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The Fly

The Fly

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 19 May 2008

Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Director: David Cronenberg

Writers: Charles Edward Pogue, David Cronenberg

Based on the short story by: George Langelaan

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz

USA/UK/Canada 1986

96 mins

Our cinemas are presently teeming with transformation, infested with the umpteenth spawn of Stan Lee, Marvel and DC - underwhelming Spiderman, the Avengers ad nauseam - so it is perhaps worth having a quick spew. Comic books give us transformation, clean, wreathed in steam and colourfully costumed, but the flip side of such adolescent power fantasies is the disgust of mutation; dirty, gooey and possibly fatal.

David Cronenberg’s The Fly begins with Howard Shore’s wonderfully bombastic B-movie score striding through the titles and immediately places the movie in highly strung melodramatic territory. Cronenberg’s gore-fest was based on the 1958 black and white horror film, which itself was based on a George Langelaan short story published a year earlier in Playboy and was directed by Kurt Neumann and scripted by Shogun author Jim Clavell. Cronenberg’s up-to-date reimagining (long before the horrific verb ‘reboot’ had seen the light of day) was an unexpected critical and commercial hit on its release in 1986. It was the film that brought body horror into the mainstream. But gruesomeness aside (only for the moment), The Fly is a chamber piece, a relationship drama, which infests adolescent hopes of transformation with the corrosive vomit of mutation.

Geena Davis is the ambitious journalist Veronica Quaife, who belatedly realises she’s onto a major story when she snags Seth Brundle, a goggle-eyed and socially inept young scientist, at a conference and he takes her home to show off his latest invention: teleportation devices. Completing the ménage í  trois of filigree-named protagonists is Stathis Borans (John Getz), Veronica’s ex-lover and current editor, who at first is sceptical and jealous.

‘I’m onto something big, really big,’ Veronica tells him. ‘What? His cock?’ Stathis replies.

In a sense though, Stathis is right. He’s the hairy truth teller. Everything in the film is motivated by sex, despite Seth’s ludicrous suggestion that his invention has been spurred by the fact he got motion sickness on his tricycle. This is a B-movie horror plot complete with a monster, a mad scientist and a spunky girl reporter, but somehow when it was being teleported from 1958, a tiny relationship drama must have got into the machine and the two were fused. Seth is obviously lonely, which explains his otherwise insane indiscretion in blabbing to the beautiful Veronica. He is the virgin of the piece - unworldly and naí¯ve, with his wardrobe full of the same clothes and his ‘cheeseburger’ dinner date invitation. Whenever he steps out of his laboratory, things are going to go wrong, be it drinks receptions or arm-wrestling contests. His relationship with Veronica is immediately intense and swiftly marred by petulant and adolescent jealousies.

Veronica, with her can-do no-bullshit approach, is the mover and shaker. She is the one who seduces Seth, in her own time and on her own terms. ‘You’re cute,’ she tells him, but only once he’s proved his chops as a scientist. She is the one with experience. She has perhaps used sex in the past, having - after all - slept with her boss and decided to stop sleeping with her boss, while keeping her job. Stathis could easily have been taking advantage of his position. He is the sleazy, hirsute chancer, cheerfully sneaking into Veronica’s apartment to take a shower. ‘Was passing… felt a bit grimy,’ he says. Despite Veronica’s protestations, perhaps they are meant to be together. There are sparks in their exchanges, compared to the puppy love Veronica enjoys with Seth. She cuddles Seth and coos about his flesh, like an old lady who steals babies (her comparison!). Seth is like their baby, a troublesome genius who shouldn’t be allowed out on his own and who ultimately longs to be joined to her and be completed by her. Seth (the romantic) wants to consume her totally, whereas Stathis just wants to fuck her.

The goo of the make-up effects is still impressive today, but none of that matters if we don’t care about the characters, as was to be proved by the sequel, which was directed by the make-up artist Chris Walas to make an interesting but ultimately forgettable film. Cronenberg’s success here, helped by several career-best performances, is to drop fully realised characters into the B-movie plot. Seth’s disintegration as a human being is played out tragically. At first, he feels benefits from the experiment gone wrong: super strength, increased sexual performance etc. but soon comes to realise that it’s a disease, a kind of cancer. His mutation isn’t a clean Peter Parker transformation. To be fair, The Amazing Spiderman does give Parker some sticky moments, but they are more for comic effect than fuelled by body disgust.

Seth is not simply turning into something. That in itself wouldn’t be all that bad. Waking up one morning to find yourself a giant cockroach is amply better than waking up one morning to find yourself a rubbish mix of cockroach and man. The speed of Seth’s deterioration and his desperate attempt to retain some semblance of humanity even as he becomes Brundlefly give the film something like a tragic grandeur. Veronica’s disgust and loathing, as exemplified by her maggot dream, is tinged with pity. Stathis, finally, is also transformed. He becomes the hero of the piece, albeit an ineffective one, trying to protect Veronica and, as a consequence, suffering his rival’s jealous bile.

In the end, the only fatality of the film is Seth himself, who to some extent achieves his ambition of being the first insect politician and retains some degree of humanity (and some call on our sympathy) even in his final moments.

John Bleasdale

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Ginger Snaps

Ginger Snaps

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 December 2002

Distributor: Whv

Director: John Fawcett

Writers: Karen Walton, John Fawcett

Cast: Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rogers

USA 2000

108 mins

This article contains spoilers.

‘Why don’t you stick to your own species, Fitzenstein?’ spits out Trina Sinclair (Danielle Hampton), hockey star and archetypical teen movie queen bee. The object of her loathing is Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle), one half of a misfit duo of sisters, the deliciously acerbic anti-heroes of Ginger Snaps (2000). It is an interesting choice of language. Playing on the name ‘Frankenstein’, Trina characterises Ginger as a monster: a sub-human freak in the high school hierarchy. Trina does not realise how blackly comic her quip is; Ginger has, in fact, been bitten by a savage wild beast and is mutating into a blood-thirsty werewolf.

John Fawcett’s cult teen horror film uses the idea of mutation - both biological and sociological - to provide a witty and intelligent exploration of what it means to become and live as a woman in middle-class suburbia. Twinned in Victorian boots, plaid skirts and over-sized overcoats, the fuzzy-haired Fitzgerald sisters - Ginger and Brigitte (Emily Perkins) - are cast as mutants in the homogenous world of Bailey Downs, a fictitious Canadian town of pristine picket fences and sports pitch triumphs. The sisters deviate from the norm, not only in their Gothic fashion choices but also in their biological development. As their mother tactfully remarks in one of several awkward family dinner scenes, ‘the girls are three years late menstruating - they’re not normal’. With their young, hollow-eyed physiques, the girls are scorned and ostracised by their classmates. Director John Fawcett emphasises the sisters’ alienation by framing the actresses in large empty shots - crossing suburban landscapes or on the fringes of sporting events. But far from wanting to fit into their high school (‘a mindless breeders’ machine’), the pair has embraced their mutant status. They take comfort in being ‘united against life as we know it’; and their intended escape route is a joint suicide pact.

When we meet the sisters at the start of the film, they are idly discussing the best way to enact their plan. ‘Wrists are for girls,’ sighs Ginger, ‘I’m going to slit my throat’. Immediately the dissatisfaction with being a ‘girl’ is flagged up as a central theme to the film. A montage of photographs follows as the credits begin, each showing the sisters meeting their ends in a variety of sticky ways, brought about by the domestic world they hope to escape. There is a dead body in a refrigerator; another under a lawnmower; another impaled on a garden fence. The Fitzgerald girls clearly abhor the idea of turning into a stereotypical housewife. The sisters’ mother, Pamela Fitzgerald (ably played by Mimi Rogers), provides a vision of that future with her seemingly prim conventionality and household routine. ‘God, I hate our gene pool,’ Ginger later moans after yet another fractious encounter. The girls are presented as aliens within their own family.

When the photographic sequence fades to a classroom, we become aware that the photographs were staged for a school project, entitled ‘Life in Bailey Downs’. The male teacher murmurs his response - ‘I am completely sickened by that. Wasn’t I? Mmm?’ - as a male student asks if they can see the pictures of Ginger again. Clearly the shots of death did not have the desired effect. The sexually predatory nature of men and male attitudes towards women are recurrent features of the film and explored during Ginger’s mutation into aggressive werewolf.

It is no coincidence that Ginger is bitten by the wild beast on the night of her first period; as she becomes a woman in the eyes of society, she also transforms into an animal, unable to control her body and urges. As alien observers of the ‘total hormonal toilet’ of high school, the girls want to avoid these biological changes at all costs, offering a variety of preferred diagnoses for Ginger’s back pain (‘maybe it’s cancer of the spine?’ ‘Or tuberculosis?’); and when it is finally clear that Ginger is menstruating, she expresses her anger at the transformation (‘God, I mean, you kill yourself to be different, then your body screws you over’) while the female adults in the film - the girls’ mother and the school’s guidance counsellor - offer only glib sentiments of encouragement (‘congratulations, sweetie!’) and advice (‘play safe!’).

After the attack and the onset of puberty, Ginger is increasingly sexualised, not only in her behaviour but also in the eyes of those around her. As she gains more male attention, the film gives a nod or two to the standard teen movie transformation with shots of Katharine Isabelle striding down hallways with newly-dyed hair and figure-revealing clothing; but the subversion of the usual ‘boy meets girl’ plotline creates a feminist critique of standard rom-com stereotypes and reveals a much more sinister side to male-female relations. Rather than a mere attractor of attention, Ginger becomes an aggressor and instigator of sexual activity - a social faux pas in the restrictive world of Bailey Downs. The object of her lust, high school student Jason McCardy (Jesse Moss), is blind-sided by Ginger’s sexual dominance: ‘You lie back and relax,’ he tells her before asking ‘hey, who’s the guy here?’ [SPOILER ALERT] Ginger is not willing to adopt the submissive role prescribed: ‘Who’s the guy here?’ she angrily retorts before lunging at him and taking some blood-curdling bites (she is a werewolf after all!). [END OF SPOILER]

The aftermath of losing her virginity is equally messy as the act itself, both physically and emotionally. As she returns to Brigitte covered in blood and vomiting, Ginger speaks of her dissatisfaction: ‘I get this ache and I thought it was for sex but it’s to tear everything into fucking pieces… It wasn’t what I thought it would be - there was all this squirming and squealing and then he was done and you’re like “Oh”.’ Ginger explains to Brigitte, the younger and less experienced of the sisters, the way that women are portrayed after sex: ‘He’s a hero and I’m just a lay, a freak, a mutant lay.’ The woman is seen as the alien other; an inferior object, which men can stereotype and dismiss.

This dialogue may sound unsubtle but Ginger Snaps is not simplistic in its message. As the plot progresses and Ginger’s mutation becomes complete, the film presents more nuanced effects of a male-dominated society. [SPOILER ALERT] One side effect is competition - the once-close sisters turn on each other (‘Poor B, I’m obviously growing up and you’re not’) and Ginger kills her love rival, Trina Sinclair, in a savage and comic attack in the Fitzgerald kitchen. After the killing, Ginger realises that the misogynistic system may have its advantages: ‘Look, no one ever thinks chicks do shit like this… We’ll just coast on how the world works.’ Their mother’s reaction to discovering the murder also reveals an interesting dimension to her Stepford Mom character. By contending that they should fake a fire in the house before going on the run, Pamela reveals her dissatisfaction with the role she has been assigned and her willingness to break free: ‘We’ll start afresh, just us girls. It’ll be fun.’ She highlights the difficulty of being a mother in society, predicting that both the girls’ father and the wider community will blame her for creating and bringing up murderous daughters. [END OF SPOILER]

While her mother voices discontent, Ginger embraces this unequal, competitive world and her new-found power, sneering at Brigitte as her peers once did: ‘I’m a goddamn force of nature. I feel like I could do just about anything. I feel almost like we’re not related anymore.’ She has now grown distant from Brigitte and fully mutated into a monstrous werewolf. The transformation (and film) ends bleakly. The sisters, once united in their mutant status and close, have become alienated from one another and the only equal and caring male-female relationship in the film has been destroyed. Perhaps Ginger Snaps aims to tell us that such a relationship is not possible once a girl becomes a woman and a sexual being. Perhaps Brigitte behaves as she does because her sister had transformed into a product of a society that they had hoped to avoid. Ironically, Ginger’s mutation (both natural and supernatural) brought her more in line with the norm than her previous mutant existence.

Eleanor McKeown

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The Wicker Tree

The Wicker Tree

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Screening date: 30 April 2012

Distributor: Anchor Bay Films

Director: Robin Hardy

Writer: Robin Hardy

Cast: Christopher Lee, Graham McTavish, Britannia Nicol, Henry Garrett, Honeysuckle Weeks

UK 2010

96 mins

Some belated sequels, which no one particularly expected or wanted to see, are actually well worth a look. These include films that see actors returning from the original, for example Paul Newman in The Color of Money (1986), or ones that revisit the title and the source material, for example Return to Oz (1985). Others, while they retain one of the original creators, for example Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 (1984), seem ill-conceived from the start, as few directors, if any, could top Kubrick at his best.

Unfortunately, and somewhat inevitably, The Wicker Tree (2011) is an example of the latter. The original film, The Wicker Man (1973), was in many respects an example of lightning caught in a bottle - a dependable British cast at the top of their game, an unusual story and a witty script that flirts with different genres but is hard to pin down. As the original film depended on many disparate elements fitting together in a production that was beset by problems, a sequel would have to be brilliant to match its reputation. A script of ‘The Wicker Man II’ by original writer Anthony Shaffer did the rounds for decades, but this was stymied both by his death in 2001 and Edward Woodward’s in 2009. The actor, almost unbelievably, was prepared to return to the role of Sergeant Howie, following in the footsteps of Donald Pleasance in Halloween 4 (1988) as another apparently fireproof hero. With Shaffer and Woodward gone, director Robin Hardy has come up with his own thematic sequel, which takes the audience to another Scottish pagan community who enjoy orgiastic celebrations and sacrificing Christians.

Christopher Lee returns in a brief cameo as a former patriarch of the community (possibly Lord Summerisle, depending on the vagaries of copyright law), but the cast of TV actors he’s surrounded with rarely lift the material above the standard of an episode of Midsomer Murders, which in tone, atmosphere and set dressing the film seems particular keen to recreate. As in the original, there are some great uses of music, some well-judged moments of tension and some good depictions of decadent Brits taking their desires to their logical conclusion. However, the comedy moments are often forced and occasionally embarrassing to watch while the horror is never extreme enough to be particularly shocking, with more disturbing and memorable cannibalistic orgies served up in recent years by Perfume (2006) and episodes of True Blood in 2009.

The Wicker Tree isn’t unwatchable, unlike parts of the misguided American remake of The Wicker Man (2006), but adds nothing to the original. A worthy sequel to the 1973 cult movie is perhaps one best left to our imaginations.

This review was first published in our coverage of FrightFest 2011.

Alex Fitch

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A Horrible Way to Die

A Horrible Way to Die

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 19 March 2012

Distributor: Anchor Bay

Director: Adam Wingard

Writer: Simon Barrett

Cast: A.J. Bowen, Amy Seimetz, Joe Swanberg

USA 201o

84 mins

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

This review was originally published as part of our coverage of Film4 FrightFest 2011.
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Guilty of Romance

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Guilty of Romance

Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 September 2011

Venue: Key cities

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Original title: Koi no tsumi

Cast: Miki Mizuno, Makoto Togashi, Megumi Kagurazaka

Japan 2011

144 mins

In rain-drenched pre-millennium Shibuya, Tokyo, a grotesque discovery is made, the dissected corpse of a woman, her limbs and torso bizarrely mixed with parts of a shop dummy, in a derelict apartment normally used by prostitutes. A detective (Miki Mizuno) begins to investigate.

We cut back to the life of Izumi (Megumi Kagurazaka), dutiful wife of a fastidious, obsessive novelist. Her existence revolves entirely about subservience to his whims, placing his slippers for his return home just so, subject to a brutal harangue when she purchases the wrong soap. She has friends, but no real purpose or life of her own. She longs to do something before she is 30, and takes up a part-time job in a supermarket, where she is spotted by a modelling agent, and before long finds herself manoeuvred into posing for soft porn. This awakens something in her that she barely seems in control of, and she begins a double life. The slippers are still placed just so, but her daytime hours become consumed with satisfying her increasingly raging libido. She drifts, wide-eyed, into the Maruyama-cho love hotel district, and into the orbit of Mitsuko (Makoto Togashi), who becomes her mentor in the world of prostitution. A wild slide into the weirder shores of degradation and humiliation follows, going back again and again to a certain derelict apartment…

Sion Sono’s Guilty of Romance is an extraordinary film, one that’s difficult to unpack and decipher. It could be read as a right-wing patriarchal tract warning women that indulging in lust is a surefire path to hell. Except that Izumi’s husband is depicted as a cold, hypocritical gobshite, and a lot of the lusty transgressive stuff sure looks like fun. It’s largely a women’s film; the detective and all the major characters are female, and their desires push the story forward; they all look incredible and are given great scenes and dialogue; the men are mainly just, well, dicks. Despite the title, romance here is in short supply. Izumi’s husband (Kandji Tsuda) writes passionate scenes for his novels but displays no real erotic desire towards his wife. Izumi wants mainly to be wanted, but under Mitsuko’s tutelage tries to channel her desires through financial transaction. Mitsuko is revealed to be a professor of literature at a local college and gives a few intellectual justifications for her chosen path (‘Every word has flesh, the word’s meaning is its body,’ she Cronenbergs). But we aren’t sure that she believes this stuff, as the bitter relationship with her mother (Hisako Ohkata) is revealed and another Freudian minefield is opened up. Everybody’s value systems seem to be built on quicksand and given the perverse bloody mess that results, Izumi’s simple desire for sex begins to look relatively healthy.

It’s beautifully shot and composed, with chapter headings and courtly classical music that brought Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon to mind. But I couldn’t help feeling that the film went off the rails in its last hour. After setting up Izumi’s strict and strange relationship with her husband for the first half of the film Sono oddly has him disappear from the story for much of the second half, as if his function in the narrative was over for a while (crucially, we never witness his reaction to her breaking his precious routine). And while Mitsuko’s caustic conversation with her mother is a comedic high point, the final series of Norman Bates-style twisted family revelations seemed imported from a different film, and, frankly, left me baffled. I’m not sure that Guilty of Romance needed its murder mystery element at all. It’s as if Sono did not trust that the core dynamic, the spiralling relationship between Izumi and Mitsuko, was ‘extreme’ enough and would hold our attention without this giallo gloss.

Still, after catching this and the director’s previous film Cold Fish I’m convinced of the man’s talent, if not his ability to control it. This is the third part of a thematically linked ‘hate trilogy’ (Love Exposure was the first), and going off the rails seems to be what his fans expect. It’s a film I primarily watched with my jaw in my lap wondering what the hell I was going to witness next. It’s a long weird trip, but I’m not sure entirely what to take away from it, apart from a warning to avoid creepy-looking blokes in white coats and black bowlers, but I kinda knew that already.

Mark Stafford

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Troll Hunter

Troll Hunter

Format: Cinema

Release date: 9 September 2011

Venue: UK wide

Director: André Øvredal

Writers: André Øvredal, H&#209vard S. Johansen

Original title: Trolljegeren

Cast: Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna M&#248rck, Tomas Alf Larsen, Robert Stoltenberg, Knut Naerum

Norway 2010

103 mins

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…

(For the film’s nearest ancestor, do check out Zak Penn’s Incident at Loch Ness, in which Werner Herzog goes in search of the monster of the loch - and finds it…)

Øvredal’s scenario isn’t exactly bursting with ideas, but it does play imaginatively with its single premise, postulating an ecology and rough social order for its monsters, and exploring just how and why the Norwegian state has managed to keep the public in ignorance (until now). To its credit, the film never gets caught up in trying to make this absurd conceit plausible, and derives a lot of enjoyment from the bare-faced silliness of it all.

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. The script cunningly weaves in every ‘fact’ and situation you’re likely to recall from children’s tales, right down to a cameo appearance by the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

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.

Troll Hunter screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June and was a big hit at FrightFest in August.

David Cairns

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Pitfall

Pitfall

Format: Cinema

Screening dates: 2 + 10 August 2011

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara

Writer: Kôbô Abe

Original title: Otoshiana

Cast: Hisashi Igawa, Kazuo Miyahara, Kunie Tanaka, Sumie Sasaki

Japan 1962

97 mins

Pitfall was the first feature film to be directed by the multi-disciplinary artist Hiroshi Teshigahara. It was his initial collaboration with the celebrated novelist and playwright Kôbô Abe, a creative partnership that would lead to Woman of the Dunes (1964), The Face of Another (1966) and Man without a Map (1968). Pitfall was also the first Japanese film to be released by the Art Theatre Guild, a company that had been founded in 1961 as a distribution operation with its own cinema chain in order to bring such classics as Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Citizen Kane (1941) to the emergent art-house audience. By the late 1960s, the Art Theatre Guild had ventured into production financing on the basis that budgets would be low but directors would be allowed complete freedom of expression, with Shôhei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes (1967) and Nagisa Ôshima’s Death by Hanging (1968) being early beneficiaries of this scheme. The template for these later successes - an experimental filmmaker engaging with pressing issues through an abstract approach to existing narrative form - would be suggested by Pitfall, which finds Teshigahara making points about the inherently corrupt nature of Japanese society through Abe’s allegorical ghost story. The director had already made the fascinating shorts Ikebana (1956), a study of the art of flower arrangement, and Tokyo 1958 (1958), a snapshot of the Japanese capital during a particularly industrious period, but Pitfall would establish him on the world stage when it was given an award by the NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and released internationally.

The film begins with an act of desperation and ends with the realisation of expendability: a miner, his young son and another worker make their escape from the mining camp where they have been not so much employed as contractually imprisoned. Attempting to make a living as a migrant hired labourer, the miner resorts to posing as a coal prospector in order to secure food and lodging for the night, a scam that is observed from a distance by an inscrutable man in a white suit, who takes a photograph of the miner. Moving on before it becomes apparent that he is a penniless worker rather than a prospector, the miner is able to settle with his son into some semblance of routine at their next location, where employment is offered. Yet, events take an eerie turn when the miner is informed by his supervisor that his professional services are wanted by a larger operation, with a photograph of the worker being provided to confirm the request. Upon relocation, the miner and his son end up in a ‘ghost town’ inhabited only by a candy store owner who informs them that the nearby mine has been closed due to potential collapse. The reappearance of the man in the white suit leads to the miner’s demise, taking Pitfall in a new direction as the soul of the deceased rises to ask questions about the meaning of his life and the reason for his death.

As with the Teshigahara and Abe collaborations that followed, Pitfall reflects their concerns about Japanese society in the 1960s - in this case, the lack of corporate concern for the living and working conditions of uneducated labourers - but it is arguably the unsettling spectral atmospherics that have ensured its cult status. Teshigahra achieves a sense of realism by shooting in the region of Kyûshû, where a number of mining disasters had occurred and communities were suffering from starvation as the area had been brought to an economic standstill due to mine closures. However, the director ultimately seeks to expose unscrupulous trade union activities through existential enquiry, causing Pitfall to be variously categorised as a horror film and as an example of the Japanese New Wave. Described by Teshigahara as a ‘documentary-fantasy’, the film is as sparse as it is surreal, with the barren landscape of deserted towns and desolate quarries serving as a purgatory where the condemned are left to contemplate the choices that keep them in a state of perpetual motion. This anxiety is emphasised by Tôru Takemitsu’s score, which eschews conventional arrangements in favour of unsettling sound effects that convey distress and isolation, while Teshigahara employs simple but effective superimposition in order to visualise the realm of the afterlife. Unlike some of the other directors featured in the Shinjuku Diaries season, Teshigahara’s work is widely available on DVD, but the inclusion of Pitfall offers an excellent opportunity to experience his uniquely haunting debut on the big screen.

Pitfall is available on DVD from Eureka Entertainment.

John Berra

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Stake Land

Stake Land

Format: Cinema

Release date: 17 June 2011

Venues: Key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Jim Mickle

Writers:Nick Damici and Jim Mickle

Cast: Nick Damici, Connor Paolo, Kelly McGillis

USA 2010

98 mins

Jim Mickle’s Stake Land (2011) is a pretty good watch, with rousing action scenes where locals turned vampires tear up rural America, although this is hindered by some unneeded frills. The film is set in apocalyptic America (what has caused this is unexplained). Towns and cities are dysfunctional and many are deserted. Various groups jostle for position: an extremist Christian cult, disenfranchised ‘simple folk’ searching for a new frontier and a pack of blood-guzzling vampires, each aiming for supremacy.

The story follows the travels of vampire stalker Mister (Nick Damici, Mulberry Street, World Trade Center) and orphaned Martin (Connor Paolo, Gossip Girl), picked up by Mister as an apprentice/vampire killer pal (I hope named after George Romero’s awkward be-fanged teenager). They are trying to find the promised land, a mysterious place called New Eden.

Stake Land is part buddy movie, part road movie, part sci-fi, part social commentary, part Western. Watching the film is like flicking through cable channels: Mad Max follows Karate Kid follows The Champ, all with teeth. There is a lot going on and it’s impressive that the filmmakers manage to cover so much film territory. But it feels a bit like an attempt to cover their bases and have something for everyone: slowed-down glamorous sections where the leading actors look cool, set to a melancholic soundtrack, are next to gripping and noisy action scenes of blood lust and staking (the best part of the film for me), and sensitive bonding scenes between the characters as they travel through a stunning landscape. All this set to music that is so unnecessary it feels like being smothered with a pillow of emotional impact.

The subtext of the film seems to suggest that in a new era of sluggish economies and ecological disaster only the fittest will survive, and those commonly portrayed as a drain on resources and not ‘pulling their weight’ are cast out. Indeed, many sequences are reminiscent of media-fetishised disasters. Vampire-struck towns with deserted houses, shops and people scavenging for food reminded me of images of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or images of terrorist attacks. The vampire format has been used before to flesh out a particular time’s anxieties (disease, addiction, etc), and here it’s a fear of terrorism. With Stake Land, we’re made more aware than ever of a ‘watch your back’ generation of Americans desperately in need of a bit of meditation and some Ritalin.

Some of these references to contemporary society work well. One of the film’s strengths is the way familiar American suburban tropes are adjusted to fit this apocalyptic vamp landscape. The scenes where these mythical beings are seen as roadkill for ‘Nam-styled Mister, or where an infected Santa Claus awaits his impending doom in a cul-de-sac, dripping with tar-like blood, are high points. On the other hand, the relationships between the characters are not allowed to fully develop, so that the audience can neither genuinely root for them, nor really despise them. Damici’s character has some great moments and his cool lines give the film some laughs, but part of the narrative draw is dropped too early. Four of the people that Mister and Martin befriend are promptly killed off, notably an old woman and a black man, and rather predictably, it’s the young white couple who survive long enough to try and reach the promised land in the end.

Nicola Woodham