Tag Archives: fantasy

Horsehead

Horsehead
Horsehead

Director: Romain Basset

Writers: Romain Basset, Karim Chériguène

Cast: Lilly-Fleur Pointeaux, Catriona MacColl, Murray Head

France 2014

89 mins

Every year the Etrange Festival hosts its share of unreleased films, and this year it included the world premiere of the first feature film by a young French director, Romain Basset, who had already presented a short on vampires in 2008, Bloody Current Exchange, and another on ghosts in 2009, Rémy, at the same festival. Horsehead is his ambitious attempt at lifting the curse that has long prevented French cinema from producing good films in the horror genre.

After her grandmother’s death, Jessica (Lilly-Fleur Pointeaux) goes back to the spooky family manor, evidently loaded with dark secrets, where her mother Catelyn (Catriona MacColl, Lucio Fulci’s muse from the early 1980s) lives with her husband Jim (Murray Head) and George the gardener (Vernon Dobtcheff). Haunted by recurrent dreams since her childhood, Jessica has turned to studying the psychophysiological theories of lucid dreams, and her nightmares worsen with the proximity of her grandmother’s corpse. When she is bedridden with a strange fever (Fièvre was the working title of the film), she tries to control the visions of her grandmother’s ghost in order to communicate with her. Soon dream and reality merge, with reality altered by the unconscious, while the plot slowly navigates between the two states to unravel a shameful family secret.

The film seduces with its aesthetic choices. Vincent Vieillard-Baron, who was also responsible for the cinematography on Rémy, elaborates on a rich visual variation of The Nightmare, the famous painting by the 18th-century painter Henry Fuseli, whose title is literally represented by the head of a mare hovering over a sleeping beauty, on whose breast sits an incubus. The mare, or rather the eponymous Horsehead, becomes a character in the film, and Basset enriches Fuseli’s pun with a further paronomastic layer (which only works in French) between jument (mare) and jumelle (twin). It seems as if Basset’s intention were to base the whole plot on this Lacanian pun, and unfortunately, the result meets neither Basset’s ambitions nor our expectations. In particular, the film would have been better off without the religious imagery that blurs its main point. Jack of all trades and master of none, Basset cannot resist accumulating clichés. One can hardly grasp the need for Jessica’s nude crucifixion, let alone why anyone would want to have an abortion in a chapel, while the figures of the grandfather (described as an ‘Old Testament kind of man’) and of the Cardinal, mixed with the theme of immaculate conception, all seem strangely out of place in a plot whose main aim is a genealogical quest.

Basset errs on the wrong side of excess, unable to turn down ideas and desires when they arise, all in all less capable of controlling his opulent imagination than Jessica her dreams. To crown it all, hoping to fool the devil by opting for an English-speaking cast, Basset does nothing to justify the fact that the film was shot on location in the village of Argenton-sur-Creuse, right in the middle of France. Yet for all the imperfections of youth, Horsehead deserves the benevolent reception one usually grants a first film, though the French curse remains yet to be lifted.

Pierre Kapitaniak

This review is part of our Etrange Festival 2014 coverage.

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John Dies at the End

John Dies at the End

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 17 February 2014

Distributor: Eureka

Director: Don Coscarelli

Writer: Don Coscarelli

Based on the novel by: David Wong

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Addison Timlin, Leonor Varela, Willem Dafoe

USA 2012

99 mins

Your new favourite film. A flip, funny thrill ride full of trippy headfuckery, rubber monsters, snappy dialogue and wild ideas, adapted from David Wong’s cult novel by Don (Phantasm/Bubba Ho-Tep) Coscarelli. Trying to explain the film’s singular tone is difficult: it’s like a punky horror/SF adventure infused with the snarky, iconoclastic sensibility of Fight Club.

Any attempt at a plot summary would be pretty much doomed; suffice to say that it concerns the effects of an intravenous drug called ‘soy sauce’, which has the effect of not so much opening the doors of perception as blowing them off their hinges. Users are apt to receive phone calls from the future and see physical manifestations of beings from other planes of existence, as a prelude to entering a multiverse of trouble and what looks like an inevitable spectacularly messy demise. David Wong (Chase Williamson) is trying to explain his recent life history on the sauce to a journalist (Paul Giamatti), the tale of how he and college buddy John (Andy Meyers) came by the stuff and started a chain of events that leads to them attempting to save the world from creepy inter-dimensional interlopers. Nothing is straightforward in this fast-paced genre mash-up: time and space are distorted, people aren’t what they seem, and metaphysical conundrums pop up with alarming regularity. I’m not sure if it’s about anything, exactly. There is a suspicion that it’s more smart-arsed than smart in places, and the random nature of the story means that it loses a little momentum before the home stretch, but I’m quibbling. It’s a blast, a wonderfully weird, eminently quotable midnight movie. Just don’t ask what happens to John, I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you.

This review was first published as part of our London Film Festival 2012 coverage.

Mark Stafford

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Odd Thomas

review_Odd-Thomas
Odd Thomas

Format: DVD

Release date: 3 February 2014

Distributor: Metroodome

Director: Stephen Sommers

Writer: Stephen Sommers

Based on the novel by: Dean R. Koontz

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Addison Timlin, Leonor Varela, Willem Dafoe

USA 2013

93 mins

In the tradition of Hollywood thrillers of the 80s like The Burbs, Odd Thomas is a delightful, offbeat yet mainstream film that will be sure to please those looking for some old-school thrills. Anton Yelchin plays Odd Thomas, a short-order cook with the ability to see dead people, who uses his powers to bring killers and murderers to justice. Addison Timlin plays Stormy Llewellyn, while Willem Defoe is Chief Wyatt Porter, who knows about Odd’s powers, and helps to keep them hidden.

Stephen Sommers keeps the whole film lighter than a ball of marshmallow, while the set-pieces and special effects are impressive enough for a film clearly not made on a big budget. The central mystery is simple – for once it’s nice to see a thriller where there aren’t complicated layers after complicated layers – it’s a true Hollywood case of good guys vs. bad guys, and Odd Thomas is not a lesser film for it. Clearly trying to attract as wide an audience as possible, this is a breezy, fun-ride reminder of how good Hollywood mainstream can be when it chooses to. Delightful.

This review was first published as part of our FrightFest 2013 coverage.

Evrim Ersoy

Island of Lost Souls

Island of Lost Souls

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 28 May 2012

Distributor: Eureka

Director: Erle C. Kenton

Writers: Waldemar Young, Philip Wylie

Original title: Hadaka no shima

Based on The Island of Dr Moreau by: H.G Wells

Cast: Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, Bela Lugosi, Kathleen Burke

USA 1932

71 mins

Hard-up 1930s Depression-era cinema-goers were eager to escape the everyday in a tantalising world of the strange and uncanny. The success of Universal’s Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) saw other studios keen to carve themselves a bloody slice of the action. Paramount seized H.G. Wells’s anti-vivisectionist novel The Island of Dr Moreau, adapted to become Island of Lost Souls (1932). Designed to combine grotesque thrills with jungle drama (another hot genre at the time), it was knocked out quickly by work-a-day director Erle C. Kenton. Little did the studio know that the end product would be one of the weirdest, creepiest films to emerge in the pre-Hays Code era and would defy time to become a transgressive horror classic.

Finally out on DVD after years of fuzzy bootleg VHS copies, Island tells the tale of square-jawed Edward Parker, marooned on the eerie South Seas island of sinister scientist Dr Moreau (the wonderful Charles Laughton). Parker is shocked to discover that Moreau has created a shambling experimental race of half-human, half-animal creatures, some cloven-hoofed, some sprouting hair in unusual places, who live in the jungle, obedient to Moreau lest they be summoned to his sadistic ‘house of pain’. Moreau’s latest creation is the sensual Panther Woman. Looking rather unlike Moreau’s other creations – more like an alluring animalistic Betty Boop – she has never seen a handsome man before. In the name of science, Moreau unleashes her on hunky Parker - and that’s when the trouble starts.

As mad Moreau, Charles Laughton dominates proceedings with an incredible performance that veers expertly between quietly understated and the edges of overblown. Like Colin Clive’s Dr Frankenstein, he compares himself to God; but Laughton’s Moreau is not a misguided would-be do-gooder; he is a cheerfully unhinged genius who revels in doing evil. Beaming proudly at the screams of his botched animal-human hybrids, cracking his whip over the awful monsters he’s created, lounging decadently across his vivisection table like a modern day Roman emperor, or simply oozing creepiness as he offers a guest a cup of tea, Laughton plays his part with delicious relish. Somehow he convinces the viewer that despite his odious transgressions against nature, humanity and God, he’s rather a fun fellow really; despite the fact that he is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, we remain sympathetic to him right to the end. This creepy moral paradox is central to the film’s unique, unsettling, perverse power.

Bela Lugosi, the ‘Sayer of the Law’, the chief experimental-reject responsible for conveying Moreau’s orders to the beast-men, deserves mention (as always). Despite sporting a mighty brush of facial hair that would infringe upon anybody’s expressive powers, he turns a lemon of a minor part into lemonade, delivering a convincing, memorable portrayal through pure energetic force of will. “Are ve not men?” he demands of his savage brethren, in that inimitable distinctly un-South Seas voice of his. And he means it. Some of the so-called ‘civilised’ characters are equally fascinating - from the booze-addled, neglectful skipper who thinks nothing of heaving Parker from his boat, before later attempting to chat up his fiancée, to a pipe-puffing disgraced medic, who finds hope of redemption in Moreau’s demise.

It all looks terrific thanks to legendary cinematographer Karl Struss. Like many of the early sound horrors, it has that distinctly creepy quality, an indefinable spookiness that faded away somehow as horror got glossier towards the 1940s. Struss’s camera is always moving, pulling back and forwards through crowded, labyrinthine sets. From the fog-shrouded ship-bound scenes to the steamy verdant undergrowth, he takes us to a distant place. We feel the oppressive claustrophobia of the jungle. In one justly renowned sequence, a succession of imaginatively made-up horrors lurch vengefully towards the camera to attack their master (British make-up specialist Wally Westmore gives Universal’s Jack Pierce a run for his money here). Briefly glimpsed, gangly, dark and hairy, they strike a potent contrast with glistening, corpulent, baby-faced Laughton in his vivid white suit, before they gleefully turn on him in one of the most gloriously twisted finales to grace a 1930s horror.

Wells was outraged by what they’d done to his novel and disgusted by the insertion of a sexual, sensual edge. The British censor banned the film outright for many years; and, even today – perhaps especially today, in these times of genetic experimentation - this tale of man messing with nature retains its creepy potency. Throw out your VHS, the DVD looks great. This is absolutely your best chance to see whether – as is rumoured – Buster Crabbe, Alan Ladd and Randolph Scott really make unbilled appearances as beast-men. Let’s hope some of the other great forgotten horrors of this era can get a similarly lavish make-over. Can we start with White Zombie (1932)?

Vic Pratt