Month: May 2020

The Wretched

Posted on by victorfraga

How well do you know your neighbours? One of our most perturbing fears is that we never really do know these people we live alongside, and so, a slice of paranoia does no more harm than the occasional home-baked sugar treat.

Cinema has delighted in toying with our paranoia of the stranger posing as neighbour, from serial killers in The ‘Burbs (Joe Dante, 1989), Disturbia (DJ Caruso, 2007) and Summer of 84 (Francois Simmard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell, 2018), a Nazi in hiding in Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer, 1998), to those supernatural forces: witches in Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and a vampire in Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1986). Brett and Drew Pierce’s The Wretched chooses the supernatural over the human, when teenager Ben (John-Paul Howard) learns that a witch is posing as his father’s next door neighbour.

Jerry Dandridge, first played by Chris Sarandon, then Colin Farrell in Fright Night is playful with this dynamic of the friendly neighbour one needs to be wary of, just as the helpful neighbours of Rosemary’s Baby have ominous intentions. The Wretched does not pursue this playful dynamic – following wife and mother Abbie’s (Zarah Mahler) possession, she functions as an ominous presence that terrifies her own son, and in one scene when she confronts Ben, the passive-aggressive playfulness between the pair is missing.

Knowledge of other genre works provokes the feeling that something has been lost here, that gives way to a conflict. A character who makes a strong impression, mixing the feminine maternal with the beer-drinking, hunting, buck-gutting masculine, the Pierce brothers and actress Mahler present a female character of note, wasted as a victim of possession, especially when her former self is exorcised entirely. While this is Ben’s story, there’s a regret that Abbie who is able to blur gender distinctions becomes a victim of the narrative intent, and whether unintentional subjugates woman to the adolescent male hero of the tale.

Ben essentially serves as a cog in the machine to drive the story forward – his alertness or being in the right place at the right time, along with his curiosity compelling him to discover and expose the truth. We connect with these protagonists because we see what he sees, his feelings of dismissal transferred through the screen to us. We become implicit in his determination, in spite of what the other characters believe. This is the joy of these films – a camaraderie that transcends the screen, countering the mundanity of our everyday lives, where neighbours may irritate one another, but no exciting call to action will be required.

What also bonds us with Ben is for many of us, shared experiences – the travails with adolescent love and lust, the jostling for recognition and discontentment with our place on the social hierarchy. But these stories also exploit our sympathies – characters struggling with family drama. Here in The Wretched Ben’s parents have separated, and he has to accept his father’s new girlfriend – the meeting of the end with the beginning. In recent films of adolescents confronting sinister forces, Dead Shack (Peter Ricq, 2017) and Summer of 84 both see teenagers weighed down by family tensions. In this context what it creates for young hero or group of heroes is the opportunity to empower themselves and stride towards adulthood, escaping their dependency on their parents and inability to resolve adult problems that they have only been able to passively watch unfold.

The witch is effectively creepy and while not a detraction visually, how she fits into the narrative is troublesome. A brief scene of exposition offers an insight into the witch’s mythology that even as Ben learns about his foe is not developed. A lack of development of the mythology hinders the witch from becoming something more powerful, or even for us to engage in her malevolent intentions that Ben desperately tries to thwart. The commitment to myth and folklore that lie beyond the aim to evoke fear responses would bolster the impression one has of The Wretched, giving it more clout to stay in the cultural consciousness upon its release.

Struggling to sustain the suspense of the opening scene, and hampered towards the end by a suspiciously illogical twist, The Wretched following a strong first impression, is an experience in which hopes for a seminal film of the sub-genre are dashed.

The Wretched in out on VoD on Friday, May 8th.

The time for burning bridges!

Posted on by victorfraga

Director Oliver Laxe’s third feature Fire Will Come (2019), centres on Amador (Amador Arias), an arsonist only just released from prison who returns home to his mother (Benedicta Sánchez). But when a new fire threatens his community, he becomes the likely suspect.

The film opens with a majestic image of nature, interrupted by the aggressive destruction of man made machinery. From the outset Laxe hypnotises, the power or emphasis of the image central to the experience of the film. Less interested in the intricacies of relationships or answering the question of guilt, the story is crafted with an attention to the senses. The way the film is shot and scored treats cinema as art, not attempting to explain itself, but something we look at and feel. There is a narrative present, but it’s more of a silent narrative, the storyteller not explaining point by point the thoughts and the feelings of his characters, rather he trusts us to be active participants, to create meaning through the projection of our own emotions and thoughts.

In conversation with Paul Risker from DMovies, Laxe spoke about cinema as an act of submission, the artist’s absurd request for an audience’s love, and the need to escape one’s inner world.

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Paul Risker – Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?

Oliver Laxe – Since I was a child I have escaped inside of myself a little. I sense this flavour when I imagine images and they agitate me, or when I’m in a place and I feel something while I’m there, and I enjoy introducing that flavour in images.

I’m not a subject filmmaker – “I want to make a film about that.” It’s more about colours and images, faces and places. I like to call those images “essential images”, that are deep inside and that want to exist. It’s as if they use you to exist, and these iconic and essential images are clear to me, and so I try to relate them. And for Fire Will Come, I saw the first images of the eucalyptus and I wanted to make that scene like falling into night; the fight between machine and forest, but there are no more machines. I don’t know what they are, but they’re not bulldozers.

When we ask ourselves the motivation of why we make a film, it’s easy to let yourself as a filmmaker. For me, there are different reasons, in part because I always wanted to come back to the village where my mum was born, which is where we shot the film. I was attracted by the fire and the place, I was attracted to the images, but as to why I wanted to make a film about something simple, about love and mercifulness, I don’t know.

PR – Is there an unconscious dimension to the process, in which not every choice is a conscious one?

OL – It’s very organic and I’m quite agitated by this will that you’re obliged to do it. I don’t know if my films are good or not, but it’s clear that it’s necessary for me, and you feel that when you are watching a film – you feel what is necessary or not for the filmmaker. We filmed inside real fires and now when I look back on that I think, “Come on, you’re crazy.” [Laughs] But when we were shooting, it was natural.

I like to say that cinema is an art of submission, which is a very frustrating thing but it’s what is good about cinema. It‘s something that transcends you – something that is not you takes the opportunity to express itself across you and the cinema. It’s crazy, and sometimes I have the idea or the image that someone is pushing me and all my crew and actors to a river that we follow. It’s as if the current of the river makes the film, and we try to swim, but you have to let go and abandon yourself.

I remember someone gave me some advice that I appreciated: “You have to be crazy to want to be someone. Fight to try to be no one. Try to be void, and it’s when you are void that something can agitate you.” If we apply that to the art then I agree, and I’m quite existentialist and determinist in the way that I think about life. There is a relationship between imagination and image and inspiration, which I trust.

PR – Does the filmmaking process create a space in time where you can explore the different sides of your personality?

OL – There is a hole of love when we come into this world and each one of us tries to transcend this hole, to jump it by asking for love or not, but each of us in a different way. This is what medicine calls a neurosis and obviously the way artists ask for love is related to this scar. But in our way it’s like saying to the spectator, “Look at what I do, love me.” It’s such a ridiculous thing [laughs] because when you mature, you understand that you don’t need to do that – to have love.

Art helps you to work because you’re blind and so you need that tool. The problem is when we think the tool is a kind of God, but it’s just a tool. We see that filmmakers keep using this tool when they don’t need to and we can see these filmmakers suffer. They think they’re not inspired, but it’s just they don’t need to make their films anymore, and continuing to make films, we feel that they have no soul. This is the reason why I am trying to adapt myself and why my films are increasingly simple, and complex at the same time.

Art is born from an inner adaptation, and I’m curious watching the work I do because I discover and understand that subtly – I unconsciously make films about region of personality. For example, that’s why I made a film about tolerance because I’m quite intolerant [laughs]. I’m somewhat of a judge, and I know it’s something I have to work on, to not judge and that’s the reason for this character [Amador]. But this is something I understood after, and also another side of my personality is that I’m an artist, and we are quite obsessive compulsive, so there is that aim of perfection. We are perfectionists, but cinema is the art of imperfection. You are never going to make the film you want to, never. I think it’s a good thing for me to try to become detached and to manage expectation.

PR – From communicating with the layers or aspects of your personality, why then seek a detachment?

OL – Cinema is a parallel and you have to be detached to avoid yourself – you have to let something inside of you go. It’s strange, but cinema is a perfect tool to invite some transcendental meanings to exist. We provoke something, but life always transcends, not always, but if you do it in a way that allows life to express itself, then it will transcend you, the author. That’s why I don’t like auteur or art house movies because at the moment cinema is becoming more polarised between art house cinema and commercial, market place films, and I think we have to keep crossing these two boundaries. Art is very comfortable in making films for an artist elite, and the depth and power of cinema is that it’s high culture and popular culture at the same time. I want to resist that way of making films more – both dimensions are my thing.

PR – You refrain from explaining the relationships, thoughts and motivations of Amador. Do you trust the audience to critique the character and the story for themselves?

OL – The narrative is quite universal – the son that comes back home who either will or will not adapt. I’m interested in psychology in my life, but not when I make films. I like some psychological movies, but I wanted to make an essential movie, and when I say essential, I’m talking about the essence inside of us, and that the characters have too.

There is the essence and there is the personality that surrounds it – the psychology and the neuroses. I didn’t want to make a film about the personality, which means mask and persona. I wanted to cross over that to the essence, and when you touch this essence, you are touching the essence of the spectator that is connected a little bit with the character’s.

This is when the artist’s gesture of the countryside agitates me because I’m from that valley, and my parents they still have these gestures of the nature of the countryside. So the process was to try to not write but to do the opposite, and to always try to find an economy. They are simple people in the countryside and I’d like to be like that because the modern human being has too much of an inner world. It’s an illness, it’s too much and I’m not interested in that.

The image at the top of this interview is from Oliver Laxe, the other ones are stills from ‘Fire Will Come’, which is available now on all major VoD platforms

The Final Wish

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

There’s a reason many couples – typically new and loved up – choose horror on a movie night; it is the genre most likely to draw them together, causing grips to tighten and heads to nestle. However, no such experience will be had watching The Final Wish, a scare-free effort that trades on Lin Shaye’s B-movie charisma.

Shaye’s schtick is a good fit for unhinged matriarch Kate Hammond, who she commands with a blend of psychosis, senility and the supernatural. Michael Welch also proves capable as her son Aaron, a bewildered everyman trying to make it as a lawyer. Regrettably, everyone else is a stock character – Jeremy the stoner friend, Derek the brutish local sheriff, Lisa the vapid love interest.

Even worse than the characters are the woefully constructed scares. It’s a reheated medley of creaky floorboards, possessed household items and characters’ reflections screaming at them in the mirror – all of which occur in a rickety old house with inexplicably poor lighting… why is it so dark in there?

And of course, this litany of tropes is amplified by a generic score that does two things: assaults you like a cattle prod during its irritating jump scares or counterfeits the tortured strings of The Shining. Even more annoying is the trailer, which uses that almost dubstep-inflected crescendo of synthetic drumbeats and screaming noises that audiences are just sick and tired of.

There is a plot, something about a haunted urn and seven wishes, but it’s so trite that it doesn’t bear repeating. Ultimately, this is just another rehashed horror movie. Aside from the competence of Shaye and Welch, the only praise one can eke out goes to the gaffers and set designers, who mock up some neon-kissed diners that have a charming air of Americana about them. Otherwise, there’s barely a shred of flair or creativity.

The Final Wish is on VoD from Monday, May 25th.

Stream the finest Latin America cinema here!

Posted on by victorfraga

Latin America cinema is rich and diverse. The 33 nations have a regular output of audacious and non-mainstream films, with countries such as Brazil and Mexico releasing more than 200 films a year. Sadly, however, most of these films never reach cinemas and streaming platforms outside the continent. That’s why we have cherry-picked the films below for you, in a real explosion of colour, flare and Latin passion.

The films are listed in alphabetical order, and streaming is available in specific countries only (all of these movies, however, can be viewed in our home market, the UK). And don’t forget to click on the movie title in order to accede to our exclusive film review, where available:

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1. Alba (Ana Cristina Barragán, 2016), from Ecuador:

Alba, 11 years old, passes her days in silence. She loves little animals. She has learned to cope with her mother’s illness, helping her to use the bathroom. Alba plays silently so that her mother can rest during the day. One night Alba’s mother gets worse, and has to be taken to the hospital. With no one else to take care of her, Alba is sent to live with her father, who she hasn’t seen since she was three years old. Living with her father is almost unbearable. Embarrassment, her first kiss, visits to mother in the hospital, Edgar’s tender efforts to get close to her, and bullying at school. These are some of the experiences that pave Alba’s journey to puberty and to self-acceptance.

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2. Cassandro, the Exotico (Marie Losier, 2018), from Mexico:

After 26 years of spinning dives and flying uppercuts on the ring, Cassandro, the star of the gender-bending cross-dressing Mexican wrestlers known as the Exoticos, is far from retiring. But with dozens of broken bones and metal pins in his body, he must now reinvent himself.


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3. Everybody Leaves (Sergio Cabrera, 2015), from Colombia/Cuba:

In Cienfuegos in the 1980s, a poetic young girl tries to make sense of her parents’ volatile separation while keenly observing the reality of Cuba’s dilemmas.

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4. Good Manners (Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, 2017), from Brazil:

Outstanding Brazilian horror blends the tender with the bizarre, in a very original story about motherhood, pregnancy and reclusion from society. Try not to find out too much about this film before you watch it. You’ll be in for a very dirty surprise. For starters, the movie title is very misleading. If you are expecting a comedy about social customs, etiquette or some sort of period drama about class struggles, you are heading in the wrong direction. In reality, Good Manners is a horror movie. A very unusual, bizarre and, at the same time, extremely tender one.

Good Manners is also pictured at the top of this article.

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5. Jésus (Fernando Guzzoni, 2017), from Chile:

Disturbing Chilean drama uses a famous real-life homophobic crime as a gauge for the strained relationship between a father and a son. This is Jesus like you’ve never seen before: he’s in an amateur k-pop band, he’s arrogant, he’s insecure, he’s violent, he’s bisexual and he has a very stormy relationship with his father. And unlike the Christian Messiah, he does not save and redeem people. Quite the opposite: he murders instead. Our protagonist here is the antithesis of the citizen any society would cherish and value.

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6. Just Meet (Fernanda Romandía, 2019), from Mexico:

One of the most influential and recognized architects in the world, Tadao Ando, will guide us through an intimate journey from his studio in Japan to the construction of Casa Wabi in the Pacific coast of Mexico. While we see his magnificent work coming to be, we will be welcomed into his world and learn his way of appreciating life, the arts, and his passion for architecture.

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7. Memory Exercises (Paz Encina, 2016), from Paraguay:

Families in Paraguay are still mourning and healing from the brutal acts and murders carried out as part of the infamous Operation Condor. The Paraguayan politician Agustín Goiburú disappeared without a trace while living in exile in the Argentinian province of Entre Ríos. He was the most prominent and vocal opponent of Alfredo Stroessner, the military dictator that ruled Paraguay from 1954 to 1989. The documentarist Paz Encina found a very inventive way to recreate the Paraguayan political context through the memories of three children. These young desaparecidos (missing) reveal intimate memories of a country for the past 35 years without ever appearing on-screen.

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8. Minotaur (Nicolás Pereda, 2015), from Mexico:

Minotaur takes place in a home of books, of readers, of artists. It’s also a home of soft light, of eternal afternoons, of sleepiness, of dreams. The home is impermeable to the world. Mexico is on fire, but the characters of Minotaur sleep soundly.

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9. Seashore (Marcio Reolon, 2016), from Brazil:

A lonely beach on the southernmost coast of Brazil is the scene for two friends, on the brink of adulthood, to explore their understanding of themselves and one another. Martin (Mateus Almada) has been sent by his father to retrieve what appears to be an inheritance-related document from the family of his recently deceased and estranged grandfather. Tomaz (Mauricio Jose Barcellos) accompanies him, seemingly hoping to regain some of their former closeness. The two boys shelter themselves in a glass house, in front of a cold and stormy sea.

From the director of the acclaimed dirty movie Hard Paint (2018).

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10. Three Women (or Waking up from the Bosnian Dream) (Sergio Flores Thorija, 2017), from Mexico:

Ivana, Clara and Marina are three women from different backgrounds living at the same time in Sarajevo. Ivana dreams about moving to the USA, Clara works during the night to save money for her studies and Marina is in love with her best friend who is moving to a different country. Each one fights to achieve her own goals, but most of the time society doesn’t accept what’s not in accordance with its norms.

Soundtrack to Sixteen

Posted on by victorfraga

Once considered the voice of a generation, The Jam’s Paul Weller summarised the decadence of youth with their lyrics, hooks and effortless cool. These days, The Jam are nothing but a memory of truth, yet this film captures The Jam’s gleeful spirit with its own picture of youth. And much like the characters in a Paul Weller song, these teenagers are striving to make a difference in a world that’s indifferent to them. Take Maisy (Scarlett Marshall), a paltry adolescent longing to put her mouth over another’s; or Ben (Gino Wilson), a precocious student longing to find the childhood sweetheart who will join him during his prosperous career; or the myriad teen girls who cannot decide whether “it’s better to be a slutty nurse or a slutty angel” for Halloween.

It helps that the pain of adolescence is every bit as sturdily malleable as it was for Weller in the 1980s. Much like the power punk trio, Soundtrack To Sixteen chugs with a fiery, almost rock heavy, energy. Certainly, Maisy has the makings of a rock star, holding back the tears she wants to cry for a series of snide, contemptuous remarks. Maisy, like many teenagers, would rather smoke and drink with her friends on Halloween than spend it trick or treating with the nieghbourhood children. Her heart, torn as it is, mirrors Ben’s homework: a paper project thrown down a cubicle when the grade fails to meet his impossibly high standards.

Both Maisy and Ben serve as narrators, and the film spends a great deal of time projecting the duos internal thoughts. By coincidence, the pair bump into each other just as they fantasise about their perfect partner. It’s a classic gag, and one that’s almost Shakespearian in delivery (in relation to both William and Hillary, the movie director).

The pair, lonely as they are in their social groups, are accompanied by a series of pounding guitar tracks that echo their internal frustration. The indie soundtrack plays like a third lead, guiding and jeering Maisy and Ben through their respective character beats. The film reaches both a visual and musical crescendo in its 10th minute, as both rain drenched characters sit next to each other on an otherwise empty bus. Much more powerful than the power of love, the power of music brings purpose to an otherwise purposeless life. And much Paul Weller and The Jam, Soundtrack To Sixteen feels urbane, slick and quintessentially British!

Soundtrack to Sixteen is available on Amazon Prime from Monday, May 4th.

X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes

Posted on by victorfraga

This remains one of the key films of Roger Corman’s directorial career: his production credits outweigh his directorial output, but he did direct around 55 films. Only a couple of these were after 1971, when he started to focus on production and distribution with his now-defunct company New World Pictures. Corman’s last film as a director was 1990’s Frankenstein Unbound, which has a connection to X. You could say X takes some of Victor Frankenstein’s urges to be a God, which are inherent to Mary Shelley’s original story, and places them in a unique retelling for the burgeoning counter-culture of the 1960s.

At this time he made X, Corman was in the middle of his “Poe Cycle,” a series of six films based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe (although one of those, The Haunted Palace, also from 1963, was actually based on the novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft, but was marketed as a Poe film). The fact that Corman made a Lovecraft adaptation immediately before X is no coincidence: X is about a kind of cosmic, unknowable horror, which was Lovecraft’s trademark. Corman was also the first person to adapt Lovecraft for the screen. And it has to be said that besides the Stuart Gordon films and this year’s The Colour Out of Space (Richard Stanley), Lovecraft’s literacy legacy is ripe for more film adaptations… his entire work is also in the public domain.

At this point in his career, Ray Milland was slumming it after being a big star in the 1940s and 1950s, including the iconic Oscar-winning performance in Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945). Milland always faced rumours of being a raging alcoholic, much like his signature role, but those seem to be just rumours (or perhaps he was as much of an alcoholic of any man of his generation). Here he plays Dr. James Xavier, who is doing tests on animals using these eye drops he has developed that allows the subject to see beyond the “visible” spectrum. Very quickly, Dr. Xavier stops seeing the world in any kind of human terms, and can only see these lights and patterns that no human can or should comprehend.

This plot is undoubtedly somewhat inspired by LSD becoming a “hip” treatment for psychiatric disorders, and the beginning of its use for non-scientific recreational purposes. Corman would go on to make the film The Trip (1967), and like the good guy he is, he felt like he had to try it before he made the film. He went up to Big Sur (a mountain range in California) with some friends and by all accounts had the ideal acid experience, but when the film was made he had to put a lame anti-drug warning on the film. Corman’s former trailer editor Joe Dante, a fantastic director in his own right, has been trying to make a film about this for years, entitled… The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes (1967).

Of course, Corman uses all the gimmicks you would expect from the title, from Xavier going to some vaguely hip party where he can see through everybody’s clothes to hilarious effect, to winning big at a casino, and so on. However, Corman is way more interested in the cosmic horror that these newfound abilities induce in Dr. Xavier, and even the physical effect they have on his eyes. It’s shockingly profound for a film made for a quarter of a million dollars, which was always going to be on one half of a double bill.

The film’s one flaw is due to the technology of the time: you never quite get the sense of “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.” That’s why Corman and Dante have both said it’s kind of ripe for a remake. Tim Burton actually worked on a remake around the time of Mars Attacks! (1997) and going into the never-to-be-made Superman Lives.

The dirty elements are everywhere. There is some not-so-subtle commentary on hucksters and religious fundamentalism throughout the picture. For a portion of the film, Dr. Xavier becomes a false faith healer in a carnival attraction, where he teams up with Don Rickles (in a rare dramatic role) as a truly despicable carny known as Crane. In the film’s final sequence, a scene reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s book Wise Blood, Dr. Xavier stumbles upon a Christian evangelical service where he decides to blind himself instead of continuing to have the visionary powers he has gained.

The novel’s protagonist Haze Motes also blinds himself near the end of the book and its film adaptation. Co-screenwriter Ray Russell was also the fiction editor for Playboy, so it’s fairly likely that he had read Wise Blood. Stephen King in his book Danse Macabre talks about an ending where Xavier exclaims “I can still see,” but that was simply King’s own imagination, Corman admits that he considered it, but it was never shot, and says that it’s an even better ending.

X remains one of Corman’s most successful artistic statements. He may have been the king of the “Bs,” but Corman always tried to have something to say within them. It may not be his best film – that’s probably Corman’s only flop, The Intruder (1962), with William Shatner in a very Trump-like role – but it remains a profound film about the dangers of seeking the unknowable, and the destruction that can wreak on the human psyche. You could probably make a case for it being the first “psychedelic” film of the 1960s, although some aspects of Corman’s Poe films also seem lysergic.

It’s also a masterclass in lean storytelling: the fact that Corman is able to go through all the situations you would expect from this story and more in 79 minutes is pretty stunning, it really should be taught in film school for plotting. It also features Ray Milland’s last really great role in cinema. He would do some memorable TV work in the 1970s, but not much in the way of the silver screen.

Second Sight has compiled a beautiful release for the film, which includes a rigid slipcase along with a gorgeous double-sided copy of the original US poster and the new original artwork for the Blu-Ray. The booklet is a nice size, and includes new essays from Jon Towlson and Allan Bryce. Disc contents include new interviews with Corman and critic Kat Ellinger, plus all of the extras from the US Kino disc, including commentary tracks from Corman and Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog fame (Lucas is also a co-screenwriter on The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes), a short interview with Joe Dante, the very silly prologue made for the TV version, Mick Garris’ Trailers from Hell commentary on X, and the trailer by itself.

The Blu-ray is out on Monday, May 4th. The movie is also available for streaming on Amazon Prime.