The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  The Cottage (2008)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 7 May 2008

  Sometimes it’s hard to be a horror film fan. Every year, there are countless horror movies released that beg for your time, and there is never enough time to watch them all. Marketers know an easy way to get someone’s attention is by pitching a film as being “for fans of” a popular film. Most of the time, these “for fans of” movies end up bearing only a superficial resemblance (at best) to those other films, with hardly any of the qualities that garnered fans for the other films in the first place.

  For example, when I say that The Cottage is a British horror comedy, many horror fans can easily guess the reference points that pop up in the marketing: Shaun of the Dead and Severance. Unfortunately, The Cottage bears only a superficial resemblance (at best) to either of those popular films. It has a bit more in common with Severance: a UK production that takes place in and around a dark forest and dilapidated house and mixes gruesome horror and comedic elements. As for Shaun of the Dead, well–they’re both British.

  The film opens with bumbling kidnappers Peter (Reece Shearsmith) and David (Andy Serkis) hiding out in an old cottage and waiting for their plans to come together. Their victim is the shrill, hateful Tracey (Jennifer Ellison), daughter of Arnie (Doug Bradley, in a pointless post-credits cameo), a crime boss who runs a strip club David frequents. Timid Peter is only in on the plan so David will give up his share of their deceased mother’s house; David wants the ransom money to buy a boat and sail away from his sordid past. Tracey manages to turn the tables on Peter and forces him out into the forest while David and the third kidnapper Andrew (Steve O’Donnell) are distracted. In the forest they find a seemingly abandoned house inhabited by a very ugly Farmer (Dave Legeno in some truly awful makeup) who does not like trespassers.

  The Cottage feels like two films uneasily shoved together–half comedy of errors, half slasher film. As for its references, it supplies the blood but sadly lacks the satirical bite of Severance (with its white-collar weapons-manufacturer office workers) or the endearing characters of Shaun of the Dead. In fact, none of the characters in The Cottage are particularly sympathetic or even interesting. It’s almost as if writer/director Paul Andrew Williams didn’t want audiences feeling too bad about any of the characters getting knocked off during the film’s violent third act, so he prevents the audience from identifying with any of them. And so despite a few creepy moments and some effective gore effects, The Cottage mostly just reminds horror fans that they could be watching something else that does something truly unique.

  The Crater Lake Monster (1977)

  Originally published on Criticplanet.org

  In the 1970s, Bigfoot was huge. That’s “huge” as in “extremely popular”– there were a number of Bigfoot-related films from 1970′s Bigfoot to a serious glut in the market from 1976 and 1977. Perhaps as an outgrowth of America’s Bigfoot craze, other monster movies often got the green light from studios anxious to pounce on yet another potentially profitable trend. Crown International threw its hat into the down-home monster craze with director William R. Stromberg’s The Crater Lake Monster, which avoided the then-popular faux documentary style and was instead made in the tradition of 1950s monster movies. The result is one of Crown’s better-known films, if not one of its better-quality films.

  Sheriff Steven Hanson (co-writer Richard Cardella) has a problem. Some time after a meteor lands in nearby Crater Lake and brings the temperature of the water up, wildlife and people both in and out of the water start turning up missing or dead. Once that’s established, The Crater Lake Monster devolves into a series of virtually unrelated scenes of people ending up on or near the lake and encountering the monster, or (much, much worse) local hillbillies wandering around the lake and nearby forest and not encountering the monster. There isn’t much plot to hang on to in order to keep watching, just a series of increasingly tangential characters and story lines that eventually come together in the end. Which, no spoilers, basically just means that everybody in town eventually gets together for a town meeting about what to do about whatever is happening at Crater Lake, and then moving on to a fittingly anticlimactic finale. It’s sort of like a terrible redneck Magnolia about people getting eaten and/or dealing with the fact other people are getting eaten by a stop-motion Loch Ness Monster creature that can also waddle along on land.

  The Crater Lake Monster is not a very well-made film by any standard. The pacing is awful, the acting is pretty bad, and the complete disregard for the audience is evident in the “day for night” scenes. In many legendarily bad films, bad “day for night” scenes are often a source of unintentional hilarity. The Crater Lake Monster literally takes this concept to an entirely different level: almost the entire film is supposed to take place in the middle of the night, but nearly every single scene in the film was clearly shot during beautiful, sunny days in the early afternoon. The sense of disorientation on the part of the viewer is so complete that it’s often literally impossible to determine how much time has passed even in a given scene, let alone between different scenes. At one point early in the film, there are two back-to-back scenes that appear to be taking place a few days apart until one of the characters in the second scene mentions that it’s been six months since the events in the previous scene. It becomes kind of a game after a while to try and figure out when a particular scene is supposed to be happening, which is good for keeping you awake since stretches of the film are lethally dull. And if you’re not a fan of drunken hillbilly antics and banjo music, you may find this a difficult watch.

  Still, The Crater Lake Monster momentarily comes to life whenever its stop-motion creature is on the screen. Which, unfortunately, is usually only a few seconds at a time. For a while it appears there are two monsters at work until it becomes clear later that the large monster head used for close-ups is actually supposed to be the same creature that is occasionally seen in its full stop-motion glory. Dave Allen, the stop motion supervisor on this film, had previously done effects work on Equinox and Flesh Gordon, and went on to a long career in special effects that lasted until his death in 1999. He worked on films from The Howling to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids to a long stretch of work on Charles Band’s Full Moon productions including the Puppet Master and Subspecies series. One of the small delights of The Crater Lake Monster is seeing Allen’s early work and knowing what would come later.

  The Crater Lake Monster is basically the perfect 1970s drive-in monster movie. It’s easy to put on and ignore, only really grabbing your attention when the creature is on the screen. Otherwise, you can do whatever it is you might want to be doing otherwise while the film’s on and not have to worry about missing any important plot points, and afterward you may even be left with a generally positive impression of it. But if you’re actually watching it with your full attention, the film’s 85 minutes feel more like 185. For low-fi monster enthusiasts and b-movie completists, The Crater Lake Monster is worth a watch, but anyone else can comfortably take a pass.

  Crimes of Passion (1984)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 22 July 2016

  Even for Ken Russell, Crimes of Passion is a weird movie. Following a run of UK productions in the 1970s that established him as a major name in international cinema, Russell came to the States to direct Altered States for Warnter Bros. in 1980. It would have been impossible to predict his follow-up to that bizarre psychedelic sci-fi/horror film would be an arguably even more bizarre satire of American sexual mores in the form of a chimera of horror, erotic thriller, and melodrama. Released in 1984, Crimes of Passion was cut heavily for theatrical release on both sides of the Atlantic. On home video, the film was released in a number of different edits on different formats. Arrow Video’s new Blu-ray/DVD release of Crimes of Passion presents the film in its “unrated” version as previously seen on home video as well as a “Director’s Cut” that includes more footage included on a separate version of the film. Regardless of the differences betw
een edits, this is a deeply strange film even from a director who has made that his forte.

  Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) is dragged to a support group by his buddy Hopper (Bruce Davison). When pushed to explain why he’s there, Bobby accidentally lets slip that he and his wife Amy (Annie Potts) are having problems in the bedroom. Bobby, who runs a shop building security systems and doing some private detective work and surveillance on the side, takes a job monitoring Joanna Crane (Kathleen Turner). Joanna’s employer suspects her of corporate espionage, but Bobby soon discovers she has a much more interesting secret: every night, she dons a wig and high heels, takes a taxi into the city, and becomes a hooker named “China Blue.” China takes johns back to her room at the seedy Paradise hotel, where she is regularly harassed by perverted junkie street preacher Rev. Peter (Anthony Perkins). When Bobby’s job ends, he crosses the line and hires China Blue for a night, after which he becomes obsessed with her. Bobby’s marriage continues to disintegrate while Joanna’s double life starts to unravel and Rev. Peter becomes increasingly dangerous.

  It’s tough to get a handle on the tone of Crimes of Passion. It starts out as a kind of lurid women’s drama with the art direction of Dario Argento’s Inferno, shot through with an undercurrent of broad black humor. Bobby’s home life is presented as a stereotypical fraying nuclear family, with a frigid wife embarrassed by Bobby’s perceived financial failures. His friend Hopper is divorced and has taken advantage of it with a number of women, but longs for the stability of married life. Joanna/China is presented as a schizophrenic, more or less. She understandably freaks out when Bobby intrudes on her “real” life, but then immediately befriends him anyway. As Joanna she’s cold and reserved, but as China she’s so sexually aggressive she ends up raping a male police officer in the film’s most deliriously provocative scene. Whenever Perkins is on the screen, the film descends into outlandish camp. This isn’t even taking into consideration Russell’s insertion of still images of works of art (usually erotic) and inexplicable cuts into a music video that exists inside the film’s reality. Again, even for Ken Russell, this is a lot to deal with.

  Arrow’s new Blu-ray/DVD combo release of the film presents it in a beautiful new 2K restoration. There’s a warning that some of the inserts from the Laserdisc version of the film are of lower quality, but the difference is not really a distraction. The disc includes a full-length commentary track with Russell and screenwriter/producer Barry Sandler, as well as lengthy new video interviews with Sandler (running about 22 minutes) and composer Rick Wakeman (running 28 minutes). Aside from the commentary, the biggest find here might be the compilation of over 20 minutes of deleted scenes. The video quality of these scenes is not great, but their inclusion with commentary from Sandler is appreciated. As with virtually every Arrow release, the reversible artwork is fantastic, and the first pressing of the release includes a booklet with new writing from Paul Sutton (author of Talking About Ken Russell) and correspondence between Ken Russell and Kathleen Turner. It’s difficult to imagine a more comprehensive or handsome release for such a curious film.

  Cross Bearer (2012)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 8 July 2013

  Being a horror fan, I often find myself in discussions with other horror fans about what movies we may have recently watched, and unfortunately more often than not we compare notes on what we disliked about those films. Watching a lot of independent horror films naturally leads to these kinds of conversations for horror fans who also happen to be cinephiles in general. There is a lot of content out there being manufactured constantly, and the majority of it is pretty bad. However, the quest for finding those few great unknown films is what keeps us going. Once in a while, we’ll find a film that stands out from the legions of samey indie films, and those discoveries make slogging through the bad stuff worthwhile. Writer/director Adam Ahlbrandt’s Cross Bearer is one of those films, a solid and stylish slasher update that stands above even some recent major studio horror films.

  Heather (Natalie Jean) is a dancer working at a strip club, living with her ex Victoria (Victoria DePaul) and planning to get away with her new girlfriend Bunny (Kacie Marie). In order to add some quick cash to their escape fund, Heather takes on a drug delivery from her boss Harry (J.D. Brown) to pimp Anton (Shaun Paul Costello). Anton likes mixing business with pleasure, so Heather, Victoria, and Bunny are all sent to his huge, formerly abandoned warehouse building along with their coworker Cindy (Julia Campbell) and her filmmaker boyfriend Mark (Tim Cronin). The plan is simple: they get in, do the deal, give Anton a show, and get out. A complication to their plan arises in the form of Cross Bearer (Isaac Williams), a violent drifter who used to live in Anton’s building, and who has come back to start his campaign of cleansing the Earth of all sinners.

  Cross Bearer doesn’t really do anything particularly new as far as slasher films go, except wallow in the more sordid aspects of its characters’ lives before the killing starts. Once the stage is set, what follows is mostly pretty obvious: Cross Bearer stalks everyone through the abandoned building and viciously knocks them off, mostly with a claw hammer. Where Cross Bearer really stands out from the pack of independent slasher films is in its great practical effects and its extremely professional look. The practical effects are often squirm-inducingly brutal and some of the most gruesomely realistic this side of Toetag Pictures. The filmmakers’ commitment to practical effects over CG blood spray (a dismaying and increasingly common feature of many low-budget horror films) is admirable.

  However, even more than the effects, Cross Bearer sets itself apart with its visual style. Director Adam Ahlbrandt has a keen eye for interesting composition and color, and this alone makes Cross Bearer worth a look. The sharp digital video captures the grime of the film’s locations (which look genuinely unpleasant), while the color occasionally makes the film look like classic Mario Bava. All this is not to say that Cross Bearer is without problems: the cast is all over the place, the sound mix is sometimes a little off, and the Cross Bearer himself is a little too cartoonishly crazy in contrast to the rest of the film’s tone. However, the film’s effects and stylish direction more than make up for these shortcomings. Cross Bearer is one of the best independent horror films of the last couple of years, and it clearly marks Adam Ahlbrandt as a talent to watch.

  A Cure for Wellness (2017)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 9 June 2017

  Gore Verbinski has had a fairly odd career trajectory for a major studio director. His feature debut was Mousehunt, a family film with a dark bent reminiscent of Barry Sonnenfeld’s Addams Family films, followed up by the Brad Pitt/Julia Roberts vehicle The Mexican. Verbinski’s first major hit was The Ring, an exemplary American remake of Hideo Nakata’s J-horror sensation Ringu that kicked off a long series of mostly dire stateside remakes of Asian horror films. He will probably always be best known now as the director of the first three films in the massively successful Pirates of the Caribbean series, and the huge financial returns on those films guaranteed Verbinski a certain amount of leeway moving forward. Although some of that capitol was no doubt spent on The Lone Ranger, a box-office fiasco largely considered a major misstep for Disney. It seems Verbinski may have been willing to bet all the Hollywood good will he had banked on his latest film, the lavishly-mounted horror film A Cure for Wellness.

  Young, ambitious executive Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) has been selected to retrieve Roland Pembroke (Harry Groener), CEO of the company for whom Lockhart works. Pembroke has sent the board of the company a letter outlining his intentions to indefinitely remain at the remote mountain spa in the Swiss Alps where he has retreated from the world. The board has enough dirt on Lockhart to easily persuade him to undertake this task or risk repercussions far beyond potential loss of employment. Lockhart arrives at the spa just after visiting hours have ended, but he soon becomes more than just a visitor after a car accident results in his becoming a “patient” there. Volmer (Jason Isaacs), head of the institute, encourages Loc
khart to relax and take advantage of his forced “vacation.” Lockhart meets several patients, but one of them stands out from all the others: Hannah (Mia Goth), a woman who looks to be at least a few decades younger than anyone else at the spa other than Lockhart himself. As Lockhart continues to pursue Pembroke, he uncovers strange secrets about the spa and its ominous history. Before long, it becomes clear that not only might Lockhart not be able to find and extract Pembroke, but he may become a permanent resident of the spa himself whether he likes it or not.

  A Cure for Wellness is one of the weirdest major Hollywood studio films in recent memory. At its heart, it’s a fairly standard “B”-horror movie blown up to ludicrously extravagant proportions: a gruesome, absolutely gorgeous 2.5-hour horror show that looks every penny of its reported $40 million budget and then some. It’s a miracle that this film exists at all. It’s all but impossible to imagine Verbinski pitching this to a room full of executives–its commercial prospects could never have possibly justified its budget, which was likely exponentially higher than even most studio horror pictures. Any reticence on the part of studio executives would have been warranted, as the film failed to make back its budget during its theatrical run. Apparently Verbinski’s name and the cold technical precision evident even in the film’s trailers were not quite enough to draw in mass audiences for a horror film with the running time of a Transformers movie but without any robots blowing stuff up