Spider Forest

Song Il-Gon
2004

I never quite understood the rationale behind the whole "k-horror" phenomenon. Being birthed from a waning cycle of Japanese fright flicks it seems that the whole idea is to cash in on a trend that's already passed. This isn't a knock on the movement in general, or any particular film, it just seems counterintuitive to good business. Anyways, Song Il-Gon's psychological freakout is a ghost story, detective mystery, and time traveling riddle all at once. While it doesn't do any of these genres particularly well the film itself is technically very pleasant with a careful, measured aesthetic, good performances, and a pretentious, but achieved gravitas. The twisty paradoxical story involves a jaded documentarian who stumbles on the murder of his boss and coworker while on assignment in a rural area. He is bashed in the head by his colleagues' assailant and lands in a hospital with serious injuries. With little concern for his recovery the now murder-suspect returns to the forest in an attempt to unravel the mystery. Song's creative weaving of narrative and time, an undertaking that often comes off as a cop-out in other films, is admirably elegant here, allowing the director to get away with certain concessions that seem like obvious twists and cliched ghost-story tropes. Inevitably some of the symbols and tricks are corny, but the film remains a good advertisement for how a good director and DP can craft something worthwhile from a weak script.

The Beast Within

Phillippe Mora
1982

I was initially under the impression that this was your average indie werewolf flick but was immensely pleased to find that it's more of a were-cicada affair. When young Michael MacCleary's illness devolves into violent crime and bizarre visions it's of little surprise to the audience considering the picture's prologue involves a bizarre beast raping his mother during an ill fated pit stop. Michael's strange post-pubescent behavior has got his folks nervous about the real identity of his pater familias, and as they begin poking around the archives of the one-horse-town it's locals become more possessive of their proverbial "dark secrets." Some horror fans may be put off by the slow beginning and build-up, but I found the mystery elements of the first two acts, the hostile natives and the isolated provincial feel, a great potboiler that explodes into a rampage monstrous self-actualization. The highlight setpiece involves the town's loathsome mayor having his head ripped off at the (literal) hands of a vengeful monster.

The American Astronaut

Cory McAbee
2001

I was a little unimpressed with the musical aspects of Cory McAbee's out-there DIY space adventure, but am ultimately enthusiastic about the rough black and white cinematography (16mm I would wager), and it's minimalist creation of a science fiction universe with limited means. Like the frequent emphasis on musical numbers, some of the film's eccentricities and quirks are a little rich: a young man on an all male mining town who is revered for having seen a woman's breast feels a bit too much like a failed Guy Maddin flight of fancy. However, the strange shadowing of our hero by the murderous professor Hess (always a step behind) is more interesting, as his destructive raygun renders victims to neat little ash piles. The psychosis of this malevolent doppelganger adds a dark, ultimately madcap angle to this trek across the cosmos. It's a flawed movie for sure, but that's not unexpected for a small auteurist picture with grand vision and limited means. Yet this "littleness" is also from where it derives it's merit.

The Gore Gore Girls

Herschell Gordon Lewis
1972
Second Viewing

This was the first Herschell Gordon Lewis picture I've seen, and though I've only seen a few others since, it remains head and shoulders above the rest. A return to the picture finds it less gratuitously glorious than I remember, but still an eminently enjoyable viewing. A goofy blonde-bombshell reporter hires pimp-like private-eye extraordinaire Abraham Gentry to solve a spate of stripper killings in order to get the scoop. Gentry, a mustachioed sephardic chap with an arsenal of stinging barbs laced throughout his eloquent locution is worth the price of admission alone. The humorous interaction between a dizzy femme partner growing increasingly attracted to this weenie's dubious charms, and his complete lack of interest is an almost Russ Meyer-like cornball side-plot, much appreciated. "The Gore Gore Girls" initially amazed me with it's extreme depictions of violence, and amateurish, but no less effective, use of makeup effects. It's the director's sense of tone that really elevates this above the standard grindhouse fare: silly jokes and cheesecake sexuality combined with an almost cartoonish sense of graphic murder (one unfortunate gal has her face burned on the stove range, and then scraped off hamburger-style with a spatula). My initial viewing took place freshman year of college. I stayed behind in the dorm during a holiday sans roommates. While watching, an extremely liberal and politically active fellow film-student knocked on my door and began watching with me. After a few minutes he asked "so this is basically a movie about killing women?" I confirmed that it was (what else was I going to say?). Offended, he soon left. I thought it was pretty hilarious.

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow
2008

The best film I've seen so far in 2009, Kathryn Bigelow's hair-rasing Iraq war thriller is at once a triumphant work of art, a psychological analysis of combat, and a mainstream popcorn-muncher. After the death of their squad's IED expert, Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Eldridge are saddled with a brash replacement (Jeremy Renner), who goes about bomb defusing with a near insane disregard for military protocol and personal safety. Each life-or-death scenario begins with the company's remaining tour time marked on the screen, echoing Sanborn's vocal anxieties and determination to make it out of the desert in one piece. The tense scenarios are unsurprisingly hackle-raising by design, but the back-at-barracks pathos of tough guys scared shitless, boozing and wrestling for escapism is a nice window into the difficulty of downtime and emergence of mental wounds. Rennner's performance is near perfect with his "git 'er done" attitude and unconscious selfishness pitched against subtly conveyed inner turmoil. The recent spate of films regarding Iraq have been about as popular as the war itself, but leave it to Kathryn Bigelow to prove there's a worthwhile film in this landscape after all.

Tropical Malady

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2004

Festival darling Apitchatpong Weerasethakul weaves this opaque and intriguing arthouse flick with some partial help from a Thai folk tale. Presented in two parts the film begins with an unhurried romance between a soldier and his country bumpkin buddy. Part two finds the soldier alone in the jungle hunting/hunted by a mystical man-tiger. While it may be an entirely different animal, this film is a marked improvement from the only Weerasethakul picture I've seen previously "Mysterious Object at Noon" (2000), which I remember being admirable for it's lo-fi cinematography and experimental leanings, but generally tedious and uninteresting. "Tropical Malady" benefits from some thoughtful cinematography, with a particularly masterful emphasis on wide shots making a distant and mysterious film all the more enigmatic. Weerasethakul also manages to successfully and convincingly convert what is essentially an old-world fairy tale into the modern age without any conflict in tone. After this one I'm willing to accept, or at least understand why he's become such a big name in world cinema. I'll have to check out "Syndromes and a Century" (2006)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

Tobe Hooper
1986

The inevitable sequel to Tobe Hooper's immaculate original fares better than one might expect, but made over ten years after the original it noticeably suffers (if slightly) from mainstream 80's horror sensibility. Hooper's maniac family is winning chili cook-offs all over Texas with their patented man-beef recipe when local rock DJ "Stretch" (well played by Caroline Wiliams) accidentally becomes an aural witness to one of the their murders. Dennis Hopper joins the fray as a lawman only a hair saner than the family, intent on fighting fire-with-fire via an arsenal of freshly bought logging saws. Horror vet Bill Moseley steals the show in one of his first roles as "Chop Top," a psychopath with a steel plate on his melon who eerily combines flower-child stylings with murderous insanity a la Charles Manson. The picture's got lots of good scares and a heavy gore level, but the epic battle between Hopper's Lefty and the killer clan takes place in a disappointing and overly fake looking set. There's a brief nod to the macabre Ed Gein inspired trinkets/furniture that were so believable and horrifying in the first but this time around they have a plastic quality that betrays any authenticity - overwrought props bought from the Halloween store as opposed to the previous Martha Stewart arts and crafts from from hell. The sequel's sense of humor is unnecessarily elevated as well; whereas in the original any semblance of humor was pitch-black and used to disturb, this outing has more "wink wink" moments as well as outright gags and pratfalls from the loonies.

Island of Death

Nico Mastorakis
1975

This campy dose of Greek grindhouse trash was banned in the UK, and has used that notoriety as a selling point ever since. Mostly a slapdash collection of halfhearted shock tactics (bestiality, male and female homosexuality) genre cliches (religious obsessions, the fetishized photographing of violence), and lots of nudity this is by no means a "lost classic," but you could certainly do worse with a couple hours. Young aryan couple Christopher and Celia vacation to a sunny Greek island where they commence to brutally stamp out what they perceive as perversion through a series of elaborate murders. Christopher's got the die-hard fervor, but an increasingly distant Celia seems to be less into cleaning up the island than getting a few kicks. The most notably extreme scene comes when Christopher beds an older woman (marked for death due to her promiscuity) and urinates on her during foreplay. Initially the old barfly is shocked, but then she begins to like it.... The picture would be mostly forgettable were it not for an incongruously satisfying and effective ending: a take on sexual relations that Sam Peckinpah would dig.

Fritz the Cat

Ralph Bakshi
1972

This marriage between Ralph Bakshi, counter-culture animator supreme, and Robert Crumb, counter-culture cartoonist supreme, is an excellent satire of the waning 60's liberalism, starring animals who do drugs and fuck. The titular hipster spits period slang and slums it in the ghetto working for the all encompassing pursuit of street-cred and tail. For all of Fritz's flagrant disingenuousness, he remains a likable hero: at least he knows what he wants out of life, and his faked affectations in the pursuit of self gratification appear far less dishonest than those that truly "live" them. Bakshi's animation is choppy, but the aesthetic's right-on with a few instances of animated visual gags livening up what sounds like unscripted natural dialogue. The representation of race is particularly ostentatious with African Americans depicted exclusively as ink-black crows, and as for the notorious "X rating," after a lifetime of viewing animated anthropomorphized talking animals it is particularly hilarious and gratifying to see them rendered with genitals for a change.

Frogs

Greg McCowan
1972

This revenge-of-nature film from American International pictures is pretty standard fare, but remains memorable thanks to some solid acting and McCowan's excellent use of atmosphere to transcend lackluster character deaths and special effects. Kickass photojournalist Sam Elliot gets caught up in the Crockett family celebration while shooting an expose on the family's pollution plagued island. Old man Crockett (Ray Milland!) is a cantankerous old cripple, proud of his wealth and his shallow gin-and-tonic swilling family. The festivities take a ghastly turn as guests, family members, and hired hands are bumped off one-by-one by the island's resident flora and fauna. Ray Milland and Sam Elliot play brilliantly off each other as they flex alpha-male wills and vie for the leadership of a dwindling human herd. The frogs themselves are frankly not all that menacing, but shot repeatedly, in large numbers, and with ominous music McCowan successfully makes a monster out of a benign amphibian. While the director uses other swamp critters as primal avengers, it's amusing to note that the better scenes tend to revolve around the more harmless animals: snakes and alligators gobbling up bluebloods is a snooze compared to hissing lizards shattering jars of poisonous insecticide on the same victims.

Gaslight

George Cukor
1944

Famed director of "women's films," George Cukor, directs an excellent psychological thriller, one of the genres less represented in the lavish MGM canon. Musical ingenue Ingrid Bergman marries sweetheart Charles Boyer in a fever, but this pepper sprout quickly turns cold as the couple moves into Ingrid's murdered mother's home, and her husband becomes increasingly antagonistic and manipulative. The grim chamber drama is rounded out with a limited cast: Joseph Cotton (sans transatlantic accent), Dame May Whitty as a local busybody, and a very young Angela Lansbury as the sassy strumpet maid. The emotional abuse Boyer heaps on Bergman is genuinely discomforting, and his final comeuppance isn't nearly satisfying enough, giving the film a deeply unfeminist feel. I found the suffering inflicted upon Ingrid Bergman here to be far more disturbing than anything in Pascal Laugier's notorious "Martyrs" (2008).