by Sam Juliano
We are looking at Election Day square in the face and a final end to months of voting madness, political banter and fake scandals, the last of which manifested itself in Vladimir Putin’s declaration today that there was absolutely no wrong doing in the matter of Hunter Biden and the Ukraine. Looks like Rudy Giuliani is himself headed for criminal scrutiny now, as well he should be. Polls continue to show Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sitting pretty but complacency is simply not allowed in this still precarious election equation. Trump pollsters like Rassmussen though continue to try and muddy the picture with false data, just today suggesting Trump is up by one point nationally which the majority of pollster shave Biden up by 8 or 9 at least. In the midst of all the election hoopla is Halloween, which falls on this coming Saturday. Trick or treating will have some restrictions in place for the first time in everyone’s lives.
Jamie Uhler’s monumental HorrorFest 2020 continues in full force with stupendous capsule reviews of five horror films that many have still not yet negotiated. This past week Jim Clark penned another sensational essay in his ongoing Ingmar Bergman series on the early-career Brink of Life, and J.D. Lafrance wrote up a splendid piece on Clive Barker’s 1995 Lord of Illusions.
Stay safe!
The Boogeyman (U. Lommel… 1980) supernatural/slasher
I’ve realized, much to my embarrassment that I’m largely ignorant of the work of German director Ulli Lommel. It’s not that he’s a household name or anything I need to feel that much grief over, but given that he often worked in Horror and was a frequent collaborator of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, perhaps my second favorite director ever—at least amongst my favorite 5 for so!—I should probably be better versed. Thus, I’ve set to correct that, initially beginning to dip my toe deeper into his career with perhaps his most famous mainstream hit, a film meant to cash in on supernatural films like Amnityville Horror and The Exorcist by capturing their mix of ultra-terrorizing modern acoustics (that’s to say, turning the Horror to hysterical pitch) via European Art film style while still nestling everything neatly in Old World hokum. It’s ironic that The Boogeyman is probably his most know feature as it’s nowhere near his best (I’ll be revisiting The Tenderness of Wolves here soon) but such is VHS availability, a series of sequels and the notoriety of landing on the British ‘Video Nasties’ list in the ‘80s. This isn’t to say the twisting tale of an old farmhouse with a dark memory of violence initially seen by a pair of siblings that could possibly be the work of a ‘boogeyman’ that lords over the place with murderous rage is bad. In fact, the plot’s through line of the spirit manifested via a reflected light energy bounced and transmitted over years from broken glass shards, pond waves and other assorted reflective surfaces is sort of cool. It helps the film get crosscut in a non-linear way; edits leaping years or decades, showing the clearest example of Lommel’s arty leanings. It’s an interesting curio for an otherwise low genre, and some of the kills are pretty grisly. I don’t doubt it got quite a few into Lommel’s career, so it can’t be all bad. Plus, you get to watch John Carradine a bit, always a reason to perk up in your chair when Horror is concerned.
Swallow (C. Mirabella-Davis… 2019) psychological thriller
Swallow, initially, looked to be the type of film I have very little patience, hell sometimes to outright contempt, for: indie cinema who professes to be high art but really exists on the thinnest of ideas with a deadening minimalism that hopes to meander long enough in strained style to cover feature length. The first reel I thought I had it dead to right—the story of the recent nuptials of Hunter and Richie Conrad, everything being merely a metaphor; Hunter is a Stepford Wife, having to play the perfect part as Richie rapidly ascends in his father’s company. Her job then, is to be his wife and nothing more, full-time duty of appearances and phony pleasantries. Swallow then, am easily understood metaphor how she just has to grin and bare it, swallow her pride, swallow her hopes and dreams and play the part in living out his. It’s not exactly original stuff, so I grew tired, but then rather than comfortably settling in happy to be one-note like so many others like it it begins adding. First, ‘swallow’ becomes literal, she’s under such anxious strain she copes by swallowing objects, growing in daring and danger from a marble to precision screwdrivers. Eventually she needs her stomach pumped, and soon the anxiety could bring the whole house of cards down. But Ritchie has his problems too—it seems the arranged marriage is make or break for him and his parents too—removing any hope of an ‘easy out’. Thus the film adds another layer by seeking some explanation for our heightened reality on display, in the end resulting in a debut film of what I must assume is a director to watch out for. Haley Bennett in the center as Hunter is everything, without her steely performance the film would be next to nothing. Recommended.
Possessor (B. Cronenberg… 2020) psychological thriller/sci-fi horror
I’ll be extra brief here, mostly because this one is brand new so there is little hope anyone reading will have seen it yet I’d assume, but also because I’d like to screen it a second time to confirm and clarify some things. You see, much of the first reel has intentionally muffled dialogue, and given my heightened inebriate state while watching (it’s a head trip of a movie so I took the necessary steps beforehand) and the pair of ears I possess (nearing 40 and a fan of blistering Noise) I’d like to rewatch with either headphones or in a quieter environment. It’s all a long setup to say that I think this could be quite a remarkable picture that I’d like to see again, but also saying that this is a gordian knot of a movie, where we could be entering and existing minds and forms in a loop resembling the drawings of the infinity symbol on all those high-school notebooks. Our first clue is a butterfly, show early and late, the symbolic image of the butterfly effect that one small, random event can move mountains elsewhere later, but if we’re in a loop, this creates an endless connecting maze of a track to follow. That our portals for existing and entering are either sexual or murderous, everything becomes life and death metaphysics of mirrored imagery (a knife stabbing can be photographed entering skin much like a penis can). I need to see it again to hear it yes, but I also just want to watch it to confirm that Brandon, son of the great David Cronenberg, has miraculous linked everything neatly in a bow (I also have a sneaking suspicious that the toll this takes on the ‘possessors’ adds even more heft) because if my suspicions are correct, it’d be a remarkable feat of directing and therefor a titanic work for Horror and film in general.
Bloodbath (aka The Sky is Falling) (S. Narizzano… 1979)
Bacurau (K. M. Filho/J. Dornelles… 2019)
The idea of cults would be an easy program to curate in Horror as there are a number of classics in the sub-genre (Wicker Man, The Devil Rides Out, The Seventh Victim [on of my absolute favorites from any genre], Midsommar, Mandy, God Told Me Too, Rosemary’s Baby, etc) to a few near classics (House of the Devil, The Void, Children of the Corn, Race With the Devil, The Invitation, and a few dozen others) so it’s interesting watching these under that context. Bloodbath, while not really successful, pitches the cult in the supreme background, a simmering, ever present low boil that all of a sudden springs into murderous action. Still, even its climax is somewhat sedate. I think the actual idea of the film—wandering, elitist expat Americans in a small town on more or less permeant vacation oblivious to the ever present, growing dangers surrounding them is a great one, as their vices do warrant retribution (especially inside the world we’re in of Trump’s 2020 America, where a political party is little more than a cult of personality). It’s as if you read A Sun Also Rises’ commentary on World War I and the late 1920’s while knowing what disasters are coming for Europe (and the world) in the 1930’s as totalitarian rises. Here, it’s subbing the optimism of the Roaring Twenties with the Sixties, and showing the washed up nature of the 1970s, which only foreshadows the even grimmer 1980’s of trickle down economics, Miner’s Strikes and the conglomeration of our entertainment industry. That’s a highly creative and potentially fruitful idea, but sadly, this film is mostly a navel-gazing, inept chore to get through. No doubt amazon offering it in a washed out VHS print hurts (the film has never seen any DVD or HD releases that I know of), but I can’t believe this was the same director that brought us Loot only 9 years before!
It’s a real shame as the idea of semi ‘lost’ Horror work of Dennis Hopper’s very own ‘lost’ period was an intriguing idea to me to say the least. I realized he is, upon reflection, one of my favorite American actors, and his decade in the wilderness (roughly spanning 1973’s Kid Blue to 1983’s return to the mainstream of Rumble Fish) one of my favorite periods for him. That it’s such a mixed bag—good to highly unique great films like The American Friend, Out of the Blue, Apocalypse Now, and the truly insane White Star sit alongside borderline unwatchable ones, is entirely the point—he removed himself from Hollywood as his idealism for the 1960’s cultural revolution turned to drugged up malaise in a New Mexico desert. He was the physical manifestation of the 1970’s corporate conservative whiplash and he couldn’t bare the strain of it, finding solace in a bottomless appetite of booze and hallucinogens. Bloodbath, then, seems autobiographical, the story of several expat American’s in a remote Spanish town otherwise populated entirely of members of a small religious sect that has recently taken over the town (Hopper isn’t the only character drawing from real life, Carroll Baker [who is actually tremendous here], nearing the end of her career plays an alcoholic, washed up formerly beautiful actress). Their arrival coincides with several mysterious deaths, so as the film endlessly meanders, the calendar striking the high holiday of Good Friday brings ominous omens.
That building dread is what compared it most to Bacarau, a film I finished last night and more or less not stopped buzzing about ever since. The story of a small village in the foothills of the Brazilian foothills, it’s a grim political allegory to the devastating affects of digital globalization on remote locales. If google maps can be coerced to wipe a town off the map, what is that but a quaint, modern visual metaphor for an oppressive regime doing it the old fashioned way: bringing a few mercenary thugs in to slowly kill the inhabitants one by one. But, in Bacarau, you have a proud people who have begun bucking the creeping authoritarianism already, and once they get hip to what’s going on the town collectively takes an old world organic hallucinogen and exact savage, bloody revenge.
If I earlier mentioned the draw of Dennis Hopper to Bloodbath, the grizzled visage of Udo Kier was a huge selling point to Bacarau. His entry is delayed–at least 45 minutes in—but once he appears in desert fatigues, the German who is “more American than Nazi” he steely watches over the film like his Dracula incarnations (best is 1974’s Blood for Dracula) of decades prior. He brings death with him, callously caring little for the living around him, and it’s Bacarau’s approximations of Horror tropes in a remarkably subtle way that make it such a brooding, highly chilling film. You could watch this just as a foreign art film, a drama with political overtones, but you’d be robbing the film of most of its dark, probing power to not get terrified to the bone with it. It’s had me fondly recalling another lost black-as-the-abyss Brazilian political allegory How Tasty Was My Little Frenchmen (1971) where the locals also slowly draw in their potential captors to eventually spring like a bear trap, entrapping them in their bloodthirsty teeth. Both are remarkable films, made sinister when we realize they’re fighting battles they can win here and there, but the war will eventually not be theirs. But, the films are documents to a single day, viva le resistance! Surely one of the great films of last year, or any year.
Early voted for Biden-Harris, natch, and sent money to Ossoff (GA), Jones (AL), Harrison (SC), and Gideon (ME). And I don’t light my joints with $50 bills, people.
To all Elizabeth Montgomery fans, donate iffin’ you can.
*Samantha Stevens (Montgomery) sings an amusing little ditty called The Iffin’ Song on an episode of Bewitched.
The late, lamented Miss Montgomery is not running for office.
Eric Trump fires off a tweet at four a.m., so does everyone in this sybaritic WH snort Adderall?
Vote like your life, your marriage, and your sanity literally depend on it, because they do.