Well, THAT Was Different

I decided it was time to try some of the more oddball items in my inbox, so stay on your toes, batters, there's some wild pitches coming your way...

FILM:


Thale - 2012
Written & Directed by Aleksander Nordaas

This low-key tale from Norway centers around Leo and Elvis, a couple guys who seem ill-suited to bio-hazard clean-up work, given how much they (but mainly Elvis) vomit throughout the film, but there you have it.  They're doing clean up in a house deep in the forest; evidently the site of some grisly murder, given the amount of blood and gore they're mopping up.  In the process, they discover a hidden basement full of cobwebs, old lab equipment and corroded canned foods.  There's also a tub filled with something like milk.  A young woman emerges from the tub capturing their attention (but mainly Elvis).  She doesn't speak, and it's impossible to tell how long she must have been in there, given the lab's state of disrepair.  Elvis in particular is compelled to care for her, possibly in connection to his feelings about recently discovering that he has a child, but possibly for a more direct and mysterious reason.  The mystery becomes who is she, what is she, and why is she in this strange environment?  When Leo and Elvis' superiors send in an armed response team, the answers become deadly.

It's a very slow-paced movie, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but one is bound to notice it.  Given that it's rooted in Norwegian folklore, I might have appreciated the developments more if I had been familiar with the legends, but I'm going to leave that to you to decide whether or not that's something you'd want to know.  The story is, frankly, on the spare side, which again, isn't inherently bad, but having been introduced to this legend and character, I would have enjoyed seeing more done with it.  The actress who plays Thale (TAH-leh), the young woman is convincing as a strange and otherworldly beauty.  I would definitely have preferred for her to have more to do, as opposed to the two depressed Norwegian dudes.  It wasn't a mind blower, but it was far from a bad movie, and made for a very welcome change of pace.

Lo - 2009
Written & Directed by Travis Betz

Now this I loved. 

Justin, a heartbroken young man summons a demon to do his bidding, and his bidding is the return of his lost love, April.  The demon, Lo, is antagonistic if not outright threatening and questions Justin's motivations, putting off the job at hand with traded tales about Justin and April's past, and questionable suggestions that Justin may not have known his beloved as well as he thought he did.

The film was clearly made on a shoestring budget, but it is at all moments entertaining and enthralling.  Set almost entirely in the nether-space between Justin's apartment and Hell (in other words, the dark), Lo could easily be produced as a stage play, and indeed frames its flashback sequences as though they were.

It's not strictly horror, in that it's not really scary, but by that measure you could discount 80% of the genre.  It's an effective hybrid with moments of tension, humor, romance and even a couple musical numbers.  It's really remarkable what they were able to accomplish in terms of story and emotion with such a minimalist approach.  Joyless viewers need not apply.

WNUF Halloween Special - 2013
Written & Directed by Chris LaMartina & co.

If Call Girl of Cthulhu was Chris LaMartina's homage to the 80s, the WNUF Halloween Special is his attempt at an identity theft.  The entire production is made to look like a bootleg VHS copy of a news broadcast and special from Halloween, 1987, including commercials.

First there's a hokey local news broadcast covering the requisite Halloween stories -- the dentist with warnings about tooth decay, the fundamentalist Christians who claim it's all devil worship, etc. -- all hosted by the bland and corny anchors.  Their broadcast feeds right into the on-location special with a reporter at the house which was once the scene of a horrible double murder and has been notoriously rumored to be haunted ever since.  Crusading reporter Frank Stewart means to go inside with a husband and wife (& cat) team of paranormal investigators to hold a seance and determine once and for all whether the house is truly haunted.  Frank also has a Catholic priest in tow, just in case an exorcism should become necessary.

This is what you call "committing to a bit."  The top priority is making the whole thing look like an actual UHF-band broadcast from the 80s.  As such, much of the humor is derived from "Ha, the 80s, what were they thinking?"  The commercials are all terribly produced (on purpose) and several are for equally terribly produced programming on Channel 28.  There are a few places where the video fast forwards past boring parts, although I could have done with a lot more of that.  The joke, frankly, gets stretched pretty thin long before anything really starts to happen.  The other source of humor is Frank Stewart getting fed up and frustrated when things don't work the way they're supposed to, like opening the phone lines for questions during the seance and getting the totally predictable "MAIDEN RULES!" calls.

While I generally felt that the whole thing got stretched too thin, I did, ultimately, feel modestly rewarded with an emergent narrative from seemingly unrelated elements throughout the broadcast.

If Blood and Love Taste So Sweet

FILM:


Excision - 2012
Written & Directed by Richard Bates Jr.

Holy crap!

Excuse me, before I get going on the other aspects of the movie, I need to recognize one thing in particular.  Excision is a masterpiece of casting achievement.  Just brilliant.  We have former teenage porn star Traci Lords playing the prudish and religious controlling mother.  Ray Wise, perhaps best known as Laura Palmer's father (and killer) from Twin Peaks plays the high school principal disinterested in hearing about psychological excuses for behavior.  Malcolm McDowell, who came to prominence as the extreme teenage delinquent in A Clockwork Orange plays a teacher who doesn't suffer troublemakers.  The one that will really grab your attention is John Waters of... being John Waters ...as a pastor, but I think the one I love the most is Marlee Matlin as a school counselor... who can't hear.  Yeah, that's how dark the humor is here.  Now where was I?  Oh yes...

Holy crap!  What did I just see!?

Excision is a restrained examination of one girl's journey from "disturbed" to "Disturbed."  I'm sure it won't fulfill all viewers' expectations of what constitutes a "horror movie," but it's undeniably horrific, while at the same time imbued with a sense of humor so black and morbid that The Joker would stand up and applaud at the end.

Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) is not your normal high school student.  That much is evident from the very first scene, in which she dreams of two selves; one erupting in blood and agony, and the other writhing in erotic delight over the sight.  Clearly not right.  She's an acne-and-cold-sore-pocked outcast at school, where her socially inept behavior and emotional detachment mark her as strange; as other.  It's natural that we empathize with her, although she continually reminds us that her reasoning is not well-adjusted.

At home, she fights with mother, more-or-less correctly assessing her as a bitch.  Mom has two daughters, and the younger, prettier, disease stricken one is "her heart," while Pauline is constantly reminded of what a frustration and disappointment she is.  Pauline is intelligent and full of wit, but a disinterested student.  She wants, more than anything, to become a surgeon, and her dreams of blood feature her in increasingly glamorous roles, where she has control and finds a satisfaction crosses into the sexual.

The early incident that establishes her character is her decision to lose her virginity to one of the popular boys -- or more specifically, the boyfriend of the popular girl whom Pauline despises.  She matter-of-factly tells him what she wants and gives him number.  Later, she inappropriately tells her sister of her intentions, and that she wants to be on her period when it happens.  Boys being stupid and incapable of turning down free nookie, he accepts.  Pauline directs the event with clinical detachment.  She has timed it correctly and experiences visions of blood and passion far more glamorous than the reality.  When she directs him downtown, he discovers just what's up and is appalled.  Dropping her off at home, he can't get away fast enough.  Later, rather than feeling shame, Pauline uses the event to humiliate both the popular boy and his popular girlfriend

Pauline's conflicts with others intensify, and most of the time, these appear, well, not necessarily reasonable, but understandable as teen behavior and film behavior.  She fights with her mother about church, school, the cotillion into which she's been forced, and really pretty much everything.  This doesn't seem SO strange to us until it is, perhaps, too late.  When the popular girls vandalize her house, Pauline attacks her nemesis, laying her out and bloodying her nose.  We want to take the side of the underdog, so we're much less offended by this counterstrike than her parents and the principal who expels her.  Maybe we shouldn't be so hasty.

After having been stuck with the-price-is-right counseling from her pastor for the last few years, Pauline pleads to see a legitimate psychiatrist, having diagnosed herself with borderline personality disorder and her parents finally relent. ...but will it be soon enough to avert disaster?

Excision is one of the more chilling and, I feel, credible cinematic examinations of the loss of sanity that I've ever seen.  It happens slowly, and it doesn't seem particularly crazy until it crosses the line in an irretrievable way.  Pauline is incredibly insightful and strikes as as the only one who really gets it in her world, and while the delusional dreams are startling, their influence on her reality is filtered through restraint.  Even when she "loses it," she does a very wrong thing for a very right reason, but that doesn't make it a sanely arrive-upon conclusion.

It's a slow burn that suddenly slips into a living nightmare, only it's less sudden than it seems.  Like a frog in boiling water, the doom is ever present but easily overlooked.  It seems purposeful that so many of the actors were cast against type.  More than merely being hilarious stunt castings, they reflect the conflict and inherent madness of the world that both ushers Pauline into her own world of madness, and fails to recognize it for what it is.  The message here is not to treat the mentally ill as weirdos, though that's how they might present to us, or pariahs, but to get the real professional help.

I expected something in the ballpark of American Mary and/or May from Excision, but what I found was something entirely itself, and in many ways much more honest.  A true nightmare.

Papa Was a Howlin' Stone

FILM:


Werewolf: The Beast Among Us - 2012
See link for writing team
Directed by Louis Morneau

I hadn't heard of this one at all until the other day when I wrote about In the Company of Wolves and found that Stephen Rea had three werewolf movies to his credit.  Having seen the other two (Underworld: Awakening being the other) I decided to give it a shot.  The prospect of paranoia within the community sounded vaguely intriguing.

It wasn't that intriguing.

The Beast Among Us is an action movie first, and a fairly generic one at that.  The horror is primarily relegated to a bit of gratuitous gore.  It packs very little punch because it doesn't give us anything to care about.

Somewhere in the poorly defined Europe of the poorly defined past, a plague of poorly defined werewolves has stricken the countryside.  A team of werewolf hunters rides into town to deal with the menace.  But this isn't your run-of-the-mill werewolf (within this movie's mill-house, anyway).  This one turns on the waxing and waning nights of the full moon as well; rather than simply the fully full moon.  Because gravity, evidently -- and just you hush your mouth about the moon having the same gravity every night no matter which direction it's reflecting.  All you need to worry about is that these kinds of werewolves are deadlier, and potentially able to transform at will, possibly because they were born, not made.  The werewolf lore gets pretty cluttered except for in the places where it's not explained at all.

There's plenty of mistrust to go around, but very little of it plays into the kind of tense cat-and-mouse story mechanics that you wish it would.  In fact, there just really aren't many reasons to care about anything that happens because the characters are generally dull and unpleasant, and indeed, there turn out to be more bad guys than good guys.  The twists are supposed to be engaging, but they're so telegraphed by secretive behavior that they never really matter.

Oh, the film tries to define the characters, but does so through making them types.  This most strongly stands out with the hunters who are cartoonishly defined the way that "colorful" teams of mercenaries are in b-movies; through their appearance and/or their weapons.  Team leader is a Cowboy.  His lieutenant is the Casanova.  There's the Battle-Scarred Brute with the eye patch and the 2-legged horse, and his yeah-yeah-you-tell-'em-boss Toady.  And there's the Sassy Chick with the Big Guns (or an over-sized crossbow anyway).  Among the townspeople, the overworked doctor is the Stern Master to the Earnest Scholar, son of the Seen-It-All Barmaid and boyfriend of the Pretty Rich Girl.

The werewolf effects show about the same level of imagination, delivering mediocre CGI so uninspired and unexamined that the creature's downy hair makes it look cuddly.  The transformation constitutes little more than a morphing effect, which simply isn't interesting in the slightest.  The beast is most menacing when you don't see it at all.  Like the film as a whole, there's potential there, but the execution is tepid.

It's not even inspiring enough to really bag on it.  Six months from now, I'll probably stumble across it again on IMDb and think it sounds interesting, only to remember that I've seen it and it wasn't.

Wolf Children - 2012
Written by Mamoru Hosada & Satoko Okudera
Directed by Mamoru Hosada

For as little as The Best Among Us gave me to care about as a viewer, the anime film Wolf Children did the opposite.  This movie is ALL ABOUT caring, and its pacing and characterizations draw in the viewer in subtle and powerful ways.  Not a horror movie in the slightest, it is nevertheless about wolves who are people too, or vice versa.  The subject of full moons and silver bullets is addressed early on, only so it can be dismissed as mythology and the things that really matter can be explored.

Wolf Children is roughly three stories in one, and action is central to none of them.  It sets a rather leisurely pace, relying on its establishment of humanity within its characters to compel interest in what might happen next, or simply, what we might learn next.

Timid yet joyously spirited college student Hana notices a new student in class one day, and develops an instant infatuation with him.  As it turns out, he's not officially a student at all, but a humble yet decidedly dreamy mover.  Soon, they're a couple, due largely to her efforts.  His initially aloof behavior is rooted in a desire to protect himself, for you see, he is a wolf.  Rather than scaring Hana away, she accepts him as he is.  He is, as far as he knows, the last wolf left in Japan.  They're not an aggressive species, but often forced into isolation simply out of societal fears. Within two years, they've had two babies with wolfy dispositions of their own.  With all those mouths to feed, he goes out hunting one night... and doesn't return.  Between school, work and two babies who are sometimes wolves, Hana can't keep up, and decides a fresh start out in the country is called for.

The next part of the film is primarily concerned with the the struggles of single-motherhood, especially when your children are apt to turn into canines in the blink of an eye.  Hana has to learn how to farm to keep her family fed, and the help she's given is delivered in the most begrudging way possible by a surly old neighbor.  Once harvest comes and she hasn't given up, she's finally accepted into the community.  Her daughter, Yuki is a rambunctious pup, and her son Ame is a sickly little thing.  They both require their own kind of attention, on top of the needs of farm life.

The last major arc in the story concerns the children's lives as students.  Hana has learned to manage things at home a little better and takes a part time job with a conservationist group.  Yuki starts school after convincing her mother that she can control her changes, chanting "I'm going to be a little girl all the way home" to calm herself.  She thrives on the social contact.  Ame, when it's his turn for school, doesn't, and finds himself troubled by the role of wolves in the stories that they read.  In time, their relationships outside the home; Yuki with a sensitive new boy in class and Ame with his "sensei," the fox that roams the mountain behind their home, will open up new and very different paths for them and their future lives.

Wolf Children is similar in tone to some of Studio Ghibli's quieter films like Whisper of the Heart or Only Yesterday.  There were a number of moments that specifically evoked Ghibli movie for me.  It takes a very slice-of-life approach to its fantasy-based premise, and ultimately uses that premise as a vehicle for telling an allegorical tale about aspects of the human condition; single parenthood and the life choices of children coming into their own chief among them.  I don't know how intentional it was, 'cause Japan, but there would seem to be a pretty powerful story here about the struggles of raising mixed-race children in a world that hasn't come to terms with the concept as much as it thinks it has.

If I had to complain (and it's the internet, so, you know, there's a law that I must), it would be that the wolfish side of the kids and their father is pretty mild.  It's not until Ame's story arc emerges that being wolf really takes on much gravity of its own.  I also have some reservations about the wolves keeping their human hair, and this strays uncomfortably close to the world of "furries."  I feel uneasy even typing the word.  Google with caution if you're curious about the movie.  That territory is arguably breached when Hana and her wolfy young swain "mate" while he's in transitional form.  I respect that it's symbolic of her acceptance and his ability to be "naked" to her in a uniquely vulnerable way, but damn you internet for tainting this moment!  Okay, obligation fulfilled; petty complaints registered, much of it not the film's fault.

Wolf Children is simply beautiful in every possible way.  The art is exceptional.  The music affecting.  It's not that it's slow-paced as much as it leaves the spaces in between the beats, and it's in those spaces that the characters have room to grow.  It's the growth of those characters that engages us and reveals the tenderness of their humanity, which is the greatest beauty of all.  It's not about things happening, it's about the thing they make happen; the people they are over time and the choices they make, most often as expressions of love deeply felt.

Yeah I bawled.  I bawled at the moon.

That wraps it up for Werewolf Week.  I have to admit that I enjoyed it more, overall, than Anthoholic.  Starting tomorrow, we'll be back to a more arbitrary selection process leading us on through Halloween.  BE THERE.