Lessons of Darkness

My Soul to Take (2010): C

Wes Craven’s My Soul to Take opens promisingly, with a husband going mysteriously schizo – or is he actually possessed? – with a knife featuring “Vengeance” etched on its blade. After a frenzied murder spree ends with the serial killer, dubbed “The Riverton Ripper,” disappearing into the night, Craven’s story (the first one he’s penned as well as directed since 1991’s The People Under the Stairs) jumps ahead sixteen years to find the seven children born the night of the Ripper’s departure still commemorating his death while fearing his possible return. When a homeless-looking guy begins offing the kids on their birthdays and one of them, troubled Bug (Max Theiriot), starts acting more than a bit deranged, panic sweeps the high school, though for all of Craven’s suggestions that Bug is haunted by the Ripper, the filmmaker’s red herrings prove depressingly incapable of hiding the real fiend’s identity. Consequently, despite its intro and a nicely freaky mirror-image sequence involving Bug and best friend Alex (John Magaro), My Soul to Take gradually loses any trace of suspense. That’s a fatal problem, and one compounded by the fact that its story also quickly dispatches with any internal logic – characters appear and disappear on a whim (sometimes explaining their out-of-nowhere arrivals with deadening exposition), see supernatural visions for no apparent reason, and generally behave as idiotically as one would expect from stock outcast/rapist jock/angry goth/religious fundamentalist/stuck-up blond/handicapped-African-American caricatures.

Trollhunter (2010): C

Yet another faux-verité action-horror effort that manages to be clever without being actually terrifying or thrilling, Trollhunter offers up the tale – culled from “found footage” – of three student filmmakers who, while investigating a series of strange bear killings in Norway, discover that the true cause of these incidents is the country’s suddenly out-of-control troll population. This revelation comes courtesy of troll hunter Hans (Otto Jespersen), a former Navy Ranger who works for the government keeping the creatures’ existence secret from the population at large. Amusingly driven by worker’s-comp gripes, Hans allows the kids to tag along to document his work, which confirms the veracity of legend: the beasts hate sunlight, can be turned to stone or exploded via exposure to UV rays, and are adept at picking up the scent of Christian blood. Writer/director André Øvredal expertly fleshes out the details of his scenario, so that controversial power-line grids are actually electric-fence enclosures to corral the trolls, and the trolls – who are mammals – have a specific medical reason for being averse to the sun. Trollhunter, however, rarely manages to elicit more than a respectful grin, given that its humans-fleeing-through-the-night centerpieces, all employing mockumentary shaky-cam, are lacking in momentum, suspense or horror. Meanwhile, the trolls themselves – giant, furry, bulbous-nosed beasts prone to growling and yelling – prove more intimidating in theory than reality, especially after Øvredal reveals their penchant for noxious farting.

2011 Tribeca Film Festival

Rabies (2010): C+

Israel’s first horror film, Rabies turns a caustic eye toward its citizenry, all of whom – through circumstances that lead to fatal miscommunications, selfishness, exposed secrets and exploited fears and hang-ups – prove comfortable veering from sociable to sinister. Opening on Tali (Liat Harlev) awakening to find herself in a narrow trap dug in the forest ground, and then proceeding to detail how her brother Ofer’s (Henry David) attempts at rescue bring him into contact with two young couples lost on their way to playing tennis, a pair of police officers, a park ranger, and the psychotic who stuck Tali in the earth, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s film spins an intricate web of jealousy, lust, abuse and deviancy. Linking its players’ kindred cruelness through somewhat leaden parallels, the directors’ debut has a cynicism that borders on the one-note. In the recurring sight of bodies buried in earth and characters suddenly and naturally taking to brutality – and then, as with friends Mike (Ran Danker) and Pini (Ofer Shechter), staring at each other with dumbfounded confusion at the nastiness they’ve perpetrated against each other – the story suggests Israel as a land with infectious violence coursing through its veins and its soil. Rabies’ ideas about mankind’s penchant for hostility, however, are generic and monotonous, and hampered by the fact that its characters are sketchy pawns in service of savage roundelays that – incapable of generating any tension, and ending on a dully ironic note – soon render the proceedings a bloody Three’s Company-inspired cartoon.

2011 Tribeca Film Festival

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2011): A-

A reverential ode to Kubrick, Argento, Cronenberg, Altered States, John Carpenter synth scores, ‘70s sci-fi and ‘80s fantasy, and mind-boggling, hyper-stylized madness, Beyond the Black Rainbow simultaneously pays homage while blazing its own uniquely insane trail. Director Panos Cosmatos (son of Rambo: First Blood Part II and Tombstone helmer George P. Cosmatos) holds little back for his debut, which opens with an Alien-ish “1983” title card before segueing into a VHS promotional video in which a creepy Dr. Mercurio Arboria (Scott Hylands) explains his plans to revolutionize humanity by creating a recipe – of “benign pharmacology, sensory therapy and energy sculpting” – for pure happiness. This introduction, which plays like a Lost Dharma tape on hallucinogens, then gives way to the so-called action proper, in which a silent and slumped-over brunette beauty, Elena (Eva Allan), is escorted into a sterile white room, where through a tinted glass partition she’s counseled by ultra-creepy doctor Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), whose attempts at conversation seem designed only to elicit some sort of emotional response from the uncommunicative Elena. His measures largely fail, leading him to his mahogany-heavy home, where he acts annoyed at wife Rosemary (Marilyn Norry) for taking a nap and methodically ingests a row of pills one capsule at a time, all while back in the white room, Elena lies on a bed, wracked by visions of a dark room with a malevolent white triangular object at its center.

Even that description doesn’t convey the initial out-and-out weirdness of Beyond the Black Rainbow, which plays like a feature-length tale set in 2001’s climactic alien-heaven netherworld, and which employs gaudy emotion-signifying color filters and haunting transitional fades to tether its dreamlike early sights: a credit sequence set inside a morphing iris; ambulatory shots of burning-red hallway ceiling panels; Barry driving home on a rural road; and a nurse (Rondel Reynoldson) leafing through a book, found in a sleek black wall drawer, overflowing with scientific illustrations of futuristic brain devices, alien beings, wombs impregnated with unidentifiable creatures, and a malicious vagina. How these otherworldly elements cohere into a sensible narrative is simple: they don’t. Or, rather, they don’t completely, as Cosmatos seeks disorientation through visual, sonic and storytelling means. The director subsumes his figure-it-out-yourself material so thoroughly beneath formal flourishes – while at the same time layering the research-facility proceedings with undercurrents of destructive and desperate parent-child anxieties, Reagan-era Cold War paranoia, and mind-body-spirit tensions – that the film somewhat resembles last year’s Amer, another genre tribute comprised of symbolic signifiers and ciphers pleading to be decoded. [spoilers follow]

A visit by Barry to his mentor Dr. Arboria, now a frail almost-corpse whose veiny skin begs for narcotics injections, instigates a flashback to 1966 that further sends things into a confounding spiral: in a whiteout nowhereland where only people’s brown hair and cocks are visible, Arboria promises Barry the key to humanity’s next evolution via a pill, but instead of enlightened bliss, it sends Barry (literally, and psychologically) down a soupy ink blot and into a melting-head, down-is-up hellscape of eye-socket flames and rolling black rainbows. It’s an LSD nightmare of ferocious psychosis, the foul flipside to 2001’s “Star Gate” sequence. And the mood of unhinged derangement doesn’t disperse once Barry emerges from this pit as a dark demon, possibly impregnates his colleague before killing her with a spurt-heavy bite to the jugular, and then rescues her chosen-one baby, who it turns out is Elena. Such lunacy is part and parcel of Beyond the Black Rainbow’s trippy stream-of-consciousness plotting, which is so unwavering that, after this interlude, the film surprisingly acquires a kind of wacko lucidity that’s maintained to the finale, in which Barry reveals himself to be something considerably less than human, and perversely interested in daughter Elena, whom he stalks with an alien knife dubbed “the devil’s teardrop.”

Toss in the fact that Elena is apparently a psychic – her only lines of dialogue (“I want to see my father”) are spoken telepathically to Barry – and that these supernatural powers seem to be stymied by the giant-triangle contraption, and the film proves a concoction of familiar sci-fi and horror tropes blended together by a brazenly pretentious and loony genre alchemist. Cosmatos revels in repetition and opacity to deliberately frustrating ends, and yet his gonzo recreation of ‘70s and ‘80s audio/video conventions (aided by Norm Li’s hypnotic cinematography) is so tenacious that they eventually cast a mystifying spell. Whether via recurring Kubrick-eye motifs, De Palma split screens, a THX 1138-indebted red-leather stormtrooper, jarring cuts from scenes scored to ominous tones and choral chanting to ones of buzzing silence, or simply the presence of Rogers’ Barry – whose waxen robot-devil countenance unnerves in extreme close-up or at his frequent, voyeuristic remove from Elena – the director delivers a feast of perplexing spectacles which magnify the story’s ever-present murkiness. Even though a narrative throughline is partially decipherable, true clarity doesn’t await those who venture to the end of this Rainbow, a work that, ultimately, demands only submission to its seamless form-content synthesis of bizarre beauty and intriguing incomprehensibility.

2011 Tribeca Film Festival

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010): C

The shadowy demon is back in Paranormal Activity 2, and this time, IT WANTS THE BABY! Unfortunately, the good ol’ child-in-peril gimmick is the only new thing offered by Tod Williams’ follow-up to Oren Peli’s 2007 hit. Primarily taking place in the two months prior to the first film’s events, this sequel charts the supernatural goings-on at the home of Kristi (Sprague Grayden) – sister of the original’s protagonist Katie (Katie Featherston) – whose young son Hunter is stalked by an invisible specter. Kristi’s husband Daniel (Brian Boland) doesn’t believe in ghosts, her teenage stepdaughter Ali (Molly Ephraim) does, and so too does the stereotypical Hispanic maid who gets herself fired by Daniel after one too many incense-burning rituals to ward off evil spirits. Bumps in the night give way to motorized pool cleaners mysteriously exiting the water and cabinets blowing wide open – otherworldly spookiness shot with a familiar blend of static security cameras and bumpy handheld first-person POV cinematography. Because of its alternating fixed/frantic perspectives on household areas infested with unseen forces, this aesthetic template does result in a few well-timed jump scares. Otherwise, though, Paranormal Activity 2 is lame through and through, from its stagnant pacing and random, laughably tossed-off explanation of the demon’s motivation, to its story’s clunky dovetailing with the first film’s timeline and a finale content to merely regurgitate its precursor’s dénouement while also portending, alas, a part 3 to come.

Robocop 2 (1990): C

Frank Miller’s nasty wit occasionally offsets typical sequel redundancy in Robocop 2, a needless follow-up that rehashes the satiric and character-based concerns of its superior predecessor. Directed by Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back), the film revolves around the efforts of Robocop (Peter Weller) to squash the spread of new designer drug Nuke, which is heralded by its messiah-creator Caine (a grand Tom Noonan) as the gateway to a euphoric new future. Jokey TV commercials and news broadcasts, as well as plentiful shootouts and a new mecha-nemesis for Robocop, help pad out the subsequent saga, though none of it boasts the nasty humor or inventiveness of Paul Verhoeven’s original. Rather, a sense of straining to maintain the outrageousness of that boundary-pushing hit can be felt throughout, as in close-ups of gruesome brain surgery and the inclusion of a foul-mouthed, gun-toting adolescent drug runner (Gabriel Damon). As one ho-hum action set piece after another fails to deliver the goods, flimsy concessions are made to Robocop’s continuing struggle to rectify his new metallic self with his human soul. That thematic issue is briefly raised before being swept aside by a tide of mind-numbing nonsense, highlighted by the decision of OCP’s evil head honcho (Dan O’Herlihy) to let a sexy psychoanalyst (Belinda Bauer) use psychotic criminals – like Cain! – as test subjects for the new Robocop 2 project. Throughout, Kershner and Miller lack anything fundamentally novel to say about their sci-fi conceit, merely repeating Verhoeven’s cartoonish critique of fascistic corporate, governmental and consumer behavior to diminishing returns.

The Mechanic (1972): C-

As slow as molasses and just as exciting, The Mechanic wants to be a Jean-Pierre Melville film, but instead proves merely a sluggish marriage of affected existentialism and brute violence. Director Michael Winner’s methodical pacing, casual references to masculine “codes,” and two scenes involving martial arts – not to mention his story’s focus on a loner hitman (Charles Bronson) – all position the proceedings as a faux-Le Samouraï, though it goes without saying that Bronson is no Alain Delon. In truth, he’s not even very Bronson-y here, what with the material sidestepping the sort of vicious sadism that would increasingly become the stoic icon’s trademark. In this go-nowhere saga, Bronson’s “mechanic” Arthur Bishop lives a solitary life performing assassinations for the shadowy “Organization,” his work supposedly defined by clean professionalism even though – as in an intro murder involving a gas leak and hidden explosives ignited by a gunshot – he goes out of his way to make his job more complicated than necessary. Breaking his ritual (a noir no-no that immediately spells doom), Bishop not only befriends amoral Steve McKenna (Jan-Michael Vincent) – during an evening in which McKenna refuses to humor or aid a suicidal gal pal – but actually takes the young man on as an apprentice, leading to more elaborate if still lethargic killings. Bronson comes off as less cold and ruthless than borderline-asleep during this middling action, and Vincent seems as vacant as usual. As such, they’re a fittingly blank pair for this stagnant jalopy of a badass ‘70s crime film.

The Housemaid (2011): B

A glossy, tawdry thriller that barely scratches the surface of its upstairs-downstairs dynamics, The Housemaid – a flamboyantly melodramatic remake of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 film of the same name – charts a household thrown into turmoil after the hiring of a new maid. That woman, Eun-yi (Secret Sunshine’s Jeon Do-yeon), is first spied blowing bubblegum bubbles, thereby establishing the ditzy immaturity that she continues to exhibit after being hired by a wealthy family to tend to their immense mansion and their polite, caring young daughter Nami (Ahn Seo-hyeon). Begrudgingly mentored by older servant Byeong-sik (Yoon Yeo-jeong) and treated like an inhuman robot by her pregnant-with-twins employer Hae Ra (Seo Woo) and her silver-spoon husband Hoon (Lee Jung-jae), Eun-yi goes about her business with docile professionalism until, one evening, Hoon spies her washing a tub and, soon afterwards, seduces her. Eun-yi’s willingness to carry on this torrid affair leads to grave complications once Byeong-sik observes that Eun-yi is pregnant, and Hae Ra’s dragon-lady mother (Park Ji-young) schemes to resolve this thorny situation via violence, a scenario that director Sang-soo shoots sleekly but fails to imbue with any serious social-gender significance. Rather, the callous exploitation of the working class, and Eun-yi’s resultant rebellion, is milked mainly for eroticized suspense, of which there’s just enough to help keep the proceedings from falling into a torpor, and which reaches an apex during a fiery climax and an outdoor birthday-celebration coda that – with mom crooning like Marilyn Monroe and cigar-chomping dad cackling with approval as the staff blankly stands by – exudes a surreal sense of deranged domestic privilege.

Ghosts of Mars (2001): B-

Ghosts of Mars, John Carpenter’s much-maligned last feature (to date), may have fake-looking exterior sets and some one-liners that should have never left the word processer, but with propulsive momentum and surprisingly deft aesthetics, it’s a rather sturdy modernized mash-up of Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York. In the distant future, Mars has been colonized, but at a monstrous cost – while on a routine mission to pick up and transport suspected murderer Demolition Williams (Ice Cube) to prison, a squad of cops led by Lieutenant Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) discover a mining outpost awash in decapitated bodies strung upside down from rafters amidst twisted-metal spikes. The culprits, it turns out, are the miners themselves, who’ve been possessed by an ancient Martian evil that takes the form of cascading red smoke which turns people into post-apocalyptic warriors with a fetish for steel piercings. Carpenter’s setting for his space-Western scenario often looks cheap, and his protagonists – though embodied with the right amount of movie-hero/villain swagger by Henstridge, Cube and supporting badass Jason Statham – have an unfortunate, if often amusing, habit of making ludicrous trailer-ready boasts at every turn. Nonetheless, the writer/director knows how to milk his familiar plot for tension, and his action sequences have a nuts-and-bolts vitality amplified by his disinterest in CG effects and fondness for hand-to-hand skirmishes. Better still, however, is the hallucinatory structure of Ghosts of Mars’ narrative, which proves a series of flashbacks within flashbacks, all tethered together by dreamy jump-fades and diagonal transitional wipes – a style that complements the old-school heavy-metal carnage in uniquely unsettling, unreal ways.

Buried (2010): B

A film designed to rattle claustrophobics, Buried situates itself exclusively inside an underground wooden coffin inhabited by Paul Conroy (a suitably frantic and furious Ryan Reynolds), a U.S. contractor working in Iraq. Armed only with a lighter and a cell phone, Paul tries to make sense of his predicament while not completely losing his mind, eventually learning that he’s being held for $5 million ransom by anonymous Iraqi insurgents. As Paul struggles to contact someone who can help as well as communicates with captors who demand that he make a hostage video, director Rodrigo Cortés maintains a rigorous gaze on his protagonist – his camera never exiting the coffin, and its twisting, turning, cramped POV generally true to the character’s confinement, Cortés creates both empathy and suspense via suffocating proximity. Paul’s attempts to contact his wife and son, enlist help from State Department experts, and deal with an employer interested in covering his own ass make up the brunt of Buried’s talky action, which boasts an urgency amplified by clues that subtly suggest that everything isn’t what it seems. A brief encounter with an animal intruder plays out phonily, and subtexts about nation-building, corporate callousness and the disposability of life during wartime do little to enhance the material. Otherwise, though, Cortés’ film remains a vigorous piece of stripped-down genre filmmaking, conveying the intensity and introspective horror of its subject’s extreme life-or-death circumstances far more authentically and grippingly than the similar, flashier and shallower 127 Hours.