Despite its flaws towing the line between musical and horror, Stage Fright is a very funny, highly unique take on the familiar slasher film formula. It’s definitely worth a look for horror fans looking for something different, and it confirms writer/director Jerome Sable as a filmmaker to keep an eye on.
Starry Eyes (2014)
Originally published on Film Monthly 3 February 2015
It’s been a while since we’ve had a really good, horrifying peek behind the curtain at the movie business in cinema. Maybe David Lynch’s last couple of features–Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive, both of which featured stories of deeply unpleasant things going on under the Hollywood sign–have intimidated a lot of horror filmmakers into looking for other avenues to explore. Fortunately, it did not deter writer/directors Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer from exploring the underworld of the movie business with Starry Eyes. This is one of the best horror films of 2014.
Sarah (Alexandra Essoe) is a young woman living in Los Angeles trying to break into movies while working part-time as a server at a Hooters-style restaurant. Her days are packed with endless, exhausting auditions, but she’s determined. She is called in for an audition for a horror film called The Silver Scream being produced by the mysterious Astraeus Pictures, and after failing the audition, Sarah hides out in a women’s restroom in the same building and punishes herself by painfully tearing out some of her hair. Her self-destructive display grabs the attention of one of the Astraeus representatives, who calls her back to the audition room for a much different and much more uncomfortable “audition.” Suddenly Sarah finds herself not only back in the running for the film’s lead, but a likely candidate. She’s called back for increasingly strange meetings with the people who run Astraeus, and finds herself being asked to do things she never would have imagined. How far will she have to go to be a star?
In a year with some spectacular performances in horror films, Alexandra Essoe’s turn as Sarah in Starry Eyes may only be second to Essie Davis’s in The Babadook. Sarah is a thoroughly developed character, one who goes from relatively naive at the start of the film to being discovering her darker impulses as her story progresses. The film requires her to go to some incredibly dark places, and Essoe handles these difficult scenes flawlessly. Her performance anchors the film, but the cast is great all around (especially Pat Healy as Sarah’s boss) and there is a lot to like here. Filmmakers Kolsch and Widmyer wisely give the audience just enough hints at a deep conspiracy pulling the strings of the star-making machine, and the film’s queasily effective practical effects are impressive. The film also features an excellent electronic score by Jonathan Snipes that perfectly complements the creepy happenings on screen. Horror fans looking for something unique should make it a priority to seek out Starry Eyes.
Staunton Hill (2009)
Originally published on Film Monthly 6 October 2009
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a group of young people on their way to an event is sidetracked and find themselves at the mercy of murderous hillbillies. I see you’ve been frantically waving your arms trying to get me to stop since about the fourth word of the previous sentence. Sorry about that.
The annals of horror are packed with countless films in which young city folk find themselves on the wrong end of any number of pointy things carried by crazy rednecks. Permutations of this particular subgenre have been popping up with alarming regularity ever since H.G. Lewis first unleashed Two Thousand Maniacs! on audiences in the early 60s. However, some recent films have proven that given a twist or two, the formula can still be effective: Fabrice du Welz’s Calvaire, Kim Chapiron’s Sheitan, and David Gregory’s Plague Town all gave the “crazy hillbilly” story different takes that kept them from feeling like tired rehashes.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Staunton Hill. It’s a by-the-numbers hillbilly slasher film with some effectively nasty gore makeup and effects, competently made but otherwise indistinguishable from any number of direct-to-DVD films on the same level. Except, of course, for its principal marketing hook: the film was directed by Cameron Romero, of the Pittsburgh Romeros. Yes, his dad is Horror Legend George A. Romero, and a quote from Dad graces the back cover of the DVD box. Is that enough to catch the attention of horror fans weary of watching yet another group of college kids get chopped up by yet another clan of subhuman inbreds?
As the film opens, it’s 1969 and five friends are on their way to join demonstrations in Washington D.C. They’re hitchhiking out in the country somewhere and spark some racial tension among the locals (this is a group of mixed ethnicity, see) before running into a guy with a truck who offers them a ride. They hop in and the truck dies in the middle of nowhere, so they decide to hike across the countryside and hope to find a main road that runs parallel to the one they were taking when the truck gave out. Unsurprisingly, they stumble upon a farmhouse and decide to crash for the night, meeting the residents of the house the next morning. You know what comes next: somebody’s going to get fed to the hogs, and it’s probably not the huge muttering guy with the overalls and the shovel. Veronica Mars versus Giant Hillbilly, Giant Hillbilly wins every time.
The problem with Staunton Hill is that there’s just nothing here that really stands out. The formula is followed down the line, the characters– on both sides of the skinning and dismembering– aren’t that interesting to begin with, so once the slaughter starts the audience isn’t really invested in either side. Maybe the biggest flaw is that everything is played completely straight; something to relieve the predictable unpleasantness every so often would have been nice. The film isn’t poorly made, either, which ironically acts against it. Instead of being so bad it’s memorably entertaining, it’s just facelessly competent. In that regard, if you’re a huge fan of this type of film Staunton Hill will probably be right up your alley. Otherwise, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before done at exactly the same level many, many times.
The Stepmother (1972)
Originally published on Criticplanet.org
Some films really know how to grab your attention from the very start. Take The Stepmother, for example: in the first five minutes, there’s a rape, a murder and a nude shower scene. Then the opening credits start and there’s another murder during the opening credits! If that’s not enough to blow your mind already, consider the fact that this is the only Crown International Pictures production ever nominated for an Academy Award (Best Original Song, “Strange Are the Ways of Love”). Seriously! It’s a good thing that the rest of the movie is nearly as bonkers as the opening, or this would have been one of the biggest disappointments of all time.
Frank Delgado (Alejandro Rey) is an architect of Latin extraction, which is standard shorthand in exploitation cinema for “passionate, impulsive, and violent.” He returns home early from a business trip to find his wife Margo (Catherine Justice) getting out of bed with Alan (Mike Kulcsar). Frank does not realize that Alan has raped Margo and mistakes the situation for an extramarital tryst. Enraged, he strangles Alan to death in the driveway and flees to bury the body before Margo realizes he has returned. In what is to be the start of a string of unbelievably bad luck, Frank ends up burying Alan about 10 feet from where another angry lover strangles and buries his girlfriend. The police find both bodies the next day and think both murders are the work of the same man.
No one is aware that Frank is the killer, or of the fact that Frank saw Alan leaving his house. So when the man who killed his girlfriend is arrested and blamed for Alan’s murder as well, the story seems to be over. But Frank can’t let it go— he neglects Margo, thinking she has been unfaithful, and he becomes increasingly angry and frustrated with his work. His situation continues to get worse until finally his son Steve (Rudy Herrera) comes to visit, and lonely, neglected Margo becomes a little overly friendly with the young man. Meanwhile, Frank has to deal with a persistent detective (John Anderson) who believes Frank is responsible for both Alan and the anonymous woman’s deaths. On top of all th
is, Frank attempts to continue working and tries to figure out how to deal with his business partner’s widow, who clearly thinks of Frank in more than friendly terms.
The Stepmother kicks off running full-bore, burning crazy melodrama as kindling in a way that brings to mind an entire season of a telenovela desperately crammed into 90 minutes. Alejandro Rey’s manic performance keeps Frank from ever becoming anything more than a caricature, and the repeated use of freeze frames (see the first screenshot for an example) only elevates the thick atmosphere of camp in which the film is enshrouded. It’s not quite as sleazy as its title and trailer promise, and it takes a really long time to get to the whole “Stepmother” plot line, but it’s more than crazy enough to make up for any lack in the sleaze department. And it bears repeating that this film was actually nominated for an Academy Award. God, the 70s must have been amazing.
The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (2013)
Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 18 March 2015
Filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani helped kick-start the popular resurgence of the Italian Giallo film with their debut feature, Amer (2009). This happened despite the fact that the film was less a “neo-Giallo” or even a tribute to Giallo cinema than a capital-A Art Film that took the cinematic vocabulary of the Giallo and filtered it through an abstract sensibility not particularly concerned with traditional narrative. The fact that Amer is closer in form and structure to something like Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle than the cinema it appears to mimic led many horror fans to write the film off as an exercise in “style over substance,” without realizing that the style actually *is* the substance. It is somewhat surprising, then, that their follow-up The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is even less concerned with narrative. It feints in that direction at the start, but for the most part this film is even more abstract and puzzling than Amer. After a successful festival run where it seemed to gather as many rabid fans as violent detractors, Strand Releasing picked the film up for limited theatrical release across the States through the Fall of 2014.
The film opens with Dan (Klaus Tange) returning from a business trip to find his apartment locked from the inside and his wife, Edwige, missing. He starts by asking his strange neighbors, who seem uninterested in his plight and instead offer up their own stories. Even the detective who shows up leads the film on a lengthy digression regarding a case he worked years previously in the same building, during which he spied on and became obsessed with a suspiciously familiar woman. Dan’s story fades further and further into the background as the film burrows deeper and deeper into the past and psyches of his neighbors, the detective, and a mysterious figure who lives inside the walls of the building in a hidden, parallel space that seems to double the size of the building (at least on the inside).
All of this makes The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears sound a lot more straightforward than it actually is. Every story is told with its own visual and aural palette, all of them informed by the look and sound of classic Giallo cinema. The film’s title explicitly references three major Giallo films that help provide the viewer with some idea of where the ingredients for these images come from: Sergio Martino’s All the Colors of the Dark (starring Edwige Fenech as a young woman who gets involved with a cult), The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Edwige Fenech again, as a wife whose penchant for S&M leads to her entrapment an elaborate blackmail scheme, also directed by Martino), and Giuliano Carnimeo’s What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer’s Body? (aka The Case of the Bloody Iris, featuring Fenech being stalked by a killer who knocks off people in her apartment building). What Cattet and Forzani do here, even more than Amer, is filter the basic concepts of those films through a dream-logic sensibility.
There is no question that The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is one of the most intricately designed films to hit screens this year. Every frame of the film is carefully composed for maximum visual impact, and the sound design is similarly impeccable. The soundtrack, like Amer, is made up entirely of music from 70s Italian cinema, with tracks from Bruno Nicolai, Riz Ortolani, Nico Fidenco, and Ennio Morricone among others. These frequently psychedelic songs perfectly offset the striking visuals, helping to create an unmatched atmosphere of nightmarish dread while Cattet and Forzani keep teasing a resolution to the film’s central mystery. However, exactly what that “central mystery” is keeps shifting: where is Edwige? Who is the black-gloved figure stalking the building’s tenants? Who is the man in the walls? Who is the woman living above Dan? Are any of the people in the building who they say they are?
Ultimately, whether or not there are answers to any of these questions will be in the hands of the viewer. Clues and symbols are scattered densely throughout the film, giving it a feel not unlike David Lynch’s Inland Empire, a beautiful, terrible nightmare where everything seems heavy with symbolic importance. Also like that film, establishing a working theory of what Cattet and Forzani have created here will require multiple repeat viewings, and viewers unwilling to engage with the film on its own terms will once again find themselves frustrated. The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears is a gorgeous, unsetting cinematic dream, utterly unlike anything else out there. Adventurous cinephiles absolutely should not miss this on the big screen.
The Strangers (2008)
Originally published on Film Monthly 8 June 2008
2008 seems to be the year for home invasion on the big screen. The Strangers, postponed from release in summer 2007, joins Michael Haneke’s remake of his own Funny Games and the domestic release of the terrifying French film Inside as the third major film this year to feature characters terrorizing people in their own home. While Funny Games is, in a way, a reaction to this sort of film–and the original, a seeming prophecy of the sort of sadistic entertainment American multiplexes would soon be showing–both Inside and The Strangers have more traditional aims in mind. While The Strangers is heavily indebted to numerous films that have come before it (most notably the recent French thriller Them) (aka Ils), it still comes out as easily the scariest American horror film in recent memory.
James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) are returning to James’s childhood summer home after a wedding reception. When we are introduced to them, there is clearly something wrong. We soon learn that James has proposed to Kristen and that she has turned him down, leaving the two in a difficult, uncomfortable place in their relationship. Unable to sleep, they begin to talk things over when a girl (Gemma Ward) appears knocking at their door at four in the morning asking after “Tamara.” James assures her she has the wrong house and sends her on her way before leaving to pick up cigarettes for Kristen. While he’s away, the girl returns and the sadistic taunting begins, ratcheting up from leaving messages and destroying their cell phones to the final act of violence that ends the film where it began.
The storyline is completely barebones, but it works. The establishing scenes of James and Kristen’s characters are done very well, and the performances by both the leads are solid. The appearance of the “Strangers” is very creepy, and their behavior is terrifying. What seems at first like disturbing pranks quickly escalates to real threats. The film wrings its best scares out of quiet scenes where the audience can clearly see the Strangers but the characters (plausibly) cannot. It’s also worth noting that the film’s sound design lends tremendously to its atmosphere and tension. The last film I can think of that gave such careful attention to sound design is Nacho Cerdà’s The Abandoned, which similarly used the surround sound space to maximum effect.
As genuinely scary as the film often is, however, there are legitimate complaints. The film opens with a set of pointless “based on a true story” title cards made even more pointless by a ridiculous voiceover reading the text. This is just one more thing that makes The Strangers feel like a near-remake of Them, another film about an isolated couple terrorized by unknown assailants. The film’s characters often make foolish decisions, a problem that usually comes standar
d-issue with this sort of genre film but is disappointing nonetheless. Finally, the film relies a bit too much on cheap jump-scares, the absolute worst of which is lazily shoehorned in at the end of the film. Cutting the film’s first minute and last two minutes would have improved it tremendously.
Despite these complaints, The Strangers is still a seriously unsettling film. It’s definitely a step in the right direction for American horror, and the decision of the studio to give it a theatrical release is refreshing in the face of the continued dominance of the PG-13 American horror film (especially after the disappointing performance of The Ruins). The fact that this is writer/directory Bryan Bertino’s first film is kind of amazing, and it makes me anxious to see what he does next. As accomplished and scary as The Strangers is, there seems little question that he’s capable of becoming a hell of a director.
Strigoi: The Undead (2009)
Originally published on Film Monthly 2 August 2011
Vampire movies are becoming nearly as numerous as zombie movies in the realm of direct-to-disc features. Breaking Glass Pictures and Vicious Circle Films, recently specializing in releasing super low-budget genre flicks, made a surprise move when they acquired writer/director Faye Jackson’s 2009 festival favorite Strigoi: The Undead. And congratulations to them on a canny acquisition, because Strigoi is very probably the best film they have released this year, a very funny and highly unique take on the increasingly tired vampire film.
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