The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Penumbra (2011)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 30 August 2012

  If the last name of Penumbra‘s co-directors– Bogliano– sounds familiar, it’s likely due to Adrián García Bogliano’s festival hit Cold Sweat, which was released earlier this year by Dark Sky Films. Bogliano’s name has been on the radar of more and more horror fans since the U.S. release of Rooms for Tourists in 2006, and Cold Sweat ‘s warm festival receptions helped get his name out there as the premiere horror filmmaker in Argentina. For Penumbra, he teamed up with his brother (and screenwriter) Ramiro García Bogliano for a film that takes a considerably different approach than Cold Sweat in creating tension, while keeping that film’s subtle political edge.

  Marga (Cristina Brondo) is a real estate agent from Spain in Argentina on business, and when we meet her she is already having a tough day. Her sister is giving her grief, her appointment to show off an old family property is forty minutes late, and she has a very important meeting rapidly approaching. Frustrated, she finally heads into the apartment building and finds Jorge (Berta Muñiz) lurking near the door of the property, having somehow sneaked past her. She lets him in and shows him the apartment, which Jorge quickly decides is perfect for his client’s needs, and he offers Marga a huge sum of money to sell him the property immediately. “Immediately” meaning within the hour, with as little paperwork and fuss as possible. Marga agrees, despite knowing that it will cause her to miss her other meeting with a wealthy client, and her day begins to get much, much worse.

  Penumbra is a seriously slow burn, a stark contrast to the sledgehammer style of Cold Sweat. The Bogliano brothers put Marga through the wringer by carefully building up a series of increasingly difficult (and sometimes very funny) obstacles to making this once-in-a-lifetime sale. Marga already draws enough attention to herself with her flashy dress in what appears to be a fairly run-down neighborhood, and she doesn’t help her situation any by looking down on the Argentinian locals. One of the few people she meets during the course of the day who helps her out is a kindly spinster who also originally hails from Spain, and wishes she could afford to return there.

  Saying much else would spoil some of Penumbra ‘s many little surprises; suffice to say that by the time the end credits roll, Penumbra feels like a much different film that it did in its opening frames. The Boglianos have followed up the success of Cold Sweat with something that has a similar tone and look, but a much more restrained style. If any horror fans were unconvinced that the Boglianos were a talent to watch out for, Penumbra may very well convince them otherwise.

  The Perfect Husband (2014)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 26 July 2016

  Allow me to save you some time if you’re considering watching The Perfect Husband: Don’t. It’s ignorant, artless, ugly, and cruel.

  If you would like more information on what I personally found so profoundly unappealing about the film, permit me a bit of a rant.

  This is the 300th film I have covered for Film Monthly. I’ve covered tons of horror movies, independent and otherwise, from all over the world. There have been a few–easily counted on one hand with fingers to spare–that I have not been able to finish watching. Over the years I’ve been writing for the site, there have been two films that I could not sit through in their entirety but still felt compelled to write about: The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol in 2012 and Kill Game in January of this year. I believe that you learn something about cinema from every movie you watch, regardless of whether or not you actually like the movie. Sometimes you learn more from the ones you hate.

  I say all this to preface a discussion of The Perfect Husband, which I hated. And of horror films in general. This will require spoiling the ending of The Perfect Husband, but since I strongly recommend not watching it, I feel like that’s OK.

  Viola (Gabriella Wright) and Nicola (Bret Roberts) are going away for a weekend together following a tragic event in their lives. Nicola behaves erratically, and after she tries to seduce a forest ranger after hurting herself in the woods, Nicola’s behavior becomes even more threatening. After a tense confrontation over dinner, Nicola handcuffs Viola to the headstand of their bed and beats her. She manages to escape, but Nicola follows hot on her heels, killing the ranger. When Viola runs into a man living out in the woods and asks for help, he rapes her and is then brutally murdered by Nicola as well. Viola finally manages to get a gun and she shoots Nicola dead, at which point it is revealed that she is not actually in the woods. Following the loss of her and Nicola’s child during birth, Viola has become dangerously delusional. The film proceeds to a series of flashbacks showing Viola and Nicola’s places switched in various scenes from the movie: she screams at him, handcuffs him to the bed, kills him, kills the park ranger, seduces the man in the woods and kills him, too. The film ends with Viola being locked away in an insane asylum, lost in her delusion.

  Imagine if you were watching I Spit on Your Grave and at the end, after Jennifer kills the last of her rapists, there’s an extended scene explaining that she was not actually raped at all. Instead, she seduced those five men, but she was delusional and believed that they brutally raped her. That’s more or less what it feels like at the end of The Perfect Husband: the viewer has just spent about 90 minutes watching Viola being beaten, raped, and terrorized only to be told that none of those things actually happened. It was all in her head. Viola was not a victim; she was the antagonist in this story. She screamed at her husband, seduced helpless men, assaulted and murdered them. “You thought it was like this,” the film says, “but it was really like this.” That can be a frustrating strategy for any movie–look at the Saw films, which do this numerous times throughout the series, for a particularly obnoxious example–but when the situation involved is the personal victimization and abuse of a woman, it’s more than frustrating. It’s nauseating.

  This is exactly the kind of thing people think of when they dismiss horror out of hand as something only stupid Neanderthals can enjoy. The Perfect Husband revels in cruelty, in violence and abuse both physical and emotional. It rubs the viewer’s nose in grimy, bloody misery that serves no purpose other than for the writer/director to sit back at the end, smirking over how he really got one over on the audience with this one. Critics who hardly ever even watch horror films bemoan the prevalence of “torture porn” in the genre, but putting a character through intense suffering can be used to serve narrative or subtextual purposes. It’s possible for a film to be both brutally violent and have something interesting to say. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to just pummel the hell out of characters to make audiences squirm in their seats and get grossed out. That’s what The Perfect Husband does. That’s what makes it a textbook case of pointless violence. It presents a parade of graphic terrors visited upon its heroine for no good reason.

  Even more troubling is the idea that filmmaker Lucas Pavetto seemed to have no compunction about the film’s flatly reprehensible subtext. Viola isn’t a victim. She’s delusional. All the violence she suffers at the hands of the men she encounters is in her head. Her mind irreparably shattered by the death of her child, Viola is plunged not just into a depression, but an imaginary world in which she must lash out and kill the men who threaten her life. This would have been an uncomfortable story in a 1970s exploitation movie, but this is 2016. This kind of ignorant, irresponsible bullshit is inexcusable. We live in a world where women are victimized constantly, and in which they are made to feel obligated to apologize for their own victimization. And that kind of thinking makes up the core of The Perfect Husband: Women lie about being abused and raped, even if they don’t realize they’re lying because they’re crazy. Specifically, Viola is crazy because she was too weak to deal with the psychological fallout from losing her child.

  Why the hell Artsploitation Films picked this up is a total mystery to me. Beyond everything outlined above, it’s also just a terrible movie. Shot in Italy with a cast all speaking heavily accented English (with one ver
y distracting exception, a female psychologist clumsily overdubbed by someone with no accent), the film steadfastly refuses to generate any empathy for any of its characters. Viola is established early on as a demanding bitch, and Nicola is blithely unsympathetic to her concerns. These initial impressions don’t change much as the film goes on, especially after Viola’s inexplicable attempt to seduce the park ranger and Nicola’s burst of jealous verbal abuse over dinner. Pavetto seems to want to play with shifting the audience’s allegiances between the two characters, but the film makes one of the most common miscalculations in horror films: there’s no one whose side any reasonable viewer would want to be on at all. Just poorly sketched, mean, ugly characters treating each other terribly and then actually visiting physical violence on one another. For nothing! All the blood, all the screaming, all the suffering in the end means nothing, because none of it even happened.

  The last few years have given horror fans and cinephiles a look at what happens when someone brings actual artistic sensibilities and interesting ideas to the genre: Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Robert Eggers’s The Witch, Nicolas Pesce’s The Eyes of My Mother. These are all films that use genre in interesting and unique ways. Of course it’s not realistic to expect that every horror film is going to be working at the level of Great Cinematic Art. But it’s not too much to ask that filmmakers think about what they’re putting out into the world with what their movie is saying (see Lights Out for another disturbing example of this). We’ve had a century of film and millennia of stories to draw on before that. We should expect more from horror films than what The Perfect Husband and its like offer us.

  Phase IV (1974)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 16 November 2015

  Even if film fans aren’t familiar with the name “Saul Bass,” chances are very good they have seen his work. Bass is best known for his work as a designer creating iconic title sequences for films, including three particularly memorable ones for Alfred Hitchcock’s films North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho. This work has had a major influence on film title and poster design that is difficult to overstate. But despite his reputation and talents, Bass only ever directed one feature-length motion picture. That film was Phase IV, a science fiction oddity that has gained a cult following since its release in 1974 and which has finally been released on Blu-ray by Olive Films.

  The film is narrated by James R. Lesko (Michael Murphy), a researcher who has been sent to investigate a massive shift in the ecosystem of a desert area. Along with Dr. Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport), Lesko is tasked with figuring out why the ants living in this area have suddenly began wiping out the animals that are usually their predators, as well as why they seem to be making aggressive moves on human dwellings. Cloistered in a geodesic dome, the men become trapped when the ants adapt to their chemical defenses and destroy their vehicle. A local girl named Kendra (Lynne Frederick) is trapped with them as well, and as Lesko attempts to communicate with the ants, Hubbs tries to figure out how best to attack them. With their radio out of commission and temperatures rising, the men engage in a desperate struggle with each other and against the ants.

  Phase IV is an exceptionally strange film to have been released by a major studio. The first actual human actors aren’t even seen on screen until around the ten-minute mark, the opening scenes depicting life among ants after a cosmic event causes them some sort of evolutionary change. These sequences punctuate the film, and are breathtakingly shot. These sequences were shot by Ken Middleham, a wildlife photographer who had made a name for himself with his work shooting similar sequences for 1971′s The Hellstrom Chronicle. It seems likely that Bass or the producers of Phase IV had seen that film and brought Middleham on to the project as a result, and the sequences of the film that he shot inside the ants’ colonies are astonishing. However, any mainstream audience looking for a “killer ants” movie likely would have been perplexed by the methodical pacing, abstract visual storytelling, and careful attention to detail of colony life that opens the film. That attention to detail carries over into the work of Lesko and Hubbs, who spend a good amount of their on-screen time explaining what exactly it is they’re doing. There is a lot of information that the audience has to process, and Bass throws the viewer in the deep end and trusts them to keep up. The film’s excellent score, including electronic music by David Vorhaus (White Noise) and Desmond Briscoe (co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop), perfectly complements the strange happenings in the story but again may have been too alien for mainstream audiences.

  Watching the film now, it seems obviously far ahead of its time while also being very much a product of the 1970s. This was a decade in which a number of thoughtful, intelligent science fiction films were made, and Phase IV is certainly a highlight among them. It is not surprising that the film has gained a cult following over the years thanks to its release on home video, where appreciative audiences keyed to its peculiar wavelength could find it and watch it over and over again.

  This new Blu-ray release from Olive Films is great, giving viewers the best look at the film possible, but it also suffers an unfortunate omission. Paramount Pictures distributed the film theatrically in 1974, and cut a closing sequence that was shown in preview screenings of the film before its theatrical release. While some footage from this sequence was incorporated into the film’s trailer, it was presumed lost after Paramount excised it prior to its release. In 2012 this footage resurfaced and the alternate ending was shown along with the film at select screenings. This footage is not included on the Olive Films disc, which has no special features at all. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that a restored version of the film with Bass’s intended ending will be released any time soon. Despite this disappointing omission, the Blu-ray of Phase IV is still the best presentation of the film on home video to date, and any serious fan of science fiction cinema who has not yet seen the film should track it down immediately.

  Phase 7 (2011)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 7 October 2011

  Horror web site Bloody Disgusting has recently gotten into the distribution business, releasing a series of films in limited theatrical runs and on DVD under the banner Bloody Disgusting Selects. Their selections so far have been a varied lot, including Cold Fish by Sion Sono and Lucky McKee’s controversial The Woman. Their international roster is interesting to say the least, and their commitment to finding little known but quality genre films is admirable. Even more so now that they have brought Argentinian writer/director Nicolás Goldbart’s debut feature, Phase 7 to the States.

  The first indication that something is not right comes when Coco (Daniel Hendler) and his very pregnant wife Pipi (Jazmín Stuart) are checking out at the grocery store and a horde of people rushes in. By the time they’ve put the groceries away, it’s on the news: there have been outbreaks of an extremely contagious fatal disease in different parts of the world. Before the day is out a government team comes to their apartment building to inform the residents that they have all been quarantined. They are assured that a doctor will be sent in to check them out and that the quarantine will be lifted after everyone is confirmed to be free of the virus.

  Once on lockdown, things quickly deteriorate in the building. Two neighbors begin planning to kill suave Zanutto (the legendary Federico Lupi), while Horacio (Yayo Guridi) seems to have been prepping for this situation for ages and takes Coco on recon missions in the building. They observe their neighbors and set up booby traps in the stairwell in case anyone gets any ideas. As the situation in the outside world deteriorates, Pipi stays inside as Coco has to deal with a similar situation in the building: Zanutto appears to go insane, other neighbors are sick, and the government trailer out in the parking lot remains eerily silent.

  While it doesn’t sound like it, Phase 7 is something of a comedy. Coco shields Pipi from the worsening relations and rising tensions among the building’s neighbors and a
wkwardly follows Horacio on his missions. Horacio’s booby traps and Coco’s lack of military training lead to some clever and perfectly-timed slapstick, while Coco’s attempts to prevent Pipi from realizing how bad things are outside recalls classic farce. It takes a while to set up the characters, but once the film gets going Phase 7 moves quickly, the darkly comic second half of the film punctuated by bursts of action and gruesome violence.

  Phase 7 is a decidedly unique take on the “outbreak” horror subgenre, and while it will inevitably draw comparisons to [Rec], the similarities are passing at best. From its dark comedy offset with brightly saturated colors to its excellent electronic score and great cast, Phase 7 is one of the best “horror” films of the year. Huge thanks to Bloody Disgusting for giving this little gem a chance to be seen in the States!

  Phasma Ex Machina (2010)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 29 August 2010

  Phasma Ex Machina is the latest in a wave of post-Primer lo-fi sci-fi films that take the concept of men tampering in God’s domain out of the laboratories and lairs and into the garages and basements of the suburbs. Fortunately, it seems that Shane Carruth’s super low-budget masterpiece has inspired writer/director Matt Osterman in the best way: clearly a labor of love for everyone involved, Phasma Ex Machina starts with a killer concept and takes it to unexpected places. When it comes to thoughtful science fiction, great ideas and excellent writing trump multi-million dollar effects every time.

  Cody (Sasha Andreev) and his brother James (Max Hauser) have lost their parents in a car accident. One year later, Cody has dropped out of college and is obsessively trying to build a machine in his garage that will allow contact with the other side. His research has led him to believe that a machine that can magnify the amount of ambient energy in a given area will allow ghosts– or whatever it is he thinks they might be– to more easily manifest themselves and perhaps even bring them back. James, meanwhile, is constantly late to school and spends more time blowing up dead frogs than paying attention in class. After one too many late mornings, James’s principal (Mari Harris) sends Cody to Child Protective Services, where he is informed that one more tardy will result in James being removed from Cody’s custody.