Beyond the Black Rainbow

2010, Panos Cosmatos

'80's fetishists take note, here's the ultimate in retro-styled boutique filmmaking, a film so in tune with a very specific type of genre storytelling it actually feels authentic.  Director Panos Cosmatos has said of his film that he wanted to recreate what horror films were like in his mind as a child after only seeing the box covers at the video store.  I know exactly what he's talking about.  I remember seeing the cover to the laserdisc of Iceman and still have a vivid impression of what that film was based on that one glimpse of a picture, and yet I've never seen it or even read up on it since.  The mind of the young will roam wildly to places adults would never think to go outside of a fever dream or hallucinogenic trip.

Beyond the Black Rainbow begins in 1983 with a videocassette, a square-boxed introduction to a fictional research institute that completely nails the ethereal sensibilities of the time, droning synthetics, pixelated sterile video effects, random images of nature, metered and low-speaking talking heads.  The intent on the part of the in-context maker is to seem progressive (nonsense terminology emblazened across the screen in primitive digital scrawl), but the filmmaker's goal is obvious.  That stuff is creepy as hell.  Though 8mm and vintage reel-to-reel handheld filmmaking has long been adopted by the modern mainstream as providing a sense of familiar warmth, the VHS or Beta age has now become a staple of science fiction and horror, because of tracking issues and fidelity loss associated with magnetic tape.  The glitches and the textural aspects to tape, both in visual and audio aesthetic seem to be the perfect starting point for establishing "creepy" or "ominous" and have been used to expert effect by shows such as Fringe and Lost.

Beyond the tape, Cosmatos presents a sterile, 80's "futuristic" environment, a concrete and plexiglass facility that's sparsely decorated, highlighted with only flat colors painted with hi-gloss finishes.  It's seemingly inhabited by only a handful beings:  A teenaged "patient", Elena;  her doctor, Barry Nyle; the nurse, Margot; the institute's barely lucid, aged founder Dr. Mercurio Aboria, and the curious non-human entities, the Sentionauts (their exact purpose I'm not entirely clear).  The film labors over Dr. Nyle's meetings with Elena.  He's after something from her, but what it is we're not too sure.  Margot, meanwhile has stumbled across a note book that looks like a disturbed and deviant field guide of sorts.  Dr. Aboria is either senile or purposefully kept in a state of dementia by Dr. Nile, while at home, Dr. Nile and his wife are utterly disconnected.

It's apparent that Elena has some sort of psychic ability, but it is kept tempered by a geometric crystal kept deep in the facility.  Dr. Nile will adjust the "volume" on the crystal to control Elena, but her powers seem to be evolving beyond the crystal's complete control.  Of course, all of this makes it sound like it's a delicious set-up to some sort of Carrie-like freak-out or Hanna-like action set-piece, but it's not.  Cosmatos' film moves at an extremely deliberate pace from the onset, reliant as much on the sound design and the atmospheric, plodding synth score from Black Mountain's Jeremy Schmidt as it does any sense of story or character.

I was constantly peeling off influences on this film as I watched it.  Early Michael Mann like Thief and Manhunter (as resonant as they were in Nicolas Winding-Refn's Drive), and Cronenberg's Videodrome, moreover his 70's Montreal horror (this is a Vancouver-based one), somehow innately Canadian yet transcending any stereotypes.  Mann's The Keep's smoky, monochromatic aesthetic and its Tangerine Dream score stick out the most, but perhaps that's because The Keep feels like a smoky, monochromatic dream I had back in the late 90's the one and only time I saw it.  Additionally the film recalls the soundtracks of John Carpenter, the grotty feel to his 70's and 80's work, as well as the cold cleanliness of Kubrick's genre work, like 2001, The Shining and the dementia of A Clockwork Orange or Roger Avery's Killing Zoe (or the far less known Frankenstein riff, Mr. Stitch).  I couldn't help but feel the same unerring sense of equally heightened intensity and detachment as Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void, which in many ways feels like a sister film.  They're both mood-based head trips that require you to succumb or freak out.

Cosmatos' film is so purposeful, fulfilling so closely his intent.  It's a challenge to view for sure, since it's not a logical film.  There's no story or clearly defined reason for it, and it's overlong by at least 15 minutes (a paring back of long establishing shots could accomplish this without sacrificing much or any of the story, though it may hasten the mood), so it's definitely not going to appeal to everyone, or most.  But I was awed by Cosmatos' conviction to style and his attention to the filmmaking details.  Whenever I felt my attention waning, something visually would draw me back.  It's an incredibly strong debut picture, with a very clear vision and sense of self. 

"I think sometimes a film can’t even be seen for what it really is during the era that it’s made. So, a lot of these films have become an interesting works of art just by aging."

[Panos Cosmatos quote link]

KWIF: Men, and Man...dy

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (or so) I have usually have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.

This week, which really spans the past 3 weeks, is just two films, as I rewatched Across the Spider-Verse in theatre twice more, and I've been series watching both the classic Planet of the Apes pentology and the sextet of Lone Wolf and Cub. I'll write each of those up in their own time.

So for, this week, it's:
Men (2022, d. Alex Garland - AmazonPrime)
Mandy (2019, d. Panos Cosmatos - DVD)

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Men is often very stunning visually, capturing vividly a gorgeous, tastefully decorated old house and very lush, wet and vibrant terrain despite seemingly perpetual overcast skies.

Men is also pretty ugly and uncomfortable to look at, at times, with makeup and digital face transplants and cgi... erm... sequences... of... things... happening, all juxtaposing against the beauty of the scenery. 

All of Alex Garland's films so far (and also including his mini-series Devs) are so full of intentionality, of thematic purpose, it's just that the purpose here is maybe a little muddier than his other works. Men trades so heavily in metaphor that it almost exclusively exists in metaphor. Where Garland's other works are entertaining outside of the metaphors, Men has little else but it to offer. This feels akin to Aronofsky's mother!, another ambitious and unsatisfying horror fable.

Having Rory Kinnear be every man in Men (save one) only for it to go unacknowledged in the film is making very much a "they're all the same" type comment (and perhaps as much a product of pandemic shooting as conceptual conceit?). Yet there's more nuance here than that blunt "all the same" statement, in the different ways Kinnear's men carry themselves, and the film's awareness of the systemic misogyny that's baked into them. The finale of the film -- an ugly, epic "birthing" sequence that is at once upsetting in it's unnaturalness in concept as its cgi unnaturalness -- is meant to hammer home the sort of generational handing down of toxic masculinity with little growth.  As the scene, and its cycles play out, what started out as frightening to Jessie Buckley's Harper eventually just becomes more of men's tedious bullshit that is being forced upon her. She walks away but the birthing keeps following her, as if to say "you must watch this , you must bare witness to my trauma for I cannot handle it myself" (and maybe also to say that there's a perpetual infant inside every man that comes out in the ugliest, and often most violent of ways).

The straightforward question of this film is "is this really happening?" Or "Is this really happening as we see it?" But even though there's a pretty chaotic aftereffect scene that hints at some reality to the events that happened, this question of "is it real" actually doesn't matter at all. It is what Harper has been going through, whether metaphorical or literal, or a bit of both.

Harper just wanted an escape after her husband's suicide/accidental death. She had filed for divorce and was immediately emotionally blackmailed by her husband. He threatened to kill himself, he put that on her. It's just one of so, so many things a patriarichal society puts upon women, and not the first of men in this film trying to put their figurative shit upon Harper, as if she owes them something, or that shes the solution to their problems, or that if she's not the solution there's something wrong with her . 

Margaret Atwood said "Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them." You can substitute "laugh at" with "reject" or even, in some cases just "make them feel anything", so trained are men to suppress emotions that aren't the "masculine ones" (that also tend to correspond with certain sins, like greed and pride) that often any strong feeling can be unfamiliar and induce any manner of irrational response.

The message here isn't so simple as "men are bad", but instead that there's an ugliness to how men are raised and how men perpetuate this ugliness, not just generationally but among themselves, and how that then spreads to how women have to think or behave or react in a society that forces them to coexist amidst this, in essence, traumatic psychopathy.

I think its an interesting movie that doesn't always get its intentions across cleanly. People will (and have) bristled at it's message, because on the surface it does seem a trite metaphor. I think given the past 10 years of politics it's a lot more loaded as subject matter than the film actually considers it to be, but the title is provocative and evocative in maybe the wrong spirit. I didn't come out of it thinking Garland was smug and self-satisfied with solving misogyny, but instead I see a storyteller wrestling with a concept too big and complex to really be contained in just a film, but trying anyway.  And what is art for, if not to wrestle with with the big concepts.

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After watching Panos Cosmatos' episode of Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, subtitled "The Viewing", I was immediately reminded that I had missed out on Mandy, Cosmatos' second feature after the dreamy and weird Beyond the Black Rainbow. I genuinely love Cosmatos' style, and what his productions endeavour to do, which is try to capture the essence of classic 80's horror movie videocassette covers, but as an entire film. In the case of Mandy it's that PLUS making 80's heavy metal album covers into a live action movie.

As a result, Cosmatos' sensibility is imagery first, story second, which is certainly not to say that his works slouch in their storytelling, but capturing the aesthetic, the mood, the vibes, is really what its all about.  It's also to say that his movies are just a trip to behold (to quote Toasty on his viewing of "The Viewing"..."Ouch. My mind just got fucked.")

Mandy can ostensibly be broken down into two halves, with the first focusing primarily on Andrea Riseborough's Mandy, her life with her loving husband Red (Nicolas Cage), and her kidnapping by a cult at the behest of its smitten, disturbed, pampered, psychotic, fragile Manson-esque leader Jeremiah (Linus Roache). The second half then becomes what Tarantino likes to call a "revenge-a-matic", where Red is out for blood, and it gets bloody.

It's a wild, jarring film that constantly makes you question what reality it exists in. It makes you wonder if the people we're seeing are human or not, if the setting is Earth or some other plane of existence. It's a film where characters are drugged, either forcefully or self-administered, which means perceptions are skewed. We're constantly jumping between points of view, different characters' experiences of the world, and as such it's hard to tell what truth we're actually witnessing.  It's all very intentional.

It's totally a "vibes" movie, though not quite as completely as Beyond the Black Rainbow was. Once the revenge film kicks into high gear and Red goes on his most metal of crusades, it's just a hair away from being an action movie, yet still running high on fumes.

If anything pulls it out of its vibes, it's Cage. I'm ever so mezzo mezzo on Cage. I don't buy into his greatness, because I've seen enough of him that isn't great. When he goes "full Cage", it needs to be the right place and the right time. Here, there's a couple of "full Cage" scenes which just pull me right out of the film, where Cage isn't acting so much as improvising, emoting, and, you know, doing that thing he does.  It doesn't fit the vibes, man.

That said, in the first half, as Mandy's loving partner, Cage is perfect, delivering a very subtle, supportive performance, which is just him at his best. And when he gets to dive into those fight sequences, his years and years on both blockbusters and low budget action features really comes through in his ability to sell the physicality.

Of Cosmatos' three productions, this is maybe his most accessible, and probably most entertaining, and yet, because of the Cage of it all, it's kind of my least favourite of the three... and yet that's faint condemnation. I still thought it was a blast.

31 Days of Halloween 2018: Mandy

2018, Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow) -- download

Wow, just wow. Yes, the director precedes himself with quite the reputation, but wow, this movie.

Don't take me the wrong way, I am not wow-ing out of being impressed, but more by "wow, what an experience". This movie was incredible to watch, but I am not quite sure that made it good.

As I said, Cosmatos is already known for his previous movie (Beyond the Black Rainbow), some calling it comparable to Lynch and Cronenburg, or others less forgiving and saying it "has a doomy, dreamy, druggy, draggy feel that's impressively sustained - until it becomes oppressive, then pointless, then laughable." I haven't seen it, but if Mandy did anything, it makes me want to even more.

At its core, Mandy's story is a pretty straight forward revenge flick. Its 1983, Red (Nic Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) live together in the woods. By day Nic is a lumberjack and Mandy works a convenience store. By night they make love in the woods, fish on the lake and frolic in the green. Mandy wears metal shirts, has a strange scar and reads 70s fantasy novels as if deep philosophy. And then the hippie cult shows up.

Jeremiah, the cult leader, wants Mandy for himself and summons four ATV riding demons to capture the couple. Yup, ATVs and motorcycles. Things don't go as the cultist planned and Mandy scoffs at his overtures. She is rewarded with death by fire, while Red watches on, bound in wire, but is left alive. That was a mistake.

This movie is all colour and sound, seen through the lense of mind altering substances. And rage. Red's vision is well ... red, of fury and blood. At one point he forges (literally) a massive battle axe straight from the covers of heavy metal albums and D&D games. Or vans. You could see this entire movie through the lense of an 80s metal head D&D player, kind of like Joe Manganiello's new business venture Death Saves. As long as said D&D player is deeply steeped in LSD.

I was rather disappointed that the demon bikers turned out to be basic LSD addicts, instead of true demons, but they were portrayed in a manner that out did Hellraiser or Silent Hill in horrific natures. Too bad, this is as far as the real horror of the movie went. The rest just degrades into bland death scenes, finally petering out with the (inevitable) craven death of Jeremiah.

I am still challenged about whether the trippy imagery and sound barrage actually contributes to the movie, or just pulls you from the centre of revenge. I think if Cosmatos had delved more deeply into the anguish and fury of Red, as he did when Red self-medicates with vodka. That imagery of Nic Cage dialed to 11 was what I wanted more of, and less of the animated Riseborough scenes. But, still... quite the experience.

31 Days of Halloween: Even More TV

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, 2022, Netflix

This spread over a few nights and fills some gaps in our viewing. The series runs 8 episodes and we watched about two a night, thoroughly enjoying each one. Yes, we are already del Toro fans, but I am also a fan of anthology series, and these are all shot/done around the Toronto area, so we get a lot of familiar faces. AND del Toro worked with some of the most popular horror names currently in the business, as well as a boat load of familiar TV and movie faces, to create an incredible series. Unabashed adoration here, so I will do something I rarely do with TV write-ups, I will go over each episode.

Lot 36, Guillermo Navarro (Sleepy Hollow)

Nick (Tim Blake Nelson, Angel Has Fallen) is an asshole, in deep with his loan shark, looking to make some good money from a storage locker auction. What he gets was owned by some old guy who hid something weird behind all the old furniture and tchotchkes. The episode does a good job of establishing Nick, as surly and unlikeable, virulent to immigrants, and vitriolic even to those he has to work with. When he discovers a couple of books in an obviously magical table, his eyes light up with dollar signs at the suggestion the final volume could net him more than $100k. In tearing apart the locker, he ignores the warnings the buyer, who is assisting him, provides, even after finding a desiccated corpse in a hidden space at the end of the locker. Dude, when the creepy German occult expert tells you to not disturb the demon corpse trapped within a pentagram on the floor, listen to the fucker. Nick ignores him, disturbs the circle to get at the final book, and the tentacle-y, Cthulhian awakens to give chase, well, after eating the creepy German guy. 

The fun in this episode was in the minor details. The lights in the storage facility are on short timer, so Nick is constantly twisting dials, as he moves things out. So, when chased by a demon, we get to do a version of things-move-during-lightning-flashes via the timer lights. Everything that happens is entirely by the trope, but its all so well executed.

Graveyard Rats, Vincenzo Natali (Splice)

Salem, late-1800s; Massam ("Hey, its Rodney!", David Hewlett, Stargate: Atlantis) interrupts some grave robbers, not because he is a studious caretaker of a prestigious grave yard, but because they are interloping on his real job, which is taking the most choice pieces of jewelry from his charges. But Massam has been down on his luck of late, as rats have invaded his graveyard via subterranean tunnels and ... well, are stealing corpses. It sounds like a far fetched tale, but no sooner is he digging up the motherload of buried treasure than he sees the corpses being dragged off into Hell knows where. So, against everyone's (us) better judgement, he gives crawling chase.

Yeah, tunnels again; yay. But not just rats, but ... well, a rather large, blind, hairless rat, something best left fought by 1st level dungeon delvers, than a single man with a revolver. The crawling leads to falling, and Massam ends up in some deep, ancient chamber dedicated to an eldritch god. OK, so two episodes in, and two Lovecraftian references. But ancient chambers to ancient gods mean ancient treasure, but as all good D&D players know, ancient treasure protected by undead guardians!! "Mine! Mine!" the thing squawks as it gives chase, and soon Massam is running from TWO creatures better left to ... OK, 3rd-5th level adventurers. Just when he thinks he has escaped the things, he ends up in... standard karmic response, a buried coffin, and the rats he has been chasing now spill .... into him.

This was just fun. Hewlett embraces the maniacal character on a mission with glee. He does things only a man utterly desperate for shiny things that could net him coin does. Its creepy, full of claustrophobia and fear of unknown things in the dark.

The Autopsy, David Prior (The Empty Man)

Possibly the best of the lot, a story of eldritch creatures from beyond the stars instead of deep in the ground. After a mine explosion, Dr. Winters (F Murray Abraham, Mythic Quest) is brought in by his friend, Sheriff Craven (Glynn Turman, The Wire) to find out why the miner triggered the explosion. The miner is also tied to the disappearances and deaths of many other locals. Inside the miner is an alien parasite/symbiote that inhabits other bodies, using their senses, and eating them from within. And thus begins a battle of wills between creature and coroner.

At it's core, the episode is just a battle of wits, as the Dr. has to defeat the alien creature which wants to inhabit his body. The thing has already freaked him out, and restrained him naked to a table, as it abandons the decaying body of its last host. How will the Dr, who knows he is already dying of cancer, stop this evil thing from continuing. That is the core, but its the construction of the episode around it that wins. The place where Winters does his autopsy is not an ideal location, as Sheriff Craven has asked his friend to do this off the books, so as to foil the insurance company. The story leading up to the mine explosion was already sordid enough and Craven is fully invested in defeating this evil, before he knows what is going on, before he involves his friend. All this, along with a heavy dose of gorey body horror make the episode just fun.

The Outside, Ana Lily Amirpour (The Bad Batch)

Speaking of body horror. Ew, ick, icky! As a man who suffers from occasional flare ups of eczema, this episode just made me itch and cringe.

Stacey (Kate Micucci, Be Cool Scooby-Doo!) just wants to join the clique of "pretty" women at work, who gossip about everyone and spread hand lotion over themselves obscenely. Eww, ick. Stacey's more than a bit weird & wonky, not aware that taxidermy is not everyone's cup of tea, with a wobbly eye and big teeth. But her husband (Martin Starr, Silicon Valley) loves her, and their mundane suburban life, dearly. But nope, Stacey won't have it, as she wants it all, so when a late night TV ad shill (Dan Stevens, Legion) talks her into buying a truck load of previously mentioned hand lotion, she listens to the man on the TV talking to her, the man with the weird mix of European & American South accent and big ol white hair. BTW, by this point, Stacey is already having quite the allergic reaction to the cream, leaving her with bright red patches, peeling skin and an obsessive scritch scritch scritch. Eww, icky, ewww!

Apparently the hand lotion has its own agenda, which Stacey is buying into. I will leave it there, and I am itching already.

Pickman's Model, Keith Thomas (The Vigil)

Back to the HP Lovecraft influence, but more directly this time, adapting one of his short stories.

Its been decades since I read anything Lovecraft directly, but this one reminded me of why I soured quickly on his writing. Sure, the stuff is lush and creepy and full of world building, but its so very often just creepiness for the sake of creepiness, without much real point. It was a technique of pulp-ish spec fic writing back then, for the short stories to be much more about the author's flourid style than plot, but it just doesn't work as well for me.

Anywayz, Thurber (Ben Barnes, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian) is an early 20th century art, doing OK for himself, when weirdo Dicky Pickman (Crispin Glover, American Gods; channeling Burn Gorman) shows up. Almost instantly Thurber is drawn to Dicky's work, following him into a cemetery where Pickman sketches dead things, and almost instantly, beginning to feel the affect of being around Pickman. He's seeing weird things, and feeling overwhelming sensations of fear. Exposure to Pickman's work has unsettling affects. If this was a Call of Cthulhu game, Thurber would have failed his sanity check.

Years later, Thurber has divested himself of Pickman's unsettling influence, until the man insinuates himself back into Thurber's life. It leads to Pickman inviting Thurber into his sanctum, likely recognizing the affect it has had, and seeking a like soul, someone who sees the otherworldly in his horrific paintings for what they really are -- doorways to actual supernatural corrupting forces. Instead, Thurber shoots Pickman and escapes. Alas, his paintings were on display, and his family has seen them. End episode with classic utterly horrible ramifications.

I didn't like the episode much, despite really good production values. It just didn't seem to have any point other than depicting the affect that Lovecraftian mythos has on some. Obviously, not on all, for many had seen Pickman's work and just dismissed him, commenting on how weird he and his subject matter was. But Lovecraft was obsessed with the "descent into madness", and liked to explore it, but that's about it.

Dreams in the Witch House, Catherine Hardwick (Twilight)

Some of them stay with me, some of them just leave an impression. While I recall thoroughly enjoying this one, I must have been hitting the Old Man time of the night, as its fading already (ed. note: it could also be the fact that you are writing it long after that date at the top of the post, which is being retained for the sake of the 31 Days event?)

Director of Twilight you say? Not exactly an accolade in my books, but sure, accomplished director. Also, another Lovecraft short story, but lesser on the sanity checks.

It begins with Walter (Rupert Grint, Harry Potter & the ...) and Epperly (Daphne Hoskins, The Baby-Sitters Club) as kids (sorry, what is her name again?). She is very ill, and he is the doting twin. She dies, appears briefly before him as a ghost and then is dragged by vines into some strange forest. And thus begins Walter's quest to find out what happened to his sister.

In most stories, this would mean finding out about some sinister thing that their family had been wound up in, something that ended with Epperly being relegated to a woody purgatory, instead of the afterlife. But being Lovecraft, it just has Walter seeking forbidden knowledge, seeking out charlatan mediums and the like, until he imbibes a narcotic that lets him enter the forest, the Forest of Lost Souls. He does find his sister, but is torn away before he can "save" her. He returns with a bit of her dress.

Also note an encounter with a painter (Tenika Davis, Hudson & Rex) obsessed with a witch's house, which felt like a straying from the ghost story, but does find its way back to the main plot, when on a second journey to the Forest, Walter sees her painting and states to him, he is not supposed to be there. But soon after, zooooop, back to the real world. Without any further funds to continue his journey to save Epperly, he seeks out the painter.

So, the painter lives in an old house that was owned by a persecuted witch, who was killed by whose body was never found. Since moving in, the painter has been haunted by visions. Walter decides that if he stays in the house, maybe he can once again make contact with the Forest and save Epperly. 

The climax and conclusion are rather chaotic involving an undead witch, resurrection, sacrifice, foretold rituals, the bonds between twins and a human faced rat (DJ Qualls, The Core). It all looked spectacular, but didn't really stick with me.

The Viewing, Panos Cosmatos (Mandy) 

Ouch. My mind got fucked.

This was one weird, brilliant, messed up episode severely lacking any point beyond experience, but was so utterly fucking enjoyable in how it played out, I forgive it entirely.

Its the 70s. A bunch of famous people are invited by an eccentric billionaire to his famous concept abode, the Sandpiper House. They have no idea why they are going, nor why they were invited, but each considers it the greatest opportunity. There is the novelist Guy Landon (Steve Agee, Peacemaker), the astrophysicist Charlotte Xie (Charlyne Yi, House MD), medium/psychic/charlatan Targ Reinhard (Michael Therriault, Locke & Key) and music producer / musician Randall Roth (Eric André, 2 Broke Girls). Each is famous and each understands how famous the other is. 

At the incredible house, all angles and colours (no pink or purple though!), they are greeted by Dr. Zahn (Sofia Boutella, Star Trek Beyond) and Lionel Lassiter (Peter Weller, Star Trek Into Darkness), their hosts. Lassiter has the perfect gift for each of them, seeking to set them at ease, and then dives into a monologue about how they are about to experience the greatest of experiences, because of who each of them is, will help him interpret it via their unique perspectives. The dialogue coming out of Peter Weller's mouth is riveting and steeped in dank bullshit, while Dr. Zahn seduces them with her confidence and giant bowl of cocaine & custom designed additive. She is seeking to open minds.

To what, you ask? Well, a freaky looking rock from space. Its entirely impenetrable, physically or any scan on the know spectrum, but obviously not a natural geographic formation. And obviously Lassiter knows something about it, for he has asked these others to come into its influence. Annnnd, well almost instantly, that doesn't go well. Faces melt, heads explode and the thing cracks open, spewing forth goo. Xie and Landon escape, tearing off into the night while the goo forms into a creature that also escapes into the drainage tunnels that surround LA.

End Scene.

Fuckity, it was trippy. But when is Cosmatos not? Not only does he embrace a 70s aesthetic, but he also triple-down'd on the drug & alien mind induced altered reality feel. The dialogue was incredible, every character chewing on their scenes, convincing us that they are intelligent people, even if some were more than a bit of a DB. And the visuals! I would love to see a Cosmatos attempt at a space opera.

And to end things off, a thoughtful, pensive ghost story...

The Murmuring, Jennifer Kent (The Babadook)

Kent (director Kent, not this-blog Kent) brings back Essie Davis (Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries) to star in an incredibly well-done, if not unfamiliar story of a couple dealing with the ever present grief of losing a child, and the ghosts in a house they visit. Nancy (Davis) and Edgar Bradley (Andrew Lincoln, Love, Actually) are renowned in ornithological circles for their knowledge of the Dunlin, a migratory bird known for its murmurations, those eerie formations of bird flocks that swoop & dive, creating mesmerizing cloud-like formations. They take an opportunity to study the birds in one of their migratory stops, on a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia, in a vacant house storied by tragedy. But despite their focus on their work, the not equally shared expressions of grief threaten to derail their marriage.

This is a gentle episode, challenging and pain filled. Its a familiar story where one member of a couple deals with her grief differently from the other, leaving them at odds. Even if this was current days, most couples don't well communicate their troubles, and the addition of ghostly figures doesn't help Edgar further his support of his wife's torments. In the end, she has to deal with it head long, on her own, but comes out stronger on the other side, for all concerned, even the dead. As the cliche goes, Davis is masterful in her depiction of this woman, as she was in The Babadook, even considering how underwhelmed I was with that movie, one cannot deny she was grand. In the end, good performances, a tightly told story and eerie, otherworldly real-world ties to ghosts (I once spent an afternoon, watching mumurations over Toronto's waterfront, feeling like I was witnessing something supernatural) and flocks of birds.

Rewatch: Tombstone

1993, George P. Cosmatos (Leviathan) -- download

Speaking of Kurt Russell's moustache, it inspired a rewatch of Tombstone, otherwise known as The Other Wyatt Earp movie. Sometimes two movies are produced at roughly the same time with the same basic plot, which I recently learned are called Twin Films.  The other one, Wyatt Earp, is a Costner epic and surprisingly, considering my fondness for Costner epics, not my favourite of the two.  This one, with its cast full of Hey It's That Guy supporting actors, and great one liners ("I'm your huckleberry...") really spoke to me at the time. It doesn't exactly stand up to time, but it is still a nice, solid, summer blockbuster style movie.

Wyatt and his brothers arrive in Tombstone hoping to leave behind his lawman days. He has had enough of violence and just wants to settle down with his family and make some money. And yet violence is what they walk into, as they move into the territory of The Cowboys, a rather oddly common name for a wide ranging band of outlaws who control the territory. Of course, Wyatt cannot hang up his guns and it is here, in this town, he makes his even greater name in the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

Wyatt is setup as the nice, calm and moral man with a talent for violence. He doesn't want to hurt or kill people, but he doesn't shy away from it. And ever by his side is wise cracking, sickly Doc Holiday, played by Val Kilmer is one of his most recognizable roles. Seriously, he is just a ray of bright light in an otherwise grim movie. Not that I am complaining, for the grim works here. As Wyatt is forced into the path to eliminate The Cowboys, the calm becomes cold rage with the  Earp Vendetta Ride. That ride is shared with Bill Paxton, Sam Elliott, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Michael Rooker, Jason Priestly, Thomas Haden Church and many others; it was seminal ensemble cast of the 90s.

KWIF: Ash (+5)

 KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
Ash (2025, d. Flying Lotus - AmazonPrime)
Kraven the Hunter (2024, d. J.C. Chandor - Crave)
Flow (2024, d. Gints Zilbalodis - Crave)
Dual (2023, d. Riley Stearns-  Tubi)
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (2019, d. Richard Linklater - Hollywood Suite)
Tombstone (1993, d. Panos Cosmatos - Disney+)

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In making Ash, I suspect that Flying Lotus -- the moniker producer/writer/director/actor/composer Steven Ellis has been working under for nearly 20 years -- was attempting to channel David Lynch primarily, but also cribbing from the sci-fi horror films of Ridley Scott, John Carpenter and Paul W.S. Anderson, among others. These influences make a soup with identifiable chunks within but it has the feel of a first-time production from a director with something to prove.  

Flying Lotus has been a top notch music producer, beatmaker and composer for a long time and working within the entertainment industry for much of that, so he knows how to be in charge of a project, and he's familiar with executing a vision. It's likely how he was able to rope in the budget needed for this very not-cheap-looking film. The result with Ash a visually pretty production, grotesqueries and all, with a very even-tempered mood of simmering dread.

The plot finds Riya (Eiza González) regaining consciousness in a habitable station on an alien planet, her memory fuzzy, and members of the crew dead on the floor. The station is in a warning state, red and violet lights illuminating the space, the occasional voice of the station's systems providing updates and alerts. Riya has horrific flashes of people with melting skin, of vibrant halos, and of fleshy tunnels that she cannot make sense of. She's eventually joined on station by Brion (Aaron Paul) who had been in the orbiting satellite when things went down, and Brion's key objective seems to be getting Riya off-planet before the station completely collapsed. Riya, however, fluttering memories returning, cannot let go of needing to find out what happened, as well as search for a missing crew mate.

The progress of the story is the unfolding mystery of what happened via Riya's fractured flashbacks and some recordings of past events. It's not a convention that works well, as the violence has already happened and we've already seen the aftermath, so the tension of the conflicts in the flashbacks are effectively neutered. Though Flying Lotus' direction is strong, it's a film with misguided storytelling, believing that the mystery of what happened is more interesting in staggered hindsight rather that unfolding in a linear fashion.  It's the difference between, I think, doing a straightforward sci-fi horror and reaching for something more clever. 

Flying Lotus reaches, but doesn't fully succeed. While I mentioned the simmering dread, there's no escalating tension, and, honestly, no scares here, as if Flying Lotus did not want to make a horror movie out of this horror script. The score reflects this, with barely any punctuation in its shifting tones. 

The designs of the film are mostly pretty good. The space suits look incredible, the station itself is visually intriguing just enough to deliver the sense of sci-fi without calling too much attention to itself, and the Japanese portable robotic medical kit delivers a bit of cheeky kitsch into an otherwise sombre affair. The grotesque makeups are also pretty fun, but the "creature" designs very wildly between disturbing and incomprehensible cgi mess. The space ship, as well, is kind of uninspired.

At the end of the day, I've seen so many projects like this, so many sci-fi horror films that they all kind of blur together. Here, there was a "we got here first" angle that I wish had intoned a larger, maybe secret war between humanity and this other species, but there's not a lot of hints towards any larger context here, and the endgame of the aliens proves unclear. 

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In the realm of big studio filmmaking there are films made from good ideas, films made from bad ideas (but ones that are still expected to make money from an undiscerning public), and films of desperation, made out of some seeming necessity to keep up with other studios output, to nab their slice of some perceived pie. Kraven the Hunter is a real desperate movie, but then that's nothing new for Sony Pictures.

Sony has held a tight grip on the Spider-Man license for 25 years, and it's been fairly profitable for them, but their attempts at shared-universe building have been absolutely miserable for over 10 years now. With the ludicrous swing of "let's build a shared universe in one movie" in Amazing Spider-Man 2 back in 2014 it was a failure so epic Sony had to relinquish some control of the character back to Marvel Studios to ensure their Spider-Man license had a future. They built up on that joint venture with Marvel by trying desperately to expand beyond just Spider-Man, first with Venom (a big hit at first, with depreciating returns ever since) and then with some of Spider-Man's extended supporting cast, resulting in Morbius, Madame Web and now Kraven the Hunter.

These SPASMs (Sony Pictures' Adjacent to Spider-man Movies) were just brimming with overconfidence. The shared universes had already imploded by the time Morbius hit, and the willingness for the mass audience to tolerate a film for any comic book hero and/or villain had long since waned. Kraven was already deep in the works when Madame Web failed, and the trailer foretold that Sony had yet another bomb on their hands.

There was a whole "It's Morbin-time" attempt at an ironic re-release to appeal to the meme crowd, but Sony quickly learned that memes can't generate box office (tell that to The Minecraft Movie...), at least not by themselves. And yet the absurdity of everything in the heavily retooled and edited Madame Web turned it into a near instant cult classic (though, not enough to make a success at the box office). 

Kraven similarly went back to the editing bay after the abysmal trailer, but whatever ludicrous arch madness went into recutting Madame Web did not make it into Kraven. Stuff happens in Kraven, but we're never given a single impulse as to why we should care. The character has a prolonged flashback story that seemed to make little difference in establishing who this character was. The moment where a mauled Sergei Kravenoff lays wounded on the ground and the shot-up lion that mauled him drips his blood directly into Kravenoff's open wound (one in a billion shot) is about as close to Madame Web's lunacy as it gets. One would think a portly, thickly accented Russel Crowe would bring a heavy load of absurd flavour to the production (not unlike his portly, thickly accented Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder) but there's not a hint of irony in the performance. He wasn't asked to play it up, so he played it straight. The result is, frankly, pretty dull.

It's a dull movie overall. Kraven with his lion-infused blood and a special magical serum given to him by a young Calypso, has super powers...super sight, super agility, super strength, which lets him crawl up walls and trees and shit, as well as leap distances well beyond mortal levels. He finds himself attuned with animals and hunts poachers but also mobsters, and people who get on his list only get scratched off when they're dead. He grows into the world's foremost hunter, and a big meaty slab in the form of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, but then he needs a grown-up Calypso's (Ariana DeBose) help to track down some other bad guys? I though he was the world's foremost hunter?

There's bad guys upon bad guys in this film including an assassin called The Foreigner who can, I guess, hypnotize people for up to ten seconds and gives the appearance he's teleported or moving at super speed. It's actually a cool effect but to no real end.  There's also the Rhino, a crime boss who, if he disconnects his backpack full of serum from his liver plug, will grow super hard skin and...really... a rhino horn on the top of his head. It's absurd, but it's not fun absurd because they kind of refuse to have fun with it.

In the end, the worst of the worst guys is Kraven's dad, and so they have it out, but the stakes feel completely absent from the climax. The stakes feel pretty absent from the entire film. What's the point? Why are we even here? What's the story we're trying to tell? Why should anyone care...especially if we're not leading into Kraven hunting Spider-Man which is basically the only think he seems to do in the comics.

Just a waste of everyone's time. Hopefully this is the last nail in the SPASM universe.

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I had not even heard of Flow until it was announced as one of the finalist for the Academy Awards' Best Animated Film this year, and it seemed only after it actually won did I start seeing write-ups on it. It was the dark horse contender against the summertime juggernaut Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot and the latest Wallace and Gromit outing (I suppose the real dark horse contender would be Memoir of a Snail, which I've still not heard about and I just wrote it down right there!!), a Latvian/Belgian/French co-production from Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis.

It is a dialogue-free production where not a single human character is seen in the film. The premise is simple, a lone black cat must survive a devastating flood with the help of a cadre of other survivors.  There is an absence of humans but there are signs of them, including statutes, habitats, and things like bottles, boats, mirrors, and the like. Is it a post-apocalyptic scenario? Are all the humans dead? Or have they just abandoned this space because they were warned of the incoming disaster.

As Cat finds herself with travelling companions (the assembly of these traveling companions is one of many of the major joys of the film) they voyage through the flooded lands to the tall spires and gilded riverside domiciles that infer that this is not Earth as we know it, but some other reality.  I truly was not expecting this.

There is a heavy weight to Flow as it puts our adorably mewing cat into so, so many perilous situations. If you're a cat lover, or even just a cat liker, it is unbearably heartwrenching to see our protagonist in such peril... not helpless completely, but at times situations seem seemingly hopeless, and you want to look away. But if you were to look away, you would miss the magic, be it some twist of fate, or moment of ingenuity from Cat, or the intervention of others. They are gloriously triumphant moments.

The setting of this world is flat-out stunning. It is an incredibly lifelike reality that could pass for an Earth-like alien world in a James Cameron movie. The camera work is incredible as it stays down at cat's eye view (or lower) for the majority of the picture, and frequently dips above and below the surface of the water, just magical animation and directing. If anything in the animation didn't work for me it was the gradient highlights on the animals' fur. Often the animation of Cat and friends looked...incomplete... or at least lacking proper detail. But it's made up for by the incredibly naturalistic movements of the creatures. If you've ever owned a cat, or even just binged cat videos on Instagram, you will recognize all the behaviours.

A slight spoiler, the ending is restorative, full of hope and promise, but with the reminder that often for the benefit of some, others may suffer. I flat out loved this movie even though I cried so many times throughout it.  Sometimes because it was so beautiful and sometimes because it just made me miss my dearly departed black cat Isis.

My second favourite movie of 2024 (behind I Saw the TV Glow), and I think what I'd hoped The Wild Robot would be.

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Dual opens with a prologue in which a man kills another man in a premeditated duel on a high school football field in front of cameras and crowd, and is interviewed afterwards like in a televised sporting competition to assess his feelings of his victory. The other man looked exactly like him. The victor was his duplicate, but now, by rights of the competition, gets to take his name and live his life.

Minutes later we're introduced to Sarah (Karen Gillan). Her long-term boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koel) has been away from work for some time, and their remote conversations seem to indicate their affection towards each other is waning. At first I thought that the film was badly written, and that Gillen's performance was not great, that she was struggling with her American accent again, but quickly realized that this reality is very much an affected one, sort of like in a Wes Anderson film but cranked up a few notches. Everyone in this reality talks in a very frank and dispassionate manner, but even among all of them, Sarah still seems autistic/spectrum-coded. She misses a lot of social cues and her sense of appeasement or cordiality almost always misses the mark.  She is not a satirical character though, even in a heavily neurdivergent world she's still struggling, an outsider.

She wakes up one morning to find blood everywhere on her sheets and pillow. Her doctors tell her she is 100% terminal with a 2% margin of error. She is give no hope but is talked into the duplication process to leave behind a double of herself so that her loved ones won't be sad.  It's a terrible idea (with a hilariously bad sales pitch video online which even Sarah scrubs through). I think if she understood emotions better, this wouldn't have even been an option for her, but since she is who she is, this was presented as "the right thing to do" and so she did it.

Time passes and her double, legally named "Sarah's Double" has become a big part of her and Peter's life, to the point that Peter like this sponge of a person who seems so amenable and upbeat and vital in a way Sarah either can't be, or just hasn't been in a long time. Eventually Sarah learns she's not dying but her double has filed a suit to duel Sarah for her life, and the second half of the film is about Sarah training with Trent, to toughen up and take back what's hers (meanwhile Sarah's Double starts falling into Sarah's bad habits and attitudes).

This is satire, but of what, I can't rightly interpret, at least not yet. It's going to need another watch or two before I'm able to land on what this is really saying about our natures. Once I looked up the director, Riley Stearns, and realized it was the same creator of The Art of Self-Defense, it all really clicked for me. I really dug that film and its very weird vibe. Dual could very well be in that same reality.  Gillan's performance very quickly went from making me flinch into admiration, much the same way Stearns managed to harness Jesse Eisenberg's very specific energy and mold it in his own image for Self-Defense. She's so keyed into this role/these roles, but it's also quite clear the director is specific about what he wants. There's a humour and a pathos to Stearns' films, in that same abstract way Yorgos Lanthamos likes to present them, though with much less discomfort. I really dig Stearns' style overall and was rather elated to be in his unusual hands again.

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I have seen a pretty good sampling of Richard Linklater's repertoire, but I have by no means been avid or fanatical about keeping up. His movies are generally pleasant, and offer something of interest worth watching, but I'd hardly call any of them exciting, at least for me (maybe School of Rock?). I'm never displeased watching a Linklater joint, but I'm also never champing at the bit to watch one, certainly not to rewatch one.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a Linklater film that really fell off the radar, making nary a blip in the public consciousness. It's a light drama about an upper-class family in Seattle, focused primarily on Bernadette, an antisocial, near agoraphobic wunderkind designer/architect who retreated from the field to raise her daughter. Bernadette is the fairly typical Cate Blanchett role of affluent, entitled, difficult personality, but Linklater's whole business here is helping us, the audience, see past these traits and instead see the traumas she's hiding from that have made her this way. She is, absolutely, an eccentric, something, again, Blanchett excels at, but we see "normal" whenever Bernadette is with her daughter, Bee (a terrific performance from young Emma Nelson), and we understand that there is a lovable person who doesn't mean to be the way she is.

Bernadette has a strained relationship with her husband, Elgie (Billy Crudup), a bigwig at Microsoft, and an even more strained relationship with her neighbours, led by queen bee Audrey (Kristen Wiig), and perhaps an even more strained relationship with Seattle itself. Things eventually escalate with both Audrey and Elgie, especially when ... out of the blue, the FBI gets involved. 

The third act takes a wild turn from suburban drama into green screened Antarctic adventure that definitely flexes Bernadette's off-putting entitlement (both for characters on-screen and with the audience) but also leads to an appropriate breakthrough and catharsis for the character.

It's a wild swing that is hard to hate on but also hard to really like a lot. There are good performances, but I have to wonder how long can we stand to watch affluent people live "difficult" lives of their own making. This whole "misunderstood genius" of the rich narrative isn't going to float very far in what's left of the 2020s, and I realize this was made prior, but were Link later reading the room, he might have understood this was all a bit much.

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With Val Kilmer passing recently, I was seeing a lot of "must see" lists of Kilmer's performances. Tombstone was a mainstay on all those lists.  The 1993 western has been on the backburner of my "to see" list for a very long time, with Kurt Russell's Wyatt Earpp being the primary draw. I'm just not much one for westerns. The glorification of a very treacherous, uncivilized, and radically violent "might makes right" time never sits well with me. I need my westerns to be highly stylized and either feel like practically alien worlds, or get right down into the dirt of the human condition of living in such a free-for-all age. (I also realize that the glorification of the old west, particularly by Hollywood, has perhaps crafted an untrue image of the era, but an image that still informs the culture of the country quite prominently, and, methinks, negatively).

I didn't much care for this film. It meanders quite a bit as the character of Wyatt Earpp, having retired from law enforcement, waffles around whether he has any duty or responsibility for his new homestead of Tombstone, Arizona.  There a very large gang called the Cowboys have set up as home base, and for a time, at least, Earpp and his two brothers and their wives just try to roll with the general tenor of the place. But the Cowboys get out of hand, they push the Earpp boys too far, and if for justice, and not revenge, they take up arms against them.

It's not the story itself I object to, one which seems to be utilizing the legit framework of the Earpp brothers (Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton) and family's life, but the wildly uneven tone it progresses through as it sets up so many inevitabilities and foregone conclusions that we just wait to play out.  

The story is also routinely interrupted by a wholly unnecessary subplot where Earpp meets actress Josephine Marcus, a relatively liberated woman of the era who pursues Earpp flagrantly despite him being married, and Earpp seems transfixed by and can't help himself with.  This subplot goes nowhere and seems only included because, in the end Earpp did wind up with such a woman, or so the closing captions said. Each time Delaney is on screen, the momentum of the picture screeches to a halt, and they feel like tacked-in "we need a romantic subplot" decree from the purple suits.

Kilmer played Doc Holliday, a long-time friend of Earpps who joins him in Tombstone to find some last bit of excitement while his life ebbs away from tuberculosis. Kilmer's dewy performance is absolutely fantastic, easily stealing focus every scene he's in. He masticates the shit out of every moment he has on screen, and I see why people were praising it so much.  If only the film were built more around him, or the time we spend with Russell and Delaney were instead spent with Kilmer as the second lead.

If I don't try too hard to remember specifics, Tombstone would be a stand out western, but with the exception of Kilmer and some beautiful, luscious mustachios, it's decidedly mid.

Series Minded: Rambo (First Blood; Rambo: First Blood Part II; Rambo III)

First Blood -- 1982, d. Ted Kotcheff
Rambo: First Blood, Part II -- 1985, d. George P. Cosmatos
Rambo III -- 1988, Peter MacDonald

As a child of the 80's, of course I knew about Rambo.  There were toys and cartoons and videogames all devoted to Sylvester Stallone's hyper-machismo action hero, all designed to sell an R-rated character as a superhero for modern kids (they did this with Robocop and Terminator too, amongst  other inappropriate things).  Thing was, I was never much into Rambo.  I wasn't really allowed to be.  Fantasy violence like Star Wars or G.I. Joe was more than acceptable, but the oversimplification of John Rambo's reality of war wasn't something my parents were willing to condone.  I remember the stories damning the excessive violence of Rambo III on Entertainment Tonight, which, to naive eyes, made it a bad thing outright anyway.

As the 80's turned to the 90's and I became a teenager, Rambo became remarkably passe. Iconic imagery of Sly Stallone as Rambo had been mocked incessantly by Weird Al and Hot Shots Part Deux, and Stallone himself had become a bit of a joke.  I never saw the Rambo movies, nor did I have any desire to.  I felt like I had seen all that I needed to.  I felt like I knew what the Rambo movies were, and that they weren't for me.

That firmly held belief persisted until this past Friday as I read Tom Breihan's latest entry in his "A History of Violence" series over at the Onion AV Club.  The series starts with 1967's Bullitt as the speculative first entry of the modern action movie, and then each installment covers the most apropos representative of the action genre for each subsequent year.  This latest found First Blood to be the monumental action movie of 1982 (1981 was a hard fought battle between Escape From New York, Mad Max 2, and champion of all-time Raiders of the Lost Ark.  1980 had dire pickings with The Octagon).  Breihan makes a very enticing case for watching First Blood, not only in being his choice for that year's top action movie, but more to the point he actually told me what the film was about.

John Rambo, a Vietnam Vet, is run out of a small town in Oregon State by the local sheriff (Brian Dennehy) who just doesn't want "his type" running around, disturbing the locals.  Rambo just wants to have a meal and gets arrested for returning, where the local PD (including a young David Caruso) manhandle and abuse him to the breaking point, triggering his PTSD.  He lashes out and escapes, and then is hunted like a dog.  Eventually, though he becomes the hunter, and, at a certain point his actions become so extreme, as the audience you're not quite certain you're rooting for him anymore.

Up until reading Breihan's article, I had just assumed all Rambo movies were dumb jungle revenge movies where big dumb ape Rambo has some mission or other where he's tasked with killing foreign faceless enemies with "rah rah 'Murrica" bluster.  To my surprise, that couldn't be further from the truth, at the very least not for first entry of the series.

First Blood is actually a remarkable film.  I mean, yeah, it's quite dated, and a lot of the richness of the character, as presented, here has since been lost to the subsequent iconography and hero baiting, but the film itself is well acted, well made, and has genuine meaning.  As I noted above, it gets very gray as to who is right or wrong.  Cops harassing someone is never cool, especially when they're doing so based on appearances alone.  I could see a modern version of this film starring an ex-Afghanistan or Iraq War veteran who is also black, and it taking on a whole other level of meaning, a veritable powderkeg of intent.  Here though, nobody seems to care that John Rambo is an Vietnam veteran, nor that his PTSD is to blame for much of his actions.  There was a lack of awareness around PTSD at that time (even today there's still a stigma around it), but also the veterans of Veitnam returned home not as heroes but as the losers in a war they never wanted to participate in to begin with, and, in many cases, as monsters who society-at-large seemed to want to forget.  Vietnam was a bullshit war, and America wanted to sweep it, and those who were forced into fighting, under the rug.  This is the subtext of First Blood.

Rambo, is chased to extreme ends up a mountain side.  He calls out to be left alone, but the cops have a blood lust.  Using his Marine training, he takes out practically the entire force, non-lethally, but painfully.  Things escalate from there, to the point that Rambo winds up in the center of the small town, shooting out store windows, blowing up transformers, just ready to kill or be killed (it should be noted, Rambo does not kill a single person, at least not directly, the entire film).  The question is laid bare, is Rambo a rabid dog that needs to be put down?  His sympathy is stretched to the breaking point, if not past it, up until it's poignant conclusion.  The film ends not with a gunfight though, but with a conversation.  John breaks down in front of Trautman, his former commanding officer, and in a seeming stream-of-consciousness explosion, relates the most horrifying visions he's had to live with from the war.  The horrors he's seen that nobody wants to hear about, that everyone wants to ignore.  John Rambo is tired of being invisible, treated like the war was his fault, that he's unwanted.  He's a broken man psychologically and spiritually.  He needs compassion and consolation, not estrangement and derision.  It's a powerful sentiment, and a powerful undercurrent to the character...one that was completely thrown away for subsequent outings.

Rambo: First Blood, Part II as a follow-up is a filmmaking travesty.  It comes as no shock to me that it's co-written by James Cameron because it's exactly everything I detest about Cameron's films.  Cameron's script (which was rewritten in great swaths by Stallone) is so full of MOMENTS, big hacky MOMENTS where the character is put in PERIL, big cinematic PERIL (like when Rambo is jumping from the airplane only to have his strap caught on a door hinge and he has to cut himself free...it's a meaningless MOMENT of tension that feels plugged into place for that very purpose.  It's not clever, nor really that tense, and there's never a moment's doubt that Rambo is in any real danger.

Cameron's story strips Rambo of all his nuance and poignancy from First Blood.  I would think the last thing you would want to do with a soldier who went a bit crazy and shot up a town as a result of his PTSD would be to send him right back to the place where his PTSD manifested.  But that's what this film asks of him.  A government bureaucrat is trying to discern whether there are still POWs in Vietnam, and Rambo's mission is to get evidence one way or the other.  But, it turns out, the government doesn't really want any evidence of POW's, they just want to be seen taking action.  This is all revealed when Rambo is trying to escape pirates and Vietnamese soldiers with a prisoner, only the have the mercenaries hired to airlift him out turn and leave without him.  Colonel Trautman is obviously upset but has little power in the situation.  Rambo is captured, thankfully his (painful) broken-English speaking local ladyfriend busts him out, and after they escape, they have their MOMENT, their "take me back to America, yes?" MOMENT where they kiss, and she immediately is gunned down seconds later.

Rambo, if he wasn't pissed before is now out for revenge on top of rescue.  Not to forget that the Vietnamese soldiers here are supported by the Russians, because of course they are.  Rambo takes out almost the entire station himself before commandeering a helicopter and freeing the POW boys from their cells.  A hairy helicopter chase sequence ends with Rambo firing a bazooka through his own cockpit window towards the opposing chopper.

It's a dumb movie, punctuated by an unearned moral at the end: "We love America, we just want America to love us", and further punctuated by the most inane Frank Stallone song in Frank Stallone's grand pantheon of inane songs (to be clear, none of the closing credits songs are all that great).  It's a terrible looking movie, with unbelievably fake looking sets, some terrible day-for-night shots, and for some reason it's shot with a soft focus lens (the old Vaseline smear, methinks) to give it this fuzzy, hazy, romantic look.  It's just ugly and cheap looking.  It feels like a modestly budgeted, totally '80's made for TV movie at best.  It's a hot garbage film, whose sole purpose was to take a complicated, tragic, yet likeable character and turn him into a machine-gun toting, muscle-bound, bandanna-wearing super-soldier hero.



First Blood, Part II was so bad that I could barely feign interest in the third installment when it started, but I committed to all three films for the evening so I let it run.  The first thing I noticed was how much better Rambo III looked than First Blood, Part II.  The film opens with Rambo stick fighting for money in Thailand (Stallone looks good, like he actually trained hard for this sequence), money which he gives to the Buddhist monastery where he lives.  Col. Trautman returns to try and get Rambo's help with a mission in Afghanistan.  The Russian war there is taking its toll on the civilian population and the US has agreed to covertly supply the freedom fighters there with weapons and basic necessities.  Rambo, tired of war refuses, but when Trautman proceeds without him and is captured, Rambo volunteers as a one-man-rescue force.

Something about this poster has always
made me laugh...like Rambo is 200ft tall
and, perhaps, an aerobics instructor

Rambo III has a more world-weary feel to it than the previous films.  John finds himself in unfamiliar terrain in Afghanistan (unlike Oregon or Vietnam) but finds a contact and makes friends with a local band of freedom fighters.  He learns about their plight and respects the bravery of the fighters, including the young men (barely even men...one teeters perilously close to kid sidekick here), but is truly focused on the sole mission of rescuing his friend from the Russians.  Which, of course, he does, with an immense amount of gunplay and knifings.

I spent large swaths of Rambo III's run time reading about the Russian war in Afghanistan, so I wasn't exactly paying immensely close attentions, but overall it's an above average 80's action movie.  They spent some fair coin into the production so it looks good all around.  Director Peter McDonald has a good eye, and comes up with some pretty amazing action sequences and iconic scenes (like Rambo fixing a puncture wound with gunpowder...it's stunning).  But as with any film overly reliant upon gunfights and gunplay, all that "rat-tat-tat" "ch-ch-ch-" "kapow" gets pretty tedious when it lags on for too long and the last 25 minutes of the film are pretty much non-stop that.  Even still, Rambo III returns the character -- at least a bit -- to the grey area from where he came.  The conflict in Afghanistan was pretty nasty, but America wasn't willing to step in directly.  This was a bit of a critique of that...but at the same time, "Russia's Vietnam" was also a war that Rambo (and by proxy, the film implies, America) didn't want to thrust themselves headlong into.

What's most astonishing is how none of these three films are meant for children, at all.  They are exceptionally violent movies with some questionable moral grounds, and in some cases some difficult questions asked.  They aren't funtime action movies, but instead (at least with the first and third) full of questions that are in most cases not forthcoming with easy answers.  That Rambo became a cartoon/toy/video game action star is taking the worst traits of the character -- his aggression and ruthless efficiency -- and building those up as his admirable qualities for young people to replicate.  It's no wonder today's American society is so gun-culture focussed, when the wrong aspects of characters like these were promoted as role models and heroes 30 years ago.
 

Horror, Not Horror: the trash bin

"Horror, Not Horror" movies are those that toe the line of being horror movies but don't quite comfortably fit the mold.  I'm not a big horror fan (Toast is the horror buff here), but I do quite like these line-skirting type movies, as we'll see. 

In the past few months I've been wading more and more into the underexplored depths of genre cinema.  Some of this has been on my own, at random, and some of it's been prompted by the films discussed by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery on the very fun Video Archives podcast (noted by an asterisk below).  These are, to a one, not good films, but the hope is always that, for as maybe limited in budget, or as tossed off as they may have been, they still have something going for them. Oh, but surprise, one of these is a prestige picture that was nominated for Oscars!

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Hercules Conquers Atlantis (1961) dir. Vittorio Cottafavi - Tubi

(AKA Hercules and the Captive Women)

What is it? One of the many, many iterations of Hercules in the "sword'n'sandals" genre of action/adventure movies, largely made in Italy throughout the 1950's through 1980's.  In this one Hercules, played by the handsome and beefy Reg Park, is ostensibly kidnapped by his friend and taken on an adventure where he discovers Atlantis, but the place is a nefarious one, and only the might of Hercules can stop their evil plot (whatever it was).

Why watch? I had, on a whim, picked up a copy of the Mario Bava directed "sequel" film to this, Hercules in the Haunted World, so I thought I should just give this one a shot first.

The good? Bava served as a director of photography so there are some pretty nice shots in this.  Reg Park, former Mr. Universe, is really nice to look at.  Bava does this tilt-down/pan-up shot in the cave which is really sweet, and there's a high-up crane shot of.  The shot of Hercules bounding through a courtyard of dead bodies is kinda nuts as is the reveal of the Atlantian elite guard which is a little provovative.  It's impressive seeing Hercules driving a chariot of 10 horses, if only there were a Hercules movie that could sustain that sort of scale.  Hercules being a petty dick was pretty fun, as were all Reg Park's muscles.  Fay Spain's eyes are the best special effect in the movie.

The bad? The audio - dubbing, sound effects, music - is pretty awful most of the time, and seemingly mixed all at the same volume. The action sequences are incredibly clumsy. The story is flimsy nonsense with little internal consistency. The wardrobe and sets waver between spectacular and silly. The envisioning of both ancient Greece and Atlantis is pretty uninspired. The cinematography wavers between impressive and pedestrian.

The trash? Reg Park does this one-armed swimming technique which just blows my mind thinking about it.

Is it horror? No, but there's definitely some little twinges of horror that the film never thinks to exploit.

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Hercules in the Haunted World (1961) dir. Mario Bava - BluRay

What is it? Reg Park's second - and final - foray as the demigod hero.  But this one's directed by Mario Bava, and Christopher Lee co-stars.  Maintaining no continuity from the prior film (in which Hercules had a wife and son), here he must go on a quest to retrieve a specific stone in order to cure the madness of his lover.  The stone's destination? Hell!

Why watch?  Bava, of course.

The good? This is a visual feast of nonsense.  I watched it twice.  Bava's innovative craftsmanship and colour sense is so damn impressive.  The visual effects, in many instances, seem so surreal, as if they shouldn't exist.  The big finale features the raising of the dead which is a sequence that would have for sure scared the crap out of me as a kid (but is both fun and silly as an adult watching on a hi definition TV)

The bad? The story is utterly nonsensical.  The Kino blu-ray features an audio commentary from a Bava scholar who identifies that there was obviously a completely different shooting script at one time and that few pains were taken to marry the original story with what they wound up with.

The trash? Very little trash in this one.  It's a really stunning watch.  I guess, the biggest trash is that they dubbed over Christopher Lee's performance. Blasphemy!

Is it horror? No, but it does swerve that way for the climax for a bit, providing a sense of Bava's chops in the genre.

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*Demonoid: Messenger of Death (1981) dir. Alfredo Zacarias - Tubi

What is it? A Mexican (but English) horror film about a demonic hand which possesses people to kill. Samantha Eggar stars as the wife of the mining honcho who releases the hand.  It seems to be fixated on trying to get her specifically as it goes from possessing person to person and murdering along the way.

Why watch?  It was a Tarantino/Avery recommendation.

The good? Honestly, it has a pretty solid sense of its own history and the evil forces at play.  It does better than many horror films in that aspect. The acting is surprisingly decent for such a off the beaten path production.

The bad? But make no mistake, this is some cheesy-crust crazy-bread stuff.  The special effects are that special blend of late-70's/early-80's waxy gore with stark red corn syrup blood. I have to wonder if the makers of this took any of it seriously or if they knew it would eventually be considered campy fun.

The trash? They really liked to work their gross visual effects, and we've come so far in making that shit so gross that it's really quaint what they used to be able to get away with.  Oh and gratuitous nudity tied to violence in the first five minutes (seen in one of the trailers even)

Is it horror? Yeah. It's that special type of 80's low-budg horror.

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*Blind Rage (1976) dir. Efren C Pinon - YouTube

What is it? The war in Viet Nam has decimated the markets in the Asian Pacific, so the world bank (I guess?) has decided to invest 15 million dollars into the region, to be held at a bank in Manila before dispersing. A man on the inside is recruited by a Black L.A. mobster to pull off a heist of said 15mil, but he's going to do it with ... 5 blind guys!  Because who would ever suspect blind guys of robbing a bank. 

Why watch? Another Tarantino/Avery recommendation.

The good? Umm, this movie real bad, but so bad that I enjoy telling people about how bad it is. It ends with a cameo by Fred Williamson in a bright blue butterfly collared deep-V-neck jumpsuit chomping on a cigar, looking great and being a total badass.  And the line: "It's all going down right now at the International House of Pancakes".  

The bad? There's no protagonist to this film.  There's nobody we follow all throughout the movie.  Is there anyone to really care about if they succeed or fail? No, there is not.  

The trash? This movie is part Blaxploitation, part kung-fu, and part crime thriller, none of which is done particularly well.  Is "Blindsploitation" a genre?

Is it horror? No, nor is it trying to be, though people do be getting shot, tho.  And the script is a nightmare, lol.

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*Welcome to Blood City (1977) dir. Peter Sasdy - YouTube

What is it? A group of strangers find themselves in the desert with no memory of who they are, and a note each found on their person telling them that they were a killer.  Kier Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey) doesn't believe a thing.  They're escorted to Blood City by the sheriff (Jack Palance) who doesn't really want to tell them much about how the town operates, but it's basically a place where anything goes, including slavery and murder.  In fact, the more you murder, the greater your status.  But who are the people in a control booth watching all this, and why? 

Why watch? Though Avery and Tarantino didn't necessarily love this, they were generally intrigued by the premise, and cited it as one of the Westworld knock-offs of the era, which intrigued me.

The good? The premise was really, really intriguing.  A group of people with a secret past, possibly filled with murder, but without their memories, are they still the same murderers?  Just one of many questions the film poses, but never answers.  It's rather rife with ideas that don't get explored well enough, and has a mysterious backdrop that gets slowly revealed in a pleasant way (possibly cribbed by Cabin in the Woods) but ultimately doesn't pay off.  And hey, more Samantha Eggar

The bad? The film is either shot terribly, with the active actor partially or fully out of frame most of the time, or else its transfer to video/digital went horribly wrong.  It's actually pretty funny how awful it looks.

The trash? The one female "murderer" is the helpless object of affection and treated like a non-entity by everyone (content warning: off screen rape).

Is it horror? No, but it's certainly playing with dystopian themes which can be scary to some.

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*The Keep (1983) dir. Michael Mann - Criterion

What is it? The infamous/forgotten Michael Mann disaster that finds Nazi soldiers in 1941 taking over an old Romanian Citadel only to unleash a terrible, murderous being from its cage.  The being uses Jewish scholar Ian McKellen to try and get set free upon the Earth, by tempting him with revenge upon all Nazis.  Scott Glenn plays an otherworldly savior type who's arrived on earth to stop it, but not before sexing up Alberta Watson, McKellen's daughter. 

Why watch? I caught this film years and years ago on a late night TV airing, and have long been wanting to revisit it.  It's a moody piece with haunting Tangerine Dream synths, that probably was even moodier in Mann's lost original 210minute cut.  This 98 minute hack job by the studios leaves the film feeling disjointed and frequently confusing.

The good?  I love all the strange lighting, the sets, the evil creature, Mann's style is all over this, even in it's chopped up form.

The bad? I have to think that a 210minute version of this would be better as a cohesive story, but still potentially direly boring.  But then again, there are some intriguing character reveals and dynamics that I think may have played out so much better in a longer form.

The trash? Scott Glenn meets Alberta Watson for less then a minute before they start boning.  Does he have Starfox's powers?

Is it horror? I think it's trying to be.  

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Leviathan (1989) dir. George P. Cosmatos - AmazonPrime

What is it? The other, lower-budget undersea movie of 1989 (next to the Abyss), it's basically Alien (with a dash of Carpenter's The Thing) in a sealab.  Starring Robocop, a Ghostbuster, Flash's girlfriend, and Evil-Lyn, so it's 80's to the core.

Why watch? It's been on my "to watch" list since I first spied its tape cover at a video store.  It always looked like something that would be in my wheelhouse.

The good? There's some really great sets and some nice underwater sequences.  It does manage to build a decent amount of attention, but...

The bad? ...you can basically watch as the film's budget starts shrinking the longer it goes on. They try to edit around the budget limitations, but they become painfully obvious.  The budget limitations can't capitalize upon the film's buildup and it's a real wet fart of an ending.

The trash?  The creature, and not in an "oh, it's so gross" kind of way but more in a "really? That's what you're going with?" kind of way.  It's a pretty corny looking beast, and the film does an incredibly poor job with devising any sort of mythology or backstory behind it.  It's basically a perfunctory creature with little to no intrigue behind it.  It's a terrible let down to an otherwise acceptably entertaining picture.

Is it horror? It probably was at some point during production.

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Nightmare Alley (2020) dir. Guillermo del Toro - Crave

What is it? The saga of down-on-his-luck crumbum Bradley Cooper who winds up helping out at 1920's-era carnival/freakshow, learning the tricks of the trade.  He effectively steals one man's mentallist act then starts performing for New York High society, pushing the boundaries of good taste and kayfabe.  Psychologist Cate Blanchette starts working with him, if only to ultimately use him for her own purposes, then destroy him for fun.

Why watch? Generally intrigued by del Toro's films, and I share his fascination with carnivals of old.  Oh yeah, and Sid worked on it!

The good? It looks great.  It's a phenomenal looking film in every aspect.  The attention to detail in every scene -- the sets, lighting, costuming, makeup, props - all just eye catching and really attractive.  I also liked how it exposed the sham of mentallists (if only it had more fun with it)

The bad? The film is tedious. It's a long 150 minutes of watching a not great person do not great things. You never really connect with Bradley Cooper, nor with any of his relationships. There's nothing there. You know he's bad news from the beginning, and that sense of distrust never abates. It makes it very, very hard to invest in him. Were he, maybe, more charming, or perhaps if we had some insight into what his goals were, what he's actually working towards, or, mayhaps if he were even a semblance of a good person we could follow him, hoping for his success even as he makes the wrong choices and finds himself unable to stop from going deeper into the darkness. But we know he's shit from the beginning, Del Toro wants us to know that being easy on the eyes will get him far, but for this story, it's not enough. We're rooting for him to fail (and hoping, at least, that he doesn't take others undeservedly down with him)..

The trash?  The last 30 minutes finally pick up the pace but they're kind of the worst moments of the film. Just waiting for Cooper to get his comeuppance, little of which is satisfying, moreover, it all seemed kinda overblown and carny...I mean corny.

Is it horror? Meh, its toes creep over the edge of the deck, but it never really tests the waters, nevermind jumps right in.