Love & Peace (2015)

Ever watch a film that suddenly reveals itself to be a Christmas movie?  When I say, "suddenly reveals itself" I mean that sincerely, because it comes as such a sudden surprise in Sion Sono's thoroughly wacky and incredibly endearing Love & Peace that, much like an anime character who is thoroughly confused, I had to blink a few times before I realized what had just happened.

Centered on a failed rock and roller turned salaryman, Ryoichi (Hiroki Hasegawa), the theme of Love & Peace quite literally is the summation of it's title.  Following a bizarre series of events Ryoichi, flushes his pet turtle, Pikadon (probably the only friend he has) down the toilet.  Pikadon winds up in the strange home of a mysterious vagrant named, Pa (Toshiyuki Nishida), and a whole gaggle of abandoned toys that Pa has somehow brought to life.  After mistakenly giving Pikadon a wish candy, Pikadon's love for his master grants his master's wishes to become reality with some unintended consequences.

This might be the most accessible of Sono's career while still manages to contain the delightfully bizarre stylistic elements that keep it true to his ouvre.  It's story teaches one of optimism and hope despite self-induced terror and an apathetic society where unconditional love is a virtue above all things.  Beyond it's surface of zany talking toys and a turtle that slowly becomes a kaiju is a tenderness and faith in the goodness inherent in humanity.  It's a subtext that has slowly been poking it's way up in his films since Love Exposure.

None of this, of course, marks any major change in the underlying themes of Sono's work.  If anything, he casts his ire upon an apathetic youth society that worships pop idols but doesn't remember the atomic bomb.  With wit and a devious sense of humor he makes the discarded his heroes and the consumers his villains.  In a fashion almost typical of his films his characters are all over the top, but each little element comes together so well that it hardly even matters.  Definitely worth a watch for the intrigue alone.

31 of 31 Horror Films I Have Never Seen 2016: Poltergeist III (1988)

The third film of almost all trilogies seems to be cursed.  Take your pick of film series: Alien, Jurassic Park, Godfather, etc.  The third film never seems to perform as well in the box offices and usually gets panned by critics, whether deserving or not.  My theory on this is that the expectations of the audience for the third installment to live up to the first two is so great that the audience will likely dismiss it within the first act of the film on a subconscious level.  In most cases this seems to be fair as many of the third films in trilogies (assuming they don't become franchises) are storytelling disasters.  Decreased budgets, weak scripts, uninterested producing teams, you name it, at least one of these things will befall the third film of any trilogy.  Almost all three happened to Gary Sherman's Poltergeist III, but that was just the beginning.

Poltergeist III sees Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke) removed from the suburbs and living with her Aunt Pat (Nancy Allen) and Uncle Bruce (Tom Skerritt) in a Chicago high rise that her Uncle happens to be the building manager of.  Her life with her extended family is idyllic and charming, but a sinister presence has found her once again and it will stop at nothing to get her.

This film could easily be called Carol Anne: The Movie just for the sheer number of times the characters call out her name.  I mean, shoddy writing is one thing, but apparently nowhere did anyone think that just screaming Carol Anne was a lazy way to convey hysteria.  Even with a great cast and crew this film suffers pretty badly from bad writing.  Gary Sherman's technical directing is the only thing that rises above the mud from all of this with incredible in camera effects rarely relying on post visual effects editing.  The gags (as they're called in the industry) never repeat themselves and push the unease to great level's but they're not distracting enough to make the audience forget how stunningly bad the film is.

It's not just that the film has a bad script, but Sherman's direction of the actors is incredibly uneven.  Tom Skerritt and Nancy Allen are so all over the place that it is only Zelda Rubinstein's cheese-ball seriousness that ever distracts from them.  The lousy performances are compounded by the uneven tone of the film.  I couldn't tell if Sherman was trying to play it straight or make a "party movie."  Decreased in budget, the film lost it's original composer, the incredible Jerry Goldsmith, and rather than trying to make a similar score Sherman and the producers went with this ultra cheesy synth score complete with annoying sound cues and hits to "heighten" the scares.  It doesn't work.  No matter how much I tried to give the film the benefit of doubt, it all boiled down to the repetitive feeling that everything going on was not working.  A bummer, but then again, the second film wasn't particularly great, though surprisingly successful.

30 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: Devil Fetus (1983)

Some films are just so completely insane that they're brilliant.  Trashy? Yes.  Crude? Yes.  Outright offensive? Probably, but in all the best ways possible.  Films like this defy every concept of logic we can think of.  Characters make some of the worst decisions, but the consequences are often hilarious if not totally brutal.  Films like Hausu and Evil Dead or The Visitor all fit this criteria.  Weird, wacky, and bloody.  Heung-Chun Lau's Devil Fetus completely earns the right to be called brilliantly insane.

Set in Hong Kong, a woman buys a strange (and phalic) vase from a market auction and unwittingly releases a demon which possesses and kills her.  Sensing the demonic presence in her body, a priest binds the spirit to her name stone with a warning not to touch it for 12 years.  Of course just shy of 12 years later, the demon is released and possesses the woman's nephew, going on a murderous rampage among the family.

Where do I even begin?  This movie is so crazy that when I watched it in a full theater at The 11th Annual Aero Theatre Horrorthon the entire room was in an uproar.  People laughed and gasped and audibly responded to the insane amounts of gore that we presented on the screen.  The subtitles, many of which seemed really poorly translated, added to the insanity in such hilarious ways that regardless of how much the content didn't make sense, it created a whole extra level of enjoyment.  And it pulls every trick in the book to create it's strange world of visual insanity.

Be warned, this is not by any means a "good" film, but it is easily one of the most insanely enjoyable Horror films I've ever seen.  It was so much fun, I couldn't believe that I hadn't seen it before.  The entire time I kept thinking, that it was like someone took the plot of The Exorcist and then genetically altered it's DNA to bind it with Hausu and through it straight into a Hong Kong incubator, unleashing it upon the world before any of the kinks were worked out.  And it completely worked!  This is one of those movies that I will now likely unleash upon unsuspecting friends (probably after a couple of beers) just to watch their faces twist and contort with chaotic confusion.  That' just how worth it this film is to watch.  Unless, of course, you don't like to ever have any fun.

29 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: The Gift (2000)

When I was in High School and I started binging on Horror films I was given a copy of The Evil Dead.  Needless to say, that crazy film hooked me for life.  I've watched almost all of Sam Raimi's films since and have a lifelong obsession with Bruce Campbell thanks to it.  Among his post Army of Darkness films are a number of intrigues entries (as well as a few duds) but whatever you say about Raimi you can't say he doesn't have a certain way about his films that makes them uniquely his.  Even when he's treading more studio friendly ground there are unmistakable Raimi moments.  Whether it's that yellow '73 Oldsmobile, a shot of a full moon on a foggy night, or strangely slapstick humor in otherwise frightening situations, a Sam Raimi film is a Sam Raimi film.  That's what makes the Billy Bob Thornton/Tom Epperson penned The Gift so interesting.

Cate Blanchette stars as Annie, a single mother with a unique gift of extrasensory perception in a small southern town called Brixton.  She spends her days offering card readings to locals in exchange for donations of food and supplies.  After a woman goes missing, the investigators turn to Annie and her gift as a last result to try and find her.

While the plot synopsis of the film is relatively simple, what makes the gift so intriguing is the sense of Southern Gothic mixed with Raimi's stylistic elements.  A good deal of the script is spent getting to know the characters who, as people in small towns  are, have a good deal of dark secrets under their well meaning mannerisms.  Complex issues of abuse and mental disturbance abound on the periphery but all of the sub plots combine toward the conclusion making for a truly complete story.  Giovanni Ribisi shines particularly as Buddy, the local mechanic who suffers from serious mental trauma surrounding his father.

One can really feel the small town aesthetic attributable to both Raimi and Thornton's youth.  I would almost be so bold as to call it a spiritual sibling to Thornton's Sling Blade if in setting alone.  Regardless of the large star ridden ensemble cast there is a truthfulness to the characters that reads marvelously.  I found myself stunned by how much I enjoyed actors that I normally don't think much of, like Keanu Reeves and Katie Holmes.  Reeves as a truly despicable wife abusing redneck was fascinating to watch and the amount of animosity that he instills is perfect to the character.  All in all, it fits well thematically as a follow up to A Simple Plan (which starred Thornton), in it's exploration of the darkness inherent in all people.  Not as outrageous as his earlier works, but still a worthy film to the Raimi oeuvre.

28 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: Night Train Murders (1975)

If it hasn't become apparent in the last few reviews, I've got a weird obsession with Italian Horror.  The Italians seemed to figure out that everything had been done already and made a great point to blatantly capitalize off of then current films overseas with shoestring budgets and looser aesthetic morals.  The directors in the film studios were often very prolific, if they weren't directing multiple films per year, they were producing other directors, writing, and sometimes acting.  In 1975, Aldo Lado endeavored to put the Italian stamp on Wes Craven's wildly successful Grindhouse classic, The Last House On The Left (which is also a remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring) with the equally disturbing and squirm inducing Night Train Murders.

The basic plot of Night Train Murders is very identical to Last House On The Left but the details are subtly different.  Lisa (Laura D'Angelo) and Margaret (Irene Miracle) are taking a night train from Germany to Italy to spend Christmas with Lisa's family.  On the train ride they encounter a trio of sadistic people (Flavio Bucci, Gianfranco De Grassi, Macha Méril) who toy with, violate, and ultimately murder the two girls and in a twist of fate they wind up in the hands of Lisa's parents.

What I found incredibly effective about the film is how the first half is spent examining the mundane goings of life and the clueless naivety of the wealthy.  It's almost 40 minutes or longer into the film before the psychotic trio sets themselves upon the two girls.  Lado treats it a little differently here too.  Unlike most films of the genre, he doesn't fetishize the violence at all.  It's horrific, jarring, and completely disturbing (as it well should be) and feels more like an endurance test.  His stylistic flair is all in lighting as the violent violation of the girls takes place under the cold blue light of night.  Unlike Craven, Lado's villains are simpletons.  They're disgusting, but murder is never a present thought on their minds until the act occurs in the heat of the moment.  It is precisely at this moment when the harsh light of day exposes the scene in the train car and reality comes crashing upon our villains like a ton of bricks.

The writing is a little clunky, but there are a number of interesting moments where discussions of morality take place.  The villains only fall into the hands of Lisa's parents because the parents believe themselves to be upstanding people of generous morals and when the discovery of the children's death makes it's play all those moral quandaries are forgotten.  The question becomes simple:  If given the chance, would a parent be able to forgive their transgressor or would they take vengeance?  While clearly a retelling of the same moral story, Night Train Murders succeeds in it's subtle differences and it's unflinching portrayal to be a truly disturbing piece of shock horror.

27 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: A Blade In The Dark (1983)

The tough thing about Giallo's, as with Spaghetti Western's, is they were so mass produced that many of the stories ended up being regurgitated again and again by other directors.  It got to the point where filmmakers shamelessly stole from one another, almost always claiming they were the originals.  The budget's got smaller, the acting got worse, and the gore went up, up, and up.  While Dario Argento may hold the claim as the "Italian Hitchcock" he was not alone in his mastery of the genre.  The first Giallo (according to most film historians) was Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much.  His son, Lamberto Bava would become a well known name following collaborations with Argento on Demons and Demons 2, but his breakthrough film as a Director was Macabre in 1980.  A very good psycho thriller in it's own right, his second feature is unfortunately a bit of a let down, and that film (if you hadn't already guessed) is A Blade In The Dark.

A composer, Bruno (Andrea Occhipinti), is hired to produce a score to an upcoming horror film and has been put up in a small villa where he can work in privacy.  Or so he thinks.  It seems that people have a bit of a knack for sneaking into the villa and two girls both appear and disappear under mysterious circumstances.  Bruno is certain (and the audience knows) that they have been murdered, but he can't find the proof and as the story plays out, the body count grows.  Can he solve the mystery before he becomes another victim?

The premise is not uninteresting, the film is lit and shot evenly, and the score is enjoyable; all things that are expected of a Giallo.  The problem is that the acting completely lacks expression.  Compared to his freshman work, Macabre, which has explosive performances, the actors in A Blade In The Dark can do little more than look surprised or scared which makes them pretty boring to watch.  I'm not sure where the slip up was coming from, and while most Gialli are about as equally strange to watch in Italian as they are in English, the English dubbing track for this one is really a bad one.  Not "Ha ha" funny bad, but "Oh god, I don't care anymore, I'll read subtitles" (I personally have no problem with subtitles) bad.

The standout moments of the film are the kill sequences which all owe a great deal to the Argento school of the off camera knife wielding hand, but they're still great fun to watch.  Unless that sort of thing really disturbs you, in which case you shouldn't be watching Giallo's in the first place.  The climactic ending kill and reveal sequences are also probably the best part of the film, which unfortunately is very telling about the playing of the mystery.  It felt like you could have called it, McGuffin: The Movie after a while because there are so many different points at which Bava tries to misdirect the audience to the identity of the killer.  However, by the second to last kill it is incredibly obvious who the killer is which makes the reveal and wrap up anticlimactic.  Definitely a misstep, but Bava lands back on his feet two years later so it's interesting to see his roots.

26 of 31 Horror Films I've Never Seen 2016: The Other (1972)

Is there anything quite as creepy as children?  The idea that underneath the innocence of youth could exist a malevolence beyond comprehension is quite honestly terrifying.  While it's certainly been explored a number of times over the years, it probably was at it's height in the 70s and into the 80s.  While mostly relegated to the realm of Grindhouse exploitation films there were a number of efforts in the more mainstream studio medium that made it through.  Films like The Omen and The Exorcist are perhaps the most renown, but Robert Mulligan's The Other deserves a special recognition for it's more psychological, albeit slightly spiritual, take on the subject.

Set in a small southern community in 1935, The Other follows twin brothers Niles (Chris Udvarnoky) and Holland Perry (Martin Udvarnoky), enjoying an idyllic summer playing and getting into mischief.  Something isn't quite right, however, and strange (often fatal) accidents seem to be happening to members of the community surrounding something that the twins grandmother, Ada (Uta Hagen), taught them called 'The Game.'  Niles, the naively innocent, is the 'good' child of the two, while Holland seems intent on a more sinister darkness.  But why are the boys hardly ever found together at the same time?

The Other is a slow paced film, but the pace is deliberately slow in order to show the fraying mental state of the characters.  With each 'accident' that befalls the secondary and tertiary characters, it becomes more and more clear that something is not right.  This is incredible effective at stirring tension and even causing dismay at the truly shocking conclusion to the story.  Mulligan doesn't quite pull his punches, but he is so careful to portray the nature of childhood and the secrets that children keep.  It is not until it is too late that action can be taken and it is very ambiguous as to the effects.

The drawback of the story is that it's a little bit too tame.  While Mulligan isn't afraid to tread some dark territories, he does so in a suggestive manner, hoping that the horror of the situation will come through.  While this is effective in a few places, on the whole it feels too restrained.  On the other hand, by practicing restraint throughout the first 2 thirds of the film, the final 30 minutes and chaotic climactic ending hit the audience in the gut like a true sucker punch.  An oldie, but a goodie, and a truly underrated classic that belongs in the canon of great psychological horror films.