrama from the trash heap. Weaned on Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder's approach to that sort of classic Hollywood "women's picture" wasn't to recreate the florid style, as fellow Sirk enthusiast Todd Haynes has done on occasion, but rather to recreate it in his own image. When Fassbinder traveled this road, the results were a wild mix of that melodramatic intensity of Sirk and others, and a kind of grainy naturalism. You kind of can't just start watching Fassbinder blind. More than most filmmakers, it helps to know what's what.

Fear of Fear, one of four pictures Fassbinder made in 1975, is quite illustrative of all this. The film's title is seen over a dolly zoom, the shot Hitchcock invented for Vertigo, his masterpiece of what you might kind of have to call melodramatic suspense. What's being dolly-zoomed is an image of what might under other circumstances be seen as a moment of domestic calm, but which that particular camera move has informed us, on a primal level, is in fact soaked in dread and depression. Starring the great Margit Carstensen as Margot, a housewife with one young child and, as the film opens, pregnant with a second, whose grip on her life and happiness is threatening to slip away, Fear of Fear manages to be both frightening and sympathetic to characters you might not expect it to like very much. I'm thinking of Ulrich Faulhaber as Kurt, Margot's husband, who is initially ignorant and insensitive, perhaps even, at first blush, detestable, but Fassbinder allows him to become someone who we understand loves his wife, and who is truly scared that what seems to be her genuine madness might have been something he could have stopped in its tracks had he not been so self-absorbed. Other characters, such as those played by Fassbinder stalwarts Irm Hermann and Brigitte Mira, who make it their mission to make Margot feel as bad about her parenting abilities and as guilty as possible about the ways in which she tries to grab some happiness out of her day, aren't afforded quite as many levels, but if everyone in this world was at worst secretly nice, none of us would ever feel miserable.

It ain't a perfect film, though. One danger, the big one, I'd say, in what Fassbinder did is to confuse style with formula. It's a trap he was often able to escape -- look at Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, or, better yet, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The idea of narrative formula is, I've always said, a bit of received wisdom that needs to be stuffed in a bag and drowned, and I think on some level, at least in Fear of Fear, Fassbinder received it a bit too happily. But definitely consciously and knowingly, too, so there's that. Anyway, there's the added touch of eerie mystery revolving around the character of Bauer (Kurt Raab), who seems to haunt Margot like a ghost, though until the end she doesn't seem to understand the meaning of it. Though she probably will, eventually, after the credits.

These Are the Capsule Reviews of October

One of these is positive!

Angst (d. Gerard Kargl) - I learned of this Austrian nightmare only recently (that it doesn't find a spot even in the updated edition of Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies seems significant in some way), but I can say that it is the film I was told it was. Somewhat put off by the fact that this is evidently Gaspar Noe's favorite film, Noe being a filmmaker I do not admire, it was therefore interesting that I could not only see where the Argentinian filmmaker has repeatedly drawn inspiration, and where Kargl has beat him at the game Noe's been trying to play for years now.

But enough about Noe. And what else to say about Angst? It's not a plot-heavy film. Loosely based on the murders committed by serial killer Werner Kniesek, Angst tells the story, in close to real time, of a convicted killer (Erwin Leder) who, upon being released from prison, immediately goes searching for his next victim. After an aborted attempt on a female cab driver, the killer flees into the woods. He eventually finds a house, which draws him not necessarily because it implies human inhabitants for him to kill, but because it at first seems deserted, and may be abandoned, and may be his new home, or dungeon. But it is inhabited: by an elderly woman, her paraplegic, mentally handicapped son, and her daughter. They come home while the killer is there.

Angst is, as you might imagine, a very difficult film to watch, but it isn't a 90-minute violent assault as I'd feared it would be. The violence is concentrated within maybe about 20 minutes (long enough, I can hear you protest) and the rest is made up of the lead-up to, and the aftermath of, that violence. Otherwise, Kargl plugs us directly into the killer's head. Though not a silent film, the vast majority of the spoken words heard in Angst are the killer's narration, which is persistent, and which sometimes overlays the slaughter. He tells us about his life, his childhood, and his desire to kill others. Another way Kargl makes us live in the killer's brain is by, whenever the killer is running, or overwhelmed by the fact that he lives in this world, hooking a device to Leder's body on which the camera is attached so that effectively the camera is not only swiveling around Leder, but up and down his body so that I, at least, wondered how it worked. This did not have the effect of booting me from the film, but rather left me feeling some of the disorientation the Leder's killer is meant to feel. Which, further, is not meant to imply that Angst is making excuses for serial killers, or pitying those who carry out such acts. The three murders in the film are feverish (the one on which I believe the film's reputation as a work of shock cinema rests feels endless) and could only have been carried out by someone whose head feels like this.

Nerve (d. Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman) - Oh, this fucking thing. Embraced by many as a film that is better, and more fun, than you'd imagine, this 2016 film by the two dinks behind the fraudulent documentary Catfish, is pretty infuriating. I will go so far as to tempt the wrath of a certain corner of the internet by saying that the film's roots as a young adult novel are betrayed by the fact that Nerve the film is thoroughly chickenshit.

For a while, though, it's more fun than you'd think! Starring the very well-cast Emma Roberts and Dave Franco as two participants in the titular social media game, which requires its participants to fulfill a series of increasingly dangerous dares in order to gather online followers leading to some sort of championship round, two participants, I say again, who stumble across each other in New York City while just getting started on the game. Franco's Ian, it is suggested, has done this before ("Nerve" is an annual game), whereas Roberts's Vee has definitely not, she being kind of a "square" who is looking for "adventure" and "life" that might match that which is enjoyed by her fame-hungry friend and fellow "Nerve"-participant Sydney (Emily Meade). So anyway, you get the idea, and the film is fun for a while, not only because Roberts and Franco are both so appealing, but also because Nerve continues to behave as though it will become even more fun, and more interesting.

Eventually, however, the deep stupidity of the film begins to reveal itself. For example, throughout Nerve, the game is described as something deeply secretive, part of the "dark web" that only teens know about, and that no one who knows about the game should ever say anything about it to any authority figures. But then the climax takes place in a wildly crowded, neon-lit ancient stadium located in....what, Brooklyn? This is simply one example of Nerve telling the audience one thing is true and important while playing out in the opposite way. Not purposely, to achieve something or other, but because it doesn't really want to be the thing it's pretending to be. See also the fact that none of the dares ever challenge the morals of the contestants; at least not our heroes. At one point it looks like they'll have to commit theft in order to advance in the game, but in fact they don't have to. They're called upon to be reckless, but never to go against their own character. For all its nefarious shadow-world window-dressing, all Nerve is really saying is "You're fine, and everything is fine."

Lights Out (d. David F. Sandberg) - Oh, this fucking thing. In 2013, a short horror film called Lights Out was released online that inexplicably excited and terrified lots of people. Lasting only a few minutes (not the problem), it relies on one good idea that can only work once, but requires it to work several times in a row. That idea being, someone in their own home turns off a light in the hallway. In the shadows left behind is a frightening silhouette of someone or something that hadn't been there when the lights were on. Flip the lights back on? It's gone. Turn the lights off again? Now it's closer. Those actions as I've just described make sense to me. Someone flipping that light off and on so that the audience can watch the ghostly figure advance four or five times is just stupid, but that was the short film Lights Out (by the way, the upshot of the thing was that the scary thing had a scary face).

How might one stretch this into a feature-length film? Well. Because the short only had one idea (in fairness, films that short only have room for one), director David F. Sandberg realized that the way to step up to the plate for his feature debut was to add a whole other idea, that idea being that the ghost-thing from the short used to be a girl who was allergic to sunlight. There's little else here. The film stars Teresa Palmer as Rebecca, a troubled young woman whose young brother Martin (Gabriel Bateman) still lives with their mother (Maria Bello, the best thing about the film), even though she, the mother, seems mentally unstable given her life-long belief in a terrifying shadow presence she calls "Diana." Rebecca has never believed in Diana, though Martin sees her too, and then one day Rebecca sees her. So then Rebecca's like "Well okay, let me see if I can dig up any evidence that this 'Diana' person ever even existed.'" Within about six minutes of searching her childhood home, Rebecca finds enough written, audio, and visual evidence to explain the whole thing. After that, it's just a matter of running out the clock.

By the way, the film opens with Martin's dad (Rebecca's step-dad) being killed by Diana. This sequence lays out the entire visual architecture of the film's horror sequences. If you've watched the first ten minutes of this movie (or, indeed, its earlier, much shorter version), you will not be surprised by anything after that. And like It Follows, Lights Out is eager to establish its rules but is less eager to follow them, so that one early scare moment requires a light source that should mean that Diana is invisible. Oh well! You can put only so much thought into your debut feature.

There's one really eerie moment in the film. I thought it was a fairly impressive idea that relied on the audience to put two-and-two together. I'm not sure how it wound up in the final cut.

The Further Capsule Reviews of October

I know that last week I said I was going to write about two other films a day or two after my post about Grizzly and The Beast in the Cellar. Clearly I never did that. Those two films were Paul Feig's Ghostbusters and Christopher Guest's Mascots. All I can tell you is, I simply didn't have it in me to write about two comedies. That's hard to do. For the record, I didn't much like Ghostbusters, and I particularly didn't understand why the film chose to treat the belief in ghosts as empowering, and I really, really enjoyed Mascots, and I don't know why I'm in the minority on this. I've read some people try to explain why Mascots is bad. I remain unconvinced.

In a Valley of Violence (d. Ti West) - The first Ti West film I saw, 2009's The House of the Devil, I rather liked. I think if I watched it again today, I'd still like it (terrific Tom Noonan performances go a long way with me). It's been all downhill since then, however. I should have known, since The House of the Devil is an "80s throwback" kind of horror film, which, saints preserve us and so on. But West's much-loved follow-up, The Innkeepers, struck me as an exercise in giving the audience precisely what they expected to get, but just holding the camera on those things a lot longer than the norm, and then in 2013 he released The Sacrament, a fictionalized re-telling of the Jonestown massacre that does literally nothing inventive with it. The idea behind that film seems to have been "What if Jonestown was made up?" That The Sacrament is a found-footage film perhaps goes without saying.

Now West has "shaken" "things" "up" by making a Western. A revenge film starring Ethan Hawke as a mysterious stranger whose unwillingness to bow down to the bullies (James Ransone, Larry Fessenden, Toby Huss, and Tommy Nohilly) of a dying town leads to them leaving him for dead after witnessing the brutal killing of his dog, In a Valley of Violence has the fucking gall to knowingly wink (and may the saints preserve us from knowing winks, too) at The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in its stylized opening credits. Which is bad enough, but the bigger problem is that West isn't even nodding at Sergio Leone -- he's nodding at Quentin Tarantino. Had Tarantino never made Django Unchained (I'm going to assume the wheels were already turning on West's film when The Hateful Eight came out), I believe In a Valley of Violence wouldn't exist. Add to all this the fact that for about the first half, this film is about as inauthentic, and as free of style, or even personality, as any Western I've ever seen in my goddamn life, and you can imagine how much blood was coming out of my ears by the hour mark. When Hawke, on his horse and with his dog, rides into the town where everything happens, he's moving his horse at a walk, all the better to cut from him looking around to shots of townsfolk sliding by as the horse progresses. This is the most beat-to-death shot in the genre, and West could not give a fuck. Plus the town is supposedly dying, but the paint looks pretty fresh, the wood pretty sturdy, and the only evidence that it's a dying town is that the budget for extras on this project had an obvious ceiling.

However, and call me a sucker (I am), bloody revenge motivated by the killing of a pet dog is going to be hard for me to not get behind, and I got behind it here (it didn't hurt that unlike in John Wick, which I liked, where the killing of the dog is sort of a metaphorical thing that must be avenged because Wick is mourning his dead wife, here the dog is important because she was a good dog). And quite honestly, the film does pick up. It becomes good for a little while. When Hawke dispatches his first victim, there is genuine savagery in the violence, and in Hawke's performance. Also, John Travolta plays the town marshal (and father of Ransone's character, who is the primary villain), and at this point his role expands. And Travolta, quite frankly, is really good here, playing the conflicted pseudo-villain (Toby Huss does that too, and is also good, but he doesn't have anywhere near the material or screentime to work with that Travolta has) who, finally, just wants peace.

But West fucks it up again. In addition to West including, in a film set in the 19th Century, dialogue like "Are you seriously bringing that up right now?", the final stretch of violence is both moronic and clumsy (at one crucial moment, West seems to have no idea where Hawke is aiming his gun) and witheringly ordinary. And the "witheringly ordinary" part is the last part. Why the fuck would you end your revenge story like that?? With that same action scene (a term I use for the sake of expediency) construction that at this point is nothing but condescending to the audience, at best. It's proof to me that West doesn't really care about what he's doing. If he has to think it up himself, if he can't simply lift it from somewhere else, it's probably not worth doing. Which is probably fair enough.

Cop Car (d. Jon Watts) - Not long before I began writing this brief review of a 2015 thriller that no one has any time for, I was shocked, even appalled, to learn that its director, Jon Watts, had previously not only directed, but even co-wrote, one of the worst films I've seen in the last two years or so. That film is Clown, a horror picture that is absolute trash, from stem to stern. This fact does slightly temper, or threaten to temper, my reasonable, grounded enthusiasm of Cop Car.

Yet reasonably and groundedly enthusiastic about Cop Car I shall remain. Before seeing it for myself, I kept hearing that it was "fine", it was just a a thriller that did thriller things, and it was honestly fine, you guys. No one seemed to want to give it any credit for being what these reactions seemed to be covertly saying it was: an effective thriller. Which, and I can say this because I watched it, it is. Cop Car is a well-shot, well-acted, modest little film about two kids (Hays Wellford and James Freedson-Jackson) out walking in the woods who find a police car, just sitting there, with keys inside. So they go for a joyride. That car is pretty important, for reasons that shall become clear, to a dishonest cop (Kevin Bacon) who then begins hunting the kids.

There's lots in this film that is goofy, or convenient. For example, while joy-riding, the kids are apparently blowing through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, because there's no one else on the road. Until Camryn Manheim, the only other driver in the world, spots them, and so she becomes an Element of Suspense. Which is fine, but by including no one else on the road, ever, she becomes a Script Thing, not a person. On the other hand, Jon Watts has a nice eye for childish behavior -- their idiot handling of the guns they find, their terror and inability to figure out how to extract themselves from the locked back-set of a police car. There are a few shots when Watts seems to want the kids to look cool, but ultimately he seems to view childhood confidence as, in hindsight, completely absurd.

It's a weird film, and interesting, and sometimes dumb. But I'll take it.

The Capsule Reviews of October: Part 2

I'll try to do the other new films I watched this week tomorrow. I'm just too tired, you guys.

Grizzly (d, William Girdler) - What can one say about this film, one of the most infamous and egregious Jaws rip-offs, that it doesn't already sort of say about itself while you're watching it? Directed by William Girdler, who would die just two years later in a helicopter crash at the age of thirty, after completing Manitou, one of the weirdest ostensibly mainstream horror films you'll find, Grizzly wears its thieving nature on its sleeve: it stars Christopher George as a park ranger named Michael Kelly who wants his forest shut off to the public until he can catch the apparently 15-foot-tall grizzly bear that recently killed a couple of bathers...er, campers. Attempts to thwart these safety measures come from the park supervisor (Joe Dorsey), who knows that camping means big money. A frustrated Kelly gets help from Allison Corwin, the woman he's courting (Joan McCall) and his employees, as well as from his old buddy, an eccentric naturalist named Arthur Scott (Richard Jaeckel) and Don Stober (Andrew Prine), a helicopter pilot.

So Kelly is Chief Brody, except this time around he's kind of a dick. He's patronizing, condescending, and sarcastic, without the one possible upside of actually being any funny at all. He also seems to suck at his job. After a third person is killed by the bear, Kelly, who we've seen find dead bodies and fret about it, fumes to Allison "There's something I'm not doing!" You mean anything? And if Kelly is Brody, then Scott is both Quint and Hooper -- he has the reckless unpredictability of Quint and the scientific know-how of Hooper, and the oddly prolonged-into-anticlimax fate of, I don't know, somebody in Jaws 2 probably. Which leaves the helicopter pilot to be Hooper again, but a helicopter pilot this time around.

Grizzly is full of stupid shit and clumsiness -- at one point the bear swings his paw savagely at a victim (for a while, the paw is all we see of the animal) in a way, and at a height, that suggests the next thing we see will be a fake head spinning through the air. But instead we see...an arm? The bear knocked somebody's arm off? And later, one of Kelly's park ranger employees, a woman, decides to take a break from looking for a giant killer bear and strip down to her underwear and stand under a waterfall, rubbing water all over her arms, as bathing women in movies so often do. But all I could think about was she didn't bring a towel. She just took off her uniform and piled it in the grass. When she's done bathing, she'll have no way to dry off. What was she planning to do, just put her clothes back on over her soaking wet body??? That is nonsense. In the end, it turned out not to matter, though, because while she was bathing she was murdered by a bear.

The Beast in the Cellar (d. James Kelly) - I'm not sure "festival" is the word I'd use, but this British horror film from 1970 sure is an odd one. Kelly, who like Girdler also died young, only made one more film after this, a thriller called What the Peeper Saw (I can guess!), but what reputation he has seems to rest in this story of a series of murders of soldiers stationed in rural England. Because this is a murder mystery (in theory, if not, finally, in practice) the killings have to be coyly filmed, and therefore, so the thinking apparently went, badly shot. It's all just 1970s shaky-cam, which doesn't become more interesting to watch the second, or third time.

What is interesting about The Beast in the Cellar is the focus on, and the performances by, Beryl Reid and Flora Robson, as a pair of spinster sisters whose bleak family history, and poor judgment stemming from social ignorance, has led to all this. I'm not sure why I'm being cagey about this, since the killer is obvious once you learn that the sisters have a family member imprisoned in their cellar. Bu Reid and Robson are pretty terrific (in Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman says that their commitment is wasted; maybe, maybe not, who can say), and they make the frankly dull murder stuff acceptable because the main business with the sisters is so off-kilter. Ultimately it brought to mind, a bit anyway, another 70s British horror film, Gary Sherman's (an American, but still) Raw Meat, aka Deathline from two years later. Sherman is more of a filmmaker than Kelly was, though. As engaging as the off-beat mood of The Beast in the Cellar can be, it nevertheless dumps the entire plot and motivation behind everything in one monologue that lasts a full fifteen minutes. Cutting that with brief flashbacks and other shit like that can't change the fact that this was probably the worst way to give the audience information possible.

Capsule Reviews for You to Etc.

Scroll down for them.

Crimson (d. Juan Fortuny) - This film, recently released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber, is, I'm afraid I must admit, my first exposure to Eurocult horror star and eventual director Paul Naschy. Most famous for playing a Polish werewolf in a number of films, in Crimson Naschy is billed as the star, but as my friend Richard Harland Smith points out in his commentary track, found on the Blu-ray, and as the film itself confirms, Naschy's character here -- Jack Surnett, a thief shot in the head, non-fatally but only just, by the police as he and his gang race to escape a botched jewelry story robbery -- may be central to the events of the film, but Naschy himself is merely a supporting player. And not even a major supporting player: just about everyone in Crimson is a supporting player, and almost all of them get more screen-time than Naschy.

Naschy is central because these criminals, ruthless though they are, are also loyal, and so they want to save Surnett without alerting the cops. One thing leads to another, and eventually their normal, dipsomaniacal doctor (Carlos Otero) leads them to the brilliant and devoted neuroscientist (Ricardo Palmerola) who, with his wife (Silvia Solar, who after an unspecified lab accident must be her husband's hands)...fixes brains, I guess. Anyway, their experiments are delicate, and they're the only ones under the circumstances who can save Surnett. They need a new brain, so the gang, led by the cold-hearted Henry (Oliver Matot), kill a rival gangster known as The Sadist (Roberto Mauri), so when a portion of The Sadist's brain is glued or whatever onto Surnett's, Surnett, after a while, first recovers, and then goes nuts.

However, the mayhem that ensues, and Crimson has its share, is far less of the Frankenstein's Monster, or Two-Headed Transplant, variety, and more of the gang-war sort. That Naschy's Surnett has been transformed into a tortured psychopath is merely a device to blow the whole thing wide open and bring all these gangsters too their knees. Which is a fun enough series of events to witness, but the film is undeniably dopey -- the head of The Sadist is removed from his body through a goofball train-track scheme that only becomes necessary when one of the gangsters, who we'd seen moments ago with a large knife to be used for decapitation purposes, confesses to have lost the knife. He just lost it.

You could do worse, though, and you could do worse with better filmmakers: see Jean Rollin's Zombie Lake.

(Also included on the Blu-ray is the supposedly more sexually explicit French edit of the film, which is odd because the edit that is being presented by Kino as the preferred cut contains almost no sex at all.)

10 Cloverfield Lane (d. Dan Trachtenberg) - This surprising cousin to 2008's found-footage giant monster movie Cloverfield was released more or less out of the blue earlier this year. Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a young woman whose car crashes on a lonely rural road, and who wakes up in a bomb shelter built by the looming, unnerving Howard (John Goodman), this is basically a three-person thriller -- it's rounded out by John Gallagher, Jr. as the likable good-old-boy Emmett -- that focuses on two things: Winstead's Michelle trying to figure out if Howard's claim that a potentially apocalyptic disaster is currently taking place above ground is legitimate, and what that disaster, should it be real, consists of.

10 Cloverfield Lane both tips its hand about what's up and entices (well, depending on whether or not you liked Cloverfield, which I did) by leaving that for the end. Most of the film, as I've suggested, is comprised of the three characters living underground and trying to come to terms with their situation. Michelle goes from disbelieving Howard to sort of trusting him -- there's evidence he's not wrong. But she never lets herself fully buy into Howard as someone who doesn't pose a danger to her, and this is where much of the film's very effective suspense grows from. And it's quite remarkable how much help three very good actors can give to a film that is certainly well-made, but is not, for much of its length, breaking new ground. But Gallagher, Winstead, and Goodman are all wonderful, with Winstead and Goodman being particularly engaging. Goodman is able to play his character for comedy here and there, but in a way that increases the unease.

Eventually, the plot goes to places that made me actually gasp, if only because things were set up so well, and the timing of the narrative was so correct. And finally, that word "Cloverfield" becomes important, and if that pay-off is somewhat less successful than what happened in the bomb shelter, that doesn't mean it's unsuccessful. And anyway, if any of this is indication that there will someday be another "Cloverfield" movie, then that's good enough for me.

Capsule Reviews For You and For Me

I watched some movies recently and I haven't posted anything in a while. So here we are.

Annabelle (d. John R. Leonetti) - The reaction to this spin-off prequel (I guess) to 2013's massively successful haunted house/possession film The Conjuring was, well I'll just say it, kind of negative. My reaction to The Conjuring was kind of negative, so I feel like everyone else is getting on this elevator on the fifth floor at minimum, but the truth is that while I did not exactly like Annabelle, I don't feel as compelled to hiss and spit at it as many have been. The reason for this is probably simply that Annabelle, while being worse than The Conjuring, isn't that much worse, and actually has one or two effective sequences. Which is nice.

The titular evil doll, which is ostensibly "based" on a "real" "doll", had a cameo in The Conjuring, in a ghost story prologue to the ghost story, in much the same way James Bond movies have a prologue action scene, and Annabelle tells the story of how that doll became so very wicked. Mia and John, a married couple played by Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton is expecting their first child, and Mia is given the doll by John, and then, long story short, a Satanist bleeds on it. But the sequence that leads to that bleeding ain't bad, as far as suspense and such things go. Eventually Annabelle becomes another skim milk pseudo-exorcism movie, one which drags Alfre Woodard into the tedium, and frankly, though I watched the film yesterday, details are draining from my mind even as I write this. So I suppose my point is, The Conjuring had some nice moments too, and I can't really see the difference.

Robinson Crusoe (d. Luis Bunuel) - The last time I watched a Bunuel film that was (mostly) free of his brand of surrealism (and listen, this is a capsule review, I'm not going to try and describe Bunuel beyond that) it was Death in the Garden, his excellent 1956 adventure about the motley survivors of a plane crash in the South American jungle. Now I've finally caught up to his 1954 adaptation of Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, and I'll be darned if the two films aren't somewhat similar! Defoe's story, of course, is about the title character's life alone as the survivor of a shipwreck on an anonymous, secluded island. In Bunuel's film, Crusoe is played by Dan O'Herlihy, previously of Orson Welles's Macbeth and later of Robocop, and unlike contemporary films about lone men struggling to survive, like Castaway and All is Lost, O'Herlihy talks a lot -- to animals, himself, mirages, and in narration as a man who is telling his story from some time in the future. The problem with that being that O'Herlihy is not, to my mind, very good here. He seems to be one of those actors who was most at home existing in his own time -- his version of an 18th century sailor is all ramrod posture, booming voice, and big-eyed mugging when taken by surprise.

However, and you'd think this would be impossible for any film version of Robinson Crusoe to manage, the rest of Bunuel's movie somehow overcomes this. It's the second half when it all really comes alive, sometime around a turning point involving Crusoe's animal companions. This is beautifully sad, and begins a kind of understandable breakdown, the cinematic effectiveness of which must be credited more to Bunuel than O'Herlihy. Bunuel pulls back when O'Herlihy's instinct, I suspect, would have been to go huge. Soon, there are cannibals, Jaime Fernandez arrives as Friday, and the drama and adventure crank way up. It's good stuff.

Genocide (d. Kazui Nihonmatsu) - The Japanese film studio Shochiku boasted a who's who of major filmmakers back in its heyday -- Ozu, Mizoguhi, Kinoshita, etc. -- and, for a brief period in the 1960s they also produced horror films. Only four, as it happened, but they're a goony bunch of movies worth just about anyone's time. That doesn't mean I have to necessarily like all of them, though, 1968's Genocide -- whose director Nihonmatsu would only make one other film, The X from Outer Space, also for Shochiku -- is a deeply frustrating piece of work because by all reason I should love it. A swarm of super bees takes down an American bomber. The three crewmen bail out, and the H-bomb they were carrying goes missing. The action from there takes place on a small island in Japan, in a little seaside town.

So what's up with those bees? everyone asks. Their stings are deadly and hallucinogenic. And what's up with the American woman the married resident bug expert is having an affair with? Plus the American military, what a bunch of jerks, right? Those first two are good questions, but that last one causes some problems. Of all the Japanese films that have been made that deal in some way with World War II but which possibly don't acknowledge the extent of the war atrocities for which that country was responsible, Genocide (and what a title, under these circumstances) has to be the most galling. The Japanese heroes all wonder why anyone should ever wish to wage war, especially these American madmen who've lost their precious atomic bomb. Don't they remember that last war? This "Who, us?" attitude goes so far in its obliviousness that the Holocaust becomes a major plot point, as well as a symbol, yet it's never once mentioned that the Holocaust was perpetrated by Japan's main ally during the war. Nihonmatsu seemed to believe viewers would just accept the notion that Imperial Japan in the 30s and 40s stood by incredulously wondering what the world was coming to. Which is ridiculous, and I won't do it.

Five Came Back (d. John Farrow) - So you I do a horror movie, then I do a movie about survival, then another horror movie, and now look at this, another one about survival! In this one, a small commercial airliner, carrying a small load of about ten passengers and a few crewmen, crashes in the Amazon rain forest on the way to Panama City. One thing and another throws the rescue party off the scent and if the survivors -- including the lovely young Lucille Ball as a woman kind of fed up with everything, Joseph Calleia as a murderer being transported for execution and John Carradine as the man doing the transporting, plus others -- are going to get out alive, they're going to have to do it themselves.

Five Came Back is classic Golden Age filmmaking, and it's also one of the more picked-clean-by-buzzards films you'll see. I don't know how many films before it toyed with the idea of a small group of characters in crisis banding together to form modern society in microcosm, one which brings out the best and worst in people, but this came out in 1939 so there couldn't have been that many, and I doubt there were any better -- there certainly haven't been many better since, although the premise has been put to work dozens of times in subsequent years. Farrow, whose best known film is probably the cock-eyed noir His Kind of Woman with Robert Mitchum, is very elegant in his staging of violence, when it occurs, and he also does a terrific job of making the survivors eventual encampment look both habitable, and like something most of us would want to get away from. On that note, the screenwriters, which include Dalton Trumbo and Nathanael West, pile on the hardships and infuriating (if you have to deal with them, I mean) moral quandaries that eventually separate the good from the bad. In its simple way, Five Came Back is brutally powerful, and finally moving. It packs most things you might want out of a film in 75 minutes. Terrific.

Digging Up the Marrow (d. Adam Green) - And now another horror film! So why am I still watching Adam Green movies? He made his name with Hatchet, one of those intensely violent and horribly knowing, as if this is somehow a plus, slasher comedies from the mid 2000s. Rather than sinking his dreams early, as you might hope would happen, Green now had a career. Four years after Hatchet he made Frozen, no not that one, about three friends stranded on a ski lift. And that one I thought was pretty good. If I watched it today, who knows, but at the time I appreciated that Green winked far less, that he was able to sustain that premise to feature length, and that one character's death, partly due to the performance, actually had an impact. All of this I thought added up to a good sign. But then Green made Hatchet II, which is appallingly shitty beyond all reason. The way my mind works, even though I've ignored Green's cable TV show Holliston and the anthology film Chillerama to which he contributed and which sounds utterly unbearable to me, I'm at the stage with Green where as a discouraged horror fan I think "Let's see what else this prick makes."

Which is called Digging Up the Marrow, and which is Green's first found footage horror film, so that makes you want to poke out your own eyes right there, and which, for a while, seems like a commercial for and misguided celebration of Green's work up to this point. For you see Green plays himself in the film, and he's making a documentary. By way of an introduction we're filled in on Green's credits and his relationship with his fans -- eventually, Digging Up the Marrow, which is partly comedy, will take on that air of self-deprecation the secret goal of which is to puff up its target. So that's obnoxious, but the subject of the "documentary" is William Dekker (Ray Wise), an ex-cop who believes that monsters are real and that he's found where they live. Is he a crackpot? There's a payoff to Green and crew's bumbling investigations, and they take the form of creature designs inspired by the work of artist Alex Pardee.  This, and Ray Wise, make the film worth seeing. Or in the interest of covering my ass, at least make me not regret seeing it. Pardee's work is solidly unusual and his creations generate actual unease. Wise, meanwhile, is wonderful, as he always is, because it doesn't matter what job Ray Wise takes, he's going to make damn sure he shows up for work. So he's a joy to watch. But the found footage thing...it could have life in it, I suppose, if the people who worked within it were willing to take on not just the form's benefits but its limitations, as well. In Digging Up the Marrow it's established that Green has one cameraman, but he edits the film as though he has as many as he needed, because in reality he did. In addition to being lazy and unimaginative, it's frankly insulting.

Collection Project Capsule Reviews: We Knows What We Knows and We Keeps it to Ourselves

From Beyond the Grave (d. Kevin Connor) - This was the last of Amicus's series of anthology horror films, and it's a classic, in its way. I wouldn't claim that From Beyond the Grave is as consistently involving as earlier such films, either by Amicus (like, say, Asylum) or not (Dead of Night, which probably has yet to be beat, in this horror subgenre), but it sticks to a strong and proven formula by pulling its stories from the work of a single horror writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes (Robert Bloch seemed to be Amicus's go-to for this sort of thing, but not here), and gluing everything together with a thin, but still intriguing wrap-around story, which features Peter Cushing as the proprietor of an antiques shop who seems to judge people based on whether or not they wish to talk him down in price. Either way, though, if you buy something from his store, or even plan to buy something, then your goose is most likely cooked.
.

The quality of the stories is a bit sporadic, with the worst coming in the third out of four -- it stars Ian Carmichael as a man who talks Cushing down on a snuff box. As Carmichael leaves the shop, Cushing says "I hope you enjoy snuffing it", which gives a hint that this story is going to be the "funny" one, which was unfortunately part of the routine, more often than not. The gist is that Carmichael now has an elemental hanging around on his shoulder. An elemental is an invisible and malicious spirit, and Carmichael's, upon his return home, tries to murder his wife (Nyree Dawn Porter). They call a clairvoyant (Margaret Leighton), who Carmichael met on the train home, and whose warnings about the elemental were blithely dismissed. Well, now who looks stupid. Leighton is given the sorry role of trying to be funny without having anything actually funny to say, and much of this story, breezy as it is, comes off as a chore. What's strange about it, though, is the ending turns out to actually be quite creepy, shifting from a light-hearted tale of haunting to, in its final moments, one of genuine demonic evil. It's hard to tell if this tonal shift really works, but it's nevertheless appreciated, as it makes From Beyond the Grave's weak middle-to-end pretty bracing, in a chilling sort of way.

.

Meanwhile, the best story, and by far the strangest, comes just before, and it stars Ian Bannen as a sad-sack office worker whose wife despises him. He shows kindness to Donald Pleasance, an old soldier selling a meager trade on the corner, and even seeks to impress the old man by claiming a military past for himself. This lie draws him to Cushing's shop, where he tries to buy a medal to prove his past, and claims, to Cushing, that he's replacing a medal he lost. But he needs a particular certificate to show he's due such a medal, and not having one, can't buy the medal. And he never gets it, but that doesn't stop the curse of Cushing's shop from dragging this already sad man down even further into the weird and blackish world of Pleasance and his daughter (played by Angela Pleasance), a grinning, big-eyed void of a girl who somehow draws Bannen to her, due likely to her general niceness and availability.

.

This one, the Bannen/Pleasance story, is, as I said, quite strange, and beautifully played by Bannen and the two Pleasances. There is something about Bannen that makes him seem particularly undeserving of his fate, and the idea that Cushing's shop might only punish those who've sinned (however small that sin might seem to us) is smashed to rubble here. Cushing's shop is called "Temptations, Limited.", but poor Bannen is tempted only to go outside of his family to find someone who might be nice to him. He just didn't know how deeply within his family the bad blood actually ran.

.

Spider (d. David Cronenberg) - Speaking, as I was recently, about transitional films in the career of David Cronenberg, Spider, his adaptation of the Patrick McGrath novel about a deeply disturbed husk (Ralph Fiennes in the film) newly released from an insane asylum only to find his past rising up to remind him why he was locked up in the first place, strikes me as especially important. If you've read McGrath's novel, you know that it's not entirely lacking in the kind of grotesque imagery that a younger Cronenberg would have made a meal of: for instance, there's a potato that, when you cut it, bleeds, and a jug of milk in which Spider finds a tiny, shriveled, lifeless fetus (he drinks the milk anyway). McGrath has said that when Cronenberg signed on for the film, he was very excited to see how the director would execute some of those images, but Cronenberg fooled everybody by not filming any of it. Instead, Spider is almost relentlessly quiet and patient, because while co-stars Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson, both excellent, kick up a storm playing two or three versions of their characters, every so often in the same scene, Fiennes barely speaks. At least, he barely says anything you can understand, instead communicating largely to himself in whispered mumbles, and scribbling in his diary, in an alien alphabet. His hallucinations are almost functional in that they deal specifically with who he is and why he is where is, and where that is. Cronenberg has stripped away the strong indications of madness McGrath supplied him with, and instead focused on evidence that is somehow both more clear and more obscure.
.

Spider is the kind of story that has a twist, but in this case, instead of rendering what's come before irrelevent, everything seems so much sadder at the end. Fiennes' stunning performance isn't a show-boat "I'm crazy!" piece of acting, but instead so completely removed from general humanity that unless the camera is pointing right at his face or nicotine-stained fingers, you might think he's simply bled out into the background. Cronenberg has dotted the film with a number of strong supporting actors -- such as Lynn Redgrave as Spider's unsympathetic landlady, and John Neville as his eternally fascinated and also-mad fellow tenant -- and has even made room for some of his often ignored humor ("I got a letter today from that Sophia Loren." "Oh, and what did she want?"). But most interesting of all is the realization that Cronenberg's previous film was eXistenZ, which was full of meat guns that shot teeth and fleshy game controllers whose penises you plugged into your spine. With that film, he seems to have washed his early work completely out of his system. I'd say "for better or worse", but Spider is one of his very best films, so I'm not sure there's an answer to give, or a choice to be made.

Capsule Reviews: The Shadow of Something That is Real

.

He Walked by Night (d. Alfred L. Werker/Anthony Mann) - The best film noirs (films noir?) can be broken into two camps. I'm speaking very broadly, of course, but in my view those camps are the doomed, prisoner of fate, dark psychology films like Double Indemnity, and the clipped, hard-bitten police procedurals, like He Walked by Night. This latter film, directed primarily by Anthony Mann after Alfred Werker fell ill, is based on a true story about a former Army radio engineer (Richard Basehart) who, upon his return from WWII, goes on an eclectic crime spree of burglary and robbery. When pinned down, he shows no hesitation about using his gun, and, after killing one police officer and critically wounding another, he shows no remorse afterwards.

.

This film's tight 79 minutes focuses mainly on the police investigation, as led by Capt. Breen (Roy Roberts) and Sgt. Brennan (Scott Brady), with special assistance from a young Jack Webb, as a kind of ballistics expert and technical jack-of-all-trades. But Basehart still stands out in his cold psychopathy, whose desire for money hardly seems to be the driving force behind his crimes, but rather -- and even then only perhaps -- a desire to simply get away with it, no matter what. On the other side, Scott Brady represents the rage of a police force struggling to bring the net (or something with more weight to it) down on the man who killed one of their own, and the whole thing drives along at a relentless pace.

.

He Walked by Night precedes The Third Man by one year, which is not a non sequitor piece of trivia, as Werker and Mann's film climaxes in the vast sewers of Lost Angeles, all shadows, echoing footsteps and gunfire, and wavering flashlight beams, courtesy of John Alton's ever-striking -- but especially so here -- camera work. This needs to be on DVD, like, yesterday.

.

Exposed (d. James Toback) - Toback's third film is a bit of an oddity, as it's made up of one part making-it-in-the-big-city story, and one part political thriller. The fact that these disparate chunks flow together quite smoothly is a testament to Toback's early skill and ambition, which I can't, with much confidence, claim is gone, because I've felt almost no interest in checking out what Toback's been up to since Exposed was released. But if When Will I Be Loved, which I did see, is anything to go by, then, well...

.

In any case, in Exposed Nastassia Kinski stars as a young woman who, after being forced out of college by her desperately lecherous English professor (Toback himself, in a performance that seems to be pretty rich in knowing self-mockery), takes to the streets on New York, trying to make her way. A series of men -- beginning with Toback's professor -- alternately hinder her, offer her help, or lie to her. After James Russo's restaurant owner gives her a waitressing job, Ian McShane's fashion photographer gives her a huge break as a cover model, after which she finds herself being shadowed by a mysterious, and quite frankly creepy, violinist, played by Rudolf Nureyev. They begin an affair, and he confides in her that his mission in life is to kill a particular terrorist who, along with the horror he's showered on dozens, if not hundreds, of innocent strangers throughout Europe, has had a significant, and negative, impact on Nureyev's own life, and that of his family.

.

This terrorist is the last link in Kinski's chain of male experience. Harvey Keitel plays the murderous Left-wing revolutionary, and it's with his appearance that I began to wonder what the film had on its mind, exactly. I suspected that whatever it was, it wasn't entirely political in nature, because while the film clearly doesn't sympathize with Keitel -- the most unambiguously decent man in the whole movie, McShane's photographer, is also the most capitalistic, in that he's rich, and seems to enjoy being so -- it also doesn't have much new to say about people like him. Keitel doesn't even show up until the film has about a half hour to go, and while he and Kinski exchange words about the folly of his way of life, they are fairly trite. They're no less true for that, but it's hard for me to believe that Toback was building towards that moment.

.

Exposed ends with a rush of violence that seems arbitrary, or maybe obligatory is more on target. I don't mean that a scene of violence isn't a natural conclusion for this material, but the scene isn't imagined with much sharpness, and the staging of it is on the bland side. Even so, the film is quite strong overall, and especially involving in the way Toback stitches together the various elements of Kinski's experience. Some might complain that, when the chips are down, she's too passive, and is simply swept along by the wills of these men, but I guess that's life in the big city for you.

.

The Collection Project Film of the Day:

.

The Last Wave (d. Peter Weir) - I'm not sure what kind of status Peter Weir currently enjoys in the hierarchy of living and working film directors, but, while I do know that he's generally admired, I feel confident that he's not admired nearly enough. The Last Wave, Weir's third full-length film, is such a unique blend of social critique -- the subject being white Australian society's casual obliteration of Aboriginal culture -- and apocalyptic horror film that I'm left wishing that, if modern horror filmmakers are going to base their careers on all the films they watched growing up, more of them had watched Weir's early work. Pairing The Last Wave with Weir's previous, obliquely hair-raising masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock, gives you a snapshot of a body of work in the horror genre that would most likely have been extremely formidable. Unfortunately, Weir decided to move away from that world, and make excellent films in any number of other genres.

.

The Last Wave centers on the mysterious death of an Aborigine man who appears to have drowned, after a drunken fight, in a shallow puddle of water. A group of Aborigines are accused of the murder, and admit their guilt. However, their white attorney, David Burton (a very good Richard Chamberlain) wants to base his defense on the idea that the man's death was the result of his breaking of tribal laws, a defense that, if it bore fruit, would strongly effect the sentencing. Because all the men, the accused as well as the victim, are believed to be city people, and not tribal Aborigines (the fact that this is all taking place in Sydney would, alone, seem to indicate this), Burton finds little sympathy for this idea, but he's driven forward, based on scraps of evidence, as well as strange, premonitory dreams involving tribal symbols, one of the accused (ubiquitous Aboriginal actor Gulpilil), and water. Significantly, this is all happening in the midst of massive, endless rainstorms that are thoroughly soaking the entirety of Sydney, in a way that at first seems like a relief that that sun-cracked country, but soon becomes ominous.

.

The Last Wave doesn't revel in the unexplainable in quite the same way Picnic at Hanging Rock does, and this is perhaps to its detriment, but working with a low budget, and therefore unable to falsely pump up his film with special effects, even if he'd been inclined to, Weir brings the same kind of quiet dread and nightmare imagery to The Last Wave as he did to the earlier film, and the overall effect is one of creeping, pervasive unease. Mr. Weir, if you have any interest in returning to your own brand of horror filmmaking, I beg you to do so. We need it badly.

Capsule Reviews of Current-ish Releases!

.

Up in the Air (d. Jason Reitman) - Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner's adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel picked up a huge amount of critical support when it first began playing festivals, but by the end of last year it had come to seem almost forgotten. And I think I can see why. Up in the Air is -- and I have no question about this -- a good movie, with a strong, and unavoidable, dark soul beneath the romantic comedy trappings. The acting is very solid, and George Clooney, even though he occasionally reverts to his comfort zone (which, honestly, is sort of what the whole film is), brings a sharp and genuine sadness to his role as Ryan Bingham, a man whose job -- which is to fire people -- demands that he spend almost his entire life on planes or in airports. Which is, finally, the problem, I believe. Up in the Air is so current, with several references to our country's "climate" of corporate lay-offs, that it's in danger of feeling, a number of years down the line, like a relic. I don't mean to sound overly optimistic -- I'm not, actually -- but instead want to remind everyone that films that manage to successfully capture a time in history often don't do it quite so directly. But boy, that sure sounds like nit-picking, and complaining just to complain, because I did quite enjoy the film, appreciating especially, as I often do, the small touches, such as brief moment between Bingham's two sisters (Amy Morton and Melanie Lynskey), one about to be married, after Bingham is told that he's too late in his offer to walk her down the aisle.

Dorothy Mills (d. Agnès Merlet) - It is my belief that if you're going to make a horror film that goes out of its way to remind its audience of earlier genre masterpieces, you had better have something of your own tucked away that will make your film seem something other than a pale waste in comparison. In Dorothy Mills, the masterpieces being foregrounded are The Exorcist and, to a lesser extent, Hardy and Shaffer's The Wicker Man, films of such stature that I was really rooting for co-writer-director Merlet to unleash something really strange and original. But she doesn't. In this story of a psychiatrist (Carice van Houten, who is very good) who travels to a secluded Irish village to discover why young Dorothy Mills (Jenn Murray) abused a child she was babysitting, most of what we're given to react to is just an abbreviated rehash of what happened in those earlier films, and what is original to Dorothy Mills is, frankly, a little dull. But after the Satanic voice of Mercedes McCambridge spews the vilest of obscenities from young Linda Blair's mouth, hearing the thick country Irish voice of a teenage boy saying "Fuck you" and "Bitch", issuing from a surly teenage girl's mouth, I couldn't help thinking that something more was required from Merlet. I suppose I should be grateful that she didn't decide to try and one-up Friedkin and Blatty in the blasphemy department, and I am, but as the film progressed from The Exorcist to settle into its own story, all I could think of was the great heights of cinematic horror achieved by The Exorcist, and how rapidly I was now descending.

.

2012 (d. Roland Emmerich) - For a film that belongs to a genre that is traditionally perceived to be trashy to be called a "classic of its type", I believe it needs to be well-written. I believe the dialogue should live, and be as effective and as memorable in its own right as whatever more obvious spectacle is being offered up. Here is, in all honesty, what I consider to be the most memorable line of dialogue from 2012: "We have to get on the other side of the freeway!" So that's not good, and I doubt if decades from now 2012 will be considered a classic of its type, although who knows. Off-hand, I can't remember any dialogue from The Towering Inferno, and frankly this whole set of criteria I've set up for this gleefully low-brow genre is starting to sound pretty bone-headed, even to me. Even though, in theory, calling 2012 the "best Roland Emmerich film I've ever seen" is to write a series of words that together mean less than nothing, when I say it in fact, as I shall now do by inference, I actually mean that I did kinda have a good time with this. The all-star cast looks frequently embarrassed (except for John Cusack), and everything about the story is just plumb stupid, but the mayhem is extreme, various, regular and photogenic. If I thought that by spending four dollars to rent the new film by the guy behind Independence Day, I somehow deserved something more than that, then I'd be a fool.