The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Rabies (2010)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 28 February 2012

  It is always a pleasure to find new horror films coming from unexpected places, and Rabies certainly qualifies. It is being marketed in the States as the first Israeli horror film, and I have no reason to argue otherwise. Rabies begins as a film in the grand tradition of “people lost in the woods with a murderer on the loose” stories, but takes that setup and does something completely unexpected with it. If this is a sign of things to come from the Israeli horror scene, horror fans have a lot to look forward to when they make a second horror film.

  The film opens with an effectively claustrophobic scene: Tali (Liat Harlev) has fallen into a person-sized trap deep in the woods while running away from home with her brother Ofer (Henry David). Ofer tells Tali to calm down and wait for him to go find help, but some ominous sounds suggest Ofer may not be back any time soon. Cut to the morning and we meet park ranger Menashe (Menashe Noy) and his young wife Rona (Efrat Boimold), preparing for another typical day in the woods. After dropping off Rona at their home base, Menashe and his dog set out on their daily patrol and discover a man in overalls (Yaron Motola) pulling Tali out of his trap.

  Meanwhile, a group of college tennis players become lost on their way to another school for a tournament and end up on the outskirts of the same woods. Mike (Ran Danker), the driver, is the cool one who has to deal with his friend Pini (Ofer Shechter) and his goofy outbursts. In the back seat are Adi (Ania Bukstein) and Shir (Yael Grobglas), who it seems everyone else in the car has a crush on. Pini and Adi trade barbs and try to flirt with Shir while Mike tries to figure out where they are, and before long they stumble upon Ofer looking for help. They call the police, putting the last piece of the film’s puzzle into place: partners Yuval (Danny Geva) and Danny (Lior Ashkenazi), already both on edge because of their own personal problems, are sent to retrieve the tennis players from the woods.

  Once all the players are in place, Rabies follows several different storylines involving this cast of characters that overlap at key moments, constantly defying expectations of where the overall story might be heading. There is no shortage of graphic violence, but the circumstances in which it happens are often completely unexpected. Co-writer/directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado turn the woods into a sort of warped funhouse mirror that brings out the worst in all these characters, and a minefield fraught with traps and conveniently placed objects that can be employed as impromptu weapons.

  Keshales and Papushado are deft at crafting tense sequences, and the multi-story structure of the film leads to more than a few shocking moments and some well-placed laughs. As dark and violent as Rabies is, the film is also shot through with a gleeful sense of black humor, saving its best bits for last. The constant unease knowing that none of the characters are safe from harm and the ever-twisting plot lines make Rabies one of the best direct-to-disc horror films to come down the line in some time, and should not be missed by genre fans and fans of unique international cinema in general.

  The Rambler (2013)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 25 June 2013

  Maybe this really isn’t the place to lament the steamrolling of digital video over film as the medium of choice for filmmakers, but it’s hard not to wonder how different Calvin Lee Reeder’s new film, The Rambler, would have been if it was shot on film rather than razor-sharp high-definition digital video. Reeder’s debut feature, The Oregonian, was shot on Super 16 and maintained the characteristic look of his short films, such as the original incarnation of “The Rambler.” The Oregonian followed an unnamed female character (played by Lindsay Pulsipher) on a bizarre, surreal walk through an occasionally terrifying redneck nightmare world. The Rambler mimics that film’s structure fairly closely, but swaps out the female lead for Dermot Mulroney and Super 16 for digital video. The results are decidedly mixed.

  After a brief introduction sequence leading up to his release from prison, The Rambler is picked up by his girl Cheryl (Natasha Lyonne). Cheryl informs The Rambler that he can have his old job back at the local pawn shop, but a letter from his brother sets The Rambler off on a hitchhiking trip across the country to live with his brother and family on their farm. At this point, the film drops any pretense of coherent plot and follows The Rambler as he gets into one bizarre, awful situation after another, while running into a few recurring characters including a girl (Pulsipher) who appears in several towns but who seems to be a different person each time. The closest thing The Rambler gets to a traveling partner is The Scientist (James Cady), a man who claims to have created a machine that will transfer dreams to VHS tape, but which apparently requires some fine-tuning that he has not quite mastered.

  The pleasure of this type of film lies mostly in the surprises of where the character’s journey takes them and the people they meet, and in that respect The Rambler certainly delivers. However, it’s also nearly a remake of The Oregonian, closely following the beats of that film’s loose storyline and sharing its obsession with characters vomiting up weird-colored stuff all over themselves and each other. At 80 minutes, it felt like Reeder was running out of ideas near the end of The Oregonian; at 97 minutes, The Rambler feels considerably less inspired and even more tiresome. The parade of low-lives spouting surreal, absurd dialogue starts to become a chore to sit through after a while, and unfortunately due to the film’s slick digital video, the low-fi charms of The Oregonian and Reeder’s shorts are completely absent.

  While it’s a common complaint that many independent films look cheap, there’s something to be said for the sort of rough-hewn look of a movie shot on real film. Reeder’s previous works are a perfect example of film that uses that low-tech approach to its advantage. “Improving” on the look of his work with digital video has robbed it of part of what made his work unique. Digital video is too clean to properly document the kind of creepy, dirty places that Reeder wants to take the audience. The professional look makes The Rambler feel more like a movie and less like a weird dream. Maybe this change will make more sense as we become more accustomed to it, the way that color came to represent “reality” in cinema after decades of black & white. For now, however, The Rambler is a film that wants to drag you through some unpleasant places, but makes sure they’re nicely lit and clearly visible at all times, an approach that robs them of most of their character and creepiness.

  Ratline (2011)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 23 November 2011

  Independent filmmaker Eric Stanze first gained attention with his super low-budget horror film Savage Harvest in 1994, and won major acclaim in the underground horror community with the harrowing Scrapbook, which was named Rue Morgue magazine’s “Best Independent Movie of 2001.” Given the often punishing content and style of the films produced and released by his company Wicked Pixel Cinema, the relatively restrained, low-key horror of 2007′s Deadwood Park came as a welcome surprise. Gone were the rough-edged “shot-on-video” look and claustrophobic interiors; Deadwood Park was a hugely ambitious undertaking for any independent filmmaker, a deadly serious horror film taking place in the present and WWII, shot on slick digital video in widescreen. The fact that Stanze pulled it off in grand style– Deadwood Park is easily one of the best independent American horror films of the last decade– meant that expectations for his next film among die-hard horror fans are ridiculously high.

  It should come as no surprise, then, that Stanze has zigged (after a fashion) where many would have predicted he would zag. Ratline, his latest feature, improves on the already impressive production values of Deadwood Park but uses them for a much different kind of horror story. Where Deadwood Park was often quiet and subtle, Ratline is loud and nasty. In other words, if Deadwood Park put a newfound maturity on display, Ratline is a reminder that this is still the same guy who made Scrapbook– the picture may be prettier, but he still knows how to hit you in the gut.

  As the film opens, Crystal (Stanze regular Emily Haack) guns down
the guys on the other side of an illicit deal involving a large bag of cash. She and Kim (Alex Del Monacco) take the money and hide out in a small Midwestern town. As it happens, this is hardly the sleepy, innocent town it appears to be– aside from harboring a small but devoted Satanic cult, a powerful evil lies hidden here. The “Blood Flag,” a Nazi flag used in arcane, demonic Nazi experiments, is being relentlessly sought out by Frank Logan (Jason Christ). It soon becomes clear that the arrivals of Frank and Crystal to this place are hardly coincidental, and as Logan moves closer to his goal, Crystal will be forced to make a decision that could seal the fate of all humankind.

  Ratline is full of surprises, and discussing much of the plot in any detail is bound to ruin them. Suffice to say that the storyline takes a few hard left turns and gleefully pulls the rug out from under the audience more than once. Stanze and co-writer/star Jason Christ treat the story’s mix of horror fiction and historical fact seriously, but there is a streak of dark humor here that was notably absent from Deadwood Park. Horror fans looking for the old standbys won’t be disappointed– there is plenty of gore on display, and for the most part the makeup and effects are fantastic, but despite their queasy effectiveness, they’re not the focus of the film. Ratline looks and sounds great, too, making it another technical leap forward for Stanze and Wicked Pixel, and the lead performances by Emily Haack and Jason Christ are excellent. It may lack the emotional heft of Deadwood Park, but there’s no question that Ratline is another example of independent American horror film at its best.

  Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 13 November 2008

  The true cult film, the one that truly finds its own audience spontaneously and grows into something more than what its filmmakers intended, is an increasingly rare beast. The simple fact is that as film has developed over the years, genres, subgenres, and niches have all become part of the business. Things are a lot different now than they were when Jodorowsky, Lynch, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show set about creating the “Midnight Movie” phenomenon. Every so often, a studio will try to explicitly market a film as a “cult” movie, usually with disastrous results. A true cult film ends up finding an audience more or less by accident; marketing a “cult movie” is rarely successful. However, this is usually because the film in question isn’t really cult material– for a recent example, look at Snakes on a Plane. Pushed hard as “so bad it’s good,” the film came out and was just a mediocre action movie awkwardly marketed as something it wasn’t.

  Repo! The Genetic Opera, on the other hand, is unquestionably cult movie material. How else to describe an “industrial rock opera” about a dystopian future where the Repo Man comes to take back your organs instead of your car? And with a cast like this: Anthony Stewart Head (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Ohgr (vocalist of Skinny Puppy), Bill Moseley (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Sarah Brightman (world-renowned opera singer), and Paris Hilton? Repo! was conceived from the ground up to be a cult film, something completely different from director Darren Lynn Bousman’s work on Saw II, III, and IV. Faced with such a defiantly non-commercial film, Lionsgate has done exactly what any big studio in its right mind would do: put it in eight theaters around the country and see what happens. As a result, director Bousman and actor Terrance Zdunich took the film out on a “Road Tour” to seven cities in seven days to get the film more into the public eye.

  The film is mostly the story of Shiloh (Alexa Vega), a 17-year-old girl with a rare blood disease who lives with her father Nathan (Head) in a vast city in the not-too-distant future that has been ravaged by a pandemic of organ failures. Shiloh is unaware of the great tragedy of her mother’s death, which intersects with the lives of Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), the head of a company that creates replacement organs and is thus the most powerful corporation in the world, his family, and Blind Mag (Brightman), a singer with cybernetic eyes under contract to Largo. Largo is told he is dying, and must choose an heir to the GeneCo throne before he passes, but his children are all monsters. Luigi (Moseley) is basically a sociopath, Pavi (Ohgr) seems insanely vain but otherwise mostly harmless, and Amber Sweet (Hilton) is addicted to both plastic surgery and Zydrate, an illicit painkiller extracted from the corpses of repo victims and sold on the streets by the Graverobber (Zdunich). The Graverobber also occasionally acts as a Greek chorus, directly addressing the camera, usually before particularly important scenes.

  Confused yet? The film takes precious few pauses for breath, using comic book panel illustrations to fill in background information before rampaging forth again through more songs that push the story along at a frantic pace. Its cast of interconnected characters, as well as its sci-fi leanings and ambition, are reminiscent of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. Like that film, Repo! starts on uneasy ground with a convoluted backstory and a large cast of characters tied together by tragedy, lies, and various other motives that may or may not ever be made clear. The film also clearly shows the results of having been restructured and re-edited, but its seams are more prominent than those in Southland Tales and the music-video aesthetic renders some stretches of the film almost incomprehensible. Also unlike Southland Tales, Repo! has more than one musical number– it really is an opera. Every line of dialogue is sung over the film’s ever-present score.

  Unfortunately, the music is exactly where the film falls flat. If you’re making a rock opera, you need damned good songs. I’ll admit right now– I hate The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Hate it, hate it, hate it. But I know songs from it that have strong hooks, something to grab onto and that sticks with you long after the film is over and that I find myself enjoying even though I can’t stand the film from which they originated. I’m a fan of musicals in general– I’ll watch Phantom of the Paradise or Moulin Rouge! any day of the week. The music in Repo!, however, is mostly of the “industrial rock” genre and suffers for being exactly that: there are big guitars, metallic percussion, and not much in the way of catchy choruses. Memorable songs are few and far between in Repo!, with most of them just serving to further the story and flesh out the characters at the expense of lyrics that make any sense outside the context of the film or melodies that stick with you after the end credits roll.

  This isn’t to say that the quality of the music is bad– it’s well produced and more than ably performed by its (mostly) invisible band members and a cast with some truly great vocal chops. Anthony Stewart Head has a fantastic voice, and his songs are among the liveliest scenes in the film. Paul Sorvino has shown off his voice a few times before, but he gets to really belt it out in this film, and he’s great. Sarah Brightman, of course, is brilliant. Hell, even Paris Hilton is pretty great in her fairly small role. There’s no shortage of talent on display in Repo! in front of or behind the camera, in either the visual or the musical components of the film. So it’s even more of a disappointment that the final product is so weirdly unengaging.

  Repo! seems to be finding its audience just fine. At the Chicago stop on the “Repo Road Tour,” there were already fans in costume who had traveled hundreds of miles to see the film. There were a lot of people in line outside the theater hours in advance of the 10:30 p.m. start time, and several blaring the soundtrack and singing along on the sidewalk. When Bousman mentioned The Rocky Horror Picture Show during the Q&A after the film, most of the remaining audience went wild. This seems to indicate that the film is already completely critic-proof: if you’ve already decided you’re part of the “Repo Army,” nothing is going to change your mind, including the film itself. Perhaps this means that Repo! will be one of the few exceptions to the rule, the cult film marketed as such that hits its anticipated demographic with surgical precision and finds new life after its initial theatrical run as a “cult movie.” However, just like many “cult movies” (studio-manufactured or otherwise), the film itself doesn’t stand up very well on its own. I imagine someday people might stumble across Repo! and find themselves in the same position as people who watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show
at home by themselves, wondering what the fuss is all about.

  The Resident (2011)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 30 March 2011

  Despite its failure to draw big audiences to the box office, there’s no question that Let Me In was an auspicious return to the horror landscape for the Hammer Films name. Already, two more Hammer features are out: The Wake Wood (yet to be released in the States as of this writing) and The Resident. While The Wake Wood sounds fairly close to traditional Hammer horror– period setting, supernatural evil– The Resident takes a very different approach.

  Hilary Swank plays Dr. Juliet Devereau, an ER doctor who is looking for a new apartment after catching her boyfriend Jack (Lee Pace) in bed with another woman. She stumbles upon a huge space with a great view in a building owned by the socially awkward but handsome Max (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his grandfather August (Christopher Lee). Juliet and Max are almost immediately drawn to each other, even as she attempts to reconcile her feelings about Jack. Soon after moving in, though, Juliet starts to notice odd sounds in the night and has trouble waking up for work in the morning. Clearly something is wrong with this “too good to be true” arrangement, something Juliet may have come to realize far too late.