Month: January 2016

By Joe Bendel. Successful horror films are like franchise restaurants—location is key. Technically, a number of creaky old courthouses and a Civil War bunker were edited together to serve as the unfinished and uninhabited faux Gilded Age apartment complex, but it still feels like a very real and creepy place. That setting generates a whole lot of dread in Eytan Rockaway’s The Abandoned (known as The Confines at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival), which opens tomorrow in select markets.

Julia Streak is a single mother with a fistful of scripts from various psychiatrists. She needs to make her new night guard gig work if she wants to continue to see her daughter. That should not be a problem, considering her partner Cooper has been there for years. He has a toxically bad attitude and also happens to require a wheelchair. Their building should have been the poshest address in the city, but the developers ran out of money. Now only a skeleton security crew works there to keep out the tramps and squatters. Streak will do the patrolling, while Cooper watches on the many closed circuit cameras. At least, that’s the idea.

Streak happened to pass one such vagrant on the way to her first day of work. Despite his aggressive behavior, she lets him in when he asks for shelter from the storm. In retrospect this will be a mistake. However, his hostile behavior pales in comparison to the dark forces that start toying with her. It seems she always had a sensitivity to spooky stuff and there is a heck of a lot of it in the sub-basement.

Production designer Akin McKenzie and the location scouts deserve a good deal of credit for Abandoned’s scariness. The vibe and atmosphere are spot on throughout. As Streak and Cooper, Louisa Krause (from Ava’s Possessions) and Jason Patric bicker and sulk quite well together. Frankly, Rockaway keeps the tension cranked up well into the late innings, rather exceeding genre norms. Unfortunately, he tacks on a wholly unnecessary big twist ending that we’ve seen before and don’t really need here. The film is effectively hair-raising without it.

To his credit, Rockaway does not overplay the surveillance motif. In fact, his execution is rather strong overall. Cinematographer Zack Galler further heightens the moody mysteriousness of a very technically accomplished horror package. If nothing else, it should convince viewers not to let strange homeless men into cavernous deserted buildings they are responsible for keeping secure. Recommended for genre fans, The Abandoned releases today (1/8) in theaters and on VOD.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on January 8th, 2016 at 7:04pm.

By Joe Bendel. Japan’s Aokigahara Forest has long been one of the world’s top suicide sites. Some estimate it ranks just below the Golden Gate and Nanjing Yangtze River Bridges as a final ending place. It is hard to say for sure, because many lost souls enter with the intention of never being found. Unfortunately, it seems Sara Price’s twin sister Jess was one of them. It has been five days since she walked in the woods. Generally, that is more than sufficient time to conclude the worst, but Price feels she is still alive through their twinster connection. She will duly go into the notorious woods after her in Jason Zada’s The Forest, which opens today nationwide.

For years, the Price sisters only had each other, but Sara has since married Rob. He is usually a stable lump of husband material, but he often loses patience with Jess’s drama. However, Price understands her sister has always had a greater affinity for the dark side and therefore makes greater allowances. After freaking out everyone at the school where Jess taught English (or teaches, if we share her optimism), Price retraces her sister’s steps to Aokigahara, the destination of their recent field trip that now looks rather ill-conceived.

Finding Jess will be difficult, even assuming she wants to be found. It’s like a forest in there. Yet, Price seems to have good fortune when an aspiring American journalist and an off-the-books guide agree to accompany her into the woods. At least Meryl Streep isn’t in there, so how bad can it get?

Real bad, of course. Michi is a decent fellow, but the local knows enough to be scared of the forest. There is no way he will spend the night out there. Aiden on the other hand, is more than game. Inevitably, Price starts to suspect the hipster expat had a hand in Jess’s disappearance. By this time, her mind has obviously been clouded by the forest’s malevolent power, but that does not mean she is wrong about Aiden.

The Forest is not dazzlingly original by any stretch, but it is cool to see Zada incorporate a lot of J-Horror influences without getting slavish in his homages. Zada taps into the Aokigahara folklore rather effectively, even if the film was shot in the Balkans rather than Japan, judging from all the Serbian names in the credits. He also profitably invests a good measure of time exploring the Price Twins’ respective psychological hang-ups.

Nobody will be working to remind Academy voters about Natalie Dormer’s performance this time next year, but she is not bad at all playing the twins. Frankly, the extent to which she glams down might be what is most impressive. Most of the time, it looks like she is uncomfortably damp and her feet are hurting her. Conversely, Taylor Kinney’s Aiden never comes across as particularly trustworthy or outdoorsy, so it is hard to understand why Price ever thought he would be good to have around. Most of the Japanese cast serve in helper roles, including Yukiyoshi Ozawa’s Michi, but Rina Takasaki nicely covers both ends of the horror movie spectrum as the mysterious lost schoolgirl, Hoshiko.

It seems foolish to belabor The Forest’s shortcomings in a week when the nasty gristle of Uwe Boll-produced zombie ugliness called Anger of the Dead also opens. Although it basically ranks alongside middling Blumhouse productions, a good deal of style went into The Forest, including Bear McCreary’s evocative score. Even casual genre fans will have seen far worse. Not classic, but presentably distracting, The Forest opens in theaters today (1/8), including the AMC Empire in New York.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on January 8th, 2016 at 7:04pm.

By Joe Bendel. You might call this Romanian style tomb-raiding. Instead of ancient crypts, Costi’s unemployed neighbor invites him to help plunder his own family history. If Adrian’s grandfather really did bury something in his backyard on the eve of the Communist nationalization, the two men hope to find and split it. Of course, that will be a big “if” in The Treasure, Corneliu Porumboiu’s wry comedy of manners and bureaucracy, which opens this Friday in New York.

Facing foreclosure on his flat, Adrian offers Costi a deal. If he can pay the eight hundred Euros necessary for a professional metal detecting service, they will share the proceeds of everything they might find. Based on his late grandfather’s cryptic words to him, Adrian is absolutely convinced there must be something there, sort of how George Bluth, Sr. would say “there’s always money in the banana stand.”

For a mild mannered government office worker like Costi, eight hundred Euros represents a considerable investment. Just taking time away from work to schedule the appointment arouses his supervisor’s suspicions, in an absurdly droll scene that could very well be a defining example of Porumboiu-ism. However, Cornel offers them an off-the-books special behind his boss’s back. For half the price, he agrees to meet them with the gear in Islaz, the site of the 1848 democratic uprising. However, they must be secretive about their scheme, because the government is entitled to claim anything deemed to have national cultural significance.

Given the discreet, severely reserved nature of Porumboiu’s style, you might not realize in-the-moment how much lunacy unfolds during The Treasure. It has the heart of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World, but the tone of Porumboiu’s “greatest hit,” Police, Adjective. However, whenever a supposed authority figure saunters into the frame, the absurdity that follows is impossible to miss. The toxicity of the Communist era also lingers over their best laid plans, like an annoying ghost.

Deceptively stone-faced, Toma Cuzin slowly but surely brings out Costa’s endearing everyman qualities. Adrian Purcarescu, Porumboiu’s filmmaker colleague, whose own metal-detecting exploits inspired the film, is uproariously neurotic as his namesake. Similarly, real life metal-detector Corneliu Cozmei is a pitch perfect Droopy Dog foil for the resentful Adrian. Their caustic bickering is wickedly droll and acutely realistic.

That is also pretty much true of Porumboiu’s film in general. It is as understated as a Stephen Wright monologue, but it builds to an uncharacteristically satisfying conclusion. This is not just Porumboiu’s most accessible film, but perhaps the most reachable and diggable film to be broadly associated with the Romanian New Wave. Highly recommended for sophisticated palettes, The Treasure opens this Friday (1/8) in New York, at the IFC Center.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted January 6th, 2015 at 9:56pm.

By Joe Bendel. Who produces better films, feminists or anti-colonialists? Supposedly, a prominent Swedish feminist filmmaker and her grungy Argentine colleague will be joining forces to co-direct a typically co-financed, festival-only kind of film, but nobody is working in concert on this shoot. Every kind of -ism and all sorts of international film production conventions are skewered in Alejo Mouguillansky & Fia-Stina Sandlund’s self-referential many times over The Gold Bug, or Victoria’s Revenge, which screens during the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema film series.

Moguillansky, playing himself, is about to start co-directing an explicitly feminist film with the Swedish Sandlund, funded with hipster European grant money. The idea is to make a bio-treatment of Swedish feminist author Victoria Benedictsson. However, unemployed actor Rafa convinces his colleagues to make a film about failed radical Leandro N. Alem instead, because he has come into possession of a map to buried treasure outside the city of Alem.

Frankly, the town has nothing to do with Alem besides being named in his honor, but that hardly matters. Caught up in his enthusiasm, Moguillansky calls Sandlund to convince her to make the eleventh hour switch (swapping one Nineteenth Century suicide for another), shamelessly playing the colonialism card. He can bamboozle the European producers, but Sandlund remains dubious. Presumably, since she is stuck at a feminist conference in Miami, she will be powerless to stop them. However, like Charlie on the phone to the Angels, the heard but never seen Sandlund will exert a powerful force from the shadows (remember the second part of the title).

Of course, the meta-meta film isn’t called The Gold Bug for no reason. Just as in Poe’s story, the map is only one clue to the treasure’s location. There is also a cryptogram to be cracked. Naturally, this will require a lot of madcap running around. Unbeknownst to Rafa and his cronies, two women on the crew, acting with Sandlund’s counsel, are conspiring to grab the treasure for themselves. There is also an incomprehensible anti-colonialist, supposedly feminist film to be made—not that they have a script to follow.

Obviously, Gold Bug follows in the tradition of chaotic movie-making films, like Day for Night and Irma Vep, but it has distantly sharp satirical edge. When Moguillansky and Sandlund were thrown together as part of some grant-writing, international financing deal in real life, the concept grew out of the absurdity of their situation. Frankly, they expose a lot of the sausage-making of multinational “prestige” filmmaking for ridicule.

Sandlund’s frosty voiceovers are absolutely hilarious and Moguillansky delivers some of the film’s best lines as the (hopefully) fictionalized version of himself. As Rafa, Rafael Spregelburd (recognizable from The Critic) deftly balances raging insecurity and manipulative game-playing, which probably comes naturally to many actors. In fact, the entire ensemble seems to have a collective talent for rapid-fire cross-talk.

Gold Bug was co-written by Mariano Llinás, who wrote and directed the utterly brilliant Extraordinary Stories (not to be confused with Extraordinary Tales or Wild Tales). We can easily see his Russian doll influence in the narrative digressions and intriguing historical flashback interludes. It might be too clever for its own good, but anyone who has seen an unwatchably pretentious film at a festival and wondered how it got produced may find their answers here. Recommended for cineastes who do not mind a little metaphorical ox-goring, The Gold Bug, or Victoria’s Revenge screens Thursday (1/7) at the Walter Reade, as part of this year’s Neighboring Scenes film series.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on January 6th, 2015 at 9:55pm.

By Joe Bendel. Somehow, elderly British upper crust ladies and gents can be either reassuring or wickedly scary, depending on the context. Perhaps they are merely products of their idyllic or macabre country manors. Regardless, the tradition of British gothic horror continues rather nicely in Simon Frith’s Eva’s Legacy and Joss Maines’ The Wager, which both screen as part of short film blocks at the 2016 Idyllwild International Festival of Cinema.

Eva’s Legacy will be a human interest story. At least that is what the reporter who has come to interview her thinks. The heirless titular Eva has announced she is bequeathing her grand family home to a children’s charity. It seems appropriate, since the estate once sheltered several children from the chaos of the London blitzes. Eva vividly remembers one little boy in particular . . .

Frith has assembled a lovely setting and classy British cast for what feels like a proof of concept short. Frankly, it seems like Legacy is just getting started when it ends (but it is far worse when a film feels like it has been over long before its credits roll). Frith controls the build-up nicely, maintaining a vibe not unlike the under-appreciated Dominic West film, The Awakening. Sue Morley is subtly mysterious as Eva and Elizabeth Twells makes an effectively contemporary gothic heroine. It would be nice to see this one expanded.

In contrast, Maines’ The Wager is more self-contained, but it is even more satisfying for genre fans. It sort of plays like the Hammer Horror version of the favorite Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, The Man from the South. After fleecing two associates in a not-so friendly game of cards, Peter, their wealthy host, offers the financially desperate younger man a fateful bargain. If he can spend a night in a reportedly haunted room of the old dark house, he will forgive all his debt and throw in all the takings from their game. Needless to say, it will be easier said than done.

The atmosphere of The Wager is wonderfully Hammer-esque and the house’s backstory is appropriately sinister (eerily evoking Abelard and Heloise). As Peter and the other old-timer Harry, Ian Hogg and Stephan Chase look they could have been wizards in the Harry Potter franchise or apprentices of Peter Cushing and Sir Christopher Lee, which is a very good thing.

Both Eva’s Legacy and The Wager are impressively produced, suitably British supernatural horror films. They represent a lot of talent contributed by their respective casts and crews, so they are easy to recommend for genre fans. The two shorts would screen well together, but they are in separate programs at this year’s IIFC, with the former screening this Wednesday (1/6) and Saturday (1/9) and the latter screening Friday (1/8) and Sunday (1/10).

Posted on January 6th, 2015 at 9:55pm.