A Horrible Way to Die

Having impressed FrightFesters at last year’s festival, A Horrible Way to Die is now released on DVD and Blu-ray by Anchor Bay. An original take on the serial killer genre, it is seen mostly from the point of view of the former girlfriend of a murderer. After Garrick’s arrest, Sarah is trying to rebuild her life and address her problems, attending AA meetings, where she meets a sensitive young man. When Garrick is released, the film intercuts flashbacks of Sarah and Garrick’s lives together before she found out the truth about him with his journey down to the town Sarah now lives in, and her tentative new romance. Shot in an impressionistic, elliptical style, the film paints a nuanced picture, evoking the tenderness and love Sarah and Garrick shared, making her realisation of his betrayal all the more horrifying. A well-observed, evocative, heartbreaking story, it never feels sensational despite moments of violence, and develops slowly but compellingly, until all the pieces of the puzzle sickeningly fall into place.

Virginie Sélavy

Two-Lane Blacktop

This is an extract from a previous article on Monte Hellman.

It seems remarkable that a major studio like Universal stumped up the cash for what Monte Hellman and producer Michael Laughlin proposed: a road movie in which all the characters have generic names, in which the cars also share the billing as ‘characters’, and in which the proposed competition fizzles out almost as soon as it starts with the competitors effectively helping each other out along the way. Indeed the move from Darwinistic struggle and the survival of the fittest to a programme of cooperation might seem a little belated in 1971. Easy Rider had already dealt with the end of the Summer of Love though with US troops still very much in Vietnam the call for mutual aid was still vital in many minds.

Warren Oates plays ‘G.T.O’, the driver of a yellow ’32 Pard Roadster’ who challenges James Taylor (‘The Driver’) and Dennis Wilson (‘The Mechanic’) in their grey 55 Chevvy to a race across the US from Los Angeles to Washington DC. As the only trained actor, Oates is the perfect foil for the laconicism of the other leads and without him the whole film might have been as grey and serious as the car they drive. Oates’s car, by contrast, is a mixture of schoolboy dream and camp excess and his character is all bluster and pompousness. Along the way they are joined by Laurie Bird (‘The Girl’) and they embark on a trip which, because it is from West to East, deconstructs the impetus towards American myth. Indeed, it’s tempting to see the Chevvy as a demythicised version of Melville’s great white whale, its dull matt grey signifying the end of days rather than the promise of glorious beginnings; it’s a road trip in which ‘nothing’ happens, with the race itself soon becoming something of a red herring.

Jeff Hilson

Troll Hunter

Norwegian monster mockumentary Troll Hunter is released on DVD this month. Here’s an extract from the review we ran for the theatrical release:

Troll Hunter, directed by André Øvredal, follows in the mockumentary footsteps of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity. The odd thing about all those American iterations of the idea (spoof verité footage with a fantastical intrusion from beyond) is how irritating the whiny characters are. Do American filmmakers assume that ‘real people’ are inherently dumb and annoying?

The Norwegians, thankfully, seem fonder of their characters, although admittedly in-depth characterisation isn’t something Troll Hunter concerns itself with. Instead we get understated, deadpan performances, especially from the titular employee of Troll Security Services, Otto Jespersen, an admirably gruff portrayal of a working Joe who decides, more or less on a whim, to blow off the lid of state secrecy concealing from the Norwegian public the existence of gigantic, boulder-eating monsters who can smell the blood of a Christian man…

The trolls themselves are rather splendid: their design is unapologetically comical, with phallic noses and Highland cow fur for the Mountain Kings, and equally gross and cartoony anatomies for the other sub-species we encounter. But the night vision photography and shaky-cam aesthetic allow these preposterous mooncalves to be cunningly incorporated into the surrounding film, making up in photographic verisimilitude what they signally lack in dignity and credibility.

Very handsomely photographed amid spectacular Norwegian scenery, all looming mountains and misty meres, Troll Hunter seems destined for cult status, and its likeable, easy-going approach doesn’t outstay its welcome. Enjoy it before the inevitable sequels and Hollywood remake sully its memory.

David Cairns

Julia's Eyes

This is an extract from the full review we ran for the theatrical release of the film.

Astronomer Julia (Belén Rueda) senses that something is wrong with her twin sister Sara and drives with husband (Lluís Homar) to her house to discover an apparent suicide. Both sisters suffer from a degenerative disease that leads inevitably to blindness, and everyone apart from Julia believes Sara’s more advanced condition caused her to take her life. So Julia begins her own investigation, against the wishes of her husband, seeking out a man her sister was with but whom no one seems to have seen, every step she takes bringing on the stress-induced episodes that reduce her vision more and more…

Julia’s Eyes is fantastically entertaining for about three quarters of its running time and slightly disappointing thereafter. It’s still pretty scary, but never steps outside the confines of what you’d expect from this kind of thing. The splendid sense of menace built up around the shadowy killer is dissipated as their actual nature is revealed, and the last 20 minutes is unnecessarily cluttered with red herrings and dead ends. And don’t get me started on that final bloody scene… Still, it has all the qualities you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro production, it looks and sounds great, Rueda plays Julia with the right mix of vulnerability and defiance, and there must be a fair few out there who’ll be just as swept up by the final reel as I was by the rattling nasty fun preceding it.

Mark Stafford

The Colour of Pomegranates

Sergei Paradjanov’s masterpiece The Colour of Pomegranates comes to UK DVD for the first time. This is an extract from our 2010 feature on Paradjanov:

Inspired by Armenian miniatures and icons, its tableaux slowly evoke – rather than tell – the life of the 18th-century poet and troubadour Sayat Nova. Because of its impressionistic, allegorical approach, many have described the film as non-narrative, but it is, in fact, fairly linear in its storytelling. We see the young poet growing up in a simple, wool-farming community; his time as bard at the court of King Erekle II; his desire for the king’s sister; the loss of this love; his retreat to monastic life; his grief over the death of his mentor, Father Lazarus; and in turn, his own old age and death.

As the troubadour moves towards death, his former muse and childhood self appear among the compositions as he looks back on his life – ‘In the Sun Valley of the distant years, live my longings, my loves and my childhood’ – but the film tends to move forward with few flashbacks. It is more that the linearity becomes lost among the rich symbolism and surrealist touches. As Sayat Nova falls in love with his muse, the beautiful princess at court, Paradjanov introduces interludes of masque and mime artistry as a couple perform a dancing courtship, disappearing and reappearing among hanging woven rugs. The poet’s death is portrayed through a long sequence of allegories: chained workers scything hay; a blindfolded man stumbling through a bleak landscape populated by dancing angels; a swinging pendulum that knocks his childhood self to the ground; the poet laid with arms outstretched among glowing candles as white chickens fall around him. The unique poetry and symbolism of these images can leave the viewer a little disorientated at times – especially those unfamiliar with the traditional culture of the Caucasus – but the opacity somehow adds to the mystery and majesty; and on repeated viewings, the recurring motifs reveal the inner logic of the film and the way that early experiences influenced the elder poet. The colourful woollen yarn, the chaotic farm animals, the literature and the music of his youth informed his artistic conception of the world (‘From the colours and aromas of this world, my childhood made a poet’s lyre and offered it to me’). Sayat Nova’s death scene among the chickens perfectly recalls an exquisitely beautiful scene from earlier in the film, when the child poet lies down on a monastery roof, surrounded by books, pages rustling in the wind, his arms outstretched and staring up at the sky.

Laden with the poet’s suffering and biblical and folkloric symbolism, there is an epic, earnest solemnity to The Colour of Pomegranates; and while such gravity and careful construction could lead to austerity and artificiality, there is also a consuming warmth and sensuality. His effervescent and corporeal sensibility mirrors Pasolini and Fellini more closely than his other mentor, Tarkovsky. The extraordinarily striking actress Sofiko Chiaureli plays the part of both poet and muse, exploring male and female sexuality (Paradjanov was himself bisexual and first imprisoned for a homosexual act with a KGB officer) and the film is joyously abundant with melodic folk music and heightened sounds: the crinkling of books’ pages; the squelch of pomegranate seeds; the dripping of wool dye onto metallic plates; the urgent chirping of bird song. There is almost no dialogue in the film; instead these sounds, intertitles displaying lines from Sayat Nova’s poems and the occasional voice-over convey the message.

The Colour of Pomegranates is an emotionally affecting film and is especially poignant given Paradjanov’s own suffering in prison and the loss of his first wife, who was murdered by her own family after converting from Islam to Christianity. Lost loves and issues of ethnicity, subjects raw to his heart, are treated with immense compassion. And yet, The Colour of Pomegranates is also a film that joyously arouses all the senses: a truly sensory experience without precedent or successor. Paradjanov once said, ‘whoever tries to imitate me is lost’. Given the unique, mystifying, enigmatic visions he sets before the viewer, imitation would be frankly impossible.

Eleanor McKeown

La jetée

Optimum are releasing a Chris Marker double bill on one DVD, La jetée (1962) + acclaimed travelogue Sans soleil (1983). This is an extract from our previous article on La jetée:

Chris Marker describes his work La jetée (1962) as a photo-roman in the opening titles. This apt form is used to tell a fragmented story of love, memory and abstracted time travel. Marker optically printed black and white photographs onto cine-film and added a narrator and sound effects for this 28-minute piece. Often mentioned, there is one fleeting moment of moving image in the film, which originated on 35mm and acts as a punctum to the still images. It is difficult to say what Marker’s film is and what it isn’t, as it is so open, but the photo-roman form allows for a very particular and illuminating relationship with the content.

‘The man’ in La jetée is a prisoner some time after the Third World War in Paris. The victors have colonised underground galleries to escape the upper world riddled with radioactivity. A group of military scientists are running experiments in their search for an emissary into the future who can return with resources to ensure the well-being of the human race. The man is haunted by a childhood memory of a woman at the end of the main jetty at Paris-Orly airport and of a man being shot as he walks to meet the woman. The scientists, judging he is of robust enough mind to visualise the past in this way believe he can endure the trauma of visualising the future.

Within the story, the man doubts whether the pictures in his mind are dreams, memories or visual derivations of stories he knows. The narrator tells us: ‘Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments.’ The narrator directs us through this photo-montage and suggestions are made as to what we are looking at, but what the viewer understands to be a memory could be a real-time event, real time could be an implant, memory could be a dream. The man is also disorientated and a strong theme of doubt emerges.

Marker suggests there is always a greater power watching over our being; within the narrative of the film this is the apocalyptic victors. Indeed, the film reflects on the subjugation of the individual to superstructures, I don’t think it is a coincidence that the film was made in the same year as the Cuban Missile Crisis, arguably the height of the Cold War.

The dilemma, typical to the genre, of freedom of the imagination versus the institutions and structures that aim to limit our minds is taken on by Marker in La jetée. This dynamic resonates in both the content of the film and in its form. The photo-roman form, however, breathes air into these themes of restriction. Marker trusts in the viewer’s capacity to fill in the gaps between the still images, and to me this is the work’s overarching power. While commenting on the possibility for mind control, ultimately, La jetée offers an alternative.

Nicola Woodham

Don't Look Now

Fundamentally, Don’t Look Now is a dirty film; a film of spreading red stains, of dripping liquids, of mud and blood and breaking glass. It is a messy examination of entropy: things fall and fall apart and we try to restore what can’t be repaired and recover what has already been irretrievably lost. And this filthiness comes with the city of Venice. When we first see Venice (aside from a brief shot of the sunlight through the slats of the Venetian blinds), we are in a trench with John Baxter, the bereaved architect played brilliantly by Donald Sutherland. He is supervising the restoration of a church and the workmen are drilling into the foundation, the petrified forest of the city’s substrata. ‘Tutto marcio,’ the disgruntled Baxter tells the Italian worker. ‘It’s all rotten.’ In a crucial change to the Daphne du Maurier short story, John Baxter and his wife Laura are not holidaying in Venice, rather he is working. Venice, for Baxter, is a building site, and not a good one. The church, San Nicolò dei Mendicoli (Saint Nicholas of the Beggars), has an unassuming, perhaps beggarly exterior, and (in a city that is almost all façade) has no great façade. Tucked away in an unvisited corner of Venice, not far from the prison at Santa Marta, the church was in the process of being renovated in 1973, providing Roeg with the scaffolding he needed. Roeg’s Venice is a wintry, dirty workaday city; a city of hospitals, police offices and off-season hotels. It is a city with a rat problem (still very much the case), a city of lost gloves on windowsills and a baby doll abandoned on the steps down to the canal. In the final funereal shot of the film, we see a huge pile of bin bags in the background, also awaiting disposal.

John Bleasdale

Cold Fish

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Sion Sono’s follow-up to the extraordinary Love Exposure (2009) is another long and convoluted tale, but without the scope and exuberance of the preceding film; rather, it seems to be a return to the dark spirit of Suicide Club (2001), with its provocative, inventive gore and an enigmatic, oblique approach to meaning.

Cold Fish charts the descent of the meek Shamoto, owner of a small exotic-fish shop, into violence and madness after an unfortunate encounter with the brash and ruthless Murata, owner of a much bigger rival fish store. The mechanics of Murata’s manipulation and Shamoto’s gradual breakdown are superbly observed, the indication of the date and time of each unfolding event adding to the sense of an implacable mechanism at work. The direction is controlled and well-paced, although the film does feel overlong. The story is based on a real-life crime, known as the ‘Saitama serial murders of dog lovers’. Sono has transferred it to the world of tropical fish retailing, which adds to the surreal quality and visual beauty of the film, thanks in part to the multi-coloured exotic fish and immersive aquarium atmosphere of Murata’s enormous shop.

It is an uncompromising film, with no chance of the redemption glimpsed in Love Exposure, but it is a triumphantly unhinged achievement from an intelligent and profoundly individual filmmaker, who clearly delights in darkness.

Virginie Sélavy

Watch the trailer:

Blood Simple

Undeniably one of the most colourful films on offer this month, Zhang Yimou’s Blood Simple is a remake of sorts of the Coen Brothers’ 1984 debut. Moving the action to northern China in the imperial age, the film follows Ni Dahong, the owner of a noodle shop in the middle of the desert, who pays a killer to murder both his unfaithful wife and her squeamish lover. It’s a shame that the banal slapstick and oddball jokes that Zhang decided to employ instead of the black humour of the original inevitably turn his ambitious venture into a comic farce as the plot rolls on, and it is only in the film’s showdown that he manages to get back on solid ground. There are plenty of things wrong with this film, including the wildly varied and exaggerated acting on display, but Blood Simple is nonetheless a visual treat throughout, from the luridly coloured landscapes and floral costumes to the film’s deft cinematography that are clear reminders of Zhang’s earlier work.

Pamela Jahn

Rubber

Quentin ‘Mr Oizo’ Dupieux’s gamble of making a serial-killer thriller with a tyre in the role of the psychopath had Electric Sheep salivating in anticipation. It starts well, opening with a US cop in the desert warning spectators armed with binoculars that sometimes there is ‘no reason’ for what happens in films. Their entertainment programme begins when a tyre thrown away in the desert comes back to life and starts exterminating the animals in its path, blowing them up with the sheer force of its evil vibrations. So far so good, but all the deaths follow exactly the same pattern, so that it soon becomes very repetitive. Inventive cruelty is one of the essential ingredients of a good horror film and it is sorely lacking here. The tension and terror one could hope for fail to materialise, and it isn’t imaginatively surreal enough to hold the audience’s attention. A great idea, but ultimately a disappointingly underwhelming experience.

Virginie Sélavy