WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?

It's clear long before Maps to the Stars reaches its conclusion that whatever it finds there is going to be unfulfilling. The film thrives far too much on a shaggy, wandering tone of mystified bitterness that flares up regularly into hilarious, but pitch black comedy; it finds interesting and unexpected echoes and overlaps between scenes, some of them adjacent, some of them separated by half the movie, but its most distinctive strengths are exactly those which come about because of its momentum-free shuffling of tones, perspectives, and plot elements, and which exist in the particular absence of a clear narrative drive. It is the sort of movie which plainly announces, by the midway point, that it's going to roll to a stop somewhere, rather than build to a pointed conclusion.

So if that's the sort of thing that sounds horrible to you, it's absolutely the case that Maps to the Stars will feel like an endless slog. It certainly does not do much to avoid triggering that reaction. But on the other hand, if one can approach the film without needing it to build and build towards a fiery conclusion, there's a whole hell of a lot going on here that's absolutely terrific. The film offers its own possible framework in the form of Paul Éluard's 1942 poem Liberté, which appears here in a new translation, and is broken up and recited in chunks, repeated in no clear order, throughout the film's running time. So let us think of it thus: as a poem. It is structured not as a story, but as series of refrains and rhymes, a collection of anecdote-like scenes that are all constructed like perfect little stanzas - all with unusually clear beginnings, middles, and ends -and which draw upon a shared pool of images, concepts, and language. Themes are woven throughout, subdued and barely noticeable in some passages, foregrounded in others with the implicit invitation to compare and contrast the way those themes are developed and how they change based on context. So maybe like a symphony, in addition to a poem.

Whatever the case, it's one of the most unusual films in director David Cronenberg's highly unusual career. It feels very much like the proper follow-up to his last film, 2012's Cosmopolis, though I couldn't honestly speak to a single element of aesthetic, performance, or story where the two films actually seem to meet. Maybe it's that both of them feel like they're using literary technique bent to the very different needs of cinema. Maps to the Stars perhaps fits more snugly into the general notion of what a Cronenberg film is: it has rampant psychotic behavior, incest both accidental and deliberate, and a fixation on the way people's bodies announce who they are to the world, without necessarily doing so with any accuracy. But little flickers of Cronenbergian madness certainly feel strangely out of place in a character-driven satiric comedy soaked through with snarky inside jokes about the state of modern Hollywood - Bruce Wagner's strange and somewhat terrific screenplay (that would be the Bruce Wagner whose erratic career includes A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, the best horror sequel of the 1980s) has the smug insider vocabulary of a particularly insipid Oscar telecast, only strung along a spine of disconcerting anti-realism that makes idle comments about Anne Hathaway, Garry Marshall, and "Harvey" feel like a bad acid trip that followed a day spent devouring back issues of Entertainment Weekly.

That combination of gossipy name-dropping, parodic broadsides about how those Hollywood fuckers live, and the steady drone of Lovecraftian madness that never quite lets the film go end up making Maps to the Stars one of the indisputably oddest pop culture satires in living memory, and to my mind, a staggeringly effective one. No film has better depicted Hollywood as a fever swamp of insecurity driving people to be their worst selves, all within a slippery structure of irrationality and subjective editing, since at least Full Frontal, and I realise that invoking that film as a comparison - and particularly a positive one - says more about me than about either movie. But they're working in similar territory, trying to explode the idea of stardom with the righteous rage of outsiders attempting to break cinematic language as a way of demonstrating the vapidity of the people who construct cinema.

I've gone a long way without even hinting at the plot, though that's at least in part because Maps to the Stars resists a plot synopsis. But here goes anyway: the film presents interrelated stories of Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an aging movie star trying to land the part her dead, (maybe) sexually abusive mother played in a movie that's going to be remade; her massage therapist and TV self-help guru Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), husband to Christina (Olivia Williams), the surly manager of their 13-year-old son Benjie (Evan Bird), a foul-mouthed narcissist who's just leaving rehab. Slashing across these lives is Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a recent transplant to Los Angeles, covered in burn scars, who lands a job as Havana's new personal assistant, and has connections to the Weisses that the film smartly doesn't try to pretend should be a shocking revelation, but simply runs with as soon as enough evidence has piled up that we can start to put things together.

The film touches on themes about how acting can serve to knock one's sense of self out of order, and not just the acting that's done by professionals in front of cameras; but the more rewarding elements are those related to the insistence of the past in interfering with the present, with people having a difficult time grasping the reality of death, with how movies and the movie industry serve as a giant machine for trying to enable people to pretend that death doesn't exist, that stars are ageless, and so on and so forth. The best way it builds its ideas is through that poetic repetition; the way that things like burning, visitations from ghosts, specific lines of dialogue and images, all keep repeating in different places. It's complex without being terribly confusing, though the effect is more impressionistic than movies tend to be.

None of which should be meant to imply that Maps to the Stars is up its own ass, though I guess it probably is. On top of everything, it's frequently hilarious - there are multiple lines of dialogue so crude, absurd, or frequently both, that they're likely to hold on as some of the funniest things said in American theaters in 2015 - and brilliantly acted: Moore, who won the Best Actress award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, is the clear stand-out, plunging fearlessly into a desperately pathetic shell of a person, raging and awful but also so helpless that even at her most hateful, we feel sorry for her. Wasikowska is miraculously enigmatic without feeling inhuman, and Cusack mixes smarmy hucksterism, outbursts of violence, and sweaty terror in perfect balance, to achieve one of the best performances of his career. But the whole cast is great, with Bird being perhaps understandably swamped by his powerhouse co-stars.

It's not a film for everybody, though I suspect it's for more people than are likely to encounter it. Cronenberg and Wagner are up to some very peculiar things here, but the film offers plenty of entry points (its comedy, its relatively obvious and straightforward symbolism, the almighty Moore in her most commending and grabby performance since... Christ, a long time, The Hours at least) that make it rather surprisingly entertaining for something so rabidly artsy and anti-commercial. At any rate, you're not going to bump into anything else this year that resembles it much at all, and for that, I can only offer praise.

9/10

Read More

THE BACK OF BEYOND

This review is dedicated to Father Chris J., whose dogged persistence in wanting me to review this movie has been incredible - and entirely justified, as I have finally learned.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is the sort of film that makes one badly want to start listing out all its apparent influences and the other movies it's copying from. Not as a way of proving that writer-director Panos Cosmatos's solitary feature to date is derivative, but the exact opposite - as a way of finding some way to get one's hands fully around the unrelentingly strange and inexplicable thing, making some first effort to crack open the Oh my God, what was this?-ness of it. You know, be able to happily declare that this bit here is reminiscent of Michael Mann's The Keep (a conscious influence Cosmatos acknowledges), that bit there of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (which he does not). Unluckily, one of the most clear-cut influences, or at least one of the best comparisons, is the work of Alejandro Jodorowsky, which is less a clarification of what, exactly, the film is going on about, and more a good way to generally indicate the specific flavor of dazzling inscrutability it favors.

Duly recapping the plot isn't much good either, since it suggests a level of concrete stability that's not really at play, but let's go for it anyway: as we see in an opening film reel, Dr. Mercurio Arboria (Scott Hylands) founded an institute in the 1960s which he named after himself, dedicated to bridging the caps between psychology and spirituality. By 1983, Arboria is now run by Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), a tetchy and dark figure in all the ways that Dr. Arboria was idealistic and warm. Nyle's chief interest is a young woman named Elena (Eva Allan), whom he keeps in a foggy state in near-isolation in a softly-lit white room. Here, he interrogates her on a routine basis, not for an apparent interest in learning anything beyond how to push her buttons, and possibly how to trigger and exploit her psychic capabilities.

That being said, the appeal of Beyond the Black Rainbow lives entirely within the ways that its scenario is reflected and explored through its visuals and Jeremy Schmidt's droning music, and not really how that scenario develops as a narrative (which is for the record, largely trite when it's not befuddling). Like Jodorowsky, or Andrei Tarkovsky in his explicit genre films, Cosmatos is playing a game here of making emotional states and philosophical concepts concrete by means of visuals. Insofar as it is a film about the mental condition of being drugged into a state of confusion and inability to express oneself - and having slept on it, I think that's the best I've got - it depicts that through a series of heavily stylised and impenetrable shots that use color and focus to convey abstract feeling. And thus, like Jodorowsky, the film sits on a line between the categories of "narrative" and "experimental" film that's hard to parse. It's not always totally successful in splitting the difference - its late lunge towards psycho killer horror is odd, to say the least - but invariably fascinating and stunningly visual. I do not say "beautiful", since part of the film's conceit is to lather everything in a grainy, broken-down look that suggests a piece of '70s psychedelia that unnervingly accurately predicted the fashion of the 1980s, and hasn't been seen since the solitary, ratty print was passed around in underground film circles.

But oh, how very striking it is in every way. The film uses enormous solid swatches of colored lighting, reds and blues mostly, which create intense and discomfiting feelings of artifice and wrongness, especially when combined with the massively interesting faces of Rogers and Allan - the former, in particular, has a wan appearance that suggests Christian Bale playing a dessicated tortoise, and it's a very appropriate fit for his inhuman excitement about turning his dull-eyed prisoner into a lab experiment. At other times, the film blasts out white and the palest of blues, which in combination with cinematographer Norm Li's fearlessly soft, shallow focus, offers the sense that the film is attempting to dissolve itself. The bold colors tend to center on Nyle, the whites on Elena, giving the whole film something of a codebook for reading itself: the one figure is otherworldly, Expressionistic terror, the other is diffuse and barely able to cling to a sense of distinct self. The contrast between these visual modes drives what I think to be the film's theme, though I concede that I'm guessing a little bit: attempting to define and explore the limitless potential and indestructibility of the human psyche by means of confining and destroying it leads only to cruelty and madness for all involved.

Not everything that Beyond the Black Rainbow does well is limited to camerawork and lighting: it has some wonderfully peculiar mise en scène, on top of it, a clear nod to the geometry of '70s sci-fi in things like the triangular prism Nyle uses to control Elena's mind. And there's a little bit of body horror in things like the reveal of certain characters' true appearances - one scene of a body disassembling itself predicting the three-years-younger Under the Skin so closely that I'm convinced that there has to be some degree of influence there (in fact, Under the Skin echoes Beyond the Black Rainbow more than a couple of times, and it's difficult for me to imagine a fan of the more popular 2013 film not responding to this one in somewhat similar terms) - or just plain normal horror in some of the dreamiest slasher-style killings I've seen in a 21st Century movie. And then there are things I can't even define, like the flashback to 1966 and a psychic breakdown - in all senses of "psychic" - that takes the form of an explosive short film of pure horror imagery cut together with balletic editing and camera, something like a tour of Hell's art gallery.

I'm tremendously excited by everything happening in this film, which is, as such things go, a success; though it's honestly hard for me to imagine how something so deliberately abstruse and driven by making short-term emotional impact over and over again for almost two hours could be a "failure" on its own terms, short of being boring. And that is certainly not the case. Still, it could not be any less idiosyncratic and willfully off-putting, and nothing this visually conceptual would ever manage to be generally well-liked outside of a tiny population of self-selecting viewers. It's anchored too deeply in genre to feel like a pure art film, but absolutely not enough of a conventional narrative to work as a genre film; it is a film for people who might call Stalker their favorite movie of all time if only it were more opaque. So, you know, a little audience, but a passionate one.

And of course, it's from Canada. Goddammit, Canada, always making the most fascinating and complicated horror and thriller movies all the time.

Read More

LEFT FURTHER BEHIND

So, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, the 2002 DTV sequel to the hardcore conservative Christian classic Left Behind. If the only thing you tell me about that film is its title, and the fact that it involves a small group of True Believers facing off against the Antichrist during the Tribulation (which is, in the particular eschatology we're worried about here, the seven-year period between the arrival of said Antichrist and the return of actual Christ, during which things are generally horrible for every living person on Earth), well, let's just say that I start to come up with some assumptions about what I'm going to see. "Tribulation Force" says, to me, rocket-bikes that fire lasers of pure holy energy, and also convert into personal mini-jets; also some big guns, like enormous, comic book shotguns that can only kill demons. Stepping back from the precipice, and recalling that the book from which this film was adapted was conceived by fundamentalist Christian zealot Tim LaHaye and written by the feckless hack Jerry B. Jenkins, I'd still at least assume that anything with "Force" in the title probably involves its protagonists doing, like, things.

Joke's on me, in that case, because Tribulation Force turns out to be 95 minutes of virtually uninterrupted idling, in which our core group of heroes talk about their plans to stop the Antichrist, but don't ever actually engage in anything that those plans entail; for the first hour or more of the movie, all that happens is that one character decides to become the Antichrist's personal pilot, while another decides to run a newspaper for him, thus getting into his inner circle and finding themselves able to keep tabs on him from the inside. But not actually fight him. Because the Tribulation is already set, I guess, and all that a True Believe and Tribulation Saint can do is to ride those seven years out, not actually take plans to lessen their impact, or whatever.

Impossibly, despite the lack of incident, the lack of characterisation, and the lack of dialogue in which two consecutive sentences share an obvious causal relationship with each other, this is still better than the book, where the same end-points of pilot and newspaper manager are reached, but instead of being the character's active plans, they sort of happen at the characters almost by accident, and the characters then spend pages and pages and pages of limp prose trying to figure out if they should take those positions or just sit around doing whatever it is they're up to when they're not praying for guidance. Which probably literally never actually happens. Yessir, Paul Lalonde & John Patus's script for Tribulation Force the movie is a 100%, objective improvement over the book, with more activity for the characters, a clearer conflict, more interaction with characters and the world of those who were left behind when God gathered up all the Truest Christians up in the Rapture, and so much less talking about things we already know, or talking about short-term possibilities whose outcome is never in doubt. And this being the case, it says terrible things about the book, given that Tribulation Force one of the worst motherfucking things I have seen - worse, yes than Left Behind, since in the two-year break, Kirk Cameron apparently figured out that he'd been making some terrible decisions as an actor, and took clear, motivated steps to correct those decisions, and so instead of being amusingly disastrous in the role of crusading born-again TV journalist "Buck" Williams, he is merely tedious and awful. Cameron's wife, Chelsea Noble, is still outrageously, deliciously terrible as the Antichrist's whore, former flight attendant Hattie Durham, but she's barely in this one.

And so, instead of a movie that comfortably wanders into "so bad it's good" territory, Tribulation Force remains simply bad, a tedious chain of non-events feeding into each other as the good guys are filmed by director Bill Corcoran in indistinguishable close-ups, looking incredibly serious as they discuss the implications of Bibilical prophecies; every now and then, we get to spend a few minutes with the Antichrist himself, Romanian businessman-turned-president-turned-UN Secretary General-turned-dictator of the entire world (and all that in the span of about 36 hours!) Nicholae Carpathia, still played by Gordon Currie with a crazy Dracula accent that is, if anything, even thicker and more relentless than it was last time, and still proves that Currie, at least, understood precisely how much respect this material deserved, and provided it. The Carpathia scenes are by far the best part of the film, a statement that is unfair only because it suggests that some other aspect of the movie might in fact be in any measurable way good: and that's certainly not the case.

(At one point, the Antichrist recites an extensive portion of the Lord's Prayer. Question for those who know more than I: shouldn't he, like, burst into flames, or something?)

I'll admit, I truly don't understand why Tribulation Force exists. Not in the broad sense, where one regrets the existence of Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 or BloodRayne. I mean, I don't know why the people who made Tribulation Force made it. Not to evangelise a worldview: the End Times theology that LaHaye so scrupulously expresses in the books has been watered down with more generic conservative Christian boilerplate. Not to continue the meager story of the first film: only about five minutes worth of actual stuff happens, clustered in two scenes: the Antichrist's goons find they can't assassinate a pair of supernatural proselytisers at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, in an action sequence that plays like bullet time done on the cheap, and cross-cut with a choir singing "Amazing Grace", to no thematic resonance of note; this turns the world's foremost rabbinical scholar into a Jew for Jesus. I suppose they might have it in their mind that it's continuing the spiritual journey of the characters, but they pretty much end up exactly where they started, interrupted by a tremendously gross little farcical complication about Buck and his new ladyfriend, Chloe Steele (Janaya Stephens), and her belief that he's a bigamist (a subplot much reduced from the book, thankfully, where it felt like a 40-page vacuum sucking all the beauty of of the world). I can't even say that the film is just pandering and smugly informing its audience that they're wonderful people for believing the right things, because the film has diluted its belief system so far down that it barely counts as anything beyond the most generic possible "up with fundamentalism" sentiments. And if there's one thing that reading the book has made clear to me, it's that Tim LaHaye recognises incredibly fine but incredibly important declinations between the right and wrong kind of fundamentalist Christianity.

So the movie is just sort of there, being ugly, being slow, being devoid of any kind of human interest at all; as in the first movie, Brad Johnson is clearly interested in fulfilling his duties as a paid actor (I have no idea if he believed in the film's messages or not, but he's not riding it out as lazily as Cameron, if that's the case), and he is mostly alone in that regard, but in trying to flesh out the mind of a man who is still rattled by a devastating worldwide event that has changed virtually nothing about anyone's behavior outside of a single scene - and we're going to be getting to that scene shortly - but is also thrilled by his newfound wisdom about how to be spiritually redeemed despite having to live in that world; while Cameron and Stephens strike about as many sparks as a matchbook at the bottom of the ocean, Johnson feels his way into the happy-sad resignation of a dad whose daughter is starting to get serious about a boy. A boy who is, lest we forget, half again as old as she is, and neither Johnson nor any other element of the film bother to engage with that supremely unsettling reality. But at least he's got something going on besides just reciting the lines and stiffening his chin to show implacable religious determination, the way the rest of the actors do.

Anyway, I have accused the film of possessing no clear message and no thoughts and no brain at all, and that's not quite true. It doesn't possess a clear message that has dick to do with LaHaye's eschatological program, and since the plot of the whole franchise is back-constructed into that program, it means that the the film's big Message Moment is stabbed into the story, rather than drawn out of it. But that moment exists, and it is actually the perfect and exact expression of somebody else's worldview: Kirk Cameron's, to be exact, as anyone who has ever visited his nauseating website (which I will not link to) can attest.

So here's what's happening: the hard-right Rapture-thumping church that was left almost totally without a population besides the insufficiently Christlike junior pastor Bruce Barnes (Clarence Gilyard, Jr.), has now become the focal point of a post-Rapture community of the lost and scared and questioning. As makes sense, really: it's one of the points where the film actually engages with the implications of its story, instead of just sleepily moving the chess pieces marked "Antichrist" and "smug fundie journalist" back and forth in an endless stalemate. And so, after the service, we move out to find groups of people struggling to make sense of what's going on. One of these people is named Chris, and he's played by David Macniven, and he's only in two scenes, but in them he gives the film's best performance outside of Johnson, and maybe even its best overall: because he plays the lines he's given as an angry, confused, scared person who is being told some really weird things and asked, in the most grotesquely smug way, what he thinks about them. None of this happens in the book - the book only has something like a dozen named characters. But the conversation that ensues is so perfectly vile and so flawlessly descriptive of the appalling worldview that went into making these movies, I am going to transcribe it in full.

Two people talking in a boring two-shot. Kirk Cameron walks up to make it a boring three-shot
CHRIS: "What is it with you people? You think everyone's bad. Well I've got something to tell you. There are lots of good people in the world. Including me."
BUCK: "According to whose standards? Yours or God's?"
C: "What?"
B: "You just said you're a good person. I mean, do you think you've kept the ten commandments?"
C: "Yeah pretty much. I'm not perfect, but I've never killed anybody."
B: "Okay, well have you ever lied?"
C: "Yeah, well who hasn't?"
B: "So what does that make you?"
C: "Human."
B: "Come on, Chris, be honest. If you've murdered someone, that makes you a murderer. So if you've lied, what does that make you?"
C: "Okay. A liar."
B: "Have you ever stolen anything?"
C: "No."
B: "Even if it's something small?"
C: "Well, yeah, once."
B: "So what does that make you?"
C: "A thief."
B: "You know, the one that really got me, was, Jesus said, 'whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.' You ever done that?"
C: "Yeah, guilty."
B: "So Chris, by your own admission, you're a lying thief, and an adulterer at heart. And that's only three of the ten commandments. So if God judges you by those standards, do you honestly think you're gonna be innocent? Or guilty?"
C: "I guess I'd be guilty."
B: "Chris, that's the point."
C: "But what am I supposed to do? Get religious?"
OTHER GUY: "No, that's what we're trying to tell you. Jesus took your punishment when he died on the cross. That... God did that so you didn't have to go to Hell, that's how much He loves you. Eternal life is a gift, you don't have to do anything religious."
B: "I can't accept that."

There's one thing I want to highlight. Well, two: the feeble, "but anyway, Christ died for your sins" coda, which feels dramatically insincere and disconnected from the rest of the completely merciless and vicious rant, and reminds me of that great George Carlin bit, where he describes the unfathomable punishments that the right-wing God doles out to the unfaithful and imperfect, ending with "…but he loves you!"

The other thing is this exchange.

B: "So what does that make you?"
C: "Human."

Human. And in Macniven's delivery, that's not played as a feeble excuse by a defeated nonbeliever, or an uncertain attempt at countering Buck's flawless logic from a wavering doubter. It's defiant, it has a sting of insult and passion, and you can hear the part of the sentence he doesn't say, which is "but I don't suppose you'd know anything about that, ya damn robot". It's the most fleshy, most feeling moment in this whole terrible, boring, antiseptic and incompetent movie.

Now, I don't know shit about shit. I'm erratically a secular humanist, when I'm not in one of my more cynical moods (spoiler alert: Left Behind puts me in a cynical mood), so hearing Kirk Cameron and his car dealer's smile tell me that by virtue of having been born and subsequently gone through the life events that are part of being a person, I'm hopelessly corrupt and venal and I should be indescribably grateful that there exists a supernatural being willing to hold his nose and overlook the countless ways in which I'm lower than dirt, well, that kind of puts me in a little bit of a blood rage. But I don't count.

Thing is, being an American, I of course know a great many Christians (using the definition of "somebody who believes in the narrative of the New Testament Gospels, and subscribes to the moral teachings found in them"; to be fair, if we use LaHaye's definition of "Christian", then in fact I do not know any at all), and many of them are people who make mistakes and forgive others for making mistakes; people who can feel real, genuine love and friendship towards people they know to have had moral lapses in their life; people whose attitude would be better described as "it's okay, we can do better next time" than "oh, you better start praying for forgiveness right now, but don't expect me to help, because I don't want to be tainted by all your sinning". People whose Jesus is the one who stood in front a crowd to bless the peacemakers, the merciful, and the meek, not the Jesus who will never, ever forget about that one time you snuck a peak at the sexy neighbor wearing hardly any clothes on a hot summer day, and will make you feel like the scummiest piece of dogshit ever crapped onto a pristine lawn for the rest of eternity because you were so miserable as to be born with a set of genitals. I don't know where that Jesus is in the Bible; I haven't come close to reading the whole of the New Testament. But I'm sure he's in there, because the people who make and consume movies like this read the Bible literally, doncha know. Anyway, it seems hard to square that with the individual who, in his last hours on Earth, said regarding the men torturing him to death, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do". But I have a 0% chance of being saved anyway, so I really shouldn't be talking like I know more than Kirk fucking Cameron and Tim fucking LaHaye.

Sorry about the snark drying up back there. Some things don't deserve the respect of taking the time and energy to make jokes about them.

Read More

I GOT IT RIGHT HERE IN MY BRAND NEW RAPTURE BAG

At the risk of seeming indelicate or bigoted: fundamentalist evangelical Christian genre movies are weird. As I am not remotely the first to point out, they represent a miserable kind of paradox about them: they palpably want to be exciting cinema like wot the heathens all get to watch with their guns and their scantily clad ladies and their car chases. Except that it's incumbent upon the terrified, moralistic worldview that these films are so anxious to espouse to specifically lack guns and bikinis and all. The result are films that ape the style of big-budget Hollywood productions, but not the elements that style was designed to showcase; and, of course, not on anything that the most innocent among us could genuinely believe to be a big budget. The result is that these films have a peculiar and at times indefinable whiff of the ersatz: watching them just feels wrong at a semiotic level, like even though everything about them is definitionally cinematic - images pass by at 24 frames-per-second (or 29.97 frames-per-second, when the budgets were really low), giving the illusion of movement, and there is sound synchronised to that movement - it still just has to be some completely different medium all together.

Of all the fundie Christian films that ever were or, perhaps, ever will be, none is more famous and celebrated in all its ersatz-ness than Left Behind, the 2000 direct-to-churches-then-to-video adaptation of the first book in the wildly popular series of novels by Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins. The Left Behind book series purports to be the blow-by-blow account of what happens when God decides that history was fun and all, but it's really time to pack up this whole "Earth" experiment and end time with the return of Jesus Christ to save some people and condemn a whole lot more people over the course of seven grueling years that are going to start like, for serious, any time now, man. At least, they present the version of the Apocalypse as it is predicted to happen by LaHaye's particular brand of pre-tribulational pre-millenial dispensationalism, and if I only needed one reason to regret the decision I made a week ago to become a Left Behind expert for the sake of this review, it would be that not only did i just type out the Jabberwocky-like chain of nonsense syllables, "pre-tribulational pre-millenial dispensationalism", I also have something like an idea of what the fuck it means.

So anyway, Left Behind. A movie whose existence makes perfect sense, actually - books as popular as that get made into movies, among the godly just as among those damn Jews in Hollywood - but whose existence is also immensely pitiable and sad. Left Behind is a stupid, stupid movie. And I mean stupid, not in reference to its plot, for in fact screenwriters Alan McElroy, Paul Lalonde, and Joe Goodman (the latter two are also producers) the best work I could imagine in training LaHaye & Jenkins's absurdly tedious, aimlessly digressive collection of phone conversations and exposition clarifying things we already knew into something that functions as a relatively concise and straightforward narrative of jut over 90 minutes in length (and I did, yes, read Left Behind as part of my week of becoming an expert. Congratulations to New Moon of the Twilight series, on no longer being my least favorite novel of all time). And I men stupid, not in reference to the toxic theology of the piece, which is anyway toned down a great deal in its rhetorical urgency from the book, though it remains fixedly anti-human, and frankly anti-Christian, as far as this atheist understands the most important elements of Christian thought. Hint: not the elements that involve running Revelations through a kaleidoscope to prove why only the people you like are going to Heaven during the Second Coming.

No, I mean stupid as in just plain nuclear-strength stupid at the level of filmmaking craft. This a movie whose basic competence can be illustrated by pointing out that there are scenes cross-cutting between events happening simultaneously, at three visually distinct times of day. Or which implies in its very opening shot that the sun sets in the East over Jerusalem. Which would be a miracle, sure, but not the one that the plot has in mind for that sequence. And it is stupid because of how badly it fumbles every single character arc, which is the literal worst thing that could happen, given that the only thing this narrative has to structure itself is the religious conversion of its three main characters, one of which appears to take place completely offscreen. And it is stupid because the villain is a charismatic Romanian politician played by Gordon Currie who talks like Count Chocula and has been given the singular name of Nicolae Carpathia, presumably because LaHaye & Jenkins's editor insisted that their first choice of "Dracula T. Antichrist" was insufficiently euphonious.

But really, it's mostly stupid because of Mr. & Mrs. Kirk Cameron. The savagely fundamentalist evangelical Right's favorite E-list celebrity who can be trotted out for state functions and not-so-low-as-the-others-budget movies as proof that people who are kind of famous belief in their punishing sectarian variant of Christianity. Though I am quite sure that Cameron is at this point more famous for the unyielding severity of his religion, and his career's function strictly as a vessel for promoting that religion, than he would be if he was just the kid from Growing Pains all growed up with a career in DTV garbage. Anyway, Cameron's presence means that his wife, Chelsea Noble, is also present, and that's a shame, because whatever Noble is up to in Left Behind, which for convenience's sake we shall call "acting", is the most magnificently unbelievable bullshit I have seen in a really goddamn long time. It's exactly like the acting you get from actresses cast solely because they will agree to spend most or all of the film topless, except, y'know, the polar opposite of that. Noble plays, sort of, a young woman of Unwell Morals, and there comes a point where extreme distaste for her character is the only thing happening anywhere near her performance, which is still a step in the right direction from the earlier parts where she's shouting lines and staring vacantly with enormous eyes in what is doubtlessly intended to be a facsimile of the hu-man emotion called "friendliness".

Noble isn't in that much of the movie, though, and she's hilarious to watch. Mr. Noble is the far, far worse problem, because his performance is only a tiny bit better, much less amusing, and he's the film's protagonist: crusading TV journalist Cameron "Buck" Williams, though he more or less stops doing any journalisming by the film's midway point. Cameron's problem is far more terrible than anything in his wife's robotic copying of people feelings: his problem is that he's enormously smug, well aware that he's the big-time star in this incredibly little pond, well aware that he's savin' souls and changin' lives with his hollow proselytising of unpleasant religious dogma, and it oozes out of everything he does onscreen. He's a smirky, insincere jackass, looking more like he's about to start giving the hard sell on some piece of shit car than anything else; the only moment in his performance that's even a tiny bit convincing is when he has a breakdown in a men's restroom and promises to let Jesus into his life. It's not just bad because it leaves us with a terrible protagonist, it takes down another actor's performance as collateral damage: Janaya Stephens, playing the much-too-young love interest for Buck, has to suffer with a scene partner who openly confesses (fuck, openly brags) that he thinks playing romantic plotlines with women not his wife is functionally the same as adultery.

I had better, at some point, shift over to the actual plot of the thing, what there is of it. Basically, the world is full of signs and portents of something important about to happen, though it is ignored by all but the most committed religious believers. After about thirty minutes of meandering character set-up introducing us to Buck, and manly airline pilot Rayford Steele (Brad Johnson), because LaHaye & Jenkins presumably figured out on their own that "Dick Hardcock" wouldn't fly with their target audience, and Steele's daughter Chloe, the aforementioned love interest. All three of these individuals share one characteristic; they're awful, vile Christ-haters, and so when the Rapture comes and magics all the True Believers into heaven, they are among the millions upon millions of people who are… wait for it… left behind. Which happens while Rayford is flying a plane on which Buck is a passenger

(Incidentally, something that's always confused me about the whole notion of these books: when the Rapture happens, all the disappeared Christians leave the highways lousy with empty cars. But my impression of the sort of people who subscribe to LaHaye-style apocalyptic thought also view themselves as a persecuted minority; surely they wouldn't actually expect that there are nearly enough Rapture-ready believers as Left Behind, in either medium, implies).

So Buck, and Rayford, and Chloe, all have to learn about the ins and outs of post-Rapture life, eagerly devouring knowledge from Bruce Barnes (Clarence Gilyard, the beneficiary of a gratifying bit of colorblind casting - the character is heavily implied to be a generic thirtysomething white guy in the book) the junior pastor at a megachurch where virtually the entire congregation was zapped into heaven. And as they learn, one by one, what's going on, they also learn that Carpathia, a philanthropist and peacemaker who has just been made UN Secretary-General from total obscurity, is almost certainly the Antichrist, because in the disgusting worldview that LaHaye espouses, desiring world peace is literally, actually against the will of Jesus. And the newly born-again heroes agree to form a force to stop Carpathia, who has just solidified his rule by killing some gangsters in the Howard Johnson conference room that's temporarily serving as the UN General Assembly. With a homemade banner that, if you see the TV out of the corner of your eye while you're running across the room, might look like the UN seal. But they don't do it in this movie. See you in the sequel, everybody!

The almost total absence of anything that actually looks like a narrative is one of Left Behind's issues, but it's not, honestly, one of the biggest. The unmitigated ticky-tacky cheapness of it is; the feeling that director Vic Sarin and crew were trying their absolute best to make a movie like the real kind, but without any sort of modicum of discipline or creativity. So not only are all the locations slugged with cards identifying the place and time (but not the date, oddly), those cards are also in a painfully generic font, and we hear that teletype tikatikatika noise as the words spell themselves out. Plot details are stated then shown then reiterated. The number of close-ups of actors who didn't have enough makeup put on to counteract the glare of set lets borders on the criminal.

It's not all a wash - Johnson is actually good at playing a man who silently hates himself and still gets caught by surprise to find out that God hates him too, while Gilyard's incredibly corny and lazy "screaming at God" scene, though hardly a triumph of the screenwriter's art, gets a boost from the actor's sweat-streaked commitment to the scene's physicality. And Currie has the basic decency to know that he can stand out and make people at least ironically happy by devoting himself to pure, visceral camp. So that's three good bits of acting. And it's manna from heaven for bad movie fans: if not the stiff, unspeakable dialogue, it's the openly desperate production design, trying to make a whole lot of locations out of some pretty anonymous, church-basementy spaces, and if it's not that, it's Smug-Ass Cameron and Soulless Android Noble, strangling the movie a little bit every time they talk or move.

The bad news, of course, is that all this bad movie fun is yoked to a movie with a deeply irritating tendency to quietly clear its throat and ask if you'd maybe like to talk about eschatology and religion, or whatever. It's not remotely as obnoxious as the book; by the standards of Cameron's filmography, it's positively muted. But even in tiny doses, the paranoid, anti-charity, anti-love, anti-everything cant of Left Behind's ideology is absolutely no fun at all, and in fact becomes quite depressing when you think about the number of people that fervently believe in it. Some things are just too grim to mock.

Read More

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: SCI-FI COMICS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the most outlandish movie yet made by the Marvel film factory, Guardians of the Galaxy, at least wins points for feeling unlike all the other comic book adaptations of recent vintage, looking back to the sci-fi adventures of the '80s. And at least one of those, I am happy to say, was also adapted from graphic literature.

In principle, I adore 1981's Heavy Metal. It represents a kind of science-fiction storytelling inordinately rare in English-language filmmaking, on the model of the anything goes kind of batshit nuts world-creating that went in in things like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories back in their early years; its multiple visual styles are all taken from the pages its namesake magazine, which nurtured some incredibly gifted talents in both comic book art and writing. And it's an animated movie from Canada, which is pretty much all it takes to get me interested.

The downside to being based on Heavy Metal, though, is that the film is, well, based on Heavy Metal: a publication that exemplifies the notion that the euphemism "adult material" almost exclusively denotes content which is chiefly of appeal to people other than adults. 12-year-old boys, to take the age group usually picked in such conversations, and I'm sure that in history there have been many 12-year-old boys of class, refinement, and unusual moral and aesthetic sensitivity. But Heavy Metal doesn't care about them. It is a title premised on the wholly sound observation that you can get a 12-year-old boy to pay any price for a glimpse of tits; even cartoon tits, like the ones here. A little gore here, a little astonishing creation of disparate worlds from across the galaxy there; but mostly it is a film dedicated so making sure that there is as much footage possible of rosy areolae surrounding lovingly drafted erect nipples on breasts the size of volleyballs. It is a film that can imagine planet-spanning conquests between toxic zombies on giant bats fighting spirit warriors from a dead race on a huge pterodactyl, but it can't quite fathom a universe where any of the women wear shirts.

I concede that calling this a "downside" ignores the fact that for Heavy Metal's target audience, it's actually closer to being exactly the point of the thing, and while it's easy to ask a heterosexual adolescent boy, "don't you want more from your art than the constant sexual objectification of physiologically impossible women?", there's no point in being distressed when he answers "no". So on we go to the other really big, heaving problem with Heavy Metal, which is that it's an anthology film: the whole shebang is directed by Gerald Potterton with a screenplay by Daniel Goldberg & Len Blum, which gives it a certain consistency of tone, but it was adapted from stories by a number of different people, and even animated by several different studios. It's just the nature of anthology films, that they are never consistent: some segments are brilliant, some work intermittently, some completely suck. That's the nature of the animal. And Heavy Metal compounds things by wrapping all of its individual stories in a completely perplexing and ineffectual frame narrative in which a glowing green orb from space called the Loc-Nar (Percy Rodriguez) melts an astronaut and torments his daughter by promising her that it is the embodiment of all evil in the universe. And before it does whatever heinous crimes to her that it has in mind, it's going to show her a bunch of its greatest hits, conveniently demonstrating a whole range of the kind of evil that it can engender, in all sorts of varied environments. It's as nonsensical as the moment in The Star Wars Holiday Special where a galaxy-wide red alert demands that we learn something about the corruption of the Rebellion by watching Bea Arthur play a singing bartender. Also, the way that the girl spends the entire frame, interstitials an all, with a single look of aghast terror plastered on her face is wildly out of proportion to the Loc-Nar's rather wandering, businesslike way of presenting its flashbacks.

The worst of the framing narrative doesn't occur until its second or third appearance, though; and happily, the frame is easily the worst individual component of the movie. The only individual story that even comes close to the same low level is "So Beautiful and So Dangerous", based on an Angus McKie story, which depicts a Pentagon secretary (Alice Playten) being abducted to a spaceship by an alien android (Roger Bumpass), at which time she strikes up a sexual affair with a robot voiced by John Candy. The ship's pilots (Harold Ramis and Eugene Levy) are bored and get high, driving the ship into the flight deck of a space station. What in the living hell this has to do with the Loc-Nar's ancient cosmic evil is anybody's guess, and the aimless, dimwitted comedy on display is hardly captivating enough to sell the short on its own merits, particularly coupled with its complete abandonment of its own plot midway through, when it shifts from "abducted women reaches sexual ecstasy with a vibrating robot" to "stoner gags with aliens".

Everything else is at least satisfactory, though the best of the segments by far, "B-17", gets that way by abandoning science fiction for horror (it's adapted from a Dan O'Bannon story, no less), and as such implicitly calls the whole idea of the project into question a bit. It's your basic "alien orb turns dead airmen into skeletal zombies in a bomber during World War II" number, and the undead are rendered with particularly loving care by the animation team on that segment. It's heavy on atmosphere and abruptly short on plot: just creating a mood and getting the hell out of there, and in that respect it's kind of cheating: most of the other segments are at least partially involved in world-building and completely removed from the simpler goals of horror, so it's harder for them to achieve as much without having to work a lot harder for it. But there are other standouts; "Harry Canyon," the first after the framing narrative is established, is probably my favorite of these, a straightforward future-noir piece that's one of the original stories Goldberg & Blum whipped up just for the movie. The crude art style with heavy lines and an exaggerated impulse to realism that defines most, but not quite all of the segments is better suited to the story here than anywhere else; and the narrative is clearer on its own terms than anything else.

The other three segments include the Richard Corben story "Den", a hyper-sexualised "weird fantasy" world story that feels influenced by the work of Lord Dunsany (or rather, one of the countless works influenced by Lord Dunsany throughout the 20th Century), and involving possibly the least appealing animation of all of them; and the Bernie Wrightson story "Captain Sternn", an odd comic bit that has no real ending, nor a beginning. The film's showpiece is the other Goldberg & Blum original, "Taarna", which takes place on a world overrun by toxic mutant barbarians, and involves a woman wearing straps of cloth across her nipples and vagina who speaks no words and swings a big sword, which she acquires in a sequence that I am absolutely certain must have influenced He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, that most beloved of all toy commercials in the guise of a TV cartoon. And indeed, the whole of the segment seems to suggest quite a lot of influence, on that series and anything else you can name where a desert planet with modular buildings is inhabited by sci-fi barbarians: the design is pretty terrific, I will happily concede that. So is the effects animation, including some flying shots that must have absolutely pushed the maximum limit that the budget of a Canadian animated feature could mange in 1981. The story is a confusing, undernourished wreck (uniquely among the segments, it feels like it could only be better with more running time to explore its world and define its rules, and to create more of a personality for its blank protagonist), but it looks nice.

Underneath all of this, we hear plenty of songs that are either heavy metal, or comfortably near to it, or don't come even close but are present anyway (has anyone, in history, tried to argue that Devo was a heavy metal group?). Mostly, the soundtrack feels like somebody wanted to justify the title of the feature, and not that anybody had a driving passion for metal that led them to make cunning and artistically inevitable marriages of music and image, though there's never anything that really feels wrong, just mostly arbitrary. That's largely how the film as a whole feels, too: a bit of inspiration but not enough to support the whole 90-minute running time, and too many of the stories end with a fizzled "so that happened" feeling, rather than the punch that comes from a really good short story collection. It's one of the more unusual corners of the early-'80s "Let's be Star Wars" cottage industry, but not also one of the most effective; and outside of animation buffs, metal historians, and the horny 12-year-old boy who lives in the heart of all of us, there's just not that much reason to bother with it.

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

The Canadian indie horror film American Mary is good enough that I wish it were better. That's a weird way of phrasing what's meant to be a statement of praise; but American Mary is a weird movie. It's the second feature by filmmaking twins Jen and Sylvia Soska, following the 2009 Dead Hooker in a Trunk, which I have not seen, though I have a sneaking suspicion I can guess what it's about; their production company is named Twisted Twins, which sounds about right. On the evidence of this sophomore effort, I'd describe them as having pretty terrific instincts, and a great sense for how to make the viewer twist and squirm though unnerving concepts carried through unfussy, brutalising images. And I'd also describe them as suffering from that common screenwriter's ailment, Can't Write a Third Act syndrome.

What they can write, though, is a hell of a character. That character being, of course, Mary: Mary Mason, to be precise, a medical student training to be a surgeon, vividly played by Katharine Isabelle as a sardonic idealist who is a little bit shocked to discover about herself that she has virtually no ethical scruples when the possibility of making money raises its head. Though even putting it that way begs the question: defining "ethical scruples" in the context of American Mary would require making assumptions that the film never asks you to make, and in some cases specifically proscribes.

Which is both the extremely refreshing and boldest part of the movie, and also the most weirdly misfiring and self-defeating. I guess I need to talk about the content of the film if I want to go any further: Mary is broke as all hell, you see, and the job where she scrambles to make enough to keep the lights on and the bill collectors angry and impatient but at arm's length winks out of existence soon into the movie. Depressed and at the end of her tether, Mary heads to look for work at the local strip club, but gets a different job offer than the one she expected: the club owner, Billy Barker (Antonio Cupo) has a badly beaten human body in the back, and he's looking to spend $5000 to have somebody with surgical training and a willingness to ask absolutely no questions whatsoever patch that body up, presumably for more beatings. This Mary does, with surprisingly little moral handwringing - some, of course, but $5000 is a titanic sum of money given her current situation.

The real fun begins when one of the strippers comes calling a little while later: this is a certain Beatress Johnson (Tristan Risk), who has invested quite a gigantic sum of money into body modification surgery to make herself look and sound as much as a physically functioning human being can to the grossly dysmorphic '30s cartoon character Betty Boop. She doesn't want Mary to help her along that path any more; she's actually look for help for a friend of hers, Ruby Realgirl (Paula Lindberg), a body modification enthusiast with less resources than Beatress herself, who wants more than anything to resemble a human Barbie doll. For the kingly sum of $10,000, all Mary has to do is remove Ruby's nipples and sew up her vagina. Reasoning that her patient is an adult capable of making decisions on her own, Mary acquiesces even more quickly than she did with the victim in the strip club's back room.

This is enough to make Mary a celebrity surgeon in the body modification underground, and American Mary spends the great majority of its running time playing around with the ramifications of that, considering the sort of weird things that such a person might be asked to do. The really remarkable thing is that the Soskas (who cameo as twins and probably lovers who ask for a few things that don't include being conjoined, which caught me off guard) don't offer up even an iota of judgment for the world they're depicting, and only a very little bit for Mary's gross violations of professional ethics in contributing to that world. So while we might be tempted to file this away under the "body horror" label, it's not really horrifying.

And this actually causes the film some issues, because it dearly wants to figure out a way to make Mary a mad scientist, drunk with her newfound power and money, and build a downfall for her. This is achieved in part by splicing in a subplot that mostly works and then ceases to as it goes on: in one of her classes, Mary is taught by a supercilious, condescending ass named Dr. Grant (David Lovgren). It's worth noting that everything he says is true, and Mary knows it; it's the vicious, sarcastic, leering way he says it that tips us off from the first scene that this guy is a huge problem. And lo and behold, he eventually invites Mary to a party with the single intention of drugging and raping her. Mary's revenge is blunt and immediate: she kidnaps Grant and makes him the canvas for her most extreme modification experiments. And this is horrifying, and the delayed reveal of just what shape Grant has come to is maybe the single most viscerally upsetting image I've seen in a horror movie in the 2010s. But that doesn't change how artificial the rape revenge subplot feels at all turns, like the Soskas were somehow aware that they hadn't built in a mechanism to demonstrate Mary's inability to distinguish right from wrong and needed to have her do something that was thus awful.

After all, the title makes it clear that this is an assault on something. Greed? The amorality of money? It's hard to say, but you don't put "American" in a title if that's not your intent, even if you're Canadian. Thankfully, it's not belabored at all; though this is in no small part because the film simply can't round the corner on Mary's downfall character arc. We have this very broad-minded depiction of a subculture; we have a revenge horror flick; we have a twist ending that makes sense logically but not dramatically and seems to exist only to depict Mary getting her comeuppance for sins that the movie didn't demonstrate as being all that sinful in the first place. And somewhere in all of that, the protagonist goes from being a charmingly innocent young woman to a callous femme fatale whose acidic wit makes her seem aloof and merciless even when she's being nice. Isabelle does her absolute damnedest to sell this, and her performance is committed enough to make it work on a scene-by-scene basis (it's a seriously great performance, not only by genre standards but by normal, everyday film standards), but it still feels like two or three scenes in the middle have to be missing, where we actually see Mary's morals start to slip.

For all the dramatic slip-ups, the film is still intensely memorable and effective, for the Soskas know how to come up with an unforgettable image. It is admittedly the case that the images are more mind-blowing for their content than because of they way they've been filmed; in fact, the film relies to an irritating degree on a certain industrial-grey lighting scheme that feels like it dates from the 1990s, and the overreliance on stock medium shots robs some moments of their impact (the reveal of Ruby's body, which actually comes quite late in the film, is a particularly unexceptional moment that feels like it shouldn't have been). But the imagination of the body modification, and the filmmakers' directness in depicting it, is intoxicatingly vivid. At the risk of gendering things, there's a distinctively feminine sensibility to how the film emphasies sexuality and body identity without being terrified of it, and for a genre as repelled by strong female sexual impulses as horror, that's quite an achievement already. The inherent conservatism of the form still shows itself in that oddly misguided finale, with its punishment of kinksters and "deviants", but the horror world could use more voices like these even so. Enough of American Mary is truly impressive that I'm pretty confident the Soskas have something outright great in them, if they can refine their talents and instincts just a bit more.

6/10

Read More

CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: HONOR DIARIES (MICAH SMITH, CANADA-UK-USA

Screens at CIFF: 10/13 & 10/15 & 10/21
World premiere: 13 October, 2013, Chicago International Film Festival

There is more than one kind of Muslim-majority country, and more than one form of Islam that could be practiced by the Muslims of a country whether they dominate its cultural life or not, so nothing applies to every situation. Even so, I am comfortable with making the blanket statement that being a woman in a Muslim-majority country has just about the highest chance of anything in the world of being completely dreadful that I can think of. At their most intensely reactionary, strict Islamic governments have perfected a system of denying women their personhood that's quite unlike anything else in the modern world, and it is a moral crime, pure and simple.

That is what I believe, and I suspect it is a version of what most of the people reading this believe, and it is certainly what the makers of the essay film Honor Diaries believe, so in theory we should all be happily sitting on the same page; but Honor Diaries is the kind of activist documentary made in such a way that you end up feeling kind of terrible for agreeing with it, even if the thing being agreed to is as close to an objective truth as "the systematic disregard for women's safety encoded into the laws of many Islamic governments is a crime against humanity". The film is only 68 minutes long, but by the second time that the soundtrack begins swelling with the Strings of Moral Approbation, it's wildly clear that those are going to be a long 68 minutes, full of much endless haranguing and self-congratulations for being the right kind of people believing the right kind of things.

The notion behind it goes a bit like this: leaders of various organisations dedicated to securing the rights of Islamic women abused and threatened in ways safeguarded by the laws and cultural norms stacked against them, thought it would be a useful thing to have a general meeting of the minds between nine leading activists in the global fight for Muslim women's rights. A documentary crew, under the direction of Micah Smith, was on hand to record the conversations had at this colloquium, and I get that pluralism and big tent and all, but I do want to point out that Micah is a boy's name, and really?

The conversation was ordered, at least in the film, around the issue of "honor violence", hence the title: acts in which a male relative is not only permitted but actively encouraged to preserve family honor against the perceived or actual sexual indiscretions of a women (and keep in mind that "revealing too much of your hairline" is a sexual indiscretion in some countries). This preservation can come in all sorts of zesty ways: disfigurement by acid, genital mutilation, imprisonment, heavy beatings, or straight-up murder. Such crimes have increased over time, and recently have begun cropping up more and more frequently in what we don't traditionally think of as "Muslim" countries, including the UK and U.S.

This much, at least, is true: as a compendium of atrocities, Honor Diaries is a terrific piece of agitprop, and watching the nine women from various backgrounds in the West and Middle East each bring their own perspective on the reasons behind this obsession with honor and the viciousness with which it is defended, offers a more multifaceted, comprehensive view of what everyday life is like for women in repressive societies than the mere knowledge that "these women sure do have it rough" can possibly stand in for. As a white American atheist male, I'm hardly in a position to do more with the participants' arguments than absorb them, but it is anyway a good film for exposing you to realities you'd happily not think about, and for making you good and mad, which is exactly what the creators are gunning for.

But sophisticated and nuanced, it sure fucking ain't; even if the filmmakers were doing absolutely everything else right, the music would be one of the most offensively sensationalising things that I can imagine happening to this material. Worse yet, that's not the only thing that's wrong: the general layout of the arguments as they are presented through editing, and especially the way that particularly heinous stories are punched up and lingered on, is the lumpiest sort of propagandising, preying on the viewer's gut reaction and not anything even vaguely intellectual. Obviously, Honor Diaries is looking to rile people up in the time-honored fashion of agitprop docs since the form was created, but making a bunch of righteously angry people is hardly the solution to the problem the film has identified, particularly since the film outwardly claims to be about the exact opposite: about discussing problems in an open forum and forming solutions. Which, I'm sorry, menacing orchestrations might be good for a lot of things, but they're there to shut down discussion, not foment it.

We have no way of knowing what happened in all the moments not depicted onscreen, but "discussing problems and forming solutions" isn't really all that much on display in the interactions between the nine participants as presented in the film. The structure of each wave of the discussion appears to go something like this: somebody identifies an issue. Somebody else tells a horrifying anecdote illustrating it. A third person starts to reiterate this and has to pull back before she starts crying. A fourth person, or maybe it's the first person again, sagely observes that it's great that they all have this chance to get these things out in the open. And of course it is, and as long as things remain they way they are, we need more of these stories being told, loudly, in public. But this is a literal chorus preaching to itself, and while I think you'd have to be a real asshole to disagree with the arguments that Honor Diaries furthers, I genuinely cannot imagine a more pandering, airless, self-congratulatory way of presenting those arguments than this.

5/10

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: BE THERE OR BE SQUARE

There's much to say about Cube, a 1997 sci-fi horror film and philosophically-laden mindfuck by director Vincenzo Natali, but before I get into any of that, a word of praise. Because this, this is how you do a low-budget movie. Only enough resources to build one cube-shaped room? Then build that cube-shaped room as best as you possibly can, make it as simple but strange-looking as you dare, and use colored gels to change the color of it. Bingo, you have an infinite-number of cube-shaped rooms, and you never need to show more than three 14-foot square panels on camera at any one moment. Of course, the problem there is coming up with a scenario that needs an infinite number of cube-shaped rooms...

What Natali and co-writers André Bijelic and Graeme Manson came up with is a sleek, simple affair, heavy on abstraction in the fashion of a Twilight Zone episode (indeed, specific Twilight Zone episodes occasionally flitted across my mind as I was watching). Not immediately. The opening scene is a fairly tepid bit of structural cliché, as a bald man whose name, if you hang around for the credits, is given as Alderson (Julian Richings), wakes up in a bright white room where every plane is covered in a 3' by 3' grid of squares full of inexplicable, vaguely circuit-looking designs, each face with a heavy metal hatch in the middle. Alderson goes through one of these hatches, into an identical room, save that it is peach-colored; as he gawks, a mesh of razor wire sweeps quickly down from the ceiling, cutting through him cleanly and turning him into a pile of, well, cubes. I call this a cliché not because of its content (on the contrary; also, I hate Resident Evil even more now that I know that it's one halfway decent moment of gory terror was a rip-off), but because nothing here ever remotely informs the rest of the plot; it's just a way to quickly establish that the cube rooms are full of deadly evil, and also to provide an early boost of queasy-making violence in a film where hardly any actual gore shows up. It's every slasher film opening scene of the '80s, and Cube is far too interesting to require such a junky gesture.

We return to the white room - or another white room? - for the film to assemble its actual cast. First up is the bloody hand of a man emerging from a red room below the white room (I said there was a hatch in every plane of the room, don't forget), and this turns out to be Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), as we first learn from his drab jumpsuit, blank except for a name on the left breast. Such jumpsuits will be a convenient way for Quentin to meet the rest of his fellow prisoners, as they stumble into his white room: middle-aged woman Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), wizened old man Rennes (Wayne Robson), thirtyish man Worth (David Hewlett), young woman Leaven (Nicole de Boer, making her second Summer of Blood appearance in a row, after headlining Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil). Eventually, after this band maneuvers through the maze, losing one person to an acid bath in the face in the process, they'll meet one more lost soul: Kazan (Andrew Miller), a mentally challenged man.

Attempting to synopsise what happens from that point on would be frivolous: what passes for plot Cube is the scene in which the five travelers attempt to determine which direction they need to go next, frequently kicking off some very, very good thriller setpieces in which there may be a trap, or there very definitely is a trap, and it has to be gotten through. Meanwhile, Leaven uses her considerable mathematical skill to attempt to puzzle out the serial numbers inside every hatch, twice concluding that she's figured out how to map the great complex of cubes that they're all tunneling through, and twice being wrong. As sleeplessness, hunger, and fear gnaw at the prisoners - a word that applies even if the film never comes closer to explicitly calling this a prison than in the cutesy-poo names of the characters - they drift inexorably from unresolved conversations about how and why and at whose hand they've ended up here, into unresolved fights about which among them is the worst, stupidest, most useless person.

And the thing is, you can't make that sound interesting - "for 90 minutes, people move through largely identical cubic rooms that want to kill them". But it is interesting, mainly, and here's where the Twilight Zone comparison is useful. See, even with the very limited information we get about the characters throughout the movie (mostly just their occupation, if that - "unspecified developmental disorder" is the entirety of what we learn about Kazan), or perhaps because it's so limited, the cast ends up filling somewhat allegorical roles: the Teacher, the Authoritarian, the Intellect, the Survivalist. And Cube, in finest Rod Serling fashion, plays out as a series of conundrums in which the audience is invited to think about how these different types, that is to say, these different worldviews and moral codes, interact with each other in a patently allegorical environment: a monstrous Building Project Run Amok, ordered by no-one to serve no purpose, a mechanical hell of faceless modernity. The audience is invited, at various times, to agree with different people: sometimes Quentin seems to be the only reasonable man in the face of wishy-washy morons, but then he turns out to be a thug and bully. Holloway alternates between laughably paranoid and totally justified almost every scene. Leaven is sometimes clever, sometimes dangerously myopic. You can take this all as allegory, or (as I prefer to do, with my general mistrust of allegory and symbolism) simply as a bunch of very different personalities butting heads in a situation where that is the absolute worst thing to do, and shake your head in dismay at human nature.

The most complex and interesting of the characters is Worth, suicidally depressed at first, totally without hope always. He frustratedly describes his life as "I work in an office building, doing office building stuff", a line that comes back in a haunting way about halfway through the film (HALFWAY THROUGH FILM SPOILER), when we learn that his job included designing the cubic outer shell housing the very complex where he now finds himself. It's where the allegory shines brightest, with the prototypical modern job in an information economy - sitting behind a desk, doing nothing that holds up to much description - an instrument of an identity-free bureaucracy that exists only to cause pointless suffering. One does not expect a low-budget genre hybrid to end up embodying, even accidentally, Hannah Arendt's idea of the banality of evil, but this is exactly what Cube ends up doing.

There are two different ways in which the film could said to fall flat: the one that doesn't interest me much is its conceptual failures. This is, again, a Twilight Zone-style study of human archetypes in a metaphorical setting, even if it has heavy sci-fi and horror and thriller trappings, and any hope that its mysteries will prove soluble (or even that it merely offers up much in the way of meat to speculate on) end up totally thwarted. Similarly, the question, "how does the Cube even work?" is beyond the filmmakers' interests at all. This is a parable, not a realist narrative, and there are always going to be those for whom that kind of thing is going to end up being too frustrating.

Cube also suffers from failures of execution, and this I will not wave away. Basically, the acting here is not very good: only the wide-eyed de Boer is acutely bad throughout, and Guadagni frequently oversells her lines like an eager community theater actor, while the men are mostly just flat and boring. Wint, I concede, is mostly good right up to the scene where he officially jumps from "rational but mean" to "outright psycho", and the actor takes that as a cue to ham it up. Allegory or not, there's no reason for the human characters to seem so bland and caricatured as these performers make them.

And allegory or not, there's some dopey writing that needn't be there: most appallingly, a third act Resurrected Killer moment that the film would be vastly improved without, it being not just a cliché whose time had long since expired in '97, but a cliché for an entirely different kind of story in the first place. What actually bothered me more, though, was the way that supposed math genius Leaven had to sweat over determining prime numbers, having not apparently learned the easy trick that any even number is divisible by 2, and any number ending in 5 is divisible by 5, so you don't actually have to spent half a minute factoring them. Strictly a nitpick, but it's always the little details that are just flat-out wrong that really break the illusion of a film's reality, even when that reality is this surreal.

On the other hand, look at all the things that the film gets right! If for nothing but the crackling tension of a scene where the party has to sneak through a blue room where even the tiniest sound fills the entire space with razor-sharp spines, Natali's handling of mood and pace would leave Cube one of the tightest horror-thrillers of the late '90s, which isn't actually a compliment when you stop and think about late '90s horror-thrillers, but I meant for it to come off like one (the one time that everything goes to hell: a montage in which the characters blast through a whole chain of rooms safely, with the images, editing, and sound design conspiring to make everything seem utterly stupid). And while that is a great scene, it is not the only great scene, maybe not even the best scene: a chase scene that has to tarry while Leaven laboriously determines which door is the safe route out, and the casually startling second death are both right up near the top as well. More generally, the director also manages to make the lengthy "can we, like, please talk about ethical philosphy?" scenes play onscreen far better than I can possibly imagine that they did on the page, though nothing at all can make the really hefty one about 35 minutes in feel like anything but an exercise in late-night dorm room bull session monologuing.

Most impressively of all, Natali and his great team of cinematographer Derek Rogers, editor John Sanders, and production designer Jasna Stefanovic did a simply killer job of presenting the endless, repetitive cube rooms in such a way that completely disguises the cheap, stagebound nature of the affair. When one slows down to consider the amount of energy and planning that had to go into setting up shots and piecing them together and focusing on just the right bits of the walls to make sure that scenes would flow right, and transition from one to the other properly, Cube can only be regarded as a titanic masterpiece of resource management. That's just about the least sexy thing you could ever praise a filmmaker for doing, but making the movie this seamless required tremendous skill and attention, and at the level of pure craftsmanship, Cube is among the most genuinely impressive low-budget films that I have ever seen.

Body Count: 6, which you will note is a healthy percentage of the 7-person cast.

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: WHERE'S YOUR GOD NOW?

This is nitpicky, but I have to get it off my chest: 1992's Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil is not about prom (which annoys me), but it does take place on prom night, and the main characters are making a specific choice not to be at prom, so it can rightly be considered a plot point. Also, one character idly mentions that the main location is his parents' summer home, but nobody needs to worry, because they're never around much in the summer. Which is, after all, roughly when prom tends to fall, maybe just a week or two before it officially begins.

And still, Deliver Us from Evil clearly, unambiguously shows that at the time the film is taking place, there is snow on the ground. Also, there's a snowstorm in one scene, and a line about getting snowed in at night. I mean, I know Canada is cold, but that's just fucking daft.

As reasons go for deciding to hate a movie with all the force of ones's rage, that's an awfully petty one, but maybe if Deliver Us from Evil wasn't such a mildewy little smear of a late slasher film, I wouldn't be driven to be petty towards it. As it is, the film is junk, and unlike the earlier Prom Night pictures, it's not even junk that has some compensating element of off-kilter weirdness or historical interest. It is, for one thing, the most purely, generically structured movie of the tetralogy: in the past, a crazy killer hacks apart some teens and is captured by the authorities, while in the present, he's accidentally freed and goes straight for his own stomping grounds, where he watches a few horny teens screw around before killing them one by one, until just the virginal girl is left to fend off his viciousness. All that separates Deliver Us from Evil from dozens of virtually identical movies is that the killer is quite a bit more coherently conceived than most of them; his stated motivations and his observable behavior actually line up pretty well, and he has a clearly defined personality that is consistent throughout the movie and is nothing at all like the taciturn man-mountains who traditionally hulked around looking for a chance to put a garden tool through a teenager's skull in the slasher film as it existed before 1996.

Also, his "theme", if you will, is particularly unusual: our killer is a religious zealot, and screenwriter Richard Beattie is careful to liven his script up with religious references both trivial but resonant (characters using "god" in dialogue more than usual), and non-trivial and deeply significant (as when the two female leads have a debate about what one should or should not mention in the confessional). It would be asking far too much of a horror film with a IV in the title that it should actually do anything important and complex with all this religiosity, but I admire the film for having more ambition than just running generic teens through a generic scenario, stopping to let them doff their clothes along the way.

Okay, so that's exactly what ends up happening, but the window dressing is particularly unique and challenging. That ought to count for something or other.

The film opens on the same prom night at Hamilton High School in 1957 that opened Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, though neither that film nor Prom Night III: The Last Kiss are otherwise mentioned in this wholly detached sequel, not even the broad idea of "the time the prom queen burned to death in the gym". Instead, we arrive to find the insatiable horndogs Lisa (Krista Bulmer) and Brad (Phil Morrison) escaping prom as quickly as possible - he came stage, she has to ditch her date - to start screwing in Brad's car. They don't get very far at all before being interrupted by menacing Gregorian chants on the soundtrack, which accompany the arrival of Father Jonas (James Carver). We've already met this deranged padre in the film's opening scene, where he feverishly prayed for guidance in ridding the world of all the sluts and whores; plainly not a fellow to forgive a bit of teenaged lust, and he uses his giant, blade-edged crucifix to kill them both with a minimum of pussyfooting around (I was all excited to talk about how Fr. Jonas "crucifucks" people up, but he doesn't use it again until virtually the end of the film, so there's really no opportunity for it). Then he blows up their car.

One can't keep one's deranged religious psychosis hidden when it's accompanied by such splashy actions, and Jonas is apprehended by church authorities and spirited away from his residence at St. Basil Seminary, to be hidden in the basement of St. George Church. And that's where we find him in the frosty summer of 1991, forgotten by all but the caretakers assigned by the higher-ups to keep him safe and sedated. We also meet here recent seminary graduate Fr. Colin (Brock Simpson, officially making it four-for-four as different characters in all the Prom Nights), who thinks that he's about to go to Khartoum for missionary work, but has been selected for a very different goal: he is to replace Fr. Jaeger (Ken McGregor), aged and ill, as the man in charge of keeping Jonas locked away from the world. He accepts this charge i n the spirit of gravity and solemnity with which it was given to him, and Jonas remains locked away for the rest of Colin's long life. The end.

No, so of course the very first thing Colin does is to dick around with the very clear rules laid out for him, and in the blink of an eye, Jonas has killed the young priest and fled to the remains of St. Basil. And thus does a movie that absolutely looks for a full half-hour like it's going to be some kind of strange-as-hell religious horror thriller that has a teenage plot crudely grafted on to facilitate a prom night connection finds its footing and turns into a paint-by-numbers slasher movie with a prom night plot crudely grafted onto its teen sex scenes. Basically, we have Mark (J.H. Wyman), who hasn't yet slept with his not-quite-ready girlfriend Meagan (Nicole de Boer), to the frustration of his pervy, voyeuristic younger brother Jonathan (Fab Filippo); their friends are Jeff (Alle Ghadban) and his very ready girlfriend Laura (Joy Tanner), who spends all her waking days leering at Meagan with a look of beatific joy the likes of which most of us will never feel, the kind of look you can only wear when you were created by a screenwriter and given the only personality trait, "adores having sex more than everything else put together". Eschewing Hamilton High's prom night, they trundle off to Mark's family summer home, an isolated manor that, a few decades ago, was a seminary. One St. Basil, to be exact.

The rest of the movie is the rest of the movie, and while the opening third of Deliver Us from Evil promises to be awful in ways that are at least unusual and unexpected, the last hour is awful in ways that are fully expected, with sex scenes choreographed to show the maximum amount of male and female butt serving as the only punctuation in a languid, aimless collection of scenes of the four teens poking around the house, waiting for the plot to arrive. It undoubtedly got lost in the snow, never expecting such freak weather in May.

In truth, by the standards of a 1992 slasher film, Deliver Us from Evil is terrifyingly functional and effective; but those are very low standards, and if we're to harbor and intellectual dignity at all, we need to set our sights a little higher. And there is no height that this film can rise to: it's crap, and not just crap, but boring crap, with only a four-person compliment of Spam in a Cabin to fill the middle section, and the two men in that equation so utterly interchangeable that by the third scene we have with these characters, we can predict every move they will ever make, so spending time with them is an imagination-starved grind. Plus, Meagan is such a powerfully obvious Final Girl - the film goes miles out of its way to establish what filthy sex-having sluts the other three are - that anything not involving her feels like outright filler.

And the generally putrid acting doesn't make these people any easier to like: only Tanner makes an impression, and I am almost positive it's a bad one, given the static, saucer-eyed, shark-toothed approach she takes to every single interaction in every single scene, as though the actress made the choice "orgasm addict", and let that be the only thing she brought to any moment. That and acidic sarcasm, though the two are harder to mix than you might suppose. Even given all this, she's the only actor I especially cared for; de Boer is thin gruel, and the boys make absolutely no impression at all.

All the film has going for it - the only thing at all - is Carver's weird, screaming performance as the crazy Jonas,and even he is let down by director Clay Borris and cinematographer Rick Wincenty, who rely on too little variation in shots (lot of close-ups, but this was direct-to-video, so it makes sense) and have a tendency to overlight everything but the very blackest scenes, which they underlight. Otherwise, it's the most routine slasher film you could possibly imagine, and while that is pretty impressive for its time frame - most '92 slashers were far too dreadful to be merely "routine" - the film's complete lack of affect makes it neither a satisfying series finale nor a watchable film in its own right. This is just useless, anonymous piffle: lazy storytelling and flat, functional filmmaking, not even interesting enough to suggest that it's for fans of the genre only. This is for nobody, and it is unworthy of the august, if inconsistent, brand name that it besmirches.

Body Count: 9? But it could be 8. The de rigueur twist ending makes it a little hard to tell for certain. Either way, I am not counting the offscreen death by natural causes of an elderly priest who we previously had seen alive.

Reviews in this series
Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)
Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987)
Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Oliver & Simpson, 1990)
Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (Borris, 1992)
Prom Night (McCormick, 2008)

Read More

SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE GIRLFRIEND FROM HELL

The horror genre was at, perhaps, its all-time low in the early 1990s, and in Canada just as in the U.S. that means it was time for direct-to-video shlock to muscle its way in. Thus we arrive at Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, which is as cheap and as horrendously acted as you'd ever want a DTV movie released in 1990 to be. Though as befit its country of origin, always anxious to do things just a little bit more oddly than the soulless Yanks with their cash-in approach to genre films, The Last Kiss is actually a damn sight weirder and more ambitious - though surely no more successful - than virtually anything else you're likely to encounter from the same year.

Before we get into that, let's start with the simple but, contextually, surprising fact that The Last Kiss, uniquely among Prom Night movies, is something like an actual sequel to one of the other films in the franchise. It doesn't in any way continue the story of Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II - and it's not remotely connected to the original 1980 Prom Night - but it makes specific reference to some of the events of that film, and the titular Mary Lou Maloney even returns, though she's now being played by one Courtney Taylor, who I can't rightly call a trade up or a trade down from Lisa Schrage, except in that she feels like a totally different character now. Given that she is a vengeance-driven poltergeist "character" is likely the wrong word to be using in the first place.

Anyway, it's an indefinite time after the Hamilton High School gym was destroyed on prom night, and the spirit of long-dead prom queen Mary Lou sent back to her hell dimension, which we get to see now in the film's opening scene, and boy, is it ever a loopy one. Basically, Hell in The Last Kiss is a place where manacled women in torn nylon stockings do aerobics for all eternity, and I didn't make up a goddamn word of that, I promise you. Mary Lou is having none of this, so she breaks her chains with a nail file and escapes to Hamilton High, where her first act is to use a spectral jukebox to electrocute janitor Jack (Terry Doyle), who was there the night in 1957 when she burned to death. I didn't make up a goddamn word of that, either.

I'm going to skip ahead a bit, and reveal that The Last Kiss is a comedy. A horror-comedy, nominally, but you know how these things go: either the balance is too much towards horror, and the jokes are all pitch-black and meanspirited, or the balance is too much towards comedy, and it basically becomes a farce with gross-out death scenes. The Last Kiss decides, very early, that it's going to be a comedy with a marginal amount of horror, and it never once looks back. This is to its benefit in at least one regard: the gore effects, which are laughably unpersuasive and overdetermined, work on at least some legitimate level when we're plainly not supposed to take any of them seriously, and so when a man is gutted and filled with banana split fixins, this is a "joke", and not just a terrible, terrible, ill-executed attempt at a cruelly comic slasher killing.

The flipside is that, if you're going to make your horror-comedy a straight-up comedy, you need to be absolutely certain that the comedy is funny. For bad horror, like most bad filmmaking, can have its own magnetism and charm; but bad comedy by definition doesn't, since you cannot laugh at bad comedy. The Last Kiss isn't, by any means, reprehensibly bad comedy, but it only has a few different ideas for jokes, and it recycles these endlessly until its final act comes along, the film essentially says "fuck it", and the surrealist absurdity starts in earnest. Which is a mode that works out a lot better the comedy does.

What happens after Mary Lou's resurrection is thus: she haunts about, looking for someone to latch onto, and find him in the form of Alex Grey (Tim Conlon). Considering that this is junk on two separate levels (insincere horror-comedy and bargain basement 1990s genre fair), it's genuinely astonishing how much effort The Last Kiss puts into building up Alex's character, positing him as torn between his best friend, the geek slacker Shane (David Stratton), and his girlfriend of precisely one year, Sarah (Cynthia Preston, going in those days as Cyndy). Neither Shane nor Sarah, it should be noted, get anything like Alex's depth of character: Shane is just a vaguely-defined "the male world that you are abandoning because of your love life", while Sarah, though given more traits, never emerges as anything but a nag, the dullest kind of stock character girlfriend, and all the more frustrating because the movie honestly expects that we're invested enough in her as a person that we'll buy it when she turns into the hero of the final sequence, or that we'll see it as tragic when she starts to lose Alex for reasons beyond her comprehension. She's just a space-filler, and not remotely up to the task of being a legitimate Other Woman to the vengeance ghost.

After Alex and Sarah have the latest of their frequent micro-fights, Alex goes to school to pick up some books, and there he meets - and sleeps with - Mary Lou's ghost, right on top of an American flag. The score, blaring forth with "The Star-Spangled Banner", takes this to be ironic in some way that the rest of the movie isn't kenning. This turns out to be the beginning of the end for Alex: he immediately starts to see and hear Mary Lou everywhere, quickly putting two and two together and coming up with "dead prom queen"; Mary Lou, for her part, is so anxious that her new fleshy boyfriend should survive and succeed that she begins to manipulate the world to improve his grades and sports career, killing anybody who stands too much in the way. Confused as to what else he can do, Alex buries the bodies and ask Mary Lou not to do it again. Rinse, repeat.

Alex, as I've said, is an unusually complex figure for a movie of this sort; Mary Lou, on the other hand, is not, and that proves fatal for any chance that The Last Kiss will work the way it wants to, since she is our designated Murderous Quipster Ghost, a veritable female Freddy Krueger without the idiosyncracies that make it vaguely tolerable when Freddy does his bloody stand-up routine. The more she spouts off lines that are plainly written as gags, but divorced from a credible personality or a performance that gives the illusion of personality, they all fall flat, and as the movie enters its damnably repetitious phase, where the same bickering between Alex and Mary Lou occurs three or four or hell, I don't know, 15 separate times, even the remotest goodwill that the movie's weirdness might have generated burns off, replaced by annoyance and boredom. In the meantime, comic business around the edges - notably an ironic intercom system straight out of M*A*S*H, or at least its community-theater equivalent - manages to also not be very funny, though at least it comes closer than Mary Lou's endless, arid bantering.

The Last Kiss falls into a chasm between being, on the one side, too frivolous and unserious about its content to be remotely compelling as a story in its own right, and being, on the other side, too labored and irritating to have the high spirit needed to justify being so damn frivolous. And it is a tedious film as a result. Oh! there is nothing as grating as wacky comedy that isn't landing - and comedy being so personal, I am not surprised that The Last Kiss enjoys as cult following. But it must be an awfully insular cult, to enjoy what directors Ron Oliver and Peter R. Simpson (the former wrote the screenplay) are doing in their non-scary, unfunny horror-comedy, in which absolutely nothing is credible but Alex and Conlon's charismatically clueless approach to playing him (imagine somebody with more heart than talent doing a Ferris Bueller impression; you are most of the way there), and that's simply not enough to keep the movie interesting or entertaining.

Until, that is, the finale: Alex and Mary Lou and Sarah in a chase scene through the film's rinky-dink iteration of Hell, no longer an aerobics class but a nightmare version of Hamilton High itself. The movie has always been distinctly off-kilter; but here, and only here, it becomes outright weird, and suddenly turns into something fascinating and mesmerising to watch. Characters we've seen die appear as sarcastic zombie versions of themselves, and the set design goes from shamefully trying to look plusher than it is to proudly turning the film's low budget into a strength, as it commits to look and feel like a haunted house put on by volunteers. And there's a flamethrower that literally just appears in the space of a cut. It's daft as hell, but at least it has the "wait, what am I looking at?" feeling that, presumably, the whole movie was meant to be playing with, and if that doesn't quite make it actually good, or actually interesting, at least it's compelling, and that's more than the rest of the movie can say. This is strange as all hell, but only the last 15 minutes are actually strange in a fun way; the rest is just tetchy zaniness and not even a little bit enjoyable, on any level.

Body Count: 7, not counting one mentioned in an offscreen joke, nor the spirits of the damned.

Reviews in this series
Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)
Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987)
Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Oliver & Simpson, 1990)
Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (Borris, 1992)
Prom Night (McCormick, 2008)

Read More