HorrorFest 2021 wrap; Canadian Film Polling; Eternals and The French Dispatch on Monday Morning Diary (November 8)

by Sam Juliano

Jamie Uhler’s 2021 HorrorFest concludes this week with a final entry.  In a prologue to the review, sent to a small e mail chain, he voiced the hope he might be able to stage it again next year, but specified it would depend on a few factors.  Here’s hoping everything comes together.  In any case his final salvo considers a Czech film he officially anoints as the finest of all the films he reviewed.

Thanks to all who have voted (and those still planning to cast a ballot) in our Canadian Film polling.  According to Voting Tabulator Bill Kamberger the returns so far have been astounding.

The publication of Paradise Atop the Hudson is close at hand, but before I download the book and the art, I must make positively certain no errors remain on the manuscript, which is always a tricky proposition for a single set of eyes.  To this end, Bill has been incredible.  The painstaking revision though, has kept me away from Irish Jesus in Fairview, which will resume immediately after Paradise is published.

Lucille, young Sammy, Jeremy and I saw two films in theaters this past week, both at the Teaneck multiplex.  Eternals (3/5) and The French Dispatch (4/5) were reasonably entertaining films, but some issues were prevalent, especially in the case of the former film.

Jamie’s review follows:

Wolf’s Hole (V. Chytilová… 1986) sci-fi horror/psychological thriller

The tremendous career of politically minded experimental director Věra Chytilová amounts to one of cinema’s greatest bodies of work, one that, unfortunately remains mostly head-scratchingly elusive in America and much of the West. This isn’t because admirers don’t exist or that the films purport language or region difficulties that audiences wouldn’t get, rather this is largely a distribution error, one sadly too common in the arts (especially arts of this sort of persuasion). You see, she’s seen more or less as a one hit wonder, her breathtaking 1966 surrealist romp Daises being what programmers and home video companies think is more than sufficient to encompass her rich and varied career. Sure, in recent years, Daises’ (also great) follow up Fruit of Paradise (1970) has starting making in roads but still, that’s now a film more than 50 years old and for a director that worked into the 2000’s—she’s a director whose riches beyond those two films need easier availability. I say this two-fold, one, I’m a great admirer, so I’m someone who’s one of the converted and yet even I am someone who has only seen a few of her works. When you add in the fact that I’m (not to pat myself on the back) someone who possesses the knowledge and (ethical) desire to obtain films any way that I can to watch them the still heavy difficulties to track them down remains frustratingly pervasive.

I bring this all up as she happened to direct a film in my favorite genre, Horror, and I searched in vain for ages to get the darn thing. Eventually, after much searching, I located a copy, which then, the promise of its screening close, needed additional searches for working English subtitles to slap on the thing to actually watch and make sense of. Alas, it all happened, probably a year later, and still, now watched (and loved) I’m still not sure how complete the subtitles were; often I thought I was getting the gist of the story, if in minimal dialogue translation. But what a story it was; a group of 10 teenagers are sent to a skiing camp in the mountains, but in the invitation the film begins its confounding, mysterious nature. They’ve been picked seemingly at random, and the organizers reveal that there are actually 11 present and that there are strict orders of only 10, so one must go. The teenager’s basic hormonal urges are manipulated, the camp leaders stating that the one expelled must be murdered as in intruder and pry on their catty and vindictive nature to reach such an end. Food is made to become a scarce commodity and emotional pangs are made alienating and jealous so that hysteria begins running rampant across the small, isolated camp. The leader promotes solidarity while also stoking division, lying or obscuring he and his fellow camp leaders origins (this thread culminates in a fantastical story that they’re aliens from another planet). It’s all clearly a political allegory from Chytilová about the cold, icy isolation of Czechoslovakia in the few decades after the Prague Spring of 1968 and the coming split with Soviet Russia that was coming in a few years at the start of the 1990’s. Everything is bleak and intentionally difficult to understand; what is the glory of a future where autocratic rule (a rule that provided housing and basic necessities, however grim) is abandoned but what it impacted on the psyche (an ease to which you’d entertain killing your fellow man for your own good) lives strong in your base desires? Sure, the ice has both thawed and re-froze, but we see our teenagers banded together, leaving danger to only depart down a mountain into a fog that also completely entombs them. Providing no easy answers, Chytilová creates a chilling tale where Horror is a thing of the past, present and future, and frights come generationally.