Charismata (UK, dir. Andy Collier & Toor Mian)
Detective Rebecca Faraway (Sarah Beck Mather) is going through a rough period in her personal life when she and her partner Eli (Adonis Anthony) are faced with their first serial killer case. Two bodies are found that were victims of some sort of ritual, and the investigation starts pointing toward Michael Sweet (Jamie Satterthwaite), a charming man who works at the real estate firm that owns the buildings where the bodies were found. Rebecca finds herself drawn to Sweet while simultaneously convinced that he is somehow involved with the murders. As pressure from both her personal and professional life intensifies, she begins to suffer nightmares and hallucinations that may be pointing toward the killer or warning of the collapse of Rebecca’s sanity–or both. While Sarah Beck Mather gives a strong lead performance and Satterthwaite gives his character a most welcome and unexpected weird energy, Charismata is ultimately dragged down by overly familiar horror/crime tropes and somewhat slack pacing. By the time the film moves into its finale, viewers may find themselves reminded of the kind of late 1990s/early 2000s straight-to-video movies that frequently straddled the lines between police procedural, (erotic) thriller, and/or outright horror in its tone and atmosphere. For what it’s worth, the film that most came to mind for this writer while watching Charismata was Hellraiser: Inferno. Whether that’s an endorsement or a warning will depend on the individual viewer.
November 5th:
The Ambulance (1989, USA, dir. Larry Cohen)
Comic book artist Josh Baker (Eric Roberts) sees Cheryl (Janine Turner) on the street and is determined to get a date with her. He tags along with her and they banter charmingly until Cheryl collapses on the sidewalk and an ambulance shows up to take her away very quickly. Josh calls around to every hospital in New York City, but Cheryl is nowhere to be found. He goes to the police and tries to explain the situation to Lt. Spencer (James Earl Jones), but Spencer is not much help and Josh also finds little sympathy from officer Sandra Malloy (Megan Gallagher). He begins to poke around himself and finds this mysterious ambulance popping up in strange places, and may be connected to a string of disappearances. Josh ends up in the hospital with Spencer suspecting Josh in connection to the disappearances, so he makes his escape with old newspaper man Elias (Red Buttons) and connects with Malloy to hopefully find the ambulance before it’s too late for Cheryl or himself. The Ambulance is a hugely entertaining thriller and an overlooked gem in filmmaker Larry Cohen’s oeuvre. The film was part of this year’s repertory screenings, shown from a very nice 35mm print with Eric Roberts and Larry Cohen in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. Preceding the screening was the recording of Doug Tilley and Liam O’Donnell’s podcast Eric Roberts Is the Fucking Man, featuring Roberts himself as a guest on the show for the first time ever. The show was great fun and Roberts was clearly having a blast, and having both him and legendary raconteur Cohen on stage together after the film was a fantastic way to cap off the festival’s celebration of their film work.
Snowflake (Germany, dir. Adolfo J. Kolmerer & William James)
Javid (Reza Brojerdi) and Tan (Erkin Acar) steal a car to make a getaway and find a partial screenplay in the back seat. It starts with the exact conversation they had just before they stole the car, and the next scene describes them reading the script. They track down the writer, dentist and aspiring screenwriter Arend (Alexander Schubert) in hopes of figuring out what the hell is going on, but he’s just as dumbfounded as they are. Although he does know everything they’re going to say and do before they do it, and when he prints them up a copy of the current draft they learn that they are about to have a very rough next few days. Caleb (David Grant), a former cult leader who may or may not actually be god, refers teenager Eliana (Xenia Assenza) to a number of increasingly dangerous bounty hunters to take revenge on Javid and Tan against the advice of her friend and bodyguard Carson (David Masterson). Will Eli get her revenge, or will Javid and Tan get the better of their assassins? And how does superhero vigilante Hyper Electro Man (Mathis Landwehr) fit into the bigger picture? Snowflake is a dizzying, hilarious film that combines post-Tarantino action/crime drama and Charlie Kaufman’s metafictional surrealism with exhilarating results. Screenwriter Arend Remmers and an excellent cast bring the population of the film’s criminal underworld to vivid life, and its wild narrative feels genuinely unpredictable. Like Ryan Prows’s Lowlife (also playing Cinepocalypse), Snowflake makes a convincing case that there are still ways to bring something new to the kind of crime drama that followed in the wake of Pulp Fiction and died off when it became apparent that most filmmakers were clueless as to what made Tarantino’s breakthrough so wildly entertaining. These films are peopled with unique and interesting characters that form a solid foundation for the horror and mayhem that surrounds them, setting up actual stakes in their conflicts and lending emotional weight to their actions. Snowflake is massively entertaining, and instantly marks debut feature director Adolfo J. Kolmerer and his collaborators in front of and behind the camera as talents to keep an eye on.
Motorrad (Brazil, dir. Vicente Amorim)
Hugo (Guilherme Prates) steals a motorcycle carburetor from a junkyard with the help from the mysterious Paula (Carla Salle). He then joins his older brother Ricardo (Emílio de Mello) and some other friends on a ride out to a remote spot for biking and partying where they run into Paula again. She leads them to another spot further out where they can swim in a quarry, but shortly after arriving a group of riders clad in all black appear and attack Hugo’s group. The survivors are left to escape the clutches of these murderous riders or kill before they are killed themselves. Motorrad is a horror story stripped to the bare bones and strapped to a motorbike, a take on the traditional slasher with a lot more leather and chains. Unfortunately, that sounds much more fun than the film actually is: the film’s color palette is flat and drained of life, frequently looking almost black & white. It’s an odd choice, but given the film’s hints at supernatural happenings and leaning toward allegory it makes sense. A bigger problem than its color correction is the fact that Motorrad is relentlessly straightfaced. It’s somewhat inexplicable that a movie about a gang of motorcycle-riding slasher villains has absolutely no sense of humor about itself. There are some great, nasty practical effects and effectively staged chases, but it’s tough to get invested in much of anything that’s going on since most of the characters are barely defined other than by what jacket or helmet they’re wearing. There’s a solid and fun horror movie lurking in Motorrad’s basic concept, but sadly this isn’t that movie.
The Crescent (Canada, dir. Seth A. Smith)
After a tragic accident takes her husband, young widow Beth (Danika Vandersteen) takes her toddler son Lowen (Woodrow Graves) to her mother’s seaside vacation home to grieve their loss. It’s a beautiful place, but Beth is a little creeped out when her new neighbor Joseph (Terrance Murray) introduces himself one day while she and Lowen are playing on the beach. Odd things are happening around the house, too, including a blaring sound that wakes Beth in the middle of the night and whose origin she can’t seem to pin down. Is the strain of her husband’s loss and taking care of Lowen on her own getting to her, or is there someone–or something–watching them? Seth A. Smith’s debut film Lowlife was a surreal, grimy black & white horror/drama made for very little money that made a big impression on the festival circuit for its blending of genre trappings and experimental visual techniques. His follow-up The Crescent is a huge step up in production quality from that previous film, a slow burning low-key psychological horror film in the vein of regional 70s American films like Messiah of Evil. It’s in color this time, but most of the film is shot in a palette that (appropriately) feels drained of life and so thoroughly conjures its setting you can almost feel the cold wind coming off the ocean. The film also uses excellent scoring and sound design to keep the viewer on edge. But Smith’s major innovation here is the film’s focus on an actual toddler as a main character. It’s a huge gamble, and it pays of
f: Smith uses little Woodrow Graves’s natural behavior and speech patterns to fashion a convincing performance that works because it doesn’t feel like a performance in the least. When Lowen is inevitably put in danger, it’s legitimately scary because he feels like a completely real character. Smith creates a powerfully hypnotic atmosphere throughout the film, but unfortunately ends up explaining far too much in the finale. It seems possible that people found Lowlife too obtuse, and that Smith overcorrected this time around. As such, the film hits a near-perfect ending and then cruises right past it with a couple of lengthy, unnecessary scenes that provide information the viewer really didn’t need to piece together an explanation to the film’s central mystery. Overall, The Crescent is a beautiful, audacious take on some familiar genre territory whose narrative flaws are more than made up for by its atmosphere and originality.
Cinepocalypse 2017: Second Half
Originally published 14 November 2017
November 6:
Dead Shack (Canada, dir. Peter Ricq)
Teenagers Summer (Lizzie Boys) and Colin (Gabriel LaBelle) are roped into hanging out at a remote cabin with their wildly irresponsible dad Roger (Donavon Stinson) and his drunk girlfriend Lisa (Valerie Tian). At least Colin managed to convince his friend Jason (Matthew Nelson-Mahood) to come along so he’ll have someone to hang out with when Roger and Lisa get too tanked to play cards. The teenagers go for a walk in the forest and happen upon the home of a mysterious woman (Lauren Holly) who has lured a pair of young men to her remote house. Colin is compelled to peep, but gets more than he bargained for when instead of seeing them having sex, he sees the woman feeding the guys to a room full of zombies. They rush back to the cabin for help, but it’s too late: Roger and Lisa are already super, super drunk. It’s up to Summer, Colin, and Jason to save everyone and escape from their neighbor’s evil scheme. Who will survive, and how bad will their hangover be? Dead Shack is a gory, unpretentious horror/comedy with a very likeable cast and personality to spare. Donavon Stinson steals the show as goofy drunk Roger, and Lauren Holly gives her character some emotional weight despite having only a few lines. Not all the jokes land, of course, but the hit-to-miss ratio is better than most indie horror films at this level. It’s also virtually miraculous that debut fiction feature director Peter Ricq and his co-writers Phil Ivanusic and Davila LeBlanc managed to find an interesting angle on the zombie movie, a subgenre that seems totally exhausted save for those exceedingly rare bright spots like this. Dead Shack is a charming, gruesome blast.
Veronica (Spain, dir. Paco Plaza)
In the Summer of 1991, Madrid police answer a desperate emergency phone call placed by teenager Veronica (Sandra Escacena). When they arrive, her mother and two little sisters are in front of the building clutching each other in terror, while Veronica and her little brother Antoñito (Iván Chavero) are still in the apartment. The action then jumps a few months back to the day of a full solar eclipse, when Veronica and two of her friends decide to try to contact the other side with a Ouija board. Veronica, exhausted from caring for Antoñito, Lucía (Bruna González), and Irene (Claudia Placer) while her mother constantly works, just wants to talk to her late father. They make contact with someone or something, but soon thereafter Veronica begins to suffer ominous hallucinations. But what if they’re not just hallucinations? And what do they want with Veronica and her siblings? Veronica is based on the real-life case of Estefanía Gutiérrez Lázaro, the only case in Spain’s history in which supernatural events are officially on file. Veteran horror director Paco Plaza expertly stages a series of increasingly hair-raising set pieces, mostly in the family’s apartment. In addition to his well-crafted scares, the film is absolutely sold with a slate of fantastic performances by first-time film actress(!) Sandra Escacena in the lead and the kids who play her brother and sisters. They’re all excellent and natural, giving the film a current of humor when it threatens to become overwhelmingly dark. Possession and exorcism movies are all too common these days, but Veronica brings a level of artistry and a new wrinkle to the formula, resulting in an exemplary horror film well worth seeking out.
November 7:
Trench 11 (Canada, dir. Leo Scherman)
World War I is nearly over when British intelligence learns of a secret underground complex built by the Germans. A team is hastily assembled to “observe and report” with two British officers, three American soldiers, and traumatized Canadian Berton (Rossif Sutherland), who just months before managed to survive nearly two weeks underground when a tunnel collapsed on him. Meanwhile, the Germans know that if the horrific research in Trench 11 is discovered by the British, the consequences will be dire. They send a team in led by the former head of research Reiner (Robert Stadlober), who is less interested in destroying evidence than recovering his work. At least Reiner knows what to expect; the British team learns too late why Trench 11 was sealed up and abandoned, and soon everyone is fighting for their lives against an insidious monster that can infect and take over anyone. Trench 11 is a solid, tense creature feature that feels a bit like David Cronenberg’s Shivers transplanted into early 20th century Europe (and underground). It has plenty of effectively gruesome and creepy practical effects that bring its monsters to queasily convincing life, and its tight, dark spaces give the whole film an unsettlingly claustrophobic edge. Director and co-writer Leo Scherman has a ton of TV credits to his name including directing episodes of Panic Button and Scare Tactics, and that background seems to have prepared him thoroughly for the particular requirements of this film. The end feels rather abrupt, coming as it does at a point where the film feels like it probably has a good 15 minutes or more left, but that’s a fairly minor point against what is otherwise a great, fun, and unique independent horror movie.
Mohawk (USA, dir. Ted Geoghegan)
1814: The young United States has been at war for two years, but the Mohawk tribe steadfastly refuses to engage in the conflict. Calvin Two Rivers (Justin Rain) is itching to join the fight against the colonialists to protect his people, his partner Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn), and both the personal relationship he and Oak share with Briton Joshua Pinsmail (Eamon Farren) and the trade relationship with Britain he has established with the Mohawk. Acting impulsively, Calvin slaughters every soldier in a remote fort and brings down the wrath of Hezekiah Holt (Ezra Buzzington). Holt enlists a small team to track down Calvin and wipe out the Mohawk people, who have taken flight North. Despite the help of professional tracker Sherwood Beal (Robert Longstreet), Holt’s crew is unprepared for just how tough a job it is to find someone in a vast forest in which they do not want to be found. But what they lack in knowledge of the terrain they make up for in sheer bloodlust, and before this is over both sides will suffer devastating losses. Ted Geoghegan’s directorial debut was We Are Still Here, a gruesome haunted house film that garnered acclaim on the genre film fest circuit a few years ago. Mohawk is his follow-up, and it could hardly be more different: shot almost entirely in the outdoors using natural light and based in historical fact (Geoghegan’s co-writer, novelist Grady Hendrix, is a serious student of American history), this film strikes a bold path away from typical genre cinema in a totally unexpected direction. It’s bleak and violent, but it’s also surprisingly entertaining. As unpleasant as can be, Geoghegan keeps the action moving at a brisk pace and stages some effectively tense sequences throughout. During the post-screening Q&A, he explained that star Kaniehtiio Horn is Mohawk herself, and the film was shot in the country where the Mohawk lived during the period in which the film takes place. His respect for history and Native American culture shows in the movie, which uses spare period detail (mostly in its costuming) to set the stage for its action. Mohawk is a hell of a second feature, and whatever Geoghegan has up next will definitely be worth looking out for.
Applecart (USA, dir. Brad Baruh)
Casey and James Pollack (Brea Grant and AJ Bowen) are heading to a cabin in the woods for a snowy weekend getaway with their teenage kids Jessica (Sophie Dalah) and Jason (J
oshua Hoffman) and Jessica’s friend Becky (Elise Luthman). While everything seems fine, the audience knows something is about to go very wrong when we are shown the opening sequence of an episode of the TV series Inside Crime about the murder of the Pollack family at the hands of Casey. When we return to the Pollacks, James finds a woman unconscious in the woods and brings her back to the cabin–when she wakes, she introduces herself as Leslie Bison (Barbara Crampton) and immediately makes everyone very uncomfortable with some inappropriate behavior. Applecart continues on these parallel tracks, cutting back and forth from the story as it unfolds and the 100% pitch-perfect replica of an Investigation Discovery-style “true crime” TV show. The whole cast is great, but Barbara Crampton is incredibly funny and menacing in a career-best performance, much different from the typical roles we’ve grown used to seeing her in lately. It would be worth watching Applecart for her even if it didn’t have some impressively gruesome and imaginative practical effects that help make up for its narrative problems.
The version of Applecart screened at Cinepocalypse was a new edit from the world premiere that screened at Fantastic Fest back in September. While it retained some basic structural issues, it did feel considerably tighter. Cutting back on the true crime show sequences and giving more time to the family members (and one particularly memorable addition for Crampton’s character) made the film feel much more cohesive and eased some of the tonal whiplash between the horror film narrative and the humor in the show segments. Overall the new edit is a notable improvement, making Applecart easier to recommend as a fun and unique take on the old “cabin in the woods” style of horror story.
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 99