Deep Focus

On Blu-ray: Up and Monsters, Inc.

2009-11-11T04:00:08Z

The new Blu-ray Disc (BD) version of Up — released on the same day as the BD of director Pete Docter's debut effort, Monsters, Inc. — is a revelation in at least one regard: it demonstrates that 2D is better.

Repulsion

2009-11-08T23:47:48Z

Not sure why it took me so long to get around to this, given my long-standing admiration for Polanski's wonderfully lurid Rosemary's Baby. Based on Repulsion's reputation as a dark psychological thriller, I wasn't expecting it to work so efficiently as a straight-up horror movie — perhaps that classification is another case of conventional wisdom classing up an especially well-respected film by lifting it out of the genre ghetto.

The New York Ripper

2009-10-28T01:00:37Z

My review of The New York Ripper is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

Fulci's killer stalks New York women and mutilates them with an unmistakably sexual aggression, although he's apparently not a rapist. He's a stock genre character except for one thing: he talks like Donald Duck, complete with frenzied quacking noises.

Trick 'R Treat

2009-10-27T23:56:31Z

Over the course of the two years that it sat on the shelf following a planned-but-aborted fall 2007 theatrical release, the Halloween-themed anthology film Trick 'R Treat was embraced by genre fans who caught it at festivals and other special screenings starting that December. I think I can see what captured their sick little hearts — in an era when the state-of-the-art in popular horror films is split between the practiced cruelty and borderline hostility of neo-gore exercises like the Saw and Hostel franchises and the incidental soullessness of Friday the 13th and Last House on the Left remakes, this film, in its straightforward, low-concept fright-mongering, feels downright fresh. In fact, except for a couple of gratuitous tit shots, Trick 'R Treat is earnest, uncynical, and nearly wholesome. What it's not — and it pains me to say this — is very much good.

Horror Hospital

2009-10-27T01:17:17Z

Director Anthony Balch, known both as a collaborator on film projects with William S. Burroughs and as a shrewd cinema programmer and distributor, made this cheesy but imaginative and good-natured horror show on a shoestring. Swinging singles Jason (Robin Askwith) and Judy (Phoebe Shaw, credited as Vanessa Shaw) take a holiday at an old, vaguely threatening English manor. By the time they figure out that the other houseguests have been lobotomized, it's too late — creepy Dr. Christian Storm (Michael Gough -- I know him from Trog) and matriarch Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock) are holding them captive in a weird kind of research laboratory with security provided by Daft Punk. Storm apparently wants to turn the poor kids into mindless sex slaves and only Frederick, a sympathetic dwarf servant, may be able to bust them out before that happens — assuming the mysterious, shambling mud monster doesn't do them in first. Too bad Balch really blows his load in the film's very first scene, prematurely debuting his pièce de résistance — a Rolls Royce with pop-out machete blades that serves as a mobile decapitation machine, right down to the sacks positioned to catch the heads as they roll off the bodies while the limo tears up the English countryside. Meanwhile, the goings-on inside the house are pretty rote — but there's a wee bit of nudity to spice up the first half and the film's cheerfully ludicrous attitude goes a long way. And complaining about the film's cheap stereotypes would likely be missing the point. Elite Entertainment released a nice version of this on DVD back in 1999; it's now out of print.

Antichrist

2009-10-23T01:10:44Z

Lars Von Trier has been ducking accusations that he holds the female sex in a rather low regard for as long as he's been making movies about suffering women. Breaking the Waves set the stage for the next decade or more of his career in grand fashion, with an epic chronicle of female sacrifice that climaxed with the conflation of a woman's faith and debasement receiving the approval of a watchful God. Arguing on Usenet back in the day, I briefly advanced a crackpot theory that Breaking the Waves was a kind of metaphysical horror movie, an audience's revulsion at the sexual hoops Bess jumps through in the belief that her promiscuity will somehow help heal her husband's paralyzing injury meant to be surpassed only by its astonishment that the universe was run by an entity that considered such behavior not only noble but exemplary. For the hell of it, I sent a quick email to an address that I believed to be Von Trier's, asking, "Does Breaking the Waves have a happy ending?" The one-word response came back overnight: "Yes!!!!" So much for irony.

Stop Making Sense

2009-10-15T23:52:11Z

My review of Stop Making Sense on Blu-ray Disc is online at Filmfreakcentral.net:

It's not simply that the on-stage enthusiasm is infectious, but that something special is coming up: the room is about to be blitzed by one of the world's greatest live bands in polyrhythmic rock-and-roll mode.

Hardware

2009-10-14T01:26:04Z

They say all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. But if you've got a girl and a killer robot, then you're really onto something. One of the joys of low-budget horror movies is that the stakes are low enough that filmmakers can get away with a lot of crazy shit, and there's crazy shit aplenty in Hardware, the post-apocalyptic SF/horror feature debut of South African director Richard Stanley. The film takes its visual and thematic cues from Alien and Blade Runner, with a few ideas from The Terminator and Demon Seed thrown into the mix. But when you boil it down, Hardware is just a gritty, crudely fashioned cyberpunk monster movie. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, boy do you need to see this.

Lorna's Silence

2009-09-17T00:35:35Z

Lorna is in Belgium on false pretenses. She married a man, a junkie, in order to gain citizenship (and a cash reward). The men who arranged her relocation to Belgium from Albania have a plan for her. Once she is widowed — and the men will see to it that she becomes a widow — she is to marry a Russian, who will use her legal status as a Belgian to gain his own citizenship. When she begins to care for her husband, who is trying hard to dig out of the hole he's in, with some success, she starts trying to gain him a reprieve from the awful fate that he's too far into his haze to anticipate. The film is truly Lorna's story. Not once is the film's audience given information Lorna is not privy to, or shown a scene that she doesn't witness. This intense subjectivity, and Lorna's eventually breakdown in the face of her experience, ultimately yields an unsettling examination of the morals of desperation and the sometimes desperate nature of morality.

Obsessed

2009-09-13T23:26:20Z

My review of Obsessed is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

When Hollywood types assimilate exploitation tropes and tactics, they start concocting films like Obsessed, in which Skinny White Bitch Ali Larter runs seriously afoul of Virtuous Black Woman Beyoncé Knowles by throwing herself at Good Husband Idris Elba. In fact, Obsessed is less a movie than it is a marketing plan, calculated to snare audiences entranced by its whiff of sex, celebrity, and dysfunctional race relations.

Nikkatsu Noir: Eclipse (Criterion) Series 17

2009-09-11T23:37:53Z

The latest addition to Criterion's budget-priced and barebones Eclipse line-up is this boxed set of five films from a cycle of tough-minded crime dramas that enjoyed popularity in post-WWII Japan. Little-seen in the U.S., this group of films as a whole probably benefits from Japanese settings and attitudes that bring a sense of freshness, even exoticism, to straightforward genre exercises. But the films are entertaining and engrossing on their own terms, and, more than that, they paint an interesting picture of a culture in a generational transition and, perhaps, a bit of an identity crisis — they're clearly derivative of American film noir and French crime films of the period. And the best ones in the set — for my money, Seijun Suzuki's Take Aim at the Police Van and Takashi Nomura's A Colt Is My Passport (pictured at top) — hold their own against any crime film of the period. Together, they provide a sketch, in necessarily broad strokes, of a key period in the development of the popular Japanese cinema. Nikkatsu Noir is a terrific collection.

Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-26T02:50:29Z

UPDATE 8/29: My wife jumped on me after reading this for the suggestion that the act of taking scalps from victims was somehow endemic to the Native American people. While she agreed that's how it's presented in this film, she told me that the Europeans introduced the practice to indigenous Americans, and not the other way around. I was not too surprised at this, though it's certainly contrary to the popular narrative, and promised to find a source online and add a footnote. Jonathan Rosenbaum, perhaps the film's most notable detractor, beat me to it. It doesn't change my opinion of the film -- Tarantino's riffing on film history rather than real history, and Aldo Raine probably wouldn't know the difference, Apache blood or no -- but I agree that it's well worth noting.

Among the most satisfying of exploitation subgenres, for those who swing that way, is the rape-revenge picture. The basic structure is well suited to the grindhouse feature — it offers an excuse to stage scenes of sexual violence (the "rape" portion of the formula) alongside images of even more graphic, brutal violence (the "revenge") while packaging the exercise as both moral lesson and wish-fulfillment fantasy. The appeal of the story is fairly primal -- an early prototype for this sort of thing, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, was based on The Virgin Spring, a 1960 Ingmar Bergman film that had its own roots in a centuries-old Swedish folk song. As folk tale, the rape-revenge yarn functions as a stern warning, perhaps first appealing to an imagined audience's prurience and sadism with the story of a violation, then warning them about the civilized world's uniform, punitive, and perhaps grisly response to such an assault. As film, the subject matter is even more charged. Given feminist ideas about the male gaze and the embedded sexism of 100 years of film history, the idea of staging a rape for movie cameras, in a film destined to reach a (presumably base and horny) grindhouse audience, has the stench of amorality (if not outright immorality) about it.

Play Time

2009-08-25T01:45:19Z

I'm a little late to the Play Time party, having sampled and abandoned Jacques Tati on Criterion laserdisc way back when, finding his work to require, I guess, more patience than I had back in my college years. But Play Time is new on Blu-ray, transferred from a recent HD remaster of Tati's 70mm comedy of modern manners that has it looking better than it ever will outside of a movie theater, and it's clearly a singular achievement. In an essay accompanying the disc, Jonathan Rosenbaum outright disses the whole idea of watching Play Time on TV, arguing that because public space is the film's very subject, it's also the most appropriate setting for its exhibition. (The film was probably never going to be a tremendous popular success, but Tati limited its commercial prospects by insisting that its initial engagements in France take place only in 70mm.) I missed that boat — there was a restored 70mm print playing in New York a few years back — but this Blu-ray Disc and a decent screen will at least allow a viewer to imagine what it must look like on a proper screen, and in that it's highly recommended.