Joe Begos’s debut feature Almost Human is an alien invasion splatter film made by a horror fan for horror fans. Right down to the fantastic poster art by Tom Hodge, this is a pure genre project with no desire, or ambition, to find a mainstream audience.
Begos’s potential was spotted when his first short film, Bad Moon Rising, was shown before Adam Green and Joe Lynch’s Chillerama at Frightfest 2011. Almost Human was conceived soon after and shot for the measly budget of $50,000.
The film is set in the 80s – October 15, 1987 flashes up on the first title card – so that’s technology out of the way from the get go. And the aliens are invading from minute one – no slow build here. Seth (played by Graham Skipper) has just seen his friend get sucked up into a beam of light and he’s hurtling along the road at night towards his friends’ house. Naturally, Mark (Josh Ethier) and Jen (Vanessa Leigh) don’t believe him. They argue until a loud ear-piercing noise paralyses them. Mark is drawn outside the house by an otherworldly force. Seth must watch his second friend disappear in a flash of light.
Fast forward two years and Seth is still haunted by that night and now dreams of Mark’s imminent return. All this action is brilliantly crammed into the first 10 minutes. Hunters find Mark, coated in a grey slime, naked in the woods, but he’s not quite the man he was. Their curiosity is met with death. Our anti-hero of the movie is born. Mark marauds through the town trying to piece his old life back together, but people have moved on. Almost everyone who crosses his path meets a cold, gruesome end. It’s old-school buckets of blood rather than CGI after-effects, and Ethier’s performance, for all its simplicity, is great – like a ginger-bearded Arnie from the first Terminator. While people are murdered, the rest of the town get into a froth over Seth’s paranoia and delusions – which mostly only serves to slow, rather than add to, Mark’s unfolding story.
The film is a potpourri of influences: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Fire in the Sky, Alien, anything by John Carpenter (most notably given the subject The Thing) and UK cult classic Xtro. The weight of these horror favourites on Begos’s writing and directorial mind means he never entirely rises above them, although this is no huge crime for a first feature.
For gorehounds attracted to this DVD, the social contract does not demand originality, or complex, emotional character arcs. There’s enough slimy goo, shots to the face, knives in the neck and faces caved in with rocks to keep them entertained and coming back for repeat viewings. Like the opening 10 minutes, the final 10 are a blast as Mark’s true mission and identity come to the fore.
Almost Human played well to audiences at Toronto‘s Midnight Madness, Sitges and Fantastic Fest. These are Legos’s film kin, and if that’s you too, you’ll have a ball watching this with friends over a cold one.
It’s not easy to explore genre films nowadays without running into the zombie apocalypse sub-genre: a popular topic for both studio and independent films, the scenario has been explored from almost every angle imaginable. However, Jeremy Gardner’s genuine gem of a movie The Battery manages to inject it with some much needed adrenaline, using its low-budget roots to intelligently revisit the tropes of the sub-genre.
The Battery concerns two ex-baseball players, Ben and Mickey, who find themselves forced to survive together despite their clear character differences. While Ben accepts the apocalypse and tries to adapt, Mickey is adamant in holding on to his old lifestyle – needless to say the two are constantly at odds.
As the two men make their way through a desolate landscape, we learn more about their past as well as the world in which they exist. The Battery is a subtle exploration of the aftermath of a tragedy, and a film inhabited by characters with more than just two dimensions.
To reveal more of the story would be unfair to those venturing into this land for the first time; instead let us say that this clever, exciting film uses the limitations of its budget and production to create a convincing world within which real people commit some very desperate acts.
The music, and the lack of it, play an important part. The film uses its soundtrack cleverly, involving the audience emotionally in ways they might have otherwise missed. The cinematography also deserves applause. Through clever framing and extensive use of natural light the filmmakers are able to conjure up a wholly believable apocalypse without ever resorting to the sort of post-production work that can prove distracting.
The Battery represents independent, low-budget filmmaking at its absolute best. It’s a film made with care and thought, bringing a hitherto unseen intelligence to a genre fast decaying into familiarity.
Based on the novel:Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Cast: Udo Kier, Marina Pierro and Patrick Magee
Original title:Docteur Jekyll et les femmes
Alternative title:The Blood of Doctor Jekyll
France, West Germany 1981
92 mins
It’s 1886. Workers at the Woolwich Royal Arsenal form a football club; Dr John Stith Pemberton develops a fizzy beverage to be known as Coca-Cola and a novella – Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – is published by Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, and becomes an instant success. It was almost immediately adapted for the stage, and starting with a lost 1908 film, over 120 film versions were to be produced, with actors from Spencer Tracy to Jerry Lewis essaying the role(s) of the austere Victorian scientist Jekyll and his libido made flesh, Hyde. In one guise the story is a moral tale of the secret desires repression creates, but in another it is a wish-fulfilment fantasy/nightmare haunted by its own ‘if only…’ premise.
Walerian Borowcyzk’s 1981 take, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, is a kinky French horror film, with a disturbingly lustful sadism. A child has been attacked in the blue-lit foggy London night and an unspeakable menace lurks. In a palatial town house complete with turbaned man servant, Dr Henry Jekyll (a young Udo Kier), a wealthy and celebrated scientist, is hosting a party to celebrate his engagement to Miss Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro). His crippled mother, his mother-in-law as well as assorted scions of Victorian society, a clergyman, a rival scientist and a general (Patrick Magee in typically eccentric form), gather for an evening of food and celebration. They are all like escapees from some savage Buñuel satire, pompous, self-satisfied and bubbling over with barely concealed desires as they exchange pleasantries and hotly debate Jekyll’s new theory of transcendental medicine. They are the apotheosis of British Imperial self-satisfaction, smirking through the evening, oblivious to the noise their clay feet make, clumping on the parquet. But Jekyll wants his estate given over to the mysterious and as yet unseen Mr Hyde, and there seems to be a settling of accounts in the offing.
Borowcyzk keeps everything suitably murky and fragmented. His use of mirrors seems at first like an over-literal rendering of the split personality theme, but as the film goes on the visual confusion becomes increasingly disconcerting and dream-like. There is more than a little vampire/Nosferatu in Hyde (Gérard Zalcberg) when he appears, an eyebrow-less fiend and something of Jack the Ripper as well with his murderous phallus. His assault on the guests is savage, and yet they are complicit in their own downfall, either because he stirs in them their own (scarcely) hidden desires, or because they rather bathetically provide him with the weapons of their destruction. His sadism is pitched against their own hypocrisy and general vileness. In a twist which the title anticipates, Marina Pierro’s yearning raven-haired heroine has a yen for some self-transformation as well. Violence and murder are intertwined with a longing for freedom, but Borowcyzk’s film is dark and claustrophobic, locked in Jekyll’s hollow town house. His characters don’t find emancipation via their potions and transformations, but rather murderous and self-destructive rage.
In the wilderness, in the dark, it’s sound that plays tricks upon your eyes – not what you can’t see, but what your imagination conjures with every rustle, crack, crunch, moan and shriek. When something outdoors whacks the side of your tent, reality sinks in, the palpability of fear turns raw, numbing and virtually life-draining.
You’re fucked! Right royally fucked!
There were, of course, the happier times – when you and the woman you loved embarked on the fun-fuelled journey of retracing the steps of Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin who, in the fall of 1967 shot a little less than 1000 frames of motion picture footage of an entity they encountered striding through the isolated Bluff Creek in North-Western California.
Your gal was humouring you, of course. She was indulging you. She was not, however, mocking you – she was genuinely enjoying this time of togetherness in the wilderness as you lovebirds took turns with the camera and sound equipment to detail the whole experience. You both sauntered into every cheesy tourist trap in the area, chatted amiably with numerous believers and non-believers alike and, of course, you both dined on scrumptious Bigfoot burgers at a local greasy spoon.
Yup, Bigfoot – the legendary being sometimes known as Sasquatch or Yeti – a tall, broad, hairy, ape-like figure who captured the hearts, minds and imaginations of indigenous populations and beyond – especially when the Patterson-Gimlin footage took the world by storm. And now, here you both are in Willow Creek, California, following the footsteps of those long-dead amateur filmmakers.
All of us have been watching, with considerable pleasure, your romantic antics throughout the day. When night falls, we’ve joined you in your tent and soon, the happy times fade away and we’re all wishing we had some receptacle to avoid soiling our panties. You’re probably wishing the same thing, because in no time at all, you’re going to have the crap scared out of you.
Willow Creek is released on DVD in the UK on 26 May 2014 by Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment.
We have, of course, entered the world of Bobcat Goldthwait’s Willow Creek. Goldthwait is one of the funniest men alive – a standup comedian of the highest order and a terrific comic actor, oft-recognized for his appearances in numerous movies (including the Police Academy series). He’s voiced a myriad of cartoon characters and directed Jimmy Kimmel’s TV show and subsequent concert flick.
In addition to these achievements, Goldthwait has solidified himself as one of the most original, exciting and provocative contemporary American film directors working today. His darkly humoured, satirical and (some might contend) completely over-the-top films are infused with a unique voice that’s all his own. They’ve made me laugh longer and harder than almost anything I’ve seen during the past two decades or so.
Even more astounding is that his films – his first depicting the life of an alcoholic birthday party clown, one involving dog fellatio, another about an accidental teen strangulation during masturbation and yet another which delivered a violent revenge fantasy for Liberals – ALL have a deep current of humanity running through them. His movies are as deeply observational and genuinely moving as they are nastily funny and often jaw-droppingly shocking.
God Bless America, for example, is clearly the most perverse vigilante movie ever made. Goldthwait created a wonderful character in Frank, an average American white-collar worker who suffers noisy neighbours, endless hours of TV he hates but watches anyway, loses his job for sexually harassing a dumpy co-worker who’s been coming on to him, is estranged from a wife who left him for a hunky, thick-witted cop, only gets to see his daughter by promising to buy her things he can’t afford and has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. When this beleaguered schlub begins a spree of mass murder, doing what all Liberals must do when civilization is on the brink of collapse, we’re with him all the way. When he teams up with a like-minded 12-year-old girl, the two of them a veritable Bonnie and Clyde, blasting away at America’s most vile entities, Goldthwait’s movie goes ballistic and so do we, cheering on these very cool birds of a feather who kill people – not because they’re necessarily criminals, but because they are horrible human beings contributing to society’s downfall.
I actually thought Goldthwait was going to have a hard time following that one, but I was wrong, of course. Willow Creek is a corker! It forces you to emit cascades of urine from laughing so hard, then wrenches sausage chubs of steaming excrement out of your bowels as it scares you out of your wits.
It’s a ‘found footage’ film, but I hesitate to use the almost-dirty-word to describe it, because Goldthwait, unlike far too many boneheads, hardly resorts to the sloppy tropes of the now tiresome genre. He’s remained extremely true and consistent to the conceit and in so doing, uses it as an effective storytelling tool to generate an honest-to-goodness modern masterwork of horror.
His attractive leads are nothing less than engaging. Lead actor Bryce Johnson has a naturally comic and commanding presence. As a bonus, he reveals a scrumptious posterior that the ladies will admire (and, of course, gentlemen of the proper persuasion). Alexie Gilmore is so attractive, sharp, smart and funny that it would be a shame if stardom wasn’t in the cards for her.
Goldthwait’s clever mixture of real locals and actors is perfection and the movie barrels along with a perfect pace to allow you to get to know and love the protagonists, laugh with them, laugh with the locals (not at them) and finally to plunge you into the film’s shuddering, shocking and horrific final third. The movie both creeps you out and forces you to jump out of your seat more than once.
Goldthwait is the real thing. If you haven’t seen his movies up to this point, you must. As for Willow Creek, I’d urge everyone to see the film on a big screen with a real audience if they can. When things get super-terrifying, you can feel that wonderful electric buzz that can only happen when you’re at the movies. Sure, it will work fine at home in a dark room with your best girlie snuggled at your side on the comfy couch, but – WOW! – this is a genuine BIG SCREEN EVENT. Try to see it that way, first! The movie is so good that it holds up nicely on subsequent viewings, allowing you to appreciate the full nuance of Goldthwait’s direction, his expert use of sound, the delectable humour (black and otherwise shaded) and then, there’s the bravura with which Goldthwait gives you the willies before he delivers several moments of cinematic cold cocking roundhouse blows.
While he was in England in 1969 turning out a clutch of very cheap Gothic horror movies (and the artier Nightbirds), the Staten Island auteur Andy Milligan threw together something called The Curse of the Full Moon, which set out to do for werewolves what his The Body Beneath did for vampires.
Set in 1899, it features a typically Milliganesque hate-ridden, incestuous, corrupt and doomed family, the Mooneys, who fester in their old dark house as a horrific disease (lycanthropy) runs through their bloodline. Dialogue runs on and on, full of non sequiturs like ‘because of my age and my health, I decided to send you to medical school in Scotland’ delivered with authentic British accents by oddballs the director happened across in Soho.
Milligan, a one-of-a-kind filmmaker, was torn by self-loathing and inscribed his personal concerns in the lowliest throwaway project. Even if you can’t follow the plot or care about the people or raise a shudder at the amateur monster make-up, you can sense the ghastly conviction with which Milligan has his characters tear into each other verbally and physically. The depiction of werewolfery as a syphilis-like taint even resonates with his own later death from AIDS, though that was in the unimaginable future when this was being shot.
I’ve tentatively become a convert to Milligan as more and more of his films have become available, though he remains a hard sell to the uninitiated, and this is an entry in his filmography that even his most devoted fans don’t take a shine to. Jimmy McDonough, whose Milligan biography The Ghastly One is among the best books ever devoted to a marginal filmmaker, describes it as ‘by far the weakest effort from Milligan’s English sojourn’, though he notes the director’s presence in his only appearance in one of his own films as ‘a rather effete gun salesman’. Tame by the director’s standards, the film went unreleased until 1972 and it wins its place in this special issue against the director’s wishes since it was the distributor, William Mishkin, who insisted on a) padding out the under-length film with footage of rats, because Willard had been a big horror hit and put rats on the fright film map; and b) changing the title to The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!. The title is a master-stroke – it seems almost like a mantra, and conjures up a weird menace and desperation that no film could really live up to.
Cast: Iain De Caestecker, Alice Englert, Allen Leech
UK 2013
85 mins
TV veteran Jeremy Lovering’s feature film debut In Fear effectively draws on moody British landscapes to construct a flawed, but chilling study of primal terror. On their way to a music festival, new young couple Lucy (Alice Englert) and Tom (Iain De Caestecker) plan to spend a romantic night at a countryside hotel. But misleading signs pointing in contradictory directions lead them in circles, and as night falls they seem unable to find their way back to the main road. Lost in an infernal maze in pitch-black darkness, they begin to believe that there is someone out there threatening them. Unbalanced by frustration, fear and paranoia, Tom and Lucy are pushed to their limits by the taunts of their invisible tormentor, and what they believe is their fight for survival.
In Fear is released in the UK on DVD + Blu-ray (R2/B) on 10 March 2014.
Lovering revealed as little of the script as he could to his two leads during shooting, which results in intense, raw performances, especially from Englert, who seems genuinely terrified. The minimal set-up explores the way in which the characters are manipulated into extreme behaviour by an enigmatic figure playing cruel games – interestingly, it is fear that is the trigger for violence here, rather than the other way around. Lovering skilfully creates a potent atmosphere of surreal dread, brilliantly supported by Roly Porter and Daniel Pemberton‘s excellent soundtrack. All in all, however, the film feels a little slight, requiring a fair amount of the audience’s good will in order to work, and the conclusion is an unsatisfactory unravelling of the tension that had been so tightly wound up.
This review was first published as part of our FrightFest 2013 coverage.
Cast: Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Johnny Depp
USA 1984
91 mins
Released in 1984, A Nightmare on Elm Street was a wide-ranging critical and commercial success, establishing the faltering young studio New Line – nicknamed ‘The House that Freddy Built’ – and revitalising the career of writer/director Wes Craven, as well as introducing the cinema-going public to the enduring horror/comedy icons, Freddy Kreuger and Johnny Depp, who together must have inspired a significant demographic of fancy dress and Halloween costumes. Returning to the original film in the wake of the increasingly bizarre sequels, culminating in Wes Craven’s meta-mad New Nightmare and Samuel Bayer’s dourly unnecessary 2010 remake, I was surprised by how much fun it is. For some reason, I had retrospectively given the original film a patina of respectability in the light of the daftness of what was to come, but that daftness was right there from the beginning, and Nightmare is best enjoyed as a pulpy B-movie that sneakily delights in its own absurdity.
Although Robert Englund is credited in the opening titles as playing ‘Fred Krueger’, he really is Freddy from the get go. Forget any contemporary neuroses about the ubiquity of paedophilia; Freddy, the disfigured knife-clawed child murderer, is a cackling, malevolent clown figure who delights in the fear and disgust he causes his victims. His costume is circus-tent red and green, and in an early appearance, his arms stretch out from one side of the street to the other, both ludicrous and genuinely frightening. He’ll happily lop of a finger for a giggle, and his murders are gruesome jokes on his victims, involving peek-a-boo chases and Johnny Depp’s Greg getting sucked into the pit of his bed to be spewed out, like the gushing spill from the elevator in the Overlook Hotel. ‘You’re not gonna need a stretcher,’ a cop tells the rushing medics. ‘You’re gonna need a mop.’
Heather Langenkamp as Nancy, Freddie’s target and adversary, has a goofy awkward innocence and a weird dreamlike nonchalance. Everyone in the film behaves with an odd dreamy logic, though the dreams themselves are never really that dream-like, with the exception of the gooey staircases that melt under Nancy’s running feet. The dreams are more like Hollywood-digested Freud, with the boiler room as the steamy, ready-to-blow site of repression, rage and dark history, in stark opposition to the pastel-coloured suburban life on show. Freddy himself is a product of Nancy’s parents’ crimes, and they are as much a danger to her as Freddy, with Ronnee Blakley as Nancy’s booze-drenched mom and B-movie legend John Saxon as the absent police detective dad.
Ultimately, Nancy will try to inhabit Freddy’s sado-comic world and play by his rules. Anticipating the Home Alone antics of Macauley Culkin’s Kevin, Nancy improvises a series of Wile-E-Coyote traps – a hammer falling from a door, exploding lightbulbs – but these manoeuvres and her attempt at psychological release will be dubiously effective against a cartoonish figure who, like all cartoon heroes, simply won’t die.
Cast: Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci, AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg
USA 2011
91 mins
The precocious and prolific Adam Wingard has not just one, but two films in the programme of this year’s Film4 FrightFest (22-26 August 2013). The rising indie horror director has been championed by the festival, which screened his wistful, affecting A Horrible Way to Die in 2011, followed by the anthology film V/H/S (for which he shot the wraparound segment) in 2012. This year’s edition of FrightFest sees the UK premiere of V/H/S 2, as well as the London preview of You’re Next.
V/H/S/2 is available on DVD & VOD from 14 October 2013.
With You’re Next, Wingard delivers a hugely enjoyable, thrilling, smart take on the home invasion sub-genre. After a terrifically creepy, brutal opening sequence, teacher Crispian takes his new girlfriend Erin to his parents’ isolated country mansion for the latter’s wedding anniversary. They are joined by his siblings: his obnoxious, successful brother Drake (mumblecore actor/director Joe Swanberg) with his wife Kelly; his younger brother Felix, accompanied by sulky, scornful girlfriend Zee; and his over-enthusiastic sister Aimee, who has brought along her new filmmaker boyfriend Tariq (played by House of the Devil director Ti West). Tensions rise over dinner as the smug Drake purposefully provokes Crispian. But as the festivities descend into a generalised shouting match, barbed comments are suddenly replaced by crossbow arrows, as the family comes under attack from sinister assailants wearing animal masks. As the besieged relatives devise strategies to survive the terrifying aggression, Erin turns out to be surprisingly well equipped to deal with the situation.
You’re Next will be released on DVD + Blu-ray (R2/B) in the UK on 13 January 2014.
The first part of the film is exhilaratingly tense, thanks to a tightly wound script and taut direction, enhanced by the surreal sense of dread created by the animal masks. With their inhuman appearance and no apparent motivation to their actions, the aggressors seem to be playing random, cruel games with their victims (in a way that is reminiscent of David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Them). Once the reason for the attack is revealed, the film switches to a different kind of dynamic, losing that unnerving strangeness, although it remains ruthlessly effective.
While You’re Next doesn’t have quite as much heart as A Horrible Way to Die, it provides all the required blood, gore, thrills and jumps, which have been so glaringly absent from many recent horror films. Wingard demonstrates a real talent for directing action scenes, cleverly plotting and expertly choreographing them. The dialogue is sharp and entertaining, the characters believable and well defined, with Erin (an exciting performance from Sharni Vinson) adding a brilliant twist to the final girl type. Wingard and his writer Simon Barrett use the premise intelligently, integrating the personal relationships and family conflicts to feed the terror, and have fun playing with audience expectations. The most nerve-racking horror film to come out in a long time, You’re Next is a blast, from the viciously intriguing beginning to the humorously nihilistic ending.
Better than the dismal Texas Chain Saw 3D but not as brutal and affecting as Franck Khalfoun’s Maniac, Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is the third remake of an influential American horror film from the 70s and 80s to be released so far this year. Produced by the star and the director of the 1981 original, Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi, the remake is an undemandingly fun and instantly forgettable update that provides the required amounts of blood, gore and demonic possession, although no real scares or re-invention.
This time, the five who fall victim to the demonic forces unleashed by the reading of the flesh-bound book of the dead are a group of friends who have come to the iconic cabin in the woods to help drug-addicted Mia as she goes cold turkey. There is marginally more characterisation than in the original Evil Dead, with the difficult family history of Mia and her brother, and a parallel between drug addiction and demonic possession. Thankfully, this is not pushed too much, but just enough information is given for the film to play nicely with audiences’ expectations as to which of the characters may survive.
Some of the gruesome highlights of Fede Alvarez’s remake include possessed characters cutting off their own tongue or limbs, a nail gun attack, a crawlspace scene and a chainsaw showdown in blood rain set to an oppressive choral score – the sound design as a whole is one of the film’s strengths. The problem is that so much is lifted from other films (not just the original Evil Dead, but also most obviously Evil Dead II and The Raid, while The Exorcist is clearly an influence) that nothing feels very fresh or surprising. Alvarez respectfully and competently provides the expected motifs – the demonic POV, the tree rape, the gift of a ring, the cutting-off of the only access road, etc. – with a few minor variations, but without any new twist or angle.
For a truly madcap reinvention of the original Evil Dead formula, it’s better to revisit Evil Dead II, released on Blu-ray this month. While Sam Raimi’s uninhibited low-budget debut established some of the horror tropes that are now taken for granted, its 1987 follow-up was a surreally comic, exuberant, irreverent take on the story, influenced by the comic sensibility of Raimi’s friend and co-writer Scott Spiegel. Bruce Campbell is a hilariously hyperactive Ash, who inadvertently summons the demonic forces from the book of the dead while on a romantic weekend with his girlfriend in the fateful cabin. As he is driven insane by various supernatural occurrences, the previous occupants’ daughter and her companions turn up and come under attack from the demon.
The film is a succession of brilliantly offbeat set pieces, including the wonderful dancing corpse; the diabolically laughing house; the flying eyeball that lands in someone’s mouth; the terrific sequence, inspired by Spiegel’s short film Attack of the Helping Hand, that plays like a macabre early Disney cartoon, in which Ash cuts off his murderous possessed hand – said hand scuttles off, squeaking like a mouse, through holes in the wall and is caught in a mousetrap before flicking Ash the finger and disappearing; and of course, the insane ending set during the Crusades.
This non-exhaustive list is probably enough to convincingly demonstrate the different natures of this month’s two Evil Dead resurrections. For efficient Saturday night popcorn horror, see Fede Alvarez’s remake. For riotously fun, maniacally imaginative comic horror, get the Evil Dead II Blu-ray.
Evil Dead will screen in a special 35mm double bill screening with the sequel Evil Dead II at London’s Regent Street Cinema on 11 June 2017, presented by Cigarette Burns.
Writers: Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur, C.A. Rosenberg, Joe Spinell
Cast: Freedom, America Olivo, Elijah Wood
France/USA 2012
89 mins
Set across a dreamy and melancholic cityscape, Franck Kahlfoun’s take on William Lustig’s notorious 1980 shocker might well be the best genre film to be released this year.
Read our Comic Strip Review of the original Maniac.
Shot largely in first-person P.O.V., it features an intense performance from Elijah Wood, who manages to portray Frank as a man both frighteningly sadistic and heart-breakingly pitiful. Frank works as a mannequin restorer and seller at a dilapidated shop in LA, which used to belong to his promiscuous mother. He has uncontrollable feeling of abject hatred and fear of women, which explode in acts of unparalleled violence. When Frank meets Ann, who wants to use his mannequins in a photography exhibition she’s preparing, the two connect in an awkward but not implausible way. However, as their relationship develops, it becomes harder and harder for Frank to control his destructive impulses.
Utilising mirrors, windows and other reflective surfaces, Khalfoun creates a glossy but emotive visual language: while the horror of Frank’s barbaric acts is never underplayed, his character comes across as a tragic figure rather than as the one-dimensional psychopath that is the stereotype of the genre. Cleverly using the soundtrack to intensify the city and Frank’s experience, Khalfoun grabs the audience when they least expect it: added into the mix are the rare appearances of Elijah Wood’s face, his eyes exhibiting a dead, hollow quality that makes his acts even more disturbing. His voice-over, delivered in a child-like whisper, speaks volumes about a man whose life has been lost for a long time: reminiscent of the protagonist Paul in Tony Vorno’s forgotten grindhouse gem Victims, Frank is equal parts abhorrent murderer and unexpected victim.
It’s hard to think of another piece of filmmaking that will manage to pack the same visual invention and emotional punch into a measly 89 minutes. Do not miss.
