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Touch of Evil

Touch of Evil 4
Touch of Evil

Format: Cinema

Release date: 10 July 2015

Distributor: BFI

Director: Orson Welles

Writer: Orson Welles

Based on Badge of Evil by: Whit Masterson

Cast: Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles

USA 1958

110 mins

Notoriety has long swirled around Touch of Evil, Orson Welles’s 1958 film noir, a box-office failure in the US that famously ended his Hollywood career. But it has since become much admired for its often emulated long take, which masterfully introduces us to the dusty town on the Mexican border in which the story is set.

In the dramatic opening scene, we see a bomb placed underneath a convertible, before the camera pulls away to soar over the streets of the town, following not only the movements of the car, but also the newlyweds whose lives are about to be derailed when the bomb explodes on the American side, killing a local construction magnate and a strip club dancer. The scene is beautifully orchestrated, with stunning sound design. Music pours out of the bars that the couple stroll past, the sound of guitars and jazz flowing into rock and roll, evoking the sultry, sweaty streets of the south, adding a risqué, decadent feel that is echoed throughout the film.

The murder pits two very different law enforcement officers against each other. Vargas (Charlton Heston) is the newly married, upstanding man who’s successfully targeted one of the biggest drug gangs in Mexico; Quinlan, overweight, dishevelled, puffy-eyed, is the revered cop who never fails to get his man, even if it means breaking the law, his convictions based ‘on intuition, rather than fact’. The murder victim is barely relevant to the unfolding plot; rather, the killing is the catalyst that turns the crime thriller into a dark, brooding meditation on good versus evil.

Caught in the middle is Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh), who becomes a victim of both Quinlan and the Mexican gang, who are now on the same side in their war against Vargas. The crime family is led by the unassuming, overweight Joe Gardi (Akim Tamaroff), who has a gang of young thugs in black leather jackets to carry out his dirty work. Susan starts out as a tough broad in pearls and cashmere sweater, but when they hound her in a deserted motel she’s no match for them. In a twisted party scene, the threat of sexual violence, with its racial undertones, pulsates to the sound of the rockabilly music piped through the motel.

Touch of Evil deserves to be watched multiple times, not for the story, but to absorb its brilliance and audacity. The cinematography is a work of art, a virtuoso example of the noir aesthetic, using angles and lighting to heighten the tension. Quinlan looms above the camera, the sweat on his meaty face almost palpable. In one shot his menacing shadow, thrown up against a wall, stalks Vargas as he walks away down a dark road. When Gardi meets his fate, the camerawork and editing are dizzying, the tension and drama escalated by the screeching jazz horns.

There are some weaknesses in the performances by Heston (ignoring the fact that he is, of course, not Mexican) and Leigh, though Marlene Dietrich as the fortune teller who predicts Quinlan’s demise is seductive as always. Joseph Calleia also deserves mention as the tragic sergeant devoted to Quinlan, who will later pay a horrible price. While there is undoubtedly a hint of the B-movie at times, it’s a masterpiece of the noir genre, one of the last true great films of that era, and a fantastic turn by Welles.

Creative control of the film was taken away from the director by Universal, who released a botched version of the film; after seeing it, Welles penned a 58-page memo detailing his desired changes. In 1998, it was re-cut by editor and sound designer Walter Murch, who tried to incorporate as many of Welles’s instructions as possible. It’s a thing of beauty.

Sarah Cronin

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The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)

The Human Centipede 3
The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)

Format: Cinema

Release date: 10 July 2015

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment/ Monster Pictures

Director: Tom Six

Writer: Tom Six

Cast: Dieter Laser, Laurence R. Harvey, Eric Roberts, Bree Olsen, Tom Six

USA 2015

100 mins

So farewell then, the Human Centipede, our time together was brief, yet far too long, and frankly I wish we hadn’t gotten quite so intimate. The THC trilogy are/were a perfectly perfect modern phenomenon, in that they were so successful as an internet meme and clickbait talking point that the actual films themselves seem surplus to requirements. The central idea broke through into comedians’ routines, spawned a South Park episode and a porn parody, and weaved its way into pub (if not dinner party) conversation and water cooler chatter. In short, it became a thing, and a thing that even people who don’t like that sort of thing became aware of. That three features have been whipped up from an idea you could explain during a one-stop bus ride is some kind of malign miracle.

If you must catch up with the actual series, part three is set in an American prison, being run, badly, by Warden Bill Boss and his accountant Dwight Butler, played by Dieter Laser and Lawrence R. Harvey, the stars of the first and second films. Given a deadline to improve matters by Governor Hughes (Eric Roberts) Boss is eventually convinced by Butler that they should take inspiration from the Human Centipede films and convert the riotous prisoners into one long alimentary canal. The plot takes a good while to get to where it’s clearly getting to, and is, in any case, mainly there to provide a series of depravities along the way before we get to the 500-person’ ’pede final act. So we get a pen-knife castration, a boiling water-boarding, a gunshot execution via a stoma hole, some light cannibalism and the various indignities inflicted upon the warden’s secretary Daisy (Bree Olsen), all of which would be a lot more offensive if it weren’t carried out by Dieter Laser as Boss in probably the most grotesquely mannered scenery-gargling performance ever committed to film. His stratospherically over-the-top gurning ensures that we can’t take any of this gleeful obscenity remotely seriously, and his mangled German/American syntax makes much of his gratuitously profane dialogue indecipherable. Anybody sharing screen time with him is left the quandary of whether to follow his lead or to go low key and restrained in order to effect some kind of balance; mostly they look a little startled that he’s doing whatever he’s doing.

But the idea that anybody so clearly eye-rolling bugfuck insane and obnoxiously undiplomatic would be put in charge of anything is absurd from the outset, and we are clearly in the realm of the absurd here. If the Final Sequence has any ambition beyond making you want to toss your cookies it’s as a sledgehammer satire on the politics of the U.S. of A.: the prison is named after Dubya, there is lots of business with flags and eagles, the suffering detainees prominently feature Muslims, Blacks and Native Americans, and there are plentiful shots of orange jumpsuit-clad prisoners being tortured, all with the take-home message being that any atrocity is permissible here as long as it upholds the bottom line. It’s not subtle.

The other theme taking up a lot of screen time in the third Human Centipede film is, um, The Human Centipede. The second film had Harvey’s nebbishy Martin Lomax becoming inspired by the first film to create his own monster, this one opens with Boss and Butler watching the first two. Thereafter most of the characters are required to voice an opinion on the THC films, generally positive, though another screening to the inmates is clearly regarded by them as cruel and unusual punishment and results in a riot. It’s as if Tom Six can’t imagine a viewing of his films as anything other than a life-changing obsessive experience or at least provoking strong reactions for or against. This strain peaks in this film with a cameo by Mr Six, playing himself, in arsehole uniform of mirror shades and linen suit, approving Mr Butler’s proposal as long as he can watch. Six has enough self-awareness to depict himself throwing up when confronted with the reality of his ideas, and I’m sure there are some who’ll find all this meta business playful and diverting. But the net result is that you have a 102-minute film written by, and starring, Tom Six, in which everybody onscreen keeps banging on about the work of Tom Six. I think the phrase I’m looking for is ‘Christ, dude, get over yourself’.

Where Six is going to go after this is anybody’s guess, there’s a peculiar European flavour and sensibility to the trilogy that might develop into something, though it’s often buried beneath the other business. The film kinda works on its own terms, it sets out to be disgusting and succeeds, and to criticise it along those lines would be a fruitless endeavour. It seems more valid to point out that it is oddly paced, stilted and set-bound, that Laser should have been reined in, and that we spend an awful lot of time in Boss’s office and not much with the prisoners. I can’t help wishing the dialogue was better, and with the meat and potatoes set-ups here I’m not entirely convinced he knows what he’s doing behind a camera. But hey, it pulls itself together a bit for the last act, and delivers what anybody renting, streaming or buying something called The Human Centipede 3 would want to see. He clearly has no problem coming up with foul ideas, his main claim to fame is that he has come up with an idea that’s just that bit more repellent than everybody else’s. The problem being that, like the human centipedes in all three films, once created they don’t actually go anywhere or do much other than die. I’m pretty sure that a fair proportion of the audience want to see the group creature go on a rampage that just never happens, damnit. Ah well, in my review of the first outing I voiced my regret that the creators didn’t break out the spangly top hats and canes for an unforgettable musical finale. This time I couldn’t help wishing that, in collision with another internet meme set in a prison yard, we could have had a synchronised routine to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. If you’re listening, Tom, that’s not a call for part four.

The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) is released in the UK on Blu-ray, DVD and VOD on 20 July 2015 by Monster Pictures.

Mark Stafford

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The Look of Silence

The Look of Silence
The Look of Silence

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 June 2015

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

Denmark, Indonesia, Norway, Finland, UK 2014

98 mins

‘Once I brought a woman’s head to a Chinese coffee shop.’

‘If we didn’t drink human blood we’d go crazy. Many went crazy, they killed too many people. To stop it you have to drink your victims’ blood.’

‘So we fished him out and killed him by cutting off his penis.’

Time and time again in The Look of Silence we are in the company of old men, normally sat in the most mundane settings, wood-panelled living rooms and cluttered gardens, as they blithely spout the most horrible and twisted things you will ever hear. They are reminiscing about their part in the mass slaughter of loosely defined ‘communists’ in 1965 in Indonesia. And they are generally unconcerned about talking about the catalogue of horrors that they took part in, because the powers that sanctioned the slaughter are still in control.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up/companion piece to his extraordinary documentary The Act of Killing does not disappoint on any level, least of all in its evocation of gobsmacking weirdness and horror existing just below the everyday. It’s a leaner, shorter piece of work than The Act of Killing, and while it lacks the central innovation of that film – the phantasmagorical genre-movie reconstructions that were set up to extract confessions from the killers – it benefits hugely from a tighter focus, this time on Adi, born after the killings to mother Rohani and father Rukun, and considered by Rohani to be a replacement for her son Ramli, who was brutally murdered in 65. Adi is the son she needed to have as a reason to keep on living, and the film follows his journey as he pieces together what happened, confronting those responsible for his brother’s death, occasionally using his position as an optician to get close to them, and asking the questions that his country clearly doesn’t want asked.

The responses to Adi’s questions range from a kind of shrugging ‘well, that’s just how it was’ to excuses that the communists deserved it because they didn’t pray enough, to not-so-veiled threats that stirring all this stuff up will lead to it happening again. There’s an ever present double-think at work here, a sense of something undigested and unhealthy. The killers of 65 flick peace signs and thumbs up as they pose for photographs by the river that was once filled with dismembered corpses (‘after it was over nobody would eat fish or clams’). They’ve made picture books about what they did (‘I illustrated it myself’). They follow the official line that hacking people to death was for the good of the country, but there’s a squirming evasiveness to their responses (‘I don’t like deep questions’) and an anger that Adi is talking about all this old news. Families in 2012 aren’t too receptive to the knowledge that, 40-odd years back, Grandpa used to cut women’s breasts off. There’s a lot of denial and obfuscation, and the kind of sick politics that can lead to someone saying ‘let’s all just get along, like the military dictatorship taught us’.

All the while Oppenheimer quietly observes, juxtaposing the most appalling revelations with tranquil shots of lush, photogenic scenery, emphasising a dreamy disconnection between then and now. Music is kept to a minimum, and barring the opening text on screen, there is no overt editorialising. This approach is mirrored in Adi, who has plenty of reasons to be angry, but never fulminates or rages, and is a model of quiet dignity throughout; he is persistent but never confrontational or accusatory, in a climate where it is doubtless unwise to be so.

As with The Act of Killing, many of the crew are credited as ‘anonymous’, and it becomes obvious that members of Adi’s family were unwilling to appear on screen. The film asks what happens to a country that’s unable to look itself in the mirror, what the scars are from this trauma. We see Adi’s parents, both over 100, Rohani stoic, but still feeling the pain of the loss of Ramli, Rukun lost in dementia, believing he’s 17, and see a parallel. We see people clearly afraid to repeat what they know to be true, and others clinging to lies they want to believe. In this context, the daughter of a killer who makes an attempt, no matter how gauche and inadequate, to reach out to Adi, and pray for his forgiveness, is a glorious exception.

Thoughtful, beautiful, upsetting, magnificent, it’s a film you’ll chew over for days, and weeks, afterwards. A film you’ll leave in silence.

Mark Stafford

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Freaks

Freaks 1
Freaks

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 June 2015

Distributor: Hollywood Classics / Metrodome

Director: Tod Browning

Writer: Tod Robbins

Based on the story: Spurs by Tod Robbins

Cast: Wallace Ford, Lila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Henry Victor, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles

USA 1932

64 mins

Few films fit into the category of ‘cult film’ quite as well as Tod Browning’s controversial masterpiece, Freaks (1932). Due to its use of real freak show performers and its ‘unwholesome’ themes, the film was almost universally reviled by critics and audiences alike. Already a major director thanks to a string of silent horror hits and the classic talkie version of Dracula (1931), Browning never recovered. His handful of post-Freaks films were hampered by the limitations of the Motion Picture Production Code or suffered extensive studio interference, like 1935’s Mark of the Vampire, and the director finally retired in 1939.

For modern viewers the idea of using real-life genetic anomalies and the disabled in a horror film would seem at the very least tasteless and exploitative; even in Browning’s day it was considered excessive. But from the outset it is clear that the ‘freaks’ are not the horror content here; this is not like the later Rondo Hatton films, where Hatton’s deformities were intended to shock and horrify, made synonymous with villainy and violence. Instead Browning – who spent part of his youth working in a circus and befriended many of the performers – shows us these people in their everyday lives, focussing on their relationships. Although the sight of a man with no arms and legs lighting a cigarette by himself (apparently, the original cut featured him rolling the cigarette too) is certainly bizarre, it’s not presented as ridiculous or amusing.

The only characters given a negative presentation in Freaks are the film’s villains, seductive trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) and her lover, strongman Hercules (Henry Victor). Together they hatch a plan for Cleopatra to marry little person Hans (Harry Earles) – and then murder him for his sizeable inheritance. When the other performers realise that Cleopatra has a murderous agenda, they punish her and Hercules in a terrible fashion. There are other subplots, most obviously the developing romance between Venus (Leila Hyams, Island of Lost Souls) and clown Phroso (Wallace Ford), but Cleopatra’s scheme is the main focus of the film. Even given the film’s short, 60-minute running time (the full 90-minute cut is now considered lost), there isn’t quite enough story here, and the pacing is quite slow.

However, the two key scenes are more than memorable enough to outweigh any minor flaws. The first is the notorious wedding feast (never entirely comfortable with sound pictures, Browning prefaces the scene with a silent-style title card). The assembled troupe try and accept Cleopatra into their community, only to see her flirting outrageously with Hercules and drunkenly giving vent to her true feelings about the ‘dirty, slimy freaks!’ Even more effective is the climactic storm scene, as the troupe of knife-wielding performers slowly descend upon Cleopatra and Hercules. Their actual punishment is not shown; Browning intended to have the strongman castrated, but (unsurprisingly) that did not make it into the final cut. Freaks is not easy viewing, or a pleasant film, but it is far more sensitive than the title would suggest. With the equally controversial Island of Lost Souls, it’s one of the strongest, most memorable horror films of the pre-Code era.

Jim Harper

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Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight)

Falstaff 1
Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight)

Format: Cinema

Release date: 1 May 2015

Distributor: Mr Bongo Films

Director: Orson Welles

Writers: William Shakespeare (adapted by Orson Welles)

Cast: Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Jeanne Moreau

Spain 1965

121 mins

Falstaff (aka Chimes at Midnight, as it also known) is an amalgam of two Shakespeare plays (Henry IV Parts One and Two) edited by Welles to bring the character of Sir John Falstaff to the fore. Sir John is one of Prince Hal’s ‘dissolute crew’, a witty but amoral figure of fun who keeps the young wastrel Prince of Wales from the serious business of helping his father rule.
Orson Welles’s obsession with Shakespeare went back a long way. He made film versions of Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952); staged plays many times, including his famous voodoo Macbeth in Harlem in 1936 and Chimes at Midnight, first staged in 1960. Welles even claimed to have played Falstaff in a high school production.

Falstaff was a labour of love. Unsurprisingly Welles felt a great affinity for the character whose ‘means are very slender and waist is great’. A man who lies, embellishes and cheats his way through life. He is a corpulent braggart living on credit or hare-brained money-making schemes, and yet he is well-loved and always entertaining – a great storyteller, exaggerator, witty raconteur and self-delusional optimist. It is as if Welles had been preparing for this role his whole life. If films can really be judged on how personal an expression of their author they are, then Falstaff stands supreme in the Welles canon.

Even the story of how Welles obtained the funding for his project seems like a scheme for a modern day Falstaff. Welles had claimed he could shoot two films at the same time using the same cast, crew, and sets whenever possible. For this BOGOF bargain his Spanish investors would get an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (with Welles as Long John Silver) and Falstaff. However, Welles’s focus was clearly on the Shakespeare film. He went as far as building a set for the Treasure Island tavern with the hope of placating the financiers and even spent a day filming sailing ships. But in the end Welles struggled to complete the one film, partly through illness (Welles was hospitalised with a gall bladder infection) and partly through the difficulties in scheduling the cast. Scenes were shot according to availability with actors playing alongside stand-ins. The film’s slightly odd montage sequences of close-ups and reaction shots are due to the fact that the cast were rarely on set together.

The finished film is a messy affair with many technical flaws that can be rather disconcerting. There are continuity errors throughout and the post-synced dialogue never quite matches the movement of the lips. Much, if not all, of the dialogue seems to have been recorded this way. Welles, in typical fashion, overdubbed some of non-English speaking actors himself. Another flaw is Welles’s trademark sonorous voice that here renders Shakespeare’s lines somewhat unclear. Fortunately Keith Baxter (Hal) and especially John Gielgud (King Henry) give the lines the clarity and rhythm they deserve.

Despite all this there is much to admire in Falstaff. The Welles style developed in Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil is still much in evidence. Chiaroscuro lighting is again used to great effect as is composition in depth and those dramatic low camera angles. The Battle of Shrewsbury is a wonderful set-piece and perhaps the film’s highlight. It is a fast moving montage sequence with the camera in close with the swinging swords, the falling bodies and the mud. The camera seems more involved in the fight than the cowardly Falstaff, who hides among the bushes or plays dead.

In Shakespeare’s plays, Falstaff largely provides comic relief although with greater depth of character than a Bottom or Malvolio. However, Welles’s performance is somewhat lacking in humour (he was never known for his ability as a comedian) and his rumbling voice adds gravitas to the role. With the focus away from Prince Hal’s growth towards kingship and skewed towards Falstaff, the narrative is one of decline and fall. Welles has created for Shakespeare another tragedy, ending in heartbreak and death.

Paul Huckerby

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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 April 2015

Distributor: Curzon Film World

Director: Roy Anderson

Writer: Roy Anderson

Cast: Nisse Vestblom. Holger Andersson, Viktor Gyllenberg, Lotti Törnros

Sweden, Germany, Norway, France 2014

101 mins

Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence initially seems to take its title rather literally: a man stands in the midst of glass display cases in some sort of natural history museum, musing on the taxidermy contained within. But the title is actually inspired by Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Hunters in the Snow, in which pigeons perch above the heads of the men below. The birds are observers, here reflecting on the characters whose lives are laid bare throughout the series of vignettes that comprise the final film in Andersson’s trilogy, which began with Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living.

Our introduction to the pigeon aside, the film begins at the end, with a few scenes concerned with mortality, poking fun at some of the absurdities endured by both the victim and their remaining loved – or unloved – ones. They are some of the mostly blackly humorous vignettes in the film, before it trains its eye again on the living, and the moments that make up day-to-day existence – and, in the big picture, humanity itself. But for Andersson, there is little sentimentality; rather life is surreal yet banal, at times painful and unfulfilling. Mercifully, this bleakness is often relieved by the subtlety of his humour, which permeates the film.

If Pigeon has protagonists, it is the two travelling salesmen who peddle their outdated and unwanted novelty items from a beaten-up suitcase. They are tragic, morose figures, whose paths intersect with those of other unhappy souls, most surreally with that of the young King Charles XII, who is on his way to the Russian front. There is a flamenco teacher in love with her much younger student; an official-looking man with a briefcase, who waits in vain for a meeting that never seems to occur; an elderly, deaf man who sits by himself in a bar, drinking vodka, reliving the past (cue a surprising musical number). Themes are threaded through the vignettes, with snatches of dialogue repeated by different characters in different situations, suggesting a common humanity regardless of circumstance. There are ever more absurd, puzzling and sometimes perplexing and disturbing moments; in a mere 90 minutes, Andersson covers the gamut of human emotions, distilling them into their basest forms.

The vignettes are framed as tableaux, the stationary camera forcing the audience to observe events at a distance, rather than allowing viewers to form any kind of closer connection with the players on the screen. The actors, powder thick on their faces, have a deathly pallor. Everything is washed out, creating a strange world infused with a limited, 70s-like palette. Though Andersson probes the intimate elements of his characters’ lives, he does so at a physical remove that can become frustratingly alienating.

With so many vignettes, it’s perhaps inevitable that there are the occasional mundane moments. Still, Andersson’s distinct way of looking at the world is undeniably unique, wistful, thoughtful and provocative.

Sarah Cronin

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The Town That Dreaded Sundown

The Town that Dreaded Sundown
The Town that Dreaded Sundown

Format: Cinema

Release date: 17 April 2015

DVD release date: 17 August 2015

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Writer: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

Cast: Addison Timlin, Veronica Cartwright, Anthony Anderson, Gary Cole, Ed Lauter

USA 2014

86 mins

Charles B. Pierce‘s The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) was an independent exploitation film that purported to tell the story of the true crime case of ‘the Phantom Killer’, who committed a brutal series of murders in the town of Texarkana, on the border between Texas and Arkansas, in 1946. The film is mainly discussed today as a proto-stalk-and-slash movie, one of those films, like Bob Clark‘s Black Christmas (1974), that came within a gnat’s hair of the winning formula of Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), but not quite… In the case of Sundown, Pierce gave us a masked killer and a body count structure, with gruesome deaths by gun, knife, and, notoriously, trombone slide, but couldn’t supply the payback climax or the final girl, for the good reason that the actual phantom killer was never caught, he simply stopped, leaving fear and mystery behind him.

If Pierce‘s film could be said to have been ahead of the pack, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s new version would appear to be tardy to the party, arriving long after every other slasher movie of the 70s has been remade, to varying degrees of worthlessness. This time, it’s Halloween 2008, in Texarkana and Jami (Addison Timlin) feels uncomfortable at a pop up drive-in screening of… The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Her date gallantly drives them off to ‘park’, but they are attacked by a hooded, gun-toting maniac, a copycat phantom who only lets her live to send a message and tell the world that he’s back. Thereafter other murders occur, following the pattern laid down in ’46 (or the movie version thereof), the town grows more and more paranoid and hysterical, the Texas Rangers are called in, and Jami begins her own investigation, alongside local archive nerd Nick (Travis Trope), convinced the murders of ’46 hold the key to the killings around her…

Sundown ’14 is, for most of its running time, considerably more fun than it should be. A fizzy, unhealthy concoction brought to us by the people behind Glee, American Horror Story, Sinister and the Paranormal Activity franchise. It looks handsome, and as with all the grindhouse remakes, clearly has fancier technical resources to hand than its progenitor. It moves at a fair clip, the small town weirdness is well realised, camerawork and editing are lively and inventive, and it always helps to have the likes of Gary Cole and Veronica Cartwright filling out your cast. Moreover the victims are actually sympathetic characters for a change, rather than the parade of obnoxious ‘types’ that normally populate this branch of cinema these days, neatly established in swift tabloid strokes, and including a rather sweet, nervous, first-time gay couple.

It’s made texturally and textually more interesting by the presence of the ’76 film effectively haunting this one. It pops up, looking faded, bleached out, and rather shonky, on screen after screen, and almost subliminal blips of it are inserted into the edit. Further, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s script has all kinds of meta-games to play: we have Pierce’s son as a character, and even see the 70s film crew in one travelling shot. Most amusingly we have Anthony Anderson as ‘Lone Wolf’ the Texas Ranger realising, upon viewing Sundown for the first time, that he has parroted the dialogue of Ben Johnson, who played the character in the original. There is a theme running of how real life gets turned, over time, into stories, the past never lets go, and of how the Phantom Killer becomes the Boogey Man.

[SPOILER ALERT]

All good nasty fun, so it’s a pity that the makers turned for the finale to the Kevin Williamson Scream sequel model of ‘whodunnit’ reveal and final girl payback. For one thing, the ‘whodunnit’ reveal at the climax of a slasher movie always felt surplus to requirements to me, like being tasked with doing a crossword puzzle at the end of a rollercoaster ride. All the running and screaming suddenly gives way to discussions of identity and motivation that seem absurdly Scooby Doo. For another, the climax plonks the remake firmly into a run-of-the-mill stalk-and-slash model when, for a while there, it seemed smarter than that. So, entertaining enough, but a little disheartening. The modern drive-in won’t allow for ambiguity, and it’s not over until somebody gets ‘empowered’. Ah, for the 70s, where violence was always degrading…

Mark Stafford

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Lost River

Lost River
Lost River

Format: Cinema

Release date: 10 April 2015

Distributor: Entertainment One

Director: Ryan Gosling

Writer: Ryan Gosling

Cast: Iain De Caestecker, Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan, Matt Smith, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn

USA 2014

95 mins

In the largely deserted, rotting metropolis of Lost River, single mother of two Billy (Christina Hendricks) is two months behind on the payments that will stop the house she loves from being destroyed. Desperate, she confronts the new bank manager Dave (Ben Mendelsohn) about her situation, only for him to offer her employment at his nightclub, a strange burlesque/grand guignol establishment. She becomes a performer, but the increasingly forceful Dave keeps pressing for her to work downstairs, where the real money is to be made. Meanwhile her eldest son, Bones (Iain de Caestecker), is also deep in trouble, as his ‘work’ stripping copper from abandoned buildings brings him into conflict with local psycho Bully (Matt Smith*). He is torn between fleeing the city and staying for the sake of his mother, and for his burgeoning romance with neighbour Rat (Saiorse Ronan), who tells him that Lost River has been cursed, and that there is a way to break that curse.

Part modern American austerity drama, part neo-noir crime flick, part ‘hero’s journey’quest, Ryan Gosling’s first effort as writer/director is very likely going to split audiences between those who find it bewitching and those who find it unbearable. It’s going to get a proper kicking in some quarters, but I feel charitable towards it, mainly because the odd grab-bag of the cast (Joan from Mad Men! A Doctor Who! The creepy uncle out of Animal Kingdom! Eva Mendes!) seem to be having a whale of a time. Gosling, like many actor-turned-directors, indulges his cast their whims and fancies, always a risky strategy. But in this case it pays off in a number of odd little moments: Eva Mendes playing with Billy’s younger kid, plastered in fake blood; Matt Smith’s interaction with a baffled (non-pro) old lady on a gas station forecourt; Ben Mendelsohn’s freaky dancing, his OTT karaoke turn on ‘Cool Water’, all feel loose, semi-improvised and playful, in a style that fits with the film’s other ace card: its thrift shop explosion/Detroit ruin porn aesthetic. The buildings are crumbling, and in the process have become theatres. There’s a post–apocalyptic carnival float feel to the visual design, where everything seems to be repurposed and recycled, all shot in Benoit Debi‘s fluid, richly coloured William Egglestone-a-like photography.

It’s certainly beautiful, it just doesn’t feel all that purposeful. This is partly down to a bit of a charisma vacuum at its core: for whatever reason, the lead character Bones just feels a lot less interesting or likeable than everyone around him. He has a function in the story but doesn’t really have much to do but brood, glower and run away for most of the film. There’s also a problem in that Billy’s travails at the saturnine night club don’t really integrate with the Bones fairy tale business. It feels like one of David Lynch’s noir nightmares has gotten entangled somehow with a Beasts of the Southern Wild bit of mythical indie heart-on-sleevery, the two parts dancing, lava lamp style, but never quite mixing. The urgency of the last twenty minutes or so, as both tales darken and climax (and Jimmy Jewel’s score really kicks in**), largely override these quibbles, but for long stretches Lost River feels a bit shapeless and diffuse, a messy patchwork of pretty things, most of them second hand, some of them cherishable. It’s as if first-time screenwriter Ryan Gosling has, against his better instincts, corralled his loose and multifarious ideas into a Robert McKee approved three-act plot-point hitting screenplay, and first-time director Ryan Gosling has taken that screenplay and done spontaneous and interesting things with it.

Worth a gamble. Hell, you might love it.

Mark Stafford

*Smith and Mendelsohn, though never meeting on screen, effectively do battle here as two different flavours of menacing sociopath. Mendelsohn, a previous Gold winner in this field, is ahead on points, but Smith’s sexually threatening moment (‘can I stroke it?’) with Saoirse Ronan’s rat, deserves special mention.

**Seriously though, what is it with brooding, John Carpenter-esque synth scores these days? It’s like the composers for this, Drive, It Follows and a fair few others all had a meeting, or started a Carpenter fan club or something. I am most definitely not complaining, mind. Try playing the soundtrack to It Follows on your headphones after stepping off the nightbus of an evening. That’ll put a spring in your step.

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The Decent One

the decent one
The Decent One

Format: Cinema + VOD

Release date: 3 April 2015

Distributor: Curzon Film World

Director: Vanessa Lapa

Writers: Vanessa Lapa, Ori Weisbrod

Original title: Der Anständige

Austria, Israel 2014

96 mins

Heinrich Himmler was not only the most terrifying figure in Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, he was also the most elusive of his henchmen to have gained tremendous power. Despite his inexorable rise from patriotic lad to the Nazi party’s propaganda leader and Hitler’s personal bodyguard, before heading the SS and the police and, from 1943, serving as minister of the interior, his character and personality remained a frustrating enigma. Inevitably it raises the question of how and why it was possible for someone as inconspicuous as he once was to eventually become Hitler’s right-hand man, solely responsible for overseeing the ‘Final Solution’.

Israeli filmmaker Vanessa Lapa’s documentary The Decent One tries to shine new light on Himmler’s murky psychological profile and, to some extent, the telling details that are revealed are haunting and illuminating in equal measure. The film is based on a newly discovered collection of documents, including hundreds of pages of diary entries and private letters between Himmler and his family, mixed with official correspondence. These documents are thought to have been found by US army officers in May 1945 in one of the Himmler family homes in Gmund, in the Bavarian Alps, but failed to get into the hands of the authorities until a few years ago. While most people might think that the number of documentaries on Hitler and his entourage have come close to exhausting the subject, what makes Lapa’s approach different is the disturbing sense of banality in the material. Recited in sometimes emphatic voice-over by actors, illustrated with photographs and archive footage, and accompanied by a heavy, occasionally sensational score mixed with amplified sound effects, the documents presented unravel the picture of a precocious, petty bourgeois who writes corny letters to his wife, and later to his mistress (his long-term secretary Hedwig Potthast), while his relentless bureaucratic bigotry, fierce anti-Semitism and urge to serve help him to quickly move up the party ladder right to the top.

The Decent One is also released on DVD in the UK on 13 April 2015 by Artificial Eye.

Yet as historic events unfold, the consistent, progressively devastating flow of readings, combined with descriptive footage, becomes problematic and precariously unwieldy. Lapa’s presentation is at its best when it exposes Himmler’s inner thoughts and occasionally surprising considerations in the wealth of mundane private correspondence. But while there’s little doubt about the value of the film in terms of revealing new aspects of Himmler’s personality – albeit on a rather superficial level – the lack of impetus that characterises The Decent One almost from the outset, with its insistence on a very concrete formal investigation, offers little more than a reminder of dark times. Ultimately, it gives less insight into the actual psychology of an introverted mass murderer and war criminal and his repression of any sense of guilt than one would have hoped for.

Pamela Jahn

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Rigor Mortis

RigorMortis1
Rigor Mortis

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 April 2015

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Juno Mak

Writers: Philip Yung, Jill Leung, Juno Mak

Cast: Chin Siu-ho, Anthony Chan, Kara Hui, Lo Hoi-pang, Paw Hee-ching

Hong Kong 2013

101 mins

Juno Mak, who played the lead in, and wrote the story for, tragic thriller Revenge: A Love Story, makes his directorial debut with a superb, sombre homage to 1980s Chinese vampire films, in particular Ricky Lau’s supernatural action comedy Mr. Vampire. Featuring members of Lau’s original cast, Rigor Mortis foregoes the humour of the earlier film for a brooding, melancholy mood and dreamlike atmosphere. Mr. Vampire’s Chin Siu-Ho plays a forlorn former actor who attempts to commit suicide after moving into a bleak, ominous building. His neighbour Yau intervenes and saves him, but Chin and his neighbours will have to face the dark forces at work in his new home.

Rigor Mortis draws on Chinese vampire mythology, which gives the story a fascinating, mysterious (to Western audiences) edge. Taoist vampire hunter Yau and his ally/nemesis, the black magician Gau, use amulets, spells, glutinous rice and red string (creating gorgeous tentacular visuals), and, in Yau’s case, the Taoist wheel and its five elements, to control the supernatural creatures unleashed – including an impressively macabre zombie/vampire. With CGI used to terrific effect, the film features breath-taking fight sequences that alternate flowing balletic grace with sharp bursts of bloody action.

Startling, beautiful and eerie, Rigor Mortis takes place in an otherworldly realm of constantly croaking crows, muted grey colours, strange children and upside down gardens growing on ceilings, all underpinned by a haunting, creepy score. While the elliptical, circular narrative is left open to interpretation, it seems to suggest that what we are watching is the heroic death dreamed by a dying actor, the casting of Chin Siu-Ho giving added poignancy to this idea. A superb, haunting, darkly poetic debut not to be missed.

Virginie Sélavy

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

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