Film Freak Central

Wendigo (2002) - DVD

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber, Erik Per Sullivan, John Speredakos
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw Larry Fessenden's Wendigo plays like a chthonic rite: it's terrifying in its brutal purity and delicious in its ability to pull domestic trauma into the well of archetype where it festers. The film is a further examination of what William Blake cajoles in his "Marriage of Heaven and Hell"--that "men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast," and it justifies itself beautifully in a Romanticist discussion, a Jungian explication, even a socio-political and historical examination. Wendigo is an extraordinarily thorny film, no question; that it manages to be so without pretension, while providing an experience that is terrifying and gorgeous, is a remarkable achievement. It's why we go to the cinema: to be fed through the eye, the heart, the mind.

MHHFF '13: Cheap Thrills

***½/****
starring Pat Healy, Sara Paxton, Ethan Embry, David Koechner
screenplay by Trent Haaga & David Chirchirillo
directed by E.L. Katz

by Walter Chaw A lean, mean, pleasantly unpleasant little clockwork from first-time director E.L. Katz, Cheap Thrills feels and acts like the best kind of noir--the kind where you don't like anyone very much. Reuniting Pat Healy and Sara Paxton from The Innkeepers (another movie that disproves the maxim that genre film is in trouble), this is a fairly stunning, if a bit on the nose, parable of our recessionary state, as car mechanic/aspiring writer Craig (Healy) is faced with the eviction of his young family from their tiny apartment and a layoff from his already-not-paying-enough job. Drinking his sorrows away at a bar, he runs into an old buddy, Vince (a fantastic Ethan Embry), and an odd couple, Colin (David Koechner) and Violet (Paxton), celebrating Violet's birthday. Mysteriously wealthy, it seems that Colin is looking to solve the puzzle of what to get the impossibly pretty younger wife who has everything, and the answer is to stage a series of increasingly sadistic stunts between Craig and Vince for various bounties. $200 for saying something to the meth-addict at the bar to make her slap you; $500 if you hit the strip-club bouncer first. The stakes escalate, tensions rise, and it all ends with probably the single best expression of the current state of manhood in the lower-middle-class United States circa 2013.

The Ring (2003) [2-Disc Collector's Set] - DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Brian Cox
screenplay by Ehren Kruger, based on the novel Ringu by Kôji Suzuki and the screenplay Ringu by Hiroshi Takahashi
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Handsomely mounted and undeniably disconcerting, Gore Verbinski's The Ring, the American remake of the first of Japanese horror auteur Hideo Nakata's "Ring Trilogy" (itself based on a series of novels by Kôji Suzuki), lacks a good deal of the original's subtlety but makes up for it with the kind of electronic paranoia that is Yankee stock and trade. The ideas of an unfolding technical mystery, of a protagonist perhaps gifted with second sight, of being a cog at the will of a malignant machine, are borrowed with intelligence and profit from Coppola's masterpiece, The Conversation. The picture even lifts part of that film's dream sequence, a setting within a warehouse before a bank of media equipment, and a quiet tableau of individuals dwarfed by identical apartment units in the sterile honeycomb of modern inner-city housing.

Fox Horror Classics, Vol. 2 - DVD

CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (1932)
***½/**** Image B- Sound C Extras A-
starring Edmund Lowe, Bela Lugosi, Irene Ware, Henry B. Walthall
directed by Marcel Varnel and William Cameron Menzies

DRAGONWYCK (1946)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Vincent Price, Glenn Langan
screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on the novel by Anya Seton
directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

DR. RENAULT'S SECRET (1942)
*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring J. Carrol Naish, John Shepperd, Lynne Roberts, George Zucco
story by William Bruckner and Robert F. Metzler
directed by Harry Lachman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I confess to feeling a little insecure while reading the entry for Chandu the Magician in Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide, wherein the learned film historian derides Chandu as "disappointing" and "not as good as most serials in this genre, and even sillier." The suggestion is that he's wholly sympathetic to the material and was actually hoping to see a good movie before being "disappointed." Mr. Maltin may very well be in a better position than me to determine the relative merits of Chandu the Magician. Speaking as a layman, I found it to be sublime pulp fiction. Prototypical of George Lucas's Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, the film is remarkably shameless in its goofiness, never veering into self-deprecation or camp. It's one of those rare pop entertainments that genuinely make you feel like a kid again.

Freddy Vs. Jason (2003) [New Line Platinum Series] - DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Robert Englund, Monica Keena, Ken Kirzinger, Kelly Rowland
screenplay by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw Though it doesn't work at all as a scary movie (with even its jump scares curiously tepid), there is the possibility with Freddy Vs. Jason to engage in an anagogical discussion as rich and fascinating as any offered before by the already meaty respective franchises, Friday the 13^th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Pitting Freddy Krueger--razor-fingered child murderer, victim of vigilante justice, and avatar of the sins of the literal fathers--against Jason Voorhees, hockey-masked victim of the cruelty of adolescence and the fear of sensuality, is amazingly fertile ground and handled herein with a seriousness that understands the death that post-modern cleverness represents for horror's slasher subgenre. This is not to say that the film doesn't make nods to Signs and 2001: A Space Odyssey, just to suggest that its story proper is firmly grounded in its own hermetic mythology, the curiously heady equation of its titular bogeys to some sort of modern holy pantheon.

P2 (2007) - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Wes Bentley, Rachel Nichols
screenplay by Franck Khalfoun, Alexandre Aja, Gregory Levasseur
directed by Franck Khalfoun

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Well, it starts off beautifully. The camera is floating around a parking lot while the Eartha Kitt version of "Santa Baby" plays on the soundtrack. The choice of this song is reminiscent of the semi-ironic use of "Mr. Sandman" at the end of Rick Rosenthal's pretty-damn-good Halloween II. It casts the madman who will chase our heroine in the role of a dream lover born of her subconscious death wish. Then the camera stops on a column with this level of the parking lot, P2, painted on it. The sign is flanked by the names of our leads, Rachel Nichols and Wes Bentley. Pretty cool way of presenting the film's title.

H.P. Lovecraft's From Beyond (1986) [Unrated Director's Cut] + Blood and Black Lace (1964) [Unslashed Collectors' Edition] - DVDs

From Beyond
**½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras B
starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Ted Sorel
screenplay by Dennis Paoli
directed by Stuart Gordon

Sei donne per l'assassino
****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Mary Arden
screenplay by Giuseppe Barilla, Marcel Fonda, Marcello Fondato and Mario Bava
directed by Mario Bava

BLOOD AND BLACK LACE

by Walter Chaw Stuart Gordon's follow-up to his flat-awesome Re-Animator reunites that film's Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton with source material by H.P. Lovecraft for From Beyond¹, a nominal splatter classic that lacks the energy and cohesiveness of Re-Animator, even as it establishes Gordon as a director with a recognizable, distinctive vision. A picture that arrived concurrently with Clive Barker's "The Hellbound Heart" (the source material for Hellraiser), it's useful as a means by which Lovecraft's and Barker's fiction can be paired against one another as complementary halves of a symbolist, grue-soaked whole. With the latter's cenobites, his most enduring contribution to popular culture², consider that Barker's vision of an alternate, infernal reality shimmering just beneath the surface of the mundane has its roots in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos--a dimension of Elder Gods lurking behind the doors of perception. Lovecraft and Barker give description to the indescribable, name to the nameless. They are in pursuit of the sublime and their quest underscores the idea that any such chase is, at its heart, inevitably a spiritual one.

Seconds (1966) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Rock Hudson, John Randolph, Salome Jens, Frances Reid
screenplay by Lewis John Carlino, based on the novel by David Ely
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For the longest time I wanted to write a book about John Frankenheimer, the crux of which would be a closer look at the relationship, if there was one, between the declining quality of his work and the assassination of his buddy Bobby Kennedy. It would be a cultural study, see, this way to tie the death of the Sixties with a director who for me definitively speaks to the rises and valleys of that decade, and who paved the way for the despairing paranoia flicks of the 1970s. In the end, I was defeated by the prospect of dealing with Frankenheimer's later films--not because they were all as bad as Prophecy (or that any of the others are near as bad as Prophecy, or that anything could be), but because many of them are really, really good in really, really difficult ways to quantify. Closer to the truth of his output post-RFK assassination is not that it's terrible, but that it's all Seconds again in some form or another: diaries of personal apocalypses and the constant threat of the dissolution of identity. Besides, I think there might be an entire book in 52 Pick-Up alone.

The Collection (2012) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick, Lee Tergesen, Christopher McDonald
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by Marcus Dunstan

by Walter Chaw A cheap, loose remake of Aliens that substitutes rampaging hordes of xenomorphs with a gimp-masked kung-fu master, Marcus Dunstan's stupid sequel to his stupid The Collector at least, this time around, doesn't function as a lame, who-cares-if-it's-intentional echo of Home Alone. No, this one vaguely recalls turn-of-the-century serial ghoul (and hotel owner) H.H. Holmes, who built a giant hotel for the express purpose of culling his guests for, among other things, medical skeletons and simple shits and giggles. Oh, who'm I kidding--the only thing The Collection reminds me of is that I have other things I should probably be doing...oh, and that Steve Beck's Ghost Ship opens with a bunch of people getting bisected by a runaway cable. The Collection, incidentally, opens with everyone getting chewed up by a combine attached to a runaway cable at a nightclub. This leaves Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick, of interest for the short For Your Consideration, in which she absolutely nails Anne Hathaway's Les Misérables performance) to be packed into a steamer trunk, because for all the things our bogey The Collector (Randall Archer) is, he's also a Jazz-era ocean-liner passenger. The Collector promptly spirits her away to his horror hotel, the one he's set up with boobytraps and galleries of pickled people parts (and tarantulas, of course, in case he needs to set them free to gross out girls and stuff), making it a terrible place to stay but still better than most Motel 6s. BAM! Take that, Motel 6.

Dead & Buried (1981) [Limited Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc + I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) [Special Edition] - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

DEAD & BURIED
***/****
DVD - Image B- Sound C+ (Remixes)/B (Mono) Extras A
BD - Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring James Farentino, Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson, Lisa Blount
screenplay by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon
directed by Gary A. Sherman

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
**/****
DVD|BD - Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze, Jr.
screenplay by Kevin Williamson, based on the novel by Lois Duncan
directed by Jim Gillespie

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gary A. Sherman's Dead & Buried and Jim Gillespie's I Know What You Did Last Summer, released theatrically fourteen years apart, together demonstrate that the more the horror genre stays the same, the more it changes. Each of these B-movies resorts to similar cheap tricks (first and foremost a coastal setting (the atmospheric equivalent of a non-perishable in horror)) and traffics in pessimism, yet one is genuinely hopeless and the other is trendily nihilistic--karo syrup as late-Nineties fashion accessory. A great gulf stands between the sensibilities of the two pictures that's unearthed by drawing other such subtle distinctions: one is cruel, the other callous; one is about death, the other about killing; one is sexy, the other exploitive; and so on and so forth. Virtually indescribable to modern audiences despite its familiar elements, Dead & Buried is a Darwinian fossil of the horror cinema, whose DNA has been perverted by the progressive commercialization of the culture and weakening of the intellectual position. Simplified: Current scare flicks still sometimes enjoy provocative subtext (like the recent Freddy Vs. Jason); more often, they die on the vine from WB-itis.

The Tuxedo (2002)

*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jason Isaacs, Debi Mazar
screenplay by Michael J. Wilson and Michael Leeson
directed by Kevin Donovan

by Walter Chaw Between watching Jennifer Love Hewitt's breasts consistently upstage her (and be commented upon constantly, besides) and Jackie Chan try hard to erase his legacy as the best physical comedian of the talkies, it's tempting to declare that The Tuxedo is a bankrupt entertainment and a remorseless time pit. Tempting and not entirely inaccurate, but in truth The Tuxedo is more than just cheerfully misogynistic (and most of Chan's films are, in one way or another, woman-hating), cartoonish, and even racist in a Green Hornet/Kato sort of way--The Tuxedo is a symptom of a far deeper concern involving the inability of the West to ever make proper use of hijacked foreign commodities or construct an action film anymore that doesn't resort to slapstick childishness and/or grotesque violence.

TIFF '13: Enemy

***/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Javier Gullón, based on the novel The Double by José Saramago
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda If the interviews floating around online in the wake of his appearance at TIFF are any indication, Denis Villeneuve spent much of his time with press managing expectations about Enemy. Though it's technically his English-language debut, as well as the first of two collaborations with Jake Gyllenhaal in a year's time, Enemy isn't slated to come out until sometime next spring, long after its bigger-budgeted, higher-pedigreed younger sibling, Prisoners. Judging from its deferred release and Villeneuve's own comments that the film is an experimental project, a one-off to help him transition from the high-toned tragedy of Incendies to more classical Hollywood filmmaking, you'd think it was a dog, but in truth it's probably the best thing he's ever made--a modest little psycho-thriller based on José Saramago's novel The Double, set in a jaundiced Toronto no one would want to hold a festival in.

TIFF '13: Prisoners

**½/****
starring starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Paul Dano
screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda Denis Villeneuve comes to America with Prisoners, an alternately strange and gripping but finally self-immolating crime picture that earns the right to its austere silver Warner Bros. logo before it devolves into a Scooby-Doo mystery for sadists. Last seen beckoned to the heavens by a pre-Oscar-anointed Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman plunges right back into the shit here as Keller Dover, a suburban dad and mild-mannered carpenter who goes berserk when his daughter and her friend (the child of perennially underused Viola Davis and Terrence Howard) vanish after Thanksgiving dinner. The first suspect is Alex (Paul Dano), a creepy, developmentally delayed young man who roams through the neighbourhood in his RV. Though he's arrested by crack detective Loki (nicely played by Jake Gyllenhaal, despite his character's name and distressingly shoddy police work) and released when the investigators find nothing to pin him on, Alex is promptly recaptured by a raging Dover, who turns out to have his own torture venue for this very occasion, complete with room enough for a black box whose construction will put Dover's woodworking skills to good use.

TIFF '13: All Cheerleaders Die

*½/****
written and directed by Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson

by Bill Chambers I suppose they've both been campy at times, but I think Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson might be too grim for something like All Cheerleaders Die (or as the closing title card ominously puts it, "All Cheerleaders Die, Part One")--a title that at the least augurs fun schlock tinged with the alarmism of '50s hygiene cinema. After capturing the dubious--but funny--death of the head cheerleader on tape, standoffish Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) remodels herself as a Heather and earns a spot on the squad, much to the dismay of goth outcast and secret admirer Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee, who looks exactly like brother Kodi). Maddy has a hidden agenda, though: to bring down Terry (Drake-ish Tom Williamson), the vicious, womanizing captain of the football team, from within that incestuous megaclique. When Terry runs the cheerleaders fatally off the road, Leena manages to resurrect them using Wiccan crystals, but not without transforming them into superhuman zombies with vampiric appetites and psychically linking them all like E.T. and Elliott. (Cue the gratuitous collective orgasm, an interminable gag saved by the better joke of a disabled kid fuming over the handicap washroom being used for nookie. I feel you, brother.) Eventually the rules and internal logic governing the movie's magic become disengagingly random, and a lot of the goodwill generated by the likable cast--"the best thing about McKee is the women he surrounds himself with," our own Bryant Frazer once wrote, and that's as true as ever--gets washed away in a tsunami of nihilism. As is often the best advice, rent Heathers instead.

Riddick (2013)

**½/****
starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff
written and directed by David Twohy

by Walter Chaw Maybe it was the anticipation, maybe it's because it's too much like the first film, Pitch Black, but David Twohy's Riddick is merely fine for what it is, lacking the kind of loopy, operatic invention of the franchise's middle course and contenting itself with being a bug hunt in the James Cameron sense of the word instead of exploring more of this universe. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but I wanted to love this movie with all my heart, having declared to everyone's exhaustion that of all the prestige movies prepping down the pike, this was the one I was waiting for. Turns out, the best science-fiction film of the last quarter of this year is Jonathan Glazer's unbelievably good Under the Skin--not Gravity and, alas, not Riddick, either. To be fair, of the three, Glazer's is the only one to deal with science-fiction as existentialism rather than as background and circus. More's the pity, because Chronicles of Riddick, with its elementals and fringe religions, its funky spiritualism and its sense of fairy-tale hyperbole, is one of the genuinely great cult films of the last decade. If not for an ending to Riddick that promises Twohy's ready for another swing at the plate if another ball is lobbed at him, I wouldn't be in a very good mood at all.