The Coffin gives a cursory explanation of how its central ritual is supposed to work, but at a slim 82 minutes there is not much time for lengthy exposition. This at least partially works in the film’s favor, as the main action of the story picks up very quickly, but it also leaves many unanswered questions. The look and tone of the film are unusually calming– the coloring of the film is nearly monochrome, with most everything being a pale shade of blue, shades of gray, or black, which is often beautiful but also a little hard to watch for the length of an entire feature. The Coffin is an unusually artful horror film, which may put off viewers looking for gore and scares. Viewers looking for a different take on the Asian horror style, however, will find The Coffin worth a look.
Cold Sweat (2010)
Originally published on Film Monthly 16 January 2012
Argentinian filmmaker Adrián García Bogliano has caught the eye of the international horror film community over the last few years, first grabbing U.S. attention when Strand Releasing issued his film Rooms for Tourists (2004) on DVD in 2006 and reinforcing his reputation with the rape-revenge film I’ll Never Die Alone in 2008 (although the latter has yet to see an official U.S. release). After a successful run on the festival circuit, Dark Sky Films picked up Bogliano’s Cold Sweat for his highest-profile American release yet, and it will not disappoint horror fans looking for something a little different to go with their gore.
Román (Facundo Espinosa) enlists his friend Ali (Marina Glezer) to help him find his ex-girlfriend Jacqueline, who left him for someone she met online and then disappeared. Ali befriends the same guy Jacqueline fell for and arranges a meeting with him at his home, a large but run-down house next door to some unpleasant characters. Once inside, Ali quickly discovers the situation is not what she expected, and after she doesn’t return or answer his calls, Román goes in after her by sneaking around the back of the building.
Román stumbles upon the shocking truth by accident very quickly. Two old men, supposedly revolutionaries who stole several crates of dynamite back in the 1970s, have been kidnapping young women after luring them in over the Internet. They then perform experiments on the women before disposing of them, and Ali is next on the schedule. Román manages to free her, but is determined not to leave the house until he finds out what has happened to Jacqueline. Ali and Román sneak through the house, trying to avoid the old men and find a way out, while Bogliano occasionally drops in a flashback to the younger days of the villains.
Cold Sweat is packed with tense situations and Bogliano wrings a good amount of thrills out of many of them, but the overly busy soundtrack unfortunately sometimes overshadows the on-screen action. There are a number of scenes that would be much more intense without the constantly pounding score, although in other scenes the unusual sound design works very well in helping ratchet up the tension. Bogliano also certainly does not skimp on the gore: there are exploding heads and ugly wounds aplenty. The film packs a few nasty surprises, a few of which are elegantly tied in to the flashbacks with a cool visual trick. Cold Sweat is definitely not lacking in visual style, with Bogliano deftly using slow motion, extreme close-ups and effective make-up and effects to help keep things interesting.
Clocking in at a brief 80 minutes, Cold Sweat is a tightly-wound thriller that manages the rather difficult trick of making two old men seem like valid horror-film villains. Bogliano explains in one of the DVD extras how he drew on actual Argentinian history for the idea of their characters, and without that information the importance of their characters’ history may be lost on U.S. audiences. Still, there’s no denying that Bogliano knows how to play the audience and deliver slick low-budget thrills. Despite the sometimes overbearing soundtrack, Cold Sweat is a unusual take on some standard horror film territory and is well worth a look. Bogliano clearly has style to burn; here’s hoping next time he reins it in just a little and lets the visuals speak for themselves a bit more.
The Collapsed (2011)
Originally published on Film Monthly 5 June 2012
A note to independent filmmakers: when you’re planning your film’s score, MIDI strings are never the answer. This is a good bit of advice for filmmakers of any type, but genre filmmakers seem particularly enamored of this type of scoring. There are a number of legitimate ways to mask your film’s low-budget nature, but substituting fake strings for an orchestra is not one of them. I feel compelled to mention this because The Collapsed is a perfect example of a MIDI score that does nothing but underline a film’s lack of Hollywood-level production value. Not to say that The Collapsed is even all that bad from a technical standpoint, but the fact that the filmmakers didn’t realize (or just ignored) the effect those MIDI strings have on viewers explains a lot of the film’s basic problems, the main one being its unfortunate facelessness amid a sea of similar post-apocalyptic indie features.
The Weaver family– dad Scott (John Fantasia), mom Emily (Lisa Moule), son Aaron (Steve Vieira) and daughter Rebecca (Anna Ross)– are trying to make their way out of the city where they live after some unspecified event sends the world into utter chaos. They manage to escape to the country, but soon lose their scavenged vehicle and a chance to grab supplies when some intimidating men with machine guns appear and nearly catch the family. Scott is determined that the family make it to the small town of Dovers Bend, where their other son still lives, despite the protests of the rest of the family that he is probably dead. Left without a vehicle, the family treks through a forest in the direction of Dovers Bend, but it soon becomes clear that the guys with machine guns are not the only things to fear in the woods.
Technically, The Collapsed is fairly solid. Shot with Red digital cameras, the film looks slicker than previous generations of low-budget horror films. This is quickly becoming the standard, though, and The Collapsed doesn’t do much to stand out from the crowd of recent post-apocalyptic films that have been making their way to home video. Aside from the grating, repetitive score, The Collapsed is weighed down by many small issues and a few major ones, one of the latter being that the main characters don’t really have the chemistry to make their survivors feel like a real family. That may be more a problem of the writing than the acting (which is fine), considering writer/director Justin McConnell has his characters do things that make very little sense– for example, in one sequence Rebecca sets off into the woods to shave her legs in a stream. It’s hard to imagine that would be a priority given that this happens immediately after the family encounters the guys with machine guns.
Little things like that litter the narrative of The Collapsed, repeatedly causing the viewer to be momentarily yanked out of the story and reminding them that they’re watching a film. Even worse, the film concludes with an obvious revelation that any viewer paying attention will see coming some ways off, but even that could be forgiven if the film generated enough interest in its characters to give the ending the proper emotional heft. Like pretty much any post-apocalyptic trek, this one is filled with dirt, darkness and misery, and even the happiest ending would be tempered by the looming prospect of the end of civilization. Bringing something interesting to that kind of setup is key to a successful PA film, and on that count The Collapsed does not deliver.
CORRECTION: Rob Kleiner, composer of the score for The Collapsed, has pointed out that the score does not use any MIDI instruments. I apologize for the mistake.
The Collector (2009)
Originally published on Film Monthly 31 July 2009
I’ll make this easy for some of you: if you’re a fan of the Saw films, you’ll probably like The Collector. Thanks for your time.
Still here? OK.
The Collector has sneaked into theaters after a last-minute ad campaign started ramping up in the last few weeks. It’s opening wide, which is surprising given how little prerelease hype there has been. Banner ads started to appear recently on various film sites, proudly announcing that the film was made by the writers of Saw IV, V, and VI. These gentlemen– Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melto
n– first came to the attention of the horror community as the writers of Feast. They’ve become hot properties, even attached to the troubled Hellraiser remake, and now they’ve been given a shot at launching their own franchise with Dunstan directing from a script co-written with Melton.
The result? Well, The Collector is basically Saw with a little Halloween and a dash of Home Alone thrown in– a hybrid of what many critics call “torture porn” and the traditional slasher movie, with a fully booby-trapped house. The styles don’t really mesh all that well, though: The Collector feels like it’s completely assembled from off-the-shelf parts, and someone forgot to get the characters until everything else was already done. It even looks and sounds like a grainier version of the Saw films: it looks like they borrowed the same lighting crew, but they shot this one on 16mm (which does give the film a pleasingly authentic grindhouse feel). I was really hoping Dunstan and Melton would deliver something with more of its own flavor, but The Collector seems more like a repository for stuff they didn’t get to do in the Saw movies.
After a promising little opening sequence, the film moves into the story of Arkin (Josh Stewart), a contractor working on remodeling a house for a wealthy family. The family is planning a trip out of town for a couple of weeks, and dad Michael (Michael Reilly Burke) sends Arkin off with a little extra payment to help him out with his young daughter. Arkin leaves to meet Lisa (Daniella Alonso), his… girlfriend? Wife? It’s not really made clear, which is typical of this film’s treatment of its characters. Anyway, Lisa owes money to some loan sharks and Arkin, as it conveniently turns out, is also a jewel thief. He’s been casing the house he’s been working on and knows Michael owns a gigantic stone worth a lot of money. He decides to return to the house that night to take the stone to get the cash to help Lisa.
Shortly after he enters the house and starts cracking the safe, Arkin hears footsteps. Naturally, it’s The Collector! The Collector and Arkin sneak around avoiding each other, and Arkin discovers that at some point during the last few hours between his leaving the house and returning, The Collector has rigged every single room in the house with incredibly elaborate booby traps. When Arkin finds the room full of dozens of bear traps, the line is officially crossed into Looney Tunes territory: whoever this Collector is, he buys in bulk from the same catalog Wile E. Coyote shops, and he’s as quiet and efficient as a entire construction company staffed by ninjas.
From this point on The Collector moves into and stays firmly planted in predictable slasher film territory: the family is chained up and tortured, Arkin sneaks around avoiding traps trying to save the little girl Hannah (Karley Scott Collins) and The Collector wanders around doing mean stuff and taking a lot of punishment. He’s curiously lacking in personality– he has creepy eyes, and a hole cut out of his mask for his mouth, but he has no lines and apparently the only thing the hole is for is so we can see him licking his lips while watching a gratuitous sex scene unfold in the kitchen.
Maybe the most remarkable aspect of The Collector is the sheer contempt it displays for the audience– the characters are barely cardboard, the traps are utterly ludicrous, and some of the action is cut so fast and hectic that it’s hard to tell what the hell is even going on. Mix this with graphic torture scenes and old slasher standbys and you’ve got a film that barely registers as anything more than a checklist of Why People Hate Modern Horror Films: it substitutes gore and torture for suspense and tension, there are no characters of any substance (or even interest), and there’s that ever-present brand of pounding industrial metal that stuffs every Saw soundtrack. Well, maybe that last one is a personal issue.
Horror fans who aren’t too disgusted by its reliance on “modern” horror style will at least find some amusement here. For all its frustrations, The Collector delivers a few cheap thrills and the makeup and gore effects are all well done. Anyone else will be just fine giving it a pass– this isn’t the kind of horror movie that changes anybody’s mind about the genre.
The Color Out of Space (2010)
Originally published on Film Monthly 21 August 2012
H.P. Lovecraft’s works have been notoriously difficult to bring to the screen successfully, largely because Lovecraft often wrote of things “beyond description” or that human language lacked the ability to convey. Unsurprisingly, though, many independent filmmakers have taken interesting routes to get to where bigger productions couldn’t quite reach: the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s silent-film take on The Call of Cthulhu is easily one of the best and most effective filmed Lovecraft adaptations around, and mostly relies on miniatures and elaborate shadow play. Huan Vu’s new feature-length adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space was clearly made on a tiny budget, but mostly gets by on its strong grasp of the tone of Lovecraft’s story.
Jonathan Davis (Ingo Heise) has hired a private detective named Ward (Alexander Sebastian Curd Schuster) to find his father (Patrick Pierce), who has mysteriously disappeared. Ward informs Jonathan that his father bought a plane ticket to Germany, and from there the trail goes cold. Jonathan manages to discover that his father has likely returned to a small village where he had a strange encounter in the last days of World War II. The village is almost entirely cut off from civilization, located near a valley about to be flooded to create a man-made lake. Jonathan finds the locals unhelpful, except for one: Armin Pierske (Michael Kausch) recognizes Jonathan’s WWII-era photograph of his father, and begins to tell the strange tale of what happened to the Gärtener family after a strange meteor landed near their farm.
The bulk of The Color Out of Space is taken up by this story, told in a series of long flashback sequences. The tone of the film is perfect, as Pierske draws Jonathan along with strange goings-on and unanswered questions. A sequence in which scientists take samples of the meteorite and attempt to identify it is particularly interesting, and very much in line with Lovecraft’s love of science, which often takes a backseat to the cosmic horrors he is best known for. The acting is mostly very good, and the story is well told, at its best when examining how the strange happenings impact the lives of the villagers. Some of the late-film CGI effects are decent, but once the film moves towards its climax, the reliance on heavy CG animation is understandable if still a bit disappointing.
Still, the film overall is a very well executed take on Lovecraft’s story. The black and white cinematography fits the film perfectly, and the solid performances help keep the viewer on edge. The pacing of the film may be a bit slow, but again it fits snugly with Lovecraft’s style. Fans of Lovecraft and independent horror should find The Color Out of Space well worth seeking out.
Corruption (1983)
Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 2 February 2016
Exploitation filmmaker Roger Watkins ensured himself a place in Grindhouse Valhalla with his uncompromisingly nasty 1977 debut feature Last House on Dead End Street. It’s inevitable that Watkins will be known for that film by most exploitation film fans, both because of its notorious reputation and because most of his other films are difficult to track down. Cult film preservationists and home video imprint Vinegar Syndrome has been working on a definitive restoration of Last House. for years, and for their final release of 2015 they released Watkins’s 1983 surreal adult horror film Corruption in a Blu-ray/DVD combo set. This release was the first chance many fans of Watkins have had to see one of his adult films, and it does not disappoint.
As Corruption opens, Williams (Jamie Gillis) and his assistant Doreen (Tiffany Clark) sit in a conference room discussing some sort of business with the intimidating Franklin (Michael Gaunt). It’s never clear exactly what they’re talking about, other than that they are involved in a transaction with serious consequences for Williams if he does not deliver. Alan (George Payne) arrives at what appears to be an abandoned building where he must retrieve the object at the center of the transaction by passing a sexual gauntlet of three different women. But instead of delivering the object, Alan disappears. Williams is chaperoned by h
is half-brother, a small-time crook named Larry (Bobby Astyr), into a bizarre underworld to find Alan or face Franklin’s wrath.
It’s almost impossible to imagine people watching Corruption in porno theaters of the early 1980s. This is a film that features hardcore sex, but presents it in a deeply unsettling context. It feels much closer in tone and content to David Lynch’s Lost Highway than any of its adult-film contemporaries: the characters find themselves in bizarre situations under the threat of mortal danger, although their motives and goals are unclear. Alan reappears later in the film, transformed into a necrophile with a top hat and harlequin face paint, forcing Williams to pass another sort of gauntlet. This is a nightmare world of sex and death, shot beautifully by cinematographer Larry Revene and set to a creepy electronic score by James Flamberg. It is, in short, an astonishing and exceptionally dark piece of art/horror that also happens to feature hardcore sex.
Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray/DVD release of Corruption presents the film in a 2k restoration from the 35mm camera negative, and it looks amazing. This is by far the best home video presentation any of Watkins’s films have ever received. The disc includes the film’s theatrical trailer, an artwork gallery, and an interview with cinematographer Larry Revene about working on the film. The first pressing of the release, limited to 2000 copies, also includes a pretty incredible Easter egg hidden on the main menu: The Last House on Dead End Street. While VS works on a full standalone restoration, they included a scan of a film print for fans who have been waiting for it. The print used for the scan has issues typical of prints that played extended runs on the grindhouse circuit in the 1970s, but it still looks great and hints at what the final restoration may have in store. Corruption caps off an incredible year for Vinegar Syndrome with one of their very best releases yet.
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 15