Evil Dead or Evil Dread?

NOTE: Normally, I do not review films that are so readily available as it is not part of the original intent of this blog.  However, I felt compelled to write this review.  It won't happen again.

I don't get to see many new movies that move me.  Call me a cynic, but most of the films that have come out lately have been rehashes, sequels, and prequels to films that were already good in their own right, but for some reason the big kids in Hollywood think it's a better idea to throw some modern glitter on them repackage and sell to the A.D.D. generation.  Why mince words, it's what we've become.  We're so busy posting on facebook and twitter, being constantly updated about what's going on miles apart that we've forgotten what it's like to read a newspaper in the morning or sip a cup of coffee while looking at life outside the windows.  I'm guilty of this behavior.  I think we all are at this point, so let's just jump right in and allow me to say that the Evil Dead remake, while filled with many things that I love about horror films is a continuing example of everything that is wrong with the Hollywood studios right now.

"But-but-but," you may be protesting right now.  "Isn't it a little harsh to say that THIS is everything wrong with Hollywood?"  No.  I don't think that's too harsh, but before I explain why, let me say that I did have a bit of fun watching this film.

"Wait a minute, didn't you just say-"

Yes.  I went into the film with low expectations.  I had eaten a delicious meal with some friends and then we drove off to Westwood Village where we bought our tickets and pricey concessions and took our seats in a wonderfully old single screen theater (complete with red velvet curtain), sat down and immediately took notice of the much YOUNGER audience surrounding us, complete with cellphones, loud voices, etc.

This also didn't really bother me, it's to be expected of the UCLA area.  So let's dive into it.  I went in with low expectations, because I'm an ardent fan of Evil Dead 2.  I've always been of the opinion that while I can respect Evil Dead (the original) for what it started off, that the sequel was a perfect blend of pulse pounding rhythm, creative story telling, horrific gore, and hilarious slapstick camp.  However, I knew that this was a remake of the first film so I accepted the fact that it couldn't really be what I was hoping for and leaned back in my chair to see how it would unfold.

The first big mistake the film made was by attempting to make an emotional back story about the two leads for the audience to care about them.  Mia and David (the brother and sister) had a crazy mom, David left Mia to take care of her while he went off to Chicago, she got hooked on Heroin from the stress of it all, she's trying to quit via isolation and cold turkey deprivation, everyone has mixed feelings because of their past BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH, enough.  This is not creative storytelling in the slightest, it's just formulaic plot building coupled with bad writing.

Furthermore, the audience is at this movie for one thing and one thing only, to see 4 out of 5 teenagers (or 20 somethings in this case) accidentally unleash an evil upon themselves and get picked off one by one in increasingly creative ways.  So why are we wasting time with this over used back story?  You know how long it took until Ash's sister gets taken by a tree in the original?  Not as long as it took them to discover the "Book" in the remake.

While I should be applauding the effort to create anything outside what has become the norm of modern horror conventions this is the one place where I say: No.  Stick to the original.  Add poorly written dialogue, 4 rather wooden terrible actors, and the only thing left is the production value and the gore, which THANKFULLY, lived up to my expectations.

Jane Levy, ironically, was the only actor that I cared about seeing on screen, because she was capable of being subtle among a bunch of future soap opera stars and day time TV movie actors, when she's not being a crazy possessed demon creature or portraying the horrifying nature of quitting heroin cold.  The rest of the film manages to pander in semi-subtle ways to fans of the original while amping the pace up to 200mph for the new which brings us to the carnage at last.  The kind of carnage that should have started about 10 minutes into the film instead of the junior high "Where were you when we needed you?" dialogue that had me stifling laughter.

I like Diablo Cody, but she, like anyone else, is not infallible.  The same way that box office numbers only tell you just how easy it is to trick people into buying a movie ticket, or conversely, just how many people want to see some creative slaughtering in a safe environment.  So, okay, I liked the editing, I liked the gore, and there were a few times I felt genuinely anxious.  Why am I blasting this movie as hard as I am?

Ultimately, Evil Dead has taught us that remakes/re-imaginings/sequels/prequels will continue to flow from Hollywood rather than new and creative ideas from new and creative people like the bloody vomit in the above picture, right into our faces.  Some of my friends will tell me: Why can't you just shut that off and have some fun with the movie?  I need to remind you, I did have a little fun, I was laughing quite a bit through the film, but that doesn't make it good and that doesn't make the implications of it's success in the box office any brighter for the future of the Horror Genre.  Quite the opposite, it's spelling out a death toll to creative story writing and reminding us that all you need is good make up, editing, and a lot of fake blood.

"Aren't you contradicting yourself?"  A little bit, but life is built on contradiction.  Evil Dead is an escape film. The problem is that while I escaped during the viewing, I came back to reality and realized that I could have just watched the original and enjoyed it just as much, if not more.  Taste is subjective and THIS Evil Dead just didn't taste good.

Science Fiction Slashers and Hippy Psychotropics

Is it possible to start out as a freaky in your head acid trip, amp up into science fiction land, and then shift further into the slasher genre without becoming so completely convoluted that you lose your audience within five minutes?  Apparently it is, or at least, that's what I marveled at.  Director Panos Cosmatos' first feature film, Beyond The Black Rainbow seems to achieve this miracle.

The film starts with a kind of psychedelic infomercial about the Arboria Institute, a futuristic psychiatric care facility which fuses modern technology, psychology, and pharmacology with a sprinkle of New Age Hippy TLC.  Of course, this is not what really goes on in Arboria.  For that matter, I'm not really sure EXACTLY what happens in Arboria, but I can say that the relationship between patient Elena and Dr. Barry Nyle (the focus of the story) is anything but healing.

Nyle is crafting Elena into something.  What that something is, is not fully explained, but plenty is left up to the imagination.  All Elena craves is to see her father, the ailing Dr. Arboria, but Nyle keeps her from him, tormenting her in order to harness a unique power from her.

Visually, the film is incredible.  A plethora of beautifully contrasting color tones and blending cuts create a very unsettling feeling; natural, given the context of the story.  It is very clear that the Dr. is not all he appears to be and that the patient is more than she appears to be, and the visuals continually heighten this feeling.  Swirling cuts fade and cross-fade, blending with freeze frames and heady imagery to put us into the characters rather than merely observe them.

Somewhere along the way, the genre bends as Elena attempts to flee from her white room of constant torment and we journey with her from a mad fluorescent prison into the lush real world of plants and fresh air.

Everyone I've talked to who has seen this film has had something unique that struck them about it, whether they enjoyed the film or not.  Suffice to say, it's a multiple viewing type of film, and you will probably still NEVER quite understand exactly where it came from.  What I can tell you is this:  Panos Cosmatos was never allowed to watch horror movies as a young child.  Instead, he would look at the VHS cases and imagine what the films were about, which were dark and twisted.  When he finally DID start watching these films his mind was completely blown.

The film just completed a week long run at Cinefamily in Los Angeles.  If you can find it anywhere, do not hesitate to check it out.

Altman + Stage = Brilliant

There have been plenty of great films based on stage plays.  Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Dog Day Afternoon, A Thousand Clowns, and Wait Until Dark are all great examples.  Robert Altman, a film director who grew largely out of the DIY, anti-establishment, pictures of the 70s has made numerous films based on the stage, but recently I had the good fortune to watch a restored print of his 1982 film adaptation of Come Back To The 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, a film rife with the crucible nature of a one location stage play, utilizing amazing cinematographic tricks to cut together flashback sequences between a 20 year time span.

The film is about a 20 year reunion of a small town James Dean fan club at their meeting place, the local 5 & Dime.  Or so is the premise, but what occurs is an evening of both heartening and tragic revelation sparking a commentary on small town prejudice and close minded obsession.

Sandy Dennis takes up the lead as Mona, a girl who's life long obsession with James Dean has warped her sense of reality, and she plays it was a nervous intensity that both grips and repels the viewer.  Cher, in her comeback performance, is Sissy, a promiscuous girl who seeks validation in all of the wrong places.  Both girls are incredible, but the knockout performance is Karen Black, who, I can't really tell too much about without giving away an important twist in the whole story.  Let me just say that she is the moral compass of the story, the only character who has an absolutely clear motive and desire.

The film sparks questions about morality, truthfulness, and the nature of obsession.  Mona, is so protective of her son and her fantasy that rather than letting him live like a normal child, she keeps him cooped up in the 5 & Dime, projecting her own handicap upon him.  It brought to mind the actual treatment of the mentally disabled, which hasn't improved all that much since the 80s.  I say this, of course, in how we approach those with mental handicaps.  There is a stigma, the same as there is toward other groups that are not part of the homogeneous white bred American of the line following the Mississippi.  A stigma, that one would assume, would be overcome with progress brought by technology, education, and plain 'ol evolution.  

All of this is tied together by the increasingly ambiguous morality, that is not quite shared by all of the protagonists.  Some of these women think of themselves as forward thinkers trapped in an oppressive community, but what do they do to escape this community?  Everyone has an idea of what it means to be happy, but none of these women seem truly happy.  Perhaps happiness can only be derived upon the confrontation of one's own faults and the tearing down of the walls we place around ourselves.  At least, that's what it feels like Altman is telling us.

Altman followed this film with Streamers, easily available on netflix.com instant video and also based on a stage play, about homo-eroticism, racism, and the dreaded 'Section 8', in a Vietnam-Era Bootcamp.  Other stage based films would follow; Secret Honor and Beyond Therapy to name a few, but Come Back To The 5 & Dime was a benchmark for Altman.  He proved that he still had IT, as he would prove again in his late career a few more times.

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Existentialism At It's Best

Austrian director, Belá Tarr, is a curious film maker.  His films are known for long takes (we're talking a 1000 ft film magazine for one take long), eschewing color film stock, and telling stories about people in the depths of personal and human struggle.  At age 58 he announced that he was retiring from film making, but not without leaving one last film for the critics and audiences.

The story is about a Cab Driver, His Daughter, and the Horse that Friedrich Nietzsche threw his arms around begging for mercy in Turin, Italy 1889.  It is known that Nietzsche succumbed to a mute madness and died in the care of his sister, but it is not known what became of the Horse.  Utilizing his characteristic real time long takes, we follow what may be the final days of the small family who are surrounded by a terrible wind storm.

To explain any key scenes would merely give away the film, so at the risk of giving myself away, I'm only going to talk about the philosophical concepts of existentialism as presented.  This film, is existential to the core.  The family is surrounded by an impartial windstorm and drowns in their own depressed repetition.  The Horse that Nietzsche "rescued" was originally being beaten by the Cab Driver because of its refusal to move and it becomes clear early on that once the horse makes it home, it does not intend to move any time soon.

Our family is poor.  They live on an old farm with no real neighbors to speak of and nothing to eat but boiled potatoes.  Nothing good happens, nor does anything truly evil.  At the core, there is only nothing, a growing void that has always been there and threatens to swallow them whole at any moment.  This is Tarr's metaphor.

His cinematography only heightens this.  At the beginning the film is relatively bright, but by the end, the father and daughter are slowly consumed by an inescapable darkness.  This darkness, manifested here as a physical entity, is all part of the existential underlining.

While I will admit that watching the film will be daunting to those who are easily distracted.  Long takes are the ADD generations enemy, unless they're coupled by suspense and violent action.  I myself found myself getting restless myself after watching the two humans eating potatoes for the third time.  Ultimately though, this film is a metaphor for the larger concept that there is nothing.  

When I say nothing, I mean that we are nothing in the eyes of the universe.  We are an insignificant speck to the greater vast space all around us and nature does not have the human concept of empathy.  When surrounded by the elements we only have ourselves.

Not for the average viewer, but it is beautifully shot.  While it garnered relatively positive reviews from critics, most audiences just plain didn't get it or were bored by the, sometimes agonizingly, long takes.  I can't say that I truly liked it, but I also can't say that I truly disliked.  I will say this: After watching The Turin Horse I have not found a day where something from the film hasn't entered my conscious thoughts in some way shape of form.  I have mentioned this film in casual conversation every day for the last three weeks and I can only assume that is because it affected me in some way.  Give it a shot if you think you're up to it.

"If There Is No Love, Make Him Pay For It"

I love Japanese Cinema. If it weren't for Japanese Cinema, I doubt I would've gotten interested in working in the film industry. That said, my favorite of the contemporary Japanese Directors is, without a doubt, Sion Sono. Most people know him, if they're aware of him at all, for The Suicide Club a bizarre trip into psychological horror.  Over the past couple of years he's been making his films at break neck speed, producing a minimum of 2 films a year, which makes this review almost dated.  Luckily, the film I'm going to talk about is relatively hard to find in America, so in that way this review will hopefully be relevant.

Based on true events, Guilty of Romance is the third and final part of Sono's "Hatred Trilogy" which began with his 237 minute epic, Love Exposure.  The film opens with a blurb about Love Hotels in Shibuya (a district in Tokyo) and prostitutes who frequent them.  It then launches into a mystery about a murder in which a parts of a body were found fused with the plastic arms, legs, and head of a mannequin.  Sono tells us his story via past and present tense revealing the past tense details in time with their discovery by the present tense detectives.  What unfolds is a sort of negative hero's journey in which the lead character Izumi Kikuchi (fantastically performed by Megumi Kagurazaka), a bored housewife living in a very chaste relationship with her husband is drawn into a seedy world of depravity.  Ironically, it is this depraved world that allows her to express herself fully, putting somewhat of a skip in her step.  Until...

Everything starts spiraling out of control.  Izumi is mentored by another woman Mitsuko Ozawa (Makoto Togashi.) Literature Lecturer by day, prostitute by night, Mitsuko teaches Izumi methods to take control and further gain confidence in herself.  Mitsuko is an enigmatic force with questionable motives that will keep the viewer guessing up until the end of the film.

Sono has become a master of finding poetry in the dumpster.  Here we have a story about the rejection of decency and the headlong dive into the obscene and yet there is a sense of tragic beauty in his characters.  Are they completely to blame for their present condition or are the norms of society so strangely defined that they are pushed in one direction or another?  Sono doesn't entirely answer this question.  While at moments it feels like he is taking one side or another, it's almost always a red herring.  He leaves it up to the audience to decide, rather than try to instill some sort of ideology.

The one moment where it seems like Sono is making a statement is at a bizarre dining table scene.  The scene speaks loads about societal class division and he advertantly critiques the way of underhanded politeness in Japanese society.  While his seem is very on the head, full of frank dialogue, the characters are all smiles and laughs.  In many of Yasujiro Ozu's films, such scenes do NOT contain the frank stabbing dialogue.  Instead, while a character may be chastising or criticizing another, they use polite language in a most passive aggressive manner.

Upon completing the film, I discovered that the cut I watched is also 30 minutes shorter than the Japanese release.  This, of course, has me curious and I will definitely seek out the longer cut to compare the differences.  That is not to say, that I didn't enjoy the international cut, but I am a stickler for watching the absolute closest thing to a true "Directors Cut."  Regardless, Guilty of Romance, may very well be considered a poem of depravity.  As beautiful as it is disgusting, Sono has once more tapped into the not so hidden dark side of an overtly polite and clean society.

Delirium Films

I haven't watched anything particularly NEW in the past couple of weeks.  When I say 'new' of course, I'm talking about recently theatrical releases.  Instead, I've been combing through my back log of films that I have acquired over the years and, for some reason or another, neglected to watch up until this point.  A few months ago I finally sat down and watched Andrzej Zulawski's Possession in it's manic, gory, uncut glory.  Today, I sat down to watch it's predecessor, L'important c'est d'aimer.

The film starts off with an actress (Romy Schneider) going through hell on some sort of film set, which we later discover is a pornographic set.  A sneaky photographer (Fabio Testi) takes pictures of her in a compromising moment and she notices him.  Somehow drawn to her, he goes to her house the next day proposing to take more artistic pictures in an attempt to make up for his trespass.  What ensues is a journey into an understanding of pain, sorrow, filth, and, most importantly, love.

Zulawski's camera is almost constantly in motion, resulting in a slightly delirious, borderline manic feeling, only offset by incredible close-ups with amazing orchestral swells.  We are locked into the characters and we want, no, we HAVE to know what is going to happen.  Will they succeed or fail miserably?  The film does not provide any definitive answers to the more basic questions, but instead offers suggestions for the viewer to take in and digest.

At the heart of it all, it is a love story between people who are caught in a sticky web of failure.  They're all failed artists.  A failed actress reduced to pornographic films and dubbing work.  Her husband (Jacques Dutronc), with multiple failed ventures and an obsession with authentic photographs of classic film stars.  It is the photographer who seeks to try and provide them with some success, a venture which fails pretty miserably, but it is through these actions that each character finds a sort of closure and a chance to move on, albeit in unexpected ways.

Zulawski has a reputation for making artistically controversial and often violent films.  His films, while excessive in some areas, still are incredibly unique in how he handles eroticism and emotion.  The characters in this film, speak quite frankly, but simultaneously they do not give themselves away to each other, making the character dynamics more complex.

This film is not for the faint of heart.  There are moments that made my skin crawl, but I do not take those moments as a reason to not watch a film.  On the whole, the story is intriguing, the pacing is excellent, the technique is strong, and the acting was top notch.  Stellar performances from the three leads and a wonderful supporting role from Klaus Kinski made this film superbly enjoyable.

Nouvelle Fairy Tales

Catherine Breillat has been dubbed, in the past, as "The Bad Girl of Contemporary French Cinema" and while her recent take on the fairy tale of The Sleeping Beauty is not particularly shocking or risqué, it is still an entertaining exercise in the style of New Wave.

Originally a made for TV film, it was later released in a limited theatrical run and some festival play.  Telling the tale of the girl who is cursed from birth to fall into a 100 year sleep at age 16, Breillat's version takes great liberty in it's lore, while simultaneously telling a story about preservation and love.  The central character is Anastasia (played for the majority of the film by newcomer Carla Besnainou,) a rambunctious princess who loves reading the dictionary and listening to the ticking of clocks and imagines herself as a knight.  From birth she is cursed by a witch (for no real specific reason I might add) to die at age 16.  Three other witches intervene and use their powers so that she will instead fall into a sleep for 100 years at age 6 and wake up aged 16, but while she sleeps she live in a fantastic dreamscape.

In the dreamscape, she meets Peter, whom she almost instant falls in love with but who is stolen from her by the Ice Queen.  What follows is her search for Peter and the many strange and interesting character's she meets along the way.  All while learning the different ways that people grow mentally and emotionally.

Breillat favors long takes, frank dialogue, and honest emotional output from her actors, never afraid to expose the beautiful and ugly things that people do to each other.  Thematically, the film is about growing up in a fantasy world and the joys and dangers that come with that.  When Anastasia does finally wake up, it's in a world much different from dreamscape, where things are not quite what they seem.  It poses a question, can love transcend time?

Since it was designed as a TV film, the budget constraints were considerable.  However, because of the minimalist new wave style the film still retains a very entertaining quality about it.  Not for the people who love special effects, explosions, and other visceral types of things, but for those who enjoy a more cerebral experience.  I found myself specifically drawn to Breillat after watching a documentary called Great Directors (which, incidentally, you can watch on Netflix Streaming.)  She's a survivor.  Her early career in the late 70s was almost destroyed by critics who found her work to be offensive.  She doesn't pull her punches and has a naturalistic approach to sexuality.  That scares people sometimes, but I absolutely love it.

As I said before, not for the average movie-goer, but the film kept my attention and it's only 1hr 27min so what's to lose?  If you've ever met someone and felt yourself thinking "This guy needs to read a bloody book once in a while." The Sleeping Beauty will not disappoint you.  It's available on Netflix Instant along with 4 other works from 2002-onward.  Check it out!