Film Freak Central

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

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THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN
**½/****
BD - Image B+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Ben Johnson, Andrew Prine, Jimmy Clem, Dawn Wells
screenplay by Earl E. Smith
directed by Charles B. Pierce

THE EVICTORS
**½/**** Image B Sound B-
starring Vic Morrow, Michael Parks, Jessica Harper, Sue Ane Langdon
screenplay by Charles B. Pierce, Gary Rusoff, Paul Fisk
directed by Charles B. Pierce

by Jefferson Robbins Charles B. Pierce's 1976 thriller The Town That Dreaded Sundown makes a fetish of breath. The bag-headed killer, ripped from the headlines of 1946 Texarkana, is a mouth-breather, his mask working like a bellows whether he's exerting himself or not. He's announced by his respiring, as when rural housewife Helen Reed (Dawn Wells) ceases brushing her rich black hair to listen for him outside her home. And his most artful, or perhaps comical, kill is executed with a bayonet trombone, stabbing with each exhalation. He's the old stereotype of the heavy-breathing phone pervert writ deadly, shambling up to parked teenagers and taking his jollies as he may. Sexual assault is implicit in his approach but quickly disavowed, although he heavily bites his earliest female victim. An oral compulsion that is sexual but not; a murder that is penetrative rape but not... As scripted, the never-captured Phantom Killer of Texarkana would be a pretty interesting psychological study.

The Conjuring (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C-
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Chad Hayes & Carey W. Hayes
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw Based on a true story in the same way that a pineapple is an apple, James Wan's latest exercise in jump-scare theatre is the workmanlike haunted house/demonic possession flick The Conjuring. In it, the paranormal investigation team of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren, co-authors of several books and shown as the film begins lecturing a small auditorium of people on the finer points of ghost-hunting, confront their Greatest Challenge Ever when they're called to the modest New England farmhouse of the Perron family. It seems this was the former home of a WITCH! Can you fucking believe the luck? An evil witch lived in this house. Fuck. A witch. Motherfucker, am I right? You buy a house and you think that...anyway, it really sucks that a witch lived there. It all starts out innocently enough with the largely-indistinguishable Perron girls getting jerked out of bed by an invisible whatever, then evolves into a game of hide and clap (which sounds venereal but isn't, unless you're doing it really wrong) that leads to mommy Carolyn (Lili Taylor) getting thrown down a flight of stairs into a creepy, boarded-up cellar™. That's when daddy Roger (Ron Livingston) calls the Warrens... Well, he doesn't, because he's away on a week-long business trip and he's a skeptic of the Warrens, we learn after the fact... Um... He's not a well-developed character, seeing as how Wan seems distracted by all the loud noises and crap leaping out at the camera.

To Be or Not to Be (1942) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

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****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart
screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer, based on a story by Melchior Lengyel
directed by Ernst Lubitsch

by Walter Chaw Ernst Lubitsch took chances, none greater than To Be or Not to Be. Released in the first months of America's involvement in WWII, in that initial flurry of propaganda that saw the Nazis as murderous, animalistic, inhuman Hun, Lubitsch chose instead to portray them as ridiculous, as human--to make a comedy, a farce...and a masterpiece, as it happens. It's a crystallization of his work in that way: He's always more interested in foible than in oppressive arcs of personal failure--if Nazis can be seen to be possessed of the same faults as the rest of us, the same vanities, the same fears. Make no mistake, To Be or Not to Be is no olive branch. Seventy years on, it remains among the most withering satires of totalitarian governments and the politics of groupthink, but it suggests that Nazism is just one of many insufficient sops to the insecurities hardwired into us--that we're all just thin projections strutting and fretting our hour on the proverbial stage, each susceptible to things that would give relief from the pain of lack of self-confidence and identity. It's a film that seeks to explain why people create cults of personality. That it sets itself amongst a theatre troupe performing "Hamlet", itself a play that houses another play within itself (holding a mirror up to nature, indeed), makes total sense in a picture that, through this absurdity, seeks to highlight greater absurdities. Of all his great films (and when push comes to shove, I'd say Trouble in Paradise is and likely always will be my favourite Lubitsch), To Be or Not to Be is inarguably his greatest.

Psycho II (1983) [Collector's Edition] + Psycho III (1986) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Discs

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PSYCHO II
***½/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Robert Loggia, Meg Tilly
screenplay by Tom Holland
directed by Richard Franklin

PSYCHO III
**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Anthony Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey, Roberta Maxwell
screenplay by Charles Edward Pogue
directed by Anthony Perkins

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For a fool's errand, Psycho II--a decades-belated, colour follow-up to a seminal black-and-white horror by a filmmaker whose mythical stature had only grown since his death--is nothing short of a miracle. The story goes that in the early-Eighties, when sequels were the new Gold Rush, Universal--who'd seen healthy returns on Jaws 2 and Smokey and the Bandit II--realized it had a sequelizable property in Psycho but intended to hedge their bets with a telefilm for the burgeoning cable market. When Anthony Perkins got wind of the project, he expressed an unanticipated interest in reprising the role of Norman Bates, having done so one time before in a warmly-received sketch on the first season of "Saturday Night Live". Australian Richard Franklin, a USC graduate back in Hollywood to direct the picture, realized the studio could be shamed into releasing Psycho II theatrically were Perkins to star in it, and recruited The Beast Within screenwriter Tom Holland (who went on to give us Fright Night and Child's Play) to craft a script the actor couldn't resist. Once Perkins said "yes," Universal begrudgingly bumped it up to a feature but still expected it to be made quickly and cheaply like the original--probably to the perverse delight of Hitchcock scholar Franklin, who prided himself on doing things the Master's way all through production, going so far as to cameo in the film.

The Counselor (2013)

½*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Cormac McCarthy
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw When I read The Crossing, I believed it to be the finest American novel in the Southern Gothic tradition since Faulkner rolled up Yoknapatawpha County under his arm and went home. Then I read Blood Meridian, and thought I was in the presence of maybe the most important American author since, who, Pynchon? But after that, Cormac McCarthy dried up. I didn't care for Cities on the Plain, his wrapping up of the lauded "Border Trilogy" that began with All the Pretty Horses and sandwiched The Crossing in between, and I thought No Country For Old Men was weak and obvious, lacking fire, while The Road was well and completely flaccid. Going backwards didn't help: Child of God was a fragment, Suttree had that bit with the pig but not much else, and the incest fairytale Outer Dark seemed a sketch. But then the Coens adapted No Country for Old Men as a summary critique of the key themes of McCarthy's work, and I was entranced again, or at least willing to give his stuff a shot again. It's the mark of a gifted critic, and the Coens are our most gifted literary critics, to reanimate something that's been dead for a while. So we land here, following a too-faithful screen translation of The Road and the curious, forgettable, elderly HBO flick The Sunset Limited (first written by McCarthy as a play) with the inevitability of a film, The Counselor, based on an original screenplay by McCarthy, supervised by McCarthy to the point of McCarthy giving line readings to frickin' Michael Fassbender, and promoted with McCarthy billed almost as prominently in the breathless trailer as director Ridley Scott and co-star Brad Pitt. And, yes, this film by a novelist twenty years past his prime, dabbling now in a new medium like old Michael Jordan playing baseball, stinks of an almost Greek hubris, an almost Icarean overreaching. The Counselor is uniquely awful.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

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***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Donald Pleasence, Lisa Blount, Victor Wong, Jameson Parker
screenplay by John Carpenter (as Martin Quatermass)
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The first of two low-budget films that John Carpenter wrote pseudonymously and directed in and around downtown Los Angeles in the late-1980s, John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness is one of the creepiest movies ever made. Underrated at the time by critics who called it "cheesy" (Vincent Canby)¹ and said "[it] stinks" (Richard Harrington), Prince of Darkness was clearly made fast and on the cheap, and it's roughly-crafted by Carpenter standards. Still, it's a triumph of mood. Filling out a mystery-of-the-ancient-artifact yarn with a cosmic-horror mythology, Prince of Darkness lives in a sweet spot between religious thriller and Satanic potboiler where science is the way, the truth, and the life, for better or worse.

Halloween Horror Video Essay: The Monster In The Painting

by Jefferson Robbins Back in September, I published the Kindle ebook The Curse of Frankenstein: A Dissection--a scene-by-scene analytical love letter to a film that shaped me, and discloses hidden depths the more one looks at it.

MHHFF '13: Shorts Program #4

Next Exit **/**** (UK, 14 mins., d. Benjamin Goodger) A light bit of nothing, Next Exit is a little Ludditism along the lines of that one episode of the American "The Office" where Michael Scott follows the bad instructions of his GPS directly into a lake. The performances are good, the direction is fairly pedestrian, and the story, about a girl who accepts a ride home from a pub one night, has a couple of decent twists but is ultimately more mildly clever than disturbing or compelling. In its short time, it does manage to cover the bases in terms of going out of cell-phone range and the suggestion of a cyclical ending, but it fails mostly in terms of generating much in the way of horror or comedy. Mostly, I had trouble with the idea that anyone would think a hotel--or a hospital, or anything--is located in the middle of the woods.

A Touch of Sin (2013)

***/****
starring Jiang Wu, Zhao Tao, Wang Baoqiang, Luo Lanshan
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda The blood doesn't flow so much as it spurts in A Touch of Sin, Jia Zhangke's invigorated if uneven return to straight fiction following an extended sojourn in hybridized documentaries about modern Chinese cities. More than the formal homecoming, however, it's the nature of the storytelling that surprises in his newest--the leap from the elegiac tone of films like 24 City into the more primal stuff of pulp. A wuxia anthology with revenge-thriller overtones, A Touch of Sin is an unusually direct genre exercise for a master filmmaker, in the sense that, unlike Steven Spielberg's Munich and other comparably shame-faced prestige films that dip a single toe in the waters of genre, it doesn't condescend to the populist trappings of the material. Jia isn't slumming so much as tapping into the righteous indignation of a popular tradition of stories about wronged knights and ruined innocents, sincerely transposed here to the working-class fringe of a nation state in the throes of late capitalism. If Jia's violence comes fast and leaves a mess, then, it's a testament to his willingness to get his hands dirty where others might have kept a safer distance.

Muscle Shoals (2013)

**/****
directed by Greg 'Freddy' Camalier

by Walter Chaw And so I find myself again reviewing a documentary that's terribly informative but not terribly artistic, Greg Camalier's Muscle Shoals, which does a very fine job of cataloguing all the great musicians who discovered their "sound," their "funk," their swamp, if you will, along the banks of the Tennessee River in a little Alabama town called "Muscle Shoals." Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, Jimmy Cliff, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Traffic--and, oh, there's Bono, talking about the struggle of black people, why not. Camalier throws a lot of stuff out there but can't quite find the balance between artsy pretension and straight reportage. Every time he mentions someone calling someone else, in other words, he's somehow dug up a different portrait of someone on a telephone--let it marinate enough, repeat it enough, and suddenly it's unintentionally hilarious. Bono could be connected to the film because either U2 was greatly influenced by the Shoals variety of R&B or because Bono is an expert talking-head or because Bono is an insufferable boor who likes to be on camera. Whatever the case, archival footage--always fun, if not that much funner than a night spent chain-surfing YouTube--splits time with new interviews with dudes like Keith Richards who wax rhapsodic about the magic of the place. It doesn't go pear-shaped, though, until Native Americans are invoked, revealing that the original name of the Tennessee River had something to do with singing.

Carrie (2013)

***½/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Judy Greer, Portia Doubleday, Julianne Moore
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
directed by Kimberly Peirce

by Walter Chaw If you were to boil down Brian DePalma's work, at least his earlier work, into a few ideas, you'd land on the way he took Hitchcock's subterranean perversions and made them perversion perversions, transforming pieces and suggestions into themes and declarations. Looking at DePalma's Carrie today, what's there is a clear attempt--often successful--to elevate B-movie tropes to the status high art, or high pulp: What Godard did to gangster films, DePalma did to Hitchcock, turning the already formal into formalism. When DePalma was at his best, his movies evoked in daylight what Hitchcock inspired in shadow. Of its many technical innovations, his Carrie, an adaptation of Stephen King's not-very-good but vibe-y debut novel, was aided immeasurably by pitch-perfect casting: Sissy Spacek, P.J. Soles, John Travolta, Amy Irving, and Nancy Allen. Hip then, it's hip still--and sexy as hell, as befitting a story that's ultimately about a girl's sexual awakening and, let's face it, really bangin' first orgasm. On prom night, no less. What could be more American?

MHHFF '13: +1

***/****
starring Rhys Wakefield, Logan Miller, Ashley Hinshaw, Natalie Hall
screenplay by Bill Gullo
directed by Dennis Iliadis

by Walter Chaw David (Rhys Wakefield) screws up and loses girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw), only to run into her the night of a gigantic, hedonistic, Gatsby-esque party attended by rave strippers, DJs, and drug dealers. An unlikely place to stage a comeback, David, with buddy Teddy (Logan Miller), coaxes Jill into a conversation that goes south--but then the lights cut out, there's a weird meteorite event outside, and David finds himself with the opportunity to try the conversation again: same place, different Jill. It seems that something's created a quantum split--a little bleed-over maybe from a parallel dimension that twists time and creates doubles of all the revellers, though only a few notice. The ones who don't party on in a kind of nightmarish inattention that reminds of the dreamscapes of Miracle Mile and After Hours; the ones who do begin to wonder what will happen when the time-slips overlap and they find themselves attempting to share the same space as their doppelgängers.

Slacker (1991) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

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****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Richard Linklater, Rudy Basquez, Jean Caffeine, and a whole bunch of people
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Jefferson Robbins Before it became a lazily-applied shorthand for my generation in particular, Slacker was a film about doom. It's pervasive throughout this seemingly casual, meticulously-constructed, 24-hour baton-pass through bohemian Austin, Texas, in which characters confront intimations of death, their own or that of the species in general, and respond with rhetoric, bemusement, a fatalistic shrug, or a joyride. Writer-director Richard Linklater awakens from vivid dreams on a bus in the opening scene, then unspools his vision to a Buddha-silent cabdriver (Rudy Basquez). His most memorable dreams, he reports, often feature sudden death: "There's always someone gettin' run over or something really weird." Fair enough to wonder if we're not dreaming along with him, in some dress rehearsal for Waking Life, when he quickly happens upon a mother (Jean Caffeine) sprawled in a residential Austin boulevard, freshly driven over by her disturbed son (Mark James).

The Bling Ring (2013) - Blu-ray Disc

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***/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Taissa Farmiga, Leslie Mann
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the VANITY FAIR article by Nancy Jo Sales
directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Doomed to be compared--unfavorably, I think--to Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring is better seen as another document of ennui and privilege and the different ways the same old dissatisfaction and yearning manifest in endlessly evolving, endlessly confounding ways, generation by generation. Appearing as they both do in the middle of a ceaseless recession with our leaders arguing, as they did in the late-1930s, about social programs that one side believed indispensable and the other recklessly overpriced, neither film is terribly different in structure and execution from The Wizard of Oz. Coppola, upon reflection, is the perfect artist for an updating of Dorothy's trip to the Emerald City--she is, after all, Dorothy. If you were to freeze-frame the film during its opening titles (scored brilliantly, discordantly, by the Sleigh Bells' "Crown on the Ground"), you'd note, as my editor Bill did on Twitter, that Coppola's own credit reads "Written and Directed by Rich Bitch Sofia Coppola." Self-awareness, self-deprecation, it's all of those things, but what it is most, I think, is a kind of acceptance: her own peace with her relationship with the two "acts" of her public life, the first indicated perhaps by her father not protecting her well enough as an actress, the second by her move to behind the camera as a director of quiet, trance-like pictures about little girls lost. If The Bling Ring is ultimately the least of Coppola's films, it gathers weight, develops context, taken as a whole with the others. Say what you will and count me deep in her camp, Coppola is every bit the auteur her father is--and it's his fault.

MHHFF '13: Haunter

*/****
directed by Vincenzo Natali

by Walter Chaw A Paperhouse/Coraline kind of movie that mixes all that familiar guff into a paste with the can't-leave-this-house crap from The Others and, oh, why not, Beetlejuice, too, Vincenzo Natali's follow-up to his unfairly-maligned Splice is the genuinely bad Haunter, which plays every bit like a collection of "Resident Evil" cut-scenes. Abigail Breslin is Lisa, a period-'80s teenager in a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt who, in a real knee-slapper, deadpans that "meat is murder" to her mother's offer of meatloaf, because The Smiths, get it? Doesn't matter. What matters is that Haunter is a master of overstatement (it wouldn't surprise me if this Lisa is an homage to the Staci Keanan Lisa), even taking a moment at the end to pay tribute to Carpenter's Christine for really no other reason than that it can't help being hyperbolic: the screaming is screamier, the whispering is whisperier, and it doesn't rain, it pours. Lisa is trapped in the last day of her life with her family in a sort of Groundhog Day conceit, except that she's a ghost who eventually figures out that the same evil ghost dude guy has been killing young girls just like her for decades, and that it's up to her to break the cycle. This leads, of course, to a scene from the ending of Ghost--no, not that one, the one before it where the villain gets dragged to hell by bad special effects.

Autumn Sonata (1978) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

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Höstsonaten
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Lena Nyman, Halvar Björk
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer By 1978, Ingmar Bergman was in trouble. The director had fled his native Sweden two years earlier after an arrest on charges of tax evasion. (He would be completely exonerated in 1979, but his mood was no doubt grim until then.) He visited Paris and Los Angeles, then settled in Munich, where he would shoot his first English-language film, the 1920s Berlin-set The Serpent's Egg, a Dino de Laurentiis co-production co-starring David Carradine and Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann. The Serpent's Egg was a box-office flop in Sweden, a critical and commercial failure internationally, and most of all a big artistic disappointment for Bergman himself--a decided stumble for a director riding high on the success of 1970s titles like the harrowing Cries and Whispers, which enjoyed huge success in the U.S. in the unlikely care of Roger Corman's New World Pictures, and the audience-friendly The Magic Flute. At the same time, Bergman was embarking on what would prove to be an unhappy tenure at Munich's Residenztheater, where he managed to mount eleven productions before being fired in 1981. In this turbulent context, the very Bergmanesque Autumn Sonata can be seen as a kind of comfort film--a deliberate return to roots. Someone once described it as "Bergman does Bergman," and the gag stuck. Bergman himself eventually quoted the remark, calling it "witty but unfortunate. For me, that is."

MHHFF '13: FFC Interviews "We Are What We Are" Director Jim Mickle

The Curtis Hotel is right across the street from the Denver Performing Arts Complex--a city block "hollowed out" in the middle that houses Denver's premier venues: the ones for the opera, the ballet, the symphony, and touring companies of Broadway productions. On a hot day in September, I walked through the complex, under the four-storey-high glass canopy, to the Curtis. It's a fun place, this hotel; the floors have themes. I met Jim Mickle on the superhero floor, on the morning his film was to screen at the 4^th Mile High Horror Film Festival. He's a tall guy, affable, friendly, and not at all what I was expecting after watching his sober, dense, matriarchal horror movie We Are What We Are. I expected, at the least, a tweed coat with leather patches on the elbows. On the last day of publicity for the film, after which he was returning to editing duties on his adaptation of Joe Lansdale's awesome noir Cold in July, I promised I would try to avoid asking him questions he'd already answered a few dozen times before--although I couldn't resist bringing up Kelly McGillis and Witness because, yeah, I'm a big, giant dork. We started off, though, talking about Antonia Bird's Ravenous and his own film's Ravenous feel.

Bastards (2013)

Les salauds
****/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Chiara Mastroianni, Julie Bataille, Lola Creton
screenplay by Jean-Pol Fargeau and Claire Denis
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda A Claire Denis film through and through, Bastards is nevertheless a brilliant departure for one of the most distinctive artists in world cinema--an indignant revenge thriller with, of all things, a straightforward plot. Of course, the plot is scrambled, doled out in the runic fragments that have become Denis's stock-in-trade. We open, for instance, in the rain, as a throbbing Tindersticks track underscores a series of beautiful but inscrutable nocturnal images: glimpses of a man forlornly staring out his window, languorous tracking shots of a nude young woman in heels roaming through a deserted street, and finally a tableau of a dead man's body splayed out beneath a fire escape, surrounded by paramedics in the background as a woman, probably his wife, is draped in a tinfoil blanket in the fore. Although films like L'Intrus have primed us to accept such shards as part of an impressionistic array of visual information, adding up to a textured view of nighttime Paris as a hopelessly lonely place, in Bastards the pieces fit together in a precise way we're simply not allowed to know until we've arrived through the movie's own idiosyncratic channel, and at its own deliberate pace. That makes it one of the most elegantly constructed of Denis's eleven features--a grim noir story broken into its component parts, then reassembled into a haunted funhouse image of itself.

MHHFF '13: Big Bad Wolves

***/****
starring Tzahi Grad, Llor Ashkenazi, Rotem Keinan, Dov Glickman
written and directed by Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado

by Walter Chaw A winning, stylish mixture of black humour, perversion, and character study, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado's Big Bad Wolves presents a popular moral quandary in a way that would make Park Chan-wook proud. Indeed, it would fit comfortably in a conversation with that director's "Vengeance Trilogy" as a companion piece in theme, even execution, to Sympathy for Lady Vengeance that finds a father and a rogue police officer brutally torturing an unassuming schoolteacher because they both suspect he's responsible for the death of a little girl. With the question of guilt beside the point, the real thrust of the piece is the toll that some actions take on the soul, no matter why they're undertaken. Crucially, it's not a product of the United States or South Korea, two cultures married to a specific kind of morally relativistic nightmare that have produced films like this for years, but of an Israeli movie industry that marks this as only their second "horror" release. (The first, incidentally, was a product of this same writing-directing team: 2010's Kalavet.) For an Israeli thriller to tackle the issue of the zero sum game of rendition and torture without due process feels dangerous--particularly with the ancillary character of an Arab man on horseback who is wry, handsome, and utterly normal, nay, the only normal one in the entire film.

Escape from Tomorrow (2013)

***½/****
starring Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez, Alison Lees-Taylor
written and directed by Randy Moore

by Walter Chaw Randy Moore's ridiculously-ballsy Escape from Tomorrow proves itself to be a good deal more than a gimmick--said gimmick being that it posits the Magic Kingdom as the locus, the key modern metaphor, for bourgeois discontent, with much of the picture shot surreptitiously on the grounds of Disneyland and Disney World. It's very much the model of a Luis Buñuel film, not just for its expert surrealism, but also for its sharply-reasoned social satire. It does the impossible in our modern conversation by feeling urgent and fresh, presenting something that's genuinely shocking to our jaded sensibilities. If there's anything left that is perverse, one is this violation of such a famously litigious sacred cow. It isn't even that the idea of using Disney as the eye of a capitalist/vaguely fascistic hurricane is particularly novel: consider that David Mamet took it on in his collection of essays Some Freaks--not to mention the gallons of ink spilled on its essentially corrupt nature by wanks following the long immolation of Disney products Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. No, what's novel about Escape from Tomorrow is that it does what it does through images; it is essentially this generation's Superstar, in which Todd Haynes told the life and death of Karen Carpenter using Barbie and Ken dolls. A picture that understands its subject and its relationship to popular culture well enough to make everyone pretty uncomfortable with their own complicity in it all, it's an indictment of a collective upbringing. The recognition you experience is of your own indoctrinated childhood.

MHHFF '13: We Are What We Are (2013)

***½/****
starring Bill Sage, Ambyr Childers, Julia Garner, Michael Parks
screenplay by Nick Damici and Jim Mickle
directed by Jim Mickle

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a leaf falling into a river and a woman, confused and trembling, declaring to a shop owner that she's fine but that the damp will sometimes get into her head. Jim Mickle's smart, downcast We Are What We Are looks to Nature as not just insensate, savage, but also the first testament to a greater power. It locates the source of religion in the need to control Nature, more specifically to find meaning in the capricious-seeming meaninglessness of the universe. It implicates the ugliest, most selfish aspect of Nature in the founding of the United States, mining resonance in the idea of "Manifest Destiny"--in the process giving women a starring role: positions of real power in which they're depended upon for their strength rather than exploited for some idea of their weakness. We Are What We Are enacts a matriarchal melodrama in that way; connecting the feminine aspect to Nature is nothing new, of course, but the picture does so in a way that feels true and is in its own way touching. It opens with a quote that seems Biblical (later, one of the characters will ask another, "Is that from the Bible?"--it's not then, either), which serves the multifoliate purposes of establishing the mood of the piece, clarifying that religion is born in the breast of man, and establishing a woman as the artifactor of the Word. The woman with the damp in her head, a mother, falls into water and drowns--the first of several images of baptism in the picture, and one that predicts the flood imagery running throughout. Water suggests change, unearths things, washes them clean. It's all heavy stuff, I know, yet the thrill of We Are What We Are is that it's about all these things without being obviously about any of it.

MHHFF '13: Ghost Team One

*½/****
directed by Ben Peyser & Scott Rutherford

by Walter Chaw Kind of a cross between Paranormal Activity and American Pie, Ben Peyser and Scott Rutherford's Ghost Team One is buoyed by a game cast and a certain relentlessness but let down by an extended conclusion that finally crosses the line from offensive-but-funny to offensive-offensive. Before that, there's virgin Sergio (Carlos Santos) and his horny, neo-Stiffler buddy Brad (J.R. Villarreal) outfitting their pad with cameras and enlisting a third, largely-unseen buddy at the handheld in the pursuit of ghost-hunting--or so they tell the beautiful Fernanda (Fernanda Romero). Really, this project seems designed around the chance of maybe capturing some uploadable gonzo porn. This promises oodles of nudity in a supernatural-tinged sex-romp, but, alas, what we get are a lot of masturbation jokes and an Asian burlesque from otherwise-hilarious frat-boy Chuck (Tony Cavalero), which starts in a bad place and descends to a very bad place during an extended exorcism scene. Opportunities to attack Mormons are squandered along with the chance to craft something with the sort of '80s lawlessness of The Last American Virgin. The film can't even take a successful swipe at The Blair Witch Project, though it tries.

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.

Mile High Horror Film Festival '13: An Introduction

by Walter Chaw I'd been vaguely aware of the Mile High Horror Film Festival its previous three years to the extent that I'd reached out at some point to see about coverage, but it came to nothing and was easy for me to ignore. Then a good friend moved from the Denver Film Society to the newly-opened Denver location of Alamo Drafthouse as creative director, and one September morning, I found myself driving down to meet with him and chat about his new position. This Drafthouse is beautiful, by the way, and for cinephiles in the Denver area, it's a hope devoutly wished, answered. If you don't support this venue and its mission statement ("to save cinema," its co-owner, Tom, declared to me proudly), you don't deserve it. Anyway, in the cavernous, leather-lined lobby, I met my friend, who had just come from a planning meeting with festival founder Tim Schultz. Handshakes facilitated, I got in touch with ace PR guy Travis Volz a few days later, and suddenly found myself sitting in a little booth across from Jim Mickle, director of a very, very good remake/not-really-a-remake of We Are What We Are.

The Hangover Part III (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

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*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong, John Goodman
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Craig Mazin
directed by Todd Phillips

by Angelo Muredda When Project X spilled forth from its amniotic septic tank last spring, I read it as a prime example of a producer-driven form of auteurism pioneered by Judd Apatow. That found-footage chronicle of a house party-turned-apocalypse, I suggested, was a monument to producer Todd Phillips's equally noxious Hangover series, where the same Dionysian impulses and deep-seated hatred of the different--whether female, trans, queer, or disabled--were championed by a trio of middle-aged men. What a difference a year makes. If Project X was a brand consolidator and The Hangover Part II was a morbidly curious recalibration of its predecessor, displacing Phillips's demonic impulses and scarcely controlled misogynist rage from Bradley Cooper's Phil to Ed Helms's Stu, Part III is an actors' contract negotiation sputtered to life. Since the previous instalment, Cooper has become a respectable leading man and Oscar nominee and Helms has been savaged for the degeneration of his irritating Andy Bernard character on "The Office", while co-star Ken Jeong's fortunes have inexplicably risen. Consequently, gone now are the days of Phil's "Paging Doctor Faggot," along with Stu's loveable dude-rage and the Wolfpack's infinite jokes about Mr. Chow's shrunken Asian manhood. In their place is a surprisingly neutered, if inarguably more ethical, product with very few laughs and no reason for being.

Heads-up!

If you're looking for our review of this week's big release Gravity, just a reminder that Walter Chaw reviewed it last month as part of his Telluride Film Festival coverage. Check it out here.

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

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****/**** 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.